The USMNT was already drawing lofty audiences throughout the group stage, but the knockout round of the FIFA World Cup has taken those numbers to another level.
Wednesday’s United States-Bosnia & Herzegovina FIFA World Cup round of 32 match averaged a preliminary Nielsen audience of 24.43 million viewers on FOX, a figure that includes pre-match coverage — ranking as easily the largest audience to watch a soccer match on U.S. English-language television. The previous high was 22.32 million for the 2015 United States-Japan Women’s World Cup Final on FOX, and the previous high for the men’s World Cup was set earlier in this year’s tournament, 18.04 million for the USMNT opener against Paraguay.
The match also averaged a preliminary audience of 9.1 million on Telemundo, a match window figure that combines a Nielsen-measured linear audience with streaming viewership tracked by Adobe Analytics.
Depending on how high the viewership rises in the final tally, the English-language audience alone could finish as the largest ever for a soccer telecast in the U.S., with or without pre-match coverage included, whether in one language or combined across both English and Spanish television. On a match window, across-all-networks basis, the all-time high is currently 26.7 million for both the 2015 Women’s World Cup Final on FOX and Telemundo and 2014 men’s World Cup Final on ABC and Univision.
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 years prior to 2020.
The United States’ win, which peaked with 31.88 million in the 9:45 PM ET quarter-hour, easily surpassed the previous U.S. knockout stage match four years ago — a loss to the Netherlands that averaged 12.97 million in a morning window on a college football Saturday. Because of the World Cup expansion, that match was in the round of 16, where the U.S. will play next Monday night against Belgium.
In other knockout stage action, FOX averaged 10.58 million for Netherlands-Morocco on Monday, the largest audience for any non-U.S. men’s World Cup match prior to the Final. It was preceded by Paraguay-Germany at 8.35 million and Brazil-Japan at 6.41 million.
