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World cup: SA glued to TV, not work

1 Jul 2010

According to the latest stats from Nielsen Company, it does indeed appear that people have been taking time off work to watch the 2010 FIFA World Cup. The average TV audience for time-period 1pm-3.30pm has grown by over half a million people.

For the past six months the average audience for this time period was 5.1 million viewers - and it's grown to 5.8 million. According to SAARF TAMS, 1.1 million "day-time" viewers are watching soccer - excellent for "gees", but interesting in terms of costs to companies.

Here are the 10 most-watched games, which may well have been occupying your staff members' 'to do' lists:

1	South Africa vs Uruguay	10 150 262
2	South Africa vs Mexico	10 064 326
3	Brazil vs Korea	7 301 500
4	Italy vs Paraguay	6 264 729
5	Spain vs Switzerland	5 610 619
6	Argentina vs Nigeria	5 529 627
7	Côte d'Ivoire vs Portugal	5 385 189
8	England vs USA	5 341 721
9	Serbia vs Ghana	5 291 560
10	Germany vs Australia	5 207 525

In looking at flag-waving across the pond, Nielsen Company's global viewership research gives an insight into fan support by television viewership.

The highest percentage reach per country measured so far is 50.4%, or 28 915 million Italian fans watching their team come up against Paraguay on 14 June. Coming off a far larger population base, 10.2% reach of the US audience meant 29 730 million Americans watched the USA versus England game. With 34.8% of South African rooting for Bafana against Mexico, we were not far behind South Korea's 47.4% reach (13 815 million) during their match against Argentina.

Interestingly, of all the games played to date, the France vs Uruguay match had the smallest local audience - only around 600 000 South Africans broke away from their post-SA-Mexico game euphoria to watch this game. All other games shown here have exceeded an audience of 3.5 million (SAARF TAMS).