Italy: Football TV ratings plummet
February 21, 2022
From Branislav Pekic in Rome
Italian Serie A football clubs lost between 20 and 50 per cent of their TV audience during the first half of the season, compared to a year earlier. The figures come from Auditel data, published by local daily Italia Oggi.
The country’s top football club, Juventus, saw its audience fall by nearly 50 per cent, from 29 million to 14.5 million viewers. With an average 15.8 million viewers for its matches, AC Milan is now the most watched club in Italy, although these figures are still far from the 21.1 million in the first half of the 2020-2021 season.
Rounding up the top five are Inter Milan (down from 19 million to 15.5 million), Napoli (from 16.3 million to 11.3 million) and Roma (from 15 million to 9.6 million).
The figures will certainly cause a headache for streaming platform DAZN which – for the first time – is the main distribution platform for Italian league football, airing all ten matches played weekly (seven on an exclusive basis, three shared with Sky Italia).
For football clubs, the low viewing figures risk pulling down the value of Serie A, putting at risk the €90 million in revenues they share from the sale of the TV rights.
However, it is worth noting that Auditel only measures the smart TV sets and set-top boxes that access DAZN, but does not take into account viewing from PCs, smartphones and tablets.