Stepping up to the plate, bases loaded, two outs, bottom of the ninth inning … Catching an inbounds pass and turning to shoot a three at the buzzer … These are scenarios that ran through so many of our childhood heads — yet some of these fantasies might not be playing out with the same frequency they once did.
Photo courtesy of Netflix
Take that bases-loaded, bottom-of-the-ninth dream. For decades, baseball was known as the national pastime, but according to Gallup polling going back to 1937, football overtook baseball as the U.S.’s most popular sport in 1972. By 2024, 41% of U.S. adults called football their favorite sport; baseball came in second, at just 10%.
Football and baseball aren’t the only sports that have seen their popularity shift over the decades. Basketball saw a rise in the 1980s and ‘90s; soccer got a bump after the 1994 FIFA World Cup; boxing waned for decades, only to have a recent resurgence, with Netflix reporting more than 36 million viewers for the 2025 Terence Crawford–Canelo Alvarez fight and a whopping 108 million for the 2024 Jake Paul–Mike Tyson bout.
Why have these changes happened, and why do certain generations gravitate to certain sports? According to Oskar Garcia, editorial director at The Athletic, much of it has to do with the media landscape. Younger people, in particular, have tended to move away from watching full games, instead consuming bite-size highlights online and identifying as fans of individual athletes — who they engage with on social media — instead of teams.
“I think the biggest change has been that fans want to connect directly with athletes a lot more,” Garcia says. “It’s definitely more prevalent among younger generations. They are just used to interacting in that way; younger people are more likely to strike up friendships on Discord or to be close with somebody they’ve never met IRL.”
The effects have been felt across the sports world. As Garcia explains, “The individual sports, and the sports that more prominently feature athletes where you can see them as individuals, benefit. So, tennis benefits, golf benefits. Soccer and basketball benefit, because the stars are obvious.”
Football, despite individual, helmet-wearing players being less recognizable, has been somewhat insulated due to the sport’s strengths as a television product — action that fits the scope of the camera lens, built-in commercial breaks — and the star power of quarterbacks. “If you’re a quarterback on a Super Bowl–winning team, like Tom Brady,” Garcia says, “now you’re the biggest star in the biggest moment, when the most people are watching.”
What do the shifting fates of sports (other than football) tell us about different generations and American society as a whole? Here, we examine that question.
Baby Boomers Still Love Baseball
Surveys show that baby boomers, who were born roughly between the end of World War II and the Beatles’ first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” prefer football, but this cohort would at least remember a time when baseball was the national pastime. They may not have seen Joe DiMaggio play (he retired in 1951), but when Simon & Garfunkel sang “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?” in “Mrs. Robinson,” everyone knew exactly what they meant.
On top of that, the 1950s and ‘60s were still relatively early days for television, meaning football’s advantages as a broadcast product hadn’t come to the fore yet. “Baseball was so big for that generation,” Garcia agrees.
1937 American League All Stars (left to right) Lou Gehrig, Joe Cronin, Bill Dickey, Joe DiMaggio, Charlie Gehringer, Jimmie Foxx and Hank Greenberg
Larry Bird
Gen Xers Saw The Rise Of Basketball
The NBA’s boom began with the 1979 arrival of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, whose rivalry captivated fans throughout
the 1980s. Right on their heels came Michael Jordan, whose high-flying dunks and camera-friendly smile became ubiquitous in games and in commercials for Nike and Gatorade. Jordan dominated the 1990s, winning six NBA championships and starring on the 1992 Olympic Dream Team; his swan song with the Bulls, Game 6 of the 1998 NBA Finals, remains the highest-rated game in NBA history, drawing nearly 36 million viewers.
In addition to Jordan’s influence, Garcia points out a change in how fans interacted with sports. “You have a lot more crossover culture,” he says. “The rise in video games, right? Think about the softball ‘Simpsons’ episode. This bleeds into different generations, but you see sports not just being the main thing for itself.”
Millennials Bring About A Shift
The children of the boomers, millennials (born between about 1981 and 1996) are the first generation to grow up in the age of the internet. Among them, we see a big jump in a desire for direct interaction with athletes, and also a sea of change when it comes to traditional media.
