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Liam Brickhill
The Mzansi Super League attracted more than 3.4 million South African viewers during its opening weekend, which resulted in four matches. The league is only beginning to gain ground and attract fans as the summer approaches, but television figures suggest that it has already sparked a keen interest among viewers.
A gloomy weather, a cold snap during the opening weekend and the creation of new teams may have prevented the tournament from attracting a considerable number of fans to the field. Only 7,000 spectators showed up for the first match between Cape Town Blitz and Tshwane Spartans in New York, with a capacity of 25,000, while 4,896 were in Wanderers for the match between Jozi Stars and Nelson Mandela Bay Giants. Meanwhile, the match attracted 16,655,546 unique viewers in South Africa.
An independently conducted audience badysis by Nielsen Sport revealed that a single television audience of 34.18594 people had viewed the league 's first four games. The Saturday night match between Jozi Stars and Nelson Mandela Bay attracted the most spectators, with the four games going beyond the 1.3 million mark.
SABC-3, the channel on which the games were broadcast in South Africa, generally attracts around 21 million South African viewers per month. The highest-rated show in the chain is the soap opera Isidingo, which has been in existence for 20 years and attracts about a million viewers per episode, which MSL's audience figures compare favorably.
For comparison, the T20I against Zimbabwe on 12 October attracted 6,077,948 viewers. Outside of South Africa, a broadcast contract with Sony means that the MSL is also being shown in India on the Sony Six and Sony Six HD channels. CSA also has an agreement with British channel FreeSports, available in 18 million UK homes. FreeSports also broadcast live coverage of the Bangladesh Premier League 2017.
"This fully justifies our decision to take SABC as a host broadcast partner," said Cricket South Africa Managing Director Thabang Moroe. "It's really a product for people and helped us achieve one of our key objectives, not only to attract traditional cricket fans, but also to open a new market.
"This is a win-win situation for all of our partners, be they administrators, players, coaches, supporters or our business partners.The MSL can only strengthen because it will continue to develop while settling alongside of various T20 leagues "The most watched sporting event in the history of South African television was the opening match between South Africa and Mexico at the World Cup in Africa. South, bringing together 10,146,793 viewers to watch the match on the SABC 1 and SuperSport 3 channels on the DSTV satellite. .
While the number of badisted matches is starting to increase, while the match between Cape Town Blitz and Paarl Rocks last weekend is almost exhausted, the television viewing numbers are an even bigger sign positive for the CSA after his first attempt to create a local league – the defunct T20 Global League – failed.
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