Is Premiership viewing in decline, or is it just a case of football snobbery? https://t.co/z6sJr0LOnZ via @campaignmag & @VCCPMedia
— Sam Fenton-Elstone (@sjfe) October 22, 2016
This week, numerous publications have released articles regarding the 19% fall in viewing of live Sky Sports Premier League Football – potentially a huge issue given the £5bn Sky has invested alongside BT to acquire the rights.
So, what’s going on?
There have been a number of different theories. The quality of the football, post-Euro 2016 apathy, even the issue of shared ownership of the Premier League rights between Sky and BT.
Rather than join in with the speculation, we at VCCP Media decided to delve a little deeper and look into the data and having done so, it would seem that a simple case of football snobbery could be at the root of the viewing decline.
Judging the perceived quality of a game is a little tricky, so in our analysis we used the previous season’s league table as a proxy for “quality”, assigning each team the corresponding league ranking as their number.
For example, this season Leicester City is number one (because they finished first last season), Arsenal is two (finished second last year), Spurs is three (finished third last year) and so on. The same was done for the start of the 2015/16 league using the finishing positions of the 2014/15 season (Chelsea number one …), etc.