Pro Football

TV Viewership Falls in N.F.L. and Premier League: A Blip, or Something Worse?

42

Sunday night’s 6-6 tie between the Seahawks and the Cardinals on NBC drew 17.7 million viewers, down 11 percent from the game played in that slot last year.

CHRISTIAN PETERSEN / GETTY IMAGES

By KEN BELSON, RICHARD SANDOMIR and RORY SMITH

OCTOBER 26, 2016

The two most successful sports leagues in the world, which bring in billions of dollars in revenue, the biggest corporate sponsors and mammoth audiences every game day, are now sharing an altogether different experience: The National Football League and the English Premier League are enduring startling, double-digital declines in television viewership this season.

Viewership through the first seven weeks of the N.F.L. season is down by 12 percent in the United States while the audiences for Premier League soccer matches this season, which began in August, are down by nearly 20 percent in Britain.

The trends that drove viewers away from other programs on broadcast television in recent years, including cord-cutting and DVRs, had not punished the N.F.L. and the Premier League in the same way. Fans — lots and lots of them — did not seem willing to look away.

They are now, in numbers that are alarming for the leagues, which have grown used to fans’ tuning in in good times and bad, and for the networks, some of which have spent 10-figure sums for the rights to broadcast the games. Viewership for N.F.L. games on CBS on Thursday nights, on NBC on Sunday nights and on ESPN on Monday nights is down by as much as 21 percent.

“We have been led to believe the N.F.L. and E.P.L. were immune to these trends, but it turns out they aren’t,” said Rick Gentile, a former CBS Sports executive producer who now runs the Seton Hall University sports poll. “This isn’t a fatal blow, but it is a wake-up call.”

While it may be too early to fully determine whether the declines are a hiccup or a serious setback, they are large enough to prompt league executives and team owners to confront the uncomfortable possibility that their leagues have hit their peak.

Publicly, the leagues contend that their businesses are fundamentally sound and that any declines in ratings have been caused by temporary factors, like the raucous presidential campaign season in the United States and the lack of a compelling story line in the Premier League, which last season got a jolt from Leicester City, the ultimate rags-to-riches champion. Viewing habits, the leagues say, will rebound.

“We recognize that network television is still dominant, and we believe it’s going to be dominant going forward,” Roger Goodell, the N.F.L.’s commissioner, said last week. “And it’s where the vast majority of our fans view our games. It’s a great experience, the advertising market is incredibly strong, and I think that our ratings are something that we’ll continue to look at and make sure we’re doing everything not just to get them to tune in but to get them to stay tuned in.”

The Premier League began playing on Friday nights this year for the first time. This Crystal Palace-Everton match on a Friday in September ended in a 1-1 tie.

MARTIN RICKETT / PRESS ASSOCIATION, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Industry observers, though, point to a stew of long-term trends, like younger audiences’ eschewing subscription television packages in favor of free content on the internet. That could erode the leagues’ business models, which rely heavily on television networks that pay tens of billions of dollars to broadcast their games. The leagues may also be responsible for some of the slide by expanding their schedules into more days of the week, eroding the exclusivity that once made their games must-see TV.

“Among other things, oversaturation is definitely an issue,” Mr. Gentile said.

If ratings rebound later in the football and soccer seasons, as the leagues predict, the power of live, unscripted sporting events will be affirmed. But for now, the drop-off does not feel like a blip. Recent games illustrated the N.F.L.’s problem.

On Sunday afternoon, CBS’s national broadcast of the New England Patriots’ 27-16 win over the Pittsburgh Steelers attracted 21.7 million viewers, 11 percent fewer than the comparable game in 2015. On Sunday night on NBC, 17.7 million viewers saw a 6-6 tie between the Seattle Seahawks and the Arizona Cardinals, down 14 percent from the game played in that slot last year. Viewership for Monday night’s game on ESPN between the Denver Broncos, the defending Super Bowl champions, and the Houston Texans was down by 8 percent, slowing a season-long slide.

Fans have tuned out the N.F.L. in previous presidential cycles, too. Dating to 1996, ratings had fallen by 2 percent to 10 percent in the games before Election Day, compared with 17 percent this time, according to N.F.L. figures.

There is more at work, though. The lack of marquee matchups and the absences of stars like Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson are to blame, said Artie Bulgrin, senior vice president for global research and analytics at ESPN. “Universally, across the board,” he said, “the N.F.L. networks believe the schedules are not as strong.”

Mike Mulvihill, senior vice president for programming and research at Fox Sports, said that audiences were down not just because fans were watching fewer games but because they were watching less of the games they tuned in to. That, he said, may be a function of the elections as viewers switch to cable news channels while games are on. On Sunday afternoons this season, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC have had their audiences grow by more than a million viewers.

Then there are factors that have a harder-to-quantify impact, like the N.F.L.’s continuing public-relations struggles involving issues like domestic violence, brain trauma and national anthem protests.

“They have largely been side issues, but even if it is a psychic toll, it’s hard to have that much of a drumbeat without their having some effect,” said Robert Boland, director of the sports administration program at Ohio University.

The leagues are grappling with an even larger problem of their own making: too much football and soccer. To grab bigger audiences and more rights fees, the leagues have spread their games across more days of the week, to 9:30 a.m. starts on Sundays and Thursday night matchups in the N.F.L. and to Friday nights, as well as Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays, in the Premier League.

Sky Sports and BT now offer more soccer to customers than ever before, with Sky permitted to broadcast 10 Friday night Premier League games this season. BT shows a Premier League match on Saturdays, with European competition filling the schedule on alternate Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Publicly, both broadcasters say they are unconcerned by their ratings and do not believe the market is oversaturated. Sky Sports described the ratings decline as a “premature comparison,” noting that the figures did not include a number of high-profile matches, like the showdown between Liverpool and Manchester United.

Still, the numbers collated by the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board in Britain are startling — not only the 19 percent decline for Premier League matches but also the slide in viewership for Champions League matches, which included a 40 percent drop on one Tuesday evening. (Viewership for the Premier League in the United States, which had swelled for three years, has fallen by 17 percent on NBCSN and 18 percent on NBC.)

The pressure is on because both Sky Sports and BT have made televised soccer the crucial battleground in their contest to win customers for their television, phone and internet packages.

The bidding war between the companies pushed the Premier League’s rights deal for the domestic British market to 5.134 billion pounds ($6.279 billion) over the course of three seasons, starting this year. BT has paid an additional 937 million pounds ($1.15 billion) for the rights to the Champions League and the Europa League, Europe’s elite competitions.

The cost of the packages, though, has pushed fans to seek out illegal streaming websites and forced Premier League executives into a race to shut them down.

Mike Girling, a Liverpool fan who canceled his personal Sky subscription this season, spoke for many frustrated fans. “It wasn’t value for money anymore,” he said. “I found that I was only watching Liverpool games and was paying 80 or 90 pounds a month for it.”

Mr. Girling, a pub owner, acknowledged that the “ease and proliferation” of streams for Liverpool games — in high definition, with English commentary — made them an appealing alternative when he could not attend a match being broadcast on Sky.

He has even considered canceling at least one of the four subscriptions at his pubs, which cost about $1,800 a month for each bar. “It does not bring customers in as much as it used to,” he said. “It doesn’t make economic sense anymore.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3400077&forum_id=2#31734604)