The FIFA World Cup ended with one last viewership record.
Sunday’s Spain-Argentina FIFA World Cup Final averaged a combined 66.4 million viewers across FOX (42.5M) and Telemundo (23.9M), the latter figure combining a Nielsen-measured linear audience with streaming viewership tracked by Adobe Analytics — marking television’s largest audience, excluding NFL games and news events, since the series finale of “Seinfeld” in 1998 (76.3M).
Including NFL games, only the Super Bowl has averaged more viewers dating back to ’98. No AFC or NFC Championship has had as large an audience since the Nielsen people meter era began in 1988 (though the 1981-82 Cowboys-49ers NFC title game is said to have averaged 68.7 million).
The official FOX audience was 38.94 million, including pre-match coverage, marking the largest audience on record for soccer on a single U.S. network. The previous high was 33.09 million for United States-Belgium in the round of 16. The official Nielsen-measured Telemundo audience was 10.0 million, trailing only England-Mexico in the round of 16 (10.1M) as the largest audience in Spanish-language TV history.
On an official Nielsen-rated basis, which again includes pre-match coverage, the match averaged nearly 49 million viewers across FOX and Telemundo — still the largest for any television program, excluding the NFL and news, since the series finale of “Friends” in 2004 (52.5M). That is with pre-match coverage included and NBCU streaming viewership excluded.
Like all NBCUniversal networks, Telemundo streaming viewership is not tracked by Nielsen. The Adobe Analytics-measured streaming audience was 13.9 million, meaning that streaming accounted for nearly 60% of the combined 23.9 million. On streaming and on a combined basis, Spain-Argentina set a new record for Spanish-language television, surpassing the previous highs set by England-Mexico in the round of 16.
The FOX audience, which peaked with 51.7 million in the 5:45 PM ET quarter-hour, increased 132% from the previous World Cup final — Argentina-France on an NFL Sunday in December 2022 (16.78M). Prior to this year’s tournament, that was the high water mark for soccer on English-language TV.
This year’s World Cup delivered nine of the 11 largest soccer audiences ever on English-language TV, joined only by the 1999 and 2015 Women’s World Cup finals, both won by the United States (17.98 and 22.32 million respectively). It also delivered the 15-largest soccer audiences ever on Spanish-language TV.
On FOX alone, the match window surpassed Game 7 of the 2016 World Series (40.9M across all Fox platforms) to rank as the largest for any non-NFL sporting event since the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics on CBS. It surpassed every NBA, college football and college basketball game in Nielsen people meter history, to say nothing of hockey, auto racing, horse racing and golf.
Note that Nielsen did not begin tracking out-of-home viewing in its estimates until 2020, did not do so in 100% of markets until last year, and is months into a new methodology that integrates “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes with its traditional panel. Those changes will skew comparisons to past years, particularly those prior to 2020.
