The U.S. team huddles before playing Belgium at the World Cup.
Courtesy Fox Sports
If you’ve been reading The Data Stream for the past couple weeks, you’ll have noticed that I won’t shut up about the World Cup. I’ve been enjoying the hell of out watching the games, and as a ratings nerd I’ve been continually amazed at how big the tournament has been across all of its TV partners in the still largely soccer-agnostic United States.
I’ve been thinking about what to compare the World Cup to as a TV product, and the best I can come up with is that it’s somewhere between March Madness and the Olympics in terms of structure, presentation and audience size.
This week’s deep dive will have me trying to support that idea with a look at the outsized audience for the tournament, where it stacks up with the two reference points I just mentioned — and some other sports — and what the future holds. All while I watch Norway and England in the quarterfinals as I type.
For starters, here’s why this World Cup has brought March Madness and the Olympics to mind.
🏀 The structure of the World Cup is the most obvious parallel the NCAA tournaments. Group stage games don’t result in immediate elimination, of course, but every match has stakes, and once those end, it’s win or go home the rest of the way. (The expanded field this year gave it even more of that feel.) The barrage of early-round games also offers viewers a ton of material to consume — the World Cup even more so than March Madness. Where the NCAA basketball tournaments play out over three long weekends (excluding play-in games), the World Cup had matches for 27 straight days before a one-day break between the final round of 16 games and the first quarterfinal.
🏅 On the Olympic side of things, the fact that the World Cup is an every-four-years competition between national teams is the primary comparison, and the nonstop action for most of the tournament adds to the similarity. There obviously aren’t multiple sports to track and other than the final group stage matches there are no simultaneous games and thus no need for a Gold Zone-like (Goal Zone?) channel that whips around to points of interest. But fans from all over the world gathering to watch lends the World Cup a very Olympian feel.
So that’s the vibes case. How do the numbers look?