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 Bellew 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,” Bellew 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.”

Any dwindling hype around Bill Belichick’s debut season as North Carolina’s head football coach after a lopsided opening loss to TCU could have big implications for the school, the ACC, TV rights-holders, and other stakeholders across college football.

No Tar Heels football season has ever begun with so much national attention, evidenced by Michael Jordan headlining a long list of celebrities that attended Monday night’s game in Chapel Hill, which turned into a 48–14 rout and saw fans leaving in the third quarter.

UNC in July sold out of all football tickets for this season, with fans taking a big interest in Belichick, 73, who instantly became one of the highest-paid coaches in college football with a $10 million salary. Tar Heels football GM Michael Lombardi is one of the top-compensated executives in the sport, earning $1.5 million this year.

Belichick’s cache from winning six Super Bowls as an NFL head coach brought a new buzz this summer to the ACC, which, along with the Big 12, is trying to keep up with the more lucrative of the Power 4 conferences, the Big Ten and SEC. His star power also led to ESPN betting big on UNC this season, hoping for a TV ratings boost similar to what Deion Sanders brought to Colorado in 2023. UNC is also the subject of a docuseries set to stream on Hulu later this fall.

UNC will make its first road trip under Belichick on Saturday against Charlotte. Last month, that sold-out game became the most expensive resale ticket in Charlotte’s history, as Belichick’s presence gave a boost to the Tar Heels’ upcoming road opponents, too.

One date to keep an eye on as UNC plays its next three games (Charlotte, Richmond, and Central Florida) is their first ACC game of the season, Oct. 4, against Clemson. ESPN had internally been targeting that matchup in Chapel Hill as a potential stop for College GameDay, but if the Belichick hype continues to die down, that may not end up happening.

McLaren is poised to take home its second consecutive constructors championship in Formula One, but it’s also setting the pace off the track.

McLaren Group Limited purchased the minority stake owned by MSP Sports Capital at a valuation of more than $5 billion, a source confirmed to Front Office Sports.

Sky Sports was the first to report the sale, though the valuation of the purchased 30% stake was at $4.1 billion (£3 billion). Axios was the first to report that the valuation was worth more than $5 billion.

The sale represents an exponential increase since MSP initially purchased a stake in McLaren in late 2020. The group reportedly initially purchased 15% which rose to around 30% by 2022 at a valuation of $740 million (£560 million). 

A source claims it is the largest institutional exit in sports history. Institutional investors are organizations that invest money on behalf of shareholders, such as private equity firms or sovereign wealth funds—which are different from recent record-breaking exits such as the Celtics and Lakers in the NBA. 

Many U.S. sports leagues limit the amount that institutional investors can own of a specific team (for example, only 30% of an NBA team can be owned by institutional investors). However, F1 does not have a collective structure and therefore does not impose the same restrictions. 

Saving Grace

MSP invested at a time of financial turmoil for McLaren. CEO Zak Brown, who took over the team in 2018, said last year the team was “on the brink” of folding and was saved by the investment from MSP.

“We were in a situation where if we didn’t have a cash injection, we would have been a risk at [not] starting the year,” Brown said.

Team Papaya had not won a constructors’ championship since 1998. Its last drivers’ championship was in 2008, the first of now 40-year-old Lewis Hamilton.

Brown has facilitated one of the quickest and most miraculous turnarounds in Formula One history. After holding off Ferrari for last year’s constructors’ title, McLaren has lapped the rest of the field. The drivers’ championship has turned into a duel between its two young drivers: Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris.

A source told FOS that it was “the right time” for MSP to exit, given the team’s rise on track, which has also translated into commercial success. The Athletic reported last week that the team signed a naming rights deal with Mastercard starting in 2026 that will be valued at around $100 million per season, the biggest title sponsorship agreement in F1.