Most popular sports in the world

In the following tables I present the world's most popular and widespread sports. In the first table, the top five sports for each country are shown. These rankings are derived from the Wikipedia pages of each country and are thus based on Wikipedia editors's subjective judgments. It serves, therefore, as an alternative measure for the popularity of sports. The basic idea is that an editor's subjective judgment takes into account a lot of different factors. Thus, the ranking tells us more about the popularity of a sport than any other single measure. However, keep in mind that this method still has its flaws (and they are not few!) and does not in all cases reflect accurate rankings. In the second table, I accumulated weighted rankings to a single score per sport and ranked the sports according to their obtained scores. The scores reflect a mixture of popularity and worldwide distribution of the the sport and are, again, subjective.

And here are the world's most widespread and most popular sports. Based on an extended ranking, I calculated a score for each sport based on the sum of its inverted country ranks. Sports with scores below 100 are omitted.

Notes: Non competitive sports or leisure activities such as various forms of martial arts or mountain climbing, surfing, etc., have mostly been excluded. Athletics or track and field is an umbrella term that was used because individual sports such as javelin or long-distance running were only occasionally mentioned in Wikipedia articles.