Ranking the World’s Most Popular Sports to Bet On

In case you haven’t heard, sports betting is more popular than ever before. Though it has always generated a ton of action, dating back centuries, the wider-spread legalization of it across the globe has turned it into one of the most lucrative industries around.

Never mind billions. Sports betting is fast-tracking itself towards a trillion-dollar enterprise. Certain markets alone are already flirting with that kind of annual handle (i.e. the total amount of money wagered in a year). 

In particular, the legal online sports betting industry in the United States is growing at an absurd rate. Every market that offers it sees monumental sums of cash wagered each year. It doesn’t matter whether you are using online Airzona betting apps or wagering with New York online betting apps. From coast to coast, in markets niche and gigantic, the popularity of sports betting is exploding. 

This meteoric rise, of course, lends itself to many questions. And with the industry taking off, experts, insiders, analysts and even fans find themselves wondering which sports generate the most action.   

In other businesses, the psychology of what appeals to people can be complicated and entirely opaque. But the data we have on sports betting is extensive, so we are able to answer the question. Using figures culled from Statista, we can see which sports generated the most amount of betting action from the previous calendar year. 

For fun’s sake, we went into this exercise attempting to guess the top options, and their subsequent order. Full disclosure: We were surprised. One trend you will notice is that international reach has a lot to do with driving the handles of individual sports. A league or competition that’s immeasurably popular in the United States may be just a blip on the global radar. On the flip side, a sport considered niche by American sports betting sites actually has a larger following and more overall appeal than leagues and competitions otherwise considered mainstream.

• Soccer (Football/Futbol)

There are no surprises here. Soccer, as Americans call it, is the globe’s pastime. It is, by far, the most popular competition across a vast many countries. It helps that so many leagues are tied together, pitting teams in separate companies against one another in pursuit of the same goal.

We are not just talking about the World Cup tournament, either. Granted, that in itself is a signal of soccer’s immense popularity. Countries effectively overhaul or build from scratch entire cities just to accommodate a tournament that happens once every four years and doesn’t return to the same location in conseuctive years. 

During the most recent World Cup, in 2022, over $1.8 billion was wagered by Americans alone. And that is but a small piece of the piece relative to the rest of the world.

• Basketball

Full stop: This one surprised us. But that may be an overcorrection for the order of popularity in the United States. 

The NFL and college football reign supreme in North America. Both the NBA and college basketball noticeably trail those in terms of betting popularity. They sometimes even lag behind other sports, albeit usually only for special events (think: the U.S. Open in golf and tennis).

Our presumption ultimately sells the international appeal of basketball incredibly short. There are plenty of other popular leagues around the globe, most notably in Spain, Italy, Russia, Germany, China, Turkey and many more. 

Somewhat shockingly, FIBA tournaments that see the best NBA players representing their national teams do not make up the lion’s share of betting interest. League games and championships do more of the heavylifting. We suspect this has more to do with the volume; there are more NBA games than FIBA games per year. It is nevertheless interesting, particularly when you consider how dominant FIFA World Cup tournaments are when it comes to betting on soccer. 

• Cricket

We could tell you that Cricket appeared in our intial top-five projections before digging into the data. But we would be lying to you.

Cricket admittedly didn’t register on our off-the-cuff rankings. We knew it was more popular internationally than in North America, specifically. We just didn’t realize how much. 

Boy, were we wrong. As the folks over at Yahoo Sports note: “Next to football and basketball, no sport is as big as cricket. Over 2 billion fans across the world make up the fan base of this fantastic game. If we were to take a look at the different betting sites, we would see that cricket enjoys massive popularity, especially in South Asian countries, like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, etc.”

When you consider all the markets here, this makes sense. So many of those countries enjoy robust population sizes. That paves the way for ultra-large blocks of fans.

Beyond that, it likewise helps that many of cricket’s most popular markets have not shied away from the legalization of sports betting. Many of these countries have permitted gambling operations for much longer than we’ve seen in Europe and the United States. That, in turn, helps establish the sport as a premier betting option.

• Football 

Make no bones about it, the United States and Canada are doing a bulk of the work for football to crack the top five. No sport in the USA is more popular to bet on. The NFL (pros) and NCAA (college) are the two biggest gambling draws in the entire country.

Canada does its fair share of the lifting with the CFL. That fanbase has grown expeditiously over the past half-decade. And when you factor in Canada’s large catalog of international betting sites, it makes sense that any sport gets a bump from their gambling market.

It’ll be interesting to see whether football can climb up this list in the years to come. It will have to become more of an international pull, but the NFL is already working on that. They now have annual regular-season games that take place out of the country, almost exclusively in Europe.

• Horse Racing

Color us shocked all over again–even more surprised than we were to see cricket hit the top five.

Though horse racing has become largely an outmoded sport in the United States, it has more magnetism abroad. As Steve Madgwick writes for OLGB:

“Don’t let the old-fashioned image of derby hats and racing forms fool you: Horse racing remains a betting powerhouse worldwide. In fact, by some estimates, horse racing generates over $125 billion in wagers annually across the globe. This sport’s deep-rooted betting culture in regions like the U.K., Ireland, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, and the Middle East keeps its handle high year after year.”

This is another instance in which we didn’t properly consider the international reach and roots of the sports. Heck, even in the United States, betting on the Kentucky Derby still pulls in massive handles each year. As it turns out, horse racing is more of a staple elsewhere. And the betting handle proves it.

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