So I tried the Google Insights / Inkscape trick again to make another map. I would have liked to make a map showing which sport is most popular (where 'most popular' means 'most Googled' in which state, but that would have been pretty boring: a single-coloured map in which 'football' is most popular in all fifty states. Without exception.
Of course, this being the USA, 'football' refers not to the sport of the World Cup but the one of the Super Bowl. Or at least in theory it does: who can tell what people are actually looking for when they type 'football' into Google's search engine.
Anyway... removing football from the list and replacing it with the other big sports - baseball, basketball, hockey and soccer (yes the
other football) - suddenly presents an intriguing map:
It's an odd one. The only one it's easy to say much about is hockey: the sport thrives in northern states, along the Canadian border. None of the states coloured blue here has an NHL franchise, but with the exception of the Green Bay Packers neither do they have a franchise in any of the other main professional team sports. Washington State uniquely prefers soccer, something not easy to explain. You might chalk it up to Washington's large immigrant community, but certainly a good many states here have high immigrant populations.
Now... baseball vs. basketball? It's tough to see what's happening here. The South and the Northeast seem to prefer baseball, but why? And why is the heartland so basketball-happy?
I can only make a stab at an answer. The populous states, containing big cities, seem to prefer baseball: California, Texas, Florida, Illinois, New York.
Perhaps states with successful baseball franchises get the interest in baseball, whereas states with no MLB team gravitate to basketball. Why? Well, like American football, basketball is also a college sport, and the NCAA competes for attention with the NBA. Perhaps it's the college level, something baseball doesn't really have, that pushes it ahead.
