American football’s elite NFL made its debut on video platform YouTube with its 2025 season-opening international game, perhaps underwhelming in terms of its viewing figures despite breaking broadcast records in the process.
The YouTube-exclusive game, hosted in Sao Paulo, Brazil, saw the Los Angeles Chargers score an upset win over the Kansas City Chiefs, and in the process drew an average minute audience of 17.3 million.
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Most of this, 16.2 million in fact, came from the US, with the remaining 1.1 million drawn from the league’s global audience, outpacing last year’s Brazil season opener, which drew an average audience of 14.2 million in the US on streaming service Peacock.
In addition to beating that Peacock broadcast, the game also set a new YouTube record for most concurrent livestream viewers.
While the game performed strongly compared to previous years, the fact it was completely free-to-air globally, combined with the close-run nature of the game, and the presence of major stars such as Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, and Justin Herbert (the Chiefs were the league’s biggest viewership draw in 2024), it remains that perhaps the broadcast could have performed better, with many pre-game mooting a potential audience in excess of 20 million, although its travails may have been caused in-part by the time difference between Brazil and other major NFL markets.
By comparison, the streaming-exclusive NFL Christmas Day games on Netflix in 2024, still the most-watched NFL games on streaming, collectively averaged a 26.5 million US audience.
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By GlobalDataThe Christmas Day fixtures also both averaged over 30 million viewers globally.
Indeed, the NFL has claimed that viewers from 218 countries and territories around the world tuned into Netflix, with the Ravens-Texans fixture bringing in 31.3 million and the Chiefs-Steelers tie drawing 30 million.
The NFL claims that viewers from over 230 territories watched at least part of the 2025 season opener, implying that while the reach was larger, the overall interest was lower, or perhaps the advertising of the broadcast was weaker.
Furthermore, rival broadcasters such as ESPN have questioned the validity of YouTube’s viewership numbers, with that media giant’s senior vice president of research Flora Kelly taking to social media platform X (formerly Twitter) to suggest that the custom methodology used to measure the game’s viewership is “Not the same approach as the rest of us, nor [media rating’s council] accredited”, adding that “their rating is not a fair [comparison].”
Kelly later added: “With no transparency into the methodology, I have no idea what these numbers mean.
“That’s the problem with an approach like this and why clear and transparent methodology matters.”
