Tuesday January 11th, 2000

Football (soccer) held its lead as the most popular spectator sport in Germany in 1999 but is losing ground to Formula One motor racing, a study on sports sponsoring released on Tuesday showed.

Market research company INRA Deutschland's Sponsor Check study showed that 38 percent of respondents said they followed football last year while 29 percent said they watched Formula One racing, putting both sports well ahead of tennis, track and field and skiing.

INRA noted however that football, despite its number one ranking, had its lowest popularity ratings in years and that its lead ahead of auto racing, at 24 percentage points in 1994, had shrunk to only nine percentage points in 1999.

The company noted that football's drop in popularity from 1998 to 1999 was only two percentage points, but said the increasing presence of the sport on television could eventually backfire.

"We have seen a year-by-year increase in the amount of football on television," INRA sponsoring research director Folkert Lammers told Reuters. "The danger is that some point viewers will be sick of it, but for now it remains the absolute number one sport in Germany."

Formula One racing, meanwhile, soared in viewership last year, despite star driver Michael Schumacher's temporary absence due to injury, and showed record popularity in October with 33 percent of respondents saying they were fans of the sport.

Tennis reported a slight recovery after years of continuous decline. INRA attributed the revival to champion Steffi Graf's victory at the French Open and the rise of German players Nicolas Kiefer and Tommy Haas.

Among sponsors, Deutsche Telekom AG was considered the best known backer of sport events in 1999, despite the weaker performance its Team Telekom cyclists turned in at last summer's Tour de France.

Two-thirds of respondents said they recognised the telecommunications company as a sports sponsor. It was followed by Ferrari, cigarette brand Marlboro, sporting goods manufacturer Adidas Salomon and automobile maker Opel.

The study was based on monthly surveys of a representative sample of 12,000 Germans.