A-League hoping to harness changing viewing habits of fans
A-League viewing figures appear to be on the slide, but the rise of digital platforms mean fans are watching games in different ways. League bosses hope they can harness evolving viewing habits.
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The numbers don’t lie – but sometimes, they don’t tell the whole story.
As the A-League grapples with sliding crowds and TV ratings, new research suggests its audience is fragmenting in ways that could point to the future of sports broadcasting.
After every round from early in the season, A-League owners have commissioned research into who watched or engaged with the competition, from a multinational consultancy, Future Sports, who provide similar services to the NRL, Cricket Australia and others.
The results give the clubs some encouragement – but also pose brand-new challenges for all sports as its consumption changes massively among younger generations.
That’s a major consideration for those running the A-League as football has the youngest demographic of all the major Australian sports. The research suggests that almost 44 per cent of its audience is under 34, compared with its nearest rival at 37.7 per cent, and that audience is also the most digitally engaged.
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Sports in the US are already grappling with the promiscuous way millennials and Generation Y sports fans consume their sport. According to research by McKinsey and others, millennials are twice as likely to watch a game via streaming instead of traditional TV than even slightly older fans, and the vast majority of them keep abreast of sports event via social media.
Even more acutely, those under 19 are 75 per cent more likely to watch the highlights of an event rather than the whole thing live, according to a major UK survey.
“It’s not just sport, it’s most programming,” said Barry O’Brien, chairman of Atomic 212, the largest independent media agency. “Viewership as we have known it in terms of regular TV is hanging dramatically, and it’s only going to get more fragmented.”
That’s why the A-League research is trying to find out whether its erstwhile TV viewers have migrated away from TV broadcasts to other platforms, or just given up entirely.
Future Sports survey hundreds of fans each week and their data from Round 17 surmised that Sydney FC v Brisbane had 286,000 “unique reaches” – ranging from 46,000 for the Fox Sports broadcast to 109,000 for streaming, and up to 229,000 real-time engagements on social and digital platforms.
The concept of “reach” is a slippery one, as it includes anyone who engages with a program or event for one minute or more, but the research seems to point to a far wider audience of fans showing at least some interest in the A-League than the headline ratings suggest.
In fact the actual Fox Sports reach was slightly higher, and the A-League owners believe the figures show there is a latent audience for the A-League, but they need to work out how to harvest it.
“Football has to be able to capture the audience, tell sponsors how it’s delivered and this is the value you’re getting out of it,” said O’Brien. “That will be the pressure on all sports if they’re to command top dollar.”
Sports in the US have similar existential challenges. In 2016-17, the NFL reported more millennials watching, but the average amount they watched had fallen by almost 10 per cent.
Survey after survey shows younger viewers wanting unique, “authentic” content on their social media if they are to be loyal to a sport.
The A-League’s various social media channels had more than 5 million video views over 30 days until last week, with nearly 400,000 views on Facebook for a 40-second clip of Adelaide’s 15-year-old boy wonder Mohamed Toure.
Originally published as A-League hoping to harness changing viewing habits of fans