What Are The Most Popular Worldwide Sports Based On Google Searches?

How does formula 1 compare against the popularity of other sports? 

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve compiled a few tables ranking formula 1 drivers and teams based on their number of monthly Google searches to see which drivers/teams are the most popular with formula 1 fans.  Just to quickly recap, it’s safe to say that all drivers receive significant numbers of Google searches every month, and in some cases certain drivers are being searched for as often as every five seconds!

To carry on the ‘Google search’ theme, I also decided to investigate how the popularity of formula 1 as a whole compares with other sports, by looking up the monthly Google searches for a sample of sports.  In some cases where a sport is known by more than one name (such as athletics/track and field), I’ve added the figures for the two search terms together and then compiled the results into a table.

One thing which becomes apparent straight away is that sport as a whole is massively popular, with even the lower ranked sports drawing in millions of searches per year.





Anyway, here are the results…

Sport	Monthly Searches	Annual Searches
Football (inc Soccer)	169.50 million	2,034.00 million
Golf	68.00 million	816.00 million
Formula 1 (inc F1, Formula1)	41.09 million	493.08 million
Cricket	37.20 million	446.40 million
Basketball	30.40 million	364.80 million
Tennis	30.40 million	364.80 million
Baseball	24.90 million	298.80 million
Rugby (inc Rugby League, Rugby Union)	18.80 million	225.58 million
Hockey	16.60 million	199.20 million
Cycling	16.60 million	199.20 million
Athletics (inc Track and Field)	16.34 million	196.08 million
Swimming	13.60 million	163.20 million
Boxing	11.10 million	133.20 million
Ice Skating (inc Skating)	7.62 million	91.44 million
Volleyball	7.48 million	89.76 million
MotoGP (inc Moto GP)	7.44 million	89.28 million
Bowls	6.12 million	73.44 million
Squash	4.09 million	49.08 million
Nascar	4.09 million	49.08 million
Snooker	4.09 million	49.08 million
Darts	4.09 million	49.08 million
Skiing	3.35 million	40.20 million
Badminton	3.35 million	40.20 million
Table Tennis	2.74 million	32.88 million
Netball	0.82 million	9.88 million
Ice Hockey	0.67 million	8.08 million

As you can see, formula 1 performs very impressively indeed with close to a mind-boggling half a billion searches being made every year on Google, and only football and golf attracting more searches.  And bear in mind, these figures don’t include the massive number of searches made for other formula 1 related terms, such as drivers, teams, circuits, etc, so the half a billion annual searches are only the tip of the iceberg.

Presumably these are just the sort of figures which marketing executives at formula 1 teams use when they’re trying to convince potential sponsors of the massive benefits of being involved in formula 1.  And also presumably Bernie Ecclestone pulls out figures of this nature when TV contracts around the world come up for renewal.

Anyway, it just goes to show the popularity of sport in general and that formula 1 is more popular than ever.

Footnotes:
1) The above table of sports is obviously not meant to be exhaustive and is purely designed as a general comparison of a sample of sports based on ‘Google search’ popularity.
2) As mentioned in previous posts, I believe Google use rounding when producing their figures which accounts for some sports having equal figures.
3) Just to reiterate, in cases where a sport is known by different names around the world, I have added the totals together.
4) Technically, ‘Rugby’ should actually be Rugby Union and Rugby League, but these received relatively few searches, so I therefore accumulated the figures due to the fact that most people seemed to be searching simply for ‘Rugby’.
5) ‘Football’ will also include a percentage of searches made in the US where people were actually searching for American Football (or as it’s known in the US … football!).  Unfortunately there was no way to differentiate these figures but whatever the percentage, football would still have been the top ranked sport.
6) On a similar theme, presumably many of the searches for ‘hockey’ were actually made by people interested in ‘ice hockey’, but as hockey is also a separate sport in its own right I therefore showed the figures separately.
7) The above figures were correct as of 3rd January 2013 but may have varied slightly since then.





That's it for my analysis of formula 1 related searches on Google.  Over the next few weeks I'll get back to the day job of formula 1 betting.

Just to recap, you can find my earlier formula 1 related Google search posts at the following links:
The 2012 Formula 1 Google Champion!
Which Formula 1 Driver Is Most Popular In His Home Country?
The 2012 Formula 1 Constructors' Google Champion


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