I LOVE the Olympics. Nowhere else do you get to watch the best in the world compete in a plethora of competitions. Even relatively esoteric (viewer) sports like shooting, sailing, volleyball (in the USA), and artistic swimming are spectacular to watch. If you say otherwise, can you really say you’re a “sport” fan? A human fan? These are people pushing the limits of what the human body can do.
Nonetheless, let’s get back to the title. Watching certain sports are definitely more entertaining than others, from a spectator point of view, not just world-class athlete point of view. There’s definitely a reason the NBA is a massive franchise and there’s not a huge competitive shooting scene in the USA on TV. Some sports are just more fun to watch than others. The contrapositive is that some sports are less fun to watch than others.
Soccer is the worst sport
Among major sports, soccer is definitively the worst to watch, definitely lower than many minor sports as well. It’s a gimmick sport, it rewards passive gameplay, the penalty system rewards flopping or can wildly punish a whole team, penalty rewards (other than red cards) largely don’t impact the game at all, the clock counts up and doesn’t even have accurate bonus time, you have a limited number of subs in a game that rewards explosive play, the tie break (shootout) is just a coin flip, and a high scoring game has only a few goals in ~100 minutes of play, among others.
The benefits it has are: anyone can play (you need a ball) so it’s relatable, and you can’t play commercials during the game (clock doesn’t stop). Wow!
“But soccer is so much fun to play!” you might argue. Great, keep playing. I’m just arguing that it’s terrible to watch.
Raw vs Gimmick sports
With my gripes out of the way, I first want to clarify a bit of terminology I’ll be using. One, i think all sports fall on the category of raw sport or gimmick sport. All sports have rules but, as a subset, some of the rules go beyond just telling you what you can do and tell you restrictive things you cannot do. When these restrictive actions go beyond preventing degeneracy, it becomes a gimmick sport. For example: Swimming or track are both raw sports. Swimming has 4 different strokes but each of those are relatively intuitive and the only restriction is how hard you can push your body. Similarly with track, where the lane lines are the rules you have to follow. Breaking these rules by swimming a different stroke or going out of your lane line would render the sport a non-sport; the rules outline minimally the boundary of what competition means.
A gimmick sport, on the other hand, has some arbitrary restrictions that do more than outline the competition. Soccer has the rule that you cannot use your hands; this makes it a gimmick sport. Handball is a great example of what something very similar would look like if it were less than a gimmick sport. Gimmick sports aren’t necessarily bad: ice hockey is just a gimmicky version of field hockey in a lot of ways but it’s still quite fun to watch.
It’s definitely a spectrum, but most sports fit cleanly into one of two categories. Basketball I’d say is a raw sport: dribbling prevents degeneracy. Volleyball is a raw sport. Field hockey is a bit in between, but probably more of a gimmick sport. etc.
Again, a gimmick vs raw sport doesn’t necessarily make it a good or bad viewing experience, but I think a gimmick sport has to have some leg up in order to make it worth watching over a raw sport.
What makes a great spectator sport?
I’ll try to enumerate what I’ve come up with to make a great spectator sport. These aren’t necessarily in order at the moment, hopefully in the future i’ll order them in terms of importance.
Note: a lot of these do not count for individual sports like track, field, or swimming
Those are raw sports where the entire sport is the discrete event. They have similar counter-points which I think are mostly obvious. I’ll discuss most of these points in the language of team sports.
Passive play should not be rewarded
It’s mind-numbing to watch soccer players pass the ball back and forth in the back line for 85 minutes in the game. There is no incentive not to do this. worse yet, when one team is up, by far the best play late in the game is to corner the ball and force your opponent to kick it out of bounds, wasting time. You may argue I’ve got iPhone brain, whatever. If one sport is more fun than another, the more entertaining sport will out compete the “gentleman’s sport”. Yes, there’s a limit and more cerebral sports should and do have a spot, but I don’t want to sit and watch ball-passing practice for 85 minutes, that’s not patient that’s boring.
Shot clocks are a great way to incentivize action:
You must make a play within XX seconds
Probably the easiest way to force some kind of play.
Back-court violations are also great. There’s a lot of ways to incentivize action. It’s usually better to punish passive play than reward active play: at some point a team will find a spot that the reward of action isn’t worth the risk and they will play passively. Having a method to punish them like handball’s passive play warning is good against this.
