How to Stop the Decline of Sports Viewership
The Dallas Cowboys and Tampa Bay Buccaneers played a great game to open the 2021 regular season of the NFL with the most familiar ending imaginable. With the death stare towards nowhere, Brady just getting hyped before taking the field to lead the game-winning drive against a Cowboys team playing up to competition, only to surrender in the last minute. The shoot-out led to the best ratings for an NFL opener since 2015 with 26 million viewers for NBC. Those NFL ratings, combined with the reports of college football experiencing a resurgent rise in ratings for its own opening weekend, are a hopeful sign for a sport with some recent rating struggles.
My last article covered the rise of the NFL as America’s number one spectator sport, and furthermore, the only sport with a significant viewership above any other sport after the six decades-long decline in love for baseball. The NFL essentially rose in viewership every decade, and even the early years of the 2010s reflected a similar increase in viewership for the Super Bowl until a peak in 2015 with a championship game between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks. Since that game, Super Bowls have been more likely to rank worse than any other this decade rather than the former year-over-year increase almost formerly expected.
Super Bowls aren’t a perfect metric for gauging viewership. A bad or great matchup changes the interest in the game, and traditionally big market teams competing in the championship are usually thought to be worth a bit more than small-market teams. Thankfully, for the past decade we have numbers on the average viewership numbers for regular-season games as seen in the following graphic.
The numbers resemble the Super Bowl changes in viewership reasonably well. Down years for the NFL in the regular season correspond to down years for the Super Bowl. Just like the Super Bowl, 2015 was the peak of viewership for the league. The 2015 Super Bowl and 2015 regular season refer to two different seasons. There is no excellent reason why the NFL may be considered worse today than then (outside of Peyton Manning’s retirement).
As reactionary as the answer may be, the national anthem protests certainly are a timely answer for the recent decline in NFL viewership. Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the 2016 NFL preseason in protest against police brutality and systemic racism, which led to a significant backlash in conservative media. The typical perps like Tucker Carlson, Fox and Friends, and presidential candidate Donald Trump all denounced the protests as anti-American and drummed up opposition against the NFL.
It is hard to argue against why the NFL took such a sudden downturn. At the time, the National Anthem protests were viewed very unfavorably by whites, which make up a significant portion of NFL viewership. On the other hand, views of BLM and protesting, in general, have trended more favorably in recent years. Generally, it seems that the league may be out of its mini-recessionary decline in viewership due to conservative anti-SJW backlash. People are rightfully coming out and, while short of defending the rights of organized labor to protest, at least may recognize the hypocritical calls of “cancel culture” in social media spaces after canceling anthem kneelers. It is encouraging for the league the number of republicans that increased their opinion to “don’t know, no opinion.”
I’ll go ahead and call it now. Ratings are going to be really good this year for the NFL. Maybe not record topping, but the closest they have been since the peak 2015 season and Super Bowl. That’s not to say the NFL is out of the woods, though, as they have another flaw in their viewership demographic: the league is losing the essential 18-49 demographic fast.
The other big American sports leagues have had similar issues attracting this younger demographic in recent years. It appears the older Gen Z class that has been graduating into the 18-49 demo is just not as interested in sports. Polling has regularly identified a gap between Gen Zers sporting fandom interest and that of older millennials. For instance, this study found 53% of Gen Z considered themselves sports fans as opposed to 69% of millennials. The Gen Zers who polled as sports fans reported much lower levels of watching sports. Almost every sports league has less interest from Gen Z than other ages except for the NBA (very slight) and Esports (very large).
As the older sports-loving baby boomers and silent generation members are dying off, the incoming Gen Zers are consuming fewer sports than the leagues are losing from the deaths of former viewers. It’s not just the big sports leagues either. The Tokyo Olympics recently reported some of the worst ratings for an Olympics in many years. 48% of U.S. adults reported spending less time watching the Olympics in 2021 than in previous years. I don’t want to read too much into the abysmal ratings in the pandemic years that have resulted in disastrous ratings for most sports leagues. Still, even here, Gen Z reports much lower levels of Olympic interest than the Millennials before them.
So, across virtually all U.S. sports, the incoming generation spells for potential doom of a decline in total viewership. Plenty of sports were probably in line to hit some degree of saturation eventually; the NFL can’t just expect to increase their ratings year over year in perpetuity, but the decreasing size of Gen Z was already a slightly worrisome sign. Gen Z is approximately 7% smaller than the Millennial generation.
The sports leagues probably won’t be lobbying for a policy like the Family Fun Pack to incentivize young adults to get busy by taking the financial burden off. Still, they can focus on the lower viewership of Gen Z. A decline in weekly sports watching from 50% of Millennials to 24% of Gen Zers has to be combatted by the sports leagues. Any continued decline in viewership among future generations such as Generation Alpha1 would be disastrous for U.S. sports. The NFL, MLB, NBA, and any league that wants to remain popular going forward need to do what they can to appeal to Gen Z and younger.
“If you lose a generation, it destroys value and the connective tissue,” said Ted Leonsis, principal owner of Washington-based teams that compete in the NBA, NHL, and WNBA. “It’s what some of the big sports leagues are nervous about. Could we lose a generation because we didn’t give them access and the products and services they want?”
