Soccer the most exciting sport: scientists

It's official: soccer is the most exciting sport

That's according to scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Why they were researching this weighty topic is not clear.

The scientists looked more than 300,000 games played in the top professional leagues over the past century in five sports: baseball, hockey, basketball, American football and English soccer.

The researchers took unpredictability of results - how often a leading team is beaten by an underdog - as a measure of how exciting a game was.

By this standard, soccer was the most exciting sport followed by Major League Baseball.

The study noted, however, that in the last ten years, baseball topped soccer in excitement. This coincides with the advent of English soccer's Premiership which The Guardian accurately describes an era marked by huge spending and a widening gap between the top league and the rest.

The irony is that baseball is the American sport which most closely parallels English and European soccer in terms of restrictions on player movement and players salaries. Specifically, there are fewer restrictions than in the NFL, NHL and NBA. Many people have insisted that the salary cap (overall limit on the amount teams can spend on player salaries) was necessary to preserve competitive balance in sport.

Yet the two leagues with the best competitive balance, according to this study, are the two leagues with no salary cap.

It's ironic that many of the same people who refuse minimum wage for low income workers insist on maximum wages for athletes. Either you let the market dictate wages in an absolute fashion or you don't.