Isiah Pacheco #10 of the Kansas City Chiefs runs for a one-yard touchdown in the third quarter against the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LVII at State Farm Stadium on February 12, 2023 in Glendale, Arizona.
Rob Carr | Getty Images Sports | Getty Images
At the beginning of the month, a well-known musician appeared a Kansas City Chiefs Because the National Football League continues its efforts to reach a new audience.
But this time it wasn’t Taylor Swift cheering on Travis Kelce, as the pop star has done at games in Kansas City, which boosted the audience.
Daddy Yankee was a Puerto Rican rapper known for hits like “Gasolina” and “Rompe”. He attended a Monday Night Football game at Arrowhead Stadium and spent time with Chiefs running back Isiah Pacheco. Pacheco, who is originally from Puerto Rico, previously let Daddy Yankee try his Two Super Bowl rings.
The moment came as part of the NFL’s “Por La Cultura.” the campaignis in its fourth year and is a key element of the league’s efforts to grow its Latino and Spanish-speaking audiences.
The NFL is known for its explosive ratings and is one of the top sports in terms of viewership on both traditional television and streaming. A Nielsen report earlier this week showed that football boosted ratings in September.
Although the league is still growing, both globally and in the U.S., a key aspect of that expansion is the Hispanic audience, league and media officials told CNBC.
“I think when you have a successful product, you’re a little bit tied to your success, right? I mean, the growth that (the NFL) can really achieve within the mainstream (English) speaking population of the United States is very small.” said Olek Loewenstein, TelevisaUnivision’s global president of sports.
He noted that the Hispanic population is “one of the largest, if not the largest, growing and younger demographic in the United States.”
Critical public
Marissa Solis, the NFL’s senior vice president of global brand and consumer marketing, said she joined the league three years ago “to get momentum behind our growing audience.” For the NFL, he said, this means three groups: the under-35 audience, which Solis says is overwhelmingly Latino; women; and Latinos.
“It’s mathematically impossible to grow the league without Latinos,” Solis said. “This audience is critical to our growth. And it’s critical to global growth because there’s so much connection and pride across borders, and fandom transcends borders.”
When it comes to sports in the U.S., Hispanic audiences tend to favor football, followed by baseball and boxing, Loewenstein said. The NFL is still working to build its brand in a global market dominated by football and other sports.
“I think the NFL is one of the first sports to grow and explode among Hispanics,” Loewenstein said.
Jaire Alexander #23 of the Green Bay Packers runs onto the field with the Brazilian flag before a game against the Philadelphia Eagles at Arena Corinthians on September 06, 2024 in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Wagner Meier | Getty Images Sports | Getty Images
At the start of the season, the NFL expanded its reach to the non-Spanish-speaking Latino public, hosting a game in Brazil for the first time as it brings more games to international venues. It was a game play it exclusively good Comcast‘s Peacock and was the second most-watched live event on the streaming platform, behind an NFL postseason game earlier this year.
Solis said about 31 million Latinos in the U.S. considered themselves NFL fans four years ago, when the Por La Cultura effort began, and that has since increased to 40 million.
Television in Spanish
While the campaign has focused on how the Latino community expresses its passion and the stories of players like Christian Gonzalez, Solis said expanding the broadcasts into Spanish has been a big help.
The NFL has more than 75 broadcasts available in Spanish this season, the league said.
“All these efforts have led to a tremendous growth in fandom,” he said.
Philadelphia Eagles guard Landon Dickerson #69 and quarterback Tanner McKee #16 take the field during the player introduction before an NFL football game against the Green Bay Packers at Arena Corinthians on September 6, 2024 in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Brooke Sutton | Getty Images Sports | Getty Images
Paramount GlobalCBS has given it this year Super Bowl between San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs, but since the network has no equivalent in Spain, it licensed those rights to TelevisaUnivision in the US and Mexico.
The Super Bowl on TelevisaUnivision’s over-the-air network broke records, the company said he said with an average of 2.3 million viewers across all its platforms, the largest audience for a Spanish-language broadcast of a Super Bowl.
However, the total contribution was small 123.4 million viewers From the 2024 Super Bowl.
“Seventy percent of the people who watched the Super Bowl didn’t watch another playoff game that year,” TelevisaUnivision’s Lowenstein said.
The first Super Bowl broadcast in Spanish was in 2015 on the Fox Deportes cable television channel. In 2022, NBCUniversal’s Telemundo aired the Super Bowl for the first time on an over-the-air network in Spanish.
Broadcasting the Super Bowl in Spanish, on the other hand, is not part of the NFL media rights agreementshas become a significant priority as the NFL looks to expand availability, according to the league.
Fans arrive before the game between the Green Bay Packers and the Philadelphia Eagles at Arena Corinthians on September 06, 2024 in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Pedro Vilela | Getty Images Sports | Getty Images
This was emphasized earlier this week by Fox Deportes and Telemundo when the two networks announced that they would Take off the Super Bowl in February Both networks will offer the “broadest Spanish-language coverage” of the US Super Bowl in history, and the networks will carry separate broadcasts.
Since the 2022 Super Bowl broadcast, Telemundo has seen “significant growth in our audience” for the NFL, said Joaquin Duro, executive vice president of sports for NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises.
Telemundo broadcasts every “Sunday Night Football” game in Spanish on both TV and Peacock. As he pointed out, while the main audience remains on traditional television, streaming is becoming more and more important. “This is helping us attract a younger, more tech-savvy audience,” Duro said.
Like the NFL, Telemundo Deportes highlights the stories of Hispanic players. It has also expanded its coverage of NFL events with a greater presence and range of interviews at games, Duro added.
“I love the change, the evolution, the expansion of the NFL,” said Rolando Cantú, a former NFL player and analyst on “TNF en Español” and Telemundo Deportes’ “Sunday Night Football.”
Disclosure: Comcast owns NBCUniversal, the parent company of CNBC.
