Germans Love David Hasselhoff / Sports

• Jan-Ove Waldner, one of the best table tennis players in the world, is by far the most well-known table tennis player in Sweden. In China he's even more popular, where table tennis is a big deal, Waldner is nicknamed "The Evergreen Tree" for his perstant playstyle and is a living legend.
• Bandy, a sport roughly described as field hockey on ice (with a ball) originated in England, but is today nearly exclusive to the Nordic countries and Russia.
• The first game of Baseball as we know it was in America, and it is still popular in the original country with the sport being called "America's National Pastime." However, baseball is also immensely popular in East Asia and Latin America—it's been a favorite sport in both Cuba and Japan^note to put it this way, the Japanese language normally uses loanwords for sports originating from other cultures, such as sakka for soccer / association football and basuke for basketball. The Japanese term for baseball, on the other hand, is yakyuu (literally "field ball"). for over 100 years, while (South) Korea is nearly as baseball-mad as Japan, Taiwan has youth baseball on its money^note Taiwanese baseball got a lot of American attention when the CBPL was the first sport to resume play during the COVID-19 Pandemic and a desperate for programming ESPN picked up the TV rights, the Philippines have had a re-emergence of baseball in recent years, Mexico has put baseball second to soccer and lucha libre in terms of Serious Business, Venezuela considers baseball as the national sport and the Dominican Republic is obsessed with the sport—it basically doesn't have any others. Italy, Spain, and Australia all have professional leagues in their own nations (although most Australians are unaware theirs even exists). In Nicaragua the national Baseball stadium is bigger than the national soccer stadium and any Nica who makes it to the Major Leagues is Serious Business. Furthermore, the 2013 World Baseball Classic featured such teams as the Czech Republic, France, Israel, South Africa, the Netherlands (who made it all the way to the semi-final round), and Germany, who hosted the first round.
  • Speaking of the Netherlands, they have enjoyed baseball even through the German invasion in World War II, their national baseball team has won several European championships and Haarlem hosts an international invitation baseball tournament known as Haarlem Baseball Week which has attracted players from around the world. And the sport is even more popular in the country's Caribbean possessions.
  • Canada also shares its neighbor's love of baseball, despite losing MLB's Montreal Expos to a relocation.
• Basketball was indeed invented in America by a Canadian and remains most popular in the US and Canada, but the sport is immensely popular in much of Europe, especially Southern Europe (Italy, Greece, Spain, Serbia and Turkey having the biggest scenes) and parts of Latin America, especially in countries neighboring the US, and in many Asian countries, China in particular. Particularly, it is the "national sport" in Lithuania.
  • Likewise the Philippines, being a former American colony. You can't walk further than a block without seeing a basketball hoop somewhere in the vicinity, every young boy in the country knows how to play, and will actually prefer to play barefoot. Despite the sport being more preferential towards taller players, and the Philippines not exactly known as a nation of tall people, the country is obsessed. There was even a documentary about it.
  • Within the United States, basketball is famously popular among African Americans (to the point of being a stereotype), particularly those in urban communities. The sport originated in a predominately white area of Massachusetts, where Canadian-born James Naismith invented it to give students at the YMCA International Training Center (now known as Springfield College) a way to exercise during the winter months. The sport would spread worldwide through the YMCA movement, but would put down some of its deepest roots in the American Midwest (a predominately rural region), as Naismith would spend the last 40 years of his life as a professor and/or coach at the University of Kansas.
• Bullfighting probably originated in Rome, but has in modern times been endemic to Spain, Portugal, Southern France, and Latin America.
• Curling is a Scottish game, yet anyone who has paid any attention at all to it (even via stereotype) knows that Canada has become the true power and home of the the sport, having dominated international competition for decades. There are an estimated 1.5 million curlers (people who play at least semi-regularly) in the world. Approximately 1.3 million of them are in Canada. And not just in playing. Canada's National Research Council has supported projects involving the sport such as studying methods of controlling condensation on the ice. Curling is Serious Business.
  • That said, the United States, whose citizens normally like to make jabs at things they see as "too Canadian" for them, grew rather interested in curling over time, eventually winning their first gold medal in men's curling at the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang. This included a Periphery Demographic in the form of businesspeople who watched it in primetime on CNBC (they found it a relaxing contrast to the break-neck business day).
