With the current Covid-19 worldwide pandemic where most – if not all – professional sport competitions suspended, I started wondering what sport aficionados have done to fill this void. Initially, what we can see by checking Google Trends is that the searches for ‘sport’ has fallen considerably from their usual level. That might confirm my feeling that when we think about sports we heavily associated it with professional sport – and with the act of passively consuming those leagues and events.
At the same time, we can see an increase on searches for exercise during this same period. In a way, we can assume that as aficionados cannot watch or consume their favourite sport now they are trying to exercise whilst in quarantine or social distancing.
But my final guess was that sport fans would have migrated to similar forms of entertainment like eSports. But according to Google Trends there was no apparent change in the amount of searches looking for eSports during these past few weeks. Maybe this confirms that sport and eSport audiences are different, and the former are unwilling to change their consuming habits.
Society + Media + Sports 