Quote:
Originally Posted by Flamenspiel
^^Does anyone really care though? Certainly not on a FIFA scale. The NBA is more interesting. I would say that really only the Olympic events or the World Cup surpass league interest in most sports(maybe Rugby WC as well).
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What? No, that's only America.
Here's a rough guide to how sports audiences work:
- Americans watch only sports they invented, and then only if it's played in America. (And even then mostly just their own team.) There's a few exceptions like the Olympics, but not really that many.
- Everyone else goes crazy over international sports in general (and football).
If your country is playing in a prestigious tournament, it doesn't matter if you've never watched that sport, it's big news and everyone cares. That's how you suddenly get a million Finns (20% of the population) to watch a FIBA world cup basketball game even if the local basketball league is so small I'm not sure if all the games are televised. (Finland has I think only made the FIBA world cup once.)
In general when it comes to the not-major-powers of the world (basically meaning the countries which don't regularly kick the crap out of smaller countries in wars), national pride is often very deeply connected to (team) sports, and almost any sport will do.
Also, any sport which is watched in India and/or China are huge. For example, Cricket World Cup gets twice the audiences of Superbowl because India watches that. When China plays in the FIBA world cup, that's instantly 50 million eyeballs on every one of those games.
So yeah, FIBA World Cup is actually a really big event. Total TV audiences way over half a billion, tickets sold are in the hundreds of thousands. When your country is playing, something like 10% of the population can easily be watching. Quadruple that if that country actually cares about basketball.