Star names have been missing but second half of campaign should bring renewed interest after ratings spike last year
Halfway through the NWSL’s 13th regular season, the league reported TV ratings were trending down. But August has already shown glimmers of recovery and context adds important caveats to that downward slope.
As first reported by Sports Business Journal, when the league took a month-long break midway through the year in July, ratings were down by 8% across their multiplatform media partnership. That partnership, which is now in its second year, was signed in November 2023 with CBS, ESPN, ION (Scripps Sports) and Prime Video for a deal worth $240m – a huge increase from their previous one-party partnership with CBS worth $4.5m. In its first year, the league saw a big uptick in viewing numbers as matches proliferated across a variety of outlets, reaching a wider audience.
At the close of the 2024 season, Nielsen measured a five-fold increase in total viewership (18.7 million) across all platforms from the previous year. The championship match became the most-watched game in league history, peaking at 1.1 million viewers and averaging 967,000 on CBS. That match – in which a record-breaking Orlando Pride squad defeated the Washington Spirit, marking the Brazilian veteran Marta’s first NWSL championship on a field packed with recent Olympians – clocked an 18% increase in average viewers from 2023.
