Spain celebrates.
Courtesy Fox Sports
Despite having made TV ratings my thing for most of this century, I have always been pretty bad at predicting how well a given show might perform. True to form, I was figuring Sunday’s men’s World Cup final would draw a big audience, and probably beat the previous combined English- and Spanish-language record from 2022, but not by a huge amount.
I was extremely, extremely wrong: Across, Fox, Telemundo and Peacock, Spain’s 1-0 win over Argentina averaged almost 63 million viewers — 38.94 million on Fox and 23.9 million on Telemundo and Peacock. For just the match (Fox’s 38.94 million includes a half-hour or so of pregame), it goes up to 66.4 million.
As I said on Bluesky when the numbers came through late Tuesday afternoon, the technical term for that is “holy shit.” Yes, having the World Cup in North America, with favorable match times for TV viewers in the U.S., would mean sizable gains on 2022. Yes, Nielsen’s measurement changes of the past couple years tend to benefit live sports to a degree. But my goodness.
Aside from the Super Bowl, nothing on TV this year — no other NFL game, no Winter Olympics event, no NBA Finals contest, certainly not any entertainment program — has even come close to that many viewers. Since the start of 2024, only the three Super Bowls played in that time and the lone Trump-Harris presidential debate (which had 67.14 million viewers over 17 networks) have drawn more eyeballs in the United States than the World Cup final did. That was as far back as I looked carefully, but outside of Super Bowls and the first 2020 presidential debate, I don’t recall anything else this decade that had a bigger audience.
Because the game (and the semifinals and Saturday’s third-place match) aired in the afternoon, you won’t see it in the primetime top 10 chart below. But I’ll have a little more to say about those in the notes for the all-day top 20.
The top network and cable shows for last week are below, along with syndicated numbers for June 29-July 5. Streaming ratings will come in a separate newsletter tomorrow evening.