The nail-biting extra-inning matchup where the Los Angeles Dodgers defeat the Blue Jays 5-4 drew a combined over 50 million watchers in the US, Canadian, and Japanese markets. MLB announced this is the most-watched World Series finale after the 1991 contest featuring the Minnesota Twins and Braves.
Television Viewership Details
Last Saturday’s memorable contest drew 27.33 million viewers on Fox Sports channels, Fox Deportes and Fox’s streaming platforms. Per Nielsen, it was the second most-watched program of the previous week.
It additionally is the most-watched World Series game since the 2017 edition final game between the Dodgers and Astros, which averaged 29.07 million. This marks a 16% improvement compared to the previous Game 7 between the Nationals and Astros, which drew 23.19 million.
In the Nielsen ratings, Game 6 ranked 4th, the fourth game was 7th, the fifth game came in 8th, and Game 3 landed in thirteenth place.
Global Audience Numbers
In the Canadian market, the climactic game recorded 11.6 million viewers on Sportsnet and the French-language TVA Sports channel. This made it the most-watched English program in Canada since the 2010 Winter Olympics.
In Japan, where the deciding game started at 9 p.m. local time, it averaged 12 million viewers. This followed last Friday’s sixth game – where Fall Classic Most Valuable Player Yoshinobu Yamamoto gave up one run in six innings – averaged 13.1 million viewers, making it the highest-rated World Series game on a single network in the country.
Series Totals and Patterns
The entire seven-match series recorded 15.71M viewers on the Fox network, a 2% increase from the previous year’s Dodgers versus Yankees series. This marks the initial instance since 2015 and 2016 that the World Series has seen audience increases for two consecutive years.
Counting the opening game telecast on Univision, the complete US viewership was over 16 million. The total World Series viewership in the Japanese market was 9.7 million and 8.1 million in Canada.
The full playoffs on Fox and its sister channels recorded 8.09M viewers, an eight percent increase compared to last year and the network’s strongest playoff performance after 2017.
MLB reported that the World Series was televised in over 200 countries and territories by forty-four broadcasting partners in sixteen various languages.
