Peter Moore, former EA Sports boss and current Liverpool Football Club chairman, worries that millennials might not have the attention span needed to watch sports and would probably prefer to spend their time playing Fortnite.
“90 minutes is a long time for a millennial male to sit down on a couch,” said Moore in an interview with Arabian Business. “When I look at viewing and attendance figures of millennial males, I’m concerned as a chief executive of a football club that relies on the next generation of fans coming through.”
This is hardly the first time that millennials have been blamed for…everything, but it must be said that the idea that millennials’ low attention span is killing various industries is one of the more popular assertions out there. So far as that goes, Moore thinks that maybe it’s time for sports organisations such as the one he works for start figuring out ways to break their content into chunks.
“We are an industry that needs to harness technology to make sure we don’t miss an entire generation of young people growing up that don’t have that love for football,” says Moore. “We need to package content in bites of 60 to 90 seconds to keep their engagement.”
While most of Moore’s ramblings are most certainly of the “old man sitting on his porch” variety (global sports ratings are still quite high as are pieces of entertainment that are longer than 60 and 90 seconds), there is a bit of truth hidden deep underneath those misguided statements. Netflix has rightly asserted that titles like Fortnite are the real competition not because of lowered attention spans, but rather because it’s a popular game that eats up what limited time for entertainment there is in a day.
All the same, Moore has mentioned that he will continue to push technology and social media-driven content in order to capture the imaginations of a generation that is apparently a meme away from loving football.