If live sports is the engine driving linear TV in the streaming era — and it is — then it stands to reason that networks would look to build that audience in any way they can. Football season, after all, doesn’t fill the whole calendar.
That notion seems to be working. As outlets have gotten more serious about the variety of sports they offer — and as the cost of airing the biggest players climbs ever higher, pricing some out of that market — what might have been considered niche offerings in the past are building solid, consistent viewing numbers at a relatively low price compared to rights fees for the likes of the NFL and NBA.
A year after a breakthrough season, the WNBA has continued to pull in strong ratings for its national games on ESPN/ABC, CBS and Ion. Wimbledon just finished its most-watched tournament in six years. Smaller national-team soccer tournaments are pulling in record viewing.
None of those sports pull in the audience of, say, the NBA or Major League Baseball postseason, let alone the average NFL game. But the viewer numbers for some WNBA games wouldn’t look out of place among those for MLB’s or the NBA’s regular season. The CONCACAF Gold Cup final may pale in comparison to the World Cup in ratings, but it just posted its largest audience to date on English-language TV.
Over the first half of the WNBA season, ESPN’s telecasts of the women’s basketball league have improved by 10 percent year to year (though ESPN hasn’t disclosed precise viewing totals), with three of its top five regular season games of all time airing this season. All that comes after a 2024 season that more than doubled the audience the year before that. Ion’s over-the-air telecasts have grown by 12 percent vs. 2024 (595,000 vs. 529,000), and CBS’ smaller slate is averaging 1.38 million viewers, about even with 2024. It’s worth noting, too, that arguably the biggest draw for viewers, Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark, has missed about half her team’s games with injuries, but the audience has held. The July 19 All-Star Game averaged 2.2 million viewers, down a good amount from last year’s record (which aired on ABC rather than ESPN) but still the second most-watched contest in the league’s history.
The increased audience for WNBA games, and the coming huge jump in media rights fees beginning in 2026, are also a key point in negotiations between the players union and the league. During the all-star weekend, a number of players wore T-shirts reading “Pay Us What You Owe Us.”
ESPN’s Wimbledon coverage was its best since 2019, with an average of 721,000 viewers across all hours. The July 13 men’s final averaged 3.2 million viewers, a 26 percent jump from a year ago, and the women’s final a day earlier drew 1.9 million, an 18 percent improvement despite a lopsided 6-0, 6-0 victory for Iga Swiatek over Amanda Anisimova.
The examples continue: The final of the CONCACAF Gold Cup on July 6 drew 3.84 million viewers for Fox, the most on an English-language network in the North American soccer tournament’s history, and it’s followed up with huge increases for the women’s European championship, which more than doubled their 2022 audience in the quarterfinal round. Formula 1 averages 1.3 million viewers on ESPN (with a sizable assist from Netflix’s Drive to Survive docuseries), double what it did at the beginning of ESPN’s current contract. (There’s widespread speculation that Apple will pay a premium to wrest F1 rights from ESPN starting in 2026.) The men’s and women’s College World Series both averaged better than 1 million viewers this season. And on and on.
The knock on televised sports outside of the four biggest U.S. pro leagues, and college football and men’s basketball, used to be that they didn’t have big enough fan bases to justify any substantial investment in them. The growing audiences, along with relatively inexpensive rights packages compared to the traditional behemoths and major advertisers willing to spend on that programming, suggest that maybe networks just weren’t looking hard enough to find them.