Research into viewing figures reveals a greater hunger for superstars producing predictable results rather than thrilling football with uncertain outcomes
The newspaper on my desk shows Chelsea in first place, Manchester City second, and Arsenal and Manchester United sat snug in the Champions League spots. Meanwhile Liverpool are fifth, Tottenham sixth, and QPR and Burnley in the bottom two. Oh, one more thing: the date on the top of the page is 5 August 2014. Nine months ago.
Flicking through the stiffened, slowly jaundicing pages of the Racing Post’s 2014-15 season guide – and particularly the table showing how the spread betting markets expected the Premier League to finish – hammers home the predictability of this latest edition. Only Everton and Newcastle have performed significantly worse than expected. Only Southampton significantly better.
Yet, here’s the rub. While the top flight has become more predictable, there has been no dent in its popularity. This isn’t what conventional wisdom expects. The NFL has a salary cap and a draft system not because they are a proto-communist organisation but because they believe audiences and advertisers want shock as well as awe; uncertainty and celebrity. Without it, they fear people might switch channels.
The Premier League, however, increasingly resembles a silk-lined straitjacket. Only six different teams have finished in the top four in the past decade (compared to eight between 1995-96 and 2004-05, and 14 from 1985-86 to 1994-95) and the correlation between performance and wages has risen steadily too. But we still lap it up. Sky and BT wouldn’t have paid £5.136bn for the rights for the next three seasons if it were otherwise.
So what is going on? Two academics, Dr Babatunde Buraimo, a senior lecturer in sports management at Liverpool University, and Dr Rob Simmons, an economist at Lancaster University, believe they know the answer. Their recent paper,Uncertainty of outcome or star quality? Television audience demand for English Premier League football, makes a compelling case that British TV audiences are far less interested in watching competitive matches than they once were. Instead they want the big names, regardless of the opposition.
You may scoff or sneer, but before you do so be aware that Buraimo and Simmons conducted an enormous amount of detective work and number‑crunching. They tracked down British TV ratings for 631 of the 660 live Premier League games broadcast from 2000-01 to 2007-08 (the other 29 games were excluded because of missing data, and they couldn’t go beyond 2008 because Sky refused to make the figures available). They got hold of the wage bills of every Premier League club for each of those seasons. And they also examined bookies’ odds for every game, to judge the unpredictability of each fixture.
Then, for each of these 631 matches, they lobbed many other factors into the equivalent of a statistical cement mixer. The TV audience. How well each team were doing in the league. Whether the game was a derby. Even the time of year and day the matches were played (did you know, for instance, that audience ratings for games played during the week are, on average, 8.6% lower than those at weekends?).
Their research – published in the International Journal of the Economics of Business – also drew on their previous work published in 2005, which trod over similar ground during the Premier League’s formative years.
In their latest work they found that TV audiences had changed. Until the 2002-03 season, if a match had a high level of uncertainty of outcome it would typically lead to bigger viewing figures. But by 2008 that effect could no longer be registered. Meanwhile over the same period, as a club’s wage bill increased compared to other teams, TV audiences for that club also increased.This means, as the authors put it: “The classic notion of a pure sporting contest in which the outcome is unpredictable has been replaced with one in which the preference is for sporting entertainment delivered by superstars.”
You might have your doubts. After all, isn’t it true that audiences have always been attracted to the biggest teams and names? Well, yes – but not entirely. As the authors note, the lowest live TV audience for a Premier League game was the 117,000 who watched Arsenal v Coventry in 2000. And, as Buraimo explains: “We controlled for the various identities of the clubs, so this notion of superstars being important to TV viewers is over and above the big four or five teams. We have identified an extra premium that drives up audiences which is over and above the actual identity of the clubs.”
What’s more, this newer audience for Premier League football “has an appreciation of football that is very different to the older audience that preferred a pure sporting contest”, according to Buraimo.
To someone who grew up in the days when Watford, Ipswich and West Ham challenged for league titles, and Nottingham Forest, Aston Villa and Blackburn actually won them, that sounds depressing enough.
But it is worse than that. For if Buraimo and Simmons are right, this audience is content with the status quo. Content that the same clubs dominate. Content that we know the major plot arcs in advance. And presumably content that each instalment of football’s most fast and furious league increasingly resembles its last.
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