Sports that kids do today

When my father was young people in Norway practiced and watched sports like skating and bandy. Big, excited crowds gathered in outdoor stadiums to cheer, eventhough it was cold in winter and the competitions could last for hours. Today kids do not fancy these activities, and egames has become the buzzword.

Actually I read that the financial interests of Real Madrid and the others behind the now failed Super League of 12 wealthy European football clubs, used as one of their arguments that youth of today do not play nor relate to clubs and the game itself as they did some decades ago. They argued something had to be done in order to keep the interest of the younger supporters. And probably they are right.

Today we are used to entertainment at very high speeds, and that also go for sports. The need for fast, continuos emotions, and a general lack of patience are key observations.

Competitions change to satisfy speed of emtions, avoid periods of less excitement. Maybe that is why american football, ice-hockey and basketball still draw crowds, thanks to their short and multiple periods of game. The soccer kind of football has games of two times 45 minutes. One and a half hours of game and a quarter of an hour of break in between.

Probably boring for a kid used to 3-minute long videos, fast games like FIFA, Fortnite, GTA, etc.. Is football games with 3 x 20 minutes the solution?

And the same thing happens all over. Cross-country skiing used to be competitions where spectators saw the athletes at start and finnish. In between the run for 5, 10, 15, 30 or 50 kilomters through the forests. Eventhough you watch TV or listen to the radio to get intermediate results, that may be a quite long thing to follow. Therefore new, shorter and faster sprint competitions on stadiums or even city-squares were introduced. Big success! The sport again started to draw crowds to cpmpetitions and recruit young skiiers to the clubs.

Same thing with speed skating. The introduction of very short-rink stadiums and 10 skaters at a time was a very atractive move, as this sport traditionally had 500, 1000, 1500, 5000 and 10.000 meters disciplines with only two athletes at a time. The latter could be a bit boring for those for less interest in time-statistics and drinking a hot toddy in 20 degrees below zero.

Today, for sparetime activities and hobbies, kids can choose from a wide variety of sports and games. A good that variety that earlier generations did not get to know. Eventhough sport reports on the news spend most of its time on big sports (where the money is), like football, basketball, tennis and alpine skiing, today there are a lot of "minority sports" out there. We could mention fencing, martial arts, badmington, land-hockey, polo, figure-skating, ski jumping...