Global football,

According to the Television Audience Report prepared for the Fédération Internationale de Football Association [Fifa] by Kantar Sport [2010], the 2010 Fifa World Cup in South Africa had a huge audience: about 72,000 broadcast hours in 214 countries reached about 2,2 billions of peoples (20+ consecutive minutes); about 3,2 billions of peoples saw 1+ minute [Kantar Sport 2010: 7]. Are these data reliable? Or did the Fifa give a too much optimistic valuation of the appeal for the world audiences of the football game by television? The question is a fascinating one, but an exact answer claims a huge work to collect data about the TV audiences from the five continents and from more than 210 countries in the world… In this paper I’ll present the main findings obtained by the Laboratory of Sport Communication of the University of Bologna “Alma Mater Studiorum” [SportComLab]; it analysed the data collected in Italy from Auditel about the Italian audience, which from at home by its TV sets followed the Mondial Football Championships of the three editions played in the period 2002-2010. The audiences of about 100 matches were studied and more than 1,8 millions of audiometric and socio-anagraphic data were compared, in order to describe the tendencies in the observed period. Two research hypothesis –the « regional nexus» between a champion player/a team/a team, and his/her television fans, and the «football sub-culture hypothesis» about the correlation between the exposition to a national team and a set of characteristic, which identify a sporting “niche” audience– led the comparison works. A book of mine, Lo sport globale [Martelli 2012 in printing by FrancoAngeli, publisher in Milan], collected the main bulk of the obtained findings by SportComLab in researches about the Italian TV audiences of the World Football Cups and of the Winter Olympics and Paralympics in the years 2002-2010.