The ratings for the Chav Ball Final are in for the US market.
The full global tally is still a ways off, but the World Cup finished strong with U.S. viewers.
Capping off a record-breaking run for the FIFA tournament’s 2014 stay in Brazil, Sunday’s final between Germany and Argentina averaged 17.3 million viewers on ABC. Compared to the network’s total for the 2010 final in South Africa, the match was up 1.8 million viewers.
ABC, carrying ESPN’s coverage, was not the only network to air the game. Univision’s Spanish-language coverage also boasted a considerable showing with 9.2 million viewers. That’s up a shade from the 2010 final.
Looking at just the ABC-ESPN combo, the game stands as the third-most-watched soccer game in U.S. TV history. The U.S. match with Portugal set a new record several weeks ago with 18.2 million viewers, edging past No. 2: the the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup final at 17.98 million viewers.
For a final, this marks the most watched men’s World Cup championship game with U.S. viewers. And all told, ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC improved their combined World Cup showing by 39 percent over 2010, bringing in an average 4.6 million viewers during the 64 matches.
Online, the WatchESPN app generated 1.8 million live unique viewers.
One of the important aspects of Chav Ball in America is talking about how popular it is with fans. The games are so horribly dull, the TV coverage spends a lot of time showing images of “passionate” fans looking passionate. Passionate is always assumed to be a good thing, especially for women. Of course, Pol Pot was passionate about killing people so there’s that.
Anyway, how does that hold compared to other quadrennial events?
NBC and Nielsen were expected to release more detailed ratings information on Tuesday, but preliminary estimates show the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics averaging a strong 21.4 million viewers in primetime.
While down 12% from the 24.4 million who watched on average during the more time zone-friendly Vancouver Games of 2010, it’s up 6% from the 20.2 million average for the last European Winter Games in Torino in 2006.
The Closing Ceremony from Sochi on Sunday averaged about 15.1 million viewers, well below the 21.4 million who watched the final night from Vancouver (following that afternoon’s Team USA-Canada men’s gold medal game). It was up slightly from the 2006 Torino closer (14.8 million).
From a competitive standpoint, the Olympics have never been more dominant. For the first complete week of the Games (Feb. 10-16), NBC logged its most lopsided primetime victory in network history.
And the Olympics have helped NBC in other dayparts, including news. “Today” beat “Good Morning America” both complete weeks during the Games, while the Brian Williams-hosted “NBC Nightly News” had its most-watched week in eight years.
NBC paid $4.4 billion in 2011 for every Olympics through the 2020 Tokyo Summer Games. The Peacock and its networks aired a record 1,539 hours over its 18 days from Sochi, Russia, including 230 on NBC Sports Network, 185 on the broadcaster and 45 on MSNBC.
Facebook released data on Monday for the Games, during which roughly 45 million people chatted about the Winter Olympics on the social media website — for a total of about 120 million combined posts, comments and “likes.”
It looks like soccer remains as popular as figure skating and interpretive dance, despite the endless hype.
The sports writers on ESPN’s Around the Horn TV program have been pushing the same line about the supposedly growing interest in kickball in the US. However, only one of them knew that many, if not most, of Europe’s professional soccer players end up suffering brain damage from concussions caused by heading the ball…which goes to show you how little these “experts” know about the sport.
I did watch a bit of the title game, turned it off after getting bored watching nothing but long kicks see-sawing back and forth the entire length of the field, without either team ever getting any closer to the goal. I was fortunate to tune back in just minutes before Germany scored the winning goal after 113 minutes of a sleep-inducing 0 to 0 tie. The “experts” on ATH claimed that such low scores in kickball games are a turn-off for American sports fans. Hey, guys, the scores in ice hockey games are also typically low, but do Americans and Canadians consider hockey games boring? I don’t think so. One big difference between ice hockey and kickball games is that the goalies in hockey turn back 20 to 30 shots on goal each game. There’s a lot of action around the goal in hockey. The problem with kickball is not just its low scores, but there is just too little action around the goal…not enough shots on the goal keeper. If “soccer” wants to increase its appeal to sports fans in the US, the rules of the game have to change to force the offense to keep attacking the goal, perhaps something like the back-court line in basketball which forces the offense to keep attacking to score baskets. Forward and retreat, again and again, kick the ball up field, kick the ball down field, head the ball and knock yourself out, that’s just not going to fly.
I tried to watch it, but I dozed off for a big part of it. I really don’t have a beef with the game of soccer. It is what it is. A little dull, but the World Cup is OK. Soccer fans, on the other hand, are more annoying than a rash.