Bad news for Colemanballs as younger fans increasingly mute TV commentary

New AO.com research has found that half of fans now mute the TV commentary at least sometimes when they’re watching live sports, and the younger generation in particular is rethinking how it consumes live sport, swapping the pundits for podcasts, playlists, subtitles and even silence.

Reaching for the remote and hitting mute has become a match-day ritual for millions of UK football fans, with a new generation rewriting how the game sounds at home.

A study of 2,002 UK consumers, commissioned by AO.com, found that among football fans, almost half of them (49%) admit to muting the TV commentary sometimes and one in five (22%) go further, saying they’ll often switch off the sound during games.

Among the young, though, there’s an even greater discrepancy. Fans aged 18 to 24 are three times as likely to mute the commentary as the over-45s: over a third of young viewers (38%) turn it off often, falling to 37% of 25 to 34s, 21% of 35 to 44s, and just 13% for anyone over the age of 45.

The older the fan, the more willing they are to take the pundits as they come.

When the commentary goes off, however, fans are rarely sitting in silence. Instead of accepting whatever sound comes out of the broadcast, fans are building their own version of match day.

Nick Bunce, AO’s TV expert, says that while broadcasters struggle to come up with alternatives to the ‘traditional’ broadcast, fans are taking matters into their own hands:

“This is the Spotify generation watching football. They curate their music, their feeds and their box sets, so it is no surprise they want to curate the match too.

“Broadcasters are already chasing the trend, with streaming services beginning to offer alternative commentary feeds and ‘watch with’ options. But our research suggests many fans have not waited to be offered the choice – they have already built it themselves.”

Alternatives to Danny Murphy reminding us about his cat that jumped in a Royal Mail Van 30 years ago on the BBC include:

• Alternative commentary – Almost one in three (31%) pipe in alternative commentary. That is a combination of those saying that they listen to fan commentary (23%) and opting for the radio instead (9%) – with a plethora of fan podcasts now available, people no longer feel beholden to listen to who the broadcasters think they should.
• Scoring the game – One in four (26%) don’t even bother with commentary at all, instead opting for their own music, soundtracking the match from their own created playlists.
• DIY commentary – 16% simply talk to whoever they are watching with, the panel of pundits replaced by the people on the sofa or their friends on the phone. This is part of a wider shift to “second-screen” watching, where the running commentary has moved from the TVs to our personal group chats or social media feeds.
• Sit in silence (AKA raw-dogging) – 10% watch in total silence – football’s version of the “raw-dogging” trend, where a younger generation deliberately strips back the noise and just takes in the moment. This is one of the few ways of watching that is actually flipped across the age groups, with the over-55s twice as likely (23%) to watch in silence.
• Subtitles on – 10% switch on the subtitles, bringing to live sport the habit that already defines how younger viewers watch everything else.

The common thread that runs through each alternative source is control, note AO’s experts – this is a generation that would rather build its own soundtrack than accept the one it is given.