Market Analysis of the Paper Edited Spanish Sports Press : Key features of a structural crisis

The irruption and development of Information and Communication Technologies have generated a significant transformation across consumer behaviours for informatics and entertainment products. This is particularly critical for paper based periodical publications, which circulation numbers exhibit a strong collapse of the business model. To address this crisis, mastheads need to find the complementarity of the printed and digital editions. Sports newspapers, despite having its own specialization character and complementarity with the generalist media, have not managed to avoid this structural crisis. In order to determine the actual impact of this crisis with regards to the circulation of this specialized press, a study of its evolution during the 1995-2019 period was executed. For the analysis, the Spanish most representative sport newspapers were selected, showing consistent and homogeneous results throughout the aforementioned time frame for Marca, As, Mundo Deportivo and Sport. The Office for the Justification of Circulation was used as the main source of data for this study, extracting the figures from the certifications associated with its Control Acts. Descriptive statistics techniques were used for the study. From the combined results, three relevant issues could be identified: the decline in total circulation, despite starting in 2004, showed a significant surge after 2010; the retail sale numbers per issue did not reflect any significant differences compared to generic press, concerning the loss of buyers; although the major element involved in the negative impact of this crisis was related to the fact that, during the period of the study, sport press lost around half a million copies on circulation, which represents a 37% drop.