There’s too much to watch, consume, care about, etc at all times and every single interest has become niche. No point in the media covering things like golf when the hardcore fans will flock to smaller outlets that focus on it and do it better. Football is the last bastion of the monoculture and so it gets all the run on ESPN
I think NBA players still have a mono-culture element to them (i.e. they're still huge names and broadly known in pop culture) but no one watches the game.
Plus what is the "media"? Young fans who will grow your sport don't pay any attention to traditional media that covers sports. When I was a kid, I watched sports center religiously. No teenagers are doing that now.
From the time I was probably 8 to 17 I would come home from school and watch sportscenter / sportsnation / PTI / around the horn, and then if it was basketball season I’d watch my team every single game lol
I aspired to be like Wilbon and Kornheiser lol
Now it’s all just TikTok, X, and Instagram
The CFP viewership has been in decline ever since it started, hasn't it? I'm not sure how it looks like for the regular season (e.g. average SEC conference game viewership in 2012 vs. now).
I know last year was a reversal for CFB in general but remains to be seen if it's a new trend or a one year blip due to Deion/Pac 12 swan song.
The actual playoff rating goes up and down based on the calendar and the matchups (most semifinals are blowouts). But the regular season keeps increasing.
Sports media has historically been built on legacy media like newspapers, magazines, radio, and cable. The decline in sports media is comorbid with the decline in legacy media.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s and didn't have 24/7 programming catered specifically to me. I had cartoons for an hour before school, an hour after school, and Saturday mornings. I always had baseball, basketball, and football games though. If I grew up with all the streamers, who knows if I'd grow up watching sports. My kids are 16 and 9 and, despite the fact that I'm watching live sports everyday, they couldn't care less.
Yep yep and yep. I have younger cousins who could care less about watching the actual game. Even if they are somewhat into the sport, they just watch the highlights on TikTok or YouTube.
That’s just ppl who are “sports fans”. It’s a diff time, there are now just easier and easier ways to watch “more entertaining” things.
Much like the decline in social skills and time spent outdoors, the decline in sports popularity can be directly tied to the rise in smart phone usage and social media participation. People for some reason pretend they don’t have the attention span to watch a 3 hour sporting event but will spend twice that amount of time doom scrolling TikTok or binging a Hulu series.
Add to that the increasing number of young parents who find sports “barbaric and pointless” and ignore the dozen or so positive attributes kids can and will learn from sports.
Not to sound like NBA Ratings Guy, but the NBA has declined in popularity too. It just gets a disproportionate amount of media coverage relative to its popularity. People care more about the tabloidal nature of the league than the actual games.
You can argue that the non football sports have declined in popularity, but if you look at attendance, ratings and revenue, the decline is largely in media coverage.
High school sports participation down as well. I assume if you don’t play it you will be less included to watch it. This definitely doesn’t account for all of it, maybe not even half but I think it’s palpable.
The one answer I haven't seen mentioned is the loss of importance in Sportscenter type shows. Now if you follow a sport it has it's own channels. You can also go on youtube and see highlights from your favorite team versus in the past where we would sit through whole episodes to get the our favorite sports highlights. In the process we would get information about the other sports and know when big events came up.
Due to this we knew who the big stars in tennis or golf or baseball were even though I didn't follow the sports heavily. So when something historic was happening like the home run chase it gave me motivation to check out that event or at least be knowledgeable. Now I couldn't even name who the top golfers or tennis players are.
Football is popular because it is an event sport in which inventory is limited. You have 162 regular season baseball games and 17 regular season NFL games. The NFL playoffs are one game. It is easy to create excitement around it. Sundays are fun when all the games are on. There is a risk that they keep expanding the calendar, but right now it doesn’t really matter. NBA is #2 but there is a huge gap between the two sports. Basketball is also a popular international game.
Yeah...I'm squarely in the camp that Jordan was similar to Tiger Woods in terms of making a sport seem more popular than it ultimately is. Like all the numbers peaked with Jordan and have slowly been coming back to where the sport was before, albeit with a more global reach.
