A “Monday Night Football” game that was streamed exclusively on ESPN Plus this week attracted fewer than 2 million viewers to the platform, according to numerous reports.
On Thursday, the Sports Business Journal, citing NBC Sports’ Pro Football Talk, said the ESPN Plus match-up between the Arizona Cardinals and the Los Angeles Chargers grabbed an average of 1.8 million viewers, making it the lowest-rated football game since a cable-exclusive match between the San Diego Chargers and the Oakland Raiders in 2008.
The game squared off against the main Monday Night Football match-up between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Minnesota Vikings, which attracted more than 18 million viewers to ESPN, ESPN 2 and ABC.
The ESPN Plus count for the Cardinals-Chargers game does not include the number of viewers who watched the game on local broadcast stations — the NFL requires games offered exclusively through streaming platforms to also air on broadcast stations in the home markets of each team playing. Broadcast audiences tend to be far lower than streaming audiences for those games, though viewership data for the TV simulcasts in Los Angeles and Phoenix were not immediately available.
The low interest in the ESPN Plus game could be attributed to a number of factors — it started relatively late in the evening for a Monday Night Football game, with its kickoff time nearly an hour later than the ESPN and ABC match-up — but could be a cause for concern for ESPN and its majority-owner, the Walt Disney Company for similar games in the future.
Disney’s agreement with the National Football League (NFL) runs through the 2032 season, and allows it to relegate one Monday Night Football telecast to ESPN Plus on an exclusive basis each year. The contract allows Disney to negotiate with the NFL toward a simulcast of ESPN Plus games on ABC or an ancillary ESPN network like ESPN U or ESPN News, should it want to simulcast the match on traditional television.
Earlier this month, Disney affirmed it would increase the number of Monday Night Football simulcasts on ABC, after previously saying it would reduce the number of games aired on ABC this season relative to last year. The decision came after Nielsen data showed the ABC simulcasts helped boost the viewership of Monday Night Football games earlier in the season, relative to those games that were only offered on ESPN.
