History of Sports Viewership in the United States
Football is back! The reigning king of sports ratings is finally back as of this Thursday’s NFL kickoff. Football has long been America’s favorite sport with both ratings and polls pointing towards the NFL as being the dominant sports league since the 1970s. Baseball is no longer "America's pastime." However, including “past” with “time” neatly fits baseball and its fall from dominant American sport status.
Today, about 10% of Americans polled by Gallup say they prefer baseball as their favorite sport to watch, down from a peak of 39% in 1947. Americans generally feel the same about the orange ball today, with another 11% saying basketball is their favorite sport. This number has been fairly consistent throughout the past century outside of a jump in popularity during the Michael Jordan-era 90s. Meanwhile, love for the spheroid ball had catapulted from 17% during 1947 to a peak in 2005 of 43%, and football currently sits at around 36% of Americans claiming it as their favorite spectator sport.
The 50s-60s
The National Football League only ever grew to its modern-day popularity thanks to the invention and adoption of the television. It’s no shock that football began its ascent in the 1950s during the expansion of television into homes. The number of televisions rose from 9% in 1950 to about 50% in 1955 and almost 90% in 1960. By 1968, after polls such as the one above by Gallup declared football as the new favorite spectator sport, The Wall Street Journal wrote, “not many years ago, baseball ranked with apple pie, the flag, and motherhood as an American institution. If you weren’t enthusiastic about it, you risked being considered unpatriotic. Not now.”
The leadership of the NFL during the 1960s decided to tie their lot with television. Their game was more visual, more action-packed, and by the late 1960s, fans were complaining about the “downtime” during baseball games. Once Americans actually started watching the sport, instead of listening to radio broadcasts, the games were just a bit too dull compared to football. The NFL wisely capitalized off its more visceral product by packaging its entire season of games and then sold the rights to CBS and shared profits equally among clubs.
The MLB, as is often the case with legacy institutions, was slower to adapt to the television revenue landscape. While the NFL sold its rights as a package deal, MLB had its teams negotiate deals individually. Primetime baseball games were mainly for the most popular clubs, and MLB could not get the extensive broadcasting deals the NFL could obtain. MLB never had the televisual product as the NFL to begin, but they certainly could not afford to compete with a league that exerted complete control over its members and used that central planning to power its broadcast into American homes.
The 1960s was a time of changing the guard where MLB finally had real competition for “America’s Pastime.” By the late 1960s, NFL ratings regularly trumped MLB ratings, but even the Superbowl would represent merely a slight advantage in ratings over a single World Series game. In aggregate, the minimum of four games and up to seven games made the World Series still comparatively more widely viewed than the first several Super Bowls. Same in regards to the regular season: each NFL game would have more viewers than an MLB game, but the 162-game MLB seasons in the late 60s and early 70s put MLB ahead in aggregate totals.
Take a look at the next couple of graphs for the history of World Series and Super Bowl ratings.
The 70s-80s
The 1970s were good for both the NFL and MLB. Ratings increased steadily for both organizations until peaking in 1978 for MLB. That year, the New York Yankees and LA Dodgers finale, a championship sequel from the prior year, culminated in 44.28 million viewers. The 1978 World Series will likely forever remain the most-watched baseball event.
The 1970s were good for MLB, but they were otherworldly for the NFL. The Super Bowl went from 44 million viewers in 1970 to 76 million viewers in 1980. The World Series experienced an increase in viewers of around 30% over the decade while the Super Bowl increased 72% and well beyond ratings MLB could ever dream of reaching. The NFL had firmly eclipsed MLB during the 1970s with viewership MLB would never reach; MLB couldn't have known it at the time, but the league was stagnating while the NFL was just revving up.
The surrounding years of the 1970s were generally great for baseball, but the 1980s were a time of substantial decline in viewership for the league. World Series ratings in the 1980s exhibited a decline of about 25-35% by 1990, while the NFL had a slight increase outside of Super Bowl XX between Chicago and New England, which had a massive 92 million viewers that went unmatched for a decade after. Still, the rating performance of the NFL in the 1980s was subpar compared to the surrounding decades.
