The 2023 NWSL Championship between OL Reign and Gotham FC ended the league’s season on a down note.
Gotham’s 2-1 win averaged 817,000 viewers on CBS in primetime Saturday, an 11% slide from last year’s title game, which averaged 915,000 viewers.
This year’s game had a weaker college football lead-in, with Tennessee-Missouri averaging 3.62 million viewers in the afternoon on CBS. A year ago, with the game taking place two weeks earlier, CBS aired Florida-Georgia, which averaged 5.62 million viewers.
Despite the decline, this year’s title game was still the second-most-watched NWSL game ever. It also was the most-watched English-language soccer broadcast of the weekend, topping several Premier League broadcasts on NBC and USA. Several games, however, drew larger Spanish audiences or larger combined English and Spanish audiences.
In October, the NWSL recorded its most-watched regular season match, and what was then the second-most-watched match, ever when 683,000 viewers watched Megan Rapinoe’s final regular season home match on CBS. Rapinoe took part in the NWSL Championship this weekend with OL Reign but was forced to exit after just six minutes with an injury.
2023 was the final year for the NWSL under its previous media rights agreements. Beginning in 2024, the league starts a new set of media agreements with Amazon, CBS, ESPN, and Scripps Sports, paying a reported $60 million annually. The NWSL Championship will remain on the CBS broadcast network in this new set of deals.
[Data via Sports Media Watch]
