Only two cricketers made Time's list of the 100 most influential people in sport. Faisal Hasnain investigates whether cricket's claim as the world's second largest sport holds up.
Only two cricketers made Time Magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in sport. That number, small as it is, set off a chain of thinking.
The obvious conclusion from that list is that cricket carries little to no influence at a global level. Cricket's footprint, however passionate its fanbase, barely registers when measured against the sports that shape the world's cultural and commercial conversation. I laid out my rationale for that in a previous piece.
But that conclusion raised a harder question. If cricket has so little global influence, what do we make of the claim that cricket is the world's second largest sport? This is something our cricket administrators have said for years, something the sport's governing bodies repeat as settled fact. It's repeated so often it has taken on the quality of received wisdom — the kind of thing that gets said without anyone checking whether it's actually true.
Cricket administrators have called the sport the world's second largest for many years. The data may tell a different story.
So I've done an analysis of that claim, looking at what the numbers actually show when you measure the sport against its rivals by the metrics that really matter. The results are coming, and I think they will surprise you.
"I think you will find the results very interesting." — Faisal Hasnain
Cricket occupies a strange position in the global sports landscape. Inside its core markets, particularly the Indian subcontinent, it commands an intensity of following that few sports anywhere can match. But intensity inside a geography is not the same as scale across geographies. The question of whether cricket is genuinely the world's second largest sport, or whether that is a story the sport has told itself for comfort, is worth answering with evidence rather than assumption. That discussion is coming soon.
