Viewers have failed to arrive for round one of A-League on its new broadcast home at Channel 10.
The decision to schedule a Sydney derby for round one of the new free-to-air broadcast deal appears to have been met by apathy from much of the rest of the country, with a national audience of just 146k (102k metro) tuning in for Saturday nights clash between the Western City Wanderers and Sydney FC.
The soft ratings results mean’s the match fell well out of the top 20 programs chart and had less free-to-air viewers than other Saturday programs including Bluey and the SBS World News.
By contrast, the Seven networks evening coverage of the Supercars Championship in Sydney achieved a national broadcast audience of 297k (150k metro) on 7mate.
Streaming audiences figures for both sporting events are currently unavailable. A-League coverage was simulcast on streaming platforms 10play and Paramount+ while the Supercars were also available on 7plus and Foxtel/Kayo.
While last night’s A-League ratings were low compared with other sports. It should be noted the ratings result is believed to be the highest a non-finals A-League match has achieved on free-to-air television in the last five years.
Last month, Channel 10’s Sport Sales Director Nick Bower told the Mi3 media podcast the network had “a fantastic pedigree in making pay-tv sport big” adding that in the first year of the networks Big Bash deal it “grew the audience for that sport by 3.7 times and it continued to grow”.
Patience give it time it’s only week one
Interesting to note game 1 of Ten’s BBL coverage back in 2012 rated over a million nationally. It’s a long road for the A League from a low base
If they had an app for smart tv they might have more viewers
Hi Arm – they do. The Paramount+ app is available on most Android-powered Sony TVs, and a wide range of Samsung TVs. It’s also on Apple TV.
No it isn’t available on Samsung and most TVs.
Hi – I apologise re: the bum steer on Samsung TVs. It is available on a number of plug-in devices along with Android TV’s… https://support.paramountplus.com/s/article/PI-On-which-devices-can-I-watch-Paramount?language=en_US
Cricket nrl and afl have had the luxury of mass TV publicity and advertising on free to air tv over last 50 years. Football us just starting out now from scratch.. you cannot compare..with consistent advertising and publicity by ch 10…football audiences will grow
Does anyone still actually believe the figures put out for any program. They are guesses at best.
Hi SC – the numbers that come from OzTAM are far from guesses, especially when we’re talking about the figures from the catch-up sites. They are accurate and trustworthy.
Most people I know watched it in devices other than TVs. Football has a younger demographic so you need streaming figures to get an idea of the true numbers.
its soccer nobody in Australia likes soccer its far to boring played by delicate drama queens
Its never going to rate well