Sports Fans Prefer Nat Sound During Games

Forty percent of self-identified sports fans believe artificial crowd noise would make the experience of watching live sports from an empty stadium on television less enjoyable, according to a Morning Consult poll. By contrast, just 16 percent of fans said they believe the addition of canned cheering would make the telecasts more enjoyable.

Fortunately for broadcasters and sports properties, these attitudes might not translate into action: Fifty-nine percent of sports fans who offered an opinion on the question said they are just as likely to watch games without crowds as they would be to watch events with fans in attendance, even though 48 percent of fans believe watching sporting events without fans will be less enjoyable.

Like Fox Sports, ESPN has also experimented with artificial crowd noise on its telecasts of Korean baseball. Mark Gross, senior vice president of production and remote events at ESPN, said that while he did not anticipate being a proponent of adding in crowd noise, he quickly decided that having it at a low level is the best option.

“We want things to feel authentic, and I didn’t think having a sort of fake crowd noise would feel authentic,” Gross said. “But I think at the level that it’s at, you can just hear it enough so it doesn’t feel, you know, incredibly hollow inside a 25,000 seat stadium.”

He added, “I don’t think we’ll get to a position where somebody’s at the plate in a Major League Baseball game and he hits a home run and we have somebody bringing the audio up on the crowd noise. I don’t think we’re going in that direction.”

Playing background music, another option to fill the silence during sporting events, polled better than the insertion of artificial crowd noise, but was also fairly unpopular. Thirty-six percent of fans said they believe music would make games on television less enjoyable, while 22 percent said it would make the experience more enjoyable. The NBA is the only one of the major North American sports where in-arena music during live game action is commonplace, something that could potentially make the lack of crowd noise less noticeable. ESPN said it hasn’t considered background music for fanless games in other sports.