Harry Shannon
I was listening to CBC radio last week, and heard someone claim that cricket is the fastest-growing sport in Ontario. Maybe it was in Canada, but that’s not relevant to my point here.
My point is that the term fastest-growing is really meaningless, or at best misleading. There are about a million registered soccer players in Canada. Compare that with 15,000 registered to play cricket. If the number of soccer players increased by half a million, that would be a 50% increase. If the number of cricket players went up by 15,000, that’s a 100% increase.
So if you look just at the percentages, you’d argue that cricket is growing faster. But the absolute increase in soccer players would be more than 30 times as many.
The lesson: remember the denominator. If you start from a small number, even a small increase will be a big percentage increase.