Super Bowl LVII — a down-to-the-wire thriller with plenty of storylines, much-anticipated commercials, and Rihanna’s hit parade of a halftime extravaganza — was watched by 113 million people on Sunday evening.
A fantastic number, one of the best in the history of American television. But soccer fans may be inclined to triumphantly flip their scarves and point out that the Super Bowl’s viewership is a fraction of the FIFA men’s World Cup final’s audience.
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Thanks to the games’ proximity on the calendar with the World Cup’s one-time move to November-December last year, there may be a natural inclination among some fútbol partisans to boast that the World Cup’s finale draws a vastly bigger global audience at nearly 1.5 billion, which is true. But is it a fair comparison?
The answer is probably not, for myriad reasons.
The NFL has dominated American television for decades, and the Super Bowl culminates pro football’s season as a secular national holiday. The game’s audience remains large, in the era of cord-cutting and people using television less, because of a blend of football’s domestic popularity along with tradition, and casual fans tuning in for the commercial showcase and the half-hour halftime show. There’s something for everyone, even if you don’t know Patrick Mahomes from Patrick Star.
Soccer has been steadily gaining popularity among Americans for decades, both to play and to watch, but remains far behind other sports in terms of U.S. television numbers. And in the case of the World Cup finale, it’s a national-team match with a built-in global audience on hundreds of channels while the Super Bowl is played on one domestic network, and some overseas, by the best of 32 teams based entirely in the continental United States — perhaps the fundamental factors in why they have a vast overall audience differential.
The 113 million figure for the Kansas City Chiefs’ win over the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LVII is an aggregate number that includes primary broadcaster Fox’s linear television audience along with Spanish-language Fox Deportes, out-of-home viewership, and both Fox and NFL digital platforms, per number-crunching by Nielsen Media Research and Adobe Analytics via Fox Sports. The peak was 118.9 million from 8 to 8:15 p.m.
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That audience average ranks as the third-most viewed U.S. television program since tracking began in the early 1950s, which is no surprise since the Super Bowl has been the most-watched single-network broadcast on American TV every year since 1983, when the “MASH” finale was the last non-Super Bowl program to sit atop a year’s viewership.
The NFL, which is making an overseas push, has said the Super Bowl’s “reach” — defined as people who watched a minute or more of the game — outside the United States in recent years is about 40 million while the average audience total is the 113 million figure for domestic viewership.
In the U.S., Argentina’s World Cup final victory over France via penalty kick shootout on Dec. 18 averaged 16.78 million U.S. viewers on Fox and its platforms, and another 9 million on Telemundo and Peacock.
In the context of the current state of the television industry, that combined 26 million viewers for the recent men’s World Cup final is an excellent number, and about on par with an NFL wild card or lesser divisional playoff game.
The largest U.S. TV audience for any single-network soccer match broadcast is 25.4 million on Fox for the 2015 Women’s World Cup final that saw the U.S. beat Japan. It also averaged 1.27 million U.S. viewers on Telemundo, meaning the match’s total U.S. audience average was 26.6 million.
The American audience for this year’s men’s final match contributed a chunk of the global audience that FIFA, the world soccer’s governing body, is boasting about.
Here’s how FIFA formally termed its audience total for the 2023 World Cup championship match: “The final achieved a global reach of close to 1.5 billion viewers (up from 1.12 billion in 2018).”
Super Bowl LVII vs. 2022 World Cup final
| Event | U.S. viewership | Global "reach" |
|---|---|---|
Super Bowl LVII | 113.1 million | 40 million (outside U.S.) |
2022 World Cup final | 25.8 million | 1.5 billion (including U.S.) |
In the final’s participating home nations, the match had 24 million viewers on French television’s TF1 and 12.07 million across three channels airing the match live in Argentina on TV Publica, TyC Sports, and DirecTV, per FIFA data.
