Did you spot the graphic darting around Twitter in recent weeks of the most watched TV broadcasts of 2022 in the USA?
Of course you did, it was omnipresent for while on everyone’s ‘For You’ feeds.
Well, even if you just had a quick glance at it you would’ve noticed that NFL games dominated the rankings with American football – both NFL and College – accounting for 86 of the top 100 broadcasts of the year.
Basketball took up two spots, political programming four, and sandwiched in-between those was football…or soccer as they prefer it to be called.
The NFL represented 82 of the 100 most-watched U.S. TV broadcasts in 2022, up from 75 in 2021. The next biggest category was college football with 5 broadcasts. pic.twitter.com/migUHD2ZxA
— Kurt Badenhausen (@kbadenhausen) January 6, 2023
That’s right, football/soccer – the sport that the USA swears it doesn’t care about – accounted for more of the most watched TV broadcasts of 2022 than basketball and the nation’s supposed ‘past time’ baseball combined.
This spike of interest in the beautiful game was due to the World Cup, obviously, with the peak US audience for the sport being a whopping 26m – up 9m from the 2018 final – but perhaps crucially, through the sheer thrill of watching two of the game’s real superstars going blow for blow on the biggest stage of them all.
Those superstars were the greatest footballer of all time Lionel Messi, and a player who could end up being the greatest football of all time Kylian Mbappe (or ‘Mubappay’ as NBA legend Charles Barkley likes to call him).
In many ways, that game and those 10/10 performances from Messi and Mbappe may have just shown football how to finally grow the game in the USA, shining the spotlight on the superstars of the game as opposed to the European centric club fandom. And as Sam Bailey, Head of Marketing at Unique Sports Group an eight year veteran of Sports Marketing, explains, learning a few things from sports leagues like the NBA:
“One of the things I got to witness first hand is that the NBA is only as powerful as their biggest players, and they’re [the NBA] not in denial about that.
“In the US there’s so many different sports and these sports are always competing for the same fans so how they differentiate their game is so important. How the NBA have done that is by putting the stars of the show at the front of house and not apologising for that.
“People follow stars.”
The fact that ‘people follow stars’ can be taken quite literally nowadays as Sam noted that the huge spike in Messi’s followers following his World Cup performances – adding around 100m followers – showed just how keen a US audience are to follow the stars of the game as opposed to following clubs, supporting teams ‘based on the best player or the player they like the most.’
Sam, who has experience working in the US market for RocNation and helping some of football’s biggest stars navigate the tricky waters of social media, noted that he has noticed a trend where when a club and a player post the same video/graphic/gif etc. the player’s post invariably outperforms the club post every time:
“People resonate more with human beings and with natural personality and the humane side of players which you don’t get to see too often so there’s that human element that comes with people following players over clubs.”
Anchoring the future of the game on its superstars and Americanising the sport could be key to growing the game in the USA, but it’s a thin line to tow for the game.
While there’s plenty of examples of this shift in focus working across the pond, there’s also a few examples of it not quite clicking with an already-established European audience. Juventus betting the house on Cristiano Ronaldo propelling them to glory and financial dominance didn’t exactly go to plan – they’ve lost well over £1bn since that signing – while Neymar’s move to Paris Saint-Germain didn’t really uplift Ligue 1 as perhaps intended.
And there’s also the issue with trying to change engrained loyalties for clubs to players, changing the very fabric of football fandom – and that’s not something worth giving up.
“I think if you look at culturally UK sport versus US sport, in UK sport everything is built around the culture and we still stick to those values to a certain extent, and I think that’s good because it still keeps the core of its fanbase.
“My girlfriend’s American and her parents came over to see a game at Pride Park and they they said to me that the atmosphere they experienced and, you know, the singing all the way through the game, you don’t get that in the US or very rarely,” said Sam on the club fan culture America is sorely lacking.
It’s a balancing act, one that’s required to grow the fanbase for football across the pond, while also ensuring that ‘traditional’ football fans can enjoy the game as they’ve always done.
Unique Sports Group (USG) are an elite talent representation agency and are recognised as one of the biggest in world football.
Ranked #16 in Forbes World Sports Agencies (2020), USG are a market-leader within the space – representing over 350 professional athletes and with completed transfers across 12 different countries.
Lead by Will Salthouse, Marlon Fleischman, Barry Whelan and Gordon Stipic-Wipfler, USG offer a full ‘360-degree’ management approach with industry experts in every field.
