Despite keen interest in the national team’s 6-1 debacle, the World Cup in Qatar fails to impress TV audiences in either Switzerland or Germany. The odds are better elsewhere.
Not to be looked at: Switzerland’s Xherdan Shaqiri during the game against Portugal.
lip./(dpa)
The Swiss national football team said goodbye to the World Cup in Qatar on Tuesday evening with a bitter 6-1 defeat. According to preliminary data from SRF, 1.49 million people from German-speaking Switzerland were tuned in when Portugal were 2-0 up just before the end of the first half. On average, 1.31 million viewers followed the round of 16, from which fans and team had hoped for much more. This is a new record for this World Cup, according to SRF.
Overall, however, it is clear that the major football event is hardly able to light up the screens in people’s living rooms during the Advent season. Apart from the two decisive games for Switzerland, the interest in this World Cup is manageable. The group games, which were shown during prime time at 8 p.m., were watched by an average of around 400,000 people from German-speaking Switzerland (28.4 percent market share). For comparison: in Russia in 2018, the evening World Cup group games without Swiss participation recorded an average of 560,000 spectators (39.7 percent market share). According to SRF, at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, an average of 607,000 people watched the comparable games (39.9 percent market share).
“The World Cup in Qatar is the first football World Cup to take place in the run-up to Christmas,” SRF explains the decline. That is why the audience figures can only be compared to a limited extent with the figures from previous world championships. For the first time ever, those interested in sports had to choose between the World Cup games and ski races.
The day of the week and the time are also important factors. This trend fits in with this: In contrast to the TV ratings, the online demand for the live games was at a record level. According to SRF, the previous games on the online portals have generated 19.6 million live stream starts – almost twice as many as all games of the World Cup in Russia.
Quota slump in Germany
The data for ARD and ZDF are also sobering: The number of viewers at the football World Cup in Qatar is lower than ever. In the round of 16, the minus compared to the 2018 World Cup in Russia was more than 50 percent.
The disinterest and boycott mood among many football fans was already evident in the preliminary round. 4.8 million watched the group games on ARD and ZDF on average, compared to 9.25 million four years ago. Even their own team could not animate the Germans: In 2018, the World Cup games of the German team still had an average of more than 25 million TV viewers – for the three games of this World Cup it was under 15 million.
“A World Cup in the hectic pre-Christmas period doesn’t create the kind of football atmosphere that develops in the summer, for example, through many outdoor public viewing offers,” says media scientist Jana Wiske. In her opinion, many people are increasingly rejecting “this extreme form of commercialization of football: the sum of the grievances surrounding the World Cup in Qatar and the dubious role of Fifa were too much for a large part of football fans, and a boycott attitude has really established itself .»
Bar visitors in Lausanne follow the game between Switzerland and Portugal while standing on chairs.
The Cologne media expert Christoph Bertling sees it similarly. “Usually football world cups connect, they are considered huge social campfires.” But this World Cup is polarizing. In his view, the main reasons are the “unusual transmission time in the winter, a very strong politicization and a lack of public viewing”.
After all: Portugal’s 6-1 victory over Switzerland was the most-watched program of the day in Germany with 5.82 million on Tuesday. After the failure of the German team, many apparently wanted to see whether their little neighbors in the south could do better.
Success usually brings better odds
Elsewhere, however, enthusiasm for the World Cup is unbroken. In France, the TV ratings for the football World Cup in Qatar are extremely high. In the round of 16 against Poland, an average of 14.32 million tuned in to the TF 1 channel – almost 2 million more people than in the 2018 round of 16 against even more prominent opponents Argentina.
In the United States, Fox Sports also saw significantly higher ratings compared to 2018. However, the increase may also have something to do with the fact that the American team did not qualify for the tournament four years ago. In Japan, whose team was the unexpected group winner, the success in Qatar was also accompanied by great euphoria from the cheering fans.