For a country that loves cricket, the findings may come as a surprise. More newsprint was spent promoting the soccer World Cup this year, than on traditional favourite, cricket. Perhaps the hype explains why more and more non-soccer lovers are staying up late to watch the games.
As per a survey, the FIFA 2006 coverage in the print media notched 185 ccms (column cms in thousands), a figure 3 times higher than what cricket got at 57 (ccms), in the period between June 4 to June 9. The soccer impact is seen in the vernacular publications as well. For instance, in Marathi dailies, soccer grabbed 11,000 ccms while cricket managed only 5,000 ccms.
In Bengali publications, the cricket coverage was a mere 800 ccms as compared to soccer which got better displays with 11,000 ccms. Hindi and Kannada dailies too have devoted more space to football than cricket. This despite the fact that currently India is touring the West Indies for the cricket series with the Caribbeans in the lead.
City-wise break-up shows that Mumbai leads the volume coverage of soccer in print at 26% followed by Kolkata with 19 %. Bangalore print media though reports a bigger coverage of cricket (21%) with soccer trailing by 4 percentage points. For TV audience, both in Hindi and vernacular, soccer has a sphere of influence.
