Editor’s note: This article was written by Ben Fischer and David Broughton, first appearing in Sports Business Journal, the industry’s leading source of sports business news, events and data.
The NFL drove both attendance and TV audience growth in 2023 by pushing at the margins, and the result was to make strong numbers even better.
The league saw a 7% year-over-year gain in TV viewing audience and a slight — but notable — gain in live attendance despite less inventory compared to one year earlier. All regular-season games averaged 17.9 million viewers, the highest average since 2015.
The average stadium crowd size grew by 0.1% to 69,524, the highest number since SBJ began tracking that figure in 2004. Total tickets sold increased from 18.8 million to 18.9 million.
On the broadcast side, league executives credit more flexibility in the scheduling as one reason for the improved figures. The new television contracts no longer tie AFC games to CBS and NFC games to Fox like in the past. Now, “every game started out as a free agent,” said Hans Schroeder, executive vice president of media distribution.
In practice, that contractual change did not yield big changes to the television lineup on a weekly basis. But Week 18 showed the upside of flexibility: When Fox had a Cowboys-Commanders matchup in the late afternoon window, two other classic NFC rivals, the Bears and Packers, got top billing on CBS instead of being regionalized within Fox affiliates.
Elsewhere on the schedule, the league found more stand-alone national windows on Christmas Day, Black Friday, Sunday mornings (made possible by an unprecedented five European games), and liberal use of late-season Saturday windows, and more Monday night doubleheaders — which can allow stars or unusual storylines to play to national audiences.
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“The game continues to shine,” Schroeder said. “The players continue to shine; even with all the backup quarterbacks that were playing, we still had so many incredible performances.”
TV makes up the bulk of NFL revenue, but owners and Commissioner Roger Goodell still expect full stadiums. In many NFL cities, sellouts happen routinely and marginal growth in ticket sales is hard to find. But the league still accomplished that this season, even though international games were played in smaller stadiums and the extra home game cycled to the AFC, which has smaller venues on average.
Leaguewide, the percent of all ticketing inventory used grew from 96.7% to 98.6%, a critical metric to NFL club business development leaders, who emphasize maximizing the business impact of available assets over sheer numbers.
The biggest growth came from the long-suffering Washington Commanders at FedEx Field. Once Josh Harris and his group acquired the team for a record $6.05 billion, fans responded immediately. The Commanders led all NFL teams in attendance growth with a 10% gain in their average crowd size to 63,951.
One expert credited the gains to NFL teams’ relatively recent focus on single-game ticket sales, including using the May schedule release to drive interest during the offseason and using data more effectively to find likely one-off buyers. “Ten years ago, teams would to a degree be embarrassed to sell single game tickets,” said Eventellect cofounder Patrick Ryan, “because it was highlighting the fact they didn’t sell out of season tickets.”
Sports Business Journal