Chock-full of statistics, sports are always ripe for rankings and comparisons. But there’s seldom been an empirical way to measure one of their most abstract dimensions: fandom. Nielsen’s new Scarborough NFL Fandom Index, however, provides some insight into the matter—at least for the NFL.
Built on the latest edition of the company’s nationally syndicated consumer study that surveys more than 200,000 U.S. adults every year, the index assessed the NFL’s 30 markets on eight key metrics to determine where the most avid football fans live. Those metrics were apparel purchases, event attendance, streaming, social media following, TV viewership, radio listening, betting intent, and overall interest level.
Buffalo, Kansas City, Green Bay, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia emerged as the markets with the highest composite fandom scores; the league’s largest media markets, Los Angeles and New York (which each have two teams), ranked last.
The entirety of the AFC North—whose four teams sit (largely) within the Ohio River Valley, an area that has famously produced some of the sport’s best coaches—landed in the top 10, too.
Considered together, a trend surfaces: the league’s smallest markets punch well above their weight in fandom, and vice versa.
This becomes especially clear when looking at the top 10 fan-apparel-purchasing markets, which Nielsen provided exclusively to Front Office Sports. Outside of Philadelphia and Detroit, no market cracks Nielsen’s 20 largest television designated market areas (DMAs). More than half of the list, meanwhile, falls outside of the top 30 DMAs.
Kansas City and Buffalo topped the apparel purchase category by a wide margin with index scores of 280 and 272, respectively. This means residents in these markets are nearly three times more likely to say they purchased NFL apparel in the last 12 months than the average U.S. adult. Their fervor shows up in the NFL Players Association’s annual Top 50 Player Sales List, where Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen jerseys routinely land among the top 10 best-selling across the league. (Allen’s jersey was No. 1 overall last year.)
Philadelphia (196) comes in a clear second on the player sales list, followed by Green Bay (178) and Detroit (175), which form a distant third-place cluster. Collectively, the three teams accounted for 10 jerseys on the NFLPA’s 2025 Top 50 List, or 20% of the total.
Officially licensed jerseys alone netted nearly $2 billion in retail sales last year, per the NFLPA. But avid fans go for more than just standard merch; Packers fans, for example, buy so many “Cheesehead” foam hats that the organization acquired the company responsible for manufacturing them back in 2023.
Jacksonville—No. 41 on Nielsen’s DMA list—rounded out the top 10 apparel markets, thanks, in part, to the Jaguars’ strong 2025 season, which ended in a wild-card round loss to the Bills.
The findings come as the league, and individual clubs, push harder than ever for international growth. Earlier this week, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said he has “no doubt” that there will be “NFL teams outside the USA” at some point.
But if the online response to the ranking—which drew hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of spirited comments—is any indication, the league already has enough highly engaged domestic fans to sustain its popularity, regardless of where they live. True to their nature, NFL fans remain invested in more ways than one—including the rankings of their own fandom.
