The Top 10 Sports (By No Objective Criteria)

Um, so this is my analysis of some of the major sports, ranking the acumen of their athletes and the nature of the game. I did close to zero research for this post, so there’s that. Worth noting is that I value elegance in my sports—that the ideal game has few mechanics or artificial structure.

So let’s begin by looking at the athletes. I give a score (that I determined in less than a second) to the physical training, mental skill, and genetic bias displayed by athletes in each sport.  I imagine those are mostly self-explanatory: I want to rate the challenges of body and mind in these sports as well as the need to simply be born with a certain height or disposition. And I get it, you can’t separate genetics from the other two (but I did anyway).

So what can we notice? Boxing and running marathons demands a lot of the body; baseball’s lucky to be where it is; and throwing darts in on par with picking up a rook. Obviously, I think chess requires the greatest use of your mental faculties, but the spatial awareness required in most team games is not to be underestimated. Some games, on the other hand, while requiring a degree of fortitude are easy to wrap our heads around. As for genetic bias, I think we all knew basketball and swimming would be up there, but I imagine golf to be an everyman’s game.

Now let’s look at the actual sports. I tried to assign a score for the complexity of each sport, its difficulty, and entertainment value. Don’t give too much focus to the averages and rankings; as I mentioned at the top, I think complexity is a disadvantage to most games. Still, the complexity score is meant to measure how artificial the game is—how long would it take me to explain to a newcomer and for them to grasp the gist of the sport. The difficulty ranking is a little hard to define, but the intention was to gauge how hard it would be for a novice to become competent in the sport. Consider a high schooler in decent shape—how long would it take for them to learn and train for the sport before they could compete with some experienced players. You can probably guess what entertainment is about.

What do we notice? Football and baseball are incredibly synthetic and modern games. Soccer and racing sports are not. A lot of these games have a fair learning curve—boxing, perhaps, most of all—while others are more general, that is, simpler and less acute in their physical demands. Lastly, violence and close races make for more entertaining spectacles—you Philistines.

So, with that, here’s my top ten:

10. Bull Riding
9. Basketball
8. eSports
7. Tennis
6. Running: either one
5. Football
4. Hockey
3. Chess
2. Boxing (and let’s add MMA and Wrestling to that)
1. Soccer

Doesn’t really add up with the rankings I gave above? Too bad. I’m from Fort Worth; bull riding had to be on there. Basketball isn’t offensive. Electronic sports offer something novel but lack the very thing that draws humans to athletics. Tennis is fun if you like watching rich people work out (which I do). Running is pure but a little monotonous. Football was engineered in a lab for maximum entertainment. Hockey is the same as my favorite sport but on ice with slightly more scoring. Chess and Boxing are the only two sports to get a perfect 10 in any category. And soccer, because obviously.