Super Bowl vs World Cup, Viewership & Value

In every official unbiased report ever published, the official Super Bowl viewership exceeds that of Champions League. Scroll back to the previous posts and click on the links provided. You will see that Super Bowl usually comes out in the 90-95 million range. Champions League final comes out in the 60-75 million range. These are not precise reports, but they are clearly unbiased, and the most official we have.

That's all I can say. I do not compile those stats myself. So, I rely on other sources, and try to triangulate whether they are unbiased, which they seem to be.

Unforutnately, those reports do not provide breakdown, which was the whole point of my previous post, stating that Champions League final's viewership is probably underestimated in Asia b/c it's so hard to get viewership data for those countries.

Finally, to the poster who is comparing the Super Bowl to the Egyptian derby - that's just not true. The SB has done a great job grabbing attention of the whole coutnry, regardless of whether the people are interested in the particular team. I would say it has by far the highest percentage viewership of people interested in a sport. That is, a higher percentage of football fans watches the Super Bowl than soccer fans watches the World Cuip, or what not. Other American sports have had difficulty doing the same, so people who love baseball still don't watch a Cardinals-Tigers World Series, or people who love basketball don't watch Mavericks-Heat. The Super Bowl's numbers have been quite consistent regardless of the teams.

So, to the original post, a much smaller percentage of Egypt cares about their greatest derby, than a percentage of Americans that cares about its event. My guess is, in Egypt the Al Ahly-Al Ittiad derby resides somewhere b/w baseball and football "percentage capture" described above. Addiitonally, Egypt is considerably smaller, % of households penetrated by TVs is smaller, and obviously financial aspects are even smaller.

 

A lot of those figures are inacurate, specially the ones by the firm Initiative, which is where you got your champions league numbers from. Here's a conservative estimate of the world cup viewership:

https://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showthread.php?t=379551

There I also explain what's wrong with the Initiative numbers. Your Super Bowl numbers look about right, ~95-100m viewers worldwide. The numbers for the world cup are closer to ~700-900m, and the champions league final is closer to ~140-170m viewers worldwide.

 

It's hard to compare most club level soccer viewerships to the super bowl because most countries have a single table format. Otherwise I would insure you that the C-league (China) soccer final would have the greatest viewership every non world cup year.
In the US I believe that this will go down as the high water mark of Super Bowl viewership. Large numbers of woman and now a new group immigrants have little interest in American football, and unlike 30 years ago there isn't the same pressure to give up on soccer in order to prove your a "good" american.
American football is at a crossroads financially. It's maxed out its home market but unlike American popular music or movies there doesn't appear to be a large export market willing to buy this product in a globalized world.
From an unsentimental and hard nosed business perspective (not my perspective but I understand what makes the world go around at the present time) the NFL and the Super Bowl will be hard pressed to compete with soccer, the NBA, tennis and the Olympics in a sports world without borders.


Perry Stein

 

Football - Sport followed by the whole world

Population of whole world - 6.5 billion

American football - Sport followed by primarily Americans (even estimates of overseas viewership of Superbowl would show that most , if not all the people who view the Superbowl outside of America are Americans)

Population of America - 300 million

People who view Superbowl - 100 million at best .

People who watch the world cup - close to a billion (of which the estimates from Asian and African countries are often projected less - so maybe the viewership could be more than a billion)

And another thing .Why are we comparing the Superbowl with the World cup and talking of it as if it is some spectacle ?100 million people and all of a sudden its equivalent to the football world cup ? i am having a laugh .

An India-Pakistan cricket match has a following of close to half a billion .In those countries , while the number of TV households is considerably less , the number of people who watch these matches in public places is considerably high .So maybe we should start a topic for cricket veiwership and compare it with that of the world cup.

Why does everything have to be about the Superbowl? I live in America and the only reason why I would watch the Superbowl is to check out the ads .But that was not necessary this time around since there is youtube.

 

No one is comparing Super Bowl to the World Cup. Every one on the boards agrees that the World Cup is considerable more popular by a wiide margin.

There are two active discussions on this thread (one original one, and one the appeared later on):

1. As a commercial entity, is the World Cup Final (one match) more or less valuable than the Super Bowl (taking into consideration TV rights, commercial spot opportunities, relative purchasing power of respective vieweers, extrinsic/intrinsic value of travellers)? As a side note, we can throw in Euro Final vs. Super Bowl (the Euro Final is also moe watched than the SB).

