As the TV ratings for the World Cup surge, it’s fair to ask whether the NFL is getting a little nervous about soccer’s sudden success in the U.S.
At a time when the league would like to infiltrate other countries where soccer is the undisputed king, there’s cause for at least a smidge of concern regarding American football’s unquestioned dominance over all other sports televised in the United States.
The 2026 World Cup is delivering. The games are exciting. The penalty-kick shootout provides a level of sustained (and mounting) tension that no other sport can match.
Still, soccer has a very long way to go. Wednesday night’s record audience for the U.S. win over Bosnia and Herzegovina (33.5 million for the English and Spanish broadcasts) falls far short of the biggest audiences the NFL has delivered.
Still, ESPN — which is now partially owned by the NFL — felt compelled to point that out in its article about the new high-water mark for soccer on domestic TV. “By comparison, the most-watched Super Bowl of all time came in 2025, when an average of 127.7 million viewers watched the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs across Fox, Fox Deportes, Telemundo and Tubi,” ESPN wrote in an item without a byline.
The ESPN article mentions only the English-language audience on Fox (24.4 million) not the Spanish-language audience on Telemundo (9.1 million). In contrast, the Telemundo audience was included in ESPN’s Super Bowl LIX figure.
Is it really apples to apples? The 33.5 million figure came five levels below the World Cup’s equivalent of the Super Bowl. The NFL’s 2026 wild-card round, three levels below the Super Bowl, averaged 32 million viewers.
Obviously, the World Cup final won’t produce an audience comparable to the Super Bowl. Even if the U.S. team gets that far, Fox is targeting 50 million viewers. (Telemundo will obviously add to that number.)
But that’s not the point. The point is that, as the NFL tries to encroach on soccer’s turf elsewhere, soccer is becoming more and more popular in the NFL’s backyard — and in 11 of the NFL’s stadiums.
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