The 2025 NFL season kicks off on Thursday night, with the defending Super Bowl Champion Philadelphia Eagles hosting the Dallas Cowboys. Ahead of that game, and another season, the league is doing something it typically frowns upon.
Not the men and women wearing black-and-white stripes, mind you, but the men and women at the Nielsen ratings system. In a new interview, Paul Bellew, the league’s Chief Data and Analytics Officer, indicated that the NFL believes the ratings service is undercounting viewers of NFL games.
“There are millions of viewers that we believe they are systematically undercounting,” said Bellew, as quoted by the Wall Street Journal.
That statement comes as the NFL moves even more games to stand-alone streaming services, such as Amazon Prime and Netflix. As with previous seasons, Thursday night games — except the Week 1 opener between the Cowboys and the Eagles — are streamed on Amazon Prime Video. Netflix returns for a pair of games on Christmas Day, and late in the year, some games will be streamed on Peacock.
The Week 1 Friday night game between the Los Angeles Chargers and the Kansas City Chiefs from Brazil will also be streamed, both on YouTube and YouTubeTV.
In the interview with the Wall Street Journal, Bellew, who serves on Nielsen’s advisory board, pointed to two areas of concern for the NFL. First, the concept of “co-viewing,” where groups of people gather to watch games together. In the league’s mind, this is working to undercount the NFL’s viewership. In addition, the NFL believes that Nielsen’s ratings are not correctly capturing viewers on streaming services. Specifically, Bellew believes that Nielsen’s data does not include “first-party audience data from most of the streaming services,” which is essential to the league’s push towards streaming.
In the piece published by the Wall Street Journal, a Nielsen representative declared that the service is “confident this will be the most accurately rated football season in history.”
Why does this matter to the NFL? With the league’s push towards streaming, described by Commissioner Roger Goodell as a means of going where the eyeballs are, the better the numbers are, the better the decision looks.
And the more favorable the terms will be when deals are renegotiated, which can begin as early as 2029 under current media rights agreements.
