Soccer

It's a good sport, especially live.  It did not televise well until about twenty years ago, which hampered its professional growth, and there still is the problem of low scoring. A three-minute highlights film is about all you need even for a World Cup game.  I understand why people who have taken to the sport like to watch the whole thing, start to finish, but the same can be said of golf and tennis, which most people find unwatchable. If you know something in depth, you see more than others and it is more interesting to you. I have never watched a videogame competition, but young people who have played that particular game and gotten good at it will see things I don't and recognise the excellence of some moves. 

There has long been a quiet political undertone to soccer, and not-so-quiet as well.  Soccer has been a mixed sport, played by immigrants and prep schools, making it a liberal natural. Sssshhh. But the World Cup has gotten problematic for liberals now.  This is a background item that is causing collisions in progressive brains.  

They liked soccer because Americans weren't good at it and had to eat crow. Especially, it was European (!) and Latin American(!) Swoon.  Now it is even African and Middle-Eastern which should further stick it to The Man, but it's too late.  The American women's team has long been dominant, which was hard enough to swallow, but at least was anti-sexist. Now the men's team has been pretty good throughout the 21st C and there is a lot of hand-wringing over whether a good liberal should root for them or not. 

I will mention again that NPR missed a trick by not adopting World Cup coverage as far back as the 70s. It's a fun alt-history to imagine how that would have played out. It would have changed NPR's audience a bit, and that would have influenced it. They would then be involved in sports broadcasting, a different world. (It could conceivably have expanded to rugby, with less coverage but still some every year.) They would then have to deal with the interests of immigrants as they really are, not as they imagined them. 

All for the want of a horseshoe nail.