The only way to keep the USMNT and Mexico from setting new viewership records was to eliminate them from the World Cup.
Mexico’s final game of the FIFA World Cup, Sunday’s round of 16 loss to England, averaged a preliminary audience of 23.1 million viewers on Telemundo across a Nielsen-measured linear audience and streaming viewership tracked by Adobe Analytics — easily the largest audience on record for soccer on Spanish-language television. The previous high was 18.9 million for Mexico-Ecuador in the round of 32 last Tuesday.
As with the Ecuador match, streaming accounted for the majority of the audience — with a preliminary audience of 13.0 million tuning in across the Telemundo and Peacock streaming platforms, or 56% of the 23.1 million. By comparison, streaming accounted for 51% of the audience in the Ecuador match (9.7 of 18.9 million). Streaming has been growing as a percentage of the Telemundo audience; during the group stage, it accounted for 44% of the audience.
The streaming figures Telemundo has reported for this year’s World Cup are historic in scope. By comparison, the United States-Canada Winter Olympics men’s hockey final averaged a streaming audience of 3.7 million on NBC and Peacock, or 20% of the audience of 18.6 million. (NBCUniversal, which owns NBC and Telemundo, is the only major sports broadcaster whose streaming viewership is not included in Nielsen estimates. Other networks’ streaming figures are included in the Nielsen tally and are thus not broken out separately.)
Figures for the United States’ final game of the World Cup, Monday’s round of 16 loss to Belgium, were obviously not available as of Monday night. The penultimate match of the USMNT run, last Wednesday’s win over Bosnia & Herzegovina, finished with an audience of 26.395 million on FOX (including pre-match coverage) and 9.8 million on Telemundo (match window only).
The FOX audience, which peaked with 34.82 million in the 9:45 PM ET quarter-hour, ranks as the largest ever for soccer on English-language television, with or without pre-match coverage included — surpassing the previous high set by the 2015 United States-Japan Women’s World Cup Final on the same network. That match had 22.32 million with pre-match coverage included and 25.4 million on a match window basis.
Note that this year’s World Cup is just the second since Nielsen began including out-of-home viewing in its estimates in 2020 and the first since the company shifted to a new methodology last fall that integrates “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes with its traditional panel. Those changes have given most sports properties a leg up on even just a year ago, much less four years ago — and certainly as compared to 2015.
The Telemundo audience ranks as the largest for a USMNT match on Spanish-language television, with streaming (4.8M) accounting for 49% of the total.
The World Cup will now continue without the sport’s two biggest draws on American television — or any of the three host countries (Canada was also eliminated in the round of 16) — but it does not necessarily follow that the viewership records are over. The World Cup final has historically had no problem attracting mass audiences sans any North American presence, and there are still prominent teams left in the field, including 2022 finalists Argentina and France.
One team that will be joining the U.S. and Mexico on the sidelines is Brazil, whose loss to Norway on Sunday averaged a preliminary audience of 12.9 million on Telemundo — on pace to rank as the most-watched non-Mexico World Cup match ever on Spanish-language television.
