The first North American World Cup since 1994 met all viewership expectations in the group stage, and then some.
The FIFA World Cup group stage averaged 5.05 million viewers on Fox Sports (including pre-match coverage) and 4.6 million on Telemundo and Peacock (match window only), with the latter figure combined across a Nielsen-measured linear audience and streaming viewership tracked by Adobe Analytics — up 92% and 122% respectively from 2022 (2.64 and 2.07 million), when the event took place from Qatar in the winter months.
This year’s group stage ranks as the most-watched ever on English-language television. It was not immediately clear if it was the most-watched on Spanish-language television as well.
(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.)
All Fox Sports viewership figures, including the streaming audience on Tubi, are included in the Nielsen-measured figure. Telemundo, like its corporate sibling NBC, uses Adobe Analytics to measure its streaming viewership. Its Adobe Analytics-measured streaming audience increased 251% from 2022 (from 578K to 2.0M), compared to a 73% increase in the Nielsen-measured linear audience (from 1.5 to 2.6M), meaning that streaming accounted for a greater percentage of the audience (44%) than four years ago (28%).
The United States and Mexico were easily the biggest draws of the group stage. The final USMNT group stage match, against Turkey last Thursday, finished with 17.02 million viewers on FOX — trailing only the USMNT opener against Paraguay (18.04M) as the most-watched men’s World Cup match ever on English-language television. The three USMNT matches rank among the top four all-time, with the team’s June 19 matinee against Australia placing fourth (16.22M).
(Including the Women’s World Cup, this year’s USMNT matches account for three of the top six soccer audiences on English-language TV.)
The USMNT matches averaged 7.1 million viewers on Telemundo and Peacock, with the Turkey match leading the way with 7.4 million — surpassing the Paraguay opener (7.0M) to rank as the team’s most-watched match on Spanish-language television. The U.S. was the fourth-most watched team of the group stage on Telemundo and Peacock, behind Argentina (7.2M), Colombia (7.7M) and Mexico (12.1M).
As previously noted, Mexico wrapped up group play with 12.3 million for a match against Czechia last Wednesday — the team’s second-largest audience ever on Spanish-language TV. This year’s tournament delivered the top three, led by the June 18 matchup with South Korea at 14.0 million (7.2M per Nielsen, 6.1M per Adobe Analytics), with the opener against South Africa ranking third at 10.1 million. (That match was originally said to have averaged more than 13 million before being revised downward, along with all other Telemundo matches from June 11-15.)
Beyond the USMNT and Mexico, the top group stage match on Fox Sports was Brazil-Morocco June 13 (10.02M), followed by the aforementioned Mexico-South Korea match (9.36M) and this past weekend’s matchup of Colombia and Portugal at 9.23 million. Colombia-Portugal was also the top such match on Telemundo, averaging a match window audience of 9.2 million across Nielsen and Adobe Analytics (4.2M).
