Something is changing in the habits of the public that consumes television. Football, formerly an unbeatable audience-building machine, is in a moment of crisis after the Eurocup recorded the lowest audience in Spain in its history at the tournament’s premiere.
The inaugural match between Italy and Turkey barely registered a following of 1,737,000 million viewers and barely 14.1% share on Telecinco. That same channel broadcast the first match of the European Championship in 2016 with very different results, bringing together 4,490,000 viewers in France-Romania with a 33.8% audience share. To give you an idea of the failure of the first game of the Eurocup, the program of heart Friday Deluxe had a very similar audience to the game just after.
Mediaset could say that the competition that Friday night with Antena 3 and the program La Voz Kids could have made a dent to leave the audience in less than half. On Saturday, however, things improved little or nothing. Despite the large bill that the duel between Belgium and Russia had, the audiences did not improve anything from the day of the premiere with a discreet 14.7% share for 1,544,000 viewers on Telecinco , numbers much lower than the previous week without football signed. Not even the Eriksen incident succeeded in reviving the audience’s interest in the Ceferin Eurocup.
It seems that it has been shown that more matches of less quality bring with them this type of audience. It must be remembered that in this edition even the third parties of the groups of four teams can go to the round of 16, reducing a great iota of importance to games that are no longer played for life or death. Not surprisingly, this thesis was confirmed on Sunday with a game on Cuatro – the second channel in Mediaset’s audience – which brought together almost as many people at 3 pm as in prime time on Telecinco. It was a quality match that measured England against Croatia, gathering 1,552,000 spectators and a 14.2% share.
The numbers are not deceiving and make it clear that people are interested in football as long as there is a game of interest involved . Seeing second-tier teams like North Macedonia or Austria – which barely reached a million viewers and 10% viewership – does not matter to the viewer in general. Ceferin will have a very difficult time replicating the results of the last European Championship in 2016 , where Telecinco signed a stratospheric average of 5,552,000 viewers and a 37.7% share.
The public in Spain is changing its customs and all the actors involved are warned, as Florentino Pérez said in his Superliga project. The invisible League of Thebes – with games with less audience than repeated episodes of The Simpsons – and Ceferin’s inconsequential Eurocup must take note of what the people want. Fewer games, more things at stake and, above all, quality on the field.
