Football is seen as the toughest and most fun to watch sport, but the old national pastime of baseball is seen as the wimpiest
Over the past fifty years, baseball and slowly but steadily yielded ground as the nation's most popular sport to football. Where once the World Series was the pinnacle of sporting triumph in America, today the television audience for the World Series doesn't even beat the average audience for a normal NFL game.
The latest research from YouGov shows that America is now a football nation. With 40% of Americans agreeing, football is seen as the most fun sport to watch, with basketball coming a distant second at 15%. 45% of Americans also say that football is the 'toughest' sport, though it faces stiff competition from ice hockey, which 36% of the country says is the 'toughest'.
Americans do seem to have fallen out of love with baseball. The sport which once gave us all-American heroes like DiMaggio, Babe Ruth and Gehrig is now seen as the 'wimpiest' of the five major sports in the country - even beating soccer, with 27% choosing baseball as the wimpiest and 21% of Americans saying soccer is the least tough sport.
The fact that soccer - the 'beautiful game' - is, by a tiny margin, the most likely to be seen as the most beautiful sport by Americans could bode well for the sport's future in America. Almost as many Americans watched Team USA's victory over Ghana in the World Cup as watched the World Series final last year - though as some critics have noted, Americans may love the World Cup but ratings for ordinary soccer games are still dismal.
Full poll results can be found here.
Image: Getty