The penalty system should neither be abusable nor overly punishing
In soccer, a regular foul just changes possession (generally useless unless the game is already a stomp), gives a free kick (which has low success rate) or awards a red card which makes one team a man down for the rest of the game. The latter most option is incredibly punishing, almost irrecoverable, and the rest are quite useless. Despite their uselessness, there’s basically no incentive not to flop for a foul whenever there’s any contact, so a touch on the shoulder is indiscriminate from take a shotgun to said shoulder.
The play in soccer is too slow to punish players that flop and waste time excessively.
Contrarily, two other sports with better (not perfect) penalty systems: basketball and hockey. In basketball, the shot clock is only 24 seconds. If you try to flop and fail, you’ve probably wasted over 1/10th of the shot clock, and your team is playing a man down on the other side of the field. In hockey, they just don’t care. You can have legal fights in hockey it’s such a good game.
Furthermore, I think Hockey has one of the best penalty systems of any major team sport (in addition to water polo, which is pretty much the same). Major penalties in hockey result in a penalty box for your team and a power play for the other team. This does punish your whole team for one player’s excessive aggression but only for a short time. It’s a well defined, consistent window of punishment. Basketball on the other hand overly rewards fouling for the offending team, making the last 5 minutes of the game take almost an entire period of play.
Unfortunately for basketball, and other similar sports where fouls stop play (unlike football’s flag system) also allow penalties to be defensively abused. In basketball, if you are fouled within the 3-point line, you get to take up to 2 free throws, earning 2 points. If a defender thinks it’s likely that an offensive player will make a play that results in 3 points, it’s advantages for the defender to foul within the 3-point line to ensure the offensive play cannot make more than 2 points. This punishes the recipient of the foul; a form of foul abuse. Some other sports get around this by only having certain types of fouls that would either needlessly stall the game or that the foul recipient would always take. Hockey, for example, commonly stops play for “icing” the puck, where someone shoots the puck far away from everyone else. In this case, the foul is for the spectator as well as the attacker. Other hockey fouls usually get a power play, which teams will always take.
In summary: The ideal penalty system should not be abusable. Penalties should either take less than 1 second to resolve or should be very difficult to invoke; ideally both. Excessive penalties can punish the team, but should do so for a pre-fixed period of time. Penalties should exist solely to prevent physical harm to the players or prevent degenerate play.
Play actions should not be discrete
Soccer is actually not the worst offender on this one, I have another target here: Baseball is also incredibly boring to watch. You can pretty much turn your head away from baseball for 90% of the game and summarize the highlights in just a few minutes. Furthermore stats nerds have totally destroyed the game by looking at just a few key variables.
I think, more so, this makes the game way less human.
Ideally the game should be made up of several small (read: continuous) actions that cumulate into a winning or losing team. Basketball is really good for this: You have players who can read rebounds and box out well, players who are great play makers, and other players who are great drivers/shooters complete the play. Often the latter ones show up in highlight reels but they wouldn’t get the ball nearly as often if it weren’t for their support. Football similarly rewards (financially) offensively linemen with high rates of pay because they allow the quarterback to make the game winning plays.
Often games that don’t have turns can achieve continuity quite easily. But, those games would also benefit from a more continuous scoring. Which leads me to the next topic
Action should be relatively frequent
The game state should progress relatively frequently, say at least every 5-10 minutes, ideally much quicker.
Soccer can have the entire game summarized with, usually, 3 highlight kicks to show the end score of 2-1. Wow! unfortunately hockey falls into this category too.
The more continuous the scoring is, the easier it is to progress (see also my later point about not scoring by 1).
It should be difficult for one team to run away with the game
This is more of a sports-organizational issue. Track, field, and swimming all do this relatively well by having pre-competitions with heats. For team sports, USA-based teams often have a reverse-draft system (where the worst teams draft college players first) or salary caps to prevent one team from having a legacy and roughly balancing the skill of all the teams. Somehow, despite having horrendous salary cap rules, baseball is still roughly balanced between teams.
Regardless, when one team has a runaway game, it’s no fun to watch. That is, unless, there’s more win entropy in the game…
There should be some, but not too much, win entropy
Win entropy is defined as the likelihood the better play or currently wining player ends up losing the game. In other words, how likely an underdog story or comeback is.
