FIFA World Cup Final n°1 favourite with TV sports fans in 2006

Initiative has published its 2006 ViewerTrack global trends report ranking the world’s most watched live, global TV sports events.  This has been produced by Initiative’s global sports consultancy division, recently launched under its own banner, Sports Futures.

The top 10 events hit parade, drawn from a preselected list of 15 events viewed worldwide, are chosen for both their sporting importance and commercial value.

This year’s league table shows that the 5 most popular events are pulling significantly ahead of the rest of the field in terms of global TV audience numbers.  The attraction for sponsors of these five most watched properties - from a brand exposure and media value perspective - grow ever stronger compared with all other sporting events.  Soccer in particular, the world’s most popular sport, is increasing its global domination. 

The five most watched events of 2006 in terms of live viewing – the FIFA World Cup Final, NFL Super Bowl, IOC Winter Olympics, UEFA European Champions League and the FIA Formula One World Championship - stand head and shoulders above the others.  Interestingly, while each of these five events shows signs of TV audience growth, less popular events are not only failing to keep up with them, some are even experiencing viewership decline.

Leading the field is the FIFA World Cup Final, which attracted more than double the global audience of any other sporting event in 2006.  The Italy vs.France match was watched by an average live global audience of 260 million people, with more than 600 million people tuning in to watch at least some part of the match.

In second place was the NFL Super Bowl, relinquishing its number one ranking from 2005.  The match between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Seattle Seahawks drew an average live global audience of 98 million in 2006, an increase on the 93 million who watched the Super Bowl last year.

The Opening Ceremony of the IOC Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy, comes in at third place, drawing an average live global audience of 87 million.  However, when comparing total audience numbers as opposed to average, more people watched the Opening Ceremony than the NFL Super Bowl.  249 million people tuned in to snatch a glimpse of the Opening Ceremony at some point, compared with only 151 million for the Super Bowl.

Close behind in fourth and fifth places, respectively, was Barcelona vs. Arsenal in the UEFA European Champions League Final and the Brazilian Grand Prix.  They drew average live global audiences of 86 million and 83 million people, respectively.  The UEFA Champions League Final drew an average audience 10 per cent larger than in 2005, and the Brazilian Grand Prix was watched by 39 per cent more than last year’s most watched race, the Canadian Grand Prix.

All the other events included within the preselected list on which the report is based failed to draw an average global audience of more than 20 million people.  Many of these experienced year-on-year declines in viewing.

The attraction for sponsors of the five most watched properties - from a brand exposure and media value perspective - grow ever stronger compared with all other sporting events.

In particular, soccer, which has always been the world’s most popular sport, is increasing its global domination.  Viewing figures from this summer’s FIFA World Cup showed impressive audience numbers in all regions of the world, with the global average live audience for the tournament as a whole up by 14 per cent compared with the 2002 audience.  Soccer has traditionally been the most popular sport in Europe, South America and Africa, but over the last decade it has shown its strongest growth in North America and Asia-Pacific.

Thus soccer, in the form of the FIFA World Cup Final and UEFA Champions League Final, has a prominent position at the head of this year’s global viewing league table of most watched TV sporting events.  The simplicity of soccer’s rules, especially compared with some other sports which also have global aspirations, enables it to appeal to a very broad range of people.  One of the most notable features of the global audience profile for the 2006 FIFA World Cup was that more women than ever before watched the tournament.  Women accounted for 41 per cent of the global audience for the event.

The wide differences in the global popularity of the world’s most watched TV sporting events presents a major challenge to brands.  Sponsors wanting to guarantee the maximum amount of global exposure from associating themselves with live sport have only a relatively small number of properties to choose from.  With the amount of clutter already a major concern among sponsors, this presents a dilemma – more and more sponsors want to associate themselves with a handful of properties.  This is placing upward pressure on sponsorship fees, and requires brands to think of ever-more innovative ways to leverage their activity so as to make them stand out from the crowd.

Comments

[imtester]

Hello good design. Very nice. 0n79p7 Enjoy. Goodbay.

[imtester]

Hello good design. Very nice. 0n79p7 Enjoy. Goodbay.