Most watched event of 2005: Champions League Final?

I am sure CL-final have more viewers than Superbowl...

You underestimate CL, its not something for "the hardcore fans", its a big event that the whole continent cares about. Sure, its not like World Cup, but not far away.

 

really... i would think worldwide there would be more viewers for the CL final than the superbowl...

plus you can't forget viewers who rely on sites such as www.********.com to watch the game....

 

I don't know, most people support teams who aren't in the CL and probably never will be, so have little to no interest in it, and probably haven't heard of most of the teams. On the other hand most American football fans follow an NFL team and know who all the rest are.

And the CL final is on a Wednesday night which isn't going to get as many people watching as a Sunday night.

 

Its funny how people just make up numbers as if they had any validity.

18.23% of Germany watched, and exactly 23% of France....

American Football has one tournament (not counting college) that means anything. The equivalent of a qualifying round (the 'wild card round') gets ratings over 20 million. The SuperBowl is essentially a national holiday ("SuperBowl Sunday"). Only Pingudo did any research to back up his gut reaction, but even he miscited (using peak instead of average, easy mistake). Those estimates were double what the cited numbers actually were (26 million was the average viewership of Italy, Germany, France, Spain and England).

Outside of North America almost no one cares about the NFL. That doesn't mean that a ridiculous number of people don't watch it in the United States. Much of it certainly is not a following of the sport but a cultural celebration (a 30 sec commercial cost 2.4 million US$ last year so many people watch). The United States (and Canada where American football is the #2 sport after hockey) is the world's biggest television market because of its size and the ubiquity of televisions. That will undoubtably change but for now that means an event that totally dominates the US TV market is going to be very strong globally. Its not big enough to overcome the World Cup or the Euros or the Olympics, but it is strong enough to beat the Champions League every year for the last few decades.

 

I heard up to 50 percent of statistics are just made up.

 

Thousands of people gather to watch the superbowl, even though none of them actually watch the superbowl.

You can show up at any random superbowl party and out of 30 people there, 2 people actually watch football on a regular basis.

So yes...I can believe that the Superbowl had more "viewers".

 

According to Initiatives own estimates, they cover about 90% of the tv households worldwide. They believe that the majority of Chinese tv consumers are in those cities they cover.

I'm not too sure if I believe them about that, though... I mean, I'm pretty sure Shanghai will have more tvs per head than a backwater town or even other large cities that are not worldwide centers of commerce, but still, there's a lot of households in Asia and Africa that are not covered, I have a hard time believing that they make up for less than 10% of the world wide tv audience (though those that they don't cover are probably not really interesting to sponsors, and initiative reports are really mostly for them). Also, as far as I know, they don't include bars or public viewing and certainly not private partys, they definitely underestimate viewership quite a bit. But I still think that in most cases, their numbers are probably closer to the truth than the inflated numbers you might get from FIFA, UEFA or the NFL. Also, they measure all events by the same criteria. So all in all, I'd say it's the best measuring stick we've got.

 

I'm actually sure there's more to do in Shanghai on a Saturday nifght than most other places in China. I don't think the ratings in backwater towns of, say, half a million people will be so bad, as long as they got TVs.