There was an undisputed winner of the summer of sport, which ended on Sunday night as the most spectacular Paralympics in living memory came to a close. Sport itself, and the unerring way it keeps so many of us watching – especially in a world where TV viewing figures increasingly resemble Tom Daley diving off a 10-metre platform.
The numbers really were staggering: 23.8 million across BBC and ITV for England’s Euro 2024 final defeat, the highest UK audience of the year. The BBC’s Olympics coverage topped the charts for 17 consecutive days, with 5 million to 7 million viewers. Channel 4 also enjoyed Paralympics audiences that regularly hopped over a million.
Broadcast TV figures have plummeted by 26% since 2015 – yet sport is the bubble that refuses to burst, the ratings winner that bucks the trend. Over the same period, it has fallen just 3%. Some of that is due to big falls in highlight shows, with Sky recently posting record figures for its live Premier League coverage.
All of us will have our favourite moments from the summer: Jude Bellingham’s survive-or-die overhead kick against Slovakia, igniting a previously moribund England; a men’s 1500m final for the ages in Paris; Carlos Alcaraz dissecting Novak Djokovic with a matador’s relish at Wimbledon, before the Serb got revenge at the Olympics. But the fact is we watched it in our droves.
As Enders Analysis, a company regarded as the gold standard for media research, put it in a recent report: “There is still a widespread misconception that sports viewing has declined at the same pace as the rest of broadcast TV due to increased competition, the high price of pay TV and the supposed short attention spans of the social media generation. In fact, sports viewing has been the most resilient component of broadcast TV.”
As Enders points out, it’s not just the big-ticket items on network TV which are flying either. In fact, young viewers now consume nearly half of their sports through Sky, “dwarfing the combined efforts of the BBC and ITV, which refutes the widely held view that young people don’t watch sport behind a paywall”, while TNT Sports has also seen its audience share rise.
That is noteworthy, given price rises and piracy concerns due to firesticks. And there is a final surprise in the Enders report. “Fears that young people are no longer interested in sport are overblown,” it says, pointing out that “sport is now a growing proportion of all under-35s’ live TV set viewing: 17% in 2023, up from 7% in 2015”.
That is backed up by Jonathan Licht, the managing director of Sky Sports. He tells me that on Sunday 1 September, Sky Sports had its highest ever share of total TV viewing audiences for under-35s and women between 2pm and 6pm.
“We’ve talked about how young fans tend to follow sport rather than always watch it,” he says. “But they do come for the big sport. Last weekend when we had Manchester United v Liverpool, the Italian Grand Prix, the Old Firm and the US Open, 60% of all under-35s that were watching TV were tuned to Sky Sports.”
Sky Sports also had more than 10% of all women viewers watching TV last Sunday – a record. “It may be harder to bring those younger audiences to TV generally,” Licht says. “But they are coming in for sport.”
So who are the winners and losers? Unsurprisingly football dominance has grown to the extent that it now “draws more viewing than the next nine sports combined and of the top sports is the youngest skewing”, according to Enders.
Cricket also did well last year, largely because of the Ashes and the Hundred, while Formula One’s audiences have recovered since going behind a paywall in 2019. Women’s football and the NFL are also growing, according to Licht.
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The losers? The Enders report points out that rugby’s 2023 World Cup audiences fell a fifth on 2015, despite England doing well, and it also warns that “English club rugby is in an existentially unhealthy state”. Most Olympic sports, outside of the Games, also still struggle. But overall the picture is rosier than you might expect.
How can we explain this? Partly it is because in a world of personalised algorithms and subcultures, sport is one of few glues that bind us together. It helps, too, that it has to be watched live. But Enders also credits broadcasters and leagues “for maintaining sport’s appeal in a changing media landscape”.
There is a final point. Britain really does love sport. That much is made clear in “Game Changing: How sport makes us happier, healthier and better connected”, research out this week.
The report, published by Sky and compiled by the policy agency Public First, says that UK adults “have spent approximately 9.1bn hours watching and participating in sports” in the past year. It also found that 15 million people across the UK “went as far as to say that sport is an important part of their identity”.
And while sport is still seen as the toy factory, and remains down the list of the government’s priorities, the report makes clear the public is keen on more investment to encourage young people to enjoy sport.
Meanwhile, broadcasters continue to face dangerous headwinds. According to Ofcom, less than half of 16- to 24-year-olds now watch TV in an average week, down from 78% in 2018. They also spend far more time on TikTok and YouTube than watching live TV. Sport probably can’t defy this gravity for ever. But so far it is giving it a damn good shot.