Chess, for example, has theoretically zero win entropy. Because players are human, they often miss moves, but if they play correctly the winner will always continue to win with no chance of a comeback by the loser. Other games with high randomness (such as dice games). For a spectator, neither of these are great; you don’t really want to see the favorite always winning but you also don’t want to see the underdog winning 50% of the time.
The exception to this is non-team raw sports, where you want as little entropy as possible. In the 100m dash, I don’t want any randomness since the goal is to push the body as much as possible. The spectacle isn’t a team game but rather an individual’s ability to perform. In some sense, the entropy is built into the human aspect of the sport, whereas in team sports there’s reduced performance entropy as is averaged by the collective team.
Every game should have something on the line
This is also more of a sports-organizational issue. Games like baseball have so many games in a season that many of the games end up not mattering. Additionally, most track and field events, hosted by NCAA competitively, have very little on the line. This makes them less popular generally than other sports except during the olympics or other international events, where world records are broken and the status of “fastest/strongest on the planet” can be claimed; a real stake on the line.
I don’t know how to up the stakes on average for a sport like swimming, but something like baseball could lower the amount of games, however it has pretty high win entropy so this isn’t a great solution. The recent NBA change of the mid-season tournament has been a great incentive. This also shows the added benefit that, when something’s on the line, it’s obviously more fun for the fans to root for someone but it makes the players try way harder as well.
Other things that help a sport be a good viewing experience
The previous terms were more rules that a sport almost has to follow to be entertaining, but there’s also a lot of things that aren’t strict rules but benefit a lot. I’d argue that a sport doesn’t satisfy most of these it doesn’t have a chance to be a good viewer sport.
The sport should be relatively intuitive
I think this is obvious. If most people can’t just watch it on the TV, most people aren’t going to just watch it on TV.
Sadly e-sports fail really bad at this test, despite passing almost every other test. But they fail it so bad it’ll never be mainstream until gamers rise up. Interestingly, see Applying e-sports mechanics to real sports to see what taking some of the ideas from e-sports might merit.
The sport should have comeback mechanics
This is more-or-less a subcategory of “It should be difficult for one team to run away with the game”. This is one way of executing that at the cost of increasing the win entropy a bit (which may benefit the sport!). Note that this explicitly does not include “the other team messes up” as a comeback mechanic. This is explicitly referring to a rule that gives the currently losing team some advantage.
Mechanics like changes of possession after scores generally do okay for this, but I think it would be interesting if, when teams were down by a certain amount of score, they have additional options to score bonus points. Free-goalie sports like hockey and water polo have the interesting mechanic of open goal, where you can pull your goalie for an extra player on the field offensively.
Having comeback mechanics prevents teams from running away with the game and makes the game more engaging for a much longer period of time than if no comeback mechanic existed.
Scores should not increase only by 1 point
Not only does this make scoring much more continuous, making the average engagement much better, but it also makes the sport way more balanced. As a third benefit, it also makes for a great comeback mechanic.
Say you are watching field hockey and one team is down by 1 point with only time for one possession left. The best case scenario for them is they tie and go into some kind of overtime(OT).
Alternatively, say you are watching a football game where the team with the ball is down by 3 and with only time for a few plays left. Now there’s a very interesting decision for the team of “do we try to just tie it up and win in OT or do we make a riskier play and try to win?” It also makes it much more entertaining for the viewer because the game isn’t guaranteed to go into OT.
Games should have a well defined timeline
This is one thing that soccer actually does really well. The clock doesn’t stop. The game starts at noon? the kickoff is at noon. There’s no OT, just a shootout. This is it’s one redeeming quality.
As cool/hype as OT is, excessive OT is numbing to the viewer and damaging to the players, making the viewing experience eventually worse.
Additionally, clock-abusing mechanics such as fouling, timeouts for icing, or intentional incomplete passes in football ruin the pace of play. Sure, they’re kind of neat to watch at the highest level and maybe they should be allowed in the post season, but it destroys regular season play and there’s little incentive against abusing the clock in games that have clock-stopping mechanics. Ideally, the clock stops minimally except for really questionable, high-impact reviews or excessive violence fouls. However, soccers’ extra time is also equally annoying since it’s just arbitrary. It would be nice if an additional stopwatch ran when play was paused and that was just added to the clock, or some fraction of it. As it stands, it just feels random/corrupt.
