The 2024-25 Premier League season, which will see Manchester City attempt to win their fifth straight title, started with a bang for NBC Sports.
Per a Wednesday release, the six matches that weren’t Peacock-exclusives this past weekend (Friday-Sunday) averaged 820,000 viewers, the most-watched opening weekend on record domestically. Out-of-home viewing wasn’t tracked by Nielsen before the 2020-21 season, and Peacock (which simulcasts all games airing on the NBC broadcast network) didn’t launch until the summer of 2020.
The data does not include Leicester-Spurs, which aired Monday on USA.
The string of strong viewership was led by City’s 2-0 win over Chelsea on Sunday. The match averaged 1.85 million viewers in English on NBC and Peacock, with another 368,000 watching on Telemundo. That’s good for the most-watched opening weekend match on record in the U.S and the fourth-most-watched match in English in Premier League history in the United States.
NBC is coming off a record Premier League season for the 2023-24 campaign, averaging 546,000 viewers per match. That season included a record 2.9 million viewers for Championship Sunday to close out the campaign and a record English-language viewership for a match, 2.12 million viewers for City-Arsenal in March.
This weekend is a Peacock-heavy slate for the Premier League, with nine of ten matches exclusively airing on the platform. The 10th is Aston Villa-Arsenal, airing at 12:30 p.m. ET on USA.
About Joe Lucia
I hate your favorite team. I also sort of hate most of my favorite teams.