Who has the Drive to Survive in sports documentary arms race? (part one)
From Beckham to Break Point, the data reveals big winners and losers
The Netflix documentary Drive To Survive transformed the fortunes of Formula 1, galvanising global interest. As soon as Season 1 aired in 2019, the show also gave rocket boosters to sports documentaries, particularly on streaming platforms.
“Everyone wanted to know ‘What’s the Drive to Survive of this?’, Gabe Spitzer, vice-president of nonfiction originals at Netflix, told GQ for this fascinating in-depth feature in February this year about how the show grew and changed F1’s audience.
That piece contains hard data to illustrate the point, including a study by media market analysts Nielsen in 2021 that showed F1’s fanbase had almost doubled since 2017. In the same period, the average age of viewers dropped by four years to 32, with more women watching.
Another survey in 2022 suggested that of almost 2,000 self-identified fans of F1 based in the USA, some 53% of them said that Drive To Survive (DTS) was the reason they became F1 viewers.
It is far from inconsequential that when Nat Grouille, the director of non-fiction series at Netflix, was exploring who might produce a ‘fly on the wall’ F1 series, he approached James Gay-Rees, who had produced the BAFTA-winning Senna in 2010.
Gay-Rees’ production company, Box to Box Films, was considering making a different F1 documentary but he sold Netflix the concept for DTS and the rest is history; the sixth season of the show, covering the 2023 season, dropped in February this year.
Among a torrent of sports docs that followed DTS Season 1 were two more sport-specific shows for Netflix, both also made by Box To Box, both of which aired their inaugural seasons early in 2023.
Full Swing is a collaboration between Netflix and golf’s PGA Tour, with Season 1 covering a tumultuous 2022 season when the controversial Saudi-funded LIV Golf series was tearing the sport apart.
Season 2 of Full Swing, covering the 2023 golf season and a hugely dramatic Ryder Cup in Rome, dropped last month. Season 3 has been commissioned and will no doubt include drama from this year’s Masters at Augusta, which begins on Thursday amid yet more confusion and rancour over the precise future relationship between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf.
‘Break Point’ was a collaboration between Netflix and the governing bodies of men’s and women’s tennis, the ATP and the WTA. Season 1, covering the 2022 tennis season, dropped in two tranches of five episodes each, in January then June last year. Season 2, covering 2023, dropped in early January this year. And then Break Point itself was axed. Poor ratings and a lack of decent access to the players who were supposed to be stars of the show were among the reasons, as we’ll explore.
In this first part of a two-part Sporting Intelligence series about the history and future of sports documentaries, we’ll first look at a comprehensive data set of Netflix viewing numbers for January to June last year and explore what those might tell us; and then look more broadly at the sports doc genre. Then on Friday, I’ll bring you the results of a Sporting Intelligence readers’ survey of the best sports documentaries.