British sports are completely orthogonal to American sports, so it seems a bit disingenuous to say that ‘no one visits London for sport’ from an American perspective. No Brit will go to the US to watch MLS. Americans care less about Soccer, Rugby and Cricket, but much of the rest of the world does.

London-based Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham are the 7th, 8th and 10th most valuable soccer teams worldwide. Chelsea won the champions league last year. All three teams play in Europe (almost) every year.

Wembley Stadium is the publicly funded national soccer stadium, and hosted the recent Euros final. It is a regular host of European club competition finals, including the Champions League.

Lords is the home of cricket. It hosted the World Cup final a few years ago, and is a mandatory stop on international tours. It almost causes diplomatic incidents if a tour of England skips Lords. London also has The Oval, traditional host to the last test of the summer. Accordingly, many famous test series have been won there.

Wimbledon is the most prestigious and historic tennis tournament in the world. It’s staunch traditionalism is polarising online, but it’s perpetually sold out, and ‘ground passes’ (a ticket to all the smaller courts) have queues for days. I’m an annual queue-er, I’ve met people from all continents.

All?!

I think you're undermining the rest of your argument (which I personally think is pretty decent) by defending the "sports in London/Paris/etc doesn't matter" angle so hard across multiple subthreads.

I actually believe that even on a back of the envelope calculation it's hard to imagine how one can come up with this being a net positive. Let's argue that a stadium brings in 1M visitors a year (which is a high number) . If a stadium costs 1B then the city (through taxes etc) needs to make around 100 per person for it to be a good investment (10% return). And we haven't even considered the costs of externalities, like large traffic jams during games, cleanup etc.. I find it difficult to imagine that this works.

> needs to make around 100 per person for it to be a good investment (10% return)

The goal of a government isn't to make a profit.

I tried googling more directly for global popularity/famousness, but couldn't find any hard data.

And of course there's the issue of "has well known sports teams" vs "well known for their sports team". The former you could probably get data on somewhere, but the latter, I doubt it.

Travel outside the USA and every kid you meet has heard of Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham. If I were French or Spanish rather than British, these kids would say PSG or Real Madrid instead.

The fans don't have as much money as Americans, but there are 10-15x as many followers on Facebook.

But I would argue England is well known for its sports teams rather than London. (There's also Manchester, Liverpool etc.)

I think what you mean by "travel outside the USA" might be "travel in Europe". I'd bet that you'd get more recognition of the Lakers in, say, China than any of those Premier League teams.

> But I would argue England is well known for its sports teams rather than London. (There's also Manchester, Liverpool etc.)

That's fair, those two cities are probably known for their football teams moreso than anything else.

I may be out of date for China, I haven't been there for over 10 years.

My place of birth (in my passport) is an English city with a football team named after it. Outside Europe, in places with not so many tourists, it is very common for staff in hotels to recognize this and make some comment on it. Kids (and adults) who talk to me in the street will also comment on it — on the city's team if I say where I'm from, or with Manchester, Chelsea etc if I just say England/Britain.

I look up the names of the famous players before I travel to Africa or South America, so I don't seem like some ignorant idiot when hotel staff (or in one case, a border guard) open my passport and say "Thomas Partey! What a goal!".

Bear in mind the best European football teams often have a lot of foreign players. Chelsea currently have players from Spain, Germany, Denmark, Italy, Brazil, France, Croatia, Belgium, USA, England (only 8/26), Senegal, Mococco and France. Arsenal add Ghana, Norway, Portugal, Japan, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Switzerland. Tottenham Argentina, Ireland, Korea, Colombia, Sweden, Uruguay.

Many people are aware when if a player from their country plays for a famous European team. They often also play for their national team, or used to.

(I have no interest in football myself, which is partly why it's so noticeable to me when people ask me about it so much.)

Hard disagree on this one. It is in fact "outside the USA" because globally (not just in Europe), English Premier League teams like Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal, Tottenham, etc. are extremely popular, especially in China.

> The National Basketball Association (NBA) has been named the most popular sports league in China in a recent survey undertaken by Ampere Analysis.

> Soccer’s English Premier League and Uefa Champions League ranked second and third respectively, in the report that conducted research with Chinese internet users.

So, the EPL is indeed popular there...but not as popular as the NBA.

Also, you see people wearing NY Yankees hats globally. Some of them don't even seem to know anything about baseball and just think it is some sort of NY merch. But still there are absolutely American sports teams that have recognizable brands more globally.

It's really not that hard.

> It's really not that hard.

Depends what you mean by football. The GP, for example, apparently meant actual foot-ball football, not American hand-egg. Does that change your assessment?

I'm also going to have to disagree on the Europe point.

South America, Mexico and Africa in particular are obsessed with football, and Russia, China and some parts of SEA are also huge football fans. Many of these will be well aware of the top British and Spanish football teams. On the other hand, basketball is also very popular in Asia so I don't know exactly how that would break.

You got any data on that? AFAIK lots of younger people have no idea what the Beatles were.

You are still forgetting a few continents. I know from experience that Central and South America complexity stop for Champions League finals.

I it’s quite possible that Liverpool is known more for The Beatles than football.

Instagram.

Arsenal (#38 from your list) has 21.9m followers and Dallas Cowboys (#1 from your list) has 3.9m followers.

But it's almost certainly not more popular than soccer.

At the very least WWE is not 6x as popular as the Dallas Cowboys.

Another example that occurred to me: I understand that American sports actually have regular breaks specifically to facilitate adverts. Whereas football (soccer) matches have two uninterrupted halves with a single 15 minute break in between.

Living here and experiencing the carnage common after football matches, I can promise you that a shit load of international and domestic tourists come to watch football.