Never before has the demand for live sports been so strong. This is largely thanks to fierce competition amongst broadcasting networks around the world, plus rapid increases in technologies, which deliver live events to viewers through a broader variety of different media platforms. But whether you watch sports on television, online or via mobile thanks to the greater choice of streaming options, which sporting events are attracting the most viewers?
5. Winter Olympic Games
First held back in 1924, the Winter Olympic Games is a major multi-discipline international sporting event held every four years. The original five Winter Olympic Sports were bobsleigh, curling, ice hockey, Nordic skiing, and ice skating, with those events broken down into nine disciplines.
During the 2018 Winter Olympics hosted in Pyeongchang, South Korea, there were 7 sports featuring 102 disciplines, which attracted a global audience of 1.92 billion viewers. The 2022 Winter Olympics will be hosted in the Chinese city of Beijing, which will become the first venue to have hosted both the Summer and Winter Games.
4. Summer Olympic Games
The inaugural 1896 Summer Olympic Games were held in Athens, Greece, harking back to the classic origins of this remarkable multi-discipline sporting event. That first modern Olympic event featured just 14 nations, competing in a total of 9 sports with 43 individual competitions, while there were 241 participants and all of them were men.
The most recent Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics featured 33 sports and 50 disciplines, comprising 339 individual competition events. Tokyo 2020 also had the lowest gender gap of any Summer Olympics, with 5,982 male and 5,494 female participants. This latest hosting of the Summer Olympics also attracted just over 2 billion viewers.
3. Cricket World Cup
Hosted every four years and organized by the International Cricket Council (ICC), this international championship of the One Day match format has been held since 1975. As the spiritual home of the sport, England hosted the first three Cricket World Cup tournaments, before India and Pakistan jointly hosted the event in 1987. Australia is the most successful One Day International team with five World Cup victories, followed by India and West Indies with two apiece.
As the most popular sport by far throughout India, fans of the game often enjoy wagering on their favorite teams and players. Increasingly more international bookmakers are available throughout Asia and the Indian subcontinent itself, therefore along with betting responsibly, it always makes good sense to compare options. Read through a reliable guide with tips and advice, covering cricket and other sports with trusted betting sites and positive reviews. England hosted and won the 2019 World Cup, while India will hold the next in 2023.
4. FIFA World Cup Football
Whether you know ‘the beautiful game’ as football or soccer, this event held every four years has become easily one of the most eagerly anticipated in global sports. Of the 21 World Cup tournaments there have been eight different winning nations, with Uruguay hosting the inaugural tournament which they also hosted back in 1930.
Since then, and having started with just 13 participating nations, the most recent Russia 2018 World Cup featured 32 national teams from 5 continental confederations. Brazil is the most successful team in World Cup history having earned 5 titles, while this country also boasts the record attendance for any sporting event, when 199,854 fans packed the Maracana stadium in Rio de Janeiro, as Uruguay beat host nation Brazil 2-1 in the tournament final. As for broadcast viewership, the 2018 World Cup attracted an audience of 3.262 billion, the biggest to date.
1. Tour de France Cycling
Dating back to the inaugural 1903 event, the Tour de France is an annual men’s multi-stage bicycle race. Often known as ‘La Grande Boucle’ amongst fans, this is widely considered to be the most demanding and difficult cycling even in world sports, whenever the event is traditionally held in July each year.
Such is the intensity of competition during every stage and throughout the race, even people who don’t consider themselves avid followers of cycling, often find themselves tuning in to catch the latest action. For this reason, perhaps quite surprisingly, the Tour de France has now become the most-viewed sporting event internationally. According to figures calculated by event organisers, the Tour de France attracts just over 3.5 billion viewers from 190 different countries, which is testament to just how appealing the race has become.
