International sporting events came up top in YouGov’s Global Sport Rankings 2023 in Australia, with the Commonwealth Games – which saw Australia as the biggest medal winner – leading the ranking with a Buzz score of 33.1 points. The Games, held from end-July to early August last year, generated the most positive Buzz among Aussies, ahead of fellow landmark sporting event, the FIFA World Cup (23.6 points), which ranked in second place.
YouGov SportsIndex measures the public’s perception of sports brands on a daily basis across a range of metrics. The 2023 Sport rankings are based on the Buzz scores, which measures whether respondents have heard something positive or negative about a brand recently.
The first domestic sporting event to make the ranking was the State of Origin Series Rugby League, which made considerable strides from its ninth-place finish in 2022’s ranking to come in third this year (22.0 points).
The recently concluded Australian Open – the first since 2020 held without COVID-19 attendance restrictions – was the fourth buzziest sporting event with a score of 21.3 points. This was not the sole tennis event on the ranking, with Wimbledon ranking in sixth (18.9 points) after the Australian Football League (20.6 points).
Swimming Australia (18.3 points) ranked seventh, while Formula One made a return to the rankings for the first time since 2021 in eighth (18.0 points). Cricket Australia ranked ninth (17.7 points) and AFL Women’s rounded off the overall ten buzziest sporting events (17.2 points).
Methodology
SportsIndex is one of YouGov Sport’s signature tools. It operates in 35 markets around the world, tracking 200 key domestic and international competitions across more than 30 sports. A core of 21 properties is tracked in every market, allowing for international comparison. Many other events, leagues and tournaments appear in multiple markets; while some competitions are tracked only in the country which hosts them.
The 2023 Buzz Report provides insight into all the sports events we monitor against just one of the 16 metrics we measure – ‘Buzz’.
Every day, we ask 100 people these questions...
“Over the past two weeks, which of the following sports events/leagues have you heard something positive about?” and “Now which of the following sports/events leagues have you heard something negative about over the past two weeks?”
From the answers we collect, we derive a Buzz score for each event, or the difference between the percentage of respondents hearing positive news and the percentage hearing negative news about an event in the previous two weeks. So, depending on what is going on, an event’s Buzz score can reveal whether conversations around a property are positive or negative at a point in time.
Buzz scores can range from +100 (where everyone we asked has heard something positive) to -100 (where everyone we asked has heard something negative). A completely neutral score, therefore, would be zero. A score of 45 would show positive sentiment towards a property, by a margin of 45 percentage-points.
For our Buzz rankings here, we look at the highest average Buzz score each property has scored each calendar month. Then we take the highest of those twelve scores and compare them with highest monthly scores of every other property we track in that market. We track up to 80 properties in each country but for the sake of this report, we display only the top ten in each market overall (typically a mix of domestic and international). In addition, we show a top five or top ten ranking for each market for those competitions hosted or held (in part or in their entirety) in each market over the year.
