Last Thursday, Oct. 10, was a huge day in Major League Baseball. A win-or-go-home Game 3 between the Mets and the Brewers to see who would advance to the National League Divisional Series took place and the Mets – one of the most historic teams in baseball – erased a 2-0 deficit in the ninth inning to defeat the Brewers, 4-2.
The game drew an estimated 4.02 million viewers and marked ESPN’s most-viewed MLB game since 2021.
But the number of people who watched this game was not even half that of the viewership of Amazon Prime’s regular-season NFL Thursday night game that same day.
On Amazon Prime – a streaming service, not a major network – two teams with little history (the Atlanta Falcons and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers) battled it out in front of 12.30 million viewers.
Think about how much easier it is to watch a game on cable, specifically ESPN, then it is on a streaming service. Then imagine how much more important a do-or-die playoff game is for the sport of baseball compared to a match-up between two non-contending teams in the first month of the NFL season.
And yet last Thursday, the NFL viewership blew the MLB viewership out of the water.
This has been commonplace for years, dating back to 1972 when football eclipsed baseball in viewership popularity just five years after the first Super Bowl.
Since then, the NFL has consistently been the most watched sport in America.
There are a couple of reasons for this. One of them is time commitment. Of the four most popular professional sports leagues in the U.S. (NFL, NHL, NBA and MLB), all but the NFL have at least 80 games per season, with Major League Baseball teams playing 162 each year.
Most Americans don’t have the time or patience to watch their team play multiple games each week, let alone games every afternoon or evening.
When it comes to the NFL, it’s pretty simple: sit down once a week and watch your favorite team for a three-hour time slot and do it again the next week for 17 weeks.
Another reason the NFL is so popular is the variety in the game. Do you like physicality? Well you get that in the trenches with the run game, or through a hard-hitting defense. Do you want high-octane moments? You have explosive passing and running plays.
With the NFL continuing to grow in popularity, expect it to remain far-and-away the most viewed professional league in the nation for years to come.
