The NFL is the rare thing that brings all Americans — Democrats and Republicans — together
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That’s what makes the NFL standout. While the NFL should perhaps worry about the youngest of fans, football is by far the most popular sport in America. It’s a sport whose popularity cuts across political and racial divides.
But this isn’t just about television ratings, it’s about interest at large.
The NFL is king in the US
No other sport (pro baseball, pro basketball, pro hockey, pro soccer, college basketball or college football) even cracked the 40% mark. In fact, only pro baseball and college football even broke above 30%.
While different pollsters have found differing levels of support for professional football — depending upon question wording among other factors — it’s the top sport in any poll.
Moreover, there’s no sign that pro football’s popularity has waned when examining Ipsos polling.
When you dig in deeper, you can see why the NFL does so well: it’s popular across the political spectrum. Among Democrats, 51% said they were fans of the NFL. Among Republicans, it was 50%. A majority (55%) of independents indicated that they were fans of the NFL.
This may be surprising given what has occurred over the last five years between Trump and the NFL.
NFL leadership backed the protests in 2020, while they did not in 2017. Perhaps, they realized Trump wasn’t ultimately making much of an impact.
Indeed, just like now, at least 50% of Democrats and Republicans were fans of the NFL in the 2007 Ipsos poll.
Racial divide in NFL fandom?
It also doesn’t appear that there is more of a racial divide among NFL fans than there was prior to 2017.
In the Ipsos poll, 51% of White adults said they were NFL fans, which is the same as overall figure. Black adults were somewhat more likely to be NFL fans at 62%, though in the grand scheme that is a far smaller racial divide than we see on many issues in America. For example, Black adults were about 40 points more likely to say they were NBA fans than White adults.
When Ipsos asked about professional football fandom in 2007, 54% of White adults said they were fans of the NFL. This is well within the margin of the error of what the 2021 Ipsos polling found.
Boys’ high school soccer saw a nearly 70,000-person participation increase over the course of the 2010s. Girls’ soccer had a 40,000-person increase in participants over that span.
This still left football with slightly over one million high school participants compared to about 459,000 boys and 394,000 girls (for a total of about 850,000) playing soccer. This meant the gap between soccer and football players in high school dropped from about 360,000 to about 155,000 over the course of the decade.
There are some signs this is leaking into the fandom of professional sports.
A majority of adults under the age of 30 (56%) in the Ipsos poll said they were not fans of the NFL. This was 15 points larger than those 70 and older of whom just 41% said they weren’t a fan.
That said, we shouldn’t oversell football’s problems. It remains the most popular American sport by a large margin. And while a sport like soccer may be picking up some ground, American adults are about 30 points more likely to be fans of football than soccer across polling.
Football — and the NFL — does not seem to be in danger of being overtaken by another sport popularity wise any time soon.
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