Five Incredibly Weird 'Sports' That Are Suddenly Taking Off

I am a sports fan in the gentlest, loosest sense of the term. I play in one fantasy football league and one confidence pool. I watch my precious Chicago Bears every week when I can. But my personal reality is packed with far more niche hobbies and games, many of which I’ve written about before (like board games, crosswords, and trying to get on Survivor). When my buddies are at the bar watching the NBA or baseball or whatnot, you’ll find me drawn to whatever games the bar has in store. Shuffleboard, darts, cornhole, etc. Those are my games, and there are hundreds like them that make for surprisingly electric viewing experiences. 

Let's dive in and take a look at five of my favorite non-sports that make for surprisingly sport-like watches. We’ll also look at how these games gain traction even when they aren’t part of mainstream broadcasts or media deals. 

Popdarts

Popdarts began as a toy. The suction cup darts stick to surfaces when thrown, creating a bevy of opportunities for homebrew games on glass tables, patios, and empty walls. 

The core Popdarts game, though, has extended beyond the household and into the public eye. It plays like a lovechild of cornhole and traditional darts, complete with cancellation scoring and a race to 21 points. My favorite part of watching Popdarts is the camera angle, which starts at the back of the table where darts are thrown and includes players in the distance as they launch their projectiles onto the playing area. It makes for a quick little pop when a dart lands and an air of mystery as the dart has some hang time before it lands. 

The first-ever Popdarts National Tournament ran in Orlando in August 2025 with a $10,000 prize pot, and organizers already have more events lined up for 2026. Watching strangers throw suction-cup darts for real money is a stranger, more entertaining spectacle than it has any right to be.

Marble Racing (Marbula One)

Jelle Bakker turned a hobby into Marbula One, a full marble racing season modeled directly on Formula 1, complete with team liveries, photo finishes, and champagne podiums for a sport with no drivers. His YouTube channel, Jelle's Marble Runs, passed 720,000 subscribers after going viral during the pandemic sports shutdown, when literal marbles rolling downhill counted as appointment viewing for a sports-starved audience. He’s now surpassed 1.5 million subscribers. Curious whether you can put money on a marble race the way you would on an actual F1 season? Early digging suggests it's mostly a novelty market on offshore sportsbooks rather than something regulated U.S. books touch, so you can’t yet put money down on the Dragon’s Egg squad. 

My favorite marble races are Sand Rally runs. They’re long tracks carved into sand on a downhill beach. The races are positively electric, given the conditions of the course. Expect dramatic disqualifications and myriad lead changes. 

In 2020, Kansas State grad student and Brazilian jiu-jitsu competitor Vik Mikheev came up with an idea only pandemic lockdown boredom could produce: two competitors, seatbelted into the front seats of a car, grappling for submission the moment the belts come off. Car-Jitsu follows standard BJJ rules: no strikes, submissions only, three-minute rounds, and points awarded for controlling position inside a space roughly the size of a phone booth. It's become a genuine phenomenon in Russia, where entire venues now host dedicated events, and a U.S. Car Jitsu Championship circuit has built a real following with around 30 regular competitors. It looks absurd. It is also, apparently, exhausting, since there's nowhere to retreat to and no room to escape a bad position.

Cornhole

Cornhole is the one entry here that's already gone fully mainstream without most casual fans noticing. The American Cornhole League's prize money has roughly doubled every two years since it launched in 2015, from $1 million in 2019 to $3.3 million in 2021 to $8 million by 2023, with players collectively pulling in about $7.7 million in 2024 alone. The ACL holds broadcast deals with both ESPN and CBS, and more than 300 hours of ACL programming aired across ESPN platforms in 2024. A backyard tailgate game now has professional athletes who make a living at it, full-time, with sponsors and a real season schedule.

Competitive Axe Throwing

The World Axe Throwing League runs the sport the way a real governing body should: standardized rules, certified venues and officials, and an official global leaderboard tracking every sanctioned thrower. Its World Axe & Knife Throwing Championships have carried prize pools north of $60,000, and tournaments air on ESPN. There's something uniquely satisfying about watching a sport where the entire objective is throwing a sharp object at a target with precision, on television, with real stakes attached and a bar-game origin story still visible underneath the polish.

None of these require existing fandom to enjoy. That's the actual appeal: A niche sport without decades of baggage is often easier to walk into cold than a league with a hundred years of history behind it. Pick whichever one sounds the most ridiculous and watch a clip. It probably won't stay ridiculous for long.