The Growth of the World Baseball Classic - Is 2023 going to be the best edition yet?

After six years away, the best competition in baseball returns, the World Baseball Classic! Like so many major sporting events, the COVID-19 pandemic delayed proceedings from an original 2021 date. The tournament now makes its triumphant return for a fifth edition. With four groups of five teams, this tournament is bigger and better than previous editions. Group A is being held in Taichung, Taiwan, Group B in Tokyo, Japan, Group C in Phoenix, Arizona and Group D in Miami, Florida. The Semifinals and Finals will be contested at loanDepot Park in Miami as well.??

But how is the competition doing overall? Is it growing? Is it gaining relevance? What does the future hold? Across a number of different metrics, I’m going to demonstrate why this will be the biggest World Baseball Classic yet, and how the tournament is on a strong growth path towards the elite of national team sports competitions.

What has been especially interesting about this iteration of the tournament has been the palpable excitement and interest, beyond even just baseball diehards, in the build-up to the games. Using search analytics data drawn from Google, bing, Yahoo!, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, and Baidu, we compared the overall global interest in the tournament in the months leading up to March 1st, 2023. The results are clear:

The 2023 edition of the WBC has had a longer and bigger build-up of global interest than any of the four previous editions. And given that the 2017 tournament, which had a very slow build-up, ultimately became the most popular tournament thus far (largely due to the US win), this augurs well for overall tournament interest. The first few games have been compelling and competitive, with the atmosphere in Taichung and Tokyo demonstrating the passionate and unique fanbases in Taiwan and Japan.

The established baseball world is fairly clear. North America, Central America, the Caribbean and East Asia provide the vast majority of baseball’s players and interest. Of the twenty teams competing, baseball is the most or second most popular team sport in ten of them. It is also very popular in Canada and the United States, and reasonably so in China and Colombia. Baseball is a niche sport in the Netherlands, but wildly popular in the Dutch Caribbean islands, including Aruba and Curacao. That leaves five nations (Australia, Czech Republic, Great Britain, Israel and Italy) where the sport has very little market penetration. It is in these markets that the tournament offers an opportunity to grow the game in non-traditional countries. This tournament also provides an opportunity for established and growing baseball nations to gather their fans for a signpost event. There is nothing quite like national team competition, and in Baseball, where signpost events are few and far between, the World Baseball Classic offers just that. It is likely to generate more interest in the upcoming MLB, NPB and KBO league seasons as well.

Among the twenty teams competing, the World Baseball Classic does not represent the highest point of interest in the sport for those nations. If current trends continue, however, this will change for the better. Below you will see the number of baseball fans by nation and the peak fan interest in the WBC in the previous four editions.

While the WBC represents a pinnacle of baseball’s interest in countries like Chinese Taipei and Puerto Rico, a variety of other nations, like South Korea, Canada and the United States, are still nowhere near the potential level of interest they can muster. The upside of the tournament is high. If you combine the level of fan interest of the twenty competing nations, the opportunity to grow is clear. The WBC so far represents only 46.27% of peak baseball fan interest in those nations, a figure that corresponds to about 138 million fans. An increase to 60% of peak baseball interest, for example, would mean an additional 42 million fans.

For context, it’s interesting to look at the popularity of the WBC compared to other major international tournaments. Set against the top 30 international team sports competitions in the world, the WBC slots in at 11th, just behind the AFC Asian Cup (Asia’s continental soccer championship), and ahead of the African Cup of Nations (Africa’s version of the same). It has quite a long way to go until it gets to the level of the Cricket and Rugby World Cups, Copa America and UEFA Euros, and is nowhere near the big daddy of them all, the FIFA World Cup. But it’s already cemented itself as a serious international competition, and I fully expect it to be solidly in the top ten across the next few editions.?

The next step for the World Baseball Classic is to attract attention from nations that aren’t current participants. These include past participants like Brazil, Germany and South Africa, but among smaller baseball-interested nations, there needs to be growth as well. In this area, the tournament needs some work. The only nations that have demonstrated some such interest are the Central and South American countries of Belize, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Ecuador and El Salvador. If the tournament can start to develop interest in bigger markets outside of its participants, then it will have a chance to reach the lofty heights of the top five international competitions. On current evidence, and with a wonderful start to the 2023 competition, I wouldn’t bet against the WBC. It’s going to be fun to watch.