Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2015 March 13

= March 13 =

Religious groups in Bangladesh vs sports
I notice that Hindus in Bangladesh tend to enjoy and play soccer more than they do in cricket. Muslims however enjoy more in cricket than soccer, not to mention that national cricket team of Bangladesh have only one Hindu player while the majority are Muslim. My questions are 1) Why?, 2) What about Christians and Buddhists? Which sport do they enjoy or play the most? and 3) Is Bangladesh that only nation to have this thing where a specific religious group enjoys and plays a specific sport? Please answer and thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.29.34.120 (talk) 01:19, 13 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Regarding your last first point: ". . . [the] national cricket team of Bangladesh have only one Hindu player while the majority are Muslim": This is less to do with religious sports preferences and more to do with the fact that the population of Bangladesh is predominantly Muslim with very few Hindus, on account of the reasons behind the protracted and bloody Partition of India. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 212.95.237.92 (talk) 13:58, 13 March 2015 (UTC)


 * That may be part of it, but if it is true that there's only one Hindu on the team, then the team doesn't represent the national distribution of religions. Per Religion in Bangladesh, one in eight Bangladeshis are Hindu.  The Bangladesh national cricket team has 24 members, meaning that one would expect 3 to be Hindu.  Still with a small number of people, there's bound to be some variation.  With only 24 people, there's no way to tell, just by the number of people, if the variation is due to systemic differences in sport preference, OR if there is just random variation which has caused a difference of 2 people from the expected (which is quite possible).  So to answer question 1) "Why?", the answer is: we can't tell, because the sample size is too small.  Of course, we're taking the OP's word that there's only one Hindu player on the national cricket team.  I looked at the articles of a bunch of the players, and it does not list their religion.  So, maybe there are more than one.  Regarding the other religions, Christians and Buddhists, only about 1 out of 170 Bangladeshis are Buddhist, and only 1 out of 250 is Christian: those are pretty tiny minorities, it would be possible to find one on a national team, but random chance would mean it would be unlikely.  Also, regarding football (soccer) numbers, we can't answer that question, because the Bangladesh national football team article doesn't list the religions of the players, and when I spot check the articles, they ALSO don't state the religions.  -- Jayron 32 14:51, 13 March 2015 (UTC)
 * However, the Bangladesh_national_football_team section shows a fair smattering of Muslim names (one is called Mohamed and another has the surname Islam, together some Ahmeds and Khans) whereas a few may plausibly be Hindus and one has a Christian middle name (Vincent). I would be astonished if ANY national sports team EXACTLY represented the religious or ethnic breakdown of the community that they represent, unless it were a completely homogeneous one. Alansplodge (talk) 15:28, 14 March 2015 (UTC)