What Do We Know About Who Watches Football on TV and Streaming?

You don’t need us telling you that football is popular. From the professional league to college conferences and individual programs, it’s been the country’s favorite sport to watch since 1972, and the competition isn’t even close. U.S. adults watch football four times more than baseball, its nearest rival for attention.

But those viewers are not a monolith, and advertisers who treat “football fans” as a singular audience will lose the nuances of everyone who watches, whether they’re tuning into Monday Night Football or settling on the couch for college games every Saturday.

So who’s actually watching football on TV and streaming?

No One Watches More Football Than NFL Fans

It should come as no surprise that in all the different football leagues out there, the NFL towers over the rest. The 2025 regular season averaged 18.7 million viewers per game, the second-highest season average on record and trailing only the 1989 season, when the television landscape looked nothing like it does now. Every major rights partner posted gains. CBS averaged 21.25 million viewers, the most in network history, and its Sunday 4:25 p.m. window was the single most-watched program on American television for the season. NBC’s Sunday Night Football closed out 2025 averaging 23.5 million viewers, its highest average yet, and extended its own record as the #1 primetime show in America 15 years running, a streak nothing else on primetime has come close to beating since Nielsen started keeping score in 1950.

That’s the baseline audience you get running ads during NFL games: broad, appointment-driven, and still growing even at a size that practically feels maxed out.

The Fastest-Growing Demos of the NFL Audience

Underneath that baseline, two segments are driving growth for very different reasons. 

Traditionally, NFL fans have skewed male, but that gap is closing. According to a 2025 SSRS Sports Poll, women now represent 47% of the NFL’s U.S. fan base, and they account for 40% of the league’s international growth. Advertisers have started noticing too, with categories like baby care showing up in game broadcasts alongside the usual beer and betting ads.

The NFL has also made deliberate investments in growing its Latino fan base. The league now offers more than 75 Spanish-language broadcasts a season, part of its ongoing “Por La Cultura” campaign, and Telemundo has reported steady, significant viewership growth since the 2022 Super Bowl. As of the league’s most recently reported figures, NFL viewership among Latino audiences, English- and Spanish-speaking combined, climbed 11% year over year, the fastest measurable growth rate of any demographic in the league. Spanish-language broadcasts alone jumped 34%. For the NFL, that makes Latino fans the clearest source of new growth in the league right now.

The NFL Audiences That Cut the Cord

Streaming has become its own distinct NFL audience, with a demographic profile that looks nothing like the traditional broadcast crowd. A Seton Hall Sports Poll found that 51% of fans watched NFL games via streaming during the 2024-25 season, and 71% of self-identified NFL fans had streamed a game at some point that year. The NFL is also the single biggest driver of new streaming subscriptions in sports, with 38% of consumers saying access to NFL games is what pushed them to pay for a streaming service in the first place. For advertisers, that’s a viewer who’s actively chosen to be there, rather than one who’ll just be casually tuning in.

The clearest evidence of who that streaming audience actually is comes from Amazon’s own numbers on Thursday Night Football. Prime Video’s TNF audience skews nearly seven years younger than NFL viewers on linear networks (a median age of 49.4 versus 56.2) and carries 28% higher household income. This pattern held across other sports Amazon carries, too, suggesting the divide has more to do with who has already left linear television behind than with football itself. These are mainstream audiences choosing streaming outright: the 16.3 million viewers who watched the Bears-Eagles game on Black Friday 2025 made it the most-watched Black Friday sporting event in the U.S. since at least 1991, entirely on a streaming platform.

Fantasy football adds another layer of engagement to that younger cohort specifically. ESPN’s fantasy football product hit 14 million players in 2025, its fourth straight year of gaining more than a million players. And the age split within that is stark: over 60% of NFL fans aged 18-29 play fantasy football, compared to just 26% of fans 30 and older, according to YouGov data. For that younger streaming-native viewer, fantasy participation is frequently the reason they’re watching at all, which tends to produce a more attentive, harder-to-distract kind of viewing.

That shift shows no sign of slowing: EMARKETER projects U.S. digital live sports viewership will reach 122.7 million for the current season, up 6.1% year over year.

The Audiences Who Live and Breathe College Football

College football had its own strong season in 2025, with regular-season viewership growing year over year and a record 22 games clearing the 10-million-viewer mark, up from just 8 games two seasons earlier. Within the various conferences and individual college football programs, there are two that really stand out.

Big Ten

Eight of the 10 most-watched college football games in the 2025-26 season involved at least one Big Ten team. The conference’s championship game was the most-watched conference championship game for any conference, on any network, ever. And the Big Ten has now produced three consecutive College Football Playoff National Champions: Michigan in 2023, Ohio State in 2024, and Indiana in 2025, whose title game against Miami drew 30.1 million viewers, the second-most-watched CFP championship on record.

Some of that surge is geographic. The Big Ten added USC, UCLA, Washington, and Oregon starting with the 2024-25 season, turning a conference once defined by the Midwest and the Rust Belt into a genuinely coast-to-coast footprint. The conference is also mid-way through a seven-year, $7 billion media rights deal spanning Fox, CBS, NBC, and Peacock that runs through the 2029-30 season, which means Big Ten football now shows up across broadcast and streaming in roughly equal measure rather than being locked to one distribution model.

The audience underneath all of that skews affluent. Data from Elevate’s EPIC platform on college football fans broadly found that 34% of fans fall into the $100,000-$199,999 household income range, and another 27% earn $200,000 or more, both well above the national average. That’s a fan base with real spending power showing up around some of the biggest games on the sports calendar.

Notre Dame Football

Notre Dame’s audience works on entirely different logic than a typical college program, and that logic traces back roughly a century. Under coach Knute Rockne in the 1920s, Notre Dame deliberately scheduled games all over the country instead of settling into a single regional conference, building a following in cities like New York and Chicago long before television existed. The result is what’s still nicknamed the “Subway Alumni”: a fan base with no meaningful geographic center, made up largely of people who never set foot on campus.

That structure is why Notre Dame is still the only program in college football with its own standalone national television deal rather than a conference-negotiated one. NBC has broadcast Notre Dame’s home games since September 7, 1991, a deal reportedly worth around $50 million a year. Because that audience doesn’t concentrate around a single market, Notre Dame’s ratings behave like a smaller, nationally distributed version of the NFL’s audience.

The numbers back that up. Notre Dame averaged 3.93 million viewers per game across the 2025 regular season, but marquee matchups spike hard above that baseline: the 2025 season opener against Miami drew a season-high 10.8 million viewers, and the 2023 loss to Ohio State pulled in 10.6 million, NBC’s second-most-watched regular-season college football broadcast ever at the time. For a brand looking to reach a genuinely national college football audience rather than a regionally concentrated one, that’s a different kind of reach than most single-team buys can offer.

Live Football Reaches Nearly Everyone

Football gives advertisers the single largest reach opportunity on the U.S. sports calendar. Even just focusing on the NFL, Big Ten, and Notre Dame, you have three overlapping but distinct audiences, each covering ground the others don’t: the NFL’s raw scale, the Big Ten’s affluent and expanding fan base, and Notre Dame’s national reach that’s built on the back of a single team.

For brands thinking about frequency, recall, and reaching audiences who show up specifically because the games matter to them, that combination reaches nearly everyone who calls themselves a football fan, no matter what or how they watch.