Weekly on-air ratings, June 22-28: The World Cup is overflowing

The men’s World Cup finished group play last week, which means that the majority of matches in this year’s tournament are already over: 72 of 104 total games. And after this week, most games will be in the afternoon, so the World Cup’s run of dominating the primetime ratings will end soon.

But what a run it has been so far. The World Cup taking place in North America is an obvious benefit to broadcasters here, but through the end of the group stage on June 27, the U.S. audience for the tournament has more than doubled from 2022 to 9.65 million viewers on Fox, FS1, Telemundo and Peacock. That’s beyond what even the more optimistic projections were.

And, OK, the expanded field/FIFA cash grab did dilute the quality of the field a bit. Teams that crashed out in group play really crashed out. But for the most part, it’s been fun as hell to watch. I’ll take a Tunisia or South Korea no-show if it also means Cape Verde somehow making the knockout rounds.

The top network and cable shows for last week are below, including a small handful of not-World Cup games. Streaming ratings will come in a separate newsletter tomorrow evening.

*The three U.S. group games averaged about 17.1 million viewers apiece on Fox, and 7 million more on Telemundo/Peacock.

**Telemundo and Peacock didn’t send all-in viewer figures for every match last week, but it’s likely that Jordan/Argentina would be the top 10 as well with Peacock viewing added. It had 3.78 million on-air viewers on Telemundo, and for the group stage as a whole, on-air viewing was about 56 percent of the Spanish-language total. If those averages held for this match, its total would be about 6.75 million with streaming.

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(Viewers for nightly newscasts are averages of their weeknight airings, including ones the networks retitle to game the Nielsen numbers but not including holidays. Weekend newscasts are noted by day.)

*The first match of the win-or-go home stages of the tournament, and the biggest audience so far for Canada, the World Cup’s third co-host with Mexico and the U.S.

**The Spanish-language telecast of this one might also have made the top 20 if the Telemundo/Peacock split was in line with the average. If that’s the case, it likely had about 6 million viewers total.

*As I broke down in last weekend’s newsletter, the biggest syndicated shows outdraw most primetime series in any given week. That would’ve been the case for the week of June 8-14 too.

**So that’s a combined 6.55 million people watching reruns of two different iterations of Judy Sheindlin’s court show. I’d be curious to know how many people watch both in the same week — probably a decent amount.

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