Last Orders for Football; Exclusive UP YouGov research; Six Shares; What's the Olympics selling; Sexualised kit; NFL socialism; Artetachoke; Money v Age; Welcome to the Balearics
Overthinking the sports business, for money
Last Orders - Football and the Pub
As part of this week’s pub football podcast, we commissioned YouGov Sport to run some numbers.
These are exclusive to UP and quite startling.
One in four (24% - 3.4m) sports fans in Britain say they're visiting the pub less than a year ago.
The majority of these (55% - 1.9m) say that's because going to the pub has become too expensive.
Going forward, 14% of pub-going sports fans - 2m - say they will be visiting the pub less in the next 12 months.
Separately, 55% (1.9m) of pub-going sports fans say sport isn't part of their pub experience at all.
And 45% (6.4m) say the pub isn't important at all to their life as a sports fan.
Point two feels true.
Here’s a graphic Matt nicked from The Sunday Times to show where the money goes.
Now take this data and run it in to the piracy question, explored previously in our Pirates vs The Premier League series.
Taken together - the pub and piracy - and it’s hard not to connect the dots.
YouGov’s data for the pirates series revealed a counterintuitive theme: most people who pirate football via an illegal stream ALSO pay for a Sky subscription.
There are echoes of this in the pub data.
Most people who go to the pub to watch football ALSO have a Sky sub.
People who watch football, watch loads of it.
And they are happy to pay through the nose, at home and in the boozer.
But then what?
What happens to the people who don’t want to or can’t afford it, either at home or in the pub?
For all the talk of changing media consumption habits, sometimes things are just obvious.
Spoiler: It’s too expensive.
For many people, football (and the pub) is a luxury product.
See previous note, Last Orders for sport’s third space
Build: Generational cliches (aka Stereotypes can be a real time saver)
It’s tempting to jump to marketing stereotypes when presented with the YouGov data above.
Gen Z don’t drink etc.
But rather than being about age, it might be more fruitful to think in terms of money, or to be more precise, asset wealth.
One of the biggest dividing lines in British society is asset ownership.
This is true beyond the price of football.
What’s the Olympics really selling?
Since the Games’ commercial rebirth at LA in 1984, there’s been a duality to the Olympic brand, the resonance of which varies depending upon not just how old you are but how much money you have.
These are the fault lines exploited for political gain by the recent Brexit and Trump campaigns in the UK and US, which blamed the world’s ills on immigrants and political and corporate elites.
Against this backdrop, the ‘Olympic Family’ can look a lot like the marketing arm of a global economic system which has favoured educated, rich people and ruined the lives of the poor and disadvantaged for whom globalisation has meant the Uberisation of their jobs, fat-cat tax avoidance, zero-hour contracts and the loss of workplace rights.
Young v old, rich v poor: this is the fractured landscape facing the IOC and its commercial partners in every major market, making the job of selling the Olympics every bit as much about wealth and education as it is about age.
The NFL’s version of socialism
Meanwhile, over on UP Yours, the Unofficial Partner guest blog.
Buddhika Rajapakse and Jacques Bassili on the apparent contradictions in how this most American of sports is run and what other sports can learn from it.
UP’s 5th Birthday Do….tickets going fast
Click the image to buy a spot.
Top 6 Shares of the Week
Rory McIlroy going to LIV for $850m (he’s not, but it was an exciting 24 hrs)
Obit of Sir Paul Fox, from The Two Ronnies to Match of the Day
Sometimes the internet is perfect
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