Network Diffusion in Sports Preferences
Many people are familiar with the American obsession with football, and the UK’s similar attitude towards soccer. Countless weekends in the United States are spent in front of the TV with a college football or NFL game occupying the screen. In the UK, fans often watch the Premier League (a top soccer league) or other soccer games for hours. Such an obsession with sports makes sense—they provide a release from the monotonous grind of day to day life. However, there are several questions we still should be asking ourselves: why is there such a dramatic divide in the sports interests between people of different countries and regions, and why is there only one dominant sport in each of the two countries?
The answer lies largely in network diffusion, which describes the spread of technology, ideas, and information as a product of imitation behavior. Network diffusion argues that people benefit from imitation of the decisions of those who they are most closely associated with. They can either benefit directly; for example if you use the same technology as your neighbor, they may be able to help you out when yours is malfunctioning. Alternatively, there are informational benefits; people believe that others who made their decision early have additional information, and trust their decision making process more than their own. These factors can result in a phenomenon known as a “cascade,” which results in large groups of people making the exact same decision as everybody else. This effect can be witnessed in people’s sports preferences. A 2017 poll showed that football is the most popular sport in the United States, at 37% of people’s favorite. The second most popular sport was basketball, with 11% of fans ranking it as their favorite sport. This is already three times less than the popularity of football, and the remaining sports are even less popular. One of those unpopular sports in the US is soccer, the favorite sport for 7% of people. This is where one really begins to question the nature of these patterns, because in the UK soccer is by far the most popular sport. In a British poll, 45% of participants stated their interest in soccer, twice as much as the second most popular sport, rugby.
Clearly, then, the issue of popularity is not necessarily correlated with the actual entertainment that the sport provides. Imitation behavior in network diffusion can explain this. In the United States, football initially became more popular as a smaller group of people emphasized their interest early on. As more and more people became football fans, this put pressure on other people to become football fans. If someone has friends who are football fans, but they themselves are not, this will place a strain on the friendship. They will have less subjects in common to talk about, they will not be interested in going to the same events, they will not be able to participate in the sport together. Fearing this, the person decides to become a football fan, and the sport continues to spread. Of course, friendships are not the only factor behind this diffusion: people may assume that the sport is great because so many people support it; perhaps people want to seem knowledgeable at work or want to impress someone; maybe they simply have a fear of missing out. Regardless of the specific factors, the overarching driving force remains the same: people within a network realize that they have more to gain by imitating the decisions of others in the network, rather than following their own intuition. The differences between the sports preferences in the US versus that of the UK prove this theory. How else could soccer be so unpopular in one country and so beloved in another? Clearly, it is not directly related to how fun or entertaining the sport is. It is more directly related to the early decisions that people in a given area made, and the rest of the population’s tendency to imitate those decisions. In the United States, this is why football is very popular, and no other sport comes close. In the UK, this is why soccer has dominated for years on end with no sign of changing.
Sources:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abb0266
https://news.gallup.com/poll/4735/sports.aspx
https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/rugby-union-britains-second-most-popular-sport