Ticket sales of all the major sports leagues have been slowly rising over the past 2 decades. This could be attributed to the natural population growth above all. However, there are two exceptions to this: First, major league baseball witnessed a plummet in ticket sales in the mid 1990s. Second, the sales of the National Basketball Association saw two dips in 1998 and 2012, respectively.
Poster of Major League Baseball's eSports season in 2020
Although ticket sales of minor league baseball was significantly less than those of major league baseball, they have been increasing most steadily among the four since 1992. Minor League Baseball also saw their ticket sales surge in 2016. Overall it has been growing the most sharply among all the four sports leagues.
A live National Basketball Association (NBA) game
In summary, ticket sales of the two baseball leagues consistently outperformed the National Basketball Association and National Football League by a large margin in the past two decades. It surprises me to discover that baseball has been the all-time most popular sport in the US.
Nevertheless, sports fans have been feeling the pain since COVID-19 started this year. Sport events have all but stopped with the stay-at-home order. We can safely predict that ticket sales of all sports leagues have crashed since the beginning of this year. The current pandemic might also shift the American culture of attending sporting events to watching sports games at home. There’s no doubt that the public health crisis has decimated the professional sporting industry like never before. Even the largest sports leagues will have to seek new revenue sources in the years to come.
YouTube Video: How badly has Covid-19 hit the sports industry?
(source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1si30RV11c)
(source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1si30RV11c)
I was also surprised to learn that baseball has been the most popular sport in the USA. We see that the Major League Baseball had a small drop around the years 1993/1994 but that did not influence in the subsequent years that it continued to grow and led the ticket sales. Basketball had two small declines in the years 1998 and 2012, but I believe there must be a reason for that, since in the other years it has maintained a reasonable growth. When it comes to sport, I certainly agree that they have a great challenge to recover after this pandemic and I hope that growth will continue and only the year 2020 is an exception.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment, Patricia! The pandemic definitely hit the sports industry very hard. The world has missed lots of fun without games. Hope they'll come back soon!
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