The NBA hasn’t been mentioned yet, and that’s only because they have been such a distant third place sport for spectating in America that it just hasn’t been relevant. That changed a bit in the 1980s. The NBA had trouble with ratings decline from the 60s into the 70s until the early 1980s rivalry between the Bird and Magic era Lakers and Celtics ripped the league back to prior success. The rivalry culminated in ratings that nearly matched the average viewership of the World Series for the first time in the history between the leagues. The Magic 80s primed the NBA for its MJ-fueled propulsion later in the 1990s to even greater heights.
The 90s-00s
The 90s were a grim continuance of MLB’s experience from the prior decade. Less viewership in the World Series and All-Star games year over year. There was a brief blip in the late 1990s around the peak of the steroid era, but the home run chase of 1998 neither slowed MLB’s decline nor was as pronounced as people thought at the time. The small ball-dominant early 80s didn’t stop the loss of viewership, and by the 90s, we learned the dongers didn’t really help either. Total MLB home runs hit per season went from 3000 in the early 80s to 5000 in the late 90s. As cool as home runs are, the league couldn’t sustain the pressure from the steroid scandal, which left reeking desperation behind MLB’s lenient approach in the first place.
The NFL continued its ascent to stratospheric heights during this decade. The Super Bowl would regularly top 90 million viewers with help from the Emmitt Smith and Troy Aikman-led Dallas Cowboys dynasty. After 1992, the NFL never had a championship game with less than 80 million viewers (a pretty weak Falcons team in 1998 was partially responsible for the least-watched Super Bowl since 1992 – that game still topped 83 million viewers).
Meanwhile, the NBA was having its most successful decade thanks to the Chicago Bulls and number 23. The Bulls won six Finals series in the 1990s, and each average series viewership was in the top 12 all-time for the sport. The last Chicago three-peat that concluded in 1998 was the most-watched NBA game of all time with 29 million viewers. MJ’s retirement meant losing his “secret stuff” for the NBA and a rapid decline of the sport. The following two Finals had the lowest viewership in a decade.
The ascent of the NBA contrasted with MLB’s decline led to the first-ever competition between the two leagues. Average viewership for the 1993 NBA Finals was higher than for the 1993 World Series, a first in the battle between the two sports leagues owed mainly to Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls appearing in their first three-peat NBA Finals finale.
The battle between the NBA and MLB championship viewership count has only intensified since that first win for the NBA due to the continued decline of MLB into the aughts with the worst viewership for a World Series of all time in 2000 (and subsequently 2006, then 2008, and so on). The Boston Red Sox managed to stop the bleeding in 2004 with their Bambino curse-breaking run that culminated in a World Series that is still the most-watched since 1996. The bleeding would pick up one year later with a new all-time low.
The NBA also declined in the ratings during the 2000s; it was just not quite as pronounced as MLB’s decline. The Lakers managed highly watched Finals with youngsters Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal, but the Spurs championship runs in the aughts were the least-watched Finals the NBA has ever had. Generally, the 2000s battle between MLB and the NBA was in favor of MLB most years; only a Celtics-Lakers rematch (similar to the highest ratings draws from the 80s) could propel the NBA above MLB.
The NFL managed to increase its Super Bowl viewers nearly year-over-year through the 2000s, but it was not until 2006 that the league had a championship game go over 90 million viewers like the Cowboys and Broncos were able to muster in the 1990s. Maybe it was the somewhat lame Patriots dynasty of the early 2000s, but since that 2006 Super Bowl, no finale has ever had under 90 million viewers. In fact, by 2010, the NFL finally hit triple digits with 106 million viewers.
That gets us to 2010-Present. I plan to cover that in much more detail across the three leagues in my next article. I have much more data over the average viewership from in-season for the last decade and plan to detail the fall of the NFL in recent years along with the continued downward trajectory of MLB with a little COVID talk spiced in. Finally, I will solve the misery that plagues all three major sports leagues and spells potential disaster for television revenue in the future.
