With the 2025 regular season now in the books, MLS is releasing some attendance and viewership numbers. It’s a bit of a mixed bag, both locally and nationally.
The top line numbers are these: Although league-wide average attendance dipped to its lowest level since 2022 (21,988), the total number of people who came to games crested 11 million for the second consecutive year. That’s mainly thanks to simply adding a 30th team, with San Diego FC averaging 28,064 per game.
It was even better news for audience on TV and streaming platforms, which averaged 3.7 million “gross live match viewers” per week. That’s apparently a 29% increase over 2024, but it’s also the first time this information has been publicly disclosed.
Depending exactly on how that number was calculated, it would suggest the average weekend game was being viewed by about 250,000 people. That’s fewer people than used to watch the average nationally televised game of the week, but a lot more than the majority of local broadcasts used to draw. For most teams, that means they’re getting seen by a lot more fans than ever before. For a team like the Sounders who actually had pretty robust local TV audiences and streaming deals, the net impact is a little harder to parse.
While these are far from disastrous numbers for MLS, they do suggest a certain stagnation in momentum when you dig a little deeper into each team. The Seattle Sounders, for instance, were one of only nine teams that saw any year-over-year increase in attendance.
Although it was by only about 200 fans per game, the Sounders did finally reverse a trend that went back to 2018 of year-over-year attendance declines. Still, the Sounders’ average of 30,933 is still the second lowest in their history. Also of some concern is that their highest attended game was just 32,913, the lowest it had ever been in any non-Covid season. Attendance is still down about 30% from the team’s peak in 2017.
This also comes at a time when the Sounders rolled out their “First One On Us” program that gave free tickets to first-time fans. The Sounders said about 15,000 people signed up for the program and close to 11,000 actually redeemed those. Total attendance was up about 4,000 from last year.
At the same time, it’s hard to say what impact the expanded schedule had on attendance. The Sounders will end up playing at least 27 home games this year, more than in any previous season (all of them at Lumen Field, too). The Sounders drew an additional 330,560 to those 10 additional games, an average of 33,056 with a high of 69,314 for the Leagues Cup final (a club record) and a low of 17,265 for a Leagues Cup group stage game. The total of 857,442 was the Sounders’ highest total attendance since 2016 and their fifth highest ever, and the average across all those games (32,979) was their ninth highest in 17 MLS seasons.
All of which is to say the Sounders made some improvements this year. They seem to have received the message that their value proposition among fans had started to slip considerably. There is still very obviously a massive audience to tap into and the Sounders can still do a better job of convincing them to come to games on a regular basis.
