Despite a late night start and nothing at stake, the United States men’s soccer team delivered another audience among the largest on record for the FIFA World Cup.
Thursday’s United States-Turkey FIFA World Cup group stage match averaged a preliminary audience of 15.86 million viewers on FOX, a figure includes pre-match coverage — marking the fourth-largest audience on record for the men’s World Cup on English-language television, trailing only the finalized viewership figures for the two previous USMNT matches against Paraguay (18.04M) and Australia (16.22M) and the 2022 Argentina-France final (16.78M).
Note that the preliminary audience exceeds that of the Australia match (14.78M) and is only slightly below that of the Paraguay opener (15.99M), meaning there is a chance the match could finish as the most-watched overall once the final Nielsen figures are published next week.
The United States’ first loss of the World Cup, which peaked with 18.1 million in the 11:45 PM ET quarter-hour, had zero implications for the knockout stage. The USMNT had already won it group and its first knockout stage opponent had already been confirmed.
The match was also the team’s latest starting — and finishing — of the World Cup, kicking off at 10 PM ET.
In other World Cup action, Wednesday’s Mexico-Czechia match averaged 12.3 million across Telemundo and Peacock, a match window figure that combines a Nielsen-measured linear audience with streaming viewership tracked by Adobe Analytics — trailing only El Tri’s previous contest against South Korea (14.0M) as the most-watched World Cup match ever on Spanish-language television.
Mexico’s three group stage matches averaged 12.1 million viewers on Telemundo, up 102% from the team’s three matches during the 2022 tournament, which took place in Qatar during the winter months (6.0M).
Earlier in the day, Brazil-Scotland averaged 5.9 million on Telemundo and Peacock. Brazil matches averaged 7.0 million during the group stage, up 97% from 2022 (3.6M).
Fox Sports reported combined viewership figures across FOX and FS1 for its Wednesday matches. The two networks combined to average 8.70 million for Mexico-Czechia on FOX and South Africa-Korea on FS1, 7.66 million for Brazil-Scotland on FOX and Morocco-Haiti on FS1, and 5.05 million for Switzerland-Canada on FOX and Bosnia-Herzegovina against Qatar on FS1. (A previous version of this post mistakenly reported those figures as being for the FOX games individually).
On Monday, FOX averaged 6.09 million for Norway-Senegal, 5.57 million for Argentina-Austria — in which Lionel Messi set the all-time World Cup scoring record — and 5.55 million for France-Iraq.
