Photo: Money Sharma/AFP/Getty Images
We've entered an era where World Cup tournaments feel like the equivalent of a four-hour director's cut: brilliant but flawed, with too many throwaway scenes before the thrilling denouement. The Men's Cricket World Cup lasted 38 days and 45 matches to reduce 10 teams to four semi-finalists - which was astonishingly 10 days longer than the entire 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. Meanwhile, the rugby union equivalent took a month and forty matches to reduce twenty countries to eight. And yet we haven't seen anything yet.
By 2027, cricket and rugby union will have four more teams and even more matches. The 2026 World Cup in the US, Canada and Mexico will be Super Size Me: from 32 teams to 48, and 64 matches to 104. Academics have an umbrella term for tournaments so big that they attract millions of people around the world become: sports mega-events. Think of World Cups. Think of the Olympic Games. Think big, big, big. But is big always better?
Related: Transgender players have been banned from international women's cricket by the ICC
The Guardian spoke to more than a dozen experts in sports leadership, broadcasting, marketing and academia to find out. Along the way, we also wondered why, at a time when we are constantly being told that viewer attention spans are getting shorter, are we witnessing a growth spurt in the length of sporting events? And do some sports even risk killing the golden goose?
The obvious question: "Why does the sport do this?" - also has an obvious answer: cash and the chance to make a lot more of it. "The number one KPI [key performance indicator] for the guys in charge of sport is generating more money," says sports marketing expert Tim Crow, who started his career at the Test and County Cricket Board, now the England and Wales Cricket Board, and later became a key figure behind the marketing of the 2012 Olympic Games in London. "It's that simple. And the more supply you give to television, the better your deal will be.
The story continues
Of course it's the economy, stupid. FIFA achieved a total turnover of US$7.5 billion during the World Cup cycle between 2019 and 2022, the most profitable in its history, with US$6 billion generated from the Qatar tournament alone. It knows it has a captive audience. So why not offer even more games and reap the benefits?
Sports also has the great advantage that TV audiences are remarkably sticky. In the US, for example, 94 of the top 100 ratings of 2022 were for sports. In Britain, England's World Cup quarter-final against France was last year's most watched show with 16.1 million viewers, ahead of the Queen's state funeral, the Platinum Jubilee and I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!
Particularly in a world where there is so much competition for eyes - from streaming services, YouTube, TikTok and more - and far fewer TV shows to which we all tune in, sports offer something rare: cultural touchstones and communal experiences.
As Charles Beall, vice president of digital strategy at global giant IMG, puts it: "The power of sports in this ever-increasing battle for attention is unparalleled. And premium live sports will always be successful, adding value to audiences and platforms, and attracting and retaining viewers."
Many sports also like to talk about 'growing the game', which expanding the World Cups certainly enables them to do. But perhaps there is also a defensive measure in all of this. Most viewers are now 'big eventers'. We don't have the time to watch the coughing and spitting of every sport. A World Cup serves as a showcase and a shorthand to say that an event matters - so why not make it longer?
However, not everyone thinks this latest trend is a good thing. One senior figure told the Guardian he feared some sports were risking "overkill" and "going off a cliff" with too many meaningless games that flog players and leave fans bored. "The next time you see Gianni Infantino, ask him: 'When do you think FIFA can get 206 teams for the World Cup?'" he said. "It is reductio ad absurdum."
You can see his point. Sports should be about unpredictability and danger. But the recent Euro 2024 qualifiers in Germany had little to offer of either. And while the Men's Cricket World Cup had some stunning upsets - Afghanistan beat England and the Netherlands beat South Africa - the lengthy group stage dramatically reduced the value of such wins, and the surprising lack of close matches didn't help either.
Has the lack of excitement affected TV audiences? Maybe. It's clear that Sky's viewing figures didn't do as well as expected, but internally that's being blamed on the poor English campaign.
However, Ed Warner, former chairman of UK Athletics, says the lack of full stadiums in India should serve as a wider warning. "When I worked at UKA, the BBC always told us it was crucial to sell out our events," says Warner. "They said people will turn away when they see empty stadiums. If no one cares enough to go, why should viewers care?
The Rugby World Cup, played in front of a sold-out crowd, had no such problems. But while the knockout stages were riveting, the group stages were anything but. Only eight of the forty matches ended with a score of seven points or less between the teams, while the average margin of victory over the group stages was almost 32 points. Of the eight quarter-finalists, only Fiji came as a surprise.
Does the lack of competitive balance matter to fans? Surprisingly not, according to Dr Robbie Butler, an economist at University College Cork. "There is a significant amount of literature showing that supporters from different sports do not care whether the matches are balanced," he says. "In recent years this has been observed in sports such as Formula 1, tennis, golf and boxing. Our recent work on F1 - a sport dominated by two teams since 2010 - found that American fans were not motivated to watch due to the increased competition and were happy to see a dominant victory from Lewis Hamilton or Max Verstappen. "
Another prominent economist, David Forrest of the University of Liverpool, has also written cogently and extensively about star power trumping uncertainty when it comes to TV viewership. However, Crow, who is now a member of the International Olympic Committee's esports committee, says the sport would be wrong to assume young fans don't care about danger.
"Jeopardy is incredibly attractive to young people," he says. "In esports, when a game becomes a walkover versus when two top teams go head-to-head, you can see the difference in terms of eyeballs. And pay-per-view boxing and martial arts are also very popular among young people. They are disproportionately attracted to it because of the danger."
So what could happen next? According to Crow, the growth of the larger sports mega-events will likely lead to others being displaced. "I think we're going to see several sports that are quite big that are really struggling right now," he says. "And in some cases they probably disappear from the map at the highest level."
Crow refuses to say which sports he's talking about because he could upset the people he works with. "But it doesn't take much to figure out who they are if you look up their revenue chart, profit chart and fan bases."
Meanwhile, Beall, an expert on changing audience trends, says people are wrong when they say younger sports have limited attention spans. On the contrary, now that phones and the Internet are so readily available, they have endless possibilities competing for their eyeballs. "The public doesn't tolerate being bored," he says. "They can transition much more easily and this is the driving force behind the shortening of sports formats."
Beall expects this to continue - and he says the sport will have to adapt the way they market and sell their sport to keep up. "Now any small window of time can be an entertainment moment: if you're waiting in line or on an otherwise empty journey, you were wasting time," he says, pointing to TikTok's particular success in offering short-form content. "The sport must continue to innovate in everything from competition format to production elements such as vertical feeds, multi-screen content, custom localization, in-stadium technology and data, and more interactivity with influencers - Peyton and Eli Manning's Manningcast is a good one example of."
But like many others the Guardian spoke to, Beall also recognizes the value of sports that have stood the test of time. "All sports need to be aware of oversaturation," he says. "The Ryder Cup, Olympic Games and Lions Rugby derive their 'special' status precisely from the fact that they have a scarcity value that attracts significant fan interest at key moments."
In other words, take care of the golden goose, but don't risk killing it.
