The first United States match of the Women’s World Cup delivered the top sports audience of the week.
Friday’s USWNT-Vietnam match averaged 5.26 million viewers on FOX and an additional 810,000 on Telemundo to top the weekly charts for July 17-23. (Additional details on that match viewership are available here.) The final round of the British Open ranked a distant second with 3.35 million viewers on NBC, marking the least-watched final round of the event since 2014.
Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race from Pocono placed third with 2.81 million, the largest audience for any NASCAR race at the track since 2017.
Rounding out the top five, third round coverage of the British Open drew 2.62 million and MLB on FOX scored 1.93 million.
Just outside of the top five was Friday’s Inter Miami debut of Lionel Messi, which averaged 1.75 million on Univision. (Apple TV is not Nielsen rated). The Univision telecast delivered the largest single-network MLS audience since 2004.
Further down the list, IndyCar drafted well off of the British Open as the Iowa doubleheader delivered 1.12 and 1.06 million viewers on Saturday and Sunday respectively — both comfortably higher than last year (941K and 719K). After growing each week of the season, the BIG3 audience fell back to 503,000 on CBS. The Superstar Racing Experience hit a second-straight new low with 380,000 viewers on ESPN Thursday, and the debut of Slamball turned in just 212,000 on ESPN Friday night.
Not cracking this week’s chart was the Premier Lacrosse League All-Star Game, which averaged just 110,000 viewers on ESPN Saturday night — the flagship network’s least-watched live sporting event of the week.
Weekly sports ratings, July 17-23
