The least-watched Olympics ever peaked at 26 percent more viewers than the most-watched World Cup ever.
Fox Sports released its numbers for World Cup viewership in the U.S.
🚨 RECORD ALERT 🚨
The #FIFAWorldCuponFOX Final is the most-watched men’s World Cup telecast in English-language television history, as well as the most-watched #FIFAWorldCup Final in the U.S., topping Italy vs. Brazil in 1994 (14,510,000) 🏆⚽️ pic.twitter.com/CEPO0nku82
— FOX Sports PR (@FOXSportsPR) December 20, 2022
All-time record! Soccer is finally catching on!
Well, let’s compare these ratings to the ratings of a different sporting event that happens once every four years that contains sports Americans largely don’t care about: the Olympics.
The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics were the least watched games since NBC began broadcasting them. Their viewership was 42 percent lower than the 2018 Winter Olympics, which were previously the least-watched games. The chairman of NBC Sports described it as “probably the most difficult Olympics of all time.”
On the most-watched night of the least-watched Olympics ever, NBC got 21.2 million viewers. The least-watched Olympics ever peaked at 26 percent more viewers than the most-watched World Cup ever.
Throughout the entire two-and-a-half weeks of the 2022 Olympics, NBC averaged 11.4 million viewers, which was considered a spectacular failure, and NBC likely lost money broadcasting it. The average viewership for Fox Sports over the entire World Cup was 3.6 million. By television ratings, the premier global event for soccer in a good year is about one-third as popular in the U.S. as the premier global event for figure skating, luge, and alpine skiing in a bad year.
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Soccer remains a relatively unpopular sport in the U.S., with a fanbase similar in size to that of tennis or golf. The outsize attention the World Cup received on Twitter among U.S. users was yet another example of how Twitter is not representative of the U.S. population. Part of the reason for the lopsided coverage may be that the top-rated media markets for the World Cup were Washington and New York, where the journalists live.
It’s not really fair to compare soccer ratings to football, so I won’t make a big deal out of it — except to note that about 40 percent more Americans watched the Cowboys steamroll the Colts in an unimportant, regular-season NFL game than watched the Netherlands steamroll Team USA in the knockout round of the World Cup in the same week.
And about 11 million Americans tuned into NCIS last season — on average, every single time it was on.