Sport is funny. If you are paying attention to a sport, it can appear everywhere. But the minute you tune out, it's just a thing that exists that occasionally enters your line of sight.
I don't watch NFL or NBA anymore. NBA made itself too hard to watch via their TV strategy, and if I'm going to spend one day a weekend watching football, it's going to be college ball. But y'all know I also spend a ridiculous amount of time watching the Cubs and now Austin FC.
Way back in '99, I somehow got wrapped up in watching Women's World Cup. And, honestly, it's hard to top the excitement of that WWC win. But I don't really even remember how I tuned in, I just remember being very onboard watching the team playing a sport I fundamentally didn't understand except for "ball goes in net gets you points".
It's not that I didn't play soccer as a kid. We all did. But the rules for kids were different, and I played defense, so the "strategy", such as it was, was to stop whomever was driving the goal from doing so. It wasn't brain surgery. But once you start watching soccer a lot, you realize how *hard* this game is, how much strategy is in play as an absolute constant. But I also know and understand how to folks watching, it can just look like 20-odd people in matching shirts running around a field of grass.