Comparing Countries’ Athletic Success and Opportunities
Comparing Countries’ Athletic Success and Opportunities Countries across the globe are constantly competing and trying to outdo each other in battles for the best education and best technology, to name a few, yet there is one area where countries can outright compete: athletics. The general consensus would agree that the United States is the athletic superpower of the world. However much that may be true, it is not as clear-cut as most people would think. The United States has better opportunities for athletes than other countries because it not only has more success in global competition, but it has more available professional leagues, and it generates more money for its athletes.
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In the study conducted by De Bosscher et al. (2003) about the success of different countries in tennis, different ways to determine success were compared. For example, “to construct indicators for countries' successes in tennis the logical place to look is at the existing indicators for successes of individual players.” However, in order to observe each country’s success, they examined the percentage of athletes from each country in the top ten, top one hundred, and top one thousand, yet inconsistency occurred because sometimes the results would change. For instance, the United States had more athletes in the top one thousand than any other country, however, Spain had more athletes in the top one hundred. De Bosscher’s study also concluded that success for tennis and other sports are determined by numerous different factors. The political system of a country determines how much money is invested into sports, religion may affect the way athletes train and compete, culture defines the way countries compete and excel in sports, population size expands the number of athletes with potential talent, economic welfare determines how much money individuals can spend on equipment and training, and urbanization/location determines available training centers and geographic advantages for different sports (De Bosscher et al., …show more content…
Of the five leagues, in the 2013-2014 season, the NFL generated the highest attendance rate of about 68,331 fans attending each game. For the season, the NFL drew 17.3 million people to attend. The team in the NFL that drew the most fans was the Dallas Cowboys, with 88,043 people attending each game for a total of 704,345 fans. Major League Baseball had a total of 30,437 fans attending each game, and the team with the highest attendance rate was the Los Angeles Dodgers with 46,695 people per game. The attendance rate for MLS was 19,151 people per game, the NBA had 17,809 per game, and the NHL had 17,502 fans per game (“Average Per Game Attendance of the Five Major Sports Leagues in North America 2014/15,” 2015). Compared to the American NFL, the Bundesliga, a professional football (soccer) league in Germany, drew about 43,500 spectators per game. The Premier League, a professional football (soccer) league in England, had approximately 36,630 fans per game. The next highest attendance rate for an un-American league, goes to the Primera Division (Spain) with 26,840 people per game. Serie A, a professional Italian football (soccer) league, Primera Division (Mexico), a professional Mexican football (soccer) league, and Ligue 1,