Who says Indians are not crazy about sports? Our desi sports fans are so obsessed that 42% of them would even cancel their honeymoon if it clashed with their team/athlete playing a big game. Yes, this is what a global survey has revealed and the world does not even come close, with only 19%.
As if this addiction is not convincing enough, the survey found, 41% of Indian sports fans would rather lose their job than not be able to attend a historic sporting final/event. But the only condition: The sports has to be cricket or football, and the match has to be big enough.
So, how did global accommodation portal, Booking.com get to this figure? They went worldwide between August 8 and September 2, spoke to 22,603 sports fans aged 18 and more in 29 countries.
A thousand fans were contacted in every country, and that list had India, Australia, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Japan, China, Brazil, the United States, the UK, Russia, Indonesia, Colombia and South Korea. Five-hundred fans each were spoken to in New Zealand, Thailand, Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Hong Kong, Croatia, Taiwan, Mexico, Netherlands, Sweden, Singapore and Israel.
Indian sports fans had a good reason to be so obsessed: Looking ahead to 2020 with great expectations, 44% of the respondents were confident that their national team or player would win an international tournament. Globally, this confidence was shared by only 34% of the fans.
Thirty-eight per cent of the Indian cricket fans would spend more on travelling for sports than on family vacations. But this priority was hardly so pronounced among Indian football fans, only 29% of whom would make that option.
Riding high on Indian cricket's recent successes, a whopping 88% of the fans queried believed their team would win a major global tourney within the next four years. The global average was only 18%. Strangely, despite the football team crashing out of the World Cup qualifiers, 79% of fans shared the same optimism.
Nothing like watching your team live, inside a stadium. Talking to a thousand fans in India, the survey concluded that 82% of them had completed between one to five trips in the last year alone. Six in ten proposed to travel both domestically and internationally to watch their team / player.
Booking.com is the official accommodation and attractions booking partner for UEFA Euro 2020.