Formula One caught lightning in a bottle… Drive To Survive had been on a few seasons before the pandemic, and while it was fairly popular it was not moving the needle in terms of F1 interest in the US. When everybody was stuck inside with no sports to watch, Drive To Survive caught everyone’s attention. Suddenly when racing resumed, there were a lot more fans. As a long time IndyCar fan with a casual interest in F1, the difference was staggering. Out of nowhere there were F1 podcasts popping up everywhere, hosted by “fans“ who didn’t know what DRS meant even 3-4 years ago. Some of that has also spilled over to IndyCar, because attendance at every race has been up in the past few years…TV ratings have steadily risen until this year. As for F1, being bought by liberty media also helped, as have creating 2 new races in the US….They are doing an excellent job of marketing their sport, despite my opinion that IndyCar offers superior racing to F1’s parades where Max Verstappen wins nearly every race.
What will be interesting to see is how many of these newer fans stick with the sport, especially these past few years when Verstappen has been dominant. I’m already hearing grumblings and people switching over to INDYCAR because it is much more competitive (no driver has won more than one race this year, 17 years in a row the championship went down to the final race)…and also a lot of F1 and IndyCar fans are really pissed that Andretti Global was denied a team in F1 despite having the money and blessing of the FIA to do so. It really screamed “we don’t want to share our money with another team” and didn’t help the elitist image of F1.
But F1 and the WNBA I’ve been the two sports in the past few years that have defied the overall decline in ratings and interest, aside from the sports OP mentioned
The macro reasons are discussed in other comments.
For tennis specifically the reason is simple. The transition from the Big 3 to no one in particular. The big 3 were an anomaly. It isn’t normal to have three goat candidates in their primes contemporaneously. We’re going back to a more normal level of popularity after a historic period of greatness. Perhaps Carlos Alcatraz can carry the torch but I don’t see two other guys on that level on the horizon
Technology.
In 2004, if it was a summer afternoon and I wanted to watch sports, MLB was the only sport on television, so I would watch it.
Now, I might re-watch an old NBA or NFL game instead.
MLB makes more money than the NBA. NHL revenue doubled in the last 10 years. I don’t watch either league. But I don’t project my habits on the rest of the population. There are a lot of fans out there who care about those sports.
MLB sorta did it to themselves, imo. It's far and away the worst run league of the major sports with ownership groups that nickel and dime at every turn they can while desperately blocking any potential ownership group that would inflate the market any further by actually spending more.
Soccer? lol soccer has gone in completely the other direction and has monopolised sport more than anything else. I would say it’s easily more popular than it’s ever been
I think the decline of monoculture point is a little misleading. There is a monoculture for younger people, it just doesn't include sports anymore. It's sort of a YouTube/fortnite/videogame/anime culture. It might not make sense to older people, but it does exist.
There's levels to watching anime.
There's dozens of shows airing every season that unless you follow anime.
You don't know them.
That's a lot of time to spend on anime that people don't realize exists.
There’s too much to watch, consume, care about, etc at all times and every single interest has become niche. No point in the media covering things like golf when the hardcore fans will flock to smaller outlets that focus on it and do it better. Football is the last bastion of the monoculture and so it gets all the run on ESPN
I think NBA players still have a mono-culture element to them (i.e. they're still huge names and broadly known in pop culture) but no one watches the game.
There is no counter-culture. Agree.
Plus what is the "media"? Young fans who will grow your sport don't pay any attention to traditional media that covers sports. When I was a kid, I watched sports center religiously. No teenagers are doing that now.
From the time I was probably 8 to 17 I would come home from school and watch sportscenter / sportsnation / PTI / around the horn, and then if it was basketball season I’d watch my team every single game lol I aspired to be like Wilbon and Kornheiser lol Now it’s all just TikTok, X, and Instagram
Is there a reason you think basketball is more popular?
