Ice Hockey Championship

[Kaikitsune Makoto 209]

Football is easy. Orange is all you need. Ball of any kind. Just play! Dance with the ball. Easy to play anywhere. In Italy and Brazil kids play it in any place. In US boys want their dads to play baseball with them. Musoyama was given 1 tenth of yen for every shiko I think when he was a small kid. Volleyball milliard? Nobody buys that. Nobody buys volleyballs. Light the ball is though and volleyball is kinda cool game. Nowadays kids play less sports, they eat a lot and play with computer all day long and gain weight and develop a dislike for sports. That is sad. Kids need to move. Adults need to move. At some point the nature has set that the need to move eases and elderly people just do calm moves. Yet basketball is popular in school yard games. It is easy too and good achilles tendon activity. Dribblers in poor areas can be very good but not get a chance in NBA or university just like in Brazil some natural talents who spend 10 hours a day with football and who never get a chance still. Ice hockey is small sport but it is nice. Winter time hours and hours of ice hockey on outdoor rings! That was so great. Also we played with ice hockey sticks on roads without skates usuallyt with tennis ball. That improved the stick handling a lot. It was fun. Juice. Sumo is the best.

[Zentoryu 154]

I wish the North American members of the forum would for once see what football really means in countries (Finland not included) where a father goes from maternity clinic to his club's office to register a new member and where inheritance disputes are about who is allowed to inherit late father's right to purchase the season ticket of the local football club.

Oh don't worry about that. We are clearly aware of how much Soccer/Football means in other parts of the world, and are often baffled by stuff like what you state above about inheritance disputes. Just amazing that a SPORT can inspire such behavior in human beings. :-) (Clapping wildly...) :-)

But almost a milliard volleyball players!

I think you mean a billion? My last name can't be a number... :-P

Ice-hockey is globally speaking a tiny sport. In only three countries, I believe, ice-hockey is the number one sport (Canada, Finland, Slovakia (?)). Three million players sounds about right.

But I still think there is no comparison in terms of size to Sumo. At least 8 countries have serious competitive Ice-Hockey leagues. As far as I know Japanese style Sumo has only one major professional competitive organization in the world and a few amateur ones.

There is nothing like football. Can not be! Today Arsenal will win...

If we speak purely in terms of popularity amongst fans (ie, the number of people who watch and cheer for the sport and their teams), I certainly agree with you.

Edited May 16, 2003 by Zentoryu

[Kotoseiya Yuichi 3]

Be not amazed by anything caused by football. A football match is a tragicomedy in two acts, a life itself compressed in ninety minutes. A beautiful game. Perhaps it needs to be grown into, perhaps not. It's not just a sport. Sport can be done without, not so with football.

I mean milliard, a thousand millions. I do know Americans call it billion which, in fact as is well known, equals million millions. (Clapping wildly...) Billion on the other hand you call trillion... :-)

Well, see for yourself if you're interested. I was taught only British English although I've been far more exposed to American English for guessable* reasons.

* Is that a word?

I'm not sure about the eighth serious ice-hockey league, nor the seventh. Anyway, countries like Sweden, Finland, Czech, Slovakia and Switzerland are relatively small. So is Canada in global scale. Russia and United States are the only two big countries with any sort of exposure to ice-hockey. Even if all these leagues are combined, it doesn't create a sport of globally major interest. Certainly NHL is relatively widely followed in those five European countries listed above but what about the big European countries; Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Poland? Very little interest. Only Germany can be thought as a semi-serious ice-hockey nation among the large European countries. On the other hand Russia is relatively unknown to me but I venture to guess football is there just as clearly the leading sport as everywhere else in Europe.

The point I'm trying to make is that the number of people actively interested in ice-hockey must be clearly under 100 million people, right? NHL isn't that popular in North America, right? Well, basically I'm talking about USA, of course. We do know about Canada's obsession with ice-hockey. :-P

Yes, admittedly sumo is a smaller sport globally than ice-hoceky but by how much? There are almost 130 million Japanese. A good proportion of them has at least some interest in ozumo. In a not much larger than average prefecture there are more people than there are in whole Finland. The number of people with some kind of interest in ozumo must be in few tens of millions in Japan alone, Waka-Taka boom or not. We can only guess the number of us gaijin enthusiasts. Eurosport keeps on broadcasting bashos. They wouldn't do it to empty audiences no matter how cheaply they got the rights.

Too many variables to say anything conclusive, of course. My guesstimate is that ozumo is at least half the size of ice-hockey, if not more. The interest is just more concentrated to the sport's original location.

[Manekineko 200]

I just wanted to say: I don't think it's possible to compare popularity of an individual sport with those of team-sports... (Clapping wildly...)

And yes, football rules as an idisputed king of team sports over at least three continents: Europe, Africa and South America. Don't know about Asia, while rugby probaly rules supreme in Australia and co.

Edited May 17, 2003 by Manekineko

[Yoavoshimaru 0]

This always becomes an interesting debate: I was hoping the link I posted would fuel it! (Clapping wildly...)

NHL isn't that popular in North America, right

It's the 4th major sport, after basketball / football (american) / baseball. I don't know what the order of popularity of the first three sports is. However, the ice-hockey is doing fairly well, especially since it expanded to warmer climates (LA, Phoenix, Atlanta, etc.) in recent years and those teams get fans as well.

American English for guessable* reasons.

* Is that a word?

Probably use "predictable" :-P

The bottom of the page I posted states some questions they asked about the alleged volleyball popularity, essentially saying the number for volleyball is wrong. :-)