- Sports viewership remains strong despite TV decline
- Younger audiences still engage, especially via pay-TV
- Football dominates, rugby faces declining popularity
There was an uncontested winner of the summer of sport, which concluded on Sunday night with the most magnificent Paralympics in living memory. The sport and how it consistently keeps so many of us watching – even when TV viewing stats resemble Tom Daley diving off a 10-meter platform.
The stats were staggering: 23.8 million viewers across BBC and ITV watched England’s Euro 2024 final defeat, the greatest UK audience of the year. The BBC’s Olympics coverage led the rankings for 17 days, with 5 to 7 million viewers. Channel 4 also had Paralympic audiences that routinely exceeded one million.
Broadcast TV figures have fallen by 26% since 2015, but sports remain the bubble that refuses to burst, the ratings leader that defies the trend. It has only decreased by 3% throughout the same period. Some of this is due to a significant drop in highlight shows, with Sky recently achieving record numbers for live Premier League coverage.
All of us will remember our favourite moments from the summer:
- Jude Bellingham’s survive-or-die overhead kick against Slovakiarekindled a previously dormant England.
- A men’s 1500m final for the ages in Paris.
- Carlos Alcaraz dissected Novak Djokovic with a matador’s relish at Wimbledon before the Serb exacted revenge at the Olympics.
But the fact is, we watched it in droves.
Enders Analysis, a company regarded as the gold standard for media research, stated in a recent report: “There is still a widespread misconception that sports viewing has declined at the same rate as the rest of broadcast TV due to increased competition, the high price of pay TV, and the alleged short attention spans of the social media generation. Sports viewing has been the most enduring aspect of broadcast television.
Enders points out that more than just the big-ticket things on network TV are in high demand. In reality, young viewers now consume nearly half of their sports on Sky, “dwarfing the combined efforts of the BBC and ITV, which refutes the widely held view that young people do not watch sports behind a paywall,” while TNT Sports’ audience share has also increased.
That is notable, given the price increases and piracy concerns caused by firesticks. The Enders report contains one final surprise. Fears that young people are no longer interested in sport are overblown,” the publication states, noting that “sport is now a growing proportion of all under-35s’ live TV set viewing: 17% in 2023, up from 7% in 2015.
Sky Sports’ managing director, Jonathan Licht, backs this up. He informs me that on Sunday, September 1, Sky Sports recorded its greatest ever share of total TV viewing audiences for under-35s and women between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m.
“We’ve talked about how young fans tend to follow sport rather than always watch it,” he jokes. “But they do come for the big games. Last weekend, when we had Manchester United v Liverpool, the Italian Grand Prix, the Old Firm, and the US Open, Sky Sports received 60% of all under-35 viewers.
Sky Sports also had more than 10% of all female viewers watching television last Sunday, a record. “It may be harder to bring those younger audiences to TV generally,” Licht contends. “But they are coming in for sport.”
So, who were the winners and losers? According to Enders, football’s popularity has expanded to the point where it now “draws more viewing than the next nine sports combined, and of the top sports is the youngest skewing.”
Cricket did well last year, thanks partly to the Ashes and the Hundred, and Formula One ratings have recovered since being behind a paywall in 2019. According to Licht, women’s football and the NFL are gaining popularity.
Who did not win? According to the Enders analysis, rugby’s 2023 World Cup audiences declined by a fifth from 2015 despite England’s success. It also cautions that “English club rugby is in an existentially unhealthy state.” Most Olympic sports, outside of the Games, still need to improve. However, the overall picture could be clearer.
How do we explain this? Partly because, in an age of personalized algorithms and subcultures, sports are one of the few ties that unite us. It also helps that it needs to be watched live. However, Enders credits broadcasters and leagues with “maintaining sport’s appeal in a changing media landscape.
There is one final point. Sport is extremely popular in Britain. The study “Game Changing: How Sport Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Connected,” published this week, demonstrates this.
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According to a survey published by Sky and collated by the policy group Public First, UK people “have spent approximately 9.1 billion hours watching and participating in sports” over the last year. The survey also discovered that 15 million people in the UK “went so far as to say that sport is an important part of their identity.
And, while sport is still viewed as a toy factory and is low on the government’s priority list, the survey clearly shows that the public wants more investment to encourage young people to participate in sports.
Meanwhile, broadcasters continue to confront difficult headwinds. According to Ofcom, less than half of 16-—to 24-year-olds watch TV every week, down from 78% in 2018. They also devote considerably more time to TikTok and YouTube than to live television. The sport will most likely be unable to defy gravity indefinitely, but so far, it’s giving it a very good shot.
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