The United States has no official national sport: no federal law or act of Congress has ever designated one. Baseball holds the title by tradition, as “America’s national pastime”, a phrase New York newspapers were already using in 1856, and it is the sport most people mean when they name the national game. By audience, though, American football has long since overtaken it: the Super Bowl in February 2025 drew an average of 127.7 million US viewers, the largest broadcast in American television history. Basketball, invented in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1891, and lacrosse, played by Indigenous nations for centuries before Europeans arrived, complete the shortlist of sports with a real claim to be called national.
Why “America’s Pastime” was never written into US law
Some countries legislate their national sports; the United States never has. Baseball’s status rests on habit rather than a statute: it has been unofficially recognised as the national sport since the late 19th century. Claims that Congress made baseball official in some particular year are wrong. The only designations are at state level. Maryland, for example, adopted jousting as its official state sport in 1962 and lacrosse as its official team sport in 2004.
The nickname stuck because baseball was the first American sport to turn professional, and it became tied to national memory through the Civil War and the Great Depression. Today’s fans see it differently. In a January 2018 Gallup poll, 37% of Americans named football their favourite spectator sport, against 11% for basketball, 9% for baseball and 7% for soccer.
From a 1791 Pittsfield bylaw to the first World Series in 1903
The earliest known American references to baseball date from the 1780s and 1790s. A Princeton student mentioned playing “baste ball” in a diary entry of 1786, and in 1791 the town of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, passed a bylaw barring the game within 80 yards (73 m) of its new meeting house, to protect the windows.
The modern rules came out of Manhattan. The New York Knickerbockers, founded on 23 September 1845, adopted the Knickerbocker Rules drawn up by William R. Wheaton and William H. Tucker. They introduced foul lines and banned “soaking”, the old practice of putting a runner out by hitting him with the ball. The first recorded match between two clubs under these rules was played at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, on 19 June 1846, and the Knickerbockers lost it 23–1. In 1857 sixteen New York-area clubs formed the National Association of Base Ball Players, which fixed three features still used today: 90 feet between bases, nine players a side and nine innings.
Cricket still outdrew baseball in the 1850s, but its matches ran for days, and Civil War troops preferred the shorter game. The Cincinnati Red Stockings declared themselves openly professional in 1869 and went unbeaten that season. The National League followed in 1876, the American League declared itself a major league in 1901, and the champions of the two leagues first met in the World Series in 1903. Boston of the American League won it.
Cooperstown, Abner Doubleday and the myth the Mills Commission made
Many Americans still believe baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York. It is a myth, and a well-documented one. In 1903 the British-born sportswriter Henry Chadwick argued that baseball came from rounders, an English game he had played as a boy. Albert Spalding, a baseball executive, insisted the game was American. A commission headed by Abraham Mills, a former National League president, spent three years on the question and named Doubleday, later a Civil War hero, as the inventor. Its main evidence was the uncorroborated account of a Colorado mining engineer.
The legend still shaped the sport’s geography. Stephen Carlton Clark, heir to the Singer sewing-machine fortune, chose Cooperstown for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum to bring tourists back to a village hurt by the Great Depression and by Prohibition’s damage to the local hops trade. The building was dedicated on 12 June 1939, and Cooperstown remains shorthand for the hall itself.
Major League Baseball, the minor leagues and Jackie Robinson’s 1947 debut
Major League Baseball, the sport’s governing body at the top level, is the oldest of the major professional leagues in the United States and Canada. Its 30 teams, 29 of them in the United States and one in Toronto, play 162 games a season. MLB also oversees about 240 affiliated minor-league clubs organised into AAA, AA, High-A, Low-A and Rookie levels. Its season attendance topped 74 million in 2013, the highest of any sports league in the world. The New York Yankees have won 27 World Series, more titles than any other franchise in American professional sport, while the Philadelphia Phillies, founded in 1883, are the oldest club to keep the same name in the same city.
Baseball’s history is also a history of exclusion. An unwritten agreement kept Black players out of the major leagues from the 1880s; Rube Foster founded the Negro National League in 1920 in response. On 15 April 1947 Jackie Robinson started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers and broke the colour line. Below the professional game, USA Baseball runs the national team, which won its first World Baseball Classic in 2017 and lost the 2023 final to Japan.
