Most Popular American Sports Leagues by Country [Infographic]

American sports leagues are going global, attracting the attention of a growing fanbase beyond North America.

We looked at Similarweb data to compare desktop web traffic across the websites of the four major American sports leagues – the National Basketball Association, National Football League, Major League Baseball, and National Hockey League.

NBA Emerges as Blowout Winner

In the global playing field (or court), the NBA wins with 625.5 million desktop visits over the NFL’s 585.5 million. Although American Football dominates in the US with a 38% share of the combined traffic across all four sites, the sport has relatively little international appeal; only 19.36% of NFL.com visitors access the site outside the US.

Not only has NBA.com grown a global audience attracting 55.94% of the site’s total traffic, the National Basketball League outperforms every other American sport in 174 of the 221 we surveyed. Even more impressive, while Canada tops the international list for Hockey with 38.29% traffic share of nhl.com traffic, the Philippines leads in NBA fandom with 7.41% traffic share of NBA.com