NFL brand health peaks as the league heads into the Super Bowl

As the NFL launches toward a Seahawks–Patriots Super Bowl matchup, the league isn’t just closing another successful season on the field. From a brand health perspective, the 2025–26 season marked one of the strongest stretches the NFL has delivered in recent memory.

At YouGov, we’ve tracked the NFL as a brand in SportsIndex since 2018. For this analysis, we looked back at league-level brand health trends since the 2020–21 season, based on responses from a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults age 18+, to understand how the NFL’s brand perception has evolved and how that momentum has built heading into this year’s Super Bowl.

The takeaway is clear: by nearly every major brand health measure YouGov tracks, the NFL is stronger today than it was in 2020, with several key metrics reaching their highest levels of this period in 2025.

To ground the discussion, it’s worth briefly outlining how these metrics are measured.

Index is YouGov’s composite brand health score, bringing together six underlying measures: Impression, Quality, Value, Reputation, Satisfaction, and Recommend, to provide a high-level view of overall brand strength.

Impression is based on the question, “Which of the following brands do you have a positive or negative impression of?” and is reported as a net score.

Value reflects whether consumers feel the NFL represents good value for what it delivers, while Quality, Reputation, Satisfaction, and Recommend capture how the league is regarded, how satisfied people are, and whether they would recommend it to others.

Attention, tracked separately, measures whether people have noticed or heard anything about the league recently.

Since 2020, the NFL has posted steady gains across many of these key performance indicators. Overall brand health improved meaningfully across the window, with YouGov’s Index score reaching its highest point since 2020 in 2025, representing roughly 5% year-over-year growth versus the prior season. That kind of lift is notable for any brand; but it’s especially telling for a league already operating at a massive scale.

The NFL’s Net Impression followed a similar path, peaking in 2025 and climbing about 7% year-over-year. In practical terms, more Americans walked away with a positive view of the NFL than at any other point since 2020. That growth reflects a league that has remained culturally relevant while continuing to deliver a compelling, week-in and week-out product.

The NFL’s Value score also reached its highest level of the period in 2025, improving roughly 3% year-over-year. In an environment where fans are increasingly selective with their time and subscriptions, that data point truly matters. Even amid broader pressure on entertainment spending, the NFL strengthened its position as a product worth investing time and money in.

Attention, as expected, fluctuated more from season to season. YouGov’s Attention metric tends to rise around major moments on the calendar, and within this analysis window, Attention peaked in 2025, aligning with a regular season that consistently drove conversation, headlines, and appointment viewing.

What stands out in particular is how these metrics moved together. Growth wasn’t isolated to a single perception pillar or driven by one-off storylines; rather, the NFL’s gains reflect broad-based strength across satisfaction, reputation, recommendation, and overall impression. That level of alignment is difficult to achieve, and even harder to sustain for a league with the NFL’s visibility.

All of this sets the stage for a Super Bowl matchup that arrives with the league in a position of brand strength. Seahawks–Patriots may deliver plenty of on-field intrigue, but the broader context matters. The NFL enters its biggest moment of the year not just with ratings momentum, but with brand health indicators that suggest fans feel good about what the league represents and delivers right now.

The Super Bowl will deliver a winner, but the season already delivered a verdict: since 2020, the NFL has strengthened its brand, sharpened its value proposition, and captured attention at scale. As Seahawks–Patriots takes center stage, the league arrives not chasing relevance, but reinforcing it.