Inside Sport

Records tumble as football finally goes TV mainstream in America


https://forum.insidesport.com.au/Topic767086.aspx

By Joffa - 30 Jun 2010 9:15 PM

Quote:
Records tumble as football finally goes TV mainstream in America

By Nick Harris
30 June 2010

With all the ratings data now available from the USA’s weekend defeat to Ghana, it has been confirmed that the match was the most-watched football game in American TV history. It drew an average audience of 19.4m, with almost 15m watching on ABC (a figure known soon afterwards), plus 4.5m on the Spanish-language Univision channel, figures now confirmed.

The previous record was the 18m people who watched the US Women’s 1999 World Cup win over China, followed by the 14.5m viewers in the USA for the 1994 Italy v Brazil World Cup final, and then the 13.7m viewers for USA v Brazil in the round of 16 in 1994. Significantly, in ratings terms, all those games were held on US soil. Some of the numbers in the USA for other games in South Africa have also been extraordinary.

Argentina’s win over Mexico on Univision was the most-watched programme (not just sport) in history on any Spanish-language network in the USA. It was watched by 9.4m on Univision and another 5.5m on ESPN. ”It’s very indicative of the changing face of America and consequently the growth of soccer in the United States,” said Cesar Conde, Univision’s president. “That’s a great trend on both fronts.”


http://www.sportingintelligence.com/2010/06/30/official-records-tumble-as-football-finally-goes-tv-mainstream-in-america-300603/
By Heart_fan - 1 Jul 2010 3:08 PM

The headline figures look great, but that is not the complete story. When you look at the population size vs viewership, the overall result is not so good at all. In the US, Football needs to connect to the richer upper and middle classes of the game to really generate the significant revenue generators required for sponsors and partner organisations to really see any real lift in the sport. The Mexican population are generally lower to middle class citizens of the US society, with less disposal income and therefore are not seen as the desired target market for most sponsors. Thats a fact of business.

The fact that Mexico is next door, and has a huge mexican population in the US, is a good thing for their bid, but the true facts are still not seeing a huge rise in the sports profile in the sporting market there inside the country itself. That is even after a '94 WC that was meant to take the game to the next level. Here we are, 16 years later, seeing an article about the rise of TV ratings, which points to either the US being slow on the uptake or a one off rise that is unlikely to hold.

Headline numbers are not always to be taken as the true story.

Edited by Heart_fan: 1/7/2010 03:10:25 PM