The TV review of the SPFL season 2015/16

I write this well aware of how it’s going to go when I post it so let’s state one thing first of all so we can get past it - yes, the team with the highest average rating over the season was Rangers, much as was the case last season in the ultra-competitive edition Hearts strolled.

That, for many, will be a cause for triumphalism but it must come with two important caveats: that Celtic were hopeless in Europe and that Rangers were on half as much as Celtic.

These caveats matter - for Celtic, European ratings traditionally outstrip domestic ratings and much of the averages of previous seasons have been built around the totems of a couple of big European nights. This season does not apply. Furthermore, Celtic were live on TV 35 times to Rangers’ 17 so the one big rating of the season (the Celtic-Rangers Scottish Cup semi) carries a bigger weighting for Rangers than it does Celtic.

In short, it’s a parable of how Celtic had fallen this season rather than one of how Rangers have risen given that the Rangers season average was not the highest of the four seasons on the journey this season.

Now that’s out of the way, let’s focus on the important statistic - average viewing figures are up for the Premiership to the highest since this site started tracking these statistics in the 2012/13 season. Fewer games have figures that are truly woeful and the league feels as if it has levelled out to somewhat of a solid ground given that there are fewer big ratings this term.

In part, this is due to BT being its strongest so far - the growth of their subscriber base has meant that the Friday night slot is less of a death slot than it used to be. Eliminating those troughs (undoubtedly driven by BT having the Champions League contract) has been the driver for BT’s pickup and the SPFL’s as a whole.

It goes without saying that that is important. Some will read this and automatically walk away making two conclusions - that Rangers are back/Scottish football needs a strong Rangers and that the SPFL is on the up.

One season of evidence is not enough to make those conclusions. For the first, the lack of balance in how many games are shown at the moment is they key driver of that - next season with both Celtic and Rangers in the Premiership, the amount of games shown by each team will be far more balanced or, at least, not 2-1 in favour of Celtic.

For the second, we will need to wait two seasons before making that conclusion. This season’s rise can be attributed to changing methods of actually watching games either via different providers or not via traditional methods at all. Our biggest rating of the season - the Celtic-Rangers Cup Semi - attained 501k but that excludes people watching on Now TV (as I did as I don’t want a Sky Sports Sub) and those watching through illegal methods - it’d be folly to think that that wouldn’t have added an extra 100k at least to the total viewership of that game.

That, in itself, explains why there are both fewer peaks and fewer troughs - people are still watching but have dropped a Sky Sports subscription, which takes the peaks away, and kept/gone to BT, which takes the troughs away. The same people are watching but they have changed their habits.

Why we can’t make that conclusion next season is that, with Rangers in the Premiership and with 4 league games we can confidently predict will have massive ratings (comparatively), the average viewership will be dragged up artificially through those means. In two seasons time, then we can, but a season where you inject the second biggest team in the country can only be viewed on its own merits and not against the cohort of data from the past few seasons.

That doesn’t mean we can’t make some conclusions and predictions. For a start, going back pre-2012, we know for a fact that average viewing figures were about double what they are now (in the limited time span between the end of Setanta and the end of ESPN). In the space of a season, it’d be hard to predict that ratings would bounce back that hard that fast, but an uptick to around 170k (around 1.5x what we have now) would be a pretty conservative estimate of where we will be this time next year and, were that the case, the SPFL would be pretty happy.

There is another wildcard in that BT now have the League Cup contract. Depending on the games they pick for the group stage (and on how seriously clubs take it), then ratings will be interesting. As the contract has previously lived on BBC Scotland, who just don’t release ratings, even for research purposes like on here, the League Cup has never featured. Tidbits of info have come out at times to give ballpark figures, but nothing concrete. To be a success, however, for both the SPFL and BT, you would want to see the group games pull over 100k a game and that rise to in excess of 300k for the Semis and the Final. That might be a bit of a stretch, but that’s the region the SPFL would want it to be in as BBC Scotland were getting 350k+ for games featuring not Celtic.

But the key takeaway from the season is, in spite of the improving figures, a criticism. The abysmal job the SPFL and certain elements of the media have done at presenting Aberdeen, a side who for two seasons in a row have pushed Celtic harder than anyone would have expected, as a credible threat has borne itself out in a series of poor figures when Aberdeen have been placed as the draw or even in games vs Celtic. Aberdeen are the fifth biggest draw in a league where they have been the second best side by some margin for two seasons. Even when playing Celtic in games that really did matter, no-one seemed to care. In contrast to the EPL and their coverage which shouted Leicester to the stage where it became almost Hodor-esque, the SPFL and the Scottish media was almost embarrassed to admit that they had their own big underdog story happening on their doorstep. BT deserve credit for persisting with the Dons along with focusing on other elements of the league (such as Dundee United’s relegation battle), whereas Sky only ever allowed Celtic or Rangers to be a draw.

As a Celtic fan and one of Deila’s harsher critics, I’ll even admit that the focus on the title race being “Let’s not watch because it’s only happening as Celtic are crap” zoomed straight past tiresome straight into infuriating. Yes, Aberdeen are not the most thrilling side in the world, but not promoting the competitive side of your competition is bordering on insanity and made everyone look like they were in a holding pattern until Rangers were promoted. It would almost take on the first weekend of next season Rangers taking an absolute beating from Aberdeen or Hearts to make people sit up and take notice that there is, as there has been for two seasons, a credible alternative to Glasgow football.

That the SPFL has progressed in spite of such blatantly counter-productive marketing is to be lauded as much as it is to be criticised. The second best team has an average viewing figure that is in the bottom half of the teams I’ve tracked. No-one can seriously justify that as acceptable and that isn’t a failure of the club itself. Earlier this year, I was on a podcast howling at the moon to talk up the game to introduce it to an American audience - I shouldn’t have to do that because it shouldn’t be necessary in the first place. The Aberdeen title challenge was, for all but the last five games, a compelling underdog tale that, in terms of financial disparity, matched that of Leicester - newspapers and the governing body were silent about that when they should have been screaming it from the rooftops.

Had our title race been built properly and had people seen Aberdeen as a credible threat, we wouldn’t be talking about what was a just over 15k jump in average rating, we’d be talking about a 50k jump. I know that, you know that and surely the SPFL know that and, regrettably, they’re only going to act on it now Rangers are in the Premiership.

That’s ridiculous. But that’s Scottish football and that’s partly why we love it so much. Next season, we need to be loud and proud about everything that’s going on lest we squander opportunity again.

Here, to end, are some of the big stats of the season:

Top 5 Clubs by average rating

1 - Rangers - 155,294 from 17 games

2 - Celtic - 149,857 from 35 games

3 - Hibs - 135,889 from 9 games

4 - Ross County - 123,250 from 4 games

5 - Killie - 116,250 from 4 games

Top 5 Domestic Games of the Season

1 - Rangers vs Celtic - Scottish Cup - 17/04/16 - 501,000

2 - Rangers vs Hibs - Championship - 28/12/15 - 273,000

3 - Rangers vs Cowdenbeath - Scottish Cup - 10/01/16 - 244,000

4 - Aberdeen vs Celtic - Premiership - 03/02/16 - 237,000

5 - Hearts vs Celtic - Premiership - 27/12/15 - 233,000



The full data is available at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1v7-SRaa3ZYZbCyk68v1g74Ubf3o6XLsKAvaI2SYyPg8/edit?usp=sharing - Please, if you do wish to use the data, then do advise you got them from here as opposed to posting them on Follow Follow and claiming them as your own work, as someone did last season.

Next season will see a big jump in figures. As always, it’ll be tracked right here.