MW The World Cup could deliver Fox a ratings bonanza: 'There will be all sorts of viewership records'
By Lukas I. Alpert
Viewership for previous World Cup finals was only a little higher than for a strong Monday Night Football game, but with matches on U.S. soil, media executives are hopeful this will be the year soccer breaks through
Fox drew a record U.S. audience to its broadcast of the 2022 World Cup final and is hopeful that this year's tournament - with the U.S. as a host country - will be even better.
The last World Cup final, between Argentina and France in 2022, drew a record audience of 1.5 billion viewers around the world. But in the U.S., just 25.8 million watched.
While that was an all-time high for an American audience, with 16.7 million watching on Fox and another 9 million on Telemundo, it was only a little ahead of what would be a strong showing for a Monday Night Football game. The Super Bowl, meanwhile, typically draws an audience five times the size.
In a country where American football remains the undisputed ratings king, executives at Fox Corp. $(FOX)$ are hoping this year's FIFA World Cup, for which the U.S. is serving as a host country, will finally break through and deliver a ratings bonanza and huge advertising windfalls.
"We couldn't be more excited for Fox Sports to present the single biggest sporting event in history taking place in our own backyard," Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks said last year. "This will be our largest production ever on a massive scale and we look forward to showcasing the greatest teams in soccer."
Fox predicted last month that an average of 15 million U.S. fans will tune in to watch the matches involving the American team, and it hopes that those games could draw 150 million in total. That's presuming the U.S. team - a 60-1 longshot - does the improbable and wins the final.
Media analysts say the games will most likely draw the biggest U.S. audiences ever for the World Cup, paying huge dividends for Fox regardless of how far the U.S. team advances.
"There will be all sorts of viewership records being set every day," predicted Jon Lewis, who analyzes sports television for Sports Media Watch.
Soccer has been growing steadily in popularity in the U.S. in recent years. A recent study by the Economist showed that 10% of Americans now rank soccer as their favorite sport, making it the third most popular behind football and basketball and narrowly edging out America's pastime, baseball.
Still, the U.S. lags behind much of the world as a market for soccer fandom. A recent survey conducted by S&P Global Market Intelligence revealed that only 13% of American respondents said they planned to watch World Cup games, compared with nearly 50% in the United Kingdom and 30% or more in Germany, France, India and South Korea.
In addition to the U.S. being one of the host countries, along with Mexico and Canada, thus eliminating time-zone disparity issues, Fox will also benefit from the fact that the tournament - which kicks off on Thursday - has been expanded to include more games this year, with 48 teams participating, up from 32 in 2022.
Fox is also benefiting in a big way from a curious deal it reached with FIFA back in 2014, which granted the network the rights to this year's tournament for $500 million, or about a third of what analysts say those rights should be worth, the New York Times reported last month.
That deal was agreed upon after FIFA granted the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, which required moving the tournament to the winter because it would have been too hot to play matches there in the summer, when the event is usually staged. Moving the schedule meant the matches would be directly competing with the football, basketball and hockey seasons in the U.S., potentially lowering ratings. To make up for it, FIFA agreed to give Fox a discount the next time around.
If all goes well, the games will likely give a boost to Fox's sports streaming service, Fox One, driving additional subscribers to the newly launched platform.
The World Cup is expected to pump $10.5 billion in ad spending into the global economy, although the impact in the U.S. will likely be more muted, according to the World Advertising Research Center.
The data-analysis group says in the past, the U.S. has seen up to a 1% boost in ad spending related to the World Cup, but that is largely due to the size of the $300 billion U.S. advertising market.
-Lukas I. Alpert
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 09, 2026 12:31 ET (16:31 GMT)
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