CASE STUDY
Predicting audience demand for European football: Insights for a Scandinavian TV channel
A Scandinavian TV channel was looking at acquiring broadcast rights across several European football leagues and needed to know which ones were actually worth pursuing. Question was: which leagues would pull viewers, and how should each be marketed to make the most of that audience? Popularity rankings could only take them so far. What they really needed was an understanding of the emotional drivers behind fan behaviour: the excitement, the loyalty, the harder-to-name preferences that determine whether someone actually sits down and watches.
Football fans feel a lot, and most of it is difficult to put into words. Someone might be able to tell you they don’t rate the coach or that the playing style doesn’t do it for them, but the reasons a particular league feels compelling, the atmosphere, the tension, the moments that stick, are often things people experience rather than consciously think about. Ask them directly and you’ll get answers that sound plausible but don’t always reflect what’s genuinely driving their behaviour. That’s the truth gap.
To close it, we combined explicit and implicit testing, EXPRESS to capture what fans could articulate, IMPRESS to capture the instinctive responses underneath.
The research was carried out in 2021 and produced detailed profiles for each league: the emotional highs and lows fans experienced while watching, how commentary shaped their engagement, and how open they were to following something new. This gave the client a much richer picture of what differentiated each league, and why that would matter to viewers.
From there, Split Second Research built demand forecasts estimating potential audience size and revenue for each league. The channel finished the project with a clear view of which leagues were worth investing in, what to lead with when marketing them, and enough confidence to make the case internally.
Traditional research would have told them which leagues fans said they preferred. It wouldn’t have told them whether that preference would translate into someone actually watching, and that’s where the real decision sits.
If you’d like to understand how this approach can be applied to your own challenge, get in touch with one of our market research experts, here.
A Scandinavian TV channel was looking at acquiring broadcast rights across several European football leagues and needed to know which ones were actually worth pursuing. Question was: which leagues would pull viewers, and how should each be marketed to make the most of that audience?
Popularity rankings could only take them so far. What they really needed was
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