Study suggests basketball fans get more attention when online dating

The online dating site Zoosk has crunched the numbers and it turns out that being a basketball fan will, at the very least, get your a bit more attention online.

Great news, basketball fans! According to the invisible math at Zoosk, the dating site you maybe sometimes see in various banner ads online, being a fan of the sport of basketball can get your more attention via online dating. Now, we can question the timing of such a study — what with us all in lockdown and no actual dating taking place — but it is encouraging nonetheless. So, let’s get into the numbers.

According to their report, users (OK, American users only) who identified as basketball fans received a whopping 111 percent more attention on their profiles. I’m not entirely sure how that makes sense, but it’s good for first place across the entire sports spectrum. And it’s over and above the apparent 53 percent boost people get simply for including the word “sports” in their bios. Do I sound incredulous yet? No? Well then, let’s continue.

(Disclaimer: These numbers apparently come from “500,000 randomly selected Zoosk members who were active in 2019.” To which I have an obvious follow-up question: Are there really that many active Zoosk users?)

According to Zoosk’s numbers, the next most, uh, exciting sports for online dating (after basketball) are baseball and rugby — which, I’ll be honest, makes me want to question the entire enterprise. If we’re talking about American sports fans, does rugby really resonate that much? Furthermore, what’s the gender split on this accounting: Is it women being drawn to rugby fans assuming they’ll have a rugby-ready countenance? Or is it men being incredibly thirsty for someone of the opposite sex to “please like my sport”? And that’s before we add in the same-sex variables to this equation. In short: questions abound!

(For those wondering, at the bottom of the scale is: mixed-martial arts [not surprising], wrestling [definitely not surprising], and finally, in last place, soccer [more curious than surprising — Americans must really just not be down for soccer; sorry, MLS!])

Anyway, back to number one: basketball. We must now turn to some more detailed numbers, and most certainly the next question on every fan’s mind: which teams will get you the most attention? Befitting their status as the league’s top team for much of the past five years, the Warriors sit atop this list, giving prospective daters an 80 percent boost to their accounts. This makes some sense: everyone wants to associate themselves with a winning brand (or everyone wants to be a front-runner, but who am I to judge?).

Now, I have some disappointing news here Raptors fans, as it appears as though mentioning your Toronto fandom puts you in the bottom third among NBA teams with only a 25 percent boost to your profile.

In truth, this makes some sense. Given the American skew to this study, as is typical of most reporting about sports, Canada’s Raptors suffer as a result. It would indeed be interesting to see what kind of boost Raptors fandom now gives online dating profiles in Canada, but that’s neither here nor there. (Please do not send me this study, thanks.) I do, however, have to wonder how being a Raptors fan is less desirable than being a Lakers fan (come on!), a Jazz fan (really?), and a Knicks fan (you must be joking). I guess there really is no accounting for taste.

Still, this study confirms something we’ve all known for some time: Raptors fans are more desirable than Celtics fans. Yep, that part checks out.