Research offers hope for A-League with digitally-engaged audience

New research offers hope for the A-League if it can adapt coverage and content to suit the tastes of its young audience.

Adelaide teenager Mohamed Toure has proved a hit on social media for the A-League. Picture: AAP

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 football clubs some encouragement — but also pose brand-new challenges for all sports as 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.

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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.

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 events 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, Australia’s 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 surveys hundreds of fans each week and its 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 reach of Fox Sports was slightly higher, and the A-League owners believe the figures show there is a latent audience for the competition, but they need to work out how to harvest it.

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.

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH