The U.S. women’s national team was on the big stage Friday night, and they drew a huge crowd.
According to Fox Sports, the USWNT’s World Cup-opening 3-0 win over Vietnam drew in 5,261,000 viewers.
That marks the second-highest figure to ever tune into an English-language USWNT group stage match, only bettered by the 5.3 million viewers who watched their 3-0 win over Chile in 2019.
Drawing on metrics from Nielsen Research and Adobe Analytics, Fox said that viewership spiked to just over 6.5 million during the game’s final 15 minutes. Additionally, the match averaged 155,821 streaming viewers, the network’s biggest figure ever for a women’s World Cup group stage match.
That’s big growth from the first U.S. game in the 2019 tournament against Thailand. That match drew a TV audience of 2,649,000, with Friday’s game representing a 99% improvement.
The @USWNT's 3-0 Women's World Cup win over Vietnam scored 5,261,000 viewers, making it the second-most watched Group Stage telecast ever on English language television ⚽️
⛰️Match peaked at more than 6.5 million viewers
🇺🇸 Next – Wed., July 26 vs. Netherlands (9:00 PM ET/FOX) pic.twitter.com/ey0tABFb6k
— FOX Sports PR (@FOXSportsPR) July 22, 2023
The Wall Street Journal reported that Telemundo, between TV and streaming, drew in around 1,000,000 viewers, a new all-time high among Spanish-language broadcasts of a women’s World Cup group-stage game in the United States.
Those figures bode well for the USWNT’s next game, a rematch of the 2019 World Cup final against the Netherlands. Like the Vietnam win, that game is set for a 9:00 p.m. Eastern kickoff on Fox (and, in Spanish, on Telemundo).
The top markets in terms of viewership share were:
- Kansas City (5.0 rating/16 share)
- Washington, D.C. (4.3/15)
- Hartford, Conn. (3.9/11)
- Austin, Texas (3.7/13)
- San Francisco (3.6/15)
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