“Why Are Pandemic Sports Ratings So Terrible?” (New York Magazine) describes a fall in TV viewership in a country where millions of people are more or less locked into their homes, unemployed, etc. How can Americans possibly have something better to do right now than turn on the TV and watch a game that they used to enjoy watching?
Here’s my theory: a big reason that people care about sports is that they see other people caring about sports. In the pre-coronapanic days you’d go into a restaurant and see people in the bar with their eyes glued to a professional sports game. This subconsciously communicated that the game was important. Maybe you’d go over to a friend’s house and the game would be on. Another hint that this game is important.
If you’re by yourself at home, on the other hand, there is nobody else to tell you that a particular sport is important enough to be worth watching.
Readers: What’s your theory? Americans are glued to screens more than ever, right? Why aren’t they watching sports on those screens?
“What’s your theory? ” I like most people do not care about black lives matter. It’s annoying the sports teams are writing black lives matter everywhere so we just don’t tune in.
I agree with the Peer Pressure Theory of sports enthusiasm. I’ve never been an active pro sports fan, for any league or kind of game. I have a hard time even getting excited about the “big games” each year. I didn’t like Little League as a kid – my father got me into it when a superior at work suggested I should play. I quit the team after the first two practices. I was much more interested in computers and riding motocross bikes.
Not having been much of a sports fan has been a positively detrimental socially over the years as a cisgender heteronormative male. It’s difficult to break into conversations you know nothing about when you’re trying to mingle. So I generally chose friends from among people who weren’t very “sporty.”
I once temped for the Food Network in Chicago, working in their headquarters on Michigan Avenue, right across the river from the Wrigley building, doing IT work and general office support. The Boss was a guy whose office was packed to the rafters with sports memorabilia, he was a huge sports guy, the first question he asked me when I walked in was who I liked among the Cubs’ prospects. I was completely clueless. I said: “I don’t follow major league baseball very closely, so I don’t really know.” He didn’t like me.
His second-in-command was a woman and I got along great with her. Fixed her laptop machine and her home computer, and straightened out a lot of problems they were having with software in the office. She offered me an $70,000/year job, and I turned it down! I should have taken the job.
But having said that, I also agree with Toucan Sam. When the major league teams allowed themselves to be roped into the political arguments, they lost a lot of people.
It’s 100% the lack of crowds at the events, which is in-line with your theory.
I used to watch Mixed Martial Arts fights live, but without the cheering, the lights, the faces, etc. it’s just not the same.
Interesting, I watch a bit more sports than usual. I find it motivates me to exercise myself.
The metric used to measure TV viewership..Nielsen Ratings…isn’t all that valid anymore. Legions of young people, and even old ones, stream these games from their devices. This has been discussed ad nauseam.
It is 100% the social justice spiral pro sports teams have gone on. Everything else is an excuse so they can keep on SJWing their way to the grave.
Sports are also an escape. Watching people run around in masks reminds us that we, too, have to wear muzzles in public. And watching the BLM symbols reminds us how much we can’t stand our neighbor/uncle/in-laws politics.
The lack of crowds are just an accelerant. Keep in mind there’s also no office water cooler to talk about the games. And if you talk to a stranger about sports it might shift to masks, BLM, and politics quickly. There goes that escape…
Maybe the people who watch football, hockey, baseball and golf are all the same. The temporal coincidence of the events due to the virus has made it more difficult for the same people to watch all of them. This would be supported/verified (not by me) by seeing whether there is an aggregate drop in viewership and not just a drop in each sport.
I did enjoy watching some French Open tennis matches despite, in other years, not even knowing when they were happening.
This is the reason. There are only so many sports one can watch. Once everyone gets back on a normal calendar things will be fine.
Definitely the effect of other people sharing in the spectacle. I watch English Premier League soccer on TV, and it just feels like an empty exercise in the absence of 50,000 fans baying at each other.
Similarly, we went to a play a few years ago in Boston and our our party of four was half the audience. It was hard to enjoy the performance in a virtually empty theater – it just felt depressing.