Facing a historic rival over a holiday weekend, the USMNT delivered a near-record audience on FOX.
The Black Friday United States-England FIFA World Cup group play match averaged 17.2 million viewers on Fox Sports’ TV and digital platforms, trailing only USMNT-Portugal on ESPN in 2014 (18.2M) and the Spain-Argentina final on ABC the same year (17.5M) as the most-watched men’s soccer match on a single network.
With pre-match coverage included, the FOX audience of 15.38 million was the largest ever for men’s soccer on a single network, surpassing the previous high of 14.51 million for the 1994 Brazil-Italy final. The 2014 USMNT-Portugal match averaged 13.77 million with pre-match coverage included.
Keep in mind this is the first World Cup to take place since Nielsen began including out-of-home viewing into its viewership estimates.
With or without pre-match coverage included, the FOX audience topped every game of the past three NBA Finals and World Series. Excluding pro and college football, it ranks fourth for the year among sportscasts behind a post-Super Bowl Winter Olympics window (24M) and North Carolina-Duke in the men’s Final Four (18.5M) and the Kansas-North Carolina national championship (18.1M). (All figures include additional streaming viewership not tracked by Nielsen.)
Friday marked the second-straight day that FOX set a viewership record. The network scored the largest NFL regular season audience on record Thursday with 42 million for Giants-Cowboys.
The match averaged an additional 4.6 million viewers on Telemundo (including additional streaming data not tracked by Nielsen), the second-largest Spanish-language audience on record for a USMNT match. It was not immediately clear whether the Telemundo figure includes pre-match coverage.
The Telemundo audience is the network’s second-largest of the tournament, trailing Brazil-Serbia on Thanksgiving Day (5.7M).
Telemundo is now averaging 2.4 million viewers for its World Cup coverage, up 14% from the same point four years ago.
(Nielsen estimates from Fox Sports PR, Telemundo PR)
