The NHL has seen significant growth since expanding to 32 teams. With success stories like the Golden Knights and the boost the Seattle Kraken brought to the league, you might expect the NHL to compete with other major sports, yet it still faces challenges. So, why is that?
Viewership Struggles
The NHL ranks 4th in income from national viewership according to sportico.com where in total it only makes up 14% of their annual revenue, which at 1.3 billion, it's roughly 10% of the NFL in comparison I'll talk about it's primary income source later on, but there's a reason why this is happening.
A key factor seems to be accessibility issues. Most teams require a specific streaming package for in-state viewers, while out-of-state fans can watch on ESPN without restrictions. For instance, as a Preds fan in North Carolina, I face no blackout restrictions, but if I lived in Tennessee, I’d need a separate streaming service. This creates a paywall for local fans and limits the sport’s accessibility.
The fragmentation in streaming services also doesn’t help; teams have varied contracts, with some tied to Bally Sports (now FanDuel Sports), Amazon Prime Video, or DirectTV, while others, like Vegas and Dallas, have launched their own services. This patchwork of options complicates and restricts viewership, deterring potential new fans.
Sales Focus
Sports is a business, and for the NHL, the main revenue driver is ticket sales and in-person experiences, which account for 44% of the league's annual revenue. You’ll notice constant pushes for ticket sales through commentators, in-game reporters, and social media ads. However, this focus primarily targets existing fans rather than drawing in new ones, limiting the league's growth.
Marketing Efforts
There are a lot of great efforts the NHL has done to grow as a league and to grow it's fan base, but there are a lot of missed opportunities. I've researched the marketing side of the NHL over the past few months by listening to interviews and attending webinars with marketing professionals in the NHL. I'll primarily focus around digital marketing as that's how most people view marketing efforts, but I'll highlight some other examples worth mentioning:
Team Growth
I attended a webinar hosted by Social Podium with special guest Dan LaTorraca, who at the time was the VP of marketing for the Carolina Hurricanes. Originally, I was just looking to attend as a networking opportunity, but I learned a lot on how the NHL uses social media as a marketing tool.
From a team perspective, it all comes down to interacting with your current fanbase and highlighting players. You've probably seen the in game updates when players score or someone gets injured, but they primarily use social media as a way of fan interaction and player highlights.
League Growth
There has been a few great marketing campaigns that drove merch sales and growth, such as the expansions to Seattle and Vegas, but there's 2 that you probably didn't realize was a social media campaign, the "Hockey Is for Everyone" campaign and the Reverse Retro Jerseys I'll touch on the HISFE campaign later, but it's been both good and bad for the league.
In an interview on the 32 thoughts podcast where Dan Near had just been appointed the Commissioner for the WHL, he talks about his involvement with the Reverse Retro jerseys as being the Global Head of Hockey at Adidas. He mentions that this was more or less a marketing campaign than just another sweater to boost sales. He states that one of the primary purposes was to create a hashtag tied to the NHL and the product. This led the first and second Reverse Retro series to be one of the most successful sports merch campaigns in recent history.
The NHL knows it can't compete with viewership, so a big effort is through social media growth. They focus around player highlights and stats more and more, but some are a bit ridiculous and people have noticed. I've seen the joke that goes like "Insert player has scored the most goals on the 43rd Tuesday after they turned 26 in NHL history." Seems a bit much right? It's fun to make jokes about this, but this is a big part of the NHL's story line writing, player highlights and looking at ways to promote elite players. But they're also putting a huge focus on the next generation of hockey players. Let's look at the 23-24 season, it seemed like every game mentioned Conor Bedard whether he played in the game, played against another team, or didn't even play at all.
So, why do they do this? We'll need to look at another sports league. The WNBA has skyrocketed in growth all because of the new star players like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. They brought in a lot of women's college basketball fans to watch the WNBA setting the 2024 season to have the highest attendance in 26 years according to the WNBA. They focused their social media content around these players and led to a significant growth in fans.
Too Many Good Players?
The reason this didn't work as well for the NHL can factor down to a couple things. One, and this is a big factor, most people in the U.S. don't watch junior hockey, so they don't really know about the players, but another thing is that the NHL has a lot of elite talent. This makes it hard for players like Bedard to stand out enough to cause the game to grow. Let's look at his rookie stats:
GP: 68 G: 22 A: 29 Pts: 61 Pts/G: 0.897
If he played a full 82 games without getting injured, he'd be around the following
GP: 68 G: 27 A: 36 Pts: 73 Pts/G: 0.890
These numbers are solid, and for a rookie they're great, but the issue is there are too many other skaters with significantly better stats.
When comparing to the WNBA, there are 12 teams, which makes this social media strategy much easier to pull off. Looking at the 2024 season, Caitlin Clark set multiple records in her rookie season, finishing 5th overall in season points.
If you look at Bedard's 2024 stats, he ranks 84th overall for season points. but if you go for projected points, that puts him tied for 43rd. On top of this, the Blackhawks still performed poorly, ranking 31st overall. People don't want to watch a team lose over and over again. You see why it's hard to use a rookie as a marketing campaign in the NHL? At least one of two things must happen. The player has to be at the same level as the top players and set records, or the team has to do exceptionally better in the standings.
Community Gatekeeping
People, and fans especially, are against change, with hockey being no exception. There are tons of people that don't want the league to expand beyond 32, and others hating on markets just because they're successful right off the bat. There is a subtle hostility when bad takes are made or uninformed opinions are expressed, often from people getting into the sport. Why would anyone want to interact with a hockey community if they're not welcomed?
I mentioned this before, but the NHL has a campaign called Hockey Is for Everyone, where they have each team highlight ethnic groups and minorities, which I think is a great way to introduce inclusivity, but it divides the fanbase and turns political way too quickly. All too often I see the phrase "where's insert pride night" referring to some sort of bigotry, when people don't realize it's not about politics, it's about making players and fans fell included when they're often ostracized. This is just another thing about hockey and sports communities that prevents a fanbase from growing.
The NHL’s growth potential is substantial, but challenges in accessibility, revenue focus, marketing strategy, and community inclusivity hinder it. While the league is making strides, overcoming these obstacles will be key to its continued expansion. Perhaps a renewed focus on simplifying access and refining community engagement could lead to a broader, more welcoming fanbase. What changes do you think could help the NHL finally compete with the other major leagues?
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