12 October – The Eredivisie has opened the season with record audiences and its strongest early-season TV figures, giving the Dutch top flight an encouraging start to a new media cycle.
After seven days, the average attendance is 20,251 per game, almost 700 more than at the same stage last season, with grounds around 95% of capacity.
This figure is now well above pre-Covid levels. In 2019/20, occupancy reached 86%, while average doors in the years immediately preceding the pandemic were generally set below 20,000.
The rise has not been entirely linear. Average attendances peaked at 20,030 in 2024/25 before falling to 19,558 last season, partly due to changes in division composition and the size of promoted clubs’ grounds. Even so, employment continued to rise.
To this extent, the Eredivisie now ranks alongside the best-supported European leagues. Their figure of 95% is only better than the Premier League at 98% and the Bundesliga at 96%, and is comfortably ahead of Ligue 1, LaLiga and Serie A.
The television image is moving in the same direction. The division released figures that ESPN is averaging 207,000 viewers per live match over the first seven rounds, up from 150,000 in 2016/17 and the highest figure so far in an Eredivisie season.
Audience share has grown even faster, from 3.7% in 2016/17 to 8.1% this season.
Ajax v PSV on September 5 has been the biggest draw so far, reaching almost 1.4 million unique viewers and averaging over 800,000 throughout the match, with an audience share of 17%.
ESPN has domestic rights until 2030, while the league has also taken greater control of its international distribution from the start of the 2025/26 season. IMG and Infront subsequently signed five-year deals to sell and distribute those rights overseas.
Ajax, Feyenoord and PSV still do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to domestic crowds, but full grounds are no longer just limited to the big clubs, with NEC Nijmegen, PEC Zwolle and Excelsior among those regularly operating close to capacity.
This may be the most significant part of this story. Dutch football not only attracts more television audiences; he does it while there are still more people in person.
Contact the writer of this story, Harry Ewing, at (email protected)
