Posted on 10/08/2017 8:50:48 AM PDT by 11th_VA
With NFL season in full swing, fans should be packing into sports bars on Sundays — so why are so many streaming the game at home instead?
Recent research from Foursquare found that in 2016, Sunday sports bar foot traffic dropped by 12 percent in cities with NFL teams; cities without their own teams saw a 13 percent drop. Furthermore, there was a 10 percent decline in people who went to a sports bar more than three times during the 17-week season, while only 40 percent of fans who had been to sports bars more than six times during the 2015 season repeated this behavior in 2016...
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
South Carolina bar refusing to show NFL games until national
Northern Kentucky bar to hold NFL merchandise burning party
Leominster bar skips NFL, listens to patriotic piano music instead
Norwich bar quietly takes stance against NFL protests
Greenville bar won't show NFL games until all players stand for anthem
Regardless of politics, there are way too many sports bars. Even non sports bars have a tv every 5 feet of wall space.
> Is Game Night at the Sports Bar Becoming a Thing of the Past? <
I talked to a few younger football fans of my acquaintance (mostly white, early 20’s, no vets). Most of them don’t care about the anthem controversy. They just want to watch pro football. And they will continue doing so.
So it seems (from my limited data) that - given enough time - this thing will eventually blow over.
These bars will have to figure out some new way to get people in or go out of business. If I had one I’d turn it into a family friendly pool hall and maybe have a movie night.
Lets hope so, because that will mean there will a whole lot less drunks on the road after leaving the, “Sports bars” which are nothing but bars to begin with.
F the NFL
Core football audience is men 34-54.
If young people don’t care about the anthem controversy, it doesn’t matter. The people who count seem to actually care. That’s bad for the NFL.
You go out to a sports bar to have some fun with your friends and get away from the daily grind, and you’ve got to watch more virtue signaling and political ideology embedded in the games.
If they could, the left would embed a chip in your head that tells you all day how much you suck and how much your neighbors hate you.
Which is pretty much what people who have full-blown schizophrenia experience. Might not be a coincidence.
So it seems (from my limited data) that - given enough time - this thing will eventually blow over.
That’s my take also. The NFL is a multi billion dollar enterprise. They’ll take a 10% hit, lose a few hundred million and move on. There is no game changer here, IMO.
Like anything else nowadays, you have your left leaning NFL fans and your right leaning NFL fans, and the two groups just don’t mix well anymore since the games have become overtly political.
Except that with the demise of youth football, there won’t be anywhere near as many newly minted football fans graduating high school.
Football as a sport has inoperable cancer.
My family are all musicians.
We are getting cancelled right and left because pubs and sports bars are not getting the traffic they used to get.
Maybe when the smoke clears on this NFL debacle, they will rip out the wide-screen plasma TVs, install a decent sized stage and a good PA system, and make “Pub Nite” a venue for LIVE MUSIC again.
(((I can dream, can’t I?)))
A local sports bar, Famous Sam’s, was always packed on the weekends. That ended after the city enacted a smoking ordinance. They hung on for a couple years but they eventually folded.
“So it seems (from my limited data) that - given enough time - this thing will eventually blow over.”
In cases like this, there’s a phenomenon I’ll call The Tipping Point. The NFL has a number of potentially fatal issues; fatal to the NFL. One is the high number of brain injuries which will, even without the present political issue, potentially end the league. Lawsuits and a dearth of talent coming up from high schools and colleges will, over time take its toll. The NFL has an exemption from the anti-trust laws. This was obtained due to a tainted bit of politics. Now some members of Congress have indicated a desire to revisit this exemption. No telling what the impact of that would be, but whatever it is it will be more than the NFL has had to deal with before this political controversy.
Another factor is that the games have become too long, lasting multiple hours with huge swaths of time for commercials and timeouts, etc. The viewing public is developing a lower tolerance for being bored. Cable cutting and culture changes are already reaping a fairly high percentage of the viewing populace. Combine all of these things with the progressively bad press from hiring thugs who beat up women and do stupid stuff and it is likely that in five years, or ten tops, the NFL will either be dead or nearly so.
The reason the named all these bars, “Sports bars” is because it helps take the stigma out of going to the, “Bar”. See in Sports bars, you can take the girl friend, the wife, etc for even bigger profit$. And it sound so much more acceptable...”We’re going to the Sports bar”, as opposed to, I’m going to the bar. They slap up some TV’s on the wall, sports jerseys and posters and whammo, you’ve got a bar the whole family can go to!
> Core football audience is men 34-54. If young people don’t care about the anthem controversy, it doesn’t matter. <
My point is that those young people will eventually age into that core audience. So if the NFL is patient...
A bit off-topic, but I wonder if the NFL will even be around 10 years from now. Not because of the anthem protests, but because of the head injury lawsuits that are sure to come. A few of those lawsuits at the college and high school level will wreck the NFL feeder pattern.
Yeah re sports bars...........
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Sports Bars wiped out neighborhood bars pretty much; even now when ya can find the remnants of neighborhood bars here and there, they are aping sports bars w/20 or more tvs janned within the bulkheads.
I notice lately that ALL re NOT tuned to news cannels! NO COINCIDENCE! Bad for biz, they say.
Recently, I witnessed an attempted political “discussion” in a “bar” even w/o a news channels on....this was promptly “discouraged” by a retired deputy “customer” who warned...this no place for that kinda talk... All hands STDU!
*****
Gunny G @ Planet WTF!
Remember To Laugh!
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Wow! Famous Sams is gone? Used to go there all the time with my Dad when I lived in Tucson. What a shame.
That’s partly because politicians rammed through anti-smoking legislation in many locales (not even allowing separately ventilated smoking rooms). Many places spent a good deal of money on ventilation equipment so that even with a few smokers, the air you were breathing in there was likely that little bit safer than what you would breathe outside on a city street.
The decline of pubs in the United States and Canada and the United Kingdom due in part to politicians and their sledgehammer to a fly approach to bars and pubs and smoking has also likely been a cause of a noted increase in binge drinking and other dangerous related practices.
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