EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

For seven years in a row, Temkin Group has tracked U.S. consumers’ preferences for watching professional sports on TV. This year, we also examined their experience when attending a live sporting event. Here are some highlights from this research:

• NFL is the most dominant sport on TV, but MLB has the highest percentage of fans who attend its games.
• Almost all sports lost TV viewers over the last seven years, with NFL dropping the most. Viewership has declined most dramatically for young adult males.
• NASCAR has the highest level of promoters for its live sporting events, while the NFL has the lowest.
• We evaluated consumer satisfaction across the nine steps that make up a live sporting event journey. Of these steps, parking received the lowest average satisfaction, and ticketing correlated most strongly with fans’ likelihood of recommending attending an event to their friends and relatives.
• We include live event scorecards for MLB, MLS, NASCAR, NBA, NFL, NHL, and WNBA.
• Sports teams that want to improve fan experience need to build four competencies: Purposeful Leadership, Compelling Brand Values, Employee Engagement, and Customer Connectedness.

This report was originally published by Temkin Group prior to its acquisition by Qualtrics in October 2018. It has been reformatted, but no substantive changes have been made to the content.