The NFL’s fan base is broadening, and advertisers now have a more diverse audience to reach over live digital channels. The upcoming season, which kicks off with its first preseason game August 6, will have more international games than ever as the league continues to grow a global audience.

• US digital live sports viewership will reach 122.7 million, up 6.1% YoY, according to EMARKETER’s forecast.
• The NFL’s current media rights agreements include two streaming-exclusive deals (Netflix and Prime Video), and four deals with broadcasters that include linear retransmission on streamers (ESPN, Paramount+, Peacock, and Fox One).

“The biggest shift is that the NFL audience is no longer as monolithic as many marketers still assume,” said Kevin McElroy, CRO of Infolinks Media. “Marketers should be planning for a much broader audience than the one many built their playbooks around a decade ago.”

International games

This season, the league is expanding its schedule of international games to include nine games in seven cities worldwide, testing new markets while urging NFL fans to travel.

• NFL games will be played for the first time in Melbourne, Rio de Janeiro, and Paris, and return to Madrid, Mexico City, Munich, and London.

American football was the top sport named by US fans, with 57% of Americans saying they’d travel the farthest to watch a live football game, more than the Olympics (38%), basketball (35%), and soccer (25%), according to a March survey by One Poll for eDreams ODIGEO.

“The international games are turning the NFL into a truly global property rather than just America’s biggest sports league,” said McElroy. “They’re creating entirely new fan communities in markets where brands previously had fewer opportunities to connect around football.”

During last year’s playoffs, Guess Fragrances used native ads on premium publishers to reach a cross-section of NFL and perfume fans, showing how diverse and targeted NFL campaigns can get.

“For advertisers, [international games mean] campaigns can increasingly think beyond domestic reach and develop creative that resonates across cultures and markets,” McElroy said. “It’s also extending the NFL conversation beyond Sundays in the US, giving brands more moments throughout the season to engage fans.”

Fragmented viewership

NFL games cater to a fragmented audience over multiple networks and streaming apps. The league drives more new subscription decisions than other sports, cited by 38% of respondents as most likely to make them pay for a service they wouldn't use otherwise, according to a June 2026 Bango survey of 2,500 US consumers reported in EMARKETER.

“There’s an interesting dynamic at play,” said David Solomon, director of sports partnerships at Ampersand. “The NFL keeps getting bigger, and that growth is exactly what's fragmenting its viewership.”

Sports ad spending has not followed the audience. Only 18.3% of total converged TV spend for sports in 2026 is on connected TV (CTV), versus 42.2% for total overall converged TV spend, per EMARKETER’s forecast. For reach, sports advertisers are caught in old patterns, instead of advertising across fragmented streaming services.

“As the league continues to grow, it spreads across more screens and more rights holders than ever before,” said Solomon. “That leaves marketers looking for a way to simplify the marketplace so they can continue to integrate their brands into the NFL instead of settling for siloed pieces of it.”

CTV performance

Many advertisers are looking to leverage CTV for the upcoming season, enticed by the ability to measure outcomes.

• Some 42% of marketers said they plan to use campaigns on CTV and linear TV that are optimized with AI technology for the upcoming football season, according to a July tvScientific by Pinterest study.

"Football used to be a property where reach alone was sufficient to support CPMs, but that's changing with the rise of digital and streaming,” said Aaron Lilly, EVP of client success for VideoAmp. “Streaming gives advertisers the opportunity to tie a football sponsorship to more targeted advertising and real outcomes as opposed to just eyeballs.”

As the NFL audience continues to grow more diverse, advertisers can also use CTV to capture the attention of specific segments who stream the games.

“Brands should stop treating NFL audiences as one large segment and instead think about the many communities that now make up today’s fan base,” said McElroy. “That starts with more nuanced audience targeting built around interests, behaviors, and context rather than

outdated demographic assumptions.”