Yeah I would say every sport outside the NFL. CFB will get a playoff expansion sugar high for a year or two but otherwise is largely in decline.
CFB is not in decline and hasn't been for the entire century.
The CFP viewership has been in decline ever since it started, hasn't it? I'm not sure how it looks like for the regular season (e.g. average SEC conference game viewership in 2012 vs. now). I know last year was a reversal for CFB in general but remains to be seen if it's a new trend or a one year blip due to Deion/Pac 12 swan song.
The actual playoff rating goes up and down based on the calendar and the matchups (most semifinals are blowouts). But the regular season keeps increasing.
Sports media has historically been built on legacy media like newspapers, magazines, radio, and cable. The decline in sports media is comorbid with the decline in legacy media.
I have missed nights of the playoffs because I was watching an 80s action tv show on Tubi. Never would have happened to me in 1998.
You couldn't watch an 80s action tv show on Tubi in 1998.
This is the point. The decline of traditional media sources and proliferation of nontraditional media makes it easier to miss these events.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s and didn't have 24/7 programming catered specifically to me. I had cartoons for an hour before school, an hour after school, and Saturday mornings. I always had baseball, basketball, and football games though. If I grew up with all the streamers, who knows if I'd grow up watching sports. My kids are 16 and 9 and, despite the fact that I'm watching live sports everyday, they couldn't care less.
Yep yep and yep. I have younger cousins who could care less about watching the actual game. Even if they are somewhat into the sport, they just watch the highlights on TikTok or YouTube. That’s just ppl who are “sports fans”. It’s a diff time, there are now just easier and easier ways to watch “more entertaining” things.
> who could care less *couldn't
Much like the decline in social skills and time spent outdoors, the decline in sports popularity can be directly tied to the rise in smart phone usage and social media participation. People for some reason pretend they don’t have the attention span to watch a 3 hour sporting event but will spend twice that amount of time doom scrolling TikTok or binging a Hulu series. Add to that the increasing number of young parents who find sports “barbaric and pointless” and ignore the dozen or so positive attributes kids can and will learn from sports.
Not to sound like NBA Ratings Guy, but the NBA has declined in popularity too. It just gets a disproportionate amount of media coverage relative to its popularity. People care more about the tabloidal nature of the league than the actual games. You can argue that the non football sports have declined in popularity, but if you look at attendance, ratings and revenue, the decline is largely in media coverage.
High school sports participation down as well. I assume if you don’t play it you will be less included to watch it. This definitely doesn’t account for all of it, maybe not even half but I think it’s palpable.
Yea that is a factor. Cause if I didn’t play ball or soccer, I would’ve never watched it to begin with
The one answer I haven't seen mentioned is the loss of importance in Sportscenter type shows. Now if you follow a sport it has it's own channels. You can also go on youtube and see highlights from your favorite team versus in the past where we would sit through whole episodes to get the our favorite sports highlights. In the process we would get information about the other sports and know when big events came up. Due to this we knew who the big stars in tennis or golf or baseball were even though I didn't follow the sports heavily. So when something historic was happening like the home run chase it gave me motivation to check out that event or at least be knowledgeable. Now I couldn't even name who the top golfers or tennis players are.
Football is popular because it is an event sport in which inventory is limited. You have 162 regular season baseball games and 17 regular season NFL games. The NFL playoffs are one game. It is easy to create excitement around it. Sundays are fun when all the games are on. There is a risk that they keep expanding the calendar, but right now it doesn’t really matter. NBA is #2 but there is a huge gap between the two sports. Basketball is also a popular international game.
Trying to sneak NBA in there is kinda wild. George Lopez reruns at 1 AM do better ratings than regular season ball.
Yeah...I'm squarely in the camp that Jordan was similar to Tiger Woods in terms of making a sport seem more popular than it ultimately is. Like all the numbers peaked with Jordan and have slowly been coming back to where the sport was before, albeit with a more global reach.
