Women’s Euro 2022 showed how to attract a disengaged younger audience

Football is bending over backwards to prove its relevance. From 60-minute matches to sin bins and throw-ins taken with feet, Fifa, the game’s governing body, is exploring every option in a bid to attract a newer, younger audience.

These ideas are not new. Real Madrid’s president, Florentino Pérez, used the claim of a growing army of disinterested youth to justify the case for the European Super League. The 75-year-old said on the Spanish TV show El Chiringuito that 40% of fans aged between 16 and 24 are not interested in football. “Why? Because there are a lot of low-quality games and they have other entertainment platforms,” he said. “It’s a reality. They say the games are too long. We have to change something if we want football to stay alive. Sometimes we don’t understand our children or grandchildren.”

The Super League may have been shot down, temporarily at least, but the idea that football must do something to recruit a disengaged younger audience is still high on the agenda. At the Financial Times’s Business of Football Summit in February, Eurosport’s head of sport, Andrew Georgiou, said: “Our research shows 42% of people between 13 and 23 are saying they’re not interested in sport at all.”

A 2017 ComRes poll of 18- to 24-year-olds for the BBC found that 62% engaged with football through playing computer games and close to three-quarters of young fans got their football news from social media. Meanwhile Nielsen data in 2019 from eight markets (China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, the US and the UK) showed that 16- to 24-year-olds prefer shorter “snackable” content.

Perhaps, though, the answer is not to shorten games or tweak the rules of the most followed sport in the world, or to assume the attention