Less is more: sport's battle to win over new fans - Financial Times

Sports are breaking with tradition by shifting to shorter formats as they seek to modernise to attract younger and more diverse audiences.

In recent weeks Formula One motor racing held its first Sprint event and women opened the Hundred, a new short-format English cricket competition.

The shorter events follow similar recent experiments in tennis, sailing and basketball and come as sports try to attract new fans — and lift revenues battered by the pandemic.

But organisers insist they are not complacent. “You can’t just shorten and expect people to engage with it,” said Sanjay Patel, 38, managing director of the Hundred. “Right from the start we were keen to make sure everything we did was relevant to a younger audience.”

The Hundred is designed to cater to younger fans. With each innings lasting for just 100 balls, the matches run over hours rather than days and the rules are meant to be more easily digestible.

The England and Wales Cricket Board, the sport’s national governing body, is spending £180m on the competition as it aims to emulate the success of the Indian Premier League, which plays short format “Twenty20” matches of 120 balls.

The IPL has grown into a $7bn entertainment behemoth since its 2008 launch, attracting the world’s greatest players and securing multibillion-dollar media rights deals.

The ECB fell to a pre-tax loss of £16m in the year to January 31, down from a profit of £6.5m in 2020, while cricket as a whole in England missed out on revenues of £100m because of the pandemic. The Hundred, whose launch was delayed by a year, is on course to bring in revenues of £49m to £52m in year one, from which about £10m will be left to invest into the game after costs.

The ECB hopes that its even shorter format than the IPL will appeal to more spectators. More than 10.5m people have followed the Hundred on television, it said.

Coronavirus lockdowns not only suspended competitions and kept fans away from matches, but also accelerated a shift to streaming and esports. The internet allows fans to pick and choose their entertainment more freely, while according to market research company Nielsen, 16 to 24-year-olds want “snackable” content and tend to steer away from watching full games.

The F1 sprint at Silverstone last month ran over 30 minutes rather than the usual two hours for a Grand Prix © Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty

These changes in behaviour were noted by backers of the contentious European Super League earlier this year. “Young people are no longer interested in football,” said Real Madrid president Florentino Pérez, whose proposals included shorter matches, while Juventus executive chair Andrea Agnelli has pointed to video games as competition for the next-generation of fans.

US online behemoth Amazon is keen to be at the forefront of the shift in sports viewing, buying up streaming rights for sports from English Premier League football, to tennis and the American National Football League. F1, owned Liberty Media of the US, has held discussions with Amazon, and in 2020 streamed a Grand Prix live and free of charge on YouTube in certain European markets.

As well as adapting to digital viewing trends, sports are playing catch-up on equality.

“I was a cricket-mad ten-year-old. I was very fortunate the local cricket club was very accommodating but I was the only girl there.” Now 34, Beth Barrett-Wild is head of the Hundred’s women’s competition, where “we’re very much putting women front and centre”.

No woman has competed in an F1 championship since Italian Lella Lombardi in the 1970s, but this season it is staging the all-female racing competition W Series. The race at last month’s British Grand Prix attracted an average live television audience of more than 500,000 in the UK.

“Unquestionably us racing alongside Formula One has raised our profile significantly but I also think it is a stamp of quality to the outside world,” said Catherine Bond Muir, W Series chief executive.

As well as women’s competition, F1 has expanded into esports. It also convinced sceptical teams and drivers to take part in a widely acclaimed Netflix series that it says won over a cohort of new fans.

Last month it trialled a short-format “sprint” race of 17 laps, an event running over about 30 minutes versus the usual 90 minutes to two hours of a Grand Prix. Aimed at simplifying and shortening competition to reach a wider audience, it also attracted a new sponsor partner, Crypto.com, a digital wallet provider.

The tie-up underscores how priorities are shifting. Former head of F1 Bernie Ecclestone infamously insisted on concentrating marketing efforts on “the 70-year-old guy who’s got plenty of cash” and bought watches from Rolex, a big F1 sponsor.

Ross Brawn, head of motorsport at F1, is wary of putting off existing fans, but conscious of the need to adapt.

“We don’t want to alienate anyone,” he said, but stressed that though F1 respected its past it “must never be held back” by its history.

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