How American football took over, from Rutgers in 1869 to the Super Bowl
If the national sport were decided by audience, it would be American football. The game grew out of soccer and rugby on college campuses. Rutgers beat Princeton 6–4 on 6 November 1869, in what is usually counted as the first game. From 1880 the Yale player Walter Camp pushed through the rules that made the game distinct: eleven players, the snap, the line of scrimmage and a system of downs.
The professional league began in a car showroom in Canton, Ohio, on 20 August 1920. The American Professional Football Association, with Jim Thorpe as president, became the National Football League in 1922. Canton now holds the Pro Football Hall of Fame, opened on 7 September 1963. The NFL’s 32 teams draw an average of more than 67,000 spectators a game, the highest average attendance of any professional league in the world, and the league generated over $23 billion in 2024.
The Super Bowl dates from the 1966 merger agreement between the NFL and the rival American Football League; the Green Bay Packers won the first one in January 1967. All seven of the most-watched broadcasts in American television history are Super Bowls. Super Bowl LIX, played on 9 February 2025 at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, averaged 127.7 million US viewers as the Philadelphia Eagles beat the Kansas City Chiefs 40–22. Super Bowl LX at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara on 8 February 2026, won 29–13 by the Seattle Seahawks over the New England Patriots, drew about 125 million viewers, a slight fall from the year before, with a peak of around 137 million.
College football matters as much as the professional game in large parts of the country. The Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, was first played in 1902, and Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, with an official capacity of 107,601, is the largest stadium in the Western Hemisphere.
Springfield’s peach baskets: basketball since December 1891
Unlike baseball and football, which evolved from older British games, basketball was invented outright in the United States, though by a Canadian. James Naismith (1861–1939), born in Almonte in what is now Ontario, was teaching at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, when Luther Gulick gave him 14 days to devise an indoor game for the New England winter. In December 1891 Naismith nailed peach baskets to an elevated track and had his class throw a soccer ball into them. Metal hoops with backboards replaced the baskets in 1906.
The professional game took shape after the Second World War. The Basketball Association of America, founded in 1946, merged with the National Basketball League on 3 August 1949 to form the NBA, which now has 30 teams. According to the National Sporting Goods Association, more than 26 million Americans play basketball, more than play any other team sport. The Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame stands in Springfield and had inducted 436 players, coaches, referees and other contributors by 2024. Internationally the record is lopsided: US men won every Olympic basketball tournament from 2008 to 2024, and US women won eight in a row from 1996 to 2024.
Lacrosse, the oldest game played on American soil
Lacrosse has the longest history of any of these sports in North America. It is based on games played by Native American communities from as early as 1100 AD, and the version played in the United States is usually traced to the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and the Lenape. Its American heartland has long been the Mid-Atlantic, especially Maryland and New York. The first women’s team in the country was formed at the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore in 1926, the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame is in Sparks, Maryland, and the state made lacrosse its official team sport in 2004.
The sport has spread well beyond that region. A 2016 survey by US Lacrosse counted more than 825,000 participants nationwide, and the professional game now runs through the Premier Lacrosse League outdoors and the National Lacrosse League indoors. The US has won 11 of the 14 men’s World Lacrosse Championships. Canada, by contrast, treats lacrosse as one of its official national sports, as explained in our guide to the national sport of Canada.
Where each sport rules: New England ballparks, Indiana gyms and Southern stadiums
The map of American sport is uneven. Baseball is strongest where it started, in the Northeast, and its oldest ballparks are city landmarks: Fenway Park in Boston has been home to the Red Sox since 1912 and is the oldest active park in the majors, and Wrigley Field on Chicago’s North Side opened in 1914. College baseball looks west to Omaha, Nebraska, which hosts the Division I College World Series every June.
College football dominates the South and the Great Plains, home to the Southeastern, Big 12 and Big Ten conferences. Indiana is the basketball state: it holds 10 of the 12 largest high-school gyms in the country, a passion known as “Hoosier hysteria”.
So the answer depends on the measure. Baseball is the national pastime by history and tradition, football is the national obsession by audience and revenue, and basketball is the sport most Americans actually play. For how these games spread abroad, see our guides to baseball around the world and to the sports invented in each country.