The popularity of the Kansas City Chiefs and star QB Patrick Mahomes has helped to drive NFL viewership. (Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)

The opening weeks of American football’s 2024-25 NFL season have been a major broadcast success, achieving the highest average rating through week three of the campaign in the last nine years.

An average of 18.6 million viewers tuned into NFL broadcasts across Fox, Paramount-owned CBS, Disney-owned ABC and ESPN, and Amazon’s Prime Video OTT service.

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This is a 10% uptick on the 2023 NFL season, a year that saw record viewership multiple times across the league’s various broadcasters.

The 2024 season’s viewership through week three has been the most since 2015 when 18.1 million viewers on average tuned in to each game.

This figure notably excludes the viewership of the OTT streamer Peacock’s exclusive broadcast of the Brazil-staged season opener (which drew 14.2 million) as it took place on Friday night prime time, a new viewership window for the league with no frame of reference for comparison.

Of the five most-watched games so far, three have featured the two-time defending Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs, whose star power in quarterback Patrick Mahomes and tight end Travis Kelce continue to drive their massive and surging popularity.

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The other two fixtures have featured the Dallas Cowboys, maintaining their position as “America’s team” with their continued popularity, despite another poor start to the campaign.

In week five, another challenge will come to the NFL when it stages the first of three International Series games in London, England in consecutive weeks, before one in Munich, Germany, in November.

Whether or not the league can keep its strong viewership trend going amid adverse time-zone challenges has been a yearly challenge for the league since the international series became a permanent fixture, but the series has also helped to ferment major growth for the league in Europe.

This was best exemplified by the most recent Super Bowl, which drew 62.5 million viewers outside of the US, including the UK and Germany where average viewership for the game grew by 18% and 13% respectively.