World of Sport held their tenth and final episode of season 1 this past weekend on ITV. The viewership data is in and again it’s not pretty. Episode 10 averaged 200,000 viewers (3.9% share), down 100,000 viewers from last week but also down a sharp 40% from Episode 7’s 500,000 viewers (5% share).
We need to revisit the sentiments from last week’s first show in the new 2:30pm time slot . It’s clear that the change from 5pm to 4:30pm played a huge role in the ratings drop from weeks 5, 6,7 to 8. With the ITV Evening News changing by 30 minutes the rest of the schedule had to follow suit. Again the number isn’t pretty to look at but a time change affects most programmes across many genres. This isn’t uncommon for WWE either, when special time changes occur for RAW and Smackdown this affects their numbers.
What Happened?
The numbers for WoS WERE steadily increasing, week 5 saw a height of 900 thousand viewers and an overall rating of 700k. Again the live tour for 2019 is an excellent sign of ITV investment in the show, both monetarily and in figurative terms.
In the end WoS/World of Sport suffered from a variety of issues. The constant time changes and lack of publicity beyond the wrestlers/personalities themselves did nothing to help build an audience on mainstream television. This final week saw a big main event for the WoS Championship between Justin Sysum and Rampage. The bout was billed as ‘pay-per-view’ quality and the heavily featured Sysum won the title, this was a steady build for a new up and coming star and he (Sysum) has great upside potential. The real issue is that finishing on a 200k number in your finale episode is in no way good for Saturday television.
The show should go on with a second series. The upcoming 2019 tour shows that there still enough value in the brand to build around. The likes of Will Ospreay will certainly need to be front and centre if the return of the show is to be successful.
