The greatest shows in town: from the NFL and IPL to the PL, BL and Aussie Rules
Many major sports leagues are setting records for the number of fans they are attracting through their turnstiles. We look at the world's 26 best attended leagues.
It’s been a while since Sporting Intelligence compiled a definitive list of the best attended sports leagues in the world but some landmark developments in recent days and weeks make this an ideal time to revisit the subject.
The world’s best club football tournament - the UEFA Champions League - climaxes at the end of this month when PSG of France meet Internazionale of Italy in Munich, but French football has had something else to celebrate in recent days: a domestic season with the highest average attendances per game since the French league began in 1893.
Spain’s La Liga could also yet have its best season ever in attendance terms, or at worst come very close to that record, while English football’s top division, the Premier League, has reached a Holy Grail moment in a decades-long attendance battle with its German equivalent, the Bundesliga. More of which shortly.
Other big sports around the world are thriving in attendance terms. Japanese baseball’s elite competition, the NPB, hit a record high in its most recently completed season (2024) and now has higher average attendances per game than Major League Baseball in North America.
The world’s most popular ice hockey league, the NHL, had its best ever season in 2024-25 in attendance terms. Aussie Rules football in 2024 had its second best season ever when measuring paying fans.
Oh, and America’s NFL, for so long the best attended domestic sports league in the world, has not only retained that position but enhanced it, with one game in 2025 that became the most-watched live event inside the USA, of any genre, ever.
Today’s piece will give you the details of the 26 sports leagues around the world that have been the best attended in their most recently completed seasons. We’ll rank them both in terms of average number of fans per game and also the total number of fans per most recently completed season.
It’s long been a personal fascination which events - sporting or otherwise - draw mass audiences together to share a communal experience, whether on TV or in venues.
In fact Sporting Intelligence’s original full launch in March 2010 began with the findings of our first major piece of sports finance research: which sports teams had the highest average pay per player, and what that might tell us about the relationship between money and success in different sports. The best paid team per player on that occasion was the New York Yankees of MLB.
That inaugural review of global sports salaries in 2010 became a 10-year series of surveys of global sports salaries (see the covers below), with the last edition, the GSSS 2019 which is downloadable free here, being in Autumn 2019 before the Covid pandemic turned the world upside down.
The salient point relating to today’s piece is that the first report considered salaries in the 10 leagues in 2010 that just happened to be the best attended (and de facto the most popular) sports leagues in the world at the time.
The make-up of those leagues has changed over time, and indeed expanded.
Anyway, onto the current 26 most popular sports leagues in attendance terms and multiple records being broken across lots of sports in many parts of the world.