Cricket Viewing Figures of the Ashes 2015 in Decline

The move to Sky Sports proves to attract less viewers of the Ashes 2015 cricket tournament in comparison with the previous years.

The win of England over Australia on this year’s Ashes 2015 was presented as a main sporting event of the week in all of the Sunday’s newspapers. Many considered this to be a proof of the attractiveness and popularity of the cricket in the country which overcomes even that of the third Grand Slam of the year Wimbledon. However, things are not straightforward, gambling news report. According to the analysis of several agencies measuring the popularity of sports events, the wider audience of this year’s Ashes significantly decreased.

• Viewership numbers for the Ashes are declining
• The move to Sky Sports is the main reason for the lower popularity
• No clear solutions for getting out of the “cricket crisis”

Cricket fans locate the reasons for the decline in the move of the tournament to Sky Sports back in 2009. The surveys shows that the England’s match against Australia was viewed by only 340,000 viewers. This figure is drastically lower than what used to be the case in the past when the tournament was broadcasted by Channel 4.

Ashes 2015? Not that interesting

Many say the reason for the lower number of viewers lay in the fact that the ladies final on the Wimbledon was scheduled for the same day. This, however, does not alter the broader point much. Cricket in England is not as popular as it once was. Its popularity for online betting is also decreased. Cricket fans were optimistic in May this year when England played against New Zealand on the final day of their first Test. The Sky’s audience was than estimated to be around 577,000. They even thought of it as an event that is going to revive the cricket in the country. Yet, if we take into consideration that the Championship play-off final between Middlesbrough and Norwich City was viewed by 757,000 viewers, these figures sound a bit defeating.

According to Babatunde Buraimo, a senior lecturer of sports management at Liverpool University, the ratings of Channel 4 concerning the live coverage of Ashes 2001 were far higher than those of Sky Sports. As online sportsbooks in the UK report, they were estimated to go above one million in 2001, reaching 2.5 million in 2005 and culminating with incredible 8.4 million on the fourth Test. That was definitely a time when the nation was deep into cricket. More than 45 % of those that were watching TV, were watching also the Ashes cricket tournament series.

But what happened next is considered by many cricket experts to be the worst strategic move in the sport. The Home Tests from 2009 started being broadcasted by Sky Sports and the popularity started to fail. Buraimo does not have all the necessary data to confirm this since Sky Sports do not make public the figures concerning the wider audience of the sports events they broadcast. However, the numbers of the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board (Barb), which are the main source in Buraimo’s analysis are sufficient to raise this worry. From 2013 only two of the matches on Ashes that Sky broadcasted attracted more than 650,000 viewers and were rated among Barb’s top 30 weekly ranking.

Ashes fans worried about the decline: what can be done?

The reasons for the decreased popularity of Ashes cannot exclusively be located in the move to Sky Sports. They are from a broader character which affects the popularity of cricket in general. The survey conducted by Sport England Active People during 2006 and 2007, showed that 380,000 people aged 16 or over played cricket at least once a month during the whole year. However, according to online gambling sites in the UK, the survey of the organization that was published last month indicates that the number had fallen to 259,200. A decline of an astonishing 32%.

How to exit this “cricket crisis” is not an easy task to solve. Many cricket fans would prefer the tournament to be brought back to a terrestrial TV. But this doesn’t seem to be a plausible solution. It is doubtful whether the terrestrial TV stations such as BBC, ITV or Channel 4 would be willing to change their daytime schedules for cricket, 35 days each summer. On the other side Sky Sports deal with Ashes is worth GBP 65 million. In case of stopping the collaboration with the TV station the sport will suffer a considerable loss.

The most devoted fans of the sport propose somehow radical moves, asking to copy the Australian Big Bash model, and show one game a night, split between Sky Sports and BBC. But this is a strategy that hardly coincides with the reality. Pessimist on the other side make a parallel between the situation of the English cricket and the Church of England. Both of them have an ageing demographics which attends them just because that is what they used to do in the past. To the youngsters both of them seem to be irrelevant.