The findings are part of a research report by media consulting firm Media. Sports of the outcome of a consumer research conducted over the six-month period from July to December 2021. The research is based on a sample size of 12,000 people across urban and rural India. A fan has been defined as someone who watched live sports on TV in the last month for at least 30 mins.
Chennai Super Kings has emerged as the biggest sports franchise in India. It is the most popular Indian Premier League teams in India, with 40.9 million fans. This is up from the 26.8 million fans reported during Indian Premier League 2020.
More CSK loyal fan base of 22.5 million people is almost the same as the entire fan base of the sport of football in India. The report defines a loyal fan as someone feels emotionally connected with teams and its results, and engages in online or offline conversations around the team and its players.
The report also look at the various football leagues and their fan following. Lionel Messi’s erstwhile team Barcelona FC tops the list with 3.9 million fans. Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi feature in the list of the 10 most popular sports persons in India. The list includes seven cricketers and badminton and two football superstars.
In the section on report at the TV vs digital consumption of sports. While 44 percent watch live sports only on TV, a sizeable 36 per cent are using both traditional and digital media to watch live sports, while the remaining 20% are watching exclusively on digital. The report also covers the preferred commentary languages in India, reported by various geographies and demographics.
Shailesh founder & CEO, Media, said, Viewership numbers, especially from television, are not an accurate representation of the fan base of any sport, as India is predominantly a single-TV nation where a lot of sports viewing is passive in nature. Through this report, we aim to fill in the need gap for reliable data on the size and the profile of the ‘real’ sports fans, who are actively watching and engaged with the sport.
In the section titled ‘Active Sports Players in India’, the report estimates that 317.8 million (about 23 per cent of India’s population) Indians are playing at least one outdoor sport actively in their life currently. While cricket, football and badminton take the top three positions as the most played sports in India, volleyball and feature also prominently in the list too, with 56 million and 19 million active players, respectively.
Two time Commonwealth Games gold medal list on Thursday questioned the timing of selection trials and slammed the Badminton Association of India for "putting" her out of mega sporting events later this year. The governing body had called for selection trials on April 2 to pick the Indian team for big-ticket events including the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, the Asian Games in Hangzhou and Thomas Cup and Uber Cup in Bangkok from May 8 to 15. A former world no 1, said she had informed about her decision to skip the trials which begins at the IG stadium on Friday it did not mean that she was not eager to participate at the major events including the Commonwealth Games.
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