36 minutes ago, bpac55 said:

Oh wow these are TERRRRRRIBLE

 

Heathered Jersey??? What is this the GAP???

And a black helmet, wow how original...😒

 

1 hour ago, we_gotta_believe said:

Digging deeper into the viewership numbers, it's likely the offers for the rights were based on the metric for average live audience which is more in line with the disparity in prize pool money. 

For 2018, total viewership for the entire tournament was 3.5B (which is defined by at least one minute of viewing of any match), the final match had 1.1B viewers watching at least one minute, with an average live audience of 517M, and an average live audience across all 64 games of 191M.

For 2019, total viewership for the entire tournament was 1.1B, the final had 262M, with an average live audience of 82M, and an average live audience of 17M across all games. 

So an offer to sell the rights for a tenth of the men's isn't entirely unjustified, but these numbers still stand in stark contrast to the previous decisions to bundle the rights and "give them away for free" because allegedly nobody watched enough to justify selling them on their own. 

https://digitalhub.fifa.com/m/5fd80f719fbff8e4/original/rvgxekduqpeo1ptbgcng-pdf.pdf

https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league/2018-russia-world-cup-england-france-croatia-final-fifa-viewing-figures-numbers-a8694261.html

 

EDIT: I'm leaving out 2022 because using viewership numbers there is dumb for two reasons: 1) the 2023 world cup hasn't happened yet so it's not gonna be an apples to apples comparison until those numbers come out, and 2) it was a crowning achievement for the MF'ing goat, baby! No doubt the final will stand out as one of the best matches ever played, let alone the best WC final ever played. And it just so happened to include the best player to have ever set foot on a pitch finally getting the trophy that eluded him his entire career. Likely his last WC, same for crynaldo, and even other greats like Modric, and possibly Lewa. Needless to say it was anomalous in several ways.

it depends what the demographic of the viewers is, Men's Soccer has a traditional audience that is much like the NFL's it's overwhelmingly your absolute everyman average joe.

So you have big advertisers with big ad budgets, like

car manufacturers (With class leading torque our new truck can pull the moon out of orbit* while making you feel like the greatest dad/husband in the world)

electronics brands (imagine you were watching this game on an even bigger TV wouldn't that be amazing?),

games consoles (Get insulted in real time by teenagers in your own home as you play the new CoD online),

beer makers (hey man this game would be even more fun if you were drunk off your arse eating barbecue on your back lawn with that new giant TV wedged into the French doors)

fast food chains (why bother with barbecue when we'll deliver all these calories direct to your door for $5.99)

and Pharma (hey man you can definitely still get it up, but if you have a friend who can't, try our little blue pills), 

most or all of which play a lot less well to an audience with a gender mix that's skewed female, then you're not going to be able to sell those ad minutes so lucratively and they'll be for products (Hey you have periods, try our sanitary products that let you keep roller skating and dancing even though you probably feel like crap and just want to curl up with painkillers and a hot water bottle) which play even worse to the aforementioned average Joes, it's a hard market to pitch at.

https://www.immaculategrid.com/football

Anyone ever try this out?  Kinda fun. Got to remember the player had to have played an actual snap for both teams, so recent signings and PS/drafted players don't count (screwed me twice on the Eagles/49ers one)

Spoiler

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16 minutes ago, DEagle7 said:

https://www.immaculategrid.com/football

Anyone ever try this out?  Kinda fun. Got to remember the player had to have played an actual snap for both teams, so recent signings and PS/drafted players don't count (screwed me twice on the Eagles/49ers one)

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Nice find. I'm a fan

 

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Spoiler

 

My strategy with the Vikings is obvious.  They have been ass at QB for so long they change them almost every year.  So I thought through of all the cast offs they brought on.

 

I also got a kick out of the fact I JUST posted that Westbrook went from Philly to San Fran  

 

3 hours ago, we_gotta_believe said:

Now square that with the viewership numbers. No need to dig them up, it's right there in your article if we want to take Infatino's word...

"The viewing figures of the FIFA Women’s World Cup are 50-60 per cent of the men's FIFA World Cup, yet the broadcasters’ offers in the 'Big 5' European countries for the FIFA Women’s World Cup are 20 to 100 times lower than for the men’s FIFA World Cup," he added.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that (until this year), an organization known for shady backroom deals was more than content to accept obvious low-ball offers for the previously bundled women's rights that it would never have accepted if separately offered for the men's rights. 

Viewership numbers don't set rights fees, as the quality of viewers matters and drives ad revenue. It's why the rights fees for the WWE are nowhere near the NBA, despite the viewership numbers being similar. The main reason is the advertising rates are MUCH lower for WWE given the audience and the quality perception. I've spent a lot of time looking at this from an investment perspective. There is not a direct correlation between viewership and rights fees/advertising rates. Just in the US alone, which is the hotbed for women's soccer (because we win), the ad spend for the men's world Cup in 2018 was 3.6x higher than the women's world cup in 2019 -- and the US men didn't make the 2018 World Cup! 

