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Most Popular Major Sporting Events

Each year there are hundreds of great major sporting events held around the world. It is very clear that soccer is the most popular sport, and this analysis of the traffic to major sporting events pages on the Wikipedia website confirms this, with the FIFA World Cup and the UEFA European Championships being the two most popular events. The most viewed sports page on Wikipedia was also soccer.



Rank of Wikipedia Traffic

The table below uses page traffic data for Wikipedia major sporting events pages for the year it was held (data period 2016-2019).

Rank Event Yearly Views
1 2018 FIFA World Cup 34306561
2 2016 UEFA Euro 14493352
3 2016 Summer Olympics 14029197
4 2019 Cricket World Cup 9420104
5 2018 Winter Olympics 7384190
6 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup 5085597
7 2018 Asian Games 4920516
8 2019 Rugby World Cup 3700120
9 2018 Commonwealth Games 3618980
10 2019 Super Bowl LIII 3406189

source: data extracted using the Toolforge website.

 

Limitations

This method only notes the most popular pages - the number of page visitors can depend on the quality of the page information, search engine rankings and strength of competing websites.

This data also does not take into consideration Internet traffic to other related pages for that event, such as for the Olympic Games there official Olympic Games website would also get a lot of traffic, as well as the Wikipedia pages for each sport that is held at that Games. There are also general pages for each event, such as a Super Bowl page, as well as pages for each annual event.

There is also location bias. Only English pages were analyzed, so the data is biased to those with Internet access in the English speaking world.



Related Pages

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Lists Extra

Football/Soccer is clearly the world's most popular sport, and has the most popular athletes, but which sport has the fittest players (but not necessarily the greatest athlete). These players do not always earn the most. The best of the best have made it to our 7 Sporting Wonders Lists.

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