With the NFL on the cusp of a new season, expect to see a bunch of stories about the league’s global expansion and how much interest there is in an international expansion of the NFL. This is obviously a load of junk, as the international games have abysmal viewership, and sports cannot seem to get around the fundamental time zone problems of international broadcasting, namely that the events must be consumed live and people don’t like watching things when they would rather be sleeping. The World Cup and Olympics remind us of this every few years, and F1 is an ongoing cautionary tale. The average U.S. viewership of the championship game of the World Cup since 1994 is entirely based on timeslots, with championships airing from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. averaging 4.2 million viewers, while those airing between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. getting 27.22 million.
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