As someone who isn't much of a sports fan but will occasionally watch, I've found Premier League more interesting than US major leagues because of the promotion/relegation system.

With US leagues once it becomes clear what teams are in contention for winning the championship that year, games between the rest teams become a lot less interesting.

With Premier League, teams are fighting for the championship, just like in US leagues. The team that finishes #1 is the champion.

But they are also fighting to get into the next UEFA Champions League season. UEFA Champions League is a league for the top clubs from several European country top leagues. The top 4 Premier League finishers make it (so the Premier League champion and the next 3 teams).

There's also a fight for the #5 spot, because that team gets into the Europa League group stage.

Meanwhile the teams at the bottom of the Premier League are also fighting. The teams that finish in the last 3 places get kicked out of the Premier League!

They get moved to the the EFL Championship League. (Not to be confused with UEFA Champions. UEFA Champions is the league with the best teams from Europe. EFL Championship is a league for UK teams that are not quite good enough for Premier League).

Those 3 teams that get kicked down to EFL Championship League are replaced with the 3 top teams from EFL Championship League. (And it doesn't stop there...there are 7 more levels of leagues blow EFL Championship League, with promotion/relegation between each adjacent level).

Premier League has 20 teams and with 5 top spots to fight for and 3 bottom spots to fight to avoid you can get a long way into the season with 3/4 of the teams still having either a realistic shot of making the top 5 or in danger of not staying clear of the bottom 3.

There's a weird perception that's floating out there claiming that video gaming cannot be "a sport", just because it's more mental than physical (although even that varies per game, for example high-level Guitar Hero players require extreme endurance and stamina). I also would wager a non-zero percentage of people with such mindset would also deny that chess is a sport, unless they grandfather it in due to the sheer age of chessdom.

It doesn't help that there is a partially overlapping mindset that believes that video games are for kids, something to grow out of. Since the vast majority of competitive gamers at the extreme top end are young adults, that theory is incorrect, but those who happen to be in the center of that Venn diagram would probably also deny that successful Twitch streamers have a "real job", etc.

Not by $$$, which is the main focus of the article.

In the second table, LoL esports is explicitly highlighted as a success by mindshare, but not profitability. And below that:

> LoL Esports: loses hundreds of millions of dollars annually, exists solely as a marketing mechanism to get people to play the actual game

"Esports" is not a league. That would be like saying "sports" is a league.

There are leagues around some games (like the ones mentioned in the article). There are also events with "league" in the name that are not really leagues (like ESL Pro League). In any case, none of them are financially successful in the US.

I guess it depends on where in the world you are, but where I am capitalism is ruling the roost and destroying everything in the process, just like the other pure isms

Best for the largest percentage of people. Clearly, pure capitalism isn't that. But so isn't pure communism, or pure socialism.

It’s a good point. You can view the unprofitable leagues as having one main sponsor, and then it’s just a matter of accounting. Profitability may not be a good metric.

Only moderately so.

The Jets are not favored to win many of their games. The expectation is that they lose.

There are multiple teams where mediocrity would be seen as an improvement.

However, people buy the jerseys, go to games, etc.

Things like the Combine and draft are becoming events on their own. The games are only there to provide the structure for why we should care about one group over another.

Sports are entertainment.

There's an enormous amount of money commanded by F1 racing. There are only three, or maybe four, teams that have any chance of winning a race. The other six or seven teams battle to just end up in the points because that determines how the revenue gets shared with the teams.

But you can place bets on WWE games:

https://www.sbo.net/wwe/

If they are not 100% transparent about it, then it's matchfixing.

That's true. But my parent post was talking about WWE, not real wrestling