American sport, all of it.

American football, by a margin nothing else is close to. The NFL holds the largest television audiences of the American year, the Super Bowl among them, and college football fills stadiums larger than any professional venue in the country. Basketball and baseball follow it, with ice hockey fourth of the four major leagues and association football growing fastest from the smallest base.

The NFL in American football, the NBA in basketball, MLB in baseball and the NHL in ice hockey. All four are closed leagues — no promotion, no relegation, entry by expansion only — and all four run an annual draft of incoming players. Major League Soccer and the WNBA are usually counted just outside that group, and both are growing faster than any of the four.

They overlap deliberately so that no month is empty. American football runs September to February. Basketball and ice hockey both run October to June. Baseball runs late March to the end of October. Association football runs through the American summer, and cricket occupies a short window in July. The densest weeks of the year are late October, when the World Series, the NFL season and the opening of two other leagues all land together.

Because the leagues were built as closed businesses rather than as the top of a pyramid. A franchise is a membership with a protected territory, sold by the league and worth what it is worth partly because it cannot be demoted. The draft, the salary cap and revenue sharing all follow from that: with no relegation to punish a bad season, the mechanism that redistributes talent has to be the draft order instead.

The Super Bowl is the NFL championship game, a single match between the winners of the two conferences, played at a neutral venue chosen years in advance. It falls in early February and is the largest shared television event in the United States by a wide margin. There is no second leg and no replay; the season ends on one afternoon.

March Madness is the NCAA basketball tournament: 68 college teams in a single-elimination bracket, played across three weekends in March and early April. Its cultural weight comes from the bracket itself — tens of millions of people fill one in — and from the fact that a school nobody has heard of can knock out a national programme in forty minutes, which happens most years.

Yes, and it was here before baseball was. The 1844 match between the United States and Canada in New York is generally recognised as the oldest international fixture in any sport, and Philadelphia sustained a serious cricketing culture into the early twentieth century before it collapsed almost entirely. The modern game restarted with Major League Cricket in 2023, a six-team Twenty20 competition, with Minor League Cricket underneath it across dozens of cities.

Grand Prairie Stadium in Texas, a converted minor league baseball park, is the largest permanent venue. There are established grounds at Lauderhill in Florida and Morrisville in North Carolina. A modular stadium was built on Long Island for the 2024 T20 World Cup and taken down afterwards. The playing base is concentrated in the New York and New Jersey corridor, the Dallas and Houston metros, the Bay Area, Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta, the Washington suburbs and South Florida.

Yes. Twenty20 cricket is on the programme for both men and women at Los Angeles 2028. The significance is less the exposure than the plumbing: Olympic status routes a sport into national governing body funding and youth programmes that cricket has never had access to in the United States.

The NFL cap is hard — a team cannot exceed it, and contracts are largely not guaranteed, which is what makes restructuring possible. Baseball has no cap at all, only a competitive balance tax that charges an escalating rate above set thresholds, and its contracts are fully guaranteed. The NBA sits between them with a soft cap and two aprons, and the NHL runs the hardest cap of the four.

Athletes became able to earn from their name, image and likeness, and the transfer portal made moving between schools routine. Together those ended the amateur model in practice: college football and basketball now operate as open markets with recruiting budgets, and the conference realignment that followed was driven almost entirely by television money.

Late October, if you want the most sport in the fewest days: the World Series, an NFL Sunday, and the opening weeks of both the NBA and NHL seasons all fall inside it, with college football on the Saturdays. If you want one event above all others, the choices are the Super Bowl in February, the Masters in April or the Indianapolis 500 in May — and all three are hard tickets for the same reason.