Viewing figures for the Premier League are down as the content amplifies at the expense of its audience
Three months into the new football season and the television ratings are in.
On Sky Sports, the number of people watching is down 19% from the same time last year. It could be more of a blip than a trend, but there are definite question marks over the content marketing policy of top-level football.
The latest Premier League TV deal is worth a phenomenal £8.3 billion over three seasons. Even away from the domestic league, BT Sport has paid £1 billion for the Champions League (where a recent Tuesday night fixture saw a 40% drop in viewers from the equivalent time last season).
Content overkill
The question of ‘Is football finally eating itself?’ comes down in part to the abundance of football on offer, 12 months a year.
This year the Premier League season finished in May, the European Championships ran from June to July, at which point the Europa League qualifying games were already underway. In August, the Premier League returned. All that without even mentioning the Olympics.
As any content marketer will tell you. You can’t keep producing ever more content and expect to retain the same level of excitement and engagement from the audience.
The only way to make that model sustainable is to continue increasing the quality of the content, incrementally higher.
Quality control
Sky repeatedly refers to the Premier League as the Best League in the World. As such, it bills matches like once-in-a-lifetime events. The weekly round of games on Sundays becomes ‘Super Sunday’. The recent match between Manchester United and Liverpool was, laughably, positioned as ‘Red Monday’. Inevitably, a drab 0-0 draw ensued.
The league can certainly claim to be the richest in the world, but has little basis claiming to be the best. Even only looking as far as Europe, since the formation of the Premier League in 1992, English clubs have won the European Cup (later rebranded as the Champions League) on four occasions. Italian teams have won five times in that same period while Spanish teams are on 10. And let’s not even talk about the World Cup…
The Premier League and Sky aims to justify the vast sums of money sloshing around the game with a hyperbolic marketing campaign. But, in reality, they have very little control over the quality of the content being produced.
Content marketers do have that control, and we must make the most of it. A well-formulated campaign that leads to a crescendo will always be a more effective tactic than pitching everything at maximum volume.
The price isn’t right
With player transfers and wages at unsustainably high levels, it’s no surprise that ticket prices have also continued to climb.
Premier League tickets are commonly over £50, and can be closer to £90 for some matches.
But with such variable quality sport on offer, the price of watching football is outweighing its entertainment value. Or, as Football365.com’s John Nicholson eloquently puts it: “If you insist on selling sh*t as sugar, at some point, someone will notice.”
British football, and the brand of being the Best League in the World, relies heavily on its famously vociferous fans – presenting English supporters as passionate, loud and committed. The audience is as vital to the content, if not more so, than the content itself.
This is a wise motif for content marketers to observe. If the audience feels it is being taken for a ride, it will simply jump off.
A couple of weekends ago, Content Desk headed to southeast London to watch Dulwich Hamlet play AFC Sudbury. Kids get free entry, it costs £4 for students and pensioners and a standard adult ticket is £10. Parents, children and dogs squeeze through the turnstiles and into the one stand, where cheap beers and burgers are also for sale.
This semi-professional game in the Ryman Isthmian Premier Division – the seventh tier of the English football league system – saw 1,700 people through the gates.
In sport, as in content marketing, the audience has the power. Forgetting this balance risks incurring the wrath of those you hope to engage in the product. Or worse, the audience simply ignores you.
If increasingly sophisticated and media-savvy football fans in the UK are becoming less receptive towards the hype machine of football, the executives who sell the game might want to reconsider how they market their content. Perhaps they need to reconnect with fans of the beautiful game to find out how they want to be sold to, or instead, aim the more hyperbolic messaging overseas, where it may be consumed with less cynicism.
Top-level football retains an enormous emotional significance that will ensure its survival with a large audience. But those ties are being tested time and again, and it would appear that this audience is dwindling – or at least looking elsewhere for its football fix.
Your business most likely doesn’t have the same emotional and historical safety net and content marketers must learn from these mistakes. The audience of content is its lifeblood. If a goal is scored and no one’s there to see it, does it really exist at all?