2. Is the Champiosn League Final (one match) more or less watched than the Super Bowl? The official statistics say "no" (60-75 mln for CL vs. 90-95 mln for SB). Pingudo has stated that that's incorrect, and that the actual number for CL is 140-170 mln. I don't think we've reached a definitive conclusion on the matter.

These are very specific questions, and in no way are they comparing the overall popularity of world football vs. american football.

 

That's debatable, but getting the TV ratings for the Egyptian derby is gonna be tough. I do know that the ratings for a Real Madrid - Barcelona league match is about 35-40% of Spain. But of course that derby is much bigger than the Super bowl since it actually generates interest outside of the country it is played in.

 

I read an article either on ESPN or CNNSI ranking club finals by viewship and it said the Champions league is generally number 1 followed by the super bowl and the FA Cup. This sounds about right as big as the Super Bowl is in the end id expect the premier club competition in the world would generally get a better viewship.

 

I was under that same impression also, thinking that US fans are more loyal to their sport than the rest of the world is to their respective sports. But then after looking at facts, I changed my mind.

For the SB, 95 million(last year's US viewership) out of 300mil is about 32%.
After looking at some European numbers for WC viewership, that ratio was in the range of 30 to 70(depending on the countries involved).

 

Yah but your comparing something that happens ever year as opposed to every 4 years. Of course its going to get a higher viewership both number wise and % wise.

 

Somebody asked a few posts back about the financial impact of the games. I think the Super Bowl has a greater gross revenue structure because of the commercial units in the game. But, I wonder how much FIFA brings in on World Wide rights payments. I know it has grown pretty expensive even in the US to pay to air the WC. Is there a table somehwere of what the different countries pay to air the WC? Like I said before I think the Super Bowl is close to a 400 million dollar revenue day. Is the WC anything like that?

R

 

The real question is....... which is a bigger 1 day event in terms of $$...... the Superbowl, or the WC Final game.

That's where much of the confusion lies.

 

I'd say Super Bowl, simply because the rights to the World Cup lie in the countries most likely to be there. As they drop out, interest will decline. At least from the casual citizens simply cheering for their nation.

The WC Final may get a lot of eyes, but I don't think a broadcaster in the third world paying a ton of money for the rights, either.

It's up to the bigger countries, and which ones pay the most. The question, though, is that the countries' TV networks that air the game pay in advance. If they hit a homerun and the national side makes or wins the final, they get many times more eyes watching than if they lost in group stage.

The other, is the commercial time alotted during the WC Final broadcast compared to the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl has about 70 thirty-second commercials that sell for over $2 million a piece. Tickets are $600 each, but resell on the open market for $1,000-$2,000. How much do soccer fans, who find out that there team is in the final with less than a week's notice, buy tickets to it?

The U.S. gets the 40+ rating no matter which two teams are playing in the Super Bowl. It's not up to a whim. And U.S. Networks know this in advance and pay so much for the TV rights to the NFL, knowing they'll get the Super Bowl every three years on their network (ESPN not included). It just changes from city to city which ones have the highest viewership.

Sykotyk

 

The interest in the world cup final is huge even if the your hometeam is knocked out in in the first rounds just compare the tv ratings for the final to the first rounds in the US. The interest for the world cup final has allways been big no matter who plays in it.
The thing with the superbowl (American football) is that all these commercial breaks every two minutes makes it allmost unwatchable from an international perpective (we are not used to it). It sure gets you a lot of money in the US, but it is not a good thing if you want to grow the game internationally.
Looks as if this survey just takes all the income (2-3billion$) from the world cup and devides it by the number of days the world cup lasts(same with the olympics) and take that number and compare it to the superbowl.
Who knows how much money all the different TV channels around the world gets from commercial breaks during the world cup final i bet we will never know.

 

That list is missing the asian cup final in 2004 between china and japan.
According to this article: http://english.people.com.cn/200408/11/eng20040811_152612.html

"More people in China watched the Asian Cup final between China and Japan on television last week than the 2002 FIFA World Cup final, smashing viewing records as roughly 300 million people tuned in."

300 million seems very high, i dont know how accurate these ratings are, but shows that things are happening outside the western world that we often forget.
I wouldnt take that list for the truth either, Tv-ratings seems to change in every article you read about it.

 

Well, we will have a new benchmark coming. The Euro 2008 Championship has about 330 000 tickets available, but world wide the reservations made were over 10 million, so there has to be a lottery who will be able to watch the matches live. If the ratio would be stadium go-er vs home watcher is 1:10 000 there will be 100 billion viewers in total.

 

I haven't watched a Super Bowl , and don't think I ever will, just don't care for the sport.

 

I can name my dad, mom, sister, some friends, me, some college professors, my uncle, and a few other people who don't watch it. I haven't watched a Super Bowl since 2002. Not even when it came to Detroit.

 

I think Globalisation needs to step away from his trailor park in Wiscounsin once in a while....

 

world cup takes in about 1.1 billion viewers daily for the month long event. adding up to an average total of 28.8 billion people. compare that to 100 million people. that is like 288 people to 1 person

 

I usually go snowboarding on Superbowl Sunday with a bunch of friends. The last Superbowl I watched was the Steelers v Seahawks and before that it was the one in 2001. I think last year Chelsea v Liverpool got more viewers on the same day then the Superbowl did worldwide.

 

You cant compare the 2 events financially. The Superbowl is the end of year culmination of the season, and the playoffs. It is a stand alone event now.

The World Cup is a culmination of a series of playoffs in each continent, THEN a second sequence of playoffs to get to a final game.

Companies buy into the Superbowl on a 1-off event basis, whilst every company who buys into the WC do so because the WC maintains a high degree of interest through the whole tournament. This means that a company has to take out a package for the whole tournament. Not only that, but the big ones sign up with FIFA to cover a multiple of events.

I believe that there was about $206 million spent on advertising during the Superbowl, whilst the WC in Germany got about $2.3 billion in marketing. Reason being that the WC can command top dollar for venue advertising since the all the stadia are on TV, and you have heavy footfall around them, so advertising is to hundreds of thousands live, and millions via TV. Superbowl is 1 stadium, and 70,000 people, along with some people who will want to be a part of it. From 2 cities. Unlike the WC where you get huge numbers from many nations travelling.

THE WC is the climax of a sequence of events that people around the world are interested, whilst the Superbowl is a stand alone thing.

Comparing them is silly.

 

Great point Devil_78,
"You cant compare the 2 events financially. The Superbowl is the end of year culmination of the season, and the playoffs. It is a stand alone event now.

The World Cup is a culmination of a series of playoffs in each continent, THEN a second sequence of playoffs to get to a final game."

This is what makes these two not comparable. If you take the entire World Cup against the entire NFL Playoffs + Superbowl, I still think the World Cup comes out on top.

Eric
Founder - http://www.usa2010.org
Wear your Support!

 

What about the Super Bowl vs the World Cup Final - any numbers on that?

 

The only numbers that can be comparable would be TV. The NFL quoted a billion viewers for the Superbowl. Problem is, this was something of an exaggeration. True worldwide viewership was something like 97,000,000. It was AVAILABLE to watch in just over a billion homes, but about 97,000,000 actually watched it.

For the World Cup, the viewership has variously been quoted from 500,000,000, to 1,500,000,000. The common number I have seen has been 970,000,000.

In terms of finances, there is no way the 2 can be compared. A Superbowl is effectively a standalone event, with people signing up for a 1 day event, and sponsorship is handled differently. Pitch signeage, and stadium signeage is not as important in terms of revenue to the Superbowl, whilst TV advertising is.

In a WC, the companies spend a bigger chunk of cash, but this is for sponsorship rights that span over the whole tournament, including the final. The final game is not treated (financially) differently to the other games. It is, effectively, part of the package! Also, pitchside signeage is much more valuable, since it is going to be on TV a lot, from a mix of venues, spread over a period of times. Also, a LOT more people are actually going to see it, with a WC involving multiples of games, and stadia being open for more games. TV sponsorship, whilst valuable, does not cover cover the same number of commercials per game than it does with Superbowl, given there are only TV commercials at the start of the game, half time, and at the end. With Superbowl, there is a proportionally larger number of commercials, so on a per-game basis, this probably leads to a higher portion of cash spent on the Superbowl.

But it is tough to compare a Superbowl with a WC Final. The WC Final is part of a package of games, and the end of a special tournament, whilst Superbowl is a 1 off game once a year.

 

I was takling about viewership of the Super Bowl compared to the WC Final as in the final game, not necessarily the advertising or the group stage viewership.