CBS News reported that U.S. Major League Soccer has eclipsed both the NBA and the NHL in terms of average attendance at games. The article noted that mere attendance isn’t the full measure of a sport’s popularity. The indoor arenas of basketball and hockey have structurally smaller audience capacities than the capacious outdoor arenas of football. And percentage attendance at NBA and NHL games tends to be nearer capacity than attendance at soccer.

Here’s how the most recent attendance numbers break down:

1. NFL: 66,960
2. MLB: 30,352
3. MLS: 17,872
4. NBA: 17,319
5. NHL: 17,126

Is soccer well on the road of becoming America’s third favorite sport behind football and baseball? We used Social Radar to analyze conversations online. 

Basketball vs. soccer vs. hockey buzz

We measured the number of times the words ‘basketball,’ ‘soccer’ and ‘hockey’ appeared online since November 2009. The trend chart above shows that basketball generated the most mentions overall throughout the two year time period.

NBA vs. NHL vs. MLS buzz

We ran the same analysis around the number of times ‘NBA’ (National Basketball Association), ‘NHL’ (National Hockey League) and ‘MLS’ (Major League Soccer) were mentioned online. Again, the NBA generated the most chatter by a wide margin, though MLS is currently at its closest point to NBA buzz.

With the NCAA tournament wrapping up, MLB opening day in the books and NBA Playoffs about to begin, we thought it would be interesting to compare which of the major sports generated the most chatter.

Football vs Baseball vs Soccer vs Basketball vs Hockey (past year)

Football consistently generated the most chatter throughout the past year, even during the off-season.

Basketball sentiment

Soccer sentiment

Baseball sentiment

Hockey sentiment

Football sentiment

Interestingly, football had the lowest amount of positive conversations (80%) among the major sports, while basketball had the highest amount of positive conversations (86%).

The Associate Press released their top 10 sports stories of the year:

1. Tiger’s lost year
2. LeBron’s free-agency
3. Saints’ Super Bowl win
4. Giants’ World Series win
5. Lakers’ repeat as champs
6. NFL concussion awareness
7. Canada Olympic gold hockey win
8. Spain’s World Cup victory
9. Jimmie Johnson’s drive for five
10. Stephen Strasburg’s debut

We used Social Radar to analyze conversations around each topic. The top 10 AP stories are listed in order below with bars representing amount of chatter on blogs, Twitter and other news feeds.

We all know that Canada triumphed this past Sunday when they beat the US 3-2 for the 2010 Olympic gold medal in hockey (here’s a video to clue you in if you didn’t know). The game itself was very intense and I found myself sitting in an airport refreshing my iphone browser trying to keep track of the game, and I don’t even care about hockey! I was more interested in seeing the impact this North American civil war was imposing  in social media.

Numbers peaked on game day, cumulatively reporting upwards of over 9,000 blog, news and forum posts directly related to this final game.

Microblogging activity like that on Twitter took up nearly 60% of the chatter with numerous hashtags, RTs and banter reproducing over the internet.

It could have been the fact this is the first time in many years that anyone has doubted Canada to win the gold in hockey, but it is surprising that even with all the drama revolved around this year’s winter Olympics (the luge guy dying, the ice skater’s mother passing, etc), that hockey (as a gaming division) prevailed more talked about than any of the other categories.

Its interesting to see what sparks peoples’ wires and the issues / stories that push us to post on the internet. From the past weekend’s events, I can predict that hockey will eventually tower over football. Hey, you never know, right?