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Cricket is **** but at the end of the day its the somewhat internationally relevant version of baseball.
Like I said if you go outside of the US and follow the sports/sports media the lack of American relevance/presence in most of what people are paying attention to is probably surprising to many because it all seems so big and important within the US. America is a bubble.Comment
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So, at best, each of those countries has one or two team sports each to compete with boxing over large athletes. Some have hockey, some have rugby, some have basketball, very few have two or more when it comes to being of consequence popularity-wise.
The US and Canada have football, baseball, hockey, basketball, and lacrosse. The NFL, CFL, NHL, NBA, NHL, NLL, and PLL combined have over 5,000 heavyweight-sized world class athletes. The amateur and collegiate systems that feed those leagues have many times more than that number, and that's before we get into minor or independent professional leagues (which would be the equivalent of the majority of pro boxers).
And, comparatively speaking, the US and Canadian leagues are many times more popular than their overseas counterparts. Especially the big 4 (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL), but even the smaller leagues listed (CFL, PLL, NLL) have more more consistent media visibility than boxing these days. Lacrosse is a niche sport compared to hockey or baseball here, but even that sport has two different pro leagues (one outdoor on grass fields, one indoor on turf covered hockey rinks) and a college league with consistent TV coverage on major networks (ABC, ESPN). It's much easier to find lacrosse on television in the US in 2025 than boxing. And again, lacrosse is a fraction as popular as the big 4 (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL).
Nothing else reasonably explains why the amount of Americans and Canadians highly ranked in a given division drops off a cliff after super middleweight. The other divisions are mostly just competing with soccer as far as team sports go, which is a global sport and much less popular in the US and Canada than most other places. So that tracks as well -- in the higher weight classes, the US and Canada are losing a lot of athletes to team sports. In the middle weight classes, they're losing fewer than most other nations do to soccer. Consequently, the US and Canada are over-represented in the middle divisions and under-represented in the higher ones.Last edited by famicommander; 11-03-2025, 12:12 AM.Comment
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You're conveniently leaving out the part where America has 340 million people in it.
Do you not get the concept of per capita? those countries are starting out with a far smaller athlete base than America to begin with, and are then, contrary to the narrative, spreading those athletes around multiple sports before boxing, and are STILL producing solid HWs. Meanwhile the US, a rich country with 340 million people and more active pro HWs than every other country, is clearly massively underperforming.
Even per capita wise some of these more successful HW countries are not putting more HW athletes into boxing than America is. The UK and US for example are fairly comparable in HW boxers per capita.
It gets even dumber still when you take into account that even though the US has 340 million people, the vast majority of the athletes are coming from one specific demographic that makes up a fairly small percentage of the population. The NFL and NBA are like 80% made up of this one minority demographic, which still leaves a surplus of around 300 million people who are barely represented in these big man sports, but also barely represented in combat sports, so where are they?Comment
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