• Volleyball originates from America and while it is popular there, it's not top-level (to the point the country went years without a professional volleyball league). In Brazil, however, specially after victorious generations in both indoors and beach volleyball, its popularity is practically only behind soccer.
  • The same goes for volleyball in the Philippines. Women's volleyball is popular there despite a period of drought which caused their national team to lag behind regional powerhouses Vietnam and Thailand. While Filipino men are mostly into basketball, the women are into volleyball. Volleyball like basketball is often part of the school curriculum and is big in collegiate sports. There are even three professional leagues with a big following, two female and one male.
• Cricket originated from England and is popular in the UK and many Commonwealth nations, but soccer overshadows it as the most popular sport; whereas in India and Sri Lanka, Cricket is the most popular sport in those nations and Cricket stars get near-god-like celebrity status, on par with movie stars and actors. Australians are cricket-mad enough to sometimes see their first victory over England in the sport as part of the birth of their national character. Believe it or not, Australia's treasurer actually wrote an article about this.
• Motor racing was originated from France where it was the venue of many motorsport events like Peking to Paris and 24 Hours of Le Mans, but it has largely enjoyed around the world. Not to mention the French people are less enthusiastic about it, however. Its governing body, Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, being located in France doesn't help either.
• Motorcycle speedway was invented in Australia, but is today nearly endemic to Europe, especially Poland, where the local Ekstraliga has the highest average attendances for any sport in the country.
• Rugby Union and Rugby League both originated from England, taking their name from Rugby School in Warwickshire. It is very popular in the UK, but (association) football overshadows it as the most popular sport. But in Australia and New Zealand, rugby is basically the national pastime, with New Zealand preferring union and Australia preferring league (though in Australia league has to share the "national pastime" status with Australian Rules Football). Both codes are also very popular in France, with union in particular being more popular than soccer in the southern half of the country.
• Although Association Football was created in England and is immensely popular in Europe, it was in South America (especially in Argentina and Brazil, long-time soccer rivals) where its popularity really soared. As a Brazilian saying goes: "The English invented football, the Brazilians perfected it." Its importance in South America is so big that the word was changed to fit Spanish phonetics (fútbol) while Mexico still uses the unmodified phonetic (futból). It has also gained immense popularity in Africa, with teams like Nigeria, Ghana and the Ivory Coast challenging the established footballing superpowers, and Asia recently began taking quite a shine to it as well, thanks to its simple rules (other than perhaps the offside rule, which almost no one actually understands) and the only requirements being a ball and two goalposts (or at least anything that resembles a goalpost, like a space between two trashcans, road cones, wooden sticks or two t-shirts/jumpers or something; even painting a goal on a brick wall works sometimes). However, like anything in life, you can't please everyone, and what prevents it from being truly a "World Game" is that the sport has had difficulty in gaining a following in Oceania (most notably Australia and New Zealand) and North America north of Mexico (especially in Canada and the United States), but even in these countries, soccer is still very popular at least as a recreational and youth sport and their national team is still well supported. The sport's immense popularity among American youth has even helped shape the popular American lexicon: since the 1990s, "Soccer Mom" has been a popular colloquial slang term for middle-class suburban stay-at-home mothers, due to the perception that they spend their afternoons shuttling their children back and forth from soccer practices and/or games.
  
  Furthermore, the Beautiful Game has been picking up in Australia ever since the national team (the Socceroos) reached the Round of 16 in the 2006 FIFA World Cup. It has also done so in the rest of North America, following the US' unexpected success at the 2014 World Cup, in which they slumped to noble defeat after Extra Time against a highly rated Belgium team (no, really, they were ranked #2 in the World not so long ago) in the round of 16 after fighting their way out of the 'Group of Death', including highly rated Ghana, established superpower Portugal and eventual World Champions Germany, and increased global attention on the Women's World Cup in Canada in 2015, which the US won, while England's 'Lionesses' won the hearts of neutrals everywhere with a never say die attitude and skilful football that took them to the semi-finals and had them within an inch of advancing to the final, after bossing then World Champions Japan all over the pitch and making them look distinctly average. Then, they proved that they were very definitely England team by exiting through the cruellest of own goals in the very last seconds of normal time - England pushed for a winner, Japan counter-attacked at speed and put a cross into the box, England defender Laura Bassett had to intercept it at full stretch to prevent one of the Japan strikers from having the easiest of tap ins. The ball looped off her toe and into the top corner. Full credit to them, though, they picked themselves up, brushed themselves off and promptly beat Germany for the first time in their history in the third place play-off to take the Bronze Medal.
