Football v Füßball
People love national sports. They love talking about them, watching them, following them on social media and buying their merchandising. Americans often have some sort of debate as to what the “national sport” of America would be. Depending on region baseball, football or basketball tend to be what most people think of. However, the closer to Canada you go the more people that will argue for hockey there are. The rest of the world doesn’t seem to have anywhere near the debate, especially in Europe or South America. This is because füßball or soccer reigns supreme as the undisputed king. Now as someone who lives with the privilege of having access to the internet, I get the best of both worlds and get to support both my American and Germany identities’ favorite past times. This got me wondering, how much do the two really compare?
With the Super bowl game occurring February 3rd, I decided to see how the numbers compared to my favorite füßball team’s league, EUFA Champions League. As a New England Patriots fan, I didn’t find this year’s game to be as disappointing as some Americans did. In fact, with a 13–3 victory over the Rams, I was quite pleased. Although compared to past Patriot’s wins, this game felt more like a regular season game than it did the super bowl. Champions League is currently about one week away from finishing the first half of the season with the finals match set to happen June 1, 2019. I wanted to dissect this super bowl along with 2018 Champions finals numbers on viewership and over all league revenue comparing to scale just how popular these national sports really are. For a basic overall of numbers, there are 327.16 million people in the United States as of February of 2018 and 5,711,373,609 in Europe, Asia and South America which makes a combined total of 7.63 billion people in the world.
On February 3, 98.2 million people turned on their televisions to watch the St. Louis Rams attempt to coup the New England Patriots. This number has been a steady drop from the ultimate high in 2015 of 114.4 million people since the leagues combined in 1990 due to controversies plaguing the NFL. However, CBS, who broadcasted this year’s game, reporter the highest number ever of people who digitally streamed the game, 2.6 million people, which offsets traditional broadcast lines. EUFA has reported that their final games reach a reported audience of over 200 countries and 165 million people. Since 2012, EUFA has relied on more than just their television broadcasting to reach global audiences. They began using Facebook as a tool for additional viewership and to create target audiences to improve viewership from. This included 26 million people having 67 million Facebook interactions during the 2012 match between Real Madrid CF and Club Atlético de Madrid.
A comparison of both 2015 games, which both had the highest viewership and revenue at the time, found the Super Bowl reaching 180 countries and having $3 billion dollars in broadcasting revenue and the Champions League Final with over 200 countries and $1.63 billion in broadcast revenue. EUFA Champions League grosses around 3.25 billion euro in commercial revenue per season and gained 2089.43 million euro in total revenue in the 2016/17 season. The Super Bowl had a $14.9 billion consumer spending on and in preparation for Super Bowl Sunday. The 2019 Super Bowl had a $408 million ad revenue and $15 billion this past season in total revenue.
Now that was numbers and quite a bit of money. So, what does it mean? Comparatively Americans are more likely to spend money towards total revenue for the NFL than the European or South American counterparts in the Champions League. However, the total viewership for Champions, which steadily increases, is higher; meaning more people watch the games. All in all, modern day era steaming, twitter and TV have made viewing the games I love easier. Whether the Pats play in the city I live or I watch Bayern-Munich from across the world, I am still able to be as much of a fan in either place.
