Comparing football to hockey
Anyway, long story short, is hockey more popular than football in Russia? If not, how are the figures? I'd be especially happy to hear from local Russians about their preferences - for example, would you and your friends choose a KHL play-off game or CSKA-Zenit? What is the general trend for people?
When talking about hockey's popularity, we need to understand that it's one of the longest running and most often televised sports of the year. When you have a 60 game season, 6-week playoffs, EHT, World Championship and an occasional NHL game in the morning, and it's mostly all the same players, it's hard to get excited for a regular game, and long series and long regular seasons decrease the amount of truly important matches.
RosGosTerror has much less games, is only shown on weekends, and best derbies can sometimes be expected for months. So of course my friends and I are going to watch CSKA-Zenit, unless it's a match that won't decide anything and the KHL alternative is an important elimination game.
Then again, there are some tendencies that affect football's popularity negatively:
- Russian football translations generally have more competition, because Match-TV broadcasts eurocups and foreign championships (though there's a large portion of fans who are not interested in other leagues and don't watch them), and also the weekend timing;
- nogomyach overall has a very negative image because of all scandals, corruption and national team fails;
- football stadiums are notorious for being a place you'd rather not bring you family to, and fans are regarded as a bunch of agressive morons;
- after RFPL had made the decision of selling the broadcasting rights to the NTV+, which was inconvenient, didn't provide the quality of broadcasting that was worth being paid for and had its commentators insulting their viewers, football's popularity declined sharply;
- and the idiotic decision of moving the season to the autumn-winter schedule forced people to attend open stadiums in February and December.
All this contributed to RFPL's attendance declining to ~11k after having peaks at 13,25k in 2007 and 13k in 2011/2012. Which is, of course, a lot more than the KHL has, but 30-40k arenas have something to do with it, with only 7 teams having average attendance above 10k:
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http://www.sports.ru/tribuna/blogs/marselo_io_off/952604.html[/collapse]
Ratings are harder to assess in Russian, because cable/satellite TV isn't as wide used so far. But the estimates show a hard decline in football viewership during the recent years:
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http://www.championat.com/business/...e-transljacii-zimy-2016-na-rossijskom-tv.html[/collapse]
Meanwhile, Tchernyshenko has repeatedly boasted of enormous ratingz for the KHL playoffs this spring:
Average ratingz have doubled last year's, the share increased by 32% and keeps jumping
http://www.khl.ru/news/2016/03/21/242257.html
The share for the 6th game of the KHL final series was as high as 11.8% which is unheard of in hockey
http://www.khl.ru/news/2016/04/19/307853.html
Match-TV also
had record ratingz over that time.
Average KHL viewership in Jan-Feb 2016 was estimated 1.9M, which I think is pretty good, but doesn't compare to Champion's League, Europa League, Copa de Rusia, biathlon or even hockey World Juniors.
Which brings us to the fact that any domestic league gets demolished while being compared to international competitions, which are traditionally much more popular in Russia. If we watch 2014 and 2015 years, with 2014 obviously being an anomaly:
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2014:
Olympics-adjusted:
2015:
Football-adjusted:
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Euro-2016 is also
esimated to have great ratings and shares around 28-30%.
So, as we can see,
- football is still easily the most popular sport in Russia, all of World Cup, Euro, domestic champioship, foreign championship and eurocups being ratings frontrtunners;
- national team hockey is probably 2nd, despite a loss in ratings to 2014 Olympic Figure Skating;
- occasinaly world title boxing or MMA (Povetkin, Lebedev, Emelianenko) can get ratings above any hockey as well;
- KHL has a hard time keeping up with season-long international competitions like biathlon world cup or figure skating grand prix;
- with that said, KHL playoffs are very promising;
- despite football's decline and hockey's growth in popularity in ratings, it's hard to imagine hockey overcoming nogomyach any time soon.