engleski

How to explore public interest for sports? New methodological approach

Although government bodies, sport associations and funding organizations often need exact criterion for assessment of interests and trends for specific sports, there is no single definition of popularity determinants, as well as specific tool designed for reliable and valid measurement of particular sport’s popularity. Consequently, there is lack of scientific-based evidence about the public interests in particular sport. This paper introduces the Google Trends (GT) as a web- based tool to identify and compare public interests for 5 Olympic team sports (volleyball, handball, water polo, football, basketball) according to the worldwide public Google queries transformed into 1-100 Likert type scale. Observing last 5 years using GT, it can be concluded that football (mean = 30) is the most popular analyzed sport followed by basketball (mean = 8), volleyball (mean = 3), handball (mean =1) and water polo (mean ≤1). It can be concluded that, although limited, GT can provide valuable information about public interests for specific sport on the global, regional, or local level.

sport popularity ; tool for measuring interest for sport ; big data ; sport categorization ; football ; basketball ; volleyball ; handball ; water polo

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