Despite postponement due to Covid-19, IPL became the buzziest sports event of 2020
Three indigenous sporting events make their way into the top five events of the year
With India’s stellar performance in the last season, Asian Games enjoys the sixth position
The domestic football tournament, ISL, managed to generate interest in a cricket crazy country, landing the fifth spot in the list
YouGov Sport’s Global Buzz 2021 Rankings reveal that the Indian Premier League has been crowned as the brand with the most positive Buzz in India in 2020, with a Buzz score of +54.4 points. Although IPL 2020 was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the event was well received by the sports-deprived public, creating a lot of positive buzz.
YouGov SportsIndex measures the public’s perception of sports brands on a daily basis across a range of metrics. The rankings are based on the Buzz score from YouGov’s SportsIndex, which measures whether respondents have heard something positive or negative about a brand recently.
Cricket continues to rule the charts with the ICC Cricket World Cup following in the second place (with a Buzz score of 46.3), while the third spot is taken by the FIFA World Cup (27).
In a strong year for national sporting leagues, Pro Kabaddi League and the country’s biggest franchise-based football series- Indian Super League, were able to generate positive buzz in 2020, parking themselves in the fourth and fifth position, with a score of 23.1 and 20.1, respectively.
The 2018 Asian Games marked India’s best performance ever with a total win of 69 medals including 15 golds. The remarkable achievements of the country left the people jubilant, making the tournament land a spot in the top ten list- at sixth (with a Buzz score of 16).
Despite being cancelled in 2020, the Wimbledon Championship managed to create positive noise and is placed at seventh (14.1) in the 2021 rankings followed by the World Wrestling Entertainment (13.8), a sports event that has been massively popular in India for the past few decades.
In the ninth spot with a score of 13.8 is the 2018 Commonwealth Games, where India finished third and won 66 medals, surpassing its own record of 64 medals in the previous 2014 Commonwealth games.
Even though India did not accomplish a feat at the 2020 Australian Open, the tournament created a positive buzz among the people, placing the event at the tenth position (12.6) in the 2021 rankings.
Commenting on the research, Joseph Eapen, Senior Vice President at YouGov Sport, said, “The Covid19 pandemic led to massive disruption within the global sports industry, leaving fans deprived of live sports during the lockdown. Although the year was tough for sports across the globe, appetite for live sports did not perish.
Despite being rescheduled, IPL peaked interest of cricket fans and became the buzziest event of 2020. The past year seemed favorable for several other domestic sporting leagues such as Pro kabaddi League, ISL, etc., placing them in the top ten rankings.
While live sports have gradually resumed over the past months, broadcasters and sports organizers need to be mindful of the needs of the captive sports audience and find innovative ways to generate viewership and engagement.”
About YouGov SportsIndex
SportsIndex is one of YouGov Sport’s signature capabilities. It operates in 33 markets across the world, tracking 200 key domestic and international properties across 30 sports.
In every market, it takes a list of the leading sports properties – a mix of domestic and international events, competitions and leagues – and, from 1.8m surveys annually, it measures the public’s perceptions of them.
Every day, and for every property on our list, we track 16 separate metrics, providing a treasure chest of data for sports marketers and administrators.
SportsIndex gives our clients the capability to do everything from measuring the effect of yesterday’s news headlines to establishing a season-on-season trend stretching back years. And because it operates internationally, users can track and compare properties across the world.
When combined with BrandIndex, which measures perceptions of more than 13,000 brands globally across 38 markets, you have one of the most powerful solutions in the sports world for informing strategy, finding partners and reacting to events.
Methodology
The 2021 Buzz Report provides insight about all the sports events we monitor against just one of the 16 metrics we measure – ‘Buzz’.
Every day, we ask 100 people this question…
“Over the PAST TWO WEEKS, which of the following sporting events have you heard something positive/negative about?”
From the answers we collect, we derive a Buzz score for each event.
What’s a Buzz score?
Our Buzz score is the difference between the percentage of respondents hearing positive news and the percentage hearing negative news about an event in the previous two weeks. So, depending on what is going on, an event’s Buzz score can reveal whether conversations around a property are positive or negative at a point in time. Here is a graph charting the Buzz score for the FIFA Men’s World Cup over 2018 which shows how this metric can change over time.
Buzz scores can range from +100 (where everyone we asked has heard something positive) to -100 (where everyone we asked has heard something negative). A completely neutral score, therefore, would be zero. A score of 45 would show positive sentiment towards a property, by a margin of 45 percentage-points.
For our Buzz rankings here, we look at the peak, average highest Buzz score each property has scored each calendar month. Then we take the highest of those twelve scores and compare them with highest monthly scores of every other property we track in that market. We track up to 80 properties in each market but for the sake of this report, we display only the top ten for 2020.