NFL Was a Sure Thing for TV Networks. Until Now - Bloomberg: "A few years ago, when the league expanded its Thursday night TV package, Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, predicted that the proliferation would one day hurt the NFL’s popularity. “I think the NFL is 10 years away from an implosion,” Cuban told a group of reporters at the time. “I’m just telling you: Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. And they’re getting hoggy. … It’s all football. At some point, the people get sick of it.” Reached by e-mail in late October, Cuban was in no mood to gloat. “Nothing really to add,” he responded. “The data is the data.”"
"So far this season, Monday Night Football ratings are down 20 percent from this time last year, according to Nielsen data. Sunday Night Football has fallen 18.5 percent. Thursday night games are down 21.8 percent. The Titans-Jaguars game averaged a little more than 5 million viewers, down 71 percent from the same week in 2015. "
Unlike climbing mountains, it's hard in business to know when you are at the top. Usually not until you realize you've gone way past it and our starting to slip down an increasingly steep slope.
Sports generally have a much stickier consumer, so I do not think we'll see a sharp decline, especially with the TV contracts the NFL has locked in for several years to come. However, I am not sure it is going to be possible to drive the growth they were expecting or perhaps just hoping for. The world of entertainment (let's face it, that's what sport is from a business point of view) is just too fragmented, and the growing populations are enjoying many other sports already.
Sports Illustrated advises not to underestimate Roger Goodell and the NFL, and that is probably good advice. But can they really get to $25B in 2027 from $13B last year? (Roger Goodell: NFL commissioner's road map for next 10 years | SI.com). They continue to experiment in London, but of all sports, NFL is a very tough one to export with the size and expense of the teams involved.
And then of course there are the concussions, highlighted recently in a decent film by Will Smith (The truth about Will Smith’s Concussion and Bennet Omalu). There continues to be debate around the cause and effect. "Slate science writer Daniel Engber, who has been skeptical of the link between CTE and the deaths of players found to have had it, called the film inaccurate in other ways, for example suggesting that Wecht's arrest on corruption charges was motivated by Omalu's paper, when in fact it was published three months afterwards. "[The film] feeds into a pervasive myth at the center of the national discussion over football and head injuries," he charges. In particular, he cites a 2012 National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health study indicating that football players, on average compared to the population as a whole, live longer and generally healthier lives, though the study also indicates, as Engber points out, that former football players are also more likely to suffer, and die, from neurodegenerative disease." (Concussion (2015 film) - Wikipedia)
As the scientists argue, it still seems likely that kids will continue to be guided away from the sport that literally relies on hitting someone as hard as possible.
Comments