Basketball as the world's most popular sport

It says on the world atlas sit that Basketball is the seventh most popular sport in the world beaten out by table tennis, cricket, regular tennis, field hockey and fucking volleyball. What would it take basketball to be the world's most popular sport, beating out the indomitable football/soccer.
 

Ian_W

Banned
It says on the world atlas sit that Basketball is the seventh most popular sport in the world beaten out by table tennis, cricket, regular tennis, field hockey and fucking volleyball. What would it take basketball to be the world's most popular sport, beating out the indomitable football/soccer.

It'd need to be established earlier, as basketball only really became popular in the 1960s.

It needing a prepared surface is an issue, as you cant play it on grass or waste ground - you need concrete at least. Maybe rammed earth courts become popular, the same way the French adopted easier to maintain clay rather than English grass courts for tennis.

Just thinking out loud.
 
Really all you need is a sufficiently cleared ground. During the industrial era we were building roads left and right. It shouldn't be too hard, you can also play indoors.
 

Ian_W

Banned
Really all you need is a sufficiently cleared ground. During the industrial era we were building roads left and right. It shouldn't be too hard, you can also play indoors.

To get sufficiently consistent bounce to be able to play basketball, you need a hard, consistent surface - bare ground wont do it.

That means the playing surface needs to be cared for, same as a tennis court or a cricket pitch. You can't just use a cow paddock, the way you can for baseball, football (any football) or field hockey.

Indoors is a plus for winter sports, once you have enough indoor gymnasiums.
 
I think the big reason soccer/football is the world's most popular sport is that it's the "poor man's sport" - it requires no specialized equipment except a ball for casual players at least, making it far more accessible than many other sports.

Basketball on the other hand does require the baskets and some wall/structure at minimum to hang the baskets from, plus a hard surface as others have said. Soccer/football goals can be more impromptu for casual play. That said, basketball takes up less space than most team sports and can be played indoors, giving it an advantage for being accessible to people in urban areas and places with cold climates.
 

Ian_W

Banned
I think the big reason soccer/football is the world's most popular sport is that it's the "poor man's sport" - it requires no specialized equipment except a ball for casual players at least, making it far more accessible than many other sports.

Basketball also has a similar advantage to association football that you can reliably go to work the day after, which is not true in either rugby or in American football.
 
Basketball also has a similar advantage to association football that you can reliably go to work the day after, which is not true in either rugby or in American football.

Pretty sure in Rugby Union that is what happened with players for years (in fact that's how they were doing it until around 20-25 years ago, play and then go to work the next day).
 

Ian_W

Banned
Pretty sure in Rugby Union that is what happened with players for years (in fact that's how they were doing it until around 20-25 years ago, play and then go to work the next day).

Look up "broken time". Needing to get paid for time off work is what caused the split between league and union.
 

SSJRED

Banned
Look up "broken time". Needing to get paid for time off work is what caused the split between league and union.
Which had nothing to do with physical recovery time. Northern Players requested broken payments to make up for potential lost wages as the majority of northern players were working class labourers without steady work.
Rugby may be a contact sport but anyone who has played it at an Amateur level would tell you that its not hard enough to prevent you from having a few beers after the game before you have to go to work the next morning
 
In America, basketball is the poor man’s sport - urban poor people play it more than any other sport. To make it the world’s most popular sport, urbanize the shit out of the world. Have most people live in cities that have paved areas where basketball can work. Once you have a flat, paved surface, all you need is two hoops (which are rather durable in weather, and shit, if it comes to it, you can use a single hoop in a pinch) and a ball. In an urban setting, it isn’t that much more complicated than soccer (or any other football - makes me wonder why rugby isn’t among the top five sports in the world when it doesn’t take terribly much to play it.)

So in short, basketball as number one would take:
1. Lots of urbanization (getting there)
2. Soccer to get scandalized (we’re talking about FIFA here so it’s definitely possible)
3. Individual stars to take on the world a la Ronaldo and Messi (picture LeBron James and Steph Curry being household names in China, South Africa, Italy and Brazil to a similar extent of soccer stars.)

A FIBA World Cup and a lot more competition for the gold medal in basketball (as in it’s not USA vs the field every four years) would help as well.
 
In America, basketball is the poor man’s sport - urban poor people play it more than any other sport. To make it the world’s most popular sport, urbanize the shit out of the world.

That's been happening all over the world since WWII. I really don't think it takes much more doing than OTL. I think the better way forward for trying to make basketball popular all over the world is have more big men playing it. Being taller than about 6'4" is no real advantage in most sports and large men generally have issues playing most sports, but not basketball, where height (so long as you are sufficiently fit) is no disadvantage and indeed can be an advantage.

I personally believe the key is have the NBA (the world's largest basketball league than as now) be able to have players from all over the world a lot earlier. Indeed, a lot of people have commented that Arvydas Sabonis (the monstrous 7'3", 290-lb center for the Soviet Union's national team in the 1980s) could have been ranked right with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Wilt Chamberlain and Shaquille O'Neal and David Robinson and Tim Duncan as the best centers to ever play basketball. Had he joined the NBA at age 31 instead of 22, him and the Portland TrailBlazers of the time (he'd have been playing with Clyde Drexler, Terry Porter, Buck Williams, Dražen Petrović and Cliff Robinson among others) might have ended up being the archrivals to Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls. Get more of that much earlier (1960s to start) in the forms of Nikos Galis, Dino Meneghin, Oscar Schmidt, Dražen Dalipagić, Sergei Belov, Krešimir Ćosić, Ubiratan Pereira Maciel and the like and you'd be able to get people seeing basketball stars across the world much earlier.
 
Ye gods, that's a nightmare scenario. Papers like the Philadelphia Inquirer try to force basketball down readers' throats as it is (during the flood tide of the baseball season, that paper led its sports pages with speculation articles on NBA free agency, for crying out loud!), and this would make it intolerable.
 
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