For the first World Cup in the United States since 1994, milestone audiences have not been limited to the home team, or home soil.
Sunday’s Mexico-England FIFA World Cup round of 16 match averaged 21.74 million viewers on FOX, a figure that includes pre-match coverage — ranking as easily the most-watched non-USMNT FIFA World Cup match ever on English-language television. That is on top of the 23.2 million who watched the Spanish-language broadcast on Telemundo (match window only), a record for a World Cup match on Spanish-language television.
The FOX audience, which peaked with 25.72 million viewers in the 10:15 PM ET quarter-hour, surpassed the previous English-language record for a non-USMNT World Cup match, 16.78 million for the 2022 Argentina-France final. Even including U.S. matches, only three soccer telecasts have ever averaged more viewers on English-language television — the 2015 United States-Japan Women’s World Cup Final (22.32M) and this year’s two USMNT knockout stage matches against Bosnia & Herzegovnia (26.395M) and Belgium (30.0M, based on preliminary numbers).
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.
Mexico-England topped each of the three USMNT group stage matches on FOX this year — against Paraguay (18.04M), Turkey (17.02M) and Australia (16.22M).
The Telemundo audience, as previously noted, ranks as easily the largest ever for soccer on Spanish-language television. The official Nielsen audience, which includes pre-match coverage, was 10.1 million on Telemundo — the largest audience of any kind for Spanish-language television. Combined with FOX, that means an official Nielsen viewership figure of about 31.8 million for a match that neither involved the United States nor was even contested in the country.
The official Nielsen estimates do not include streaming viewership for the NBCUniversal-owned networks — like Telemundo — with that data instead tracked by Adobe Analytics. As previously reported, the Adobe Analytics-measured streaming audience for the Mexico match was 13.0 million (excluding pre-match coverage), taking the combined audience well past the 40 million mark.
Final figures for Monday’s Belgium-United States match were not available as of late Wednesday, but it would seem to be a close call as to whether that match will finish with as many viewers as the Mexico-England contest. The preliminary FOX audience was 30 million and the preliminary Telemundo audience was 12 million.
Earlier Sunday, Brazil-Norway averaged 13.8 million on Telemundo and Peacock — the largest non-Mexico World Cup audience ever on Spanish-language television — with more than half of that total coming from the Adobe Analytics-measured streaming audience (7.5M). Figures for the FOX broadcast were not immediately available.
In other action, Friday’s Argentina-Cape Verde round of 32 match averaged 15.62 million viewers on FOX (including pre-match) and 10.6 million on Telemundo and Peacock (match window only). The FOX audience — which peaked with 22.96 million in the 8:30 PM ET quarter-hour — finished not far off the least-watched USMNT match in this year’s World Cup, a Friday afternoon matinee against Australia (16.22M).
Figures for Argentina’s round of 16 win over Egypt on Monday will be available later in the week.
Earlier Friday, FOX also averaged 10.39 million for Colombia-Ghana and 8.85 million for Australia-Egypt. Telemundo had not reported viewership figures for those matches.
Portugal-Croatia topped the previous day’s charts with 11.11 million on FOX (including pre-match) and 9.9 million on Telemundo and Peacock (match window only). Earlier in the day, Spain-Austria had 6.52 million on FOX and Switzerland-Algeria 3.46 million on FS1, with equivalent figures on Telemundo unavailable.
The full round of 32 averaged 9.55 million on FOX and FS1 (including pre-match) and 7.4 million on Telemundo (match window only). There was no equivalent round in previous tournaments.
