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Survey: Champions League final usurps Super Bowl

The yearly report from London-based Initiative Futures Sports and Entertainment, found that both events continue to grow but the European football final is growing faster.

With 2009 not including a 'mega event' - a Summer Olympic Games or a football World Cup or European championship - it offered a chance to measure the two biggest annual sporting events.

In terms of 'total audience', the amount of people who watched part of the event, the difference was larger with the Champions League pulling in 206 million throughout the game while the Super Bowl managed 162 million.

While the Super Bowl's audience was overwhelmingly domestic, UEFA's product appeared to be doing better in the battle for viewers globally - in non-World Cup and non-Olympic Games year.

"The Champions League has been better able to exploit the large burgeoning populations of the Asia-Pacific region," said Kevin Alavay, the report's director, who noted the presence of global brands such as Barcelona and Manchester United helped UEFA.

The report also showed the Super Bowl had the lowest ratio between average and total audience figures among top events - in other words, a much larger percentage of fans watched all of the Super Bowl than all of the Champions League programming - a key factor behind the American event's huge appeal to advertisers.

"While the Super Bowl has secured free-to-air broadcasting deals in a number of important European markets such as the UK, France and Germany, it's distribution and popularity in the key Asia-Pacific region lags far behind the UEFA Champions League," said the report.

The report, in its seventh year, is based on official data from national bodies and measures 'at-home viewing'.

"The value of these properties is actually growing disproportionately and in an area of digitalisation they are more than bucking the trend," he said.

Formula One's Bahrain Grand Prix was in third place with an average of 54 million, while the men's 100 metres final from the Athletics world championships was fourth with 33 million.