February 1st, 2022, Bhawna Singh
YouGov’s 2022 Sports Buzz Rankings reveal the sports brands that generated the most NET positive buzz in the past year
The Indian Premier League tops YouGov’s 2022 Sports Buzz Rankings in India for the second year in succession with a Buzz score of 50.8. Even in its 14th season and interrupted by COVID outbreaks which forced it to relocate to the UAE – the IPL continues to hold Indians in its thrall, creating a lot of positive Buzz.
YouGov SportsIndex measures the public’s perception of sports brands on a daily basis across a range of metrics. The rankings in YouGov’s 2022 Buzz Report are based on the Buzz scores, which measures whether respondents have heard something positive or negative about a brand recently.
As India recorded its best-ever performance in the Olympics with a haul of seven medals, including a gold, it’s unsurprising to see the Olympics coming a close second (49.2) and making a new entry in this year’s rankings. In fact, IPL only just pips the games by a margin of 1.6 points.
Even though India failed to qualify the knockout stage, the ICC Cricket World Cup managed to secure the third-place (45.9), but its buzz score recorded a slight decline (of -0.4) compared to last year. FIFA World Cup also noticed a decline in its year-on-year score and moved down one place to fourth (28.3).
On the other hand, India’s indigenous football league- the Indian Super League managed to hold on to its fifth position (20.4), further cementing itself in the country’s sporting landscape. The Pro Kabaddi League, however, recorded a drop of three places to seventh compared to last year’s rankings (from 23.1 to 17.9).
In the sixth spot is the Wimbledon Championship with a buzz score of 18.0 and the Australia Open takes the tenth (13) place.
Finally, completing the top ten list for India is the Asian Games and World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), securing the eighth(15.3) and ninth place (13.3), respectively.
About YouGov SportsIndex
SportsIndex is one of YouGov Sport’s signature tools. It operates in 35 markets around the world, tracking 200 key domestic and international competitions across more than 30 sports. A core of 21 properties is tracked in every market, allowing for international comparison. Many other events, leagues and tournaments appear in multiple markets; while some competitions are tracked only in the country which hosts them.
In every market, YouGov takes a list of the leading sports properties – a mix of domestic and international events, competitions and leagues – and, based on 700,000 surveys annually, measures the public’s perceptions of them.
Every day, and for every property on our list, we track 16 separate brand metrics, providing a treasure chest of data for sports marketers and administrators.
SportsIndex gives our clients the capability to do everything from measuring the effect of yesterday’s news headlines to establishing a season-on-season trend stretching back years. And because it operates internationally, users can track and compare properties across the world.
Methodology
The 2022 Buzz Report provides insight into all the sports events we monitor against just one of the 16 metrics we measure – ‘Buzz’.
Every day, we ask 100 people these questions...
“Over the past two weeks, which of the following sports events/leagues have you heard something positive about?” and “Now which of the following sports/events leagues have you heard something negative about over the past two weeks?”
From the answers we collect, we derive a Buzz score for each event.
What’s a Buzz score?
Our Buzz score is the difference between the percentage of respondents hearing positive news and the percentage hearing negative news about an event in the previous two weeks. So, depending on what is going on, an event’s Buzz score can reveal whether conversations around a property are positive or negative at a point in time. Here is a graph charting the US Buzz score for the FIFA Women’s World Cup over 2018 which shows how this metric can change over time.
Buzz scores can range from +100 (where everyone we asked has heard something positive) to -100 (where everyone we asked has heard something negative). A completely neutral score, therefore, would be zero. A score of 45 would show positive sentiment towards a property, by a margin of 45 percentage points.
For our Buzz rankings here, we look at the highest average Buzz score each property has scored each calendar month. Then we take the highest of those twelve scores and compare them with the highest monthly scores of every other property we track in that market. We track up to 80 properties in each country but for the sake of this report, we display only the top ten in each market overall (typically a mix of domestic and international). In addition, we show a top five or top ten ranking for each market for those competitions hosted or held (in part or in their entirety) in each market over the year.
Click here, to download the full report