Sports in the Middle East In Comparison to Sports In the West

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Sports in the Middle East In Comparison to Sports In the West

With regard to sports, not all parts of the world are created equally. Different parts, or regions of this planet follow different sports and participate in different sports for that matter as well. While in America, you can basically narrow it down to three popular sports, for the country as a whole. Football, baseball, and basketball, with ice hockey, soccer, and tennis probably fairly close behind, in terms of popularity. In the Middle East, sporting preferences differ greatly among the surrounding countries, with the exception of the top sport, soccer. Soccer, or football as it is called in the Middle East and every other place on Earth, is the overwhelming favorite participation and spectator sport.i

Lets first start with spectator sports and their popularity among the specific Middle Eastern countries as a spectator sport. Like I mentioned previously, you would think that there would be consensus among the countries, as their geography and demographics are fairly similar, again this is not the case at all it seems. Among the countries of Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria the top three favorite sports are as follows;

1. Football (Soccer)

2. Basketball

3. Motorsportsii

Among the countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen the top three favorite sports are as follows;

1. Football (Soccer)

2. Swimming

3. Motorsportsiii

This is fascinating to me due to basketball and swimming being equals in popularity because in the United States swimming is really only popular during an Olympic year.

As far as participation of these spectator sports, once again there are some discrepan...

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...his is probably due to climate and geography more than anything though, as is baseball, but I couldn't discern a specific reason why baseball is not popular in the Middle East. Without American football, sports in the United States would look very similar to sports in the Middle East, with the exception of golf and baseball. With the moves the NFL wants to make worldwide, it will be interesting to write a paper like this again in ten years to see if the above information has changed at all, or if soccer will still continue to rule all. Maybe the NFL will alienate its American fan base enough and soccer will become the number one sport in America. Who knows? It will be interesting to see sports continue to evolve and change as technology allows the planet to become smaller and more connected, surely our ideas will start to rub off on each other, sports included.

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