Young People Aren’t to Blame for Declining Interest Levels in Sport — So Stop Acting Like It
Making the sport more accessible to viewers could go a long way to fixing the problems young people are blamed for having caused.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If it is broken, publicly blame a group of people who can’t do anything to fix it. That’s the message received loud and clear from those who are very happy to go around claiming everything is broken.
This week’s latest old man yelling at a cloud was Ross Brawn. Formula One’s Technical Director claimed that young people aren’t capable of paying attention to a two-hour race so they need to be placated with the new Sprint Race format.
“Things change and young people don’t necessarily want to watch two hours of racing on a Sunday afternoon. We may find the short format racing’s more appealing to them,” he said.
“But we don’t want to disorientate our loyal fans who are really the core of our sport. And so can we find a combination? That’s what we’re testing. So there are three races this year. We’ll take stock and then we’ll decide what the next step is for the future.”
Yet there is really nothing to suggest young people actually want to be placated like this. Who asked for this?
As discussed on this newsletter before, the Sprint Race idea in its current form is a stripped-down, half-hearted attempt at what diehard fans of the sport had initially suggested as an attempt to make racing more exciting on a Sunday.
Brawn has completely twisted this around and is now blaming new and young fans for forcing F1 into making up convoluted ways to change the weekend format to make the weekend’s TV schedule more interesting to broadcasters.
But the interest levels of F1 in younger people is actually on the rise anyway.
People are more interested in the sport than they have been for a very long time. This is in large part thanks to the sport successfully targeting that audience through Netflix and Twitch, two of the most popular platforms among younger people.
This piece by Frank Dalleres from April breaks down the figures behind this and they are staggering.
“Research by Nielsen Sports based on 10 key global markets found that 73m new people claimed interest in F1 in the last 12 months,” wrote Dellares.
“And they are mostly young: 77 per cent of those new fans were aged 16–35. That age bracket now represents 46 per cent of F1’s interest pool, up from 40 per cent in January 2020.”
“Those numbers back up trends identified by 2019 studies, which also showed that half of all new fans, and 46 of the total fanbase, were female.”
These are genuinely impressive figures, and this form of marketing by F1 through Drive to Survive and the Virtual Grands Prix should be noted by other sports who also claim a lack of young viewers.
However, it is now equally absurd to then blame those new fans for not being able to pay attention to a two-hour race. It takes 10 hours to binge watch Netflix’s docu-series.
And let it be clear, people are binge-watching this series.
This is the pastime of many young people, to plough through a new series of TV in the space of a day or two. People watch day-long Twitch streams of all sorts of activities — ranging from watching people play video games to watching people hang out in hot tubs.
Young people can handle a couple hours of cars going around in circles. Particularly if the product itself is more exciting.
The Sprint Race format doesn’t tackle the problems of why the racing isn’t all that exciting. The current generation of cars can’t race each other properly because of the effects of dirty air. The next gen of cars, coming in 2022, have been designed to fix that. This is how the sport tackles its issues.
The track layouts of numerous circuits are poorly designed and don’t allow for cars to race each other through several corners or over multiple laps of back and forth action. A car needs to be over a second quicker than the car ahead to be fast enough to make an overtake at some circuits.
If a car is that much quicker, and does overtake, it then can easily drive off into the distance. Thus the tension of a lot of Grands Prix comes down to if an overtake is even possible, and once it is achieved that tension vanishes.
All of this is just the on-track action. This is only half of the problem. The other, much more significant portion, is that watching F1 events live just isn’t very accessible.
In Ireland and the United Kingdom, it costs €40 a month to subscribe to Sky Sports. It was only 10 years ago that all F1 races were shown on free to air TV on the BBC. Which one sounds more incentivising for young people to watch?
Nowadays the only race on free to air TV is the British Grand Prix, as it is protected under British law.
But, of course, F1 makes far too much money from the likes of Sky Sports to ever suggest going back to free to air TV. They took the money all those years ago in exchange for smaller viewership. So, when young people can’t afford to pay for Sky, they can’t be blamed for not watching the sport. F1 can’t have its cake and eat it too.
It is pig-faced to suggest the weekend format needs changing because of a lack of attention spans. These can’t be the reasons given for tinkering with the sport because they simply don’t square up to reality. Frankly, it’s insulting and most definitely patronising.
How can people pay attention when they simply don’t have the money to? Especially when Twitch is just a couple of clicks away, or Netflix is far more competitively priced.
Has Brawn ever even discussed F1’s issues with a group of 18-30 year olds? Nothing about what he is saying suggests he has. The sooner he does, the better.
Because something is definitely broken, but it isn’t what the decision makers think it is. They won’t learn until they realise young people aren’t the problem, they’re the solution.
