Your Economy (No Politics)

[al44]

Financial firm deals Fox a blow over faltering NFL ratings

By Jake Harp
on October 14, 2017 at 10:57am

One of the hottest topics of the young NFL season has been the decrease in television ratings. According to multiple polls, the biggest reason fans aren’t tuning in as much is because they disagree with the anthem protests that became so prevalent earlier in the season.

Now things have reached the point where low ratings could start to impact the bottom lines of the NFL’s broadcast partners.

On Thursday, Wall Street firm Credit Suisse lowered its 2018/19 financial forecast for Fox, citing low NFL ratings as one of the primary reasons.


“We trim our 2018/19 EPS forecasts … ahead of Q1 earnings,” analyst Omar Sheikh wrote. “The key near term headwinds are soft NFL ratings and the risk that the Sky transaction is blocked by UK regulators.”

The second part refers to Fox’s ongoing attempt to acquire 61 percent of European TV company Sky.

“NFL ratings [are] weak so far,” Sheikh added. “This was negatively impacted during the first 2 weeks by hurricane disruption, but is disappointing given the soft comps — if ratings do not improve materially, we see a potential headwind to domestic advertising revenues in Q2/Q3 ’18.”


Sheikh reduced projections for 2018 and 2019 earnings per share by 1 percent.

What does all this mean?

It means some very smart financial minds think it is likely Fox will lose a bunch of money, essentially because of players protesting the anthem.

As anthem protests grow smaller and smaller league-wide, TV ratings are slowly increasing week over week, according to the New York Post. Still, the ratings are down considerably over last season, when the NFL was battling a heated presidential election for the nation’s attention.


Week 5 saw combined NFL ratings down 7.2 percent from 2016. There were bright spots, like Fox’s late game featuring Green Bay and Dallas, which was up 12 percent, but it wasn’t nearly enough to offset the other Sunday afternoon games, which were down 17 percent as a whole.

As more news of NFL broadcasters and sponsors being impacted by protests rolls in, expect the league to finally do something to address the issue that has continued to irk a huge percentage of its core base.

https://www.thewildcard.com/financial-firm-deals-fox-blow-faltering-nfl-ratings/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=westernjournalism&utm_content=2017-10-14&utm_campaign=manualpost