No USMNT? No problem.
Even with the U.S. team failing to make it beyond the Round of 16, the 2026 World Cup Final averaged more than 62 million viewers on U.S. television.
Sunday’s game between Spain and Argentina at MetLife Stadium, which Spain won 1-0 in extra time, averaged more than 62 million viewers between Fox and Telemundo/Peacock.
The English-language broadcast on Fox averaged 38.937 million viewers. The Spanish version, on Telemundo and Peacock, averaged 23.9 million. It adds up to 62.837 million viewers.
That’s an enormous number, exceeding all NFL games for the 2025 season (including the regular-season record of 57.23 million for Chiefs-Cowboys on Thanksgiving) except the Super Bowl. It’s also more than twice the viewership for the Miami-Indiana 2025 college football championship game, which attracted 30.1 million.
What would the World Cup have done if the U.S. had somehow managed to make it to the last game? Surely, it would have been more than 100 million.
And even though the World Cup is played only once every four years, no other sport (other than pro football) can touch those figures. Sorry, soccer haters, but the other football is absolutely a mainstream American sport — and possibly the most popular American sport other than the NFL.
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