…and they get more viewers, at least in the US.
Which is the only metric that really matters for sport-as-entertainment.
Athletes, by and large, don’t get paid for playing whatever sport they compete in. They are paid for drawing spectators to either pay to attend the event or watch the event TV in large enough numbers that advertisers want to pay to be shown during the broadcast.
Being the very best at your sport is one way to draw viewers, but it’s certainly not the only way.
The animosity may stem from the fact that the OP and others are being pretty sexist. He is entitled to his opinion, but he and others who have made other rather insulting comments about women’s sports are not entitled to not being called on some of this stuff. Men and women compete differently and have different physical talents. Most sports over the long term have historically favored men’s physical skills. Except women’s gymnastics which specifically highlights the particular sorts of physical athletic skills women excel at.
Edited because spelling and grammar are things and better wording.
I don’t think most of the arguments here in this thread are contradictory at all.
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Women are, on average, not as physically strong or fast as men. That is pretty much biological fact - I hope we haven’t become so progressive that we can’t acknowledge that.
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Many people prefer to watch sports that feature stronger or faster athletes.
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Women’s sports is still valuable in its own right.
But then you can get into other qualifiers on that. Mens Olympic soccer is not the national teams that will be playing later this year as it’s a U-23 tournament. There’s an argument to be made that thanks mostly to Title IX the women had very little competition for years and the rest of the world is slowly catching up. And again, the pay issue was a combination of collective bargaining on their end plus the fact that the men’s tournament just simply brings in so much more money.
Yes, but that’s largely because the U.S. women were, for a long time, facing a not-so-diverse-and-wide competition field as the men. Men’s soccer, at the World Cup/FIFA level, is immensely diverse and populated, it’s competing against many sharks in the pond. For a long time, the US women were the main big shark in a small pond of minnows. And recently, once the minnows grew bigger, the U.S. women stumbled and flopped in the last World Cup.
edit: Asterion beat me to it
Fair, but the women’s team has, generally, been the best in the world at what they do for the last 30 years. Which is what the OP says that he prefers watching, except that he can’t get over the fact that it’s women, and that they would not beat a men’s team.
Whoa, I guess the OP can’t watch that, since it’s not the best of the best, it’s U-23.
Why should any parent watch their child play in high school sports if they’re never going to be a professional?
They were probably forced to buy gift cards for the local pizza place, so they may as well watch the game at this point.
I love women’s sports. It has all the excitement, drama, and superb athleticism that men’s sports do. That’s why I watch games.
I love the LPGA, the college softball championships, the WNBA, women’s tennis. I almost had a heart attack when the U.S. Women waited till 2:04 left to tie up the gold medal game.
Here’s the stunner: Some people are shocked—shocked!—to learn that post-pubescent males have a significant strength advantage, much more explosiveness in their jumping, etc. So, an elite high school squad could give a high-level women’s basketball team a tough game.
So what?
High school sports are exciting, and so is college. And women’s sports is often superior in terms of strategy and fundamentals. If you’re not watching women’s sports because you “only watch the best,” you’re missing some awesome games.
Literally no sane person on earth thinks that men athletes at a given level of accomplishment aren’t better than women athletes, at least not in 99.5 percent of sports.
What is unclear is where this connects to popularity. It is indisputably the fact that women’s tennis is an exceptionally popular sport. The world’s #1 ranked woman would be massacred by any man who qualified for a major tournament - but the fact is that women’s tennis generates oodles of money all the time. Clearly, fans enjoy watching it. Elite women in tennis are richer than Croesus.
Women’s basketball has achieved some popularity now but it’s been a long haul and is still not at all comparable to the NBA.
Women’s MMA is quite popular.
Women’s hockey struggles outside the Olympics.
Women’s golf generates solid revenue and has for a really, really long time now.
I’m really not sure WHY some sports are way far apart in popularity and some aren’t. In some cases it makes sense - women can do things in gymnastics men cannot. Women in figure skating offer a beauty and elegance men can’t to go along with remarkable athleticism. But why has women’s golf done well? Beats me, but it has.
I’d hypothesize that part of it is that golf (and tennis, for that matter) have also been very popular participation sports for adult women in North America for many decades, as well.
CErtainly that make sense to me. On the other hand, the NFL is very popular even though most people don’t play football.
The popularity of a sport is, I think, linked to a LOT of interrelated factors and is hard to predict or explain.
Horses run faster then men, therefore men suck at running. Why would anyone watch those weak male sprinters when they should be watching horseracing instead?
From this non-golf watcher, if you’re watching it on TV, you see whack!->ball flying some distance->a couple more shots. It’s hard to tell from the camera following the ball how far it has gone, so maybe it doesn’t matter that the women aren’t hitting it as far?
But also because a lot of women play it, as kenobi says.
So, do you watch US men’s soccer? NCAA sports?
What about NASCAR vs the faster Indy, or the more skillful F1? Why would anyone watch NASCAR if Indy is faster and F1 requires you to turn left AND right.
sorry, I don’t agree with many of the OP’s reasons for not wanting to watch women’s sports, but this statement is simply incorrect. D would absolutely beat any WNBA team, and it wouldn’t be close. The top HS boys team in the country in any given year has multiple kids 6’6” and taller, and many of them can dunk. Athletically, they are so far ahead of the WNBA team that any skill advantage the WNBA team had would be nullified. It would be constant layups for the HS team. E would be closer, and the outcome would likely depend on the particular team.
and fish swim much faster than humans, shouldn’t we be watching fish or whale swim races rather than humans?
Women – even the professionals – play on shorter holes than men. Golf courses, even amateur courses, have “women’s” and “men’s” tees, with the women’s tee being placed closer to the hole. As women do, generally, not drive the ball as far, this is particularly important on longer holes (par 4 and par 5), to keep the hole at an appropriate distance/difficulty level, relative to par, for both genders.
For an LPGA event, the overall yardage is typically something like 10% shorter than for a men’s event.
In golf, while being able to hit the ball a long way is certainly one of the important skills, accuracy is even more important: keeping the ball on the fairway and the green, and not hitting into hazards (trees, rough, bunkers, water). That accuracy isn’t really strength-dependent.