The U.S. and Mexican teams are now out of the FIFA men’s World Cup, but American rights holders Fox and Telemundo finished the round of 16 with a historic flourish, leaving them in strong position for the event’s final matches.
Fox, the tournament’s English-language rights holder in the U.S., and Telemundo, the Spanish-language rights holder, each posted unprecedented audience numbers during the round of 16. Among the individual results:
The match window for the U.S.-Belgium clash on July 6, an ugly 4–1 defeat for the Americans, averaged 37.225 million viewers on Fox according to final data from Nielsen, setting a record for the most-watched soccer telecast in U.S. history. Fox’s audience alone also represented the most-watched non-NFL telecast on any U.S. network since Game 7 of the 2016 World Series between the Cubs and Cleveland, also aired on Fox.
Telemundo averaged 12.9 million viewers for that U.S.-Belgium match. Put together, the combined average of 50.1 million for that match beat the average audience of 47.4 million for January’s NFL conference championship games, and underscored the idea of this World Cup being the only thing to truly rival NFL-type audiences.
The July 5 match between Mexico and England, a dramatic 3–2 win for England, combined to average 46.7 million viewers across Fox and Telemundo, including 23.2 million average on Telemundo that set a network record for soccer.
