Spectator involvement

Spectators at the 1906 unofficial Olympic Games

Main article: Spectator sport

The competition element of sport, along with the aesthetic appeal of some sports, result in the popularity of people attending to watch sport being played. This has led to the specific phenomenon of spectator sport.
Both amateur and professional sports attract spectators, both in person at the sport venue, and through broadcast mediums including radio, television and internet broadcast. Both attendance in person and viewing remotely can incur a sometimes substantial charge, such as an entrance ticket, or pay-per-view television broadcast.
It is common for popular sports to attract large broadcast audiences, leading to rival broadcasters bidding large amounts of money for the rights to show certain fixtures. The football World Cup attracts a global television audience of hundreds of millions; the 2006 final alone attracted an estimated worldwide audience of well over 700 million and the 2007 Cricket World Cup attracted about 2.3 Billion worldwide viewers.^{[citation needed]}
In the United States, the championship game of the NFL, the Super Bowl, has become one of the most watched television broadcasts of the year.^{[citation needed]} Super Bowl Sunday is a de facto national holiday in America; the viewership being so great that in 2007 advertising space was reported as being sold at $2.6m for a 30 second slot.^{[citation needed]}