Category exclusion/inclusion not working

Hi. I’m using the plugin on my site where I have categories for different areas. So I have “sport” posts. I want to show the most popular posts that have sport as category. But it does not work. I also tried excluding the other two categories (“news”, “politics”). But nothing changes. It either shows no posts or “standard” posts.

Any pointers?

https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/popular-widget/