World Series Final Game Draws 51M Viewers Across the US, Canada and Japanese Regions.
The nail-biting extended clash where the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Blue Jays by one run attracted a combined 51 million spectators in the US, Canada, and Japan territories. MLB announced this marks the most-watched Fall Classic finale after the 1991 edition contest featuring the Minnesota Twins and Braves.
Broadcast Ratings Breakdown
The Saturday epic contest drew over 27 million audience members on Fox Sports networks, its Spanish-language channel and their digital services. According to Nielsen, it was the second highest-rated program of the week.
It additionally is the most-watched World Series game since the 2017 final game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Houston Astros, which averaged 29.07M. This marks a sixteen percent increase over the last Game 7 between the Nationals and Astros, which attracted 23.19 million viewers.
In the Nielsen ratings, Game 6 ranked 4th, Game 4 was seventh, the fifth game was eighth, and Game 3 finished in thirteenth place.
International Audience Figures
In the Canadian market, the game drew over 11 million viewers on Sportsnet and the French TVA Sports. This made it the most-watched English broadcast in the country after the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.
In the Japanese market, where the deciding contest started at 9 PM local time, it averaged 12 million viewers. This came after the previous Friday’s Game 6 – where Fall Classic MVP Yoshinobu Yamamoto allowed one run in six innings – drew 13.1 million spectators, making it the most-watched World Series matchup on a single network in Japan.
Series Totals and Patterns
The full seven-game World Series averaged 15.71M viewers on the Fox network, a 2% increase from the previous year’s Dodgers-Yankees series. This marks the initial instance after 2015 and ‘16 that the World Series has seen audience increases for two consecutive seasons.
Including the Game 1 broadcast on Univision, the complete US viewership was over 16 million. The total Fall Classic viewership in Japan was 9.7M and 8.1 million in the Canadian market.
The full playoffs on Fox, FS1 and FS2 drew over 8 million viewers, an eight percent increase compared to last year and the network’s best playoff ratings since 2017.
MLB stated that the Fall Classic was televised in 203 nations and regions by forty-four broadcasting partners in sixteen different tongues.