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The nearly 1.5 billion in reach is functionally a brag. Having that many people consume some part of the match broadcast is absolutely a good thing, but the actual global audience that watched the game under traditional measurements for a bigger chunk of time is a much lower figure, but FIFA hasn’t formally given a specific average. FIFA’s media unit deferred questions about the audiences specifics to the general fact sheet already published and said more numbers will be coming out in a few weeks.
Still, a more precise World Cup audience average would still be more than the Super Bowl, but that’s a function of the final airing on hundreds of channels across the entire planet. While the NFL title game does have overseas broadcast rights, with it being aired in “about 200 countries” with more than a dozen non-U.S. broadcast crews on-site, it just doesn’t have the global popularity of soccer’s quadrennial championship.
Germany’s 1-0 win over Argentina in the Brazilian-hosted 2014 World Cup final has been the gold standard for the game’s TV viewership with an average of 570.1 million watching, based on Kantar Media and FIFA data reported by the Associated Press. The measurements at the time didn’t include mobile-phone or online users.
Using the reach metric, the 2014 match had 1.01 billion people watch at least a minute of the broadcast. About 700 million reportedly watched at least 20 minutes.
It doesn’t help American World Cup viewership that the U.S. men’s national team isn’t a soccer powerhouse like the wildly successful women’s side. But its modest success in the 2022 event helped with U.S. audience numbers overall and is a positive for future audience growth. And it’s certainly a flight of fancy for American fans and U.S. TV execs to dream about the USMNT reaching the final at home in 2026 (the championship game stadium will be selected by FIFA sometime this year).
What makes soccer audience tracking tricky outside the United States are a few factors. One is trusting FIFA and its data — its reputation isn’t the best in sports, to be polite. Another is that some countries that air the World Cup don’t have audience measurement services such as Nielsen and Kantar Media, or use varying tabulation methods, so that data may be absent or suspect.
Soccer-mad Brazil, with a population of 217 million and its own domestic TV metrics company called IBOPE, averaged almost 37 million viewers for the World Cup final, per FIFA data.
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Of course, Nielsen data at its core also is highly educated guesswork — viewership extrapolations based on electronic sampling from 42,000 demographic panels from among the nation’s 121 million television households, plus more precise data on tracked digital and streaming consumption.
World Cup final vs. NFL wild-card games
| Game | U.S. viewership |
|---|---|
Giants-Vikings | 33.21 million |
Dolphins-Bills | 30.87 million |
Seahawks-49ers | 27.46 million |
World Cup final | 25.78 million |
Chargers-Jaguars | 21.8 million |
Even with imperfect viewership measurements, there’s no dispute that the NFL remains emperor of U.S. television, but soccer continues to make incremental gains as a whole.
For 2022-23, the NFL’s 272 regular-season games averaged 16.7 million viewers across its major network and tech partners. While that’s a decline from the 2021 season’s 17.1 million average, the NFL traded a smaller reach for its Thursday night games streamed on Amazon Prime Video in return for a much higher rights fee for those games.
The NFL’s regular-season viewership record is 18.1 million set in 2015.
For soccer aired in the U.S., Comcast/NBC-owned Spanish-language Univision’s most recent Liga MX season averaged 939,000 U.S. viewers for Mexico’s top league, per Sports Video Group reporting.
Britain’s Premier League enjoys the second-best overall U.S. soccer viewership on average, and NBC’s broadcast of Arsenal’s 3-2 win over Manchester United on Jan. 22 averaged 1.92 million viewers (aggregate across NBC, Peacock, digital) to make it the most-watched Premier League match in U.S. television history. It also got 382,000 U.S. viewers on Telemundo.
Premier League matches last season averaged 507,000 U.S. viewers across NBC, USA, CNBC, NBCSN and Peacock, which made for the second-best American viewership season for the league since 514,000 viewers.
Major League Soccer’s 34 matches that aired nationally on ABC and ESPN networks last season averaged 343,000 viewers, which was up 16 percent from 2021 and the best average on the Disney-owned channels since 357,000 in 2007. (MLS goes behind the Apple TV paywall this season.)
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Observers have noted that the NFL is home to the best football players in the world, while the best soccer players are in foreign leagues, particularly Europe’s top professional sides — a fact that may suppress additional interest in soccer here until more of the very best are regularly playing and winning on American pitches.
Another factor that often works against the World Cup’s U.S. viewership is the location of the tournament every four years. In 2022, the final in Qatar was eight hours ahead of the U.S. Eastern Time Zone.
The France-Argentina match began at 10 a.m. on a Sunday in the U.S., well ahead of NFL live game coverage but with extra time and the shootout ending moments before NFL games kicked off, the soccer match’s trophy ceremony and postgame analysis was booted to FS1.
Last year’s World Cup was shifted from its normal summertime schedule to the later fall because of Qatar’s brutal heat, a move that put the matches up against college and pro football in the United States — the two biggest viewership draws on American television, but apparently not especially major siphons as many worried.
Lionel Messi and Argentina’s win in the World Cup final was the most-watched men’s soccer game on a single network in U.S. television history. (Julian Finney / Getty Images)In fact, this year’s World Cup broadcasts by Fox saw some audience records set.
The 0-0 draw between the United States and England during group-stage play on Nov. 25 averaged 15.38 million viewers on Fox, which set the mark for the biggest U.S. audience for a men’s soccer match on a single network. That mark lasted until the final on Dec. 18.
With Fox’s digital numbers included, the USA-England total leaps to 17.2 million viewers for the Black Friday match. Another 4.6 million watched on Telemundo’s linear and digital platforms.
Those are great numbers for soccer on U.S. television, to be sure, but they came a day after the NFL enjoyed a new regular-season viewership record when the mid-afternoon Giants–Cowboys game broke 42 million viewers on Fox — a reminder that the NFL’s grip on domestic TV remains iron-clad today.
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The NFL, which now has a bundle of media rights deals that will pay it north of $113 billion over the next 11 years, is keen to ensure that it has as much Super Bowl viewership as can be measured — particularly amid the changes across the TV industry.
A year ago, the league hired Nielsen to conduct a custom post-Super Bowl audience survey of 6,600 households using the research organization known as NORC at the University of Chicago to determine the size of viewing groups across locations beyond what Nielsen may normally track. Results show an estimated 208 million people watched Super Bowl LVI.
Because the game is the top U.S. television draw and has long lent itself to family and group watch parties, and heavy viewership outside the home at places such as bars and restaurants, the NFL wanted better audience estimates for this unique TV property. Audience translates into dollars, after all, and the league has staked out a goal to be a $25 billion entity by 2027.
The formal addition of out-of-home viewership tracking in 2020 meant Nielsen clients would get more detailed metrics on who is watching where and when. And while OOH remains imperfect — Nielsen audio signals at crowded sports bars showing different games and events isn’t simple to slice and dice — it remains the currency of the U.S. television industry. Using OOH also means older Super Bowls had larger audiences than the known totals.
“While it’s no secret that the Super Bowl is the biggest event across the media landscape on a yearly basis, the exact number of people watching the game has been challenging to pinpoint given the fact that people tend to gather in groups to watch the game,” said Paul Ballew, chief data and analytics officer of the NFL, in a statement about last season’s Super Bowl survey.
What this ultimately means is that the Super Bowl and World Cup are enormously lucrative events even as the television business continues to evolve, and while their respective viewership totals may be fun watercooler boasting topics, they’re ultimately two different entities — an apples-to-oranges comparison, or perhaps footballs to soccer balls. The Super Bowl isn’t going to become the most-watched sporting event on Earth, and the FIFA World Cup — nor anything else — is likely going to oust the NFL title game from its domestic throne.
(Top photo of the Kansas City Chiefs celebrating their win in Super Bowl LVII: Christian Petersen / Getty Images)
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