Lionel Messi in the 2014 FIFA World Cup final
A study by AI sports content agency WSC Sports found that 65% of millennials watch games on streaming platforms. They’re also less likely to watch full games than their forebears.
“Younger generations of fans are more likely to be happy with highlights and memes and reactions,” Garcia says. This trend benefits sports with individual stars that produce spectacular moments. “When you score goals [in soccer], those are automatically big moments,” Garcia points out. “With combat sports, you have concentrations of big moments in a way that you don’t with some of the others. Boxing, MMA — they’re kind of exercises in star-making.”
When it comes to soccer, another factor is the boom in youth participation. The U.S. hosted the World Cup for the first time in 1994, and afterward the sport the rest of the world calls “football” exploded. In 1980, fewer than 1 million American kids were registered in youth soccer leagues; by 2014, that number exceeded 3 million.
Gen Zers Consider Sports An Entertainment Product
Millennials may have grown up with the internet, but Generation Z (born roughly from 1997 to 2012) was the first to be immersed in digital media from birth. This group places even more emphasis on social media, highlights and individual connections with stars. As the website Front Office Sports reported in 2021, football is still Gen Z’s favorite game, but basketball is a closer second than for other generations, and soccer and boxing rise to third and fourth, respectively.
A telling example of how a sport can grow its audience today comes from Formula 1 racing. While F1 is huge in Europe, it struggled to gain traction in the U.S. until the 2019 premier of the Netflix documentary series “Formula 1: Drive to Survive.” Race viewership doubled over the ensuing five years. F1’s popularity is particularly evident locally, as the Miami Grand Prix has become one of South Florida’s most high-profile sporting events since debuting in 2022.
“It’s the insider access, the entertainment element,” Garcia observes. “Ultimately, sports is about connecting with people. ‘Drive to Survive’ is basically all about that. You’re personalizing something that, just by virtue of the sport on the track itself, is really hard to do.”
The official poster for Netflix’s eighth season of ‘Formula 1: Drive to Survive’
Photo courtesy of Netflix
To Play Is The Thing
Despite shifting viewership — and an increase in digital entertainment offerings — youth sports remain strong. According to a 2023 survey by the National Survey of Children’s Health, 55% of kids played sports.
Jim Thomas, who has worked for the city of Boca Raton for 28 years and is the acting athletic programs administrator, says that youth sports continues to thrive locally, with 7,000 kids taking part in the city’s various programs and associations. “Participation has been fairly consistent throughout my tenure, with a high point in the 2008–09 years,” he says.
“Participation numbers in youth sports ebb and flow on an annual basis, with the core sports of baseball, basketball, softball and soccer holding steady. Some sports, like tackle football, have seen a minimal decrease over the years.”
On a national level, the Aspen Institute’s 2024 Project Play survey found that among kids who participated in sports, 41.9% played basketball, 24.1% soccer and 23.1% baseball. Only 16.3% played tackle football, but 10.6% chose flag football, which has surged. “In the decades to come,” the researchers concluded, “we may view youth sports as two eras — before flag football exploded and after.”
Alysa Liu at the 2026 Winter Olympics
It’s probably safe to say that football and basketball have a bright future as spectator sports, as will any game that can offer accessible, personable athletes. Consider the difference between a star of yesteryear and a contemporary one: Baseball fans knew DiMaggio had a hit in 56 straight games, but they knew little of his personal life, other than that he was briefly married to Marilyn Monroe. On the other hand, perhaps the biggest winner of the 2026 Winter Olympics, which saw a spike in streaming viewers and social media engagement, was figure skater Alysa Liu. Sure, Liu, who has 8.3 million followers on Instagram, had to win a gold medal to ascend, but her personality — hair dyed in a halo, a frenulum piercing she did herself, F-bombs dropped at the ends of routines — drove her popularity as much as her performance, making her a textbook 21st-century star.
“People are really shrewd about where they spend their time and how they want to be entertained,” Garcia says. “They demand more out of sports than ever before. They want to know the athletes. They want to be able to interact about the sports they like, and they’re pushing to do it in the places where they feel like they can. And if it’s more difficult, then they move on quickly to something else.”