Are kids watching? The Super Bowl’s massive audience hides a ‘massive problem’

If your grandfather watched sports, then your father watched sports. And if your father watched sports, then you, likely, also watched sports.

“It was very seamless,” Anthony Palomba said. “It was an easy transition for a long time to pass team fandom across generations.”

Anthony Palomba has expertise in audience analysis, media innovation and firm competition, and entertainment science. (Photo by Stephanie Gross)

Palomba is an assistant professor of business administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. He’s also 39 and speaks from the perspective of a millennial – the generation of people born between 1981 and 1996 – as it relates to consuming athletic events on television.

The New York native continues to occasionally watch the Yankees, among his other favorite teams, largely because of family tradition.

Data suggests, though, Palomba’s generation could be the last of its kind.

While Sunday’s NBC broadcast of the Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks may indeed draw a large viewing audience – 127.7 million tuned in to last year’s big game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs – network executives, those overseeing deals worth billions of dollars to show these games, remain uneasy about what these numbers could look like in the future.

In 2022, an Emory University marketing professor released a study that found only 23% of Generation Z (people born between 1997 and 2012) defined themselves as “avid sports fans” compared to 42% of millennials, 33% of Generation X (people born between 1965 and 1980) and 31% of baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964).

The average age of viewers watching primetime NFL games on broadcast television is 62.5, according to a 2024 report from Front Office Sports.

An ideal average viewership age, Palomba said, would fall between 30 and 35.

“If you ask my direct reports, what it is that’s keeping them up at night, if you ask me, it’s that,” ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro said in the Front Office Sports story.

Shorter attention spans, an explosion of viewing options and a cultural obsession with individuals – exemplified by the mass following of influencers and individual athletes on social media – over teams all contribute to declining sports viewership among younger audiences, Palomba said.

“Sports betting helps because you have to bet on a player on a team or bet for a team,” Palomba said, nodding to the rise in widespread gambling. “That could be the new connective glue. But overall, this is a massive problem, and it’s been a problem for a long time.”

So how does it get fixed?

Creative attempts are ongoing, Palomba said, noting ESPN’s collaborations with Disney and Pixar to produce animated alternate broadcasts of live NFL games featuring characters from “Toy Story,” “The Simpsons” and “Monsters Inc.”

Several NFL games in the past five seasons have aired with Nickelodeon-themed alternate broadcasts, including a “SpongeBob SquarePants” playoff game last year.

“If you watch some of these clips,” Palomba said, “they turn the football into a Christmas present. There’s slime and Gak that comes down when there’s a touchdown. It’s interactive, it’s fun. It’s meant to be kid friendly.”

Palomba acknowledged the comparison is imperfect, “but it does remind me of Joe Camel with cigarettes years ago, where a cigarette is a very adult, boring thing,” he said. “You could argue the same for football. Let’s zhuzh it up for children. This is zhuzhing up the NFL for kids.”

One of the first NFL games of this season – a Week 1 matchup between the Chiefs and Los Angeles Chargers in Brazil – was streamed exclusively on YouTube.

“I think that they’re going to try to make advertisements more interactive,” Palomba said. “I think that’s why YouTube is in the picture more and more with a lot of NFL games. You have to find ways to make ads engaging.

“And I also think they may wind up cutting up parts of the Super Bowl, putting it on TikTok and YouTube, and thinking of other ways to monetize this content that they haven’t done before. It could be a gateway in for Gen Alpha (people born between 2013 and 2025) and Gen Zers, who see this stuff and then maybe get interested in the game.”

While parents and grandparents may be tuned in Sunday, it’s the younger ones in the room who remain the moving target for broadcasters and advertisers.

Palomba described a hypothetical Super Bowl party with members of Generation Z and Generation Alpha gathered at their parents’ home.

“Maybe if they have their phones in front of them – and the Super Bowl knows they have their phones in front of them – you create an interactive game experience for kids,” Palomba said. “You can also have interactive ads on the phone, which keeps them engaged and helps acclimate them to the game itself.

“I could see those things. Those would be the ideas I’d start pitching.”

This article originally appeared on UVA Today.