What Are the Most-Watched Premier League Matches Ever?

**TL;DR: **The most-watched Premier League matches are typically title deciders involving Manchester City, Liverpool, Arsenal or Manchester United, plus marquee derbies like Manchester or Merseyside. Globally, peak audiences run into the hundreds of millions when broadcast across the Premier League's 200-plus territory deals. Exact figures vary by season and source.

The Premier League is the most globally distributed football league in the world. That is the headline that explains why even mid-table fixtures can pick up substantial international audiences. The genuinely massive ones - the matches everyone talks about for weeks - share a few common features.

What pushes a match into 'most-watched' territory

Three things drive monster audiences. Get all three and you have a record-setter.

• Title implication (or relegation drama on the final day)
• A 'big' club involved - usually two of them
• Convenient kickoff time across multiple time zones

Domestic UK audiences peak when Sky and TNT Sports schedule a Sunday 4:30pm kickoff between two top-six clubs. International audiences skew towards Saturday lunchtime kickoffs because that suits Asian prime time.

The matches that consistently top the lists

Without quoting precise viewer counts (which vary wildly by source and methodology), the categories of match that dominate global lists tend to be:

• Title-deciding final-day matches
• Manchester United vs Liverpool
• Manchester City vs Liverpool during their head-to-head title runs
• Manchester derbies (City vs United)
• Arsenal vs Tottenham (the North London derby)
• Big six 'top of the table' clashes

If you want our take on the marquee derbies, see the Manchester derby predictor's guide, the North London derby predictor's guide, and the Merseyside derby predictor's guide.

Why final-day matches break records

If a title is going to the wire, audiences explode. The last gameweek of the season has produced some of the most-watched single matches in Premier League history. Multiple matches kick off at the same time, with simultaneous live coverage, and the sense of 'anything could happen' draws in casual viewers as well as fans.