Fueled by the biggest names in women’s basketball, the FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup delivered record audiences in its TNT Sports debut.
This year’s FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup produced the five largest audiences on record for the event, topped by a United States-Italy group stage game on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend that drew a 0.7 rating and 1.26 million viewers on TNT.
A U.S.-Czechia group stage game ranked second with 1.2 million on Labor Day itself, followed by this past Sunday’s U.S.-France final, also at 1.2 million. Rounding out the top five, the U.S.-Spain semifinal had 938,000 on Saturday and U.S.-China in the group stage drew 577,000. This past weekend’s games faced competition from college football, Week 1 of the NFL season, and the U.S. Open singles finals.
Prior to this year, the most-watched game of the FIBA Women’s World Cup was the 2022 final — which despite airing at 2 AM ET managed to average 446,000 on ESPN thanks to a college football lead-in.
The top audience of the Women’s World Cup outpaced the most-watched WNBA games this season on USA Network (Fever-Valkyries: 1.14M) and Prime Video (Fever-Wings: 1.07M) and all-but-one on ION, but would rank further back compared to games on ESPN, CBS, ABC or NBC. The most-recent WNBA game on a major network, Sky-Liberty on CBS August 29, averaged 820,000. The most recent Fever game, against the Sun on August 28, averaged 1.17 million on ION.
Viewership soared far beyond the level of TNT Sports’ Unrivaled women’s basketball telecasts, which topped out this past season at 314,000 for its finals.
By comparison, the top audience of the most recent men’s World Cup — 2023 — was just 334,000 for a United States-Lithuania group stage game on ESPN2. Note that the United States did not advance to the final of that tournament, a matchup between Germany and Serbia that drew fewer than 200,000. In addition, none of the 2023 games started later than 8:30 AM ET.
As one would reasonably expect, viewership was no match for Olympic competition. The 2024 United States-France women’s basketball Olympic gold medal game had 7.8 million on NBC.
This year’s Women’s Basketball World Cup was the first major event in TNT Sports’ rights deal with FIBA, struck earlier this year.
