The Kansas City Chiefs helped smash an NFL viewership record for a Black Friday game against the Las Vegas Raiders.

It was a record-breaking holiday period for the NFL as fears of a lackluster matchup on Thanksgiving Day were rubbished as the league saw its most-watched games on record. While the Chiefs-Raiders clash saw a massive rise in viewers from last year’s Miami Dolphins-New York Jets contest.

The NFL’s Black Friday experiment has paid off after the league’s second consecutive year of hosting a game on Black Friday on Amazon Prime Video saw a massive increase of 41 percent viewership. The Chiefs 19-17 victory over the Raiders was watched by an average of 13.51 million viewers, peaking at 17.43m at 6pm ET.

It’s a significant increase on last year’s fixture on the same day with the draw of watching the 11-1 defending back-to-back Super Bowl champions being the biggest attraction in the league this season. Kansas City’s performance on the field and Taylor Swift’s romance with Travis Kelce off the field, have propelled the Chiefs and simultaneously the NFL’s reach.

Prime Video’s growth across the NFL this season has increased with viewership up again, marking a third year of substantial growth for the streamer’s pro football slate. Thursday Night Football has also been consistently outperforming all competing broadcasts each week.

Ahead of the Black Friday game, TNF’s Pittsburgh Steelers-Cleveland Browns drew an audience of 13.72m. While there are no comparable games to last year, Prime Video said viewership was up 24 percent from the last time the Steelers and Browns faced off on TNF in 2022 when 11.03m watched.

Patrick Mahomes - Travis Kelce

Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce’s Chiefs’ success has grown the franchise exponentially ( 

Image:

Getty Images)

Meanwhile, the NFL also reaped the rewards of Thanksgiving Day as three games across FOX, CBS and NBC averaged 34.2m viewers, edging out last year’s 34.1m viewers. According to figures from the Sports Business Journal, FOX led the way with a peak of 38.8m viewers watching the New York Giants defeat at the Dallas Cowboys.

The viewership was the fourth-best Thanksgiving game on record, and the fifth-best NFL regular-season game on record dating back to 1988. However, the Giants-Cowboys is down seven percent from 41.7m viewers for the Washington Commanders-Cowboys clash on CBS last year in the late window.

CBS drew the most-watched early Thanksgiving game on record as the Chicago Bears were beaten by the Detroit Lions, in a game that put the final nail in Matt Eberflus’ coffin as he was sacked following terrible game mismanagement. That contest averaged 37.5m viewers, up 11 percent from the Green Bay Packers-Lions game on Fox last year at 33.7m, which was the previous early window record.

In prime time, the Dolphins-Packers game averaged 26.1m viewers on NBC, down three percent from 26.9m for the San Francisco 49ers-Seattle Seahawks last year but up from the previous years 26m for the New England Patriots-Minnesota Vikings contest.