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Super Bowl Can’t Hold the Candle to the Biggest Game in Soccer

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Source: Statista

While Americans are getting ready for what they consider the biggest sporting event of the year, the 54th Super Bowl, the rest of the world couldn’t care less. Well that may be a bit harsh, but from an American perspective it’s easy to overestimate the global appeal of the biggest game in (American) football.

Speaking of football, soccer, i.e. the proper kind of football from a European perspective, far exceeds the Super Bowl in terms of global interest. The FIFA World Cup Final, played every four years to culminate a month-long tournament of 32 nations, really is the biggest game in the world, regularly reaching more than a billion people across the globe.

According to FIFA, last year’s World Cup final between France and Croatia reached an average live audience of 517 million viewers, with more than than 1.1 billion people tuning in over its 90 minutes. The 2019 Super Bowl pales in comparison, having had an average viewership of 98 million in the U.S. plus an estimated 50 to 65 million around the world.

Which Football Leagues Draw the Biggest Crowds?

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Source: Statista

In many aspects the English Premier League (EPL) considers itself the best in the world, and rightly so. It is the most widely followed football league in the world, it has incredible financial resources, a handful of history-laden world class clubs and definitely the most entertaining line-up of managers, including the Pep Guardiola and Jürgen Klopp. Sure, there is the nuisance of the world’s best (certainly most acclaimed) players Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo stubbornly scoring their goals in Spain and Italy, respectively, but apart from that it’s hard to argue against the EPL.

There’s one aspect though in which the Premier League is beaten by another one of Europe’s “Big Five” football leagues and that is stadium attendance. According to a recent report published by the CIES Football Observatory, the average attendance at Premier League games between the 2013 and 2018 was 36,675. During the same period, matches of the German Bundesliga on average lured 43,302 people into the arenas. As opposed to the Premier League, the Bundesliga still allows unseated stands, which a) keeps ticket prices down and b) increases the average capacity of the stadiums.

As our chart illustrates, the Premier League does have the top-tier leagues from Spain, Italy and France easily beaten in terms of attendance, but as long as it keeps its strict seating policy in place, it probably won’t be able to challenge the German league in that respect. Considering that the lion’s share of the clubs’ earnings comes from TV rights anyway these days, it is doubtful that anyone within the EPL will be losing any sleep over this statistic though.