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How Will Super Bowl LIX Audience Stack Up To Last Year’s Record-Setter? Here’s What Could Help Or Hurt The Big Game

katie campione and dade hayes
·7-min read

The Kansas City Chiefs are aiming for a three-peat at this Sunday’s Super Bowl LIX, but what are the odds that the big game will also set an all-time audience record for the third consecutive year?

It’s certainly possible that Super Bowl LIX will beat last year’s 123.4M viewers, which not only the record for Super Bowl viewership but is also currently the second most-watched TV program in history after the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing.

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But, last year there were multiple factors that pretty clearly set the stage for a record-setting audience, from Taylor Swift’s trek from Tokyo to Las Vegas for the affair to an already stellar year of viewership for the NFL. This year, not so much.

NFL Ratings Are Down, Except For The Chiefs

With some notable exceptions, the NFL has seen a bit of a downturn in overall viewership this season. The 2024-25 regular season averaged 17.5M viewers, down 2.2% from the 17.9M it generated the previous season. Neither were able to beat the 2015-16 season’s record high of 18.1M, but last season was the league’s best in several years.

While a 2.2% decline is by no means a death knell, it is worth noting, especially since three out of five of the NFL’s big TV packages were also down year-over-year. Fox, CBS and ESPN all saw lower audiences this season, while NBC eked out a win and Prime Video actually saw an impressive 11% lift.

The NFC Championship, where the Eagles solidified their spot in the Super Bowl, was also down a whopping 21% year-over-year after scoring its best audience since 2012 last year. On the other hand, the AFC Championship, which the Chiefs won yet again, drew nearly 58M viewers, setting a new record for that title game.

Even Netflix’s flashy Christmas Day showdown between the Baltimore Ravens and the Houston Texans, which featured a halftime performance from Beyoncé, couldn’t beat previous December 25 matchups. In fact, viewership peaked while the Cowboy Carter artist was performing, rather than at any point during the game.

The NFL’s saving grace this year was actually the Chiefs. Excluding the Thanksgiving Day games, the team played in three of the top five most-watched games of the regular season, with the Chiefs-Bills coming in at No. 1 with 31M viewers.

Overall, the Chiefs played in six of the 15 most-watched games of the regular season — far more than any other team — and five of those boasted more than 25M views, per Nielsen data. For further context, the Eagles played in two of the top 15.

While none of this means that the Super Bowl won’t beat pretty much every other TV program in the last year, as it routinely does, it certainly doesn’t bode well for a record-breaker like the past two years.

Alternative Viewing On Tubi & Telemundo

Tubi is a big component of the curiosity around this year’s audience tally. The free, ad-supported streaming service, which Fox acquired in 2020, has been on a tear of late. It has steadily gained share of TV viewing, reaching 97M monthly unique viewers in 2024 and recently getting on pace to deliver $1 billion in annual revenue. On Sunday, it will have some original shoulder programming but not a separate simulcast with different announcers (as Nickelodeon did last year).

Many streaming vets wonder about the technical capacity for handling a live event of this magnitude. Live programming is a rare commodity for Tubi, which usually sees about 90% on-demand viewing and has never emphasized its FAST channels as much as other free streamers.

“It’s a big question mark to me,” says one top exec at a rival company. “If Netflix technology got overwhelmed with the fight last fall, what will happen to them? And the stakes are not low – this is the Super Bowl.” (Fox and Tubi execs in recent weeks have pointed to the deep experience of Fox Sports with handling live games, many of which have streamed across authenticated pay-TV apps.)

Past Super Bowls have been carried by subscription streamers, but this will be the first free, ad-supported outlet to have it. Based on the year-by-year increases in streaming on Super Sunday, analysts expect as much as 15% of overall viewing of the game could come on Tubi, which would instantly rank the Chiefs-Eagles matchup among the biggest live-streamed events of all time.

The Spanish-language setup is a small but interesting wrinkle in the overall viewing picture. In an unusual move, Fox Deportes and Telemundo are sharing rights via a sublicense deal. The NFL wanted to ensure that a broadcast network had the game in Spanish, one source told Deadline, with cable net Fox Deportes likely to only deliver an audience of a few hundred thousand viewers. The Fox Deportes broadcast will also be available on Tubi. By spreading the game around for Spanish-speaking viewers, as it does in any language, the NFL hopes the total number adds up to another record.

Last Year’s Overtime Thriller Is Tough To Beat

The Chiefs entered last year’s Super Bowl as the underdogs. It was still expected to be a pretty well-matched game, though few anticipated such a nail-biting matchup that had spectators on the edge of their seats well into overtime. When the Chiefs did ultimately win, it marked the NFL’s first back-to-back Super Bowl wins in 20 years.

That thrilling game will be tough to beat, especially since this is yet another rematch from recent years, after the Chiefs secured their first win of this potential three-peat against the Eagles in 2023. That year, Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce went up against his brother, Eagles center Jason Kelce, which made for a great storyline to drive interest to the game.

There’s no heartwarming family story this year, but there is another interesting narrative taking hold ahead of Super Bowl LIX.

The NFL has been scrambling in recent weeks to refute claims that the referees are favorably officiating the Chiefs in order to help the team win games as part of a larger conspiracy to boost ratings. Generally, the NFL wouldn’t lend credence to what had previously just amounted to online chatter. The noise has gotten pretty loud, though, drowning out almost anything else about this matchup.

Everyone from NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to Fox Sports rules analyst Mike Pereira to The NFL Referees Association has weighed in recently, insisting that the officiators have not and will not favor the Chiefs during games. The responses even have some wondering if this will negatively impact the Chiefs on Sunday, so the refs can prove a point about their neutrality.

Regardless of the validity of the claims, there’s nothing like a good story to attract any many eyes as possible to an event like the Super Bowl.

Taylor Swift And Trump

As always, the Super Bowl is sure to be full of famous faces, including Taylor Swift, who is expected to be cheering on her beau Travis Kelce again this year.

During her first regular season in attendance, it was pretty clear that the pop star had an impact on NFL viewership, especially among young women. Swift also had to jet from Tokyo to Las Vegas directly after an Eras Tour performance to make it to last year’s big game, and seemingly the whole world was keeping tabs on her to know if she’d make it, which added to the allure around her attendance.

While it’s possible that Swift was still responsible for some of the eyes on the NFL this season, it appears that the interest surrounding her attendance has cooled off just a bit, as it became a more regular occurrence, and she’s already been spotted in New Orleans this weekend, eliminating any questions about whether she’ll make it to Super Bowl LIX.

However, President Donald Trump is set to make history Sunday as the first sitting president to attend the Super Bowl.

Not only is that likely to draw some curiosity on its own, but considering the president’s previous comments about Swift after her endorsement of Kamala Harris last fall, the idea of these two in the same stadium is already piquing interest online.

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