The 2025 World Series was one of the most thrilling in recent memory. After all, it was the first World Series of the 2020s to go seven games.
The Blue Jays’ incredible offense combined with the Dodgers’ star power and the series of unfortunate mishaps in pivotal moments made the series must-watch television across the globe.
Of course, superstars Shohei Ohtani, World Series MVP Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bo Bichette, Freddie Freeman, Blake Snell and so on, played a large role in the intrigue around the globe. The fact that the Dodgers have become villains in Major League Baseball played a large role as well. While fans may claim they hate dynasties, they always watch when they are on TV. The opportunity to see titans fall is a feeling people can’t seem to turn away from.
The viewership numbers speak for themselves.
How many people watch the 2025 World Series?
In total, the World Series drew approximately 238 million viewers around the world, or 34 million viewers per game.
That’s the largest World Series audience since 1992, and a massive 19% jump from last year.
How many of those viewers came from the United States?
The obvious question is how the inclusion of a Canada-based team influenced viewership. As USA TODAY’s Gabe Lacques pointed out, Canadian teams have been good for viewership.
In the story, Lacques mentions that John Kosner, president of Kosner Media, lauded the 2019 NBA Finals between the Golden State Warriors and Toronto Raptors. Kosner noted that despite the 2018 Finals featuring a showdown between Stephen Curry and LeBron James, the decisive Game 6 between Golden State and Toronto drew more viewers (18.3 million) than the decisive Game 4 the year before (16.2 million).
Kosner believes the teams itself do not matter, but rather how the teams capture intrigue.
‘It really matters more that the teams can capture people’s attention,’ Kosner said. ‘There was a lot of interest in Kawhi Leonard and Toronto in 2019. There’s a lot of interest in the Toronto Blue Jays and how they dispatched the New York Yankees and Seattle Mariners.’
Still, it’s not coincidence that the Blue Jays’ involvement in the 2025 World Series bolstered viewership numbers north of the border. The seven-game series saw an average of 8.1 million Canadian viewers per game. Game 7 alone saw 11.6 million Canadian viewers.
The United States dwarfed that number though, nearly doubling the average Canadian viewership at 16.1 million, making it the most-watched World Series in the United States since the 2017 series between the Houston Astros and Dodgers.
Most notably, the 2025 series saw a huge rise in fans 17 and under. There was an 11% uptick within that demographic since last year, marking the most-watched World Series for fans 17 and under since 2017.
Japanese viewership
What really made a difference, though, was Japanese intrigue. The inclusion of Ohtani, Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki helped draw viewers from across the Pacific, and it paid off in a big way.
Game 6 averaged 13.1 million viewers on NHK-G in Japan, making it the most-watched World Series game on a single network in Japanese history. Game 7 averaged 12 million viewers on NHK-BS. All in all, Japan averaged 9.7 million viewers over the course of the full series, 1.6 million more per game than in Canada.
