Athletes aren't the only competitors in the world of professional sports: individual sports are battling one another for market share in what has become an international entertainment industry with global revenues of more than $38 billion in television rights and ticketing alone.

This commercial contest does have winners and losers. The global economic downturn intensified the competition with other forms of entertainment. Not surprisingly, sports that have been traditionally popular in the United States or Europe—which are the most lucrative television-advertising markets—enjoy an inherent advantage and are grabbing the biggest slices of a competitive pie. Soccer and US football together take more than a third of the revenues in the global TV sports market (exhibit). But commercial success isn't just about popularity. For a sport to capture its fair share or more of this market's revenues, it must translate its popularity into cash. In the course of studying many different sports, we found surprising discrepancies between their popularity, on the one hand, and the revenues generated by their sport organizations, on the other.

Some sports, regardless of size, capitalize on their popularity more successfully than others do. While broadly...