While most Americans who watched Sunday’s Super Bowl XLII were thrilled with a close game that wasn’t decided until the final seconds, Financial Times ($) Simon Kuper examines why American football does not translate well to other cultures:
. . . few foreigners watch American sports. The media agency Initiative tallies audiences for sporting events, counting only the average number of live viewers who watched from home, and not in places like bars. It estimated that of the Super Bowlís 93 million live viewers in 2005, just three million were outside north America, including nearly one million in Mexico.
Meanwhile, game four of baseballís World Series in 2005 attracted about 21 million viewers in north America and Mexico, and fewer than one million elsewhere (all of them possibly American expats). And the last game of the NBA finals in 2005 drew fewer than one million live viewers outside the US, according to Initiative.
American sports suffer partly from having arrived late: the British empire got everywhere first. Kevin Alavy, an analyst at Initiative, says: ìIf people have been following the same sports for 50 or 100 years in a country, itís hard to break into that.î
Furthermore, Alavy points out that, American footballís NFL has almost no foreign players, while baseball draws its foreigners almost exclusively from central America, Venezuela and Japan. Foreign fans elsewhere have no local heroes to root for. The British, by contrast, spread football so thoroughly that foreigners now generally outperform them. Consequently, English footballís Premiership features about 70 nationalities. Qiang Yan, Chinese author of a book on the Premiership, describes 100 million Chinese sitting up at 1am to watch two Chinese play in Everton v Manchester City. ìThatís ridiculous, right?î he asks. The Premiership belongs to the Chinese, the French, the Israelis. [. . .]
. . . The gross revenues of major-league baseball were $6.1bn last year, up twofold since 2000. The NFL, the USís most popular sport, grosses a fraction more. And the average NBA team made pre-tax profits of $9.8m in 2007, says Forbes magazine.
But these sports earn peanuts abroad. That is worrying, because the biggest potential for growth is not in the US but in new markets such as China and Europe. Thatís why the NFL staged a league game in London last October. And in 2006 baseball staged the ìWorld Baseball Classicî. Unfortunately, the tournament demonstrated how far the game is from global conquest. Only about 10 countries fielded serious teams. The rest struggled: South Africaís biggest name was a minor-league pitcher with Wichita. Italyís star was a 37-year-old American with a Sicilian grandfather. Meanwhile many American fans grumbled that the ìclassicî was interrupting spring training. [. . .]
Global fans want global leagues, above all the NBA or the Premiership. Itís therefore wrong to think that Beckham will save American soccer by playing for the LA Galaxy. American soccer is alive and well and watching Manchester United on Fox Soccer Channel. This is a posthumous victory for the British empire.
Read the entire article.
I’m trying to remember why I should care if people from other countries don’t want to watch American sports (they wouldn’t understand the Bud Light commercials, anyway), especially considering the Anglo-centric position of the article’s author – have you ever put yourself through the torture of watching soccer, rugby, or cricket on TV? Each is about as dry as the English sense of humor. The most interesting part of taking in a televised foreign sporting event is deciding whether the participants or the spectators had bathed most recently.
Quite candidly, I’m not interested in having the Super Bowl MVP hail from Brazil – unless, of course, he played his college ball at ‘Bama, USC, or OU.