Wimbledon viewership finished at a seven-year high on the ESPN networks.
ESPN averaged 853,000 for coverage of the Wimbledon tennis tournament, up 18% from last year and the highest average for the event since 2019 (877K). This year’s audience trails only 2019 as the highest since Wimbledon began airing exclusively on ESPN in 2012.
The opening round (734K), opening week (885K) and round of 16 (862K) were each the most-watched since ESPN began carrying Wimbledon in 2003, including an audience of 2.1 million for ABC’s “middle Sunday” window and 1.8 million for Serena Williams’ highly-anticipated return from retirement. The quarterfinals (599K) were the most-watched since 2009, led by Novak Djokovic’s five-set win over Felix Auger-Aliassime at 1.1 million.
The good times extended into the singles finals, though some context is needed. Last Saturday’s Linda Noskova-Karolina Muchova women’s final averaged a 1.0 rating and 1.94 million viewers on ESPN, officially marking the largest audience for a Wimbledon women’s final on ESPN, with the caveat that the record is based on the full Nielsen telecast window. Because Noskova’s three-set win was one of the longest women’s finals in Wimbledon history, the full telecast window and match window were essentially one in the same.
By comparison, women’s finals from prior years generally made up only a small portion of the overall Nielsen window. The women’s finals themselves regularly surpassed the two million mark throughout the 2010s — including an ESPN-era record 2.83 million for Serena Williams’ 2012 win over Agnieszka Radwanska — but those matches generally accounted for just a portion of the full telecast windows. The 2012 final was a three-set match that lasted more than two hours, but it still made up less than a third of a whopping nine-hour telecast window that ran from shortly before 9 AM ET until 6 PM.
Similarly, Williams’ 2018 loss to Angelique Kerber averaged 2.70 million for the match window — but the full telecast, which included the conclusion of a men’s semifinal between Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal, averaged less than 1.5 million.
On a match window basis, Noskova-Muchova was merely on par with last year’s historic “double bagel” of Amanda Anisimova by Iga Swiatek, much less a record-high. (And given changes in Nielsen methodology since last year, it is likely that the year-ago matchup would rank higher all things being equal.) But as with the FIFA World Cup, the official Nielsen-measured window is for the full telecast and not the match portion — so it is officially a record.
As for the men’s final, Jannik Sinner’s win over Alexander Zverev averaged a 1.3 and 2.44 million for the full telecast window, which ran two hours past the conclusion of the match — down from last year’s five-set final between Sinner and his main rival Carlos Alcaraz (2.9M).
(Note that as always, both singles finals re-aired later in the day on ABC. The women’s final re-air averaged 998,000 viewers on Saturday and the men’s encore, which overlapped with the conclusion of ESPN’s live window, averaged 901,000.)
Last Friday’s men’s semifinals, which pit Sinner against Djokovic and Zverev against upstart qualifier Arthur Fery, averaged a 0.7 and 1.18 million — down from 1.31 million last year, which featured Sinner-Djokovic in one semifinal and Alcaraz against American Taylor Fritz in the other.
The women’s semifinals — Muchova over Coco Gauff and Noskova over Marta Kostyuk — averaged a 0.6 and 1.04 million, up 16% from last year’s pairings of Anisimova against Aryna Sabalenka and Swiatek against Belinda Bencic (897K).
