The Sporting Drug

Certain sports in the UK have massive fan bases, but what is the cause of this? Could it be that sport is the focal point of all UK interests? Could it be that these sports just completely sell out to make fans happy? Could it be the gambling interest keeping people hooked on the sports with so many different ways of betting including: football spread betting, football betting online, rugby league betting, cricket spread betting and horse racing betting? Could it be due to how we are raised during childhood by our parents and our experiences at school? Or is there some unknown factor?

Football, Cricket, Tennis, Rugby Union, Rugby League, Motor sport (F1 and Rally), Golf and Horse Racing are the top sports in the UK, however Football has a far bigger fans base, but why? Modern football is an old sport but that doesn't mean it has to be the most popular, as Golf is older but is nowhere near as popular in the UK.
And as for football being a UK sport, so are rugby, golf and cricket. Plus football has many origins including Chinese "kick ball" which 'FIFA' has admitted to be the main influence on early versions of football as a sport.
The factor of team sports having more fans is a likely reason for football's huge fans base in the UK with over 600 league teams, plus more none league teams. But still having a large number of teams is not the reason for it popularity, as it has to be popular for teams to be founded in the first place.

Motor Sports are the most modern sports with technology improving more and more every year, cars getting faster and more hi-tech every year, yet the terrible acting of foreign players in the Premiership draw more attention.
Rugby tends to be the hard mans English game!

Gambling is a big part of the UK sports scene; all sports have bets of some shape or form placed on them every day, from betting on a team or person to win, a certain player to score or the difference in the result (spread betting). Betting on sports such as football, rugby and cricket, gets more people interested in the sport as there is money involved for them personally. But this interest only lasts as long as the money holds out, so it doesn't really account for the popularity of a certain sport. Horse Racing seems completely built around betting as horse racing events tend to be massive betting shops and money changes hands constantly during the whole event. So if horse racing can be built upon a betting environment could other sports have developed from similar effects? Or is money simply the driving factor for everything?

Does our upbringing and schooling influence our preferences when it comes to sports? At school everyone takes part in sports but certain sports are focused on more others, for example in 1999 over 27% of sporting activity for boys in school was football, followed by Athletics accounting for 20% of the sporting activity, while other sports like rugby and cricket have much lower percentages. Could it be that from childhood our choices are swayed by what we do the most, after all if you do something repeatedly you get used to it. Therefore what would happen if in 2010 over 30% of sporting activity in schools was American Football; would American Football become a far more popular sport in the UK?

So out of all these factors is it possible to determine the root cause of the addiction people have to certain sports, why football more than golf?

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Does spread betting or even just football spread betting have more of an affect than we thought? Does a sports history make it more prestigious? Are we brainwashed as children to follow a certain sport in a crazed delirium?
Or is it just a combination of all these factors plus a little dumb luck? Or have we just over looked something far simpler? It's really impossible to tell but all these factors make some difference to the way we think about individual sports and why we stick with them through thick and thin, but whatever it is, it is the true heart and soul of sports fans not just in the UK but worldwide.