Over the moon: Super Bowl gets more USA viewers than ANY event, including Apollo 11
The live audience inside America for the Philadelphia Eagles' win on Sunday was the biggest for any show in US history. Many think it was for 1969's moon landing. Nope.
Sunday’s Super Bowl not only set a new record for the number of viewers inside the USA who have ever watched the climax to an NFL season, but it also attracted the largest confirmed live telecast audience in history for any event, of any genre, inside the United States.
If any reader is already thinking “Hang on, the 1969 moon landing was bigger”, then no, it wasn’t, and I’ll come back to that, in detail, later.
The fact is that even a commonly quoted “estimate” of 125m people in the USA tuning in to Apolllo 11’s finest hour, 56 years ago, has now been topped by the 126m, on average, who watched the Philadelphia Eagles beat the Kansas City Chiefs 40-22 in New Orleans.
It should also be stressed that the 125m “estimate” cited above was only ever that: an estimate. Hard data from the time suggests the truer figure - undoubtedly massive - was closer to 90m. Again, more shortly.
The 126m figure for Sunday’s game included data from the live TV broadcast figures, live streaming and Apps. It was the average number of people watching at any one point of the broadcast. The peak figure - the most number of viewers at any one time - was 135.7m people, in the second quarter.
Ratings firm Nielsen subsequently confirmed - after this piece was originally finished - that the average viewership was 127.7m, and the peak was 137.7m.
While the NFL’s regular season viewership dipped 2% year-on-year, the sport remains king in America. In 2024, there were 72 NFL games among the 100 most-watched shows in the USA, of all genres.
The size of Sunday’s Super Bowl audience inside the USA tells us a few things, not least:
Super Bowl remains, by a million miles, the largest single cultural unifier in the USA. Nothing else comes close to bringing people together at the same time. (Apart from maybe college football) !
Elite live sport, in this case the Super Bowl but also especially when it’s football (soccer) that is free-to-air can still reward broadcasters with jaw-dropping viewing figures that have vanished from most other TV genres.
The TV business side of the NFL, and of Super Bowl especially, is still booming, with advertisers on Sunday willing to pay up to $8m per 30-second slot, grossing roughly $800m from the 51 minutes of ads during the broadcast. You can see the most-watched ads here.
The Super Bowl audience isn’t just watching for the game, but for the half-time show (Kendrik Lamar’s 2025 set was controversial, and got mixed reviews), and the collective experience, and those ads, and celeb spotting. Donald Trump (pictured in the montage below) was the first sitting US President to attend a Super Bowl. Taylor Swift was there, and booed by Eagles fans. Jay-Z was there, not least because one of his companies now produces the Super Bowl half-time show. Serena Williams was there, in Lamar’s show, and Lionel Messi was there, with various footballing mates. And there were umpteen Hollywood A-listers, from Samuel L Jackson (in the show) to Kevin Costner (on the pitch, pre-game) and Macaulay Culkin (in the crowd).
Size matters … as in the size of an audience. Big is always better in TV terms. Your viewership makes a statement. Long-time readers of Sporting Intelligence will know I have a bugbear about bogus audience claims for “big” events, not least in sport. Kevin Alavy, the Global Managing Director at Futures Sport + Entertainment, has long been a hugely valuable source of accurate information. I quoted him in pieces including this takedown of the risible claim that 2bn people would watch the wedding of William and Kate in 2011, and in this piece (“Beware Billions Bollocks”) about another ludicrous claim, that billions would watch the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics.
But let’s move on to the issue of the day, and the 2025 Super Bowl being the most-watched televisual event in the history of the USA. And to “prove” that, we first need to debunk the idea that the moon landing of 1969 was watched live inside the USA by 125m people or more.