Barcelona and Real Madrid continue to dominate LaLiga TV audiences in 2025 and 2026

The El Clásico giants lead the way despite not featuring in free-to-air broadcasts

Barcelona and Real Madrid continued to dominate television audiences in Spanish football’s top flight during 2025 and at the start of 2026, with both clubs clearly ahead of the rest of the league in terms of average viewers per match.

The final audience rankings for the 2024/25 campaign, published by AS on 3 June 2025 using data from Barlovento Comunicación, placed Barcelona first with an average of 1.57 million unique viewers per game and Real Madrid second with 1.468 million. Sevilla were third with 1.09 million, while Atletico Madrid followed with 938,000.

These figures provided by PlayersTime.com also showed an interesting gap between average viewership and total reach. Barcelona and Real Madrid led the way despite not having a single match broadcast free-to-air in AS’s breakdown, which underlined how strong their pull on pay TV remained. Sevilla, by contrast, ranked third in average viewers and recorded the highest total unique audience outside the top two, with 11.696 million, driven by 11 free-to-air appearances. Barcelona’s total unique audience was 9.259 million and Real Madrid’s was 9.237 million, showing how closely matched the two giants were in both overall reach and average viewership.

The most recent figures available for 2026 cover the first 19 matchdays of the 2025/26 season and show an even tighter race at the top. In Barlovento Comunicación’s January 2026 report, Barcelona were averaging 1.658 million unique viewers per match and Real Madrid 1.656 million, a gap of just 2,000. Atletico Madrid were a distant third with 965,000, followed by Real Betis with 743,000 and Athletic Club with 665,000. Across the competition as a whole, top-flight matches averaged 728,000 unique viewers, while the league’s total unique reach stood at 11.887 million at that stage of the season.

The rankings for the first half of the 2025/26 season also suggested that television interest did not always reflect the league table. Valencia were sixth in audience rankings despite sitting 18^th in LaLiga at the time, making them the biggest positive overperformer in the television standings. Villarreal went in the opposite direction, ranking ninth in audience while sitting third in the league. Mallorca had the lowest average audience in the division, with 505,000 viewers per match. Barlovento’s methodology notes that the figures include guests and viewing in second homes, and that a “unique viewer” is any person who watched at least one minute of a broadcast.

The individual match rankings in the same January 2026 report confirmed what the club averages had already suggested: the biggest television events still revolved around Barcelona and Real Madrid. El Clasico between Real Madrid and Barcelona on 26 October 2025 was the most watched top-flight match of the first half of the season, with 2.945 million unique viewers.

The match between Barcelona and Atletico Madrid on 2 December ranked second with 2.362 million, while Alaves v Real Madrid on 14 December drew 2.119 million. All of the top four matches featured either Barcelona or Real Madrid, and nine of the top 10 included one of the two, showing how much the league’s television appeal continued to rest on its two biggest names.