Contradictions?

In one of my previous posts I went on and on about Hispanic's being avid football fans- or at least in the process of becoming. But in the past few days everything in the news is contradicting those "facts" , or now more like, assumptions. First, this article from Medialife magazine features a short interview with Max Kilger, chief behavioral scientist at Experian Simmons. a Florida-based market research firm. Kilger tells Media Life that typical football fans are still what you imagine them to be: Republican, male, usually white and , here we go: less likely THAN EVER to be Hispanics, with the number of Hispanics identifying themselves as NFL fans falling over the past few years.

What?
What about all the articles claiming those percentages have risen? I guess this is what happens when you believe marketing hype.
Personally, I do feel there are more Hispanic football fans than before, if only simply for the fact that the Hispanic population in general has grown dramatically in the past few years.

WSVN Channel 7 in Miami has an article about how some Hispanics are still not ready to trade their futbol for their ( the NFL's) Football.

I wonder what Coors Light thinks about that? Were their bilingual marketing efforts worth it?

Well, according to Mark Kilger, probably not:

Are there any demographic characteristics that NFL fans share that you don't see as widely among the general population?
They’re probably going to be more educated, because they have more money. They’re more likely to be male. Hispanics also don’t seem to identify as much as NFL fans.


As you just mentioned, there don't seem to be many Hispanics who identify themselves as NFL fans. Has that changed over recent years, and why is that?
Part of it is that football in the Latin community means soccer, so that’s going to be a big difference between Hispanic and non-Hispanic. Also, there aren’t really any Hispanic stars in the NFL, much like Yao Ming has been a hit with Chinese fans in the NBA.

( ahem, NFLatino.com, recently launched a basic guide to football and profiles of the league's 23 Hispanic players, and it signed a contract with Telemundo to air more football ads on its radio stations across the country) ( source: WSVN).

It looks like Hispanic has actually gone down a little--9 percent of Hispanics in Spring ‘03 identified themselves as NFL fans compared to 6.4 percent this year. That could be because cable is starting to show more soccer games.

( BUT according to the National Football League, 77% of bilingual Hispanic men ages 21 to 34 consider themselves football fans, and as the official beer sponsor of the NFL, Coors Light is not neglecting those consumers).