The 2025 World Series, the finale of the Major League Baseball campaign, drew multi-year highs in multiple countries after a thrilling seven-game series between the victorious Los Angeles Dodgers and the defeated Toronto Blue Jays.
Game seven, the series decider, on Saturday (November 1) drew an average of 25.98 million US viewers on media giant Fox’s array of networks, including Fox Sports and the Spanish-language Fox Deportes, making it the most-watched single MLB game since game seven of the 2017 World Series.
That figure may yet rise higher as more expansive viewer data is released later in the week.
The game, which went to extra innings, peaked at 31.54 million, and despite its unfavored Saturday night time slot (it was the first Saturday World Series game seven fixture since 1931), became the most-watched Saturday MLB game in any category since the 1996 World Series.
Across all seven games, US broadcast coverage drew a mean average around the 15 million mark (although that was pulled upwards by the bumper game seven viewership).
That figure is a major boon for broadcaster Fox, standing in line with 2024’s major Dodgers-New York Yankees matchup (which featured the two largest US media markets) despite this year’s edition featuring the lone Canadian MLB franchise, which in other years could have been a death knell for TV ratings.
Naturally, the Blue Jays’ strong performance in the World Series (in which they outscored the eventual winners by 34-26 despite falling at the final hurdle) produced strong results in Canada.
Indeed, game one of the series, a Blue Jays victory, became the most-watched Blue Jays fixture in history according to long-term rightsholder (and Blue Jays owner) Rogers, which, through its Sportsnet channel, has been an MLB rightsholder in Canada since 2003.
An average of 7 million people in Canada watched game one of the series, which accounts for around one-sixth of the country’s entire population.
That record lasted only a matter of days until game five of the series notched 7.2 million, and although game seven viewership has not yet been released, that figure is likely even higher still.
Japan, MLB’s largest global market for viewership, which was represented in the World Series by Dodgers trio Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Roki Sasaki, also tuned in en masse for the series.
Game one, across the US, Canada, and Japan, averaged a combined 32.6 million viewers, the most for any MLB game across those three markets combined since 2016.
11.8 million viewers in Japan caught the game on the NHK-G network, making it the third most-watched World Series game ever, and the most watched when only taking into account a single network.
