The Olympic Games attracts some of the biggest viewing audiences in broadcast history: 3.9 billion are estimated to have watched the 2004 Athens Games, while 3.6 billion are estimated to have tuned into action from the 2000 Sydney Games on the small screen.
The most popular regular-broadcast sports event and TV programme in the world is said to be the English Premier League. It is broadcast to 600 million households in 202 countries (matching the number of FINA federations) and is estimated to be watched by more than 1.2 billion people per week.
Outside the realms of sport, tragic moments are among the biggest draws, the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales estimated to have been watched by 2.5 billion, the funeral of Pope John Paul II by more than 2 billion people, the funeral of Michael Jackson estimated to have topped 1 billion for a place in the list of biggest global audience attractions.
Little wonder then that when FINA tells us that 3.5 billion tuned into the world aquatics championships in Rome last July, eyebrows are raised and questions are posed by our readers.
On a top 10 list of biggest broadcast moments in sport 2009, the UEFA Champions League Final achieved an average live global audience of 109 million, while the Wimbledon men's final was said to have moved up the pecking order with a 29-million figure for the men's final, compared to a 10th place finish on 21 million in 2004. Times the Wimbledon men's final by two weeks (Roma09 over a fortnight) and you still fall well shy of that astonishing 3.5 billion figure.
Independent groups have long challenged the worldwide viewership statistics cited in press releases by television networks and big sports organisations, from the IOC to FIFA and the NFL. Those independent counters state that figures cited in billions are considered practically unverifiable.
Here's a short extract from the Independent newspaper in Britain, 2006:
"The myth that the World Cup final attracts a global television audience of more than a billion people has been debunked by an Independent investigation into TV viewing figures that shows that true audiences are between a quarter and a third of that size.
"This prompted Fifa to admit yesterday that numbers up to now have been massively exaggerated in some cases, and simply guessed in others. Football's world governing body has promised to use only verifiable data in future. "We are going to steer clear of estimating, and publish data from audited measurement systems only," a spokesman said.
"The revelation about exaggerated figures not only raises questions about Fifa's methods for attracting multimillion pound sponsorship deals - including six major, long-term commercial partners, secured before the 2006 World Cup - but also about its tactics in marketing TV rights.
"The company ultimately responsible for compiling World Cup TV data is Infront Sports and Media, based in Zug, Switzerland, and whose chief executive is Philippe Blatter, nephew of Fifa's president, Sepp Blatter. Infront also handles the global sales of World Cup TV rights.
"According to Fifa's overblown figures, the World Cup finals of 1998, 2002 and 2006 respectively attracted global audiences of 1.3 billion, 1.1 billion and 715.1 million people. In fact, the 715.1 million still includes a large element of guesswork, including for most of Africa. It also used unreliable "diary data" (which overstates numbers) in some major Asian countries. The figure, concedes Fifa, also includes "a huge number of repeats, highlights and delayed showings", as well as an estimated 100 million-plus people watching "out of home".
So how many people actually watch the World Cup final live, from start to finish? According to Initiative Sports Futures, independent analysts with no ties to Fifa, the figure for the 2006 final was 260 million in the 54 key markets it surveyed, accounting for 90 per cent of the world's TV households."
And here is what the Indy concluded were the verifiable figures for the top 5 sports events in 2006:
- Sport/Event/Claim/Verifiable*
- Football, Italy v France World Cup final, 715.1m/260m
- American football, Super Bowl Steelers v Seahawks, 750m-1bn/98m
- Winter Olympics, Torino 2006 opening ceremony, 2bn/87m
- Football, Champs League Arsenal v Barça, 120m/86m
- Formula One, Brazilian Grand Prix, 354m/83m
The article in full, with information about the sources of claims and verifiable data and how such things are worked out.
A list that nails fanciful claims into context with a large hammer.
The conclusion from the above is that all figures such as that 3.5bn from Rome should be taken with a large dose of salt, while international sports federations ought to supply the full picture, stating the top claim by all means as a figure of "potential global audience" while being rather more truthful about the verifiable figure that tells us, sponsors and others, something more accurate about the popularity of aquatic sports (and that is doubtless nothing to be ashamed of), including the breakdown of which of FINA's five Olympic sports attracts what percentage of the total cake (a more difficult exercise for FINA, one would imagine). As ever when we nod to good governance, transparency and honesty are paramount, and when FINA receives information from whoever supplied the figure of 3.5bn it ought to ask "how do you get to that, because our sponsors and the world swimming community may ask just that and we would need to know the answer".
