I’m the UK there used to be a culture where when two guys met, an almost inevitable question was what football team do you support. I was never into football. (What Americans call soccer).
Another sport there is some culture of watching is Tennis.
In the past , the 1990s, there were 4 and later 5, television channels. They showed tennis and football. If you played tennis, you probably watched it too. Tennis players were household names. Federer is probably from the television era.
I haven’t watched tennis in a long time.
I don’t currently do Hulu or Netflix.
People don’t get into playing sports like table tennis or badminton as fans of watching the sport. There is no social pressure to either.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that people that play it typically aren’t watching it. At a good level one might study it.
A good question is why do people watch sport at all! If you watch 5 minutes of it you have seen it! Fortunately there are 2min or 5min clips, well edited. Maybe a lot of players have seen those? If not then they would watch it. So when you see people don’t watch, there are levels of not watching. So what do you mean. If you showed them a brief clip, they’d watch.