That quote was taken from this Washington Post article, which details some sports executives sounding alarm bells about various Gen Z qualities that need marketing towards. I would not focus on fixing issues such as these:
“The challenge isn’t about finding Gen Z,” said Kate Jhaveri, the NBA’s chief marketing officer. “It’s about attracting and keeping their attention.”
“They want to see our players in their real lives, see them with their wives, know what they eat or drink or are bingeing on Netflix,” Heidi Browning, the NHL’s chief marketing office.
That sucks! Sorry, but before we move to TMZing sports or changing a sport to make it more interactive or shorter and more conducive to fan’s attention spans, maybe try even being available to Gen Z in the first place. Stream entire games directly to the consumer with no subscription fee, only relying on ad support. Exactly the means sports have made television revenue for their entire existence in America. In this scenario, the sports leagues should make out even better without the broadcasters acting as the middleman between sports leagues and consumers.
TikTok videos are fine, do those too. It is a popular platform. Same for YouTube. But unless the sport would like to be resigned to appeal towards those services, the leagues need to embrace reaching as many youth and young adults as possible with their product. The product isn’t four-minute recaps or highlight reels; those should be advertising and encouraging fandom to the actual game. Unfortunately, as most games are currently locked behind a dated and expensive cable television model, those fans who may be interested cannot even access the games on their screens. For instance, the NFL has offered its Sunday Ticket app, which has every Sunday day game except local broadcasts, for $300 but only for DirectTV subscribers.
Using a paywall behind cable made sense when cable usage was high. Even today, after years of cord-cutting, about half of all baby boomers still have cable. That is compared to 25% of Gen Z and 19% of Millennials. Gen Z honestly hardly reports much traditional TV watching at all, preferring video games and social media, so don’t give me any bullshit about broadcast antennas either. Focus on the one device they definitely have and use: their phones.
Put. Entire. Games. On. A. Free. App.
That is it! Just do that! You can have separate packages, but at least don’t do something foolish like blackout local games like you currently do. The local games are the ones that most need to be free. The prime heyday of getting everything you wanted at any price is over. People can’t afford it, and the youth think you’re boring. You have to focus on building a new generation of fandom for the first time in a long time. The products are pretty decent. The NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL are all great entertainment that are, for the most part, in very competitive shape, but you have to make it easily accessible to Gen Z.
A billboard with similar sentiment was posted with the following message during the Field of Dreams game that took place in Iowa in August:
“Commissioner Manfred: End The MLB Blackouts, Let Iowans Watch Their Favorite Teams.”
When asked about the blackout situation in Iowa, Manfred was forced to vaguely address the issue where currently the Chicago Cubs, St. Louis Cardinals, Chicago White Sox, Minnesota Twins, Kansas City Royals, and Milwaukee Brewers are unavailable to watch on MLB.tv or on national broadcasts. What are Iowan baseball fans expected to do to watch a baseball game? The commissioner said the following:
“There’s nothing more important to us as a business priority than delivering games to fans,” Manfred said during a pregame press conference ahead of the “Field of Dreams” game. “That’s what we’re about. The blackout situation is a complicated one. It involves regional broadcasters, distributors, our individual clubs. And we are spending a tremendous amount of time in an effort to get to a better place in terms of where our games are distributed.”
MLB and the NBA have most of their games streamed on regional sports networks like Bally Sports or NBC Sports. Outside of the nationally televised games that are usually the most high-profile matchup, the rest are packaged and bundled off from each team. It makes sense this could be a slow process, either renegotiating with regional sports networks or simply waiting until they expire, but it has to be worked out. Thankfully, MLB owners unanimously voted to cede control of digital broadcasts to the league, which would allow MLB to offer a subscription to MLB.tv with access to local games. That is, only if they can wither the expected early losses from regional sports networks demanding lower costs.
The NFL doesn’t have the same problem. All of its games are either shown nationally or packaged to one service in NFL Sunday Ticket. DirecTV has been pretty savvy with its contract with the NFL by being the exclusive home to the full range of NFL offerings. You literally cannot watch an out-of-market broadcast without DirecTV unless DirecTV is unavailable in your area (the streaming-only service is available in just 29 of the 210 U.S. media markets). That could end in 2022, with DirecTV’s exclusivity deal with the NFL set to expire after 27 years.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell seems to be on the right track with recent comments about Sunday Ticket “maybe will be more attractive on a digital platform” as streaming platforms continue to add subscribers at the expense of traditional pay-television. So far, Amazon has been rumored as the potential front-runner for the rights to NFL Sunday Ticket which would be a large shift for the league away from cable and firmly in favor of streaming. Disney and Apple are the other rumored companies in the running for the rights, making it reasonably safe to count DirecTV out of the mix. DirecTV is worth about $16.5 billion compared to the $2 trillion tech companies.
That’s not to say any of these developments between MLB and the NFL are perfect. Sunday Ticket does not offer local games. Both services are far from free, but MLB.tv is moderately affordable, and NFL Sunday Ticket could be offered at a lower price if the service will be primarily used to juice Amazon Prime subscriber numbers. I still think the primary worry needs to be putting the product in front of as many Gen Z eyes as possible, so an ad-revenue model would make more sense, but these developments are certainly in the right direction.