Ramblings on soccer, hockey and sports journalism

I think the most interesting thing about studies like this one is less the actual comparison and more the choice of metrics. You could probably compare the Gold Cup final ratings favorably to those of lots of different well-known sports. But the fact that the writer chose to compare them to the Stanley Cup is an indicator of their similar positions in the American sports landscape, and of the fact that they are competing for the same pool of advertising and endorsement dollars. Person for person, soccer is probably more popular than hockey in the United States right now, but the popular perception is the reverse. Articles like this will work towards changing that perception.

However, this issue of popularity and perception of popularity is a tricky one. For a start, as I suggested above, the perceptions are often wrong. Witness the disproportionatly extensive coverage given to boxing in English-language media in America.

But I also feelt that the issue of popularity itself is overblown. Sports commentators see popularity as the only criteria for judging the worth of a sport. You might think that that's obvious, but it needn't be. For instance, coverage of art, or movies, or books isn't solely driven by the perceived popularity of what they're reviewing. But sports is different. A sporting event's entire worth is based purely on the perceived popularity of it. Now you might say, well, that's because sports are big business, and it's all about money, etc. And that's true. But it's also true of the movie industry, or the book industry. And yet, there is a professional commentariat who judges movies and books independently from economic factors.

That doesn't exist at all in sports, except in isolated cases (NPR's Only a Game, for instance).
Very few media outlets cover sport because it happens to be simply good sport, judged by standards other then the perception of how many people watch. I'd love to see a sports journalism grounded on something resembling aesthetics, rather than on a popularity contest, one that both encourages "sport vs. sport" articles that make the business of sport a sport in and of itself, and yet justifies itself by mindless repeating that football and baseball are the most popular sports and that it will be that way until the end of time.

Back to the article itself. One on hand, I suppose these numbers are surprising. But on the other, I can't help but feel it's not quite a fair comparison. The Stanley Cup only had one American team, and not a great hockey town at that, while the Gold Cup final probably was watched by every Mexican-American sports fan.