Numbers Games

Let’s do some maths. (i.e. Readers of a non-analytical bent stop reading now).

ENGLAND

Football

• Premier League: 20 teams, each plays each other twice. 10 matches per round, 38 rounds per season, therefore 380 matches per season.
  
• FA Cup: 64 teams from the third round (when the Premiership clubs enter). That’s 63 matches. Plus 15 replays this year. Makes 78 matches in a season.
  
• Carling Cup: 32 teams from the third round (when all Premiership clubs enter). That’s 31 matches in a season.
  
• Champions League: 8 groups of 4 teams each. 16 matches per round, 6 rounds in the group stages. That’s 96 matches in the group stages. 16 teams go through to the knockout stages. And each round is two legs up to the final. That’s 29 knockout matches, so 125 in total.
  
• Europa League: 12 groups of 4 teams each. 24 matches per round, 6 rounds in the group stages. That’s 144 matches in the group stages. 32 teams go through to the knockout stages. And each round is two legs up to the final. That’s 61 knockout matches, so 205 in total.
  
• England internationals: England have played 118 internationals in the last 10 years. That makes an average of about 12 matches per season.

So the total number of top flight football matches played in England each year is around:

380 + 78 + 31 + 125 + 205 + 12 = 831

Cricket

The ECB website tells me that there are (a quite frankly, baffling array of) 729 domestic and international cricket matches this summer. 144 LV County Championship matches, 151 Friends Provident Twenty20 matches, 6 npower test matches etc. The average length of these matches will be a little over 2 days – if they are all rain-unaffected and last for the maximum possible duration. Allowing for this, but adding on some internationals in the winter and the recent Twenty20 world cup, let’s call it about 1,500 days of top flight cricket this season.

Rugby Union

• Guinness Premiership: 12 teams, each plays each other twice. 6 matches per round, 22 rounds per season, therefore 132 matches per season.
  
• Heineken Cup: 6 groups of 4 teams each. 12 matches per round, 6 rounds in the group stages. That’s 72 matches in the group stages. 8 teams go through to the knockout stages. That’s 7 knockout matches, so 79 in total.
  
• Challenge Cup: 5 groups of 4 teams each. 10 matches per round, 6 rounds in the group stages. That’s 60 matches in the group stages. 8 teams go through to the knockout stages. That’s 7 knockout matches, so 67 in total.
  
• LV= Anglo-Welsh Cup: 4 groups of 4 teams each. 8 matches per round, 3 rounds in the group stages. That’s 24 matches in the group stages. 4 teams go through to the knockout stages. That’s 3 knockout matches, so 27 in total.
  
• Internationals: England have apparently played 104 internationals in the 21st Century so far – so an average of about 11 per year.

132 + 79 + 67 + 27 + 11 = 316

I could well be missing out on some rugby union competitions here, but that would not really matter, because most English people don’t really care about domestic rugby union. Not only are there only a third the number of matches in the top domestic league of rugby union compared to football, but the average attendance at a Guinness Premiership match is less than 12,000, compared to 36,000 for Barclays Premiership games. Although the average attendance for domestic Twenty20 games in England is less than 7,000, and for county championship games it was a pitiful 3,215 in 2005 – as this fascinating Wikipedia link attests. Unsurprisingly, NFL matches have the highest average attendance per match (68,000 people), followed by the IPL cricket league in India (58,000), and then the German Bundesliga (42,000). The poor Rugby Union National League 3 (North) must be wishing that someone had not bothered to count the 229 people that turned up to watch its fixtures on average in the 2008-09 season. It’s not the greatest accolade to be the “Least watched domestic professional sports league in the world”. You know you are struggling when your attendance figures can be beaten by the Lithuanian Association Football league, the Norwegian Premier Handball League, and the Finnish Pesapallo League (which is apparently some sort of colder version of baseball).

Rugby League

• Super League: 14 teams, each plays each other twice. Plus one an additional match at a neutral venue on the “Magic Weekend”! 7 matches per round, 27 rounds per season, therefore 189 matches per season. Plus 9 playoff games equals 198 matches in a season.
  
• Challenge Cup: 32 teams from the third round (when the Super League clubs enter). That’s 31 matches in a season.

198 + 31 + a handful of internationals = 235

Grand total for the top 4 professional team sports in England

Football (831) + Cricket (1,500) + Rugby Union (316) + Rugby League (235)

= 2,882 matches.

AMERICA

Baseball

30 teams in the Major League, and each plays 162(!) games. That’s 2,430 regular season games. Then you have the four Division Series playoffs (best of 5 matches), the two Championship Series games (best of 7), and the World Series (best of 7). That’s 41 playoff matches, but let’s say only 35 happen. That makes 2,465 baseball matches in a season.

Basketball

30 teams in the NBA, and each plays 82 games. That’s 1,230 regular season games. Then 16 teams make it to the playoffs, and there are 15 playoff match-ups. Each match-up consists of the best of 7 games. Let’s assume that the average match-up is concluded in 6 games. That makes an additional 90 playoff games. So 1,320 matches for the season as a whole.

American Football

32 teams in the NBA, and each plays 16 games. That’s 256 regular season games. Plus 11 playoff matches makes 267 matches in a season.

Ice Hockey

30 teams in the NHL, and each plays 82 games. That’s 1,230 regular season games. Then 16 teams make it to the playoffs, and there are 15 playoff match-ups. Each match-up consists of the best of 7 games. Let’s assume that the average match-up is concluded in 6 games. That makes an additional 90 playoff games. So 1,320 matches for the season as a whole.

Grand total for the top 4 professional team sports in America

Baseball (2,465) + Basketball (1,320) + American Football (267) + Ice Hockey (1,320)

= 5,372.

AND THEN THERE’S COLLEGE SPORTS!

I don’t know how to calculate this one easily, but it seems to me that there are about 15 weeks of college football in the season, and about 50 matches each week. This makes 750 matches. And then each college plays about 35 basketball matches. So if there are 100 big colleges, that makes an additional 1,750 matches. I will not count college hockey and college baseball because I understand they’re not as well-followed (i.e. I rarely see them on ESPN).

Professional sports (5,372) + College Football (750) + College Basketball (1,750)

= 7,872

CONCLUSION

The 1,500 days of cricket above should probably not be counted. The average attendance at county championship cricket matches was 3,000 in 2005, and even this was spread over 4 days! This compares to an average attendance of over 30,000 at MLB games in 2009. But even if you include all of these days of cricket, the number of sports fixtures per season in America is nearly three times what it is in England. 7,900 matches vs. 2,900 matches, or thereabouts.

Now we should not be surprised by this. The US has 6 times the number of people as England, and 107 cities of over 200,000 people, compared to only 20 for England. In fact, this means that England has significantly more top-level sporting matches per head of population.

But for the armchair sports fan, this is not the important statistic. The only thing that matters is “the number of games that I can watch”, and this number is much higher in America than in England. ESPN Sports Center’s “Plays of the Day” is about the greatest 3 minutes of TV in the world. My thanks to the volume of American sports matches that make it possible.