Originally Posted by Regis Magnae:
“I think it shows the reality of how (un)popular the sport is in the UK.
It reminds me of how F1's popularity was regularly vastly overstated 10 years ago, when a person watching the news coverage was counted as a fan.”
“I think it shows the reality of how (un)popular the sport is in the UK.
It reminds me of how F1's popularity was regularly vastly overstated 10 years ago, when a person watching the news coverage was counted as a fan.”
Without a doubt NFLuk overstate how popular it is and so do many others in the media with a vested interest/lazy journalism. The NFL funded Deloitte research figures of 13 million fans, 3 million avid fans is as close to reality as the recent turnout of 99.97 in the North Korea elections.
Mark Waller (NFL VP International) was trying to claim last year that NFL games on Sky get an average audience of 400k on the Pro Football Talk podcast (according to Barb it doesn't even get a quarter of that). Channel 4 live Wembley games struggled to get that. Such bare faced 'truth stretching'.
FTA TV coverage is really where the rubber meets the road. The only content on FTA from the NFL that will outperform it's usual time slot is the Super Bowl. NFL viewing has not increased in the last five years in the UK. Sport England figures released this summer show a decrease in participation in the sport. And the Yougov profiler that went live this year showed roughly 900,000 (over 16s) would claim to be some type of NFL fan.
Unless they can get the BBC to show part of the FTA package like before and also have one of the main channels pick up SNF (which seems a harder sell) then it has to be seen as a body blow to their popularity claims.
Originally Posted by Radiomike:
“ If I had to pick a likely FTA candidate I would probably go for ITV 4 with some programming (Superbowl and some Wembley coverage) on ITV.”
“ If I had to pick a likely FTA candidate I would probably go for ITV 4 with some programming (Superbowl and some Wembley coverage) on ITV.”
Yeah I agree though any Wembley coverage may be pushed to ITV4 this year because of Rugby World Cup clashes.
I still think BBC Sport won't be able to resist adding Super Bowl 50 for free to their threadbare Sports cupboard.