• Women’s association football has largely eclipsed the popularity of the men’s sport in the United States, despite paling in comparison everywhere else. This was even more firmly cemented at the end of the 2010s, with the USMNT failing to make the 2018 World Cup while the USWNT successfully defended their World Cup title the next year. Though at club level, the women are still well behind the men in attendance and media interest; only three women's club teams (longtime National Women's Soccer League attendance champ Portland Thorns FC, and now California newcomers Angel City FC [Los Angeles] and San Diego Wave FC) consistently draw crowds comparable to those of MLS sides.
• On a club-to-club basis, for some unfathomable reason, Liverpool FC is wildly popular in Norway. While Liverpool, as the second most successful club in English history, is massively popular all around the world, particularly in the US, Southeast Asia and Australia, something taken advantage of with summer tours, no one's ever figured out exactly why they're so beloved in Norway. The success of fan favourite Norwegian full-back/winger John Arne Riise, who was famous for a left foot that regularly did passable impersonations of Mjolnir (as Alan Smith found out when he got in the way of one of Riise's free kicks and got his leg broken in two places. Poor old Smudge was never the same after that) and won almost every trophy possible with Liverpool save for the league title, might have something to do with it.
• The word "soccer", an abbreviation of Association Football, is used in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Ireland, which all have their own code of football, along with South Africa, Japan (though this is interchangeable with the word "football" there as neither is that big), and several other countries to distinguish the different "footballs". However in Britain, the word's country of origin (no, really), as well as other countries that have soccer... er, football as the number one sport, the word seems to make a lot of people cringe. For some reason though, despite its British origins, the Americans are normally blamed and flamed for the creation of the word.
• American Football is very popular in Canada, mainly this is because Canadian Football; the second most popular sport in the country behind Hockey, is basically quite similar to American Football, with some notable differences^note The main ones being that there's 12 players per side as opposed to 11, 3 downs in a series instead of 4, and the Canadian field is bigger. There's a couple other differences, but anyone with even a passing familiarity with American football would have no trouble following along with a CFL game, and vice versa. Toronto for example, has plenty of Buffalo Bills fans, and the team has even had games played there. Some Canadians have even pushed for NFL teams in Canada; but that isn't likely to happen anytime soon, mainly due to the existence of the Canadian Football League.
  • Believe it or not, American Football is surprisingly popular in Germany of all places. There is a national league (founded in 1979) and when a TV station decided to bring American Football back to free TV, they got five times the predicted audience share, despite the fact that the "afternoon" games start at 19:00 (7PM) German time and people have to stay up to 2:00 AM on a Sunday to watch the second game. (see Ran NFL) The NFL Europe also consisted of only German teams with one Dutch team in its last season. The only other country in Europe that comes close to German levels of American Football craziness is Austria. When they lost the final of the European Championship 2014 (yes, such a thing exists) to Germany (27:30 in double overtime) 27000 fans turned out to Vienna's Ernst Happel Stadium. And Austrian TV carried every single game - even those without Austria in them. Unfortunately, squabbling between different "world governing bodies" has hampered international competition a lot, to the extent that a planned European Championship in Germany 2018 (with Germany defending champion) was moved and Germany excluded because rival functionaries could not agree which was the "legitimate" governing body.
  • American Football is extremely popular in Mexico, especially in Mexico City, which has hosted one game per season since 2016. The Patriots, Steelers and Cowboys are Mexico's favorite teams, American Football is one of the top sports in the country, alongside with Baseball, Boxing, and Soccer. The sport is also gaining popularity in Brazil.
