The first weekend of the 2025 NFL American football season delivered record numbers for its US media partners, highlighting the strength of the league’s national media dominance.
All of the four major US media giants that broadcast the league (CBS, ESPN, Fox, and NBC) reported multi-year gains for their coverage on September 7 and 8 as the league returned following a controversial and exciting offseason.
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Leading the way was Paramount-owned national network CBS which, via its CBS Sports channel, averaged 20.38 million viewers throughout the day in its doubleheader slot, up 15% year-on-year.
This peaked with the afternoon’s matchup between NFC North rivals the Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers, with an average of 23.89 million viewers tuning in for the Packers’ 27-13 win, the highest figure for a CBS game since the network regained NFL rights in 1998.
In fact, both the total day average and the single-game average for the Lions-Packers were the highest such figures in week one of the season for CBS since the beginning of the 1998 campaign.
Of course, in that time, CBS has only broadcast unopposed week one doubleheaders in 2000 and 2015, but the figures are nonetheless positive, with the Pittsburgh Steelers’ earlier 34-32 win over the New York Jets also powering a strong early window for the network.
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By GlobalDataFox, which broadcast the day’s singleheader slot (CBS and Fox alternate singleheader and doubleheader weeks to conform to NFL rules), also performed well.
The network drew an average of 17.9 million viewers across the day in the two-game singleheader slot.
This coverage included the divisional rivalry game between the Washington Commanders and the New York Giants, a 21-6 rout in favor of Washington, which helped make Fox’s slot the most-watched week one NFL singleheader on any network since the last time Fox had a week one singleheader, in 2015.
While CBS’s strong multi-year performance can be put down in part to the fact that Fox is typically the broadcaster with the week one doubleheader and, as such, usually secures stronger week one metrics, Fox’s numbers beating out all other networks over the last 10 years for that timeslot is a strong reflection of the league’s strength.
Viewership gains continued into the evening, with NBCUniversal-owned NBC showcasing the Buffalo Bills’ action-packed 41-40 victory over the Baltimore Ravens, coverage that averaged 24.7 million viewers across the linear network and the Peacock streaming service.
This coverage peaked at an audience of 28.2 million, and became the most-watched week one Sunday NFL game of the past three years.
Monday Night Football (MNF), broadcast by Disney-owned ESPN, performed well also, with the Minnesota Vikings’ last-gasp 27-24 win over the Chicago Bears attracting 22.1 million viewers, up 8% year-on-year, making it the most-watched week one MNF game since ESPN took over the coveted slot in 2006.
The NFL kicked off the 2025 season in Brazil late last week, with its second consecutive opening week game in the country.
While the match was showcased globally on YouTube to mixed results, in Brazil, national network Globo saw a 41% increase year-on-year on its coverage of the game, and across the 5 NFL fixtures it broadcast across the opening week (September 4 to 7), it averaged 2.7 million viewers.
That Chargers victory over the Chiefs in Brazil drew an average minute audience of 686,000, the most for any pay-TV operator in the country over that timeframe.
