Should sports rights buyers pay attention to more than ratings?

Super Bowl LX drew an average of 125.6 million American viewers. A few 30-second ads sold for more than $10 million. When networks pay the NFL more than $10 billion a year, that’s what they’re buying: people in front of a screen, at the same time, watching commercials.

Ratings are the currency. They always have been. So here’s a fair question for anyone writing a rights check: should you pay attention to anything else?

We measure attention for a living, so you might guess our answer. It’s more complicated than you’d think. Attention would have made buyers a lot of money on a few deals. It would also have fooled them on at least one.

The case for ratings alone

Divide what each league gets paid by the hours Americans spend watching it, and most deals land in the same place.

The NFL gets about $1.20 for every hour of viewing. Hockey, baseball, the Premier League, the WNBA and golf all sit between $1 and $2. That’s not a coincidence. It’s an advertising market doing its job. Networks pay roughly what they can earn back from the audience.

Attention doesn’t sell a 30-second spot. And it can flatter a sport. Some sports are followed far more than they are watched.

Relative to the hours Americans spend watching, F1, the Premier League and the NWSL get roughly ten times the NFL’s share of attention. You can read that two ways. Either those sports have a lot of room to grow on TV, or a lot of their fans are happy to follow along without watching a full race. Plenty of people know who Lando Norris is. Fewer set an alarm to watch him drive.

A buyer who priced deals on attention alone would overpay. Often.

Where ratings mislead a buyer

Ratings answer one question well: how many people watched last season, on that channel. The trouble is that buyers are increasingly asking different questions.

Will the fans follow us to a new channel? Ratings can’t tell you, because ratings measure the channel as much as the fans. When the channel or the counting changes, the ratings move whether the fans did or not.

Will they pay to subscribe? Apple doesn’t publish its F1 audiences. It isn’t buying ratings. It’s buying sign-ups. One analysis found that 30% of Apple’s F1 viewers hadn’t used Apple TV at all in the second half of 2025. That’s the whole point of the deal, and no rating would have predicted it.

Will the audience grow? A rights deal runs seven to eleven years. Ratings describe last season. By one Wall Street estimate, the NBA’s new partners are paying $3.55 per hour of viewing, three times the NFL’s rate. On ratings alone, that looks like a mistake. But the NBA draws about as much American attention as the NFL with a tenth of the per-game audience. Its stars live online all week. The buyers paid for the conversation between games, not just the games.

What attention would have told a buyer

The best argument for attention isn’t that it replaces ratings. It’s that it often gets there first.

F1 is the cleanest example. Attention jumped in 2019, when Netflix’s series debuted, and more than doubled by 2020, a year when US TV audiences actually dipped. The TV audience caught up in 2021 and 2022. The money came last. ESPN was reportedly paying about $5 million a year. Its renewal was reported at $75 million to $90 million. Apple now pays about $140 million. A buyer watching attention in 2020 had two years’ warning.

The WNBA ran the same play faster. Attention to Caitlin Clark exploded in 2023, while she was still in college. In 2024, WNBA viewership on ESPN rose 170%. That summer the league agreed to new TV deals. With later additions, they’re now worth about $281 million a year, several times the old ones.

In both cases the order was attention, then ratings, then rights.

Where attention would have fooled a buyer

Now the skeptical part. In 2025, NASCAR moved more of its races off broadcast TV, to Prime Video, TNT and cable. Its audience fell 15%. Its attention went up. The easy story writes itself: the fans didn’t leave, the ratings just lost track of them.

So we took the increase apart.

Only about 15% of it was fans hunting for the races. Lookups of where to watch more than doubled, and they ran almost four times their normal rate during the Prime and TNT weeks. That’s real. It’s also small.

A third of the increase was one man: Dale Earnhardt Jr., who joined Prime’s broadcast booth. That’s attention the new channel brought with it, not new interest in the races. Nearly half came from four drivers having big summers. Interest in the sport itself, meaning the league and everyone else on the grid, grew far less than the headline number.

So the ratings were partly wrong about NASCAR, because the fans didn’t leave. The attention was partly wrong too, because the fans didn’t grow. A buyer who read the 2025 attention number as momentum would have been paying for a broadcaster and a hot summer.

(It did resolve. In 2026 the where-to-watch lookups calmed down, and Prime’s audience rose 6%. Fans learned where to look.)

So should buyers pay attention to more than ratings?

Yes. But not instead of ratings, and not to the total.

Ratings still price today’s audience, and today’s audience is still most of the money. Attention earns its place on the questions ratings can’t answer: will the audience grow, will it follow you to a new channel, will it pay. And the useful number is rarely the headline. It’s what’s underneath: whether the gain is broad across a league or riding on one star, one storyline or one broadcaster.

That’s a fair way to read the deals coming up. Hockey’s ratings (+25% last season) and attention (+26%) agree, which makes the NHL’s 2028 renewal easier to price. The WNBA was priced on attention, so its ratings have until the 2028 reset to catch up. MLS’s audience numbers come mostly from the league itself, and half its attention comes from outside the US, which leaves a buyer doing a lot of guessing.

Ratings tell a buyer what they’re paying for. Attention tells them what they’re getting into.

How we measured it

Rights: average annual value of current US national deals from Sportico, Sports Business Journal, Front Office Sports and league releases. Viewing: national average audiences from Nielsen as reported by Sports Media Watch, Programming Insider, Front Office Sports and network releases, multiplied by national windows and typical broadcast length. Per-hour figures for the NFL and NBA are from Guggenheim; others are our estimates and should be read as ranges. Nielsen changed its measurement in 2025, which lifted many 2025–26 numbers. Followed vs. watched: our attention measure for each league, its teams and its 100 most-followed players, US readers only, sampled weekly from October 2025 through September 2026. Growth figures (league, teams and leading players) compare the last 12 months with the 12 before, adjusted against tennis, golf, basketball and football. F1 attention covers the sport, its teams and its leading drivers, and the history chart uses the sport plus Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen. NASCAR breakdown: daily attention to the league, its season and broadcast partners and 17 leading drivers, February–November 2025 vs the same months of 2024. Shares are of the increase in lookups, and the channel-finding share includes an estimate of extra league lookups during the Prime and TNT weeks.