I tried several words in the Ngram, and then I found something interest by a combination of terms of sports. Here is my example:
English
I chose five sports for this analysis; (1) Baseball, (2) Football, (3) Tennis, (4) Golf, and (5) Cricket. At first, I picked several other sports like polo (I think this word is used not only for describing a sport but also for other meanings like polo shirts), wrestling, swimming, basketball, hockey and so on. But, I thought the five sports which I picked are interesting because of having well variations. At 2000, Baseball is the most frequently used in the above graph! Yeah! However, as you can guess, when this result falls into American and British English, ...
American English
In the American English, Golf was the most popular for writers to mention during the early twentieth century. Also, before baseball was a popular sport in the US, cricket was in style in the late nineteenth century. It's surprising for me! Of course, cricket has been popular in the UK (+India) as shown in the British English, while baseball has been the worst attractive for writers who use British English.
One more thing I want to state here is the influence of wars on sports. Even my graphs show the evidence that less frequent words regarding sports were mentioned during the wars such as WWI, WWII, and Vietnam War. In particular, compared the American to British graph at 1960, there is a big difference. For example, tennis indicates the opposite trend between the American and British. My explanation for it is that Vietnam War has something to do with the trend because US involvement to the war escalated in the early 1960s and also there was Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
Anyway, I recommend you play the Ngram!
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