The television business is the realm of moneyed catastrophists, executives who anticipate disaster at every turn while pulling in more money than Charles Foster Kane, but who often find themselves taking their marching orders from sultans whose net worth makes Cristiano Ronaldo look like a weirdly buff street urchin. Any deviation from the normal run of things is cause for existential panic, and whenever outside forces of greed and abject stupidity subvert the artful arrangements of routine, that’s when the night sweats start mucking up the 1,500-thread-count sheets.
At Fox, the Egyptian cotton bedding is drier than the sand dunes south of Doha. Despite the blinkered insanity of FIFA awarding the 2022 World Cup to a country that withers under average summer temperatures of 107ºF—an extremity that forced officials to move the tournament from its usual June-July run to the more temperate climes of November-December—the time-shifted soccer extravaganza is putting up Rub’al-Khali-size ratings.
Sure, there’s something (quite a lot, actually) to be said for what a difference the U.S. team has made with respect to Fox’s recent ratings run. The Americans’ no-show in 2018 cast a pall over the network’s very first men’s World Cup; the 64-match event averaged just 2.98 million viewers, which marked the lowest turnout since 2006 and a 35% decline versus the previous outing on ESPN/ABC. No matter how many Indiana natives run around every four years saying things like “nil-nil” and “pitch” and “kit,” even the most annoying Soccer Guy couldn’t muster the same enthusiasm for a World Cup bereft of the Stars and Stripes.
What a difference four years makes. Not only is the young U.S. squad tearing its way through the Nielsen record books—with an average draw of 11.7 million viewers over its first three matches, the Yanks have completed the most-watched group stage in stateside TV history and are up 10% versus their last appearance in 2014—but their success has had a ripple effect throughout the entire tourney. Through the first 10 days of play, Fox and its cable sibling FS1 are averaging 3.85 million viewers per match, a figure that leaves out the 5 a.m. ET telecasts favored by vampires and insomniacs.That’s up 44% versus the corresponding stretch during the USA-free 2018 World Cup.
Outside Fox’s massive USMNT deliveries, which include a record 15.5 million viewers for the team’s Black Friday tie with England, key contributions have come from the likes of Thanksgiving’s Brazil-Serbia broadcast attracting 6.19 million viewers and a Messi-anic Argentina-Mexico clash that drew 4.13 million viewers on basic cable. Note that the Nielsen ratings include pre- and post-game segments of each broadcast and are not distilled down to the far more elevated whistle-to-whistle numbers. (While those concentrated figures make for a greater ratings tally, they also leave out much of the actual commercial content, which is a no-no, given that the entire point of Nielsen’s TV-measuring scheme is to figure out how many people are watching the ads.)
Spanish-language viewers and soccer obsessives who prefer to hear “GOOOOOLLLLL!!!!” when the ball hits the back of the net have been making similarly big waves for Telemundo and Peacock, where overall deliveries are up 24% versus 2018 with an average draw of 2.57 million viewers per match. Among NBCUniversal’s top draws thus far are Brazil-Serbia (4.16 million viewers), Spain-Germany (3.42 million), USA-England (3.24 million) and Mexico-Poland (2.99 million).
While some ratings obsessives and more than a few armchair bean counters assumed that the World Cup would crumple in the face of American football, the version with all the flopping and incomprehensible offside rules and bonkers mononyms (so mighty is the Brazilian squad that they haven’t missed a beat, despite having had to sub in Fred—Fred!—for the great Neymar) is holding its own. But there’s no magic at work here, other than the aerosol spray that brings maimed extremities back to life like some kind of ozone-depleting surgical intervention.
For the most part, the World Cup is thriving in its unfamiliar environs thanks to the return of the aforementioned USMNT and a set pattern of viewing behaviors that hasn’t changed much since Jackie Gleason was forever threatening Audrey Meadows with knuckle sandwich-propelled lunar voyages. Simply put, Americans have always watched wayyy more TV in the fall than they do during the summer months, with average HUT levels—that’s industry argot for “Households Using Television”—up 15% in November versus June. Also, The Honeymooners is so canceled.
All of this is good news for Fox, which hasn’t had to navigate the make-goods quagmire of 2018, and should it extend its rights deal with FIFA, is likely to be on the hook for another off-cycle World Cup in the not-too-distant future. That photo of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman yukking it up with FIFA president Gianni Infantino speaks a thousand words, and most of them rhyme with “we’ll make it worth your while.” Hell, the NBA just announced that it will accept sovereign wealth funds to invest in its franchises, so as much as appending the suffix “-washing” to everything willy nilly a la “-gate” is an irritating and lazy practice, there’s a reason why you’re suddenly seeing it get Human-Centipeded onto “sports” every time you turn around.
But as we’ve seen in Qatar thus far, a little temporal disconnect and a whole bunch of dead migrant workers aren’t going to derail the event’s ratings train, provided the U.S. are on hand to satisfy the folks back home. With apologies to Infantino, who opened the 2022 World Cup with a meandering, hour-long monologue in which he characterized any criticism of Qatar/FIFA as spasms of self-serving “hypocrisy” and “racism,” the prospect of the Saudis buying their way into the world of top-shelf sports with a hybrid blend of blood and oil money isn’t exactly something that makes the already dicey practice of enjoying international athletic competitions any easier to swallow.
In the meantime, none of the cruelties of this unseasonal World Cup have thus far spilled over onto Fox and NBCU, neither of which had any say in where this year’s event would be held, or what might happen to the unfortunates who got dragged into Qatar’s labor system. As is the case with the IOC, any network that does business with FIFA eventually has to deal with a sociopath or two. So it goes. The real victim here is Infantino, who last month told reporters that he understands what it means to face discrimination because “as a child at school I was bullied because I had red hair and freckles.”
And now he’s bald. Poor guy can’t catch a break. But Fox sure can—the Round of 16 kicks off with Netherlands-USA on Saturday.
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December 02, 2022 at 05:56PM
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U.S. World Cup Return and Fall Viewership Trends Drive TV Spike - Sportico
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