World Cup Ratings Show America Loves Big Events…And Yes, Soccer Too

By
at Internationaled.org

Published: June 24, 2014

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The ratings for the United States World Cup draw with Portugal were announced Monday with record-setting numbers. ESPN boasted that 18.2 million people watched the game Sunday—huge for anything on television, but astronomically so for soccer, even at an event as big as the World Cup.

ESPN's business reporter Darren Rovell noted that the rating for ESPN was higher than the average rating for a regular-season NFL game last season. Sports Media Watch added that the 18.2 million viewers were more than any game of the NBA Finals this year, including the series clincher, which traditionally gets a ratings boost for any sport. (People love trophies.)

The ESPN numbers are flat-out huge, and it speaks to the big-event nature of American sports fans.

The thing is…those numbers aren't the entire audience.

Don't listen to people who say that 18.2 million people watched the U.S. and Portugal play one of the most exciting matches of this year's World Cup. They're wrong.

It was more. Way more.

 



Inside the U.S. World Cup Ratings

We have a tendency in this country to discount things we find unfamiliar, and while most of us are familiar with the English language—and therefore gravitate toward English-language channels on our television dial—there are a host of less familiar networks that provide programming in other languages.

In America, Spanish-language television stations are huge, especially for sports, often getting better ratings for soccer than American stations do. (The Mexico games in this World Cup, for example, are doing well on ESPN but are crushing on Univision.)



So let's take the 18.2 million viewers on ESPN and add in the reported 6.5 million who watched on Univision. Suddenly we're in BCS territory, as SportsBusiness Daily's Austin Karp reported that the 24.7 million viewers who watched U.S.-Po...
Article Source: Bleacher Report - International Football

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