Sports journalists are less willing than alcoholics to admit they have a problem:
Almost every single sport has experienced a TV ratings erosion over the past year, and dishonest people with an agenda have liked blaming the lower ratings on sports becoming more political.
Well, the least political sport on the planet just got some depressing ratings news. This weekend’s Masters on CBS generated its lowest viewership numbers in 28 years.
I don’t follow golf closely, but to my knowledge, there have not been any golfers who have kneeled during a playing of the national anthem. There have not been many golfers who have protested anything. Courses have not featured political messages.
Yet the biggest tournament of them all just pulled its worst numbers since 1993.
Have a few people here and there stopped watching sports in some ridiculous protest because of politics? Yes. Is it a significant, game-changing number? No.
The obvious and most significant reason for any and all sports TV ratings loss is cord-cutting. People are saying goodbye to cable at a rapid rate. From 2014 to 2020, 23{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} of households cut the cord. Approximately 6.6 million households cut the cord in 2020 after 6.3 million households cut the cord in 2019.
While we have data on cord-cutting, we don’t have numbers for how the pandemic has changed the viewing habits of sports fans. But it’s obvious people’s lives are different, their schedules have changed and their priorities have shifted. We can’t quantify any of these things, but they are absolutely a factor in sports across the board losing viewers.
Actually, it’s much more likely that there is a knock-on effect. I didn’t watch the Masters, so I have no idea if it was a big diversity fest, although the fact that a Japanese golfer won it for the first time ever does tend to indicate that it might have been.
But at this point, I suspect people are beginning to assume that televised sports are all converged, and they’re actually beginning to preemptively turn them off. I haven’t not only quit watching NFL football, but I’ve quit watching Premiership and Seria A football as well, in addition to the Champions League. I assume that they’re chock full of SJW hectoring, but I don’t actually know, because I preemptively stopped watching them.