As the WNBA enters the most consequential winter in league history — the league’s current collective bargaining agreement is set to expire on Oct. 31 — ESPN’s final viewership numbers are out for the 2025 season and the data tells a very good story.
The company said the WNBA’s regular season and postseason were the league’s most-watched ever across ABC, ESPN and ESPN2. ESPN’s networks aired the entire postseason (24 games), with games averaging 1.2 million viewers each. That was up 5 percent over 2024 and the most-watched WNBA postseason on ESPN networks to date. You have to go back to 1999 (when the games aired on NBC) for a higher postseason number.
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The 2025 WNBA Finals averaged 1.449 million viewers during Las Vegas’s four-game sweep. That was down 7 percent from the 1.565 million average for last year’s five-game Liberty-Lynx series. (Last year was the most-watched Finals ever to air on ESPN.) For context, the 2022 WNBA Finals averaged 534,000 viewers. The WNBA went to a best-of-seven format for this season, but neither the league nor ESPN could capitalize on a long series, which would have bolstered viewership.
Some interesting demo stats for full season viewership on ESPN: Each game attracted an average of 540,000 female viewers (ages 2 and up, which is the full sample for Nielsen), up 10 percent year over year and the highest number ever. There was an average of 679,000 male viewers, up 2 percent and ESPN’s highest ever. Female viewership between ages 35 to 54 was also up 8 percent year over year.
The highest-rated media markets for the entire season, in order: Indianapolis, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Louisville, Las Vegas and Richmond-Petersburg. As we have noted in many sports viewership stories, Nielsen’s expansion of its measurement capabilities via Big Data + Panel and an increased out-of-home viewing sample have bolstered sports viewership numbers across all sports in 2025. The WNBA, like other major pro and college televised sports, benefits from that.
Now, here is where you can really see the growth trajectory: All four WNBA Finals games topped a million viewers, and as noted by Jon Lewis of Sports Media Watch, there have now been nine straight WNBA Finals games that have topped 1 million viewers. That nearly matches all prior years combined (10).
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ESPN said its 49 total telecasts across its networks averaged 1.2 million viewers, up 5 percent year over year. It was the most-viewed full season ever on ESPN networks. The company’s “WNBA Countdown” pregame show averaged 437,000 viewers over 13 episodes, up 30 percent year over year.
Heading forward will represent a sea change for viewers. In July 2024, the WNBA announced a new 11-year media rights package, worth an average of $200 million per year, with Disney, NBCU (which includes Versant) and Amazon. Under the old rights deal, ESPN had exclusive rights to all playoff games. The playoffs will now be split among all the partners.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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