Basketball or football?

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Which matters more, basketball or football?

Hockey, obviously.

The whole point of this thread is that I think football and basketball are the two most international sports. Hockey fans are very passionate, especially now, but they are limited to certain parts of the world.

Football matters much more if you refer to proper international football, not the american version where you carry around an eggshaped ball in your hands.

Don't forfeit to vote.

It seems you're starting with an incorrect premise, which leads to readers assuming your choices are arbitrary.

Cricket is the world's second largest sport after association football.
Hockey (all codes combined) is the world's third largest sport, well ahead of basketball.

Basketball is #7 on the list.

This poll addresses international following of different sports, not numbers of individuals.

When I said hockey I meant ice hockey. I think everyone understood that. Interpreting that to include some form of field hockey played in South Asia is disingenuous. The reason hockey in any form ranks high is because of a big lump due to South Asia.

Likewise cricket. I know many cricket fans and they are all South Asian. That would be obvious if I had a map of where cricket fans live.

I may look for such a map later, but the Google result I posted clearly shows that world wide, basketball is football's clear rival, with the potential to someday surpass football due to its great accessibility.

Ball chasers...

SMH

Well, I voted football thinking american football, otherwise I'd've voted basketball. Soccer doesn't do it for me, watching or playing.

Where'd you post it?

You asked a very broad question and seem to be arbitrarily shifting criteria in order to dismiss any other options.

Personally, to me, I've never really cared about any sport except for hockey, so of course by my preferences it matters much more than all the football codes and basketball combined.

If you're meaning globally, how do you define influence? Is being widely spread out better than being hugely popular in a few highly dense regions? Does purchasing power of fans make a difference, given that spending money on a sport is a clear expression of the influence a sport has?

Most of the big sports exist to some extent in most places, but there's a huge variation on how popular many of them are (except for soccer being pretty popular everywhere).

You're right that basketball is in a good position to possibly catch up to soccer, since it's also cheap and accessible. That said, in order to catch up it needs to beat out a lot of sports that are regionally deeply popular, like ice hockey, field hockey, the good football codes, cricket, baseball, etc, not to mention how dominant soccer is in some markets. Each of those sports is also strongly focused on how to grow the sport and this means growth for basketball in all of those markets isn't inevitable. There's a lot of places where people might play basketball, but it's not very popular, like how ice hockey is in India or field hockey is in Canada. How popular does it need to be somewhere before that's counted as having influence?