  • American football, specifically the NFL, also has a very large following in Australia despite the less than optimal time zones. This may be partly due to the fact that the NFL season begins as the Australian contact sport winters are beginning to wind down, as well as the big influence of hip hop and other American culture. Walk into any office or job site in Sydney or Melbourne on a Monday morning during NFL season and you can guarantee there is at least one person who is watching a game or at least closely tracking their fantasy football lineup.
• In the early 1990s, the Canadian Football League started up four teams in the United States. Three of those teams didn't do very well. The fourth, however, moved into Baltimore, Maryland, which had been football-starved ever since the Baltimore Colts snuck out of town in the middle of the night in 1983. Baltimore welcomed their new CFL team with open arms. The team, which changed names from "Colts" to "CFL Colts" to "CFLs" to "Stallions" due to the NFL calling trademark on the Colts name, was turning a significant profit. When the CFL administration decided to end the USA expansion there was talk of leaving the Stallions. However, the NFL was preparing to relocate the Cleveland Browns into Baltimore as the Ravens, and the CFL decided that trying to compete wasn't worth the risk. The Stallions moved to Montreal and became the second Montreal Alouettes (the original team folded in 1987).
  • An unexpected sidenote on this is that football is hugely popular in Quebec. Not just the Alouettes of the CFL, but on the high school, college and university levels. Le Rouge et Or from Université Laval have won 10 Vanier Cups (the Canadian university football championship) since 1999, and their archrival, Les Carabins from Université de Montréal, won the Cup in 2014.
• In 2018, Vince McMahon announced the revival of his failed American football league, the XFL, which began play in 2020, then returned to play in 2023 after a brief hiatus caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, then subsequently merged with the USFL revival to form the United Football League. While ostensibly a minor league that would rather act as a stepping note into the NFL rather than a competing league, one of the teams the XFL set up upon its initial launch was the St. Louis Battlehawks, located in a city that had been football-starved ever since the St. Louis Rams relocated back to Los Angeles in 2016. Still reeling from the loss of the Rams, St. Louis welcomed their new XFL team with open arms. The Battlehawks have the third highest win percentage among UFL teams, and have led the league in followers on social media and in fan attendance (including drawing the XFL revival's record attendance of 38,310 for their 2023 home opener).
• The Baltimore Ravens were originally the Cleveland Browns, before moving to Baltimore in '96. Most current Browns fans hate the Ravens because they feel like the Ravens backstabbed them. There are, however, a minority of Cleveland football fans who root for the Ravens as the "real Browns" and consider the current Browns an In Name Only imposter.
• It's not uncommon for American sports teams to develop significant fandoms in distant cities based on the background of a star player.
  • Major League Baseball has some examples:
    • The New York Yankees have a significant fandom in Kalamazoo, Michigan, of all places, due to Hall of Fame infielder Derek Jeter having grown up there.
    • Their neighbors from Queens, the New York Mets, also have a surprisingly large fanbase in both the United Kingdom and Ireland, with fan groups getting together to watch games at baseball-themed pubs.
    • A prime example of Big in Japan in US team sports — through the 2023 season, the Los Angeles Angels had a massive fandom in Japan thanks to two-way superstar Shohei Ohtani,^note "two-way" meaning a player capable of pitching and hitting at a high enough level to regularly play in both roles; before Ohtani came along, the last player to have been a pro superstar in both roles was some guy named Babe Ruth where the team was much more popular there than in Los Angeles. At the time, you could find more Angels merchandise than any other MLB team in Japan in any store dedicated to the league. It even has gotten a special manga cover of Ohtani in the video game MLB The Show 22. Said fandom is likely to transfer to the crosstown^note well, in the same metropolitan area Los Angeles Dodgers in 2024, with Ohtani having signed for them in free agency. Not to mention that the Dodgers signed another Japanese superstar ahead of the 2024 season in pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
    • The Miami Marlins have become a Broken Base team among American natives in Miami, but is loved by Cuban natives in Miami, to the point that even they have an uniform based on the former Havana Sugar Kings team from Havana, Cuba.
    • The Detroit Tigers have had a large Venezuelan fandom thanks to their now-retired star player, Miguel Cabrera, the only Venezuelan native to have reached either 500 home runs or 3,000 hits in his MLB career (he's reached both milestones).
