The excessive deletion needs to end

Is it a problem to have 1.5 million articles about sports on the English Wikipedia? I haven't been bothered much by them, if that is the number. About the only problem I have had with sports articles is that it seems nearly every search on a person's name ends up finding a footballer among the results, so there is an extra layer of disambiguations and hatnotes to click through sometimes. But that seems a small price to pay for attracting and retaining the (presumably) hundreds of thousands of editors who come here primarily to write about sports, some of whom may end up doing something useful.

For example, editors with a fervent interest in sports may also contribute to wiki infrastructure such as templates, help pages, answering questions on the Help desk, and other things that benefit all other topics. Wikipedia is such a well-developed wiki because it appeals to so many people who do not share our interests, who can all share their tools and innovations.

I can't think of a good argument for chopping off Wikipedia's Long Tail. We can have tens of millions of articles that hardly anyone looks at, except for small groups of people who care deeply about them. One example is articles of geographically local importance. I wish we had articles about every single identifiable object in the city where I live. Most of these topics would not be relevant to people outside my city, making them blood in the water to deletionists. Instead, we have to set up our city wikis outside the Wikimedia family to provide in-depth coverage of locally relevant topics, but this is inefficient since it requires duplicating Wikipedia's extensive infrastructure (templates, help pages, etc.) or doing without these goodies and having a bare-boned wiki.