The descent of viewers in Spanish Basketball national league

Why the ACB league has lost 88% of its audience in the last 20 years?

 

On May 20, 1997, the ACB league reached its peak. Succession in the Palacio de los Deportes, in Madrid, in the fifth game of the final, which would decide the title. It was a Tuesday, but more than 12,000 spectators filled the pavilion. Madrid and Barcelona decided the title of the ACB. The game was broadcast by La 1. The league finally was won by Barcelona. It was the first time that a team managed to win a final of ACB with the court factor against. However, the most important data of the final we knew it the next day, when reviewing the audimeters, that match was followed by television 4.8 millions of Spaniards, which is not only the highest ever registered by the league, it was also, finally, the basketball obtained better results than the average of football matches, eternal first choice of the Spanish people. Those 4.8 million meant, in addition, that the League enjoyed a good audience that could evolve to be broadcast in the private TV.

In the 96/97 season, when the audience heaven was touched, the ACB averaged over a million spectators for every match. Two years after this final, the league went to Canal +, a private television channel, and never again it went the same. Five years later, basketball returned to Televisión Española with an average of 713,000 viewers. Nowadays, again closed for subscribers, the ACB is followed by just 128,000 Spaniards, with some matches results of 5,500 spectators. How has ACB lost almost all of its audience in twenty years?

Indeed, Canal + invested heavily in the ACB, transplanting the innovations that were sweeping football, such as planes with the crane, the super slow camera or a program like 'What the eye does not see'. Of those four years we do not have audience data, only that, when the league returned to the open source, it had left twelve out of every hundred spectators on the way.

The return to public television was traumatic: the clubs spent less money, which impoverished the quality of the staff, and part of the television rights went to the regional ones.
In this period it was when the fans definitively lost the space-time reference of basketball. There came a time when people did not know when the ACB was played. When it is? Saturday afternoon? Sunday morning? People who want to see basketball have to look for it, they do not have a specific time of the week, as happens with the Champions League or the Euroleague.

 

In view of the poor results, many fans, often spurred by the league itself, reproached Televisión Española with the little care that ACB handled: "It is true that TVE has not treated the product well, but it is also that there was a margin ... With regard to Canal +, our media was outdated, we had to invest in the deployment, in the post-party ...

As the national league was losing influence, the Euroleague won, in which the main Spanish teams compete. Thus, the interests of the most distinguished members of the ACB were uncoupled, since the Euroleague meetings fill the pavilions more and, to top it all, financially reward the victory. "The Euroleague is eating not only the ACB, but all the European leagues, before they played Tuesday and Wednesday, but they moved on Thursdays and Fridays, which are more commercial, and they ruled out the ACB, which was forced to play on Sunday. This situation, degraded the perception of the ACB. Although the ACB is the most important league in Europe, it is actually third division for a professional. Above are the NBA and the Euroleague teams, and that makes it very difficult to retain talent and build on it.


In 2008 came the crisis and stripped the economic model of most of the ACB teams: "The league, for many years, has been two football clubs and 16 political wills, I was terribly impressed behind the clubs that were public institutions releasing money without control. I saw the budget of the Unicaja that won the league on  2005 and 16 million euros were spent, then you see the income and they did not cover a million.

These words were said by a journalist that was specialized in Spanish basketball.

Is there salvation for the ACB? We are not so clear that there is a solution at this point. We know that the interest in basketball exists, we see it with the National Team and the NBA, but we do not like the ACB product, so there is an evident disconnection. Perhaps one solution would be to limit the number of signings per season, so that the fan could recognize his players and re-identify with his team, but that is something that obviously will not happen.

We also heard that the ACB is decapitated, does not have an executive figure, as in the NBA, which sets a horizon for the competition. It was decided long ago by an assembly model that has two problems. The first, that each decision costs a lot, which causes the league to advance with short steps. The second, and more serious, that are the big clubs that decide in the shade, manipulating to support them with assignments and other perks. The ACB needs someone at the front to prepare a road map, as in the Euroleague, which may have errors, but knows where it is going.

Also, we think that the ACB matches, should be available TVE, because it is basic that the ACB retrieves a window to the outside, so that everyone can see the product.

Finally, we follow the NBA. Everyday we open the NBA app on the smartphone and for free, and we see the best plays in the NBA every three minutes, but in the ACB we don’t see nothing at all. Maybe americans know better how to sell their League?

What do you will change in the ACB league to make it greater? Which do you think are the current problems on the ACB?