Over 34-million fans tuned into the inaugural Vodacom United Rugby Championship season as the league set a number of major broadcast records in its first campaign.
Using consolidated reports from Nielsen Sports, one of the world’s leading agencies in broadcast reporting, the URC confirmed that the audience for the entire 2021-22 season reached a high mark of 34.6m across 7,000-plus hours of coverage.
This figure of 34.6m is an increase of 169% compared to the 2020-21 PRO14 and Rainbow Cup campaigns combined.
- The cumulative average audience per game during the season was 230k which represented a 109% increase on ’20-21.
- A cumulative audience of almost 3m people tuned into round three with the figure of 2,892,000 setting a new record for the highest audience for a single round in the league’s history.
- In total, four rounds eclipsed an audience of 2m, seven rounds drew more than 1.5m and six of the remaining seven rounds all attracted a minimum viewership of 1m.
- The average audience per round in the regular season was 1.7m.
- The cumulative audience from Italy was 1.6m.
A total of 1.25m watched the Stormers win their first URC title to set a new record for the league decider. Although the Grand Final was an all-South African affair, 41% of the audience came from outside the territory with live coverage in the Republic of Ireland accounting for 15%.
In the top 10 most watched games of the regular season, Munster featured five times, the Sharks were involved in three with Ospreys, Ulster and the Stormers appearing twice.
The most watched game in the regular season was the Sharks’ round-three trip to Ospreys which was viewed by a combined audience of 581k on BBC Wales, SuperSport and Premier Sports.
- R3 Ospreys vs Sharks 580,026
- R3 Cardiff vs Vodacom Bulls 560,886
- R2 Munster vs Stormers 538,909
- R6 Sharks vs Scarlets 531,421
- R10 Munster vs Ulster 523,707
- R4 Munster v Connacht 521,110
- R1 Munster vs Sharks 484,267
- R5 Ospreys v Munster 480,652
- R4 Ulster vs Lions 468,993
- R4 Dragons vs Stormers 445,471
Not only did SA teams drive the audience in seven of the top-10 most watched matches, the Stormers were the most viewed team in the league with their total audience coming in at over 7.2m. The URC champions are followed by the Bulls, Munster, Sharks and Leinster for audiences across the entire season.
Top 5 Games from South Africa
- R6 Sharks vs Scarlets 531,421
- R17 Stormers vs Leinster 417,323
- R7 Lions vs Munster 394,416
- R16 Sharks vs Leinster 361,290
- R17 Bulls vs Glasgow Warriors 323,386
Photo: Shaun Roy/BackpagePix