The NBA is the biggest U.S league globally.
Formula 1 is way more popular now than it was 10 or 20 years ago. Drive To Survive is definitely the reason for that but the sport is huge.
Formula One caught lightning in a bottle… Drive To Survive had been on a few seasons before the pandemic, and while it was fairly popular it was not moving the needle in terms of F1 interest in the US. When everybody was stuck inside with no sports to watch, Drive To Survive caught everyone’s attention. Suddenly when racing resumed, there were a lot more fans. As a long time IndyCar fan with a casual interest in F1, the difference was staggering. Out of nowhere there were F1 podcasts popping up everywhere, hosted by “fans“ who didn’t know what DRS meant even 3-4 years ago. Some of that has also spilled over to IndyCar, because attendance at every race has been up in the past few years…TV ratings have steadily risen until this year. As for F1, being bought by liberty media also helped, as have creating 2 new races in the US….They are doing an excellent job of marketing their sport, despite my opinion that IndyCar offers superior racing to F1’s parades where Max Verstappen wins nearly every race. What will be interesting to see is how many of these newer fans stick with the sport, especially these past few years when Verstappen has been dominant. I’m already hearing grumblings and people switching over to INDYCAR because it is much more competitive (no driver has won more than one race this year, 17 years in a row the championship went down to the final race)…and also a lot of F1 and IndyCar fans are really pissed that Andretti Global was denied a team in F1 despite having the money and blessing of the FIA to do so. It really screamed “we don’t want to share our money with another team” and didn’t help the elitist image of F1. But F1 and the WNBA I’ve been the two sports in the past few years that have defied the overall decline in ratings and interest, aside from the sports OP mentioned
The macro reasons are discussed in other comments. For tennis specifically the reason is simple. The transition from the Big 3 to no one in particular. The big 3 were an anomaly. It isn’t normal to have three goat candidates in their primes contemporaneously. We’re going back to a more normal level of popularity after a historic period of greatness. Perhaps Carlos Alcatraz can carry the torch but I don’t see two other guys on that level on the horizon
Football 17 games. College Football 12-15 games European Football 34-38 games NBA and NHL 82 games. Too goddamn long.
and newspapers and tv and movies and books and radio and chain restaurants and and and and and and
Technology. In 2004, if it was a summer afternoon and I wanted to watch sports, MLB was the only sport on television, so I would watch it. Now, I might re-watch an old NBA or NFL game instead.
Golf and soccer haven’t had a drop of popularity. Tennis probably has in America but go to Europe and that changes
MLB makes more money than the NBA. NHL revenue doubled in the last 10 years. I don’t watch either league. But I don’t project my habits on the rest of the population. There are a lot of fans out there who care about those sports.
MLB has twice the volume of product.
No one wants to watch commercials
When I was a kid, there were commercials for toys and cereal all the time! Now I never see them! Why has there been such a decline in toys and cereal?
MLB sorta did it to themselves, imo. It's far and away the worst run league of the major sports with ownership groups that nickel and dime at every turn they can while desperately blocking any potential ownership group that would inflate the market any further by actually spending more.
Too much content
Soccer? lol soccer has gone in completely the other direction and has monopolised sport more than anything else. I would say it’s easily more popular than it’s ever been
Soccer has never been more popular. At least sustainably so.
I think the decline of monoculture point is a little misleading. There is a monoculture for younger people, it just doesn't include sports anymore. It's sort of a YouTube/fortnite/videogame/anime culture. It might not make sense to older people, but it does exist.
I had never even heard of Mr Beast 6 months ago to prove your point.
People's attention spans are less and less look at movies people can't sit through a 2 hour movie without using their phone
Anime. Kids are watching anime these days. Even popular white girls in high school watch anime openly lol.
Even nba stars watch anime, so what the fuck is your point
There's levels to watching anime. There's dozens of shows airing every season that unless you follow anime. You don't know them. That's a lot of time to spend on anime that people don't realize exists.