Fanalytics – Introduction

So the piece I wrote on hockey marketing got me thinking  (ed. note – that’s never a good thing), and I’ve been thinking about a problem the past few days – how the heck can you track a sports popularity. Citing back to the prior piece, VS is currently not available on Direct TV, how do profitable demographics play into the relative publicity of various sports, and so on. And this is no way influenced by me trying to prove how great hockey is.

To start off with the basics, the Harris  Corporation tracks sports popularity, which the NHL has shown growth. Since 1985, they have risen from 2 to 5 % in popularity. The NBA, their seasonal competitor has remained stagnant at 6%. Notice that in the mid 80s, when this started – the NHL had arguably their most marketable star, Wayne Gretzky, in history, and the NBA had the Magic/Bird era blossoming. Football appears to be the most popular far and away, and has surpassed baseball as the national sport.

Television ratings also point to the continued growth of the NHL. Game 7 of the Stanley Cup final was the highest rated game in 36 years. 8 million viewers is a respectable number for an NFL or MLB playoff game – and pointing to football, they own the Sunday market while this number was drawn on a Friday night. (All of these stats make me angrier and angrier at Gary Bettman for the Versus deal  (I’d love to have seen him negotiate with the Native Americans for the rights to Manhattan – he would have granted them exclusive building rights for 150 years and the price would have been at least $50 worth of beads.)

The fantasy realm is where football and baseball really take hold. I’m in 3 baseball and 3 football money leagues, and they keep me engaged throughout the year – lord knows being a Jets fan usually requires some type of secondary interest. Hockey, which should be a statheads dream, is not analyzed at the level required to create excessively interesting leagues. Just look at the various websites, and hockey ranks in a distant 4th.

Ironically, the demos of hockey fans tend to be above average income males – they’ve got money to burn and an itch to gamble. To increase the leagues viability, a Vegas franchise would be something worth considering – a place to bet on than go watch a game.

The final problem dealing with hockey growth, as commentator Pam pointed out, is capturing the youth market. Hockey, I think, would be well served by encouraging 4 on 4 indoor soccer – common in colleges, as a game that plays similar to hockey. People that get used to the lesser bodies would be amazed at the speed the NHL operates on.

Single sport blogs would be another interesting method to track popularity. Which blogs get the most hits, which sports generate the most topical blogs. I’m not terribly concerned, but will attempt to track, multi sport blogs coverage of various sports. I feel highly traffic sole purpose blogs will do a better job of determining the level of interest in a sport.

So, objectively, how can we measure the sports popularity. I think some metric of live attendance ( which would have to be weighed accordingly for the larger college football stadiums); capacity full of arena; TV ratings; fantasy participation;  and total wagers could play a large part in this.  I will be producing a series of articles on the topic, where I attempt to breakdown popularity and see where the fan base and revenues come from. What other factors do you think should be considered?

Tags: fanalytics, large scale projects, mlb, nba, NCAA, nfl, nhl, popularity, sabermetrics
Categories: Daily Specials, Munchies

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 17th, 2009 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Daily Specials, Munchies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.