I heard a theory recently that intrigued me. Simply stated, the theory was this: Americans care about soccer more than we think. Proponents of this theory claim that TV ratings are severely underestimating the number of people watching soccer games in the United States. Specifically, they point to two shortcomings in the way that media consumption is currently being measured.
The first problem relates to issue of public viewing. As it turns out, lots of Americans congregate at sports bars and at private parties to watch soccer games. Traditional media measurement techniques have no way of accounting for such out-of-the-home viewing. In other words, soccer’s biggest fans – those who love the sport enough to attend parties dedicated to it – are going almost entirely uncounted. It is widely accepted that ratings “would metastasize at an even greater rate if ESPN or Univision were credited for taproom and taqueria audiences. As neither network has made guarantees against Arbitron’s unaccredited ARB-TV [out-of-the-home measurement] service, millions of fans will go uncounted.”(1)
The second problem is internet viewing. World Cup games are now broadcast via the internet and thousands of people are watching them on their computers and on their mobile handsets. Despite this fundamental shift in the way people are watching soccer, “neither ESPN nor its mobile partners could provide total audience numbers for live mobile streaming.”(2)
Unfortunately, these two shortcomings leave us with our original question. Could the theory be true? Could Americans actually care about soccer more than we think? Unfortunately, the current media measurement techniques provide no way of definitively answering that question. Until we begin accurately measuring out-of-the-home and internet viewing, we simply cannot estimate the number of people actually viewing a given television event.
