The FIFA World Cup continues to deliver substantial audiences heading into the stretch run of the group stage, and not just for matches involving the United States and Mexico.
Through Sunday, FIFA World Cup matches were averaging 5.9 million viewers on Fox Sports (including pre-match coverage), and 5.5 million on Telemundo (match window only), with the latter figure combining Nielsen-measured linear viewership with a streaming audience of 2.3 million tracked by Adobe Analytics. Both figures are up a triple-digit percentage from the previous World Cup four years ago in Qatar, which took place in the winter months.
Last Friday’s United States-Australia match finished with 16.22 million on FOX, trailing only the USMNT opener against Paraguay (18.04M) and the 2022 Argentina-France final (16.78M) as the most-watched men’s World Cup match on English-language television. (It ranks fifth including the 1999 and 2015 Women’s World Cup finals.)
(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 FOX audience, which peaked with 21.22 million in the 4:45 PM ET quarter-hour, was the largest for a Friday afternoon sportscast on broadcast television since a Christmas 2020 NFL game on FOX and NFL Network — though that is obviously a small sample size. [CORRECTION 7/17: The preceding originally omitted the ‘broadcast television’ caveat. Last year’s Black Friday NFL game on Amazon Prime had a larger audience of 16.33 million.]
The match also averaged 6.8 million on Telemundo (match window only), behind only the aforementioned Paraguay opener (7.0M) as the most-watched USMNT ever match on Spanish-language TV.
Later in the day, FOX averaged 9.17 million for Scotland-Morocco and 8.74 million for Brazil-Haiti (including pre-match coverage). Those matches also averaged 4.9 and 7.3 million respectively on Telemundo (match window only)
Over the weekend, Germany-Ivory Coast topped the FOX charts with 7.79 million on Saturday afternoon. The broadcast network carried only three of the eight weekend matches, drawing 5.595 million for Netherlands-Sweden earlier in the day and 5.05 million for Spain-Saudi Arabia on Sunday.
Sunday night’s Uruguay-Cape Verde topped the weekend charts on both Telemundo (7.0M) and FS1 (6.18M), which drew the two largest soccer audiences in its 12-year history between that game and its New Zealand-Egypt lead-out (5.88M). It also drew 4.49 million for Belgium-Iran earlier Sunday and 4.43 million for Ecuador-Curacao on Saturday.
Telemundo had five matches top the five million mark over the weekend — with Ecuador-Curacao (6.0M), Belgium-Iran (5.8M), New Zealand-Egypt (5.6M), and Germany-Ivory Coast (5.4M) joining the aforementioned Uruguay-Cape Verde — bringing its total to 19, up from two at the same point in 2022.
Going back to last Thursday, the Mexico-South Korea match on Telemundo finished with an audience of 14 million, including a record streaming audience of 6.1 million measured by Adobe Analytics, making it the most-watched World Cup match ever on Spanish-language television. The previous record was 10.1 million for the Mexico-South Africa opener, though it should be noted that viewership for that match was originally estimated at 13.4 million before all of Telemundo’s figures from June 11-15 were revised downward.
