Sports documentaries, who is it for?
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Text / Meng Qiao
Just last month, the second season of Netflix's PGA TOUR-themed documentary series "Full Swing" ended, with an average score of 8.35 on IMDb, and the final two episodes of "All Roads to Rome" scored 8.5 and 8.7.
Interestingly, despite the similar ratings and the production level online, the two seasons of "Full Swing" have received different reviews among the audience - almost all viewers are satisfied with the quality of the work, but there are different opinions on which season they prefer.
Gathering all the perspectives, we can draw a preliminary conclusion: Season 1 of Full Swing contains a lot of explanations on the basics of golf, while Season 2 omits these and focuses more on things like the PGA's merger with Saudi LIV, the Ryder Cup, and the behind-the-scenes story of the U.S. national team.
For non-golf audiences who learn about and try to love the sport through film and television, the basics are invaluable to them, while for fans who are already past their primacy, the basics are boring and more inclined to off-court or behind-camera stories.
So, this also begs the question: who is the sports documentary for?
Source: Netflix
F1 and Rush to Survive, a precedent for success
To explore this question, we have to mention another popular sports documentary, Formula 1: Drive to Survive from Netflix, which was watched by more than 50 million viewers on top of Netflix's roughly 231 million subscribers, and in North America, more than 30% of viewers learned about F1 through it.
It's worth noting that "The Amazing Race" and "Full Swing" were created by the same team, and the success of the former has also set the template for documentaries on other sports in recent years.
Extended reading: Five-fold in six years: How did F1, which rejected a $20 billion offer, run out of the miracle of sports business history? Source: Netflix
The planning of "Amazing Survival" is inseparable from the strategic layout of the owner of the F1 event, the Liberty Media Group.
Although it is known as the "world's three major events" along with the Olympic Games and the World Cup, the core audience of F1 has long been concentrated in Europe. When Liberty Media Group took over in 2017, it was natural that it would be able to grow globally as soon as possible, especially in the U.S. home market, where documentary documentation was the most efficient way to explore the stories behind the event.
The success of Amazing Battles has not only led to an increase in audience for F1 events, but has also helped the latter increase its marketing value – ESPN's most recent contract with F1 for a renewal of media rights was $75 million to $90 million per year, compared to $5 million last time, an increase of more than 1,500%.
To some extent, "The Amazing Battlegrounds" revitalizes the F1 races that have gradually solidified the audience over the years. And the series "Full Swing" was also planned and born under this purpose.
So, did the broadcast of "Full Swing" achieve the desired effect for the PGA Tour?
Sports documentaries, who does it serve?
According to official information, "Full Swing" was released in 190 countries and regions around the world in 32 languages and entered the top 10 of Netflix's global views, of which it ranked second in the United States and the United Kingdom, and ranked first in Ireland.
In September last year, Nielsen (Nielsen Media Research Analysis) released a set of data that within two months of the release of "Full Swing", 63% of viewers watched PGA Tour events, of which 11% of viewers did not touch the PGA Tour within six months, but became fans after watching the show.
A similar trend is reflected in the data provided by Xcelerant Omnibus: 42% of viewers showed greater interest in the game of golf after watching Full Swing, and 36% spent more time following golf events on social media.
The PGA officially said that the PGA's total audience delivery (TAD) rose by 5% in 2023, and it grew even more in the international market, with about 21% in the PGA's 14 major overseas markets.
Alex Myers, the author of Golf Digest, said in a podcast that the PGA quickly communicated their intentions to F1 and Netflix after seeing the results of their partnership on The Amazing Battlegrounds. From this point of view, the appeal of the event party for sports documentaries is obvious - the mission of attracting new users is far greater than serving existing audiences.
Netflix's recent new documentary of the same kind also includes the tennis-themed "Break Point"
The "old white man" movement in the bubbles
Starting from the demands of the event party, it is not difficult to understand the disagreement between the two types of viewers mentioned above on the basic content of "Full Swing".
As Chad Mumm, producer of Full Swing and chief creative officer of media company Vox, explains, "After watching Full Swing, your perception of golf as a whole will change forever. In order to achieve a "change of perception", it is necessary to establish a basic understanding of the sport - this is where the basic knowledge of the show, which has been criticized by the hardcore golf audience, comes from.
In the past few years, sports documentaries have reached unprecedented heights in the global market, and some traditional sports leagues, whether it's tennis or golf, are facing the same problem: difficulty in attracting new players.
In 2020, Australian businessman Alex Poplin co-founded the "Ultimate Tennis Matchup (UTS)" with the famous French tennis coach Mouratto Grou, a tennis tournament for young people, which is very trendy from publicity to competition format.
According to Gru, the audience for traditional tennis tournaments is around 61 years old, while the majority of UTS audiences are under the age of 30, and more than half of them have never watched tennis.
Moratto Grew Source: UTS official website
Not to mention golf. Today, in the eyes of the public, golf is the embodiment of the three words "old white man" in the sports world, and if you want to add a label, it is probably "rich".
And when a sport and the circle with it at its core are labeled as such, it is enough to discourage any passerby.
In fact, there is an interesting commonality that can be found in several sports documentaries on Netflix in recent years: whether it is "Speed" about F1, "Break Point" for tennis's four Grand Slams, or "Full Swing" for golf, these sports have all of these problems.
Unlike sports like basketball and football, which have street, working-class overtones, tennis, F1 and golf are inherently proud and unattainable of the Western upper class.
This is built up by history and time, and the superiority in the bones of a sport has little to do with the income of athletes. For a long time, the discourse of these movements remained in the hands of the Western upper classes. In a way, these emotional values are very similar to luxury, creating a bubble away from the world with the elite lifestyle that Westerners admire, enveloping the audience, looking down on the masses, and enjoying a sense of security – that's certainly not the whole charm of these sports, but there's no denying that elite filters are definitely part of the reason why they have gained a large and loyal audience.
Today, however, this top-level perspective has become an obstacle to the development of these movements. So we can see that golf, F1, and tennis are all actively popping these bubbles, in the way of sports documentaries.
Source: Netflix
In the two seasons of "Full Swing", both the film and the event are more inclined to show the more human side of the players.
For example, in the second season, the Dustin Johnsons revealed the death threats they received after supporting the Saudi golf tournament LIV, the first season devoted a certain amount of space to the human relationship between golfers and caddies, and the F-words and foul language that many viewers noticed.
Letting top athletes fade their godheads is a common part of sports documentaries, which helps to bring athletes and spectators closer. But we can easily notice that in some of the more down-to-earth North American sports content, the banned language is either beeped or simply cut.
Sports events with more accessible audiences need to be high-level, while less approachable golf needs to retain these original curses in Full Swing to get closer to the average person.
This is just a simple microcosm, and it is not enough to achieve the goal of being close to the people alone, but it is enough to see the big from the small and confirm the thinking of some producers and creators.
epilogue
At the end of 2023, some golf venues in the United States underwent a lightweight reform. They've created a "short course" that's somewhere between traditional golf and mini-golf – with shorter courses, between 9 and 13 holes, essentially an equal scale of traditional golf.
Venue operators believe that traditional golf takes seven and a half hours to play round trip + play, which shortens the time consumption, and the shortest track can be played in an hour, while the small scale of the venue eliminates the need to build a venue in a remote place on the outskirts of the city, making the venue closer to the city center and allowing more passers-by and enthusiasts to experience the fun.
This means a huge cost reduction: a traditional golf course costs around $15 million, while a short-course course is only in the million-dollar class. The cost is lower, the footprint is smaller, and it is easier to get a project approved from the government.
It stands to reason that this kind of reform, which is lighter and appeals to a larger audience, is definitely good business. But in fact, this reform did not make much of a storm.
There are two main reasons for this: the inability to balance the emotional value of customers – many Americans are happy to spend the whole day on the golf course on weekends, which is a traditional culture that even a two-hour one-way drive is part of the culture and cannot be omitted, and the fact that the majority of the American game of golf is in the hands of traditionalists who do not want to see this change.
When a movement wants to reform, transform, and embrace a new audience, it is bound to collide with traditional and original audiences. And the contradiction involved in this is far greater than the two seasons of "Full Swing" in which hardcore golf fans and passers-by fans stood on the sidelines respectively.
However, it has become a trend for the aristocratic movement to begin to transform into a commoner, and the collision suffered by the movement in the transformation may not be solved by a few documentaries. The key questions are –
When a sport pops a bubble on its own, what happens to those in the bubble?