  • The Tampa Bay Buccaneers of the NFL gained a huge fandom in New England almost overnight after New England Patriots legends Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski joined the team.
  • In an even more dramatic example, Louisville is within two hours' drive of two NFL teams (the Cincinnati Bengals and Indianapolis Colts), but has strong pockets of fandom for several other teams who have had stars with Louisville connections:
    • In the 1950s and 1960s, before the Bengals existed and while the Colts were still in Baltimore, many in the city became Green Bay Packers fans thanks to the presence of Louisville native Paul Hornung.^note Hornung retired during training camp in 1967, a year before the Bengals began play. This fandom was especially strong among Catholics, with Hornung having attended one of the city's Catholic high schools. As for the Colts, they had a lesser following thanks to legendary QB Johnny Unitas having played college ball at Louisville.
    • In more recent times, the Minnesota Vikings developed a significant fandom when Teddy Bridgewater, who had been a college star at U of L, was their starting QB.
    • Today, the Baltimore Ravens have a major fandom thanks to current starting QB Lamar Jackson being a Heisman Trophy winner at U of L.
• While Ice Hockey was created in Canada and is immensely popular there, it is also popular in Russia, Sweden, Finland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and the Northern United States. Not so much in the Southern United States though considering that there is little to no snow in those areas and hockey is obviously popular in places where it snows in the winter, although Los Angeles and Dallas are two exceptions—possibly because those areas have large populations of transplanted Northerners. Both cities (along with LA's neighbor Anaheim) have won The Stanley Cup, and titles also helped Raleigh, North Carolina and Tampa, Florida earn fanbases for their respective teams. Las Vegas surprisingly also had enough hockey drive to get its own franchise in 2017, which even more unexpectedly was a good team that started breaking records among expansion teams in all sports.
  • As far as players go, Vancouverites love the Sedin twins (who retired in 2018 as the Canucks' captain and co-captain, respectively) despite their being Swedish and not Canadian.
• Sumo, a form of folk wrestling, was invented in Japan and is immensely popular there (though the professional scene has suffered recently, particularly in the wake of some nasty scandals), but it has also enjoyed popularity in Mongolia, Eastern Europe, and the Pacific.
• As for individuals, German-Vietnamese gymnast Marcel Nguyen won a silver medal in the all-around for Germany and became very popular there as a result. However, he's even more popular in Hong Kong, and he has absolutely no idea why.
• Another athlete-specific version: Stan "The Man" Musial was one of the greatest baseball players of the 1940s and 1950s and was very beloved in his time, but faded into national obscurity because he was never a Yankee and because he was too nice. Then he took a trip to Tahiti and Australia with his family two decades after he retired and unwittingly found caches of die-hard Musial fans in both countries.
• Czechoslovak gymnast Věra Čáslavská was a favorite among the home crowd at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics due to her doing a floor routine set to the "Mexican hat dance" music and having her wedding at the Mexico City Cathedral near the end of the Games. After she was blacklisted in her own country for her opposition to the Soviet regime, the Mexican president personally arranged for her to come to Mexico to work as a coach, allegedly threatening to cut off Mexico's oil exports to the Soviets if they didn't allow Věra to emigrate.
• Football/soccer play-by-play man Ian Darke was at best a second-tier broadcaster in the UK, his native country. In the United States however, he's considered THE voice of the game. He became instantly popular with several of his calls during the 2010 World Cup, became the voice for both the US Men's and Women's National Teams, and is widely credited as a major reason why the game is becoming more popular in the US.
• Most of the teams competing in VEX Robotics Competition are from the US, VRC's country of origin, but it also has strongholds in China and other Asian countries, as well as New Zealand.
• It's a similar dilemma for the FIRST Robotics Competition, while a majority of the teams are from the US, it has a HUGE following in both Israel and Canada, in fact, both Israel and Ontario have so many teams, they switched to a District model of competition just to keep up.
  • Speaking of the US, most US states have at least between 1 to 100 teams. Michigan on the other hand has a mind-melting 508 teams, and it's still growing there!
• Speaking of which, combat robotics had its first serious competitions in the United States, but it took off in major ways in some other countries:
  • The United Kingdom holds a disproportionately large number of competitions to its population, and all of them are packed full of participants from all walks of life. The British Robot Wars events have consistently kept up with the American BattleBots events in terms of number of competing domestic robots despite the UK having a much smaller population than the US. Among non-televised events, for every American one, there is typically a British one comparable in size too.
  • Starting in the late 2010s, China has also very much taken to robot combat, in large part due to the Chinese tournament King of Bots and the massive, incredibly expensive push by the TV network to bring in the most talented builders and operators they could, including bringing over established talent from the US and the UK and footing the bill for the creation of every competing robot. King of Bots wound up a ratings success and introduced robot combat to the Chinese mainstream, inspiring numerous viewers to build their own or hold their own competitions. As of 2019, there are now Recursive Imports as Chinese teams travel to other countries to compete.
• German soccer team Borussia Dortmund has gained a fanbase in Poland, ever since their back-to-back German championships in 2011 and 2012. It's not a surprise, given that their squad at the time included Polish national players Lukasz Piszczek and Jakub "Kuba" Blaszczykowski. (Also of mention is Polish striker Robert Lewandowski, who played for BVB until the 2014 season, when he switched to arch-rivals Bayern Munich.)
  • They also became increasingly popular in England, thanks to their attacking style of play and much loved former manager Jürgen Klopp taking the position of Liverpool manager - which, since BVB and LFC were Friendly Fandoms to begin with, BVB having adopted Liverpool's famous club anthem "You'll Never Walk Alone", and the Liverpool fanbase fell in love with Klopp at first sight is perhaps unsurprising. The result was that when the two met in a Europa League match at Anfield both fans, the day before the 27th anniversary of the Hillsborough Disaster which killed 96 ^note  The actual tally is 97, but one only died of his injuries in 2021. Liverpool fans, both sets of fans sang You'll Never Walk Alone in perfect unison, something that greatly endeared Dortmund to Liverpool fans and English football fans in general. While the match itself was epic - Dortmund were 2-0 up inside 10 minutes, 3-1 up on the hour, before Liverpool scored three unanswered goals to clinch the tie 4-3, that was one of the most memorable moments and it was nominated by FIFA for their inaugural Fan Award.
  • And they've got an increasing US fanbase thanks to one of their recent wingers, teenage prodigy Christian Pulisic, being American. He's also widely considered to be the best American player of his generation and possibly the first truly world-class player the US has produced. Though Pulisic has since left both his teen years and BVB behind, moving first to Chelsea in 2019 and then to AC Milan in 2023, BVB now has another top young American prospect in Giovanni Reyna.
• Stephon Marbury is most well-known in North America for being a good, but not great, player who didn't fully reach his potential. In 2011 he joined the Beijing Ducks in the Chinese Basketball Association, and has reached megastar status. Among other things, he has a statue in Beijing, was granted permanent residence in China for "outstanding contributions" to the country, had a museum dedicated to him opened in Beijing, and got his own film about his career.
• Canadian ice skater Kevin Reynolds has huge Japanese fanbase, due in no small part to his performances taking inspiration from Japanese culture, such as his 2016 routine set to the opening theme of Cowboy Bebop, all while dressed up as Spike Spiegel.
• Formula One great Ayrton Senna has a massive fanbase in Japan, which has remained even after his untimely death in 1994. It does help that most of his iconic drives and all of his championship titles were won by a Honda engined Formula One car, and that the Japanese GP is always held near the end of the season, which has led many a championship to be decided there (Senna' 1988 and 1990 victories in Suzuka were title clinchers for him). In fact, when he died, the Japanese Honda HQ received so many floral tributes, they overwhelmed the large exhibition lobby of the building; and Japanese people consider him to reach near-mythical status. Later, in 2006, when the Japanese people were asked on their Top 100 Historical Peoples, Senna ranked 22nd; ahead of other famous historical peoples such as Da Vinci, Napoleon, Gandhi, Mozart, JFK, Elvis, Columbus, Picasso, Confucius, and Lincoln.
