World Cup final eyes Super Bowl-scale U.S. audience again

Fox and Telemundo’s U.S. broadcast of the 2022 World Cup final drew 25.7 million viewers, a number that pushed soccer’s biggest match into the same conversation as the Super Bowl. ESPN said Argentina’s penalty-shootout victory over France was the second most-watched soccer match of any kind in the United States, and ESPN’s coverage put the U.S. audience for the final at more than 25 million.

The global scale was larger still. The 2022 final in Qatar was estimated at 1.5 billion viewers worldwide, a reminder that the World Cup remains television’s broadest sports spectacle even as its U.S. presentation has become more American in structure and marketing. Fox was later linked to expectations for NFL-level ratings if the United States reached a World Cup final, a benchmark that reflects how aggressively the event is now measured against the country’s most lucrative sports broadcast.

That comparison has intensified because the World Cup’s American reach no longer runs through a single feed. Fox, Telemundo and Peacock widened the event’s footprint in the United States, while viewers also made clear they were responding to how the matches were packaged. NPR reported that nearly half of World Cup viewers were choosing Telemundo over Fox, citing Telemundo’s exuberant announcers and the fact that cameras stayed on the field during hydration breaks instead of cutting away to commercials.

The advertising logic matters as much as the audience count. In a sports market where every major property is judged by ratings and inventory, Telemundo’s approach showed that audiences would accept a different rhythm if the presentation felt more continuous and less interrupted. That helped make the network a serious player in World Cup consumption, not just a Spanish-language alternative.

The Super Bowl comparison sharpened again in 2024, when the game drew 123.4 million viewers on Fox and Tubi, according to Sports Media Watch. Telemundo then set a Spanish-language Super Bowl ratings record with 3.3 million viewers, another sign that the largest U.S. sports broadcasts increasingly overlap across languages, platforms and audience habits. For soccer’s global crown jewel, the question has become whether that overlap expands the game’s reach or flattens the traits that kept the World Cup distinct.