Pittsburgh notches 7th straight crown as best city for football fans
The Pittsburgh Steelers closed 2024 with a five-game losing skid and a humbling early exit from the playoffs. The City of Champions, however, did manage to clinch its Stairway to Seven this winter in at least one way.
For the seventh year in a row, a national poll ranked Pittsburgh as the best city for football fans.
WalletHub, a personal finance website, used 21 metrics to calculate its gridiron hierarchy, which it announced online Monday. For Pittsburgh, some of those categories left competing cities in the dust — number of Super Bowl wins and AFC divisional championships, for example. Or number of coaches in the past 10 seasons.
Dallas ranked second and Boston, third.
Kansas City, whose Chiefs will take on the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday in hopes of securing the league’s first-ever Super Bowl three-peat, came in fourth.
“Living in one of the best football cities means much more than attending games and watching your hometown team on TV every weekend in the fall,” Chip Lupo, a WalletHub analyst, said Monday.
“Faithfully following your team on social media, spending big on tickets and merchandise, and taking part in local traditions are just some of the factors that make the best football cities stand out,” Lupo added. “Having a football team with a winning culture and multiple championships doesn’t hurt, either.”
Super Bowl wins have always played a key role in the WalletHub rankings for the Steelers, who took home their sixth Super Bowl win in the 2008 season, the website said. Acrisure Stadium’s roughly 65,000-fan capacity doesn’t hurt.
WalletHub compared 249 U.S. cities with at least one NFL or college football team.
When it comes to TV ratings, the NFL is king, WalletHub said. League games accounted for 72 of the top 100 most-watched TV events in 2024.
Super Bowl 58, when the Kansas City Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers, drew 123.7 million views, according to the website Sportico. The only presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris grabbed just half of that.
Though the Steelers didn’t make the big game last year, they didn’t fall off the ratings radar.
The team’s AFC Wild Card playoff game against the Buffalo Bills last winter drew 31.1 million viewers, Sportico reported. That’s about the same number, nationwide, who watched President Joe Biden’s final State of the Union address.
Justin Vellucci is a TribLive reporter covering crime and public safety in Pittsburgh and Allegheny County. A longtime freelance journalist and former reporter for the Asbury Park (N.J.) Press, he worked as a general assignment reporter at the Trib from 2006 to 2009 and returned in 2022. He can be reached at jvellucci@triblive.com.
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