You may be mistaking correlation for causation in your reading of the statistics. The fact that men express a higher interest with sport is more likely to be the result of socialisation rather than an inherent interest in sporting activities.
It is easy to see how this arises. Gender stereotyping happens even before children are born. Baby boys are handed squishy footballs and told that manly men take an interest in football, while their sisters are handed dolls and told that sport is a manly activity. So the first explanation for the statistics may simply be that they are conditioned away from sport from a young age.
But even if conditioning does not change women's internal attitudes towards sport, social pressure may shape the one they are willing to voice in public. As in, when the interviewer asks whether they like football, they feel obliged to give the womanly answer since that is what is expected from them.
So yeah, the whole 'interest' thing is a bit spurious, particularly since the study was probably conducted in a biased way by men to trying to prove a point.
(Charlotte is probably also right about the unrepresentative nature of the data sample, by the by.)
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