ESPN’s ‘MNF’ Ratings Up 8% As NFL Surges to Strong Start

The NFL’s opening week of play in the 2025 regular season ended on another historically high note.

ESPN said late Wednesday that it averaged 22.1 million viewers for the Monday Night Football game in Chicago between the Vikings and Bears, up 8% from the comparable game to start the 2024 season. The figure represents the second-highest audience for a Week 1 MNF game, spanning 35 broadcasts, since ESPN gained those rights in 2006. Monday’s game was also shown on ABC.

The total represents a particularly strong coda to what was almost universally a banner start to the season for the NFL. CBS posted its best Week 1 viewership since regaining NFL rights in 1998, NBC had its best two-game audience to start a season since 2015, and Fox similarly had the best opening-week singleheader viewership in a decade.  

The lone outlier in that trend was YouTube, which saw a 14% U.S. audience increase from last year’s NFL game in Brazil on Peacock, but it had a non-accredited measurement that fell below expectations and drew rebukes from other networks.

These figures continue to show the impact of Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel audience measurement system. The enhanced methodology is designed to provide a fuller, more accurate picture of viewer behaviors, bringing in tens of millions of additional data points from set-top boxes and smart TVs.

ESPN also generated an average of 1.76 million viewers for the Monday Night Countdown pregame show, the best Week 1 figure for that show in 11 years. The game was also preceded by the Bears’ announcement on Monday of their abandoning a prior plan to build a downtown stadium and focus fully on suburban Arlington Heights, Ill.

Turning the Page

Attention around NFL viewership now quickly shifts to Week 2, which has another set of big games, including the Thursday Night Football opener on Amazon featuring the Commanders and Packers, and a Super Bowl LIX rematch between the Eagles and Chiefs. That latter contest will be the featured national broadcast on Fox for its America’s Game of the Week showcase late Sunday afternoon.

Fox plans to buttress that production with a two-hour, on-site airing of the Fox NFL Sunday pregame show from Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City.

“Now we get to roll out the big cannons for Week 2. Cowboys early, Super Bowl rematch late,” Fox Sports president of insights and analytics Mike Mulvihill tweeted.