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Some Thoughts on this Gallup Poll, and the Youths Moving Away from Football
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Everybody is talking about this new Gallup poll, which reveals the popularity of certain sports among different age groups:
The full report is linked here, but the graphic in the story that’s getting the most traction was shared by Taylor Twellman and others:
The first thing that jumped out to me was baseball. No surprise that it’s the second most popular sport among the oldest demographic, but it’s the second most popular sport among the youngest demographic while dipping dramatically among Millennials and Gen X. Why is that? Were we turned off by the steroid era? Was it because the Red Sox were good while we were in college? That one is really interesting.
Football’s decline is noticeable as well. Still #1 across all three demos, but down to 20% in the youngest group. They grew up being told that football was dangerous. Head injuries, CTE – all of that. Fewer kids are playing tackle football and some of these college football student sections are pathetic. They don’t look at the sport the same way the 35+ crowd does. I can’t imagine NIL is helping the college game as well, since it’s now about the haves and have nots. The cream is rising to the top, with the money, while middle-tier schools aren’t very competitive.
The soccer numbers don’t surprise me at all. The boomers and older Gen X don’t like the sport because it’s Communist or soy boy/Euro. They’ve always found the sport to be foreign, literally and figuratively, but it’s #2 in the middle demo and tied for third in the younger demo. Certainly the sport has become more mainstream over the years with streaming access to the Premier League and other European competitions. Major League Soccer has come a long way in a short amount of time while immigrants and their kids make for a big shift in the Gen Z demo.
The one thing that would be helpful here, which is not included in the data, is how much these folks care about Lionel Messi F.C. and overseas clubs vs., say, the Philadelphia Union and USMNT. I’d imagine it’s a significant fracturing there.
RE: hockey, those numbers look accurate. It’s the 5th sport in the United States and I don’t think that’s a hot take, I think the numbers pretty much confirm what we already knew. The NHL is more popular than MLS, but it’s not more popular than the combined Premier League + UCL + La Liga + World Cup/etc, which may or not be fair, but it is what it is. Like comparing apples to oranges. We always had the nets out in the cul-de-sac back in the day, and played street hockey with the other neighborhood kids, but if you want to play on ice it’s seasonal, it’s expensive, and it’s Caucasian. But the good thing in this region specifically is that the Flyers are trending upward and about to go on a multi-year run.
Finally, 23% of kids aged 18-34 answering “none” is annoying. Get these dweebs off of YouTube and down to the sports complex.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com