• Table tennis, also known as ping-pong, originated from Britain, but is ridiculously popular in China. Even back in the Chinese Civil War, the Communist forces are known to have a very bizarre passion for the sport. Today, Chinese players dominate the top scenes of international table tennis. The exchange of ping-pong players between China and America in 1970s even helped to thaw the relations between the two nations, known as ping-pong diplomacy.
• Judo is one of the most popular sports in Belgium, where some of its best practitioners compete on an international level and win notable events. It definitely does help that a renowned Belgian politician was well-known as a judo coach that helped his team to win for 4 times Olympian gold.
• Chilean soccer star Alexis Sánchez is unexpectedly popular in Lebanon.
• Monster trucks are very popular in Australia, as evidenced by American drivers such as Kreg Christensen and Paul Shafer getting to drive over there and Monster Jam having a multi-city Aussie tour.
• Midget car racing is also very popular in Australia, where they're called speedcars. Some tracks received corporate sponsorship (the now-defunct Tralee Speedway in Jerrabomberra, New South Wales was at one point called the Pepsi Power Dome) and some Aussie speedcar racers have even participated in U.S. midget car racing events.
• MotoGP is incredibly popular in Indonesia. How popular? Well, if you were to compare the search numbers of MotoGP and Formula One on Google Trends, Indonesia is the only major country where the search results for MotoGP outnumbers Formula One. And its not a close call either: MotoGP's interest over time number is double of Formula One's. MotoGP is so popular there out of all types of sport, only soccer/football would give numbers that would exceed MotoGP's numbers in Google Trends. Not bad for a country that only hosted the championship twice in the mid-1990s. Part of MotoGP's popularity stems from the ubiquity of inexpensive underbone^note A type of motorcycle whose design and underpinnings are a cross between a motor scooter and a regular bike, popular in developing countries. motorcycles throughout Southeast Asia, which are seen as far more economical than a car, and that most of the constructors participating in MotoGP have a significant presence in Indonesia especially Yamaha whom Valentino Rossi raced for.
• As far as American motorsports go, IndyCar racing is a distant second to NASCAR in popularity—save for the Indianapolis 500, which attracts the largest crowd of any race (or any sporting event) in the world. ^note Even then, a lot of people who go don't really care about racing and just want an excuse to party for a long weekend. It is more popular in Europe and Australia, perhaps due to its superficial similarity to Formula One. ^note Although in reality, Indy cars all use the same chassis and are significantly cheaper and less technologically advanced than F1. A non-American IndyCar driver winning a race will often be front-page news in his home country, such as when Swedish driver Felix Rosenqvist claimed his first victory in the series in 2020, or even more notably when Brazilian Hélio Castroneves won his record-tying fourth Indy 500 in 2021 and another Swedish driver, Marcus Ericsson, won the 500 in 2022.
• Roller hockey (also known as rink hockey or quad hockey) was born in England, which was before World War II the dominant powerhouse of the game but where it is now basically forgotten, is now mostly popular in Portugal, Spain (both of which dominate the game in the world championships), Italy, Argentina (the only other two countries to have won world championships since WWII) and then France, Switzerland, former Portuguese colonies and Latin America (the latter to a much minor degree).
• In horse racing, Sunday Silence is a literal example of the "Big in Japan" aspect of this trope. He had an outstanding racing career in the US, winning the first two legs of the Triple Crown in 1989 before losing to rival Easy Goer in the Belmont Stakes and gaining revenge against his rival in the Breeders' Cup Classic. After an injury during his 4-year-old season in 1990 ended his racing career, he was retired to stud, but drew little attention from breeders in the US. In 1991, he was shipped to Japan when a breeder from that country who had a minority stake in the horse bought out the other partners. Things took off from there—Sunday Silence became the leading sire in Japan in 1995, and until his death in 2002 led the country's sire rankings every year. And even after his death, his final crops of foals (the last born in 2003) kept him atop the sire rankings through 2007. A pedigree expert for the American racing magazine Blood-Horse speculated, "Had Sunday Silence retired in Kentucky, it's almost certain he would have tanked commercially and been exported in disgrace, but he found his perfect gene pool and thrived instead."
