Getty Image / Winslow townson
The NFL is the biggest financial powerhouse in all of sports. Even the least valuable teams in the league would sell for likely $4-5 billion minimum, and no other television product comes close to matching its viewership.
But, despite their best efforts, viewership actually went down this year. That’s despite FOX, one of the league’s top television partners, bringing on Tom Brady as a color commentator in hopes to boost viewership.
Make no mistake, television ratings were far from bad for the NFL this season. But, they were indeed down. Here’s more from Sports Media Watch.
With the exception of Prime Video, the major NFL broadcasters each posted declines in viewership for the recently-completed regular season.
NFL regular season games averaged 19.4 million viewers on NBC, 19.2 million on CBS, 18.4 million on FOX and 15.0 million on ESPN/ABC, each down from last season, when the networks averaged 19.9, 19.3, 19.0 and 17.3 million respectively. (The NBC average — which does not include a Saturday afternoon Texans-Chiefs game in Week 16 — rises to 21.6 million including additional streaming viewership tracked by Adobe Analytics, up 1% from last year’s 21.4 million and the highest since 2015.)
The numbers that really stick out there are FOX and ESPN. FOX was definitely betting on Tom Brady bringing in huge viewership numbers as part of their top broadcasting team alongside Kevin Burkhardt. That bet didn’t necessarily pay off, though some of that declined viewership may have something to do with the fact that the 49ers, often featured on their game of the week, were not good this year.
As for ESPN, it just goes to show how many people are ditching cable. But, ESPN is going to be launching their own streaming service sometime this year, and that should help get back some of the losses they’ve suffered due to people cutting the cord.