If you want to say FIFA should try and get more for the WWC fees, well...OK, but show me who is willing to pay more.

1 hour ago, bpac55 said:

Oh wow these are TERRRRRRIBLE

 

These black helmets are so played out, geez. I wish Lurie and company would hire some creative artist type personnel for uniforms, fonts, helmets, etc etc. 

1 hour ago, EricAllenPick6 said:

Those are awesome.  Love it.  Keep them, please.

They never should have gone away from it, but they hired Jerry Glanville to be their HC and he fancied himself to be Johnny Cash... and the all black falcons uniforms were born.  So stupid.

1 hour ago, bpac55 said:

Oh wow these are TERRRRRRIBLE

 

Put a brown paper bag over those. Yuck.

1 hour ago, EricAllenPick6 said:

It's a great day for Washington fans.  A terrible day for the rest of the NFC East.  

 

Because Josh Harris has proven to know what he's doing running the Sixers?  Seems like a nothing move to me.  Washington is a laughingstock right now.  They might elevate all the way to medicore with Harris running the ship.

51 minutes ago, Alphagrand said:

Their regular uniforms are among the worst in the NFL, so ....    🤷‍♂️

They are pretty classic going way back.  I like the Colts regular unis.

2 minutes ago, Iggles_Phan said:

They are pretty classic going way back.  I like the Colts regular unis.

Classic but incredibly boring. The biggest thing that makes them look bad IMO is the grey facemask. Either go white or blue and it would change the look of the uniform. 

Interesting to see 2 HOF RB who were better known as Rams.

8 hours ago, mattwill said:

Please take your clown show out of town.

I'm in the process of reading Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking. EVA could do worse than read it. Not that he/she/it will, of course.

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There are actually 2 BTW

https://dynasty-daddy.com/gridiron

So everyone gets new ones but us 

32 minutes ago, vikas83 said:

Viewership numbers don't set rights fees, as the quality of viewers matters and drives ad revenue. It's why the rights fees for the WWE are nowhere near the NBA, despite the viewership numbers being similar. The main reason is the advertising rates are MUCH lower for WWE given the audience and the quality perception. I've spent a lot of time looking at this from an investment perspective. There is not a direct correlation between viewership and rights fees/advertising rates. Just in the US alone, which is the hotbed for women's soccer (because we win), the ad spend for the men's world Cup in 2018 was 3.6x higher than the women's world cup in 2019 -- and the US men didn't make the 2018 World Cup! 

If you want to say FIFA should try and get more for the WWC fees, well...OK, but show me who is willing to pay more.

Yeah I think that's the issue, I can't help but question how concerned FIFA was (historically at least) with selling the rights to the women's game when they were already raking in so much from so many host countries who were crawling over each other like crabs to grease the palms of everyone they could to secure a bid to host the men's tournament. Gotta imagine it would've been chump change in comparison, which in a roundabout way maybe only reinforces your point (being that nobody was bribing officials to host the women's tournament like they were for the men's.)

As for finding anyone willing to pay more, apparently we've gone from "free" in 2019 to $200M in 2023, so that's a pretty good start by most metrics.

9 hours ago, devpool said:

You are way too hung up on specific players. The entire point is if our best athletes decided to play soccer INSTEAD OF football, basketball, etc they would be world class. I only cited specific players because you for some reason decided to start naming people. I'm not talking about taking players FROM the sports they're currently in. I'm saying if those players decided to play soccer they could be good because of their athletic profile.

Nowhere did I say "mahomes and LeBron would be awesome soccer players". I didn't think I needed to clarify that when I said "our best athletes" I didn't mean ones that have been playing their respective sports for 10+ years but I guess I did.

The average height of a male professional soccer player is probably 5’9”. The average height of an NBA player is probably 6’7 or so. 

Soccer is by far the most popular youth sport in America. My meaningless opinion, I think it has more to do with how our soccer players are developed than our best athletes playing other sports. 30 years ago - sure. 
 

We’re also the 3rd or 4th largest country in the world so there’s a way bigger poll of athletes to pick from compared to Italy, France, or Germany. 
 

There’s no reason why the USA shouldn’t be a top 5 national team at this point. 

27 minutes ago, vikas83 said:

Viewership numbers don't set rights fees, as the quality of viewers matters and drives ad revenue. It's why the rights fees for the WWE are nowhere near the NBA, despite the viewership numbers being similar. The main reason is the advertising rates are MUCH lower for WWE given the audience and the quality perception. I've spent a lot of time looking at this from an investment perspective. There is not a direct correlation between viewership and rights fees/advertising rates. Just in the US alone, which is the hotbed for women's soccer (because we win), the ad spend for the men's world Cup in 2018 was 3.6x higher than the women's world cup in 2019 -- and the US men didn't make the 2018 World Cup! 

