See! Americans DO like soccer after all!
People assumed that once the USA team was eliminated from the World Cup, TV ratings and social media interaction would plummet, but that wasn’t the case at all.
In fact, the World Cup final set a record of 26.5 million viewers! Overall, Facebook reported more than three billion interactions throughout the tournament, and there were over 672 messages on Twitter about the event as well!
ESPN/ABC and Univision were the North American stations broadcasting the game, and they both tried various ways to get viewership up. Univision even partnered with an Israeli tech company so that their feed was a few seconds faster than ESPN’s! They also used a new kind of technology that pitted former soccer players against the current Cup players.
So fancy!
It clearly worked because the TV ratings were great, and online, 750,000 people per minute were watching as well!
To put these numbers in perspective, the 2010 finale had 24.7 million viewers, as did this year’s US game against Portugal. This year, each game averaged 4.56 million viewers, but back in the 2002 World Cup, games only drew 1.04 million.
Oddly enough though, it was the Brazil vs. Germany semi-final that saw the most action on social media, and specifically when Germany scored four goals in seven minutes!
We have to admit, that was pretty remarkable!
The 2018 games are in Russia, and will be broadcast on Fox. Both ESPN and Univision think that Fox will have a hard time reaching the numbers they did this year because the time difference in Russia is much greater from America’s than Brazil’s time difference is.
We’ll just have to wait and see because one thing that’s clear is that Americans LOVE soccer!
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