The UEFA Euro soccer tournament delivered one of the largest non-football sports audiences in the past 16 months.
Sunday’s Italy-England UEFA “Euro 2020” final averaged approximately 9.4 million viewers across ESPN, Univision and TUDN, marking the largest audience for any soccer telecast since the 2019 Women’s World Cup final, and the eighth-largest audience for any non-football sporting event since the industry went dark in March of last year.
The combined audience surged 59% from Portugal-France in 2016, which averaged 5.9 million across ESPN and ESPN Deportes. It rose a similar 62% from Spain-Italy on those same two networks in 2012 (5.8M).
ESPN alone outdrew the combined audience in those years, averaging 6.49 million for its coverage — up 43% from the ESPN-only audience in 2016 (4.57M) and the largest single-network audience in tournament history. Viewership peaked at 8.20 million. Univision and TUDN averaged 2.9 million for their Spanish-language coverage, up 137% from the 2016 audience on ESPN Deportes (1.22M).
The ESPN telecast was the network’s most-watched program of any kind since college football’s national championship in January, though it has already been surpassed by Monday’s Major League Baseball Home Run Derby (7.13M).
For the weekend, Italy-England ranked as the most-watched sportscast on any network — surpassing Game 3 of the NBA Finals on ABC later that night (9.02M).
As mentioned previously, only seven non-football sportscasts have averaged a larger audience since the wave of cancellations and postponements that decimated the industry in March of last year — college basketball’s national championship (16.92M) and Gonzaga-UCLA in the Final Four (14.94M), this year’s Kentucky Derby (14.37M), last year’s World Series Game 6 (12.70M) and Game 5 (10.06M), last year’s NLCS Game 7 (9.66M), and the final round of the Masters (9.45M).
Leading into the final, ESPN averaged 2.56 million for the semifinals — up 37% from 2016 (1.88M). England-Denmark averaged 2.66 million last Wednesday and Italy-Spain 2.46 million last Tuesday. Viewership also increased double-digits for each of the previous rounds, rising 23% in group play (from 707K to 870K), 38% in the round of sixteen (from 1.32M to 1.82M) and 16% in the quarterfinals (from 1.74M to 2.02M).
The complete tournament averaged 1.36 million on ESPN’s networks, up 31% from ’16 (1.04M). The Univision networks averaged 1.2 million, albeit for only 11 of the 51 total matches (Prende TV, a streaming service that is not Nielsen rated, carried the bulk of Univision’s coverage). That compares to just 186,000 on ESPN Deportes in 2016, but that network carried far more matches (45).
[Nielsen estimates from ESPN, Univision]