If you want to say FIFA should try and get more for the WWC fees, well...OK, but show me who is willing to pay more.

Is it possible that the problem is fifa bungled ad sales in the 2019 world cup? Sponsor partnerships increased 150 percent this wc. How do you reconcile that? Do you think maybe fifa left some money on the table previously, or is women's soccer just that much more popular now? 

8 minutes ago, just relax said:

I'm in the process of reading Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking. EVA could do worse than read it. Not that he/she/it will, of course.

I wish I would have taken a keener interest in Astronomy when I was younger.  IIRC we were taught in Grade 5/6 science class that Jupiter had 12 moons and Saturn had 9 moons.  Now students are being taught that Jupiter has 67 moons, Saturn has 66, Uranus has 27, etc.  We weren't even taught that Uranus and Neptune had rings.  A lot of what is passed off as scientific "fact" is only such until technology yields new discoveries, when we realize a lot of cosmological science is scientific theory, in reality.

Now with the JWST discovering fully formed galaxies from only a few million years after the theorized timeline of the formation of the universe, scientists need to go from saying "those shouldn't be there" to theorizing "maybe the universe is actually 24 billion years old instead of 14 billion" -- that's a pretty big difference, even for a simple person like me.  As more discoveries are made over the next few years, textbooks will need to be re-written again.  

Having said all that, flat earthers need a collective cuff across the head.

40 minutes ago, paco said:

Nice find. I'm a fan

 

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  Reveal hidden contents

 

My strategy with the Vikings is obvious.  They have been ass at QB for so long they change them almost every year.  So I thought through of all the cast offs they brought on.

 

I also got a kick out of the fact I JUST posted that Westbrook went from Philly to San Fran  

 

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Spoiler

 

 

3 minutes ago, we_gotta_believe said:

Yeah I think that's the issue, I can't help but question how concerned FIFA was (historically at least) with selling the rights to the women's game when they were already raking in so much from so many host countries who were crawling over each other like crabs to grease the palms of everyone they could to secure a bid to host the men's tournament. Gotta imagine it would've been chump change in comparison, which in a roundabout way maybe only reinforces your point (being that nobody was bribing officials to host the women's tournament like they were for the men's.)

As for finding anyone willing to pay more, apparently we've gone from "free" in 2019 to $200M in 2023, so that's a pretty good start by most metrics.

I wonder if there is real competition for the rights in the rest of the world. The "right" answer would be to have FIFA hire an independent agency to sell the rights.

But, as you said, it's all just a rounding error compared to the money from the World Cup. It's the same reason the NCAA will never get real money for women's sports -- it's all a rounding error, and ESPN is the only buyer. The reason WWE finally got a real increase on their last deal was Fox got involved -- before that, NBC Universal (USA) was the only buyer. 

2 minutes ago, jsb235 said:

Is it possible that the problem is fifa bungled ad sales in the 2019 world cup? Sponsor partnerships increased 150 percent this wc. How do you reconcile that? Do you think maybe fifa left some money on the table previously, or is women's soccer just that much more popular now? 

Probably a combination of both. Which then begs the question as to why it's growing in popularity so quickly. Domestically at least, their success is an obvious reason, but the increased publicity surely isn't only a function of performance.

5 minutes ago, jsb235 said:

Is it possible that the problem is fifa bungled ad sales in the 2019 world cup? Sponsor partnerships increased 150 percent this wc. How do you reconcile that? Do you think maybe fifa left some money on the table previously, or is women's soccer just that much more popular now? 

Probably a combination of the two, but more attributable to the increase in popularity of the women's game. The ads aren't sold by FIFA exclusively -- the broadcasters sell as well.

Just now, we_gotta_believe said:

Probably a combination of both. Which then begs the question as to why it's growing in popularity so quickly. Domestically at least, their success is an obvious reason, but the increased publicity surely isn't only a function of performance.

Eh...Americans watch sports when we win. It's why men's soccer doesn't catch on here - we suck at it. It's why tennis ratings have plummeted since all the good US players have retired. Americans are front-runners.

 

1 minute ago, vikas83 said:

I wonder if there is real competition for the rights in the rest of the world. The "right" answer would be to have FIFA hire an independent agency to sell the rights.

But, as you said, it's all just a rounding error compared to the money from the World Cup. It's the same reason the NCAA will never get real money for women's sports -- it's all a rounding error, and ESPN is the only buyer. The reason WWE finally got a real increase on their last deal was Fox got involved -- before that, NBC Universal (USA) was the only buyer. 

But I was referring to illicitly gained money, not purely the broadcast rights. Getting $200M for something that was previously bundled together with the men's rights pretty much indicates it was something they should've done years ago or at the very least for 2019. How much were they truly leaving on the table by not doing so? Hard to say, but like I mentioned, I doubt they even cared when that Qatari oil money came flooding in.