The 2026 FIFA World Cup, the first with 48 teams, was an unqualified audience success for both Fox Sports and Telemundo, with combined viewership for English and Spanish telecasts that easily set a record in the U.S. and more than doubled the audience from four years ago.
All 104 games across Fox, FS1, Telemundo and Universo averaged a combined audience of just over 14 million viewers, up 128% from Qatar 2022, when the World Cup was surprisingly moved to November and December and only had 32 teams. This year’s tournament in the U.S., Canada and Mexico was also up 179% from Russia 2018, which was held in the summer and did not feature the U.S. men’s national team.
The 2026 combined audience will certainly be a factor as a number of suitors line up to consider rights to future World Cups. Companies like ESPN, Fox and NBCUniversal have already expressed a desire to bid and have said so without knowing how many teams might be in the 2030 tournament, as speculation about a jump to 64 teams continues to grow. Netflix, which has already acquired U.S. English and Spanish rights to the next two FIFA Women’s World Cups, is a likely bidder as well. The 2030 event will be jointly hosted by Spain, Portugal and Morocco.
Mike Mulvihill, Fox Sports’ president of insights and analytics, said he hopes the network