Interesting little Snapshot from this morning's USA Today: Ignoring the inevitable "Just wait until all those softball players grow up, the Pro Fast Pitch League is going to do great!", I'm curious about how to analyze this. Do you think every guy who's ever played Slow-Pitch on Tuesday nights for 55 minutes answered "yes" to this question? Why do you think soccer ranks so low in this particular poll (not accepting it as gospel by any means, just presenting it)? And what does this do to the age-old saw of "so many people play soccer in this country, it should be more popular", if so many more people play the other sports? Just curious. Thoughts?
Meaningless Stats This poll is probably meaningless, was it one of the ones on espn's pages? Web polls are just popularity contests and nothing meaningful can be concluded from them except 'This sites visitors said X on this day...' No reason to believe that the poll used a representative sample of the population so its useless.
Oscarm beat me to it. It's a flawed and skewed sample, totally meaningless. It's not a poll of all adults, all people, all athletes, or all anything. It's just the idiots who responded to a web poll on a web site full of idiots. I mean that with all due respect, of course.
Assuming that this poll is accurate (big assumption), it's results are very misleading. First of all you have to take into account who you polled. The older the average age the less chance that soccer will get votes. Many 50 year old people have never played soccer because when they played competetive sports (ages 10-30) soccer was not that big in the US and they may not have had a choice. Taking that further, how many men over 30 have played some type of organized youth baseball? Almost all of them. Data from polls is meaningless unless the demographic is given.
Does not every poll have an inherent bias towards those who respond to it? Just asking. I don't know if this was on their site or not, I didn't remember seeing it. But I wouldn't call it "totally meaningless" because there is something to be learned from almost any data sample as long as you interpret it correctly. Would it mean that those who play soccer don't respond to polls?
It is a stretch to say that the results of any web poll is repesentative of the "Percentage of the US population". Liars, damn liars and statisticians.
Was it a web poll? It doesn't say. I assume it was part of the big poll they did in their last issue that included the Top 100 Things That We Could Get Stuart Scott Excited About, and I don't recall reading the methodology.
It is not a web poll. USA Today would not use a web poll on ESPN.com as a source. Furthermore, the polls on ESPN.com only allow one response, which would make the results meaningless.
One question is: participated WHEN? The poll may be filled with responses from misty-eyed 70 year-olds thinking fondly back to their days as strapping youths.
The poll is obviously fixed because by my own stats it breaks down to this: % 76.5 - people who play dodgeball % 23 - people who wish they would play dodgeball % .5 - vegetarians I think there is an % 89 margin of error though...I'll have to get back to you on that.
All the results really mean: Big Soccer didn't pick up on this poll in time to get the word out and stuff the ballot box.
I just assumed it was a web poll, sorry. kenntomasch: "Does not every poll have an inherent bias towards those who respond to it? Just asking." Yes, that's why it's so important to know if the sample was truly random. But if it came out of a specific universe, it's inherently skewed. For instance, a poll among ESPN The Magazine readers will have different results than a poll among Sports Illustrated readers, or Soccer America readers. At any rate, there are other factors, as people have pointed out. Anyone can play "organized" softball for a game or two, without any kind of emotional or practical commitment to the sport -- for instance, it's a church activity that you only did once or twice after church because... it's a church activity. Soccer v. softball is really a meaningless comparison.
Some insight into the poll itself, as noted in the "Sports Nation" article in ESPN The Magazine of August 5: There's your skew. Regardless of what percentage of the audience is female (growing), if you go out with the intention of asking sports fans a question, you're going to get mostly men (and they apparently did). I have no problem believing that a large percentage of that sample has ever played softball. If you're a guy, especially as you get past the age where you could realistically get that call out of the blue from the Red Sox, chances are pretty good that you've played at least some softball, and chances are that you didn't play soccer unless you're under the age of about 35. For USA Today to extrapolate that out to be a representative sample of the US population (if, indeed, they were quoting from this particular poll, as I can only assume they were based on the timing of it) was misleading. The numbers weren't meaningless, they just needed some interpretation. As most numbers do.
How come nascar, tennis, golf and hockey were not included. They are arguably in the top 10 sports from a spectator point of view.
Most "sports fans" I know of don't care for soccer... a lot of soccer fans I know don't care for other sports...........
Included in what? Nobody plays NASCAR, and I'd imagine that since tennis, golf and hockey are either fairly regional (as in hockey's case, though less so now than it once was) or expensive (as in all three), they wouldn't show up in the top five sports participated in by sports fans in America.
By the way, I found an ESPN page that I should have posted earlier. ESPN Sports Poll is an ESPN "venture" based in White Plains, NY. I am guessing this is the company that ran the poll in question here. Take a few minutes to poke around their site. There is a list of polls they run there and one of them is "MLS Fan Demographics." They also describe their methodology. If this is indeed the company responsible for the poll, it looks like Gran'pa Simpson's response carries the same weight as Little Johnny's from down the block. That's really no surprise. It would be interesting to see teh age breakdown for the data though. Anyone want to go in on a subscription to the site so we can see the data?
Big Deal, I've played all five, and through in another five sports I've played competively. I'm not surprised that Softball is #1. Just about anybody can play it. You don't need to be in shape to play it.