Morgan Rogers (17) of England holds off Marcus Holmgren Pedersen of Norway during their World Cup quarterfinal match on July 11. Justin Setterfield/Getty Images The hosts are out, but the audiences have stayed.
The quarterfinals of the World Cup delivered their four largest English-language audiences ever, continuing to fuel a run of big atings for Fox Sports. While they didn’t reach the record-setting heights of matches involving co-hosts Mexico and the United States in the previous round, any fears of viewers abandoning the World Cup after the hosts (including Canada, also out in the round of 16) were eliminated were unfounded.
Saturday’s match between England and Norway led the quarterfinals with 21.8 million viewers on Fox, based on final same-day Nielsen ratings. Argentina’s victory over Switzerland in the nightcap brought in 18.15 million. On Thurday, France’s win over Morocco delivered 10.25 million viewers in final numbers. Spain’s win over Belgium on Friday drew the smallest audience of the four with 9.87 million.
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All four of those matches topped the previous English-language high for a World Cup quarterfinal in the United States. France’s win over England in the 2022 World Cup delivered 8.86 million viewers for Fox on a Saturday in December. Recent changes to Nielsen’s measurement, including more complete out of home ratings and the big data element, have tended to benefit live sports, but the England/Norway and Argentina/Switzerland matches, at least, are far beyond the marginal gains those changes would have added to prior years’ numbers.
Ratings for Telemundo and Peacock‘s Spanish-language telecasts of the quarterfinals weren’t available at publication time. If trends from earlier rounds continue, they will likely add 5 million or more viewers to each total.
Fox averaged 15.64 million viewers for the quarterfinals of the World Cup, up 150 percent from the 2022 tournament (6.25 million).
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