It was considered a boon for the UFL last year when they were included in FOX's Friday night sports lineup in the spring, joining college football in the fall and college basketball in the winter. A dedicated, primetime timeslot on broadcast television was seen not only as a stamp of approval for the league from part of its ownership group, but also the potential to draw the highest viewership numbers and expose the product to the largest possible audience they'd have on a weekly basis.
Things didn't exactly go as planned. Let's take a look at the UFL's viewership totals in comparison to its sports counterparts.
2024-2025 Season
College Football (12 games): 2.313 million average viewership; .50 average 18-49 demo
College Basketball (12 games): 1.145 million average viewership; .23 18-49 demo
UFL (10 games): 612.8 thousand average viewership (622.6k including 7-10 min. pre-game); .12 18-49 demo
As you can see, the UFL fell well short of its peers in the same timeslot. It didn't help that the kickoff game, St. Louis vs. Houston, was uncompetitive from very early on. That first game drew 690k, so there wasn't even an initial bump at the outset for those curious about the product. It did end up being the highest-rated game, showing a pretty low ceiling. The lowest viewership number came from Memphis vs. Birmingham in week five, drawing 467k viewers, up against the NBA Playoffs and night two of the NFL Draft.
Despite many making the move to streaming and broadcast TV numbers being down across the board from years past, a primetime slot on network TV is still considered important real estate. Those numbers are certainly more critical and more widely distributed than the UFL's ratings in weekend afternoon slots (which were also down from 2024). In some ways, it's a surprise that FOX allowed the UFL back on Friday nights in 2026.
But back they are, and here is how well the other sports performed in the second year of the Friday night sports lineup.
2025-2026 Season
College Football (10 games): 2.100 million average viewership; .41 18-49 demo
College Basketball (10 games): 1.520 million average viewership; .28 18-49 demo
Women's Volleyball (2 games): 702.5 thousand average viewership; .13 18-49 demo
Repeats of scripted programming (8 shows): 831.9 thousand average viewership; .08 18-49 demo
The first thing to note is the change in the way Nielsen is measuring ratings this year. It's called Big Data + Panel, and it mixes analytics with traditional panel data to get, supposedly, a more accurate view of how many people are watching a given program. Andy Nemmity had a great write-up back in October about the change and what it meant. It's geared toward wrestling fans, but even UFL fans who want to track ratings information will find it informative. It's found here.
It should be noted that the process is a work-in-progress and not everyone in the industry is happy with the results that have come from those changes. That could signal some tweaking on the part of Nielsen over the course of the next several months, or even years.
One big takeaway so far is that live sports have benefitted from this new measurement system. On all of its stations, the NFL was up from 2024, by about 10%. College football was up 2%. The NHL on ESPN was up 40% for the first four months of action. The NBA saw its highest Christmas Day TV rating in 15 years, and national broadcasts across numerous platforms have been up as much as 89% over 2024-2025. And the still in-progress March Madness ratings are at all-time highs.
If there's a reason to be optimistic about the UFL's ratings this year, the above can be used as evidence. It's not a guarantee, though, as we can see from the UFL's Friday night FOX partners. The year-over-year numbers show that college football was down, but college basketball was up, and by a pretty healthy margin.
The real issue is the repeat programming: If FOX can get just as high a rating (though lower in the 18-49) from a rerun as they can the UFL, then what's the incentive to keep the league in this coveted timeslot? With Mike Repole now in charge of marketing, the hope is all of the efforts he's made, from switching three markets, to emphasizing more intimate settings for games, to the overall tone and branding of the league will help make a difference in television viewership.
The UFL will not live or die based on success on Friday nights. However, it may be their best opportunity to bring new eyeballs onto the product, which they need to not just sustain but thrive. If they can't even approach respectable numbers there, then they may be relegated to weekends-only moving forward. The good news is the bar is low, and any kind of growth will be seen as a positive sign, not just on Friday nights but taking into account all days and times.