The Most and Least Loyal NFL Fanbases

The NFL regular season is just about to start back up again, and fans are ready to watch their team play across the upcoming weeks. And while some may be confident in their team, others will be feeling the nerves after years of disappointment and heartache – but who has stayed loyal through all of the challenges?

A new study by Casino Guru USA surveyed NFL fans to assess their resilience and commitment to their teams, from how many games they attend per season to whether they’ve ever stopped supporting them when times were tough. The results were compared to each team’s performance for the last 25 years, creating true loyalty scores out of 100 and determining which fanbases are the most devoted.

Key findings

• The Cleveland Browns have the most loyal fanbase, scoring 100/100, with 84% of fans claiming they’ve never stopped supporting them despite facing 22 losing seasons since 2000
• Fans of the Indianapolis Colts are the least loyal with a score of 10/100 – 1 in 4 admitted they started supporting them because they were performing well, and 2 in 3 said they don’t ever attend their games
• Roughly 1 in 7 NFL fans admitted they’d be likely to support a different team if their own had a bad season – the Houston Texans had the highest proportion of fans who’d ditch at 32%, while the New York Giants had the most fans who’d stay supporting at 96%
• One-fifth of fans (20%) would miss out on a family member’s wedding to watch their team in the Super Bowl, with Jets fans the most eager at 42%
• From tickets to gameday costs, the largest proportion of fans (39%) reported spending $100 or less per season – but Seattle Seahawks fans splurge the most, with 28% reporting a spend between $501-$1,000

The NFL’s most loyal fanbases

Cleveland Browns fans top the list, earning the highest true loyalty score of 100/100. And while it’s a perfect score, it doesn’t quite make up for their struggles, given the 22 losing seasons since 2000 and a lengthy playoff drought of 17 years that ended in 2020. Despite this, 84% of fans claimed that they have never stopped supporting their team after a bad season – and over a third (34%) claimed that they would miss out on attending a family member’s wedding to watch them play in the Super Bowl if they ever made it.

Fans of the New York Jets rank second with a score of 81/100. The Jets haven’t earned a title since 1968 and hold the record for the longest active playoff drought at 15 seasons – yet 42% of fans stated that they still watch 14-17 games in a season, even if they are performing poorly – and 3 in 4 claimed they’d keep backing them publicly.

Washington Commanders fans also scored 81/100, sharing second place with the Jets. With 16 losing seasons since 2000, plus nine particularly poor seasons where they won five of their games or less, more than half (53%) of fans claimed that they’ve never stopped watching or left a game early when things weren’t looking good – and, unsurprisingly, 1 in 4 rated themselves a 10/10 when asked how much of a die-hard fan they think they are.

Fourth place goes to Tampa Bay Buccaneers fans, scoring 74/100. Fans have dealt with 14 losing seasons in 26 years, alongside a playoff drought of 12 years – and through the hardships, they stay loyal. Nearly three-quarters (72%) said they would be unlikely to support a new team if their favorite Bucs player moved there, and the fanbase had the highest proportion of people who have traveled more than 500 miles to attend one of their games (1 in 6).

In the fifth spot are Arizona Cardinals fans, scoring 67/100. Throughout the team’s 16 losing seasons since 2000, fans still showed their support, even when things weren’t playing out how they’d hoped; average home game attendance stood at 63,100, which is a slight increase of 0.15% compared to the average during winning seasons of 63,004. But fans are more humble about their loyalty, with only 10% scoring themselves a 10/10 on the die-hard scale.

The NFL’s least loyal fanbases

Fans of the Indianapolis Colts rank as the least loyal of all, scoring 10/100. Even though their seven losing seasons since 2000 sit on the lower side of the scale, success doesn’t equate to loyalty for Colts fans. One-quarter (25%) said they started supporting them because they were performing well when they began following the league, and more than two-thirds (67%) admitted that they don’t ever attend their games, the second-highest proportion of all fanbases.

New England Patriots fans sit in second, scoring 22/100. While they share the record for the most Super Bowl wins with the Steelers, fans would give them up if things went south – in fact, the team has one of the largest drops in the league in average home attendance from winning seasons to losing seasons since 2000 (4.5%). But the flakiness doesn’t stop there - around 1 in 4 fans confessed that if their favorite player left the Patriots, they’d start supporting their new team instead.

In third place are fans of the Green Bay Packers, scoring 23/100. In the past 26 seasons, only one of those saw a win percentage of .3215 or lower – the fewest of any team – but it’s not enough for fans to stick around during tough times. Around 3 in 4 fans (74%) claimed that they never attend their games, and roughly 1 in 2 (43%) said they’ve left or stopped watching a game before it finished if it wasn’t going well.

Philadelphia Eagles fans rank fourth, scoring 28/100. Having earned two Super Bowl wins since 2000 and boasting a relatively short playoff drought that lasted just three seasons doesn’t appear to be enough for Eagles fans. Roughly 1 in 7 said that, if the Eagles performed poorly consistently over one season, they’d consider supporting a different team – and the top choice for fans was the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Fans of the Houston Texans take the fifth spot, scoring 29/100 – but in contrast to the other teams, they’ve endured more heartache, with 11 losing seasons since their first regular-season game in 2002. Almost a third (32%) of fans reported that they would consider supporting a different team after one bad season – the highest in the league – with nearly half (44%) opting for the Dallas Cowboys instead. And yet, the largest proportion of fans (25%) gave themselves a self-reported die-hard score of 7/10.

Conclusion

With fans of the Browns and Jets emerging as the most loyal, while fans of the Patriots and the Colts are among the bottom end of the ranking, one thing is clear: loyalty does not always depend on winning. The findings suggest that, if anything, lack of success could even cause fans to become more committed as they cling on to hope that their next season will go better than the last.

Methodology

In August 2026, Casino Guru USA surveyed over 1,000 NFL fans to assess their loyalty to their team, including the furthest they’ve traveled to watch them, if they’ve ever stopped watching a game early when performance was poor, and special events they’d miss to watch them in the Super Bowl. Responses were split into the four categories below and weighted to assign each fanbase a ‘Loyalty Score’ out of 100:

• Identity – 15% weighting
• Resilience – 35% weighting
• Defection resistance – 20% weighting
• Commitment – 30% weighting

Season-by-season performance data since 2000 was then obtained, from average win percentage to playoff drought. Data for the Houston Texans was gathered from 2002, the year their first regular season game took place, so each metric was converted into shares instead of using counts to ensure fair representation. The following metrics were used to assign each fanbase an ‘Adversity Score’ out of 100:

• Mean regular-season win % (figures were inverted) - 30% weighting
• Share of losing seasons (< .500) – 20% weighting
• Share of very bad seasons (win % <= .3125, i.e. 5 wins or fewer)– 15% weighting
• Share of seasons without a playoff appearance – 20% weighting
• Longest consecutive playoff drought within study window – 10% weighting
• No Super Bowl win within study window – 5% weighting

For the final ranking, a ‘True Loyalty Score’ was calculated for each fanbase based on their Loyalty Scores and Adversity Scores.

True Loyalty Index = 50% loyalty (min-max rescaled) + 50% adversity (min-max rescaled)

Note: The Los Angeles Chargers, Jacksonville Jaguars, and Tennessee Titans were excluded from the final ranking due to small survey sizes.

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