A huge Spanish-language turnout helped the MLS All-Star Game overcome its smallest English-language audience in years.
The MLS All-Star Game, which pitted the league’s best against Real Madrid, earned a 0.8 rating and 1.5 million viewers across Univision and Univision Deportes Network Wednesday night — up 300% in ratings and 312% in viewership from last year (0.2, 360K) and up 300% and 421% respectively from 2015 (0.2, 285K), both of which aired on UniMas.
It was the most-watched MLS telecast ever on the Univision family of networks and the most-watched MLS All-Star Game ever on a single network.
On Fox Sports 1, the game had a 0.25 rating and 420,000 viewers, down 24% in ratings and 18% in viewership from last year on ESPN (0.33, 513K) and the game’s smallest audience on English-language TV since 2013 (319K).
The Univision record-high was more than enough to offset the English-langauge low. The combined audience of 1.9 million viewers ranks as easily the highest for the game all-time, topping the previous mark of 1.45 million in 2011. By comparison, Saturday’s Real Madrid-Barcelona El Clasico had 1.7 million viewers on ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPN Deportes.
Compared to other All-Star games, MLS still trails the “Big Four” — the NHL All-Star Game (2.3M), NFL Pro Bowl (7.4M), NBA All-Star Game (7.8M) and MLB All-Star Game (9.3M) — but did top the recent WNBA All-Star Game (606K).
[Numbers from Univision, Programming Insider 8.3]
