Summer madness: Diving into a historically huge World Cup

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?

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Through the round of 16, the World Cup has averaged about 12.2 million viewers on Fox, Telemundo and Peacock, based on Nielsen ratings and Adobe Analytics measurement for Peacock. Both Fox and Telemundo/Peacock have more than doubled their audiences from the 2022 World Cup in Qatar (which was played in November and December that year), beating even optimistic projections for ratings bumps having the World Cup in North America — which has meant that nearly every game has landed in a prime afternoon or evening.

That stacks up pretty well against recent editions of March Madness … and less so against the past two Olympics.

*Through the round of 16 across Fox, Telemundo, Peacock and other digital platforms.
**Combination of live daytime and taped primetime shows, linear and streaming on NBC, Peacock and cable networks.

The average for the World Cup so far includes all the record-breaking audiences for U.S. and Mexico games, and with all three co-hosts (Canada is the third) out, there’s a small chance that ratings for the final eight matches — four quarterfinals, two semifinals, the third-place game and the final — go down some. On the plus side for the broadcasters, all four semifinalists (France, Spain, England, Argentina) are powerhouses well known to even casual fans.

The 2022 final between Argentina and France delivered a combined 25.78 million viewers on Fox, Telemundo and Peacock. Several other round of 16 matches this year also drew 15 million-plus combined viewers, so I don’t think the audience is going away.

Speaking of those huge U.S. and Mexico audiences …

The two knockout round games that the U.S. and Mexico each played drew just huge audiences, among the most watched sporting events in this country in the past year. Here’s how they stack up against the biggest NFL games last season, the college football championship game, the clinching games of the NBA Finals and World Series and the NCAA men’s basketball championship game.

(Note: A few other NFL games also outdrew game 7 of the World Series.)

For comparison, the 25.78 million viewers for the 2022 World Cup final ranked behind 19 NFL games (regular season and playoffs) that season.

There’s one other remarkable stat in this World Cup, and it has to do with Peacock’s streaming of the Spanish-language telecasts. Through the round of 16, streaming has accounted for almost half of the Spanish-language audience (2.7 million of 5.5 million viewers), and it was above 50 percent for the round of 16.

That is pretty much unheard of in sports when events simultaneously air on a broadcast outlet. NBC’s NBA games last season (regular season and playoff) got between 15 and 20 percent of their viewers from streaming; for Sunday Night Football, streaming accounted for about 13 percent. To have a live sporting event that’s also on free TV get that much of its viewership from streaming is essentially unheard of.

Will next year’s women’s World Cup, or the 2030 men’s edition, be this big in the U.S.? Probably not. Because the U.S. women have been a world power for almost 30 years, the disparity in audience between the past few men’s and women’s World Cups hasn’t been as pronounced as, say, the NBA and WNBA. The women’s tournament next year is in Brazil, which is only an hour ahead of Eastern time. The broadcast rights in the U.S. belong to Netflix, which has shown it can draw sizable audiences for live sports. But the streamer has also never done sports at that big a scale before, so some hiccups may happen.

The 2030 men’s World Cup will be played mostly in Spain, Portugal and Morocco (with a couple games in South America to mark the 100th anniversary of the first World Cup). FIFA hasn’t yet struck a deal with a U.S. broadcaster, but whoever lands rights will be dealing with a six- to nine-hour time difference in the continental United States.

It’ll be interesting to see if NBC, USA Network and Peacock’s Premier League games get a bounce when they start up again in about six weeks. MLS in the United States runs almost solely on Apple TV, which almost never releases audience information (a handful of games also air on Fox and FS1). What is out there is pretty vague, and individual game numbers are likely rather small.

Soccer has a much greater TV foothold in the U.S. than it did a decade ago, thanks largely to the Premier League being readily available. Year in and year out, though it doesn’t draw nearly as well as other team sports (NBC’s games last season averaged 1.2 million viewers). Maybe another way the World Cup is like the Olympics is that it gets huge attention every four years and then drops back to a low level until the next tournament rolls around.

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