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If the NFL had a relationship status with Nielsen, it would certainly be complicated—something poised to be a significant storyline throughout the 2025 season.
As the league prepares to start the regular season on Thursday with the Eagles hosting the Cowboys, it has applauded Nielsen’s move to its Big Data + Panel, the company’s newly expanded viewership measurement system. At the same time, though, the NFL also believes the additional data coming into the agency still fundamentally undercounts what is the top-ranked programming in all of U.S. television.
“We should give Nielsen credit where credit’s due,” NFL chief data and analytics officer Paul Ballew said Tuesday in response to a Front Office Sports question. “We’re happy with the steps we’ve taken forward for 2025, but there’s more work to be done.”
Among the specific issues for the NFL is a perceived undercounting of people watching games collectively at home, known as co-viewing in Nielsen data. Bellew said record-setting viewership data for Super Bowl LIX in February included a co-viewing factor of 2.4 people per household, something he said “makes no sense” given the heavily communal nature of that major event, and the NFL believes that issue is repeated in many other games.
“It’s been a protracted journey [with Nielsen], and we can’t get them out of neutral,” Ballew said.
As a result, the league is also exploring working more with other viewership data providers such as VideoAmp, a company that Bellew called “intriguing” after some initial testing with that company. Bellew, however, said VideoAmp still has much more work to do to enhance its measurement processes, and it does not have the industry accreditation that Nielsen does.
Far more than mere bragging rights, billions of dollars in advertising are spent on NFL games each year, and even small swings in viewership and resulting advertising rates can have significant impacts. Ultimately, those metrics also help inform rights fees agreements, and the NFL is a virtual lock to open up most of its domestic deals after the 2029 season.
Nielsen said in a statement that it projects 2025 to be the “most accurately rated football season in history,” and added that it “works collaboratively with all our clients, including the NFL, to continuously innovate and evolve our products.”
Bigger Hopes for 2025
The NFL, meanwhile, is optimistic about seeing a strong lift in its viewership this season, something that would follow a 17% boost during the preseason and would reverse a 2.2% decline during the 2024 campaign. Not only is the new Nielsen methodology expected to reflect a broad-based audience boost, but the league is relishing the opportunities in a 2025 schedule that includes more standalone games than ever.
“The underlying flexibility we have now in scheduling allows us to have any one of our 272 games in any [broadcast] window, any platform, any partner,” said NFL EVP of media distribution Hans Schroeder. “So we’re spending a lot of time on getting every one of those 272 games in the right window.”
Additionally, the NFL believes it will benefit from an enlarged streaming landscape that includes the recently introduced ESPN direct-to-consumer service and Fox One as cord-cutting accelerates. All of the league’s games this season will now be available on a standalone streaming service.
Brady Rules
Schroeder also said the recent relaxation of rules for Fox broadcaster and Raiders minority owner Tom Brady to attend production meetings virtually is about finding a proper balance between enhancing network broadcasts and ensuring competitive fairness among teams.
“We feel really good about the rules and guidelines that we have in place for this year,” Schroeder said. “We’ll continue to stay focused and evolve where it makes sense going forward.”
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