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Topend Sports Newsletter: 11 Feb 2015

Sports Science News Alert #013

Bringing you the latest news in sport, science, fitness and nutrition

Sport Fans Edition

Welcome to the sport science alert newsletter brought to you by Topend Sports, the ultimate online sport and science resource. This week the topic is Sports Fans, which I assume all of you are. Without fans, it is hard to imagine any professional sport would exist. Without fans there would be no sponsors, therefore no prize money, possibly less incentive, and definitely less promotion and viewing. Although you would hope that athletes would still play sport purely for the love of it! That doesn't sound too bad actually, I'd still watch!

In the News

Super Bowl Audience: The largest crowd to ever watch a Super Bowl live was at Super Bowl XIV in 1980, where 103,985 attended the game held at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. Live attendance at games are limited by the stadium size, though I would like to think that with current ticket prices (game tickets with a face value of $800 to $1900 sold for over $10,000) it would be financially limiting. Last week's game did however set a record for TV viewing. The Super Bowl game drew an average audience of 114.4 million viewers, making it the most watched broadcast in U.S. TV history. Add to that the huge worldwide audience and online followers, that's a lot of fans.

On Topend Sports

World's Largest Sporting Crowds - list some of the very large crowds that have watched sporting events.
Effect of Crowd Noise on Sports Teams — how crowd noise influences athlete performance, and what can be done about it.
Major Events Calendar-sports fans will find this calendar very handy for planning their sport watching.

The World's Most Popular Sport is Football (Soccer)

It will be no surprise to anyone that football (also known as soccer in some parts of the world) leads nearly every list of popular sports around the world, but the next most popular sport is not so clear, especially with no true measure and many ways to analyze the data.

An old list online has soccer with the most fans (3.5 Billion) over cricket (2.5 Billion). Fans do spend a lot of time online, and my analysis of wikipedia traffic to sports pages found soccer leading basketball. Similarly, using Google search trends, soccer topped the list with golf coming in second. Who knows?

Real Crowd Simulator [Ad]

The Real Crowd Simulator was created to help coaches train players under game-like conditions. The Real Crowd Simulator is a downloadable software application that allows coaches to trigger sounds, such as booing, cheering, defensive chants, custom chants and other noises often heard at basketball games, in response to player actions on the court. When connected to a stereo system, the device will deliver high quality, professionally recorded sounds that allow the user to reproduce the same intense sounds heard by players and coaching staff during a jam packed sporting event.

That's all for this week. Thanks for reading. If you are now inspired to watch some sport, how about heading down to the local sports field to enjoy watching people compete in sport just for the love of it.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for the content of future newsletters, please let me know. If you are new to this newsletter, you might want to browse the archive of past newsletters. Use the links below to contact me on my website, via email or on social media. See you next time.

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