If the league allows for a draw, that’s a fine resolution, especially in the regular season. Alternatively a skill-based tie resolution can also be a good way to end the game with only a few extra minutes of play instead of half an hour.
Ties should have a skill-based resolution
Shootouts are a fine resolution time-wise for a tied game but, especially in soccer, they often feel like a coin flip. The net in soccer is so large compared to the ball speed and goalie size that the goalie effectively has to just guess where the ball is going at the highest level. Other games like field hockey where the goalie can be active are much more entertaining to watch and feel significantly less like a coin flip. It feels like the better team actually won.
I think the best resolution, though, are fast-scoring games that have a win-by-two rule like tennis.
Refereeing should be as objective as possible
This one is also obvious. Sports where the reffing is objective tend to be annoying to watch and very corrupt (*cough, soccer).
Summary: what are the best spectator sports?
First, I’ll run through a few major sports and explain where they rank on these metrics:
Soccer
- gimmick sport
- passivity is rewarded (-)
- penalties are incredibly abused and flopping encouraged (-)
- action is continuous (+)
- Easy to run away due to passivity and hard to score (-)
- Action very infrequently
- low win entropy (-)
- games have community pride on the line, legacy game (+)
The last point I’ll give that soccer does have a massive community around it, probably because it requires so little to play (a ball), but I think if other sports were equally popular in other countries it would not have the same following.
Overall ranking: -2
Basketball
- raw sport (mostly)
- passivity is punished (+)
- penalties are abused at the end (-)
- action is continuous (+)
- hard to run away based on league and foul abuse (+)
- action every 24 seconds (+)
- mild win entropy (+) (made up for by 7 game series in finals)
- mid-season games often don’t matter (-)
Overall ranking: +3
Swim Meet
- raw sport
- passivity is punished (+)
- penalties un-abusable (+)
- action infrequent between events, but continuous during event (~)
- difficult for one player to run away due to heats (+) (but exciting when they do)
- heats make win entropy more exciting (~)
- most races do not have something on the line (-) (except at international events: +)
Overall ranking: +2 local level, +4 international level.
What’s the best sport?
Actually, I think I’ll award it to one I haven’t mentioned yet:
volleyball (especially indoors).
- raw sport
- passivity is non-existent (punished) (+)
- penalties unabusable and very objective (+)
- play is continuous the whole point, points have very little breaks (+)
- continuous action (+)
- changing serves and tournaments makes runaway games unlikely (+)
- College seasons are short and usually high skill; games have something on the line (+)
Overall ranking: +6
As an added benefit:
- the games are pretty predictably timed, win by two is a great answer to ties.
- It’s insanely intuitive.
The big issue is that there’s no real following for it outside of college leagues. I would definitely watch it and root for it if there were though, much more than the upcoming united soccer league.
Water polo
As a runner up, I think water polo is another great viewer sport, it’s only downside is you swim much slower than you run, so it feels a bit sluggish, but:
- raw sport (sure you’re in the water, but you can do anything on top of that)
- passivity is punished
- penalties are generally un-abusable1
- play is continuous (hockey style swap ins now!)
- runaway games can happen, but are unlikely
- college seasons
Overall ranking: +4
It’s, in my opinion, a marginally better version of hockey because you can’t ice the puck and scores tend to be much higher (10-20 range). At the finals tournament level, too, matches tend to be much closer and tournament structures prevent runaway games, bumping it also up to a +6 score. It doesn’t beat out volleyball though because of the minor reasons.
Side note: I think e-sports horribly fail the issue of not being intuitive, but I think they have tons of other great mechanics that make them spectacular viewing opportunities. I have an entire follow up post about e-sports as a spectator sport.
Footnotes
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You might argue that the water polo play pattern of 1) get the ball to set 2) set draws an exclusion foul 3) play the rest of the point a man up; is an abuse of the penalty system from the offensive team. However, if anything, this is abuse by the defensive team. The larger reason this play pattern exists is because if the ball gets to set and the foul is not immediately drawn, the set player will almost always score a point and it’s almost impossible to foul in the set defense without getting ejected. You can see when the defenders are late to foul it is catastrophic. This repeated gameplay of drawing exclusions is a little repetitive but makes the game more interesting by letting us see how teams play 6-on-5, so it’s not too bad. ↩