Center for Sports & Management

Who is the Chinese soccer consumer?

Although China is still a developing soccer market, it is attractive. Currently, 237 million Chinese consider soccer their “favorite sport”; and, at 308 million, even more Chinese consumers watch soccer “at least once a week”.

Interestingly, the potential size of the Chinese soccer market is about nine times greater than the well-developed German market and it already surpasses consumption of traditional Chinese sports such as badminton, table tennis, or volleyball. In addition, further potential to develop sport, and particularly soccer, is evidenced by the fact that 414 million Chinese people currently do not watch sports at all.

To better understand and define the ‘typical’ Chinese soccer consumer and his/her consumption behavior, we conducted a country-representative consumer survey in collaboration with Nielsen Sports. We then compared this consumer behavior to better known soccer consumption behaviours in countries like Germany, the US, Korea and Japan. Overall, 5,000 people participated in the survey. Their opinions are representative for a population of 1.899 billion people in Asia, Europe, and the USA.

Read the complete article by Prof. Schmidt here