USMNT World Cup Win Draws 24.43 Million Viewers On Fox

The United States' World Cup round of 32 victory over Bosnia and Herzegovina drew a record English-language television audience Wednesday, averaging 24.43 million viewers on Fox. The number, which includes pre-match coverage, marks the largest audience ever recorded for a soccer match on U.S. English-language television. It surpasses the previous record of 22.32 million set by the 2015 United States-Japan Women's World Cup Final on Fox. The match also topped this year's earlier men's World Cup high of 18.04 million, set during the USMNT's tournament opener against Paraguay. Telemundo added a preliminary audience of 9.1 million for the match, a figure combining Nielsen's linear measurement with Adobe Analytics streaming data. Combined viewership across both networks could still climb high enough to challenge the all-time record for any soccer broadcast in the United States. That mark currently stands at 26.7 million, shared by the 2015 Women's World Cup Final and the 2014 men's World Cup Final. Viewership peaked at 31.88 million during the 9:45 p.m. ET quarter-hour window. The audience easily exceeded the United States' previous knockout stage match four years ago, a loss to the Netherlands that averaged 12.97 million during a Saturday morning window. This year's tournament is only the second since Nielsen began incorporating out-of-home viewing in 2020, and the first under a new methodology blending smart TV and set-top box data with traditional panel measurement. Elsewhere in the knockout round, Fox averaged 10.58 million viewers for Monday's Netherlands-Morocco match, the largest non-U.S. audience of the tournament before the final. Paraguay-Germany drew 8.35 million, while Brazil-Japan brought in 6.41 million.