Are All Sports (Watching) Created Equal ?
Are All Sports (Watching) Created Equal?
People have different likings for different sports—a lot of it depends on upbringing and surroundings. If you live in the desert, chances are your liking for ice hockey might be lower than for field hockey. But it’s worth pondering: beyond your favourites, are we predisposed to liking certain sports more than others just because of the sport itself?
This is evidently based on my own experience and an attempt to decode what makes watching sports a great experience (which is different from playing sports—that might be altogether different).
Time to a Result
Assuming you’re watching sports for entertainment, the core deciding factor is the unlikelihood of the result—with the likelihood of the result becoming clear as late as possible, without the result taking too long to arrive. As attention spans decline, the duration it takes to decide a result, as a factor for liking, is on a downward trajectory.
The sweet spot seems to be around 2–3 hours now—almost competing with a movie. So that’s the first filter: time it takes to decide the result. This does rule out sports like Test cricket or one-day cricket, which can go over five days or a full day, as being attractive to a new, unintroduced viewer (for now—more on why this might change later).
Unpredictability, and Where It Lives
Apart from time taken, the other piece is the unpredictability of the result—which can be spread across time, across participants, or both.
Unpredictability Spread Over Time
Some games are designed to be more unpredictable throughout, while others are more likely to be decided quickly. To decode this variability, you need a finer metric: the amount of unpredictability per unit time.
If a sub-session of a game (a small unit of play) is short and can quickly end in either side’s victory, it’s more likely to attract attention than a sub-session that takes long to decide and/or has no result. That creates two more criteria to care about:
- Length of the sub-session
- Number of sub-sessions that end with results
For example, in football/soccer/hockey, sub-sessions (say, from one throw-in to the next or a free kick) can be moderately long, and most of them end without results—making them less attractive to me. Conversely, the lack of short sub-sessions is what makes sports like rowing a bit uninteresting to watch.
Unpredictability Spread Across Participants
The last bit to unpack is the distribution of unpredictability: two-player/team vs multi-player/team sports. By “two-team,” I mean within a single session. Football and hockey are two-team sports, although tournaments include more participants. However, sports like F1, swimming, golf, running, and rowing are multi-player sports where multiple participants compete simultaneously in the same session. This spreads the unpredictability across many participants.
While this seems advantageous (more sources of uncertainty), the challenge is that it’s difficult to focus attention on any one player at a time. In practice, predictability is biased toward favourites, and most people end up rallying behind them—unless they have other reasons for separate favourites.
For a new, unintroduced audience, when likelihoods are too sparse and you can’t watch all participants in action together, two things happen:
- You lose context of the game.
- If you’re watching a non-favourite at any moment, you’re likely to be bored, since that moment feels less connected to the final result (at least in your mind).
That’s why most broadcasts in these sports focus on the favourites. And that’s why these sports are somewhat contextual for an unintroduced audience—more engaging when there are clear favourites.
So, while unpredictability of the outcome is great when it’s spread over time, it’s not as great when it’s spread across players. When it’s spread over time, your mind can follow it more closely because you can make sense of binary outcomes in each sub-session. When there are multiple outcomes at once—an explosion of outcomes per unit time across many players—it becomes cumbersome unless you arrive with favourites (which is hard for a new audience).
Sports like javelin throw and golf make this easier by having multiple players take turns, so at any unit of time there’s only one outcome to follow.
A Simple Model
interest ≈ exp[−(time taken)] × (unpredictability spread over time)
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(unpredictability spread across players)
Exponential because it functions like a gate: the rest of the expression only really matters when the time taken is low.
What This Explains
Clearly, sports like tennis, table tennis, and badminton stand out because they score high on all fronts: they take less time, involve a couple of players/teams at a time, and a point rarely takes more than a minute. Even basketball lives up to similar popularity for the same reasons.
How Some Sports Could Adapt
Following the corollary, games like football and hockey could improve with a more relaxed rule for what counts as a goal and with fewer disruptions around throws. Imagine if taking the ball past a certain line (like in American football) counted as points, or if the number of consistent passes counted as mini-victories. That way, many more sub-sessions would result in outcomes.