It’s Not Buzz, Social Media or Growth…It’s the Damn Time Zones

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Occasionally, I have to debunk something that should be rather obvious to everyone, and yet, somehow, most people seem to believe the opposite.

For example, I still see pundits and analytics companies that don’t seem to understand that, the lower the price is for something, the more people will consume it. I wrote a whole article for The Ankler on this, the appropriately titled “F-R-E-E: The Word That Warps Our Brains”, describing basic economics. The less something costs, the more people will use it. 

Yet I still see analytics companies pointing out that movies that are available on streaming plans have more views than when they’re available for rent on PVOD. Some streamers used to brag that their streaming films got more “views” than tickets sold for big comic book movies (which also wasn’t even true). Paramount+ bragged, just last month, that their UFC fights, as part of a monthly streaming plan, get more viewers than when the fights were Pay-Per-View only. I mean, no kidding. Obviously more people will watch a film or a UFC fight if it’s included in a cheap streaming plan compared to paying the cost of that entire streaming plan to watch it. 

Today, I have to explain another one of these very, very basic things. 

In this case, time zones exist.

Due to the curvature of the Earth and the rotation of the sun, people live at different times of day. Thus, live events will air/stream at different times for people across the Earth. But due to humans’ diurnal sleep cycle, most humans sleep at night. Sports that start in the middle of the day for some people will start in the middle of the night for other people. Since most folks want to watch sports live (which is literally what platforms bank on when they buy sports rights), this is a problem.

Thus, time zones will, forever, hamper sports leagues’ efforts to expand globally, because people like watching sports live and, again, time zones exist.

I know, seems obvious, right? But billions of dollars are being spent as if this isn’t true and, worse, very, very few (if not zero) pundits or analysts challenge the major sports leagues’ plans for “global domination”. Global American sports expansion is taken as a given, when it’s anything but. Also, I regularly read analysis about why some sports ratings are up (“social media is driving interest in the Olympics” and “soccer has arrived in America” spring to mind) when time zones are the more obvious, but less sexy, explanation. 

So that’s the plan today. Explaining how time zones work, showing the data that, yes, people hate watching games that are on at inconvenient times, and then going over the strategic implications of this somewhat obvious conclusion.

Why This Matters: All the Leagues Are Pursuing International Growth

Last spring, I heard two sports pundits discussing San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan’s complaints about the 49ers’ upcoming season opening game in Australia; one pundit confidently asserted why this was happening with little to no skepticism:

Roger Goodell is seeking to conquer the world!!!!

On the surface, this sounds smart, right? I mean, if you’re the NFL, you’ve conquered America. As I cover every fall, the NFL is absolutely massive. Seemingly everyone in media repeats the stats about how 84 of the 100 telecasts on broadcast were from the NFL. Here’s my chart showing the massive viewership for the Thanksgiving and Christmas Day games:

Yet there’s almost nothing else the NFL can do to get bigger in the US. But we live in an economy that demands growth, growth, growth. So the next target: the world. 

Same goes for the NBA:

So will the NFL conquer the globe? Or the NBA? Or Formula 1? Probably not. After all, sports leagues have consistently failed to expand globally. The English Premier League still hasn’t taken off in America (averaging half a million viewers a match last season, a record). Formula 1 remains way less popular than NASCAR in the US (averaging 1.3 million viewers per race last season; this season they haven’t released any viewership figures). When the NBA signed its latest media rights deal, they gave global streaming rights to Amazon for free basically…and they had the lowest bid of the three companies.

This isn’t some minor concern; it matters financially. Literally, people are betting billions of dollars on the fact that time zones don’t exist.

How “Time Zones” Hurt International (and Domestic) Media Rights

The following two things are true:

• It’s cheaper than ever, thanks to digitization, to share content globally.
• The vast majority of people still prefer content from their own region.

There are some exceptions, most notably America’s film industry (globally, almost every country loves watching Hollywood blockbusters), but study after study shows that people prefer to watch TV shows and films from their home countries or regions. For example, Japanese audiences mostly watch Japanese TV shows, then American shows and films, then Korean TV shows. As I’ve written before, the proportion of foreign-language viewership in America matches the number of foreign-language speakers. Technology has certainly lowered transmission barriers, but cultural barriers and other factors still limit the spread of global content.

Sports provide a different flavor of this phenomenon. Let’s use the NBA to show why. (I’d use the NFL, but their games come on at all different times. I’ll cover Formula 1 later.)

Weekday NBA games start between 7:30 and 8:00 PM East Coast time, then the second set of nationally televised games start between 10:00 and 10:30 PM East Coast. On the West Coast, that’s 4:30 PM and 7:00 PM start times. (I tend to avoid personal anecdotes, but between work, kids and dinner, I struggle to watch East Coast NBA games.)

So, if you’re a French NBA fan, what time are you going to watch NBA games? With a six hour time difference, NBA games start airing in France at 1:30 AM and 4:00 AM. It’s virtually impossible for the vast, vast majority of French NBA fans to watch the games. What about China, the oft-talked-about huge opportunity for the NBA? It’s a bit better: it has a twelve or thirteen hour difference, so the games come on at 7:30 or 8:30 AM (depending on the time of year), a time when most people are at work. 

Or consider the converse, an NBA game played in Europe. If the game starts at 7:00 PM in Paris, it will be airing at 10 AM on the West Coast. That means most fans can’t watch, because they’re at work.

People hate—and I mean hate—watching sports at horrible times. It’s a point that’s so obvious, I almost feel dumb having to make it. I mean, seriously, who likes watching tape-delayed sports? Who wants to wake up at 7:00 AM or, God forbid, one in the morning to watch a game? Almost no one except some die hard fans.

How popular can your league become if local fans can’t watch the games?

This point is so obvious, my critics have leveled it at me before. Writing about Formula 1’s low viewership, the most common rebuttal to me, on Twitter, was, “Of course they’re low! Formula 1 races are on at horrible times!” I mean, I know that! But could someone tell The Athletic or Axios the next time they write a huge think piece about how popular Formula 1 is in America now? (By the way, if you’re new to the newsletter, check out my writing on Formula 1 here, here and here; the hype versus the reality regarding Formula 1’s popularity might be one of the biggest misconceptions in sports.)

The Data on Sports and Time Zones

So, I sound pretty confident, right? Well, this is one of those cases where the theory matches the data. So I’ve compiled four examples of sports playing in different time zones to show the impact on viewership. 

The NFL

Here’s the average viewership for the NFL’s CBS and Fox afternoon games, Sunday Night Football, Monday Night Football, Thursday Night Football, and the international games from last season. Can you guess which bar represents the international games?

Okay, here’s the chart with the labels:

Again, apologies, this article and its conclusions seem very, very obvious, but clearly the overseas games completely decimate the US viewership for the NFL. 

The NFL touted that the international games audience set a record for average viewership last year, but as I wrote about last month, that’s probably just a result of Nielsen changing how they measure TV viewership. And even if they set a record, they’re still very low compared to convenient, middle of the day games. Perhaps the best counter-argument is that the international games (at least most of them) were on the NFL Network/NFL+, thus inhibiting viewership, and this matters, as I detailed recently in my “viewership hierarchy”. But I feel confident predicting that, even when these games switch to other platforms next season, they’ll still be the lowest watched each week.

Formula 1

Here’s last year’s viewership data for Formula 1 races in 2025, arranged by start time on the East Coast.

And here’s that viewership by start time:

Again, the relationship is clear: the earlier, less convenient race times result in fewer people watching them. When a match comes on at 1:00 AM, far fewer people watch it compared to afternoon or primetime races. (The one exception? The Monaco Grand Prix, which is like the Indy 500 or Daytona for Formula 1.) For most of the European races, let’s be honest: most sports fans on the West Coast aren’t waking up at 6:00 AM to watch a race.

(To be clear, you could add up all of the 2025 Formula 1 viewership in America—my rough estimate is 63 million hours—and it’s more or less equal to a single Sunday Night Football game for the NFL. This sport is still tiny in America, despite oodles and oodles of press coverage arguing otherwise.)

You can see the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t quandary facing Formula 1. Do you sacrifice viewership in Europe for potential viewership in America? Indeed, Formula 1 starts Middle Eastern races (which are behind Europe, timezone-wise) at inconvenient times for those local markets to put the races on at better times in Europe and America, where most of the eyeballs and dollars are.

World Cup

Here are the last nine World Cup final matches arranged by time zone: