The 2024 European Cup in Germany will start on June 15, Beijing time, and the championship will be decided on July 15. For fans, it's time to stay up late to watch the football feast for a whole month.
Compared with the 2022 Qatar World Cup, the competition time of the European Cup is a bit "cruel" for Chinese fans. If you want to watch the game, you can't stay up late.
Of all 51 European Cup matches, only 7 were kicked off at 21:00 Beijing time, and the other 44 were whistled at 0:00 or 3am (0:00 in 18 matches and 3:00 in 26 matches).
After entering the top eight stage, 5 of the 7 matches were held at 3:00 a.m., including 2 semi-finals and the final.
In the group matches, such strong and powerful dialogues as Spain vs Italy and the Netherlands vs France also start at 3 am.
In contrast, the match time of the last football feast - Qatar World Cup - was not so purgatory. There are more than 18:00, 21:00 and 23:00 evening matches in the group matches of the World Cup. Nearly half of the 64 matches are arranged in these times (31 games). The final match of the champions and runners up also starts at 23:00.
There is a saying in the fan circle that the World Cup is about liveliness and the European Cup is about professionalism.
It means that those who don't watch the football at ordinary times will also follow the trend of watching the World Cup, but when it comes to the European Cup, only die hard fans will watch the football.
Not to mention whether there is any basis for this statement, but the European Cup is not as hot as the World Cup, which is an indisputable fact. With such a cruel start time, how many people will stay up late to watch the game?
Time flashes back 20 years.
At the 2004 European Cup in Portugal, the then FIFA president Blatter once named Chinese fans: "The enthusiasm of Chinese fans surprised me".
According to the statistics of UEFA, in China, the audience rating of some important matches of the European Cup exceeded 50 million, more than twice the highest audience rating in Europe.
At that time, the main force of Chinese fans was the post-70s and post-80s generation. They witnessed the first competition of 19 year old Ronaldo and shed tears for the runner up.
A year later, they witnessed the birth of an 18-year-old Argentine teenager Messi at the World Youth Championships.
A cruel reality is that Messi Ronaldo cannot resist the erosion of time, and the Chinese fan community is also the same. The group of people who are willing to stay up late to watch the ball may be too old to endure.
According to a fan big data survey (Fastdata data platform) during the 2022 World Cup, 87.3% of Chinese football fans are men, 41.5% of them are 25-34 years old, 21.6% are 35-44 years old, 7.6% are over 45 years old, and 29.3% are 24-year-old and under.
The official White Paper on the Commercial Value of the CSL also gives a portrait of such a fan group: "Among the fans of the CSL, middle-aged men are the core group, aged 30 to 45, and 78% of them are married and have children."
In other words, 60% to 70% of China's current football fans are middle-aged people, while the proportion of student fans and "young people" is only 20% to 30%.
Do young people nowadays stop watching the ball?
The author's own experience may give a glimpse of the changes of the times.
In the semi-final of the 1992 Asian Cup, the Chinese men's football team compared with Japan. The author lived in a famous university campus, and walked through the dormitory buildings of college students on the way home to watch the ball.
Suddenly, the surrounding dormitory buildings broke out a huge sound of "boom". All the buildings seemed to be shaking. It was the students cheering and shouting, and the national football team scored early! Xie Yuxin!
In 2001, the campus was once again crowded. Students walked around, waving flags and singing loudly. The security guards tried in vain to stop the dropping of wine bottles... The national football team rushed into the World Cup!
Over the years, there has been no excitement about football in this campus.
The last time there was such a movement, students walked out of the dormitory at night to cheer and shout, it was 2021, EDG won the championship in the League of Heroes, and the era of e-sports has come
Football is losing young people, and this loss is growing faster and faster.
This phenomenon appears not only in China, but also in the world. Juventus President Agnelli said: "Now, teenagers aged 10, 15 and 20 are becoming more and more indifferent to football. They care about other things. According to our research, men aged 15 to 24 have no interest in football for 40% of the time";
Real Madrid President Florentino also said: "We must be alert to why 40% of young people aged 16 to 24 are no longer interested in football..."
In fact, the answer may not be hard to find.
Playing football and watching football is originally fun, but in the fragmented era of pan entertainment, young people have too many choices for fun, especially a piece of electronic screen, which can easily let children get dopamine pleasure and hold them firmly.
It is possible to experience victory and satisfaction from football only after sweating, consuming huge physical strength, and experiencing pain and failure on the court. Now you can get excitement by clicking the button, so why do they still play football?
If a short video fails to attract attention for five to ten seconds, it will make people lose patience. Under this new era of attention habit, how many children are willing to spend more than 90 minutes watching a football game just for the second of waiting for the goal?
Virtual world sports such as e-sports occupy more and more time for young people, which is enough to compete with traditional sports such as football, and even more attractive.
Even fans who like football can find mirror substitutes in the world of e-sports.
Have you heard of the Electronic Premier League? This is an e-sports event launched jointly by the Premier League and e-sports company Gfinity since 2019, which is a replica of the Premier League in the virtual world.
Last year's electronic Premier League champion was Leeds United. In reality, Leeds United was demoted from the Premier League in the same season.
Now there are three major football e-sports events in the world - e-sports World Cup, e-sports Club World Cup and e-sports National Cup. In Japan, there is also the professional football e-sports team Blue United eFC.
Many of the post-95s, post-00s and post-10s who grew up in the background of the Internet have condensed their knowledge and experience of football into a small screen and a keyboard. In this virtual world, skilled electronic players have replaced the real world star idols and become popular objects. Virtual events also have their own fan groups and operation expansion The economic revenue is totally different, like a parallel world.
As for watching a live football game in the real world, for these young people, it is no longer the only way to link with football, just like the red and blue pill choices in The Matrix. Since you can get pleasure by immersing yourself in the virtual world, why should you experience the tedium and boredom of reality? Is the difference between virtual and real important?
In addition to the loss of young people, the elite group watching football - the post-70s/post-80s/pre-95s - has also passed the peak period of "watching football career".
Trapped in the pressure of physical strength, time, work and family, they either lost interest in football or could not stay up late even if they wanted to watch it.
For them, missing the live broadcast in the early morning and watching the video collection in two or three minutes on their way to work the next day will probably become the main way for them to focus on the European Cup.
Even if you watch the collection, it is much harder for the European Cup to have a disruptive impact on the short video platform than it is for the World Cup.
The information cocoon room caused by the short video algorithm objectively limits the attention of non fans to the European Cup and football. Unless there is a social explosion, the European Cup cannot form a viral transmission in the media, and its sense of existence is limited to the core fan circle.
Finally, let's take a look at the "peripheral" data related to the European Cup.
During the last European Cup, according to the data of a takeaway platform, the orders of bars, takeaway and other consumption related to football games were not as good as those of the previous years.
From 21 p.m. to 2 a.m., the takeout orders of users had a growth rate of less than 10% compared with the same period before the start of the tournament, and the growth rate was lower than 22.97% during the 2016 European Cup and 15.02% during the 2018 World Cup.
By this year's European Cup, similar figures may only be worse.
In the minds of the post-70s and post-80s generation, during the previous European Cup, the lively scene of eating in restaurants and bars all night while watching the big screen and watching the football match seems to be disappearing, becoming a beautiful memory that is difficult to reproduce.
Football has not changed. The world has changed. We have changed. (Li Puli)
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