Switch Off the Football - Young people are turning off sport
Switch Off the Football -
By Leila Abboud
Nov 25, 2016 2:00 AM EST
Young people are turning off sport on the box --
something that will strike fear into television executives who hoped live
matches would be immune from the diversions of Netflix and video games.
European broadcasters like Sky Plc and Telefonica SA pay
billions for sports rights and rely on the games' allure to attract people to
their more expensive broadband and television bundles. Walt Disney Co., the
owner of ESPN, and broadcasters including NBC also use sport to build audiences
and sell advertising.
But there are signs it doesn't hold the same spell over
young people as their parents. Viewers between the ages of 18 and 24 were the
least interested in sport as a genre, according to a survey of 31,000 people
across 10 countries carried out by research firm Ampere Analysis.
The trend was most pronounced in the U.S. and U.K., the
most advanced markets in terms of internet adoption and alternative sources of
information and entertainment. In those countries, interest in sport among
young people diverged the most from the average for the country as a whole.
(France and Poland were the two exceptions, where young people are more
interested.)
Sporting Chance
Young people in eight of the ten countries surveyed
displayed less interest in sports than the average for the country. The
steepest under-indexing occured in more advanced media and entertainment
markets.
It's important to stress the data are patchy and have
limitations. Nielsen, which tracks and dissects U.S. television viewing
figures, says it's yet to study young people and sports in depth, while
publicly available figures for other markets are much scarcer. Ampere's survey
is based on online surveys that may not represent the population as a whole.
But disillusionment among the young does help to explain
the decline in audiences for English Premier League soccer, something Gadfly
explored here, and, potentially, the slump in viewership for the NFL season.
Some have blamed the presidential election and boring games for the latter's
problems -- but Nielsen data show American football's struggle to attract
younger viewers goes back much further than this year.
One thing is indisputable: Young people have far more
entertainment options now than in decades past and spend less time in front of
the box. From Snapchat to Candy Crush, young people are developing new media
consumption habits at a rapid clip.
Second Screen
Piracy may also be at work. Anyone with a minimum of tech
savvy and a high-speed broadband connection can find illegal streams of most
sports. Young people may also watch sport differently. They're happier to dip
into games, watching snatches of video on their phones or following along on
Twitter.
There's one final source of the disillusionment among
young people: the sports leagues themselves. In recent decades, many decided to
sell the rights to their matches to pay-TV companies. But in taking the extra
money, Formula One and the English Premier League limited their audiences to
only those people willing to pay.
It's telling that the age groups most loyal to the sports
were the ones who watched on free television years ago. Like many clubs on the
brink of relegation, the audience for televised sport is ageing and it isn't
being replenished at the same rate. Its glory days may be behind it.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of
Bloomberg LP and its owners.To contact the author of this story:
Leila Abboud in Paris at labboud@bloomberg.netTo contact
the editor responsible for this story:
Edward Evans at eevans3@bloomberg.net
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