Sports business leaders’ outlook index on their own industry has hit an all-time low of almost zero, according to the MarketCast Sports Poll, a monthly survey covering more than 2,000 senior-level sports executives.
The survey’s “net optimism” index — the percent of respondents who feel optimistic minus those who are pessimistic — plummeted to 2% in March and was 5% in April. It’s the first time in the survey’s 17-year history that the industry has seen back-to-back single-digit results and immediately follows one of the study’s strongest-ever periods when the optimism level topped 80% for four straight months including 84% in January and 83% in February.
The previous low of 8% occurred in November 2008, a month that saw the election of Barack Obama as president and a U.S. unemployment rate that had risen to 6.7%, up from 4.9% at the beginning of the year. It took exactly one year for the metric to get back to the more typical 70% levels.
July 2007 was the highest level ever for optimism, at 89%. At that time in sports, Barry Bonds was about to break Hank Aaron’s career home-run record and, shortly after, the economy and optimism were about to start unraveling.
Optimism has faded right around the time of each of the four presidential elections (2004, 2008, 2012, 2016) during the study’s existence but has quickly recovered after each of them except 2008.
The national anthem protests that became commonplace in late 2017 generated no significant movement among the respondents, according to Haynes Hendrickson, MarketCast’s senior vice president of sports and live events.
“The metric zig-zagged a bit but didn’t fall below 70%,” he said.
The survey was called Turnkey Sports Poll from its launch in 2003 until Turnkey was acquired by MarketCast in 2018. Survey results are published frequently in Sports Business Journal.
