Ranker

Anime Underground

Button Mash

Graveyard Shift

Total Nerd

Unspeakable Times

Weird History

Weird Nature

Weirdly Interesting

Sports

Music

Entertainment

Lifestyle

Culture

Food

Makeup

Halloween

Thanksgiving

Holidays

Watchworthy

HBO Max

These are things that make America great. Get in the spirit and vote!

USA! USA!

pageType

safe_grapeshot

X_AMP

edit_update_annually

top_search_2-3

Ticker Exclude

mod_duplicate

mod_criteria

dfp_policy_violation

srch

video_wall_test

Mens Lifestyle

Microsoft Sales Exclude 3/22

Current Sports

For the past century, sports have become an important part of American culture. Many of the most popular sports in the world have been American games. A fair number of Americans either participate or follow sports. Children play sports to meet other kids their own age and they teach important tactics, like teamwork, which helps people later on in life. Football, not to be confused with European football or soccer, is one of the most popular American sports.&nbsp;The Super Bowl is always the <a class="edS-cl" href="https://www.ranker.com/list/most-watched-events-in-television-history/brendan-kelly?ref=internalCrossLinking_keyword">most watched sporting event</a> in the United States, drawing nearly 100 million people to their TVs to watch an event that&#39;s distinctly American.

Basketball is another popular American sport that has a worldwide reach. Becoming almost as globally relevant as soccer, basketball&nbsp;and the NBA in particular&nbsp;have turned the game from a semi-popular American sport into a game people across the globe love to play.

Vote for the game you think is the most popular American sport on this ultimate list. If you see a sport that isn&#39;t on the list and should be added, feel free to.

Most Popular Sport in America | List of Favorite Sports in the US

The Most Popular Sports In America

General

Other

Best Rankings of Random Cool Facts + Stuff

other

Ranker Community

Region

American

Gender

Women

Gen Zs

Millenials

Gen Xers

Baby Boomers

West Coast US

Mountain US

Midwest US

Southern US

Northeastern US

International

American Football

Basketball

Baseball

Soccer

Ice Hockey

Ice hockey is a contact team sport played on ice, usually a rink, in which two teams of skaters use their sticks to shoot a vulcanized rubber puck into their opponent's net to score points. In Canada, the United States, and some European countries such as Latvia and Sweden, it is known as "hockey"; the name "ice hockey" is used in places where "hockey" more often refers to field hockey, such as South America, Asia, Africa, Australasia, and some European countries like Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom. Ice hockey teams usually consist of four lines of three forwards, three pairs of defencemen, and two goaltenders. Normally, each team has five players who skate up and down the ice trying to take the puck and score a goal against the opposing team. Teams normally have a goaltender as their sixth on-ice player, whose job is to prevent the puck from entering the goal.
A fast-paced physical sport, hockey is most popular in areas of North America and Europe. In North America, the National Hockey League is the highest level for men's hockey and the most popular. The Kontinental Hockey League is the highest league in Russia and much of eastern Europe.

Volleyball

Mixed martial arts

Mixed martial arts is a full-contact combat sport that allows the use of both striking and grappling techniques, both standing and on the ground, from a variety of other combat sports and martial arts. Various mixed-style contests took place throughout Europe, Japan and the Pacific Rim during the early 1900s. In 1980 CV Productions, Inc. created the first regulated MMA league in the United States named Tough Guy Contest, later renamed Battle of the Superfighters, sanctioning ten tournaments in Pennsylvania. However, in 1983 the Pennsylvania State Senate passed a bill prohibiting the sport. The combat sport of vale tudo that had developed in Brazil from the 1920s was brought to the United States by the Gracie family in 1993 with the founding of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
The first documented use of the name mixed martial arts was in a review of UFC 1 by television critic Howard Rosenberg, in 1993. The term gained popularity when the website newfullcontact.com, then one of the largest covering the sport, hosted and reprinted the article. The question of who actually coined the name is still in debate.

Boxing

Boxing is a combat sport in which two people, usually wearing protective gloves, throw punches at each other for a predetermined amount of time in a boxing ring.
Amateur boxing is both an Olympic and Commonwealth Games sport and is a common fixture in most international games—it also has its own World Championships. Boxing is overseen by a referee over a series of one- to three-minute intervals called rounds.
The result is decided when an opponent is deemed incapable to continue by a referee, is disqualified for breaking a rule, or resigns by throwing in a towel. If a fight completes all of its allocated rounds, the victor is determined by judges' scorecards at the end of the contest. In the event that both fighters gain equal scores from the judges, professional bouts are considered a draw. In Olympic boxing, because a winner must be declared, judges award the contest to one fighter on technical criteria.
While humans have fought in hand-to-hand combat since the dawn of human history, the earliest evidence of fist-fighting sporting contests date back to the ancient Near East in the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC. The earliest evidence of boxing rules date back to Ancient Greece, where boxing was established as an Olympic game in 688 BC. Boxing evolved from 16th- and 18th-century prizefights, largely in Great Britain, to the forerunner of modern boxing in the mid-19th century with the 1867 introduction of the Marquess of Queensberry Rules.

Track and Field

Snowboarding

Snowboarding is a recreational activity that involves descending a slope that is covered with snow while standing on a snowboard attached to a rider's feet. The snowboard is attached using a special boot set into a mounted binding.
The development of snowboarding was inspired by skateboarding, sledding, surfing and skiing. It was developed in the United States in the 1960s by Gordon Kosteroski and became a Winter Olympic Sport in 1998. Its popularity peaked in 2007 and has been in a decline since.

Swimming

Human swimming is the self-propulsion of a person through water or another liquid, usually for the purpose of recreation, sport, exercise, or survival. Locomotion is achieved through coordinated movement of the limbs, the body, or both. Humans are able to hold their breath underwater and undertake rudimentary locomotive swimming within weeks of birth, as an evolutionary response.
Swimming is consistently found to be among the top recreational activities undertaken by the public, and in some countries, swimming lessons are a compulsory part of the educational curriculum. As a formalized sport, swimming features in a range of local, national, and international competitions, including every modern summer Olympics, which occurs every four years.

Lacrosse

Lacrosse is a team sport played using a small rubber ball and a long-handled stick called a crosse or lacrosse stick. It is always played as a rough contact sport. The head of the lacrosse stick is strung with loose mesh designed to catch and hold the lacrosse ball. Offensively, the objective of the game is to score by shooting the ball into an opponent's goal, using the lacrosse stick to catch, cradle, and pass the ball to do so. Defensively, the objective is to keep the opposing team from scoring and to gain the ball through the use of stick checking and body contact or positioning. The sport has four major types: men's field lacrosse, women's lacrosse, box lacrosse and intercrosse. The sport consists of four positions: midfield, attack, defense, goalie.

Car Racing

Golf

Skiing

Beach Volleyball

Table Tennis

Fishing

Fishing is the activity of trying to catch fish. Fishing usually takes place in the wild. Techniques for catching fish include hand gathering, spearing, netting, angling and trapping.
The term fishing may be applied to catching other aquatic animals such as molluscs, cephalopods, crustaceans, and echinoderms. The term is not normally applied to catching farmed fish, or to aquatic mammals, such as whales, where the term whaling is more appropriate.
According to FAO statistics, the total number of commercial fishermen and fish farmers is estimated to be 38 million. Fisheries and aquaculture provide direct and indirect employment to over 500 million people in developing countries. In 2005, the worldwide per capita consumption of fish captured from wild fisheries was 14.4 kilograms, with an additional 7.4 kilograms harvested from fish farms. In addition to providing food, modern fishing is also a recreational pastime.

Softball

Softball is a variant of baseball played with a larger ball on a smaller field. It was invented in 1887 in Chicago as an indoor game. It was at various times called indoor baseball, mush ball, playground, softbund ball, kitten ball, and, because it was also played by women, ladies' baseball. The name softball was given to the game in 1926. A tournament held in 1933 at the Chicago World's Fair spurred interest in the game. The Amateur Softball Association of America governs the game in the United States and sponsors annual sectional and World Series championships. The World Baseball Softball Confederation regulates rules of play in more than 110 countries, including the United States and Canada; before the WBSC was formed in 2013, the International Softball Federation filled this role. Women's fast-pitch softball became a Summer Olympic sport in 1996, but it were dropped in 2005 from the 2012 games.
There are two types of softball. In the most common type, slow-pitch softball, the ball, sometimes larger than the standard 12 inches, must arch on its path to the batter, there are 10 players in a team, and bunting and stealing are prohibited.

Motocross

Chess

Chess is a two-player strategy board game played on a chessboard, a checkered gameboard with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide in homes, urban parks, clubs, online, correspondence, and in tournaments. In recent years, chess has become part of some school curricula.
Each player begins the game with 16 pieces: one king, one queen, two rooks, two knights, two bishops, and eight pawns. Each of the six piece types moves differently. The objective is to 'checkmate' the opponent's king by placing it under an inescapable threat of capture. To this end, a player's pieces are used to attack and capture the opponent's pieces, while supporting their own. In addition to checkmate, the game can be won by voluntary resignation by the opponent, which typically occurs when too much material is lost, or if checkmate appears unavoidable. A game may also result in a draw in several ways, where neither player wins. The course of the game is divided into three phases: opening, middlegame, and endgame.

X Games

Climbing

Many animals have unique features that help them climb, from the sticky pads on the bottoms of frogs' feet to the prehensile tail of the kinkajou. The Kratts lose a climbing contest to a band of coatis, whose sharp claws and long tails give them an advantage, while Jackie and the Animal Helpers rescue a kitten who has figured out how to climb up a treeâ€”but not how to get back down to the ground.

Gymnastic

Kickball

For the past century, sports have become an important part of American culture. Many of the most popular sports in the world have been American games. A fair ...