Posted on by Andrew
There’s been a lot of discussion recently about declining viewership for TV sports. Below I’ll link to a news article discussing various possible explanations, but first I want to share my theory, which is that we’re watching less sports because we’re talking about sports less, and we’re talking about sports less because we’re mixing with other people less.
My theory
The World Series recently ended. In normal times, we’d run across people at work or at school or on the street, and sports would come up in conversation. Are the Dodgers finally gonna win it all? Everybody hates the Astros. Is LeBron now officially the goat? Etc. The sports is as good as it always is, but we’re more motivated to watch the game if we’ve been talking about it for the past few days. And it’s not even just face-to-face conversations. There’s also been less sports coverage in the newspaper.
Some other theories
Here are some other theories, along with some numbers courtesy of Kevin Draper writing in the New York Times:
TV Ratings for Many Sports Are Down. Don’t Read Too Much Into It Yet. . . .
Ratings for the N.B.A. finals were down 49 percent, and the N.H.L.’s Stanley Cup finals were down a whopping 61 percent. Baseball, golf, tennis, horse racing and other sports have all seen huge declines. Even the usually untouchable N.F.L. was down 13 percent through Week 5. . . .
Since each restarted play, the N.B.A. playoffs, N.H.L. playoffs, Major League Baseball regular season and playoffs, United States Open tennis, United States Open golf, Kentucky Derby, Preakness and college football have all had ratings declines of at least 25 percent compared with 2019.
In a normal year, the ratings for a league might be up or down a few percentage points; anything approaching double digits is a pretty big deal. Ratings drops like these are rare for a single league or event, and unheard-of across most of the entire sports television landscape at once. . . .
He then discusses possible reasons for the ratings drop:
To begin, fewer people are turning on their televisions. Compared with September 2019, total viewership across all television was down 9 percent in September 2020 . . .
There are also standard cyclical trends that affected some sports. August 2019 viewership was down 9 percent from April 2019 viewership, as people watch less television in summer than in spring. This year, that hurt leagues like the N.B.A. and N.H.L., which typically end before the summer. . . .
When sports have been played during the evening, they have faced unusually tough competition. Viewership of cable news in early October was up 79 percent compared with last year . . .
There has also been increased competition within sports. . . .
And, of course, politics gets into the act:
There are a lot of people grafting their preferred political narrative onto the N.B.A.’s ratings decline. Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, sparred with the Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban about ratings on Twitter. . . .
There are a few problems with asserting that political or social justice stances have affected N.B.A. viewership. . . . Much of the polling on the issue is poorly done, but the main takeaway from the better polls is that there is little evidence fans are turning away from the N.B.A. for political reasons. . . .
Also, nearly every other sport also saw huge declines even though they did not embrace demonstrations in the same way. As some people on social media joked after seeing the low ratings for the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, did people turn off the television because the horses knelt during the national anthem? . . .
