After World Cup, US men recede to background for 3 1/2 years
DOHA, Qatar — Now the United States men’s soccer team recedes into the background of American sports for the next 3 1/2 years.
While the Americans’ four World Cup matches averaged 12.2 million viewers on Fox, their 27 games on rated English-language networks from the start of 2020 through this fall averaged 668,000, according to Nielsen.
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The U.S. team averaged 2.45 million during the World Cup on Telemundo, double its 1.02 million average for 40 matches on Spanish-language networks during the three years ahead of the tournament, Nielsen said.
American games have been aired on an alphabet soup of networks with start times ranging from 8 a.m. Eastern to 10 p.m. from locations ranging from California to Europe.
“Soccer has become the most bewildering sport to follow on television,” said former ESPN president John Skipper, now CEO of Meadowlark Media.
He cited various networks for the U.S. national team, the Premier League, the German Bundesliga, the Spanish league and the Champions League, some drawing more viewers than Major League Soccer.
“Can you imagine European basketball being somewhat more popular than the NBA?” Skipper said. “We are as Americans just used to thinking that we’re the world leaders in the sports that we like. And here, we’re not the world leaders.”
Soccer is seen by just a fraction of the audience of the NFL, which said it averaged 17.1 million on television and digital for the 2021 regular season and drew 42.1 million alone for the Dallas Cowboys-New York Giants game on Thanksgiving.
Just 226,000 viewers tuned in to the English-language broadcast of the Americans’ final World Cup warmup match in September, with 159,000 more watching with Spanish commentary. The match play-by-play and color commentator were 6,000 miles away in a Los Angeles studio and no staff reporters from U.S. newspapers were present, though there were three from major online organizations.
Still, the men were more-viewed than the U.S. women’s national team, which averaged 295,000 for English and Spanish telecasts during the same three-year period, according to Nielsen.
Like the men, the women’s ratings soar during their World Cup.
Broadcasts, some sold by the U.S. Soccer Federation and others by the regional governing body CONCACAF, were spread across ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN News, Fox and Fox Sports 1 in English along with the unrated CBS Sports Network and the digital Paramount+. Spanish coverage was on Univision, TUDN and UniMás.
