England’s Jude Bellingham, Harry Kane and Dan Burn after their World Cup quarterfinal win.
Courtesy Fox Sports
It’s a broken record at this point, but the World Cup has been freaking huge as a TV event in the United States. Even with fewer matches as the tournament moved into the quarterfinals last week, between Fox’s English-language telecasts and Telemundo and Peacock’s Spanish-language coverage, they had 14 of the top 20 programs across the whole day.
It will be the last week of that kind of full-scale dominance — after the two semifinals Tuesday and today, all that’s left are the third-place game and the final. All of those are afternoon games, so the usual summer shows will start take over the primetime rankings. Dumb as this might sound, it’s fun to see big numbers at the top of the charts. That won’t happen as much for a while.
Anyway: The top network and cable shows for last week are below, along with syndicated numbers for June 22-28. Streaming ratings will come in a separate newsletter tomorrow evening.
Network primetime top 10, July 6-12
Show | Network | Viewers in millions |
World Cup - U.S./Belgium* | Fox | 33.09 |
World Cup - Argentina/Switzerland** | Fox | 18.15 |
World Cup - U.S./Belgium* | Telemundo/Peacock | 12.9 |
World Cup - Argentina/Switzerland** | Telemundo/Peacock | 11.8 |
America’s Got Talent*** | NBC | 4.99 |
60 Minutes Presents | CBS | 4.35 |
America’s Funniest Home Videos - R | ABC | 3.96 |
Big Brother - Thursday | CBS | 3.88 |
Celebrity Family Feud | ABC | 3.67 |
Password | NBC | 3.23 |
*As I noted in Sunday’s World Cup data dive, the combined audience for the U.S./Belgium match was bigger than all but five NFL games last season.
**This was the only quarterfinal game that aired in primetime; the others will be in the all-day chart below.
***AGT will likely be at or near the top of the primetime rankings till for the next couple of months, until (American) football season starts.