Soccer 'the most exciting sport'

LONDON - Soccer has been the most exciting sport for the last 100 years, but baseball is catching up.

A team of scientists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico studied a string of sports to discover which offered the most unpredictable and surprising results -- and soccer was the winner.


Among the great upsets in soccer history are the defeat of Newcastle United by lowly Hereford in the English FA Cup in 1972 and Senegal's defeat of France in the 2002 World Cup.


"If there are no upsets, then every game is predictable and hence boring," Eli Ben-Naim told New Scientist magazine.

He and team members Sidney Redner and Federico Vazquez analysed results from more than 300,000 games over the last century from the US national hockey, football, basketball and baseball leagues and the top English soccer league.

Rugby and cricket were omitted because they do not have a big following in the US.

The results showed that the "upset frequency" was highest for soccer followed by baseball, hockey, basketball and finally American football.

But there was a twist in the tale for soccer fans.

When the team studied data from just the last 10 years, English soccer and American baseball swapped places, suggesting that soccer had become more predictable over the past decade.

- REUTERS