YouGov, a global data company, has released its sports buzz rankings for India. The company assigns a buzz score to each event in order to calculate the rankings. The buzz score is the difference between the percentage of respondents who heard positive and negative news about an event.
The Indian Premier League (IPL) became the most talked-about sports event, with a buzz score of 50.8. The IPL has maintained its position as India’s most talked-about sporting event.
Even though it was in its 14th season and had been disrupted by Covid-19 outbreaks that forced it to be relocated from India to the UAE, the IPL continued to dominate the rankings.
YouGov takes a list of the leading sports properties in each market – a mix of domestic and international events, competitions, and leagues – and measures the public’s perceptions of them using 700,000 surveys per year.
The Summer Olympics 2020 was second on the list with a score of 49.2. Given that India had its best-ever performance in the Olympics, with seven medals, including a gold, it’s unsurprising that the Olympics came in second (49.2) and made a new entry in this year’s rankings. In fact, the IPL only narrowly outperformed the games by 1.6 points.
Meanwhile, the ICC T20 Cricket World Cup finished third on the list, despite the fact that India did not advance to the knockout stage. The event received a buzz score of 45.9 out of 100.
While India’s premium domestic football league, the Indian Super League (ISL), maintained its fifth place.
Back in December, Google India released results for its ‘Year In Search 2021,’ and the cricket craze in India was unavoidable, with the IPL and the ICC T20 World Cup filling the top spots for the year’s trending queries.
On the other hand, Wimbledon Championship and Australian Open were ranked sixth and tenth, respectively, with buzz scores of 18.0 and 13.0.
The Pro Kabaddi League (PKL) and World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) were also among the top ten events in India.