MLB Future Fandom Report - Part 1

Major League Baseball, alongside the NFL, has been one of the two cornerstones of American sports culture. At least, that’s what baseball has been in the past.  While baseball boasts a rich history and consistently has the highest attendance of any league, its current position and its future prospects are uncertain. On some fandom metrics, MLB remains very strong. Yet, there are also indications of significant weakness.

Attendance

Let’s start anecdotally with a single market. In Los Angeles, the world champion Dodgers drew over 3.9 million fans in 2024, and the other LA team, the Angels, drew 2.5 million attendees. Collectively, the Los Angeles market sold about 6.6 million tickets. In the 2023 NFL season, the two Los Angeles football teams sold a combined 1.2 million tickets. The two LA basketball teams sold about 1.5 million tickets. The two hockey teams come in at about 1.4 million attendees. LA’s single WNBA team reported an attendance of 220,000 in 2024.

It's just one market, and the raw data doesn’t account for the different numbers of games, ticket prices, arena capacities, and winning rates. Still, it is a striking observation that the Dodgers draw about the same number of folks as the other teams combined. When you add in the Angels, a lot more people are watching live baseball than the NFL, NBA, NHL, and WNBA combined. At least in  LA. 

Viewership

Baseball may be in excellent shape regarding live attendance, but the situation starts to feel shaky if we look at national viewership comparisons. World Series viewership has been on a steady decline for decades. MLB’s most-viewed World Series was in 1978 when 44.3 million people tuned in for the Yankees and Dodgers. Throughout the late 1970s and early eighties, viewership bounced around 40 million. The average World Series viewership from 2015 to 2024 is around 14 million. In the post-COVID period, the average is about 11.5 million. This year’s World Series, which also featured the Yankees and Dodgers, set a post-COVID high of 15 million viewers.

However, the interpretation of viewership trends also needs to consider population trends. The U.S. population in 1980 was about 225 million, so the World Series used to attract about 20% of the population. With a current population of about 330 million, World Series viewership is down to about 3% to 4% of the population.

Another critical comparison is between the NFL’s Super Bowl and the World Series. The Super Bowl’s viewership tended to be higher than the World Series even in the 1970s, but given the World Series multiple-game format, the events were of similar interest. However, since the 2010s, the Super Bowl has typically drawn more than 100 million viewers, with a record 120 million in 2024. In the 1970s, the Super Bowl might have drawn 1.5 to 2 times as many viewers as the World Series. By the 2020s the multiple was close to 10 times as many. Maybe the most telling comparison is between the World Series and regular season NFL games. In 2023, 17.9 million viewers watched the average NFL regular season game.

Online Search

A comparison of the NFL, NBA, and MLB search volume is also illuminating. The figure below shows the indexed search volume (Google Trends) over the last year for the NFL, MLB, and NBA. The volume is indexed based on the peak search week for the three leagues. The NFL has about four times as much search volume as MLB, and the NBA has about twice the search volume. MLB only has the most search volume in the month between the end of the NBA season and the start of NFL preseason. The MLB is a distant third in the online space.

What about at the individual level? How do MLB stars compare to other leagues’ stars? Shohei Ohtani, the likely National League MVP, has 8.6 million Instagram followers. LeBron James has 159 million IG followers. Bronny James clocks in at 8.1 million. A comparison of online searches for the likely American League MVP Aaron Judge and WNBA rookie Caitlin Clark is stunning. Using Google Trends data over a 12-month period that ended with the 2024 World Series, Caitlin Clark had a higher search volume than Judge over 90% of the time. When a rookie WNBA player generates four times as many searches as the likely American League MVP who plays for the league's most famous team in the country's largest market, we are in new territory.

Financial Results

Where is MLB be at financially? According to data from Statista (MLB league revenue 2023 | Statista), MLB has continually set revenue records over the last two decades (with some bumps from COVID). Attendance, media, and sponsorship dollars have grown league revenues from less than $4 billion in 2001 to over $11 billion in 2023. The $11 billion number is about on par with the NBA and about 3 billion more than the English Premier League (EPL). Seems healthy.

However, it's also about $9 billion less than the NFL. Baseball’s strategy of building team-focused, locally-oriented fandom has its merits. Baseball fandom is ingrained in local communities far more than the NBAs (there are more LeBron fans in Atlanta than Trae Young fans).  But the team-first, local-oriented strategy has hurt baseball nationally. In 2023, the NFL generated over $20 billion in revenues playing a 17-game season compared to baseball’s 162-game season. By the way, MLB’s revenues in 2001 were $3.6 billion, while the NFL’s were $4.28 billion. The last two decades have seen a seismic shift in the market positions of MLB and the NFL. The NFL has found opportunities during the previous 25 years that have eluded MLB.

Summary

The data is mixed, to say the least. Baseball has been remarkably successful within local markets but seems to be falling off the mainstream’s radar as a national sport. I won’t go into the details, but a statistical analysis of market size and TV viewership suggests that baseball has only about 5 million fans who tune in regardless of who is playing in the World Series. The conclusion is that Baseball is on the precipice of shifting from a broad, culturally unifying pastime to a lucrative locally focused niche sport. In part 2, I will take a more qualitative look at baseball fandom.