I always figured that a lot of men my parents' age watched NFL because they played football when they were younger, so there's some vicarious enjoyment.
When I was growing up, and I think this is even more true now, there were way more kids playing video games than football, and this was in the Midwest. The barrier to entry is just so much lower. So I think it's not impossible for streamed video games to one day be more popular than traditional sports.
I think there's a lot to be said for this. I just don't have the energy or time anymore to commit to sitting down and finishing a game, but I love watching them being played while I'm having lunch or something. I don't so much just sit down and watch the whole thing like a football game, but I think it scratches a similar itch.
While the cat's probably out of the bag by now, if it were a service I had to pay for I likely would.
I just want to add that in my personal experience, it's also easy to fall out of a fanbase due to the game having too much complexity thus making it too hard to achieve balance between competing mechanics. A case in point is League of Legends which has to nerf and buff their characters constantly and is always adding new characters which in turn spawn new imbalances, these changes can be too fast for the casual follower to understand the games as time pass by.
This is one of the places Rocket League truly shines. The only changes in the meta happen slowly, organically, and (almost) exclusively at the very high end.
Low skill floor, crazy high skill ceiling, no randomness, no pay-to-win, short matches, and ELO-based matchmaking is the recipe for the perfect competitive sport replacement.