• Much like examples from other sports, there is a long history of baseball players from America or elsewhere moving to Japan or South Korea to play after they've hit their ceiling in MLB or have entered the backend of their career. While in many cases they only stay there for a year or two or even end up being forced out of those leagues for not being good enough, some such as Randy Bass, Wladimir Balentien and Tuffy Rhodes have ended up finding the fame and fortune they never acquired in the United States, all three becoming cultural idols in their respective eras to some degree. Specially Randy Bass, who went from, at best, a AAA journeyman with bad luck whenever he was put in the MLB to a NPB ^note  Nippon Professional Baseball, basically the MLB of Japan. hall of famer ^note  inducted in 2023. .
• Despite historical Sino-Japanese tension, figure skater Yuzuru Hanyu is as beloved in China as in his home country of Japan. Many Chinese fans cite his public image and career performance of being a relentless sportsman looking to conquer technical achievements, an artist perfecting his craft, his strength that enabled him to survive being in a cutthroat field fraught with politics and possibly debilitating physical injuries (and actually surviving a natural disaster, the Tohoku 3.11 earthquake-tsunami), his commitment to charity work and advocacy as a disaster survivor, his unfailing politeness and grace whether he wins or loses, and his tendency to suffer silently in the name of achievement. These perceived traits tally with the notion of a gentleperson worthy of admiration in Chinese culture. Due to restrictions from the COVID-19 Pandemic, international fans were not allowed at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, upon which Chinese fans turned out in droves to support Hanyu in addition to their own skaters in various disciplines. He trended repeatedly on Weibo before, during, and after he has left the Olympics. Hanyu has directly thanked his Chinese fandom for their support in helping him overcome his devastating loss of the position of reigning Olympics champion and fall on the quadruple axel, his ultimate goal and the jump he covets.^note As it turned out, he was beaten to the ratified quad axel by 17-year-old American Ilia Malinin, who landed it at the lower-level U.S. Classic in Lake Placid, New York on September 14, 2022. There is an effect referred to as the Hanyueconomy: Anything Hanyu sponsors or uses sells out very fast, including tickets to events, and fans return tickets in droves if he withdraws from competitions. Even though his Iconic Item/Companion Cube is a Winnie the Pooh tissue box, with the character being controversial in Chinese politics, many Chinese fans (and fans from other countries) buy them and throw them on the ice as gifts after he finishes a performance.
• Argentine football legend Lionel Messi is obviously beloved the world over, both for his club success and his legendary performances on Argentina's national team. But even by those standards, nobody loves Messi or Argentina's national team (short of Argentina themselves, obviously) more than the people of - of all places - Bangladesh! Messi is considered a hero over there, and his and the Argentine team's 2022 World Cup victory was cheered on vigorously, with gigantic crowds watching the matches on outdoor screens. Many went as far as to wear Argentina jerseys and wave Argentina flags, and referring to the Argentine team as "us" or "ours." And given Bangladesh's lack of success as a footballing nation, there might be a reason they'd rather hitch their wagon to Argentina!
• Mascots in team sports in general: The mascots of professional sports teams aren't that overly recognizable among American team sports fanbases (for the longest time, the exceptions were limited to the Famous Chicken, often erroneously called the San Diego Chicken because he's an unofficial mascot of the San Diego Padres;^note While the Chicken made many appearances at Padres games, he has never been the official mascot of any San Diego sports team. Phillie Phanatic of the Philadelphia Phillies; the New York Mets' Mr. Met; Wally the Green Monster of the Boston Red Sox; and Youppi! of the Montreal Expos,^note A few years after the Expos left for Washington, Youppi! became the mascot of the Montreal Canadiens. all from MLB; since 2018, Gritty of the NHL's Philadelphia Flyers has (terrifyingly) been added to the list). But it is another story in Japan, where sports mascots tend to be very recognizable among Japanese sports fans, to the point they are seen in many products of the team and even are as recognizable as cereal mascots in Japan.
• While boxing has produced a number of legends worldwide such as Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson among others, it is considered to be the second most popular sport in the Philippines, right next to basketball. Manny Pacquiao made a name for himself (in a Rags to Riches story no less) as the only eight-division world champion in the history of boxing especially during the peak of his career in the 2000s and early 2010s.

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