Robert Lewandowski finally got the action, which, framed, will be the perfect souvenir from his first El Clasico at Camp Nou. For an hour and a half he played mediocre at most, but in the end he made a brilliant heel pass to Alejandro Balde, pushing Barcelona both to victory and towards the Spanish championship. Barcelona won 2-1 and are 12 points ahead of Real Madrid. The show of Lewandowski and the company was watched in Poland by at least 810,000 viewers.
On average, 810,000 fans watched the match every minute of the broadcast. From this group, as many as 505,000 viewers chose the Eleven Sports station, where Sebastian Chabiniak and Mateusz Święcicki commented on the match. The remaining 305,000 listened to the commentary of Tomasz Ćwiąkała and Michał Mitrut on Canal +.
The source of the above numbers is Nielsen. This viewership survey does not include online viewership, so the actual El Clasico audience was even higher. The more so that some fans, let’s face it, also followed the match on illegal streams.
810 thousand viewers is a great viewership. Great, but not record breaking. In October 2022, when Lewandowski made his debut in the most famous league match in the world, his actions were watched by a million viewers. Exactly: one million and three thousand (of which as many as 688 thousand chose Eleven). And it was the highest average viewership of a single event in the history of Eleven, which has been on the Polish market since 2015.
Taking into account the viewership before Lewandowski’s transfer to Barcelona, it can be concluded that the captain of the Polish national team attracts tens of thousands of additional viewers. In 2017, El Clasico was watched by 482,000 viewers on the Eleven station (Canal + did not have a sublicense at that time).
But let’s get back to the current reality. Over 800,000 viewers in Poland is a great result, because the match was watched by almost two million viewers on Spanish television. And what does it look like in the world?
Half a billion El Clasico viewers? It’s bullshit
For several years, you can find “information” in the media that the clashes between Real and Barca are watched by up to half a billion viewers. The nonsense about the hundreds of millions of El Clasico viewers is repeated by the most reputable websites – such as the BBC, CNN, Forbes and Wikipedia. However, no one reached for the audience research and the legend lives its own life.
Journalist Sport.pl Michał Kiedrowski has been dealing with this topic for years. And according to his calculations – in the case of global viewership – the average for El Clasico does not exceed 15-20 million viewers. And what is important: in an optimistic variant. All reports of hundreds of millions are untrue, which you can read more about HERE.
