Earlier this week, The Independent newspaper in England
announced that the Premiership has grown so much in popularity that it now has 160 million viewers in 202 countries. Just for the Arsenal against Man United match, the UK TV audience was up to 6 million people.While the game is growing in popularity in the States, it’s a
different story back home in the UK where TV ratings are stagnant.This goes back to my original argument made several months ago that many Americans have a bigger appetite for watching Premiership football than those fans in the UK. The league is still a novel thing to watch in the U.S., where many fans religiously get up each weekend at 4:30am PT to watch the early kick-off. Plus with ten or more live Premiership matches on TV each week in the States, Americans are watching many of these games live.It’s a different story in the UK where fewer matches are shown on TV. Plus ticket prices for matches are exorbitant. But it does make you wonder how a team like a Wigan or Middlesbrough, who feature large numbers of empty seats week after week, would fare in the U.S. and whether the seats would be packed each week if those teams were transplated in America.
