The NFL - More Popular than the Barclayard Premiership?

Attendance- NFL

TV- NFL wins in Mexico and Canada.
EPL wins in most of the rest of the world, although NFL is gaining in China and Japan (but EPL popularity is increasing exponentially in China).

NFL games are regularly televised in most major nations- usually up to 5 games a week (4 on Sunday plus the Monday Night game). The Super Bowl may draw a global audience exceeding 500 million people, EPL may reach or exceed that depending on the teams involved.

EPL and NFL generally get their TV viewing/attendance numbers internally (the teams supply attendance information). But the TV numbers are rarely unrealistically high.

 

How many countries worldwide have any interest in American Football at all ? I know the NFL is screened in the UK, but it's like on the most obscure channel and goes out in the early hours of the morning. Not knocking A.F but there just isn't the global appeal for it to challange a major Soocer league like the EPL

 

That's what I wonder. Isn't rugby favored instead of the NFL? I heard that NFL Europe isn't having much success. During the Super Bowl they were saying the game was drawing a lot of attention world wide.

 

Does it draw 500 million viewers, or is it available to 500 million viewers?

 

http://www.visitbritain.com/uk/presscentre/campaigns/current/sports_campaign.htm

"The Premier League is the world’s most watched football league with a global audience of over a billion viewers."

http://www.toshiba.com.sg/__48256BAC0062814D.nsf/webDocuments/TSPS-5Q8992

"The English Premier League is the most widely distributed sports programme across Asia. It is seen in over 150 million homes on the ESS network with 8 of 10 people with cable in Asia tuning in to the 02/03 EPL season. It was also the top programme on cable in 2002, rating 10 times better than the best programme on all other cable channels. (Peoplemeter)

According to Peoplemeter data, a single EPL match delivers reaches 167% more viewers than all cable news channels combined. While Asia's sizeable out of home audience remains unmeasured by in-home Peoplemeter measurements, research indicates that 64% watch the EPL outside their homes every week.

Viewership of the world's most popular football league among Asian sports audiences with access to cable and satellite is projected to grow by 70% from the current 150 million to 407 million over the next ten years."

 

If it's either, it is definitely the latter.

And it seems to me the NBA is a far bigger deal overseas than the NFL. I've seen NBA highlights on TV stations from a couple dozen countries at least. I haven't seen that kind of coverage of the NFL. It's certainly not like people can tune into NFL games to see their local athletes make it big in America.

 

The Superbowl drew about 92 millions, of which 96% are Americans. Don't know how many people in Europe stayed up at 1AM on a Monday morning to watch a sport they don't know anything about. My estimate, can't be more than 1 million.

See this thread here for that discussion: https://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=89346


Basically, this question of NFL vs. Premiership can be explain by regions/continents:

In North America, NFL is more popular.

In South AMerican, Premiership is more popular
In Europe, the Premiership is more popular
In Asia, the Premiership is more popular
In Africa, the Premiership is more popular
In Australia/NZ, the Premiership is more popular

In Central America, I have no idea. Though I would go with the Premiership with the exception of Mexico.

In Asia (beside Japan) and Africa, I don't think 99% of the population know what NFL is or what it stands for.

Here is my estimation:

Overall, about 300 millions know about the NFL and on average about 30 millions people watch them regularly. (mostly in the U.S. and Canada).

About 1 billion people know about the EPL and on average about 100 millions people watch them regulary (the majority of which are in Asia)


(Manchester United claims that it has 55 millions fan world wide).

Oh, top team comparision in $$$ worth:

NFL-Washington Redskins about $800 million to buy
EPL-Manchester United - $1.4 billion on the stock market and $1.7 billion for a successful takeover bid.

However, the bottom NFL team is worth about $400 mil and the bottom EPL team is worth about $90 mil. (or in the case of Leeds United, it doesn't worth much with the club heading into bankcruptcy.

 

NFL is regional, Soccer is global !!!!!

The appeal of NFL is basically limited to North American Continent. However soccer has already established global fan base and it is from the grass roots in most of the countries.

NFL will go nowhere beyond North America because paradigm of this sport is different. The game is heavily armored, the score is like 7 point per goal and it favors big fat guys. Problem is no other country wants to compete against U.S. in this term.

Other countries want to compete against U.S. in their terms. I mean in soccer terms. U.S. is spreading the gospel of democracy. But NFL is not a democratic sport. Soccer is a democratic sport.
That's why it has global appeal. It doesn't mind poor country or rich country.

River Plate ( w/ Aimar, Saviola, Angel) with low payroll is as good as any rich club in the world.
That's the beauty of soccer.

 

You're selling the NFL short. Given the disproportionally high number of American scientists and other personnel in Antarctica, I think we can say with a fair degree of certainty that Antarctica goes to the NFL.

 

Who cares about # of viewers? Not all viewers are the same.

Compare ticket revenue, merchandising revenue, advertising revenue and TV revenue.

 

Okay then, compare the relative disposable incomes of the respective markets, if you want that comparison to mean anything.

 

As far as viewership its not even CLOSE. EPL DOMINATES the NFL In fact you'd be lucky to find people in Europe & South America who can NAME an NFL TEAM let alone watch the games.

As Far as attendance, its not really fair considering England's population is about 1/5 th of the US. Plus you have the 30 EPL games vs. 16 NFL games in a season.

 

Of course they are the same. Number of viewers is everything when measuring popularity. You need to count number of eyeball pairs watching TV-screens. NFL can probably call itself the richest league in the world simply because it operates in the biggest economy in the world, but they are dwarfed in popularity world-wide compared to the Premier League.

 

Plus, NFL Europe is an absolute JOKE in europe. The league is down to 5 teams after the Barcelona team recently folded, & 3 of those teams are in Germany! Plus the average attendance in the league is like 6000. The NFL is pretty much a joke outside of the United States.

 

I, for one, can't even imagine that the viewership for the NFL is even remotely close to the viewership for the EPL.

Take Australia as an example. I recently visited, and some business associates had no idea about the NFL--all they knew was that it appeared that the players were big sissies for having to armor up like they do. Of course, Rugby and Aussie Rules Football were king down there. And although the domestic soccer league has a relatively small niche of its own, I was surprised by how much these guys knew about the EPL. When I expressed my surprise, they told me that the EPL is heavily watched in Australia, and although they still consider Rugby or Aussie Rules Football to be king, they enjoyed soccer played at its best. (Perhaps my surprise was due to the opposite reaction that an American Football fan generally has for soccer in the States--I kind of expected the same in Australia where a sport similar to American football was king).

Soccer is very popular in asia (perhaps not as much as cricket is)--but I can't imagine that anyone there likes or watches American football at all. Remember, China and India have a whole heck of a lot of the world's population.

 

True - the only American sport with any real interest here is NBA.

Noone really knows much about 'gridiron' - the impression is just that players wear armour and helmets, stop for a chat after every tackle and that they just do what the coaches tell them to. When those few of us who understand a bit about it try and explain, their eyes glaze over.

There is a bit more recognition in Melbourne due to Darren Bennett playing at San Diego - but the comment then becomes "all he does is kick then he goes off to sit down???".

It only shows on cable, except for the Superbowl which shows on the "ethnic" foreign language channel, alongside the Polish news and Brzilian soap operas, at about mid morning Monday.

 

Apart from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh I don't think cricket has much of any presence in Asia, though obviously India's huge population is going to have an effect if you're looking at total number of viewers regardless of the country.

 

Anecdotal evidence can accumulate to the point that it is no longer just anecdotal evidence. At risk of sounding arrogant/snotty, I've spent most of the last several years overseas, been to 40+ countries and had satellite TV overseas with stations from dozens of countries, all of which had news/sports shows, all of which I watched from time to time. Outside of this country, the NFL's presence is not terribly significant. Forget the EPL, it is far behind the NBA and arguably (an argument I personally would make) it has less of a global presence than MLB or the NHL.

Of course, there are different criteria for determining a league's popularity, and this thread hasn't established one, but I don't see any measure that puts the NFL close to the EPL, unless you actually buy the numbers the NFL's head office claims about a billion or even half a billion people watching the Super Bowl, boasts that are in any case made as sales pitches to potential advertisers and not based on verifiable facts.

 

I can speak for Southamerica and Mexico 'cause I've lived in both places.

Mexicans love the NFL, it's been there for years. I'm not sure about the English game, they've only showed it since the inception of FOX, I think ESPN international carried a couple of seasons at the beginning of the Premier League.

Now Southamerica is a whole different thing. Over there people don't know crap and don't care about the NFL. Definitively the biggest US sport in SA is the NBA.

Now, comparing the NFL to the EPL in Southamerica is weird because even though some people watch the Premiership because they like soccer and like good games, it's still relatively small compared to the Spanish and Italian leagues. They've shown games from Spain and Italy on air TV for over 20 years in Southamerican countries.

But if you really want a comparission between those two, there's no competition. In SA the EPL is small, but the NFL is nonexistant.

Oh, by the way, in Mexico, Serie A and La Liga also beat the Premier League.

 

You can't use the attendance factor. NFL is king in America and will always be. You are overrating its appeal elsewhere. NFL does not have a billion viewers. Not even close. Nothing indicates it:

1) The sport American football is very minor on a global scale. There are probably at least ten other teamsports who are more popular participation sports. May be more.

2) If the Asian statistics I quoted earlier on this thread are correct (nothing so far indicates that they aren't) that alone is enough to completely write off NFL as a threat to EPL popularity wise. Asia is the key region. About half the world's population lives there and this is the region NFL has to win by a solid margin to beat EPL world-wide. Otherwise NFL has to depend on beating EPL in Europe, Africa and South America who all happen to be the three most soccer-mad continents. They are not likely to make up for the big loss in Asia in either of those three continents.

So I do believe "dwarf" is a pretty accurate term to use when measuring the global appeal between EPL and NFL. NBA should have much larger international audience than NFL. At least there are some famous players there.

 

So I'm taking it MLB isn't popular worldwide. Personally, I think it should be cause they have a lot of different ethnicities playing in teams. But it's only popular in Japan, North America, the Caribbean and Venezuela. Is there any reason why it isn't as popular as the NFL or EPL? (please don't say cause the sport is boring! haha)

 

I'd say MLB has more fans outside of the US than the NFL given its popularity in much of the western hemisphere (not just the Caribbean and Venezuela - Mexico, Central America, Colombia, Canada) plus Japan and South Korea. There've even been a handful of Aussies in MLB though I have no idea if anyone in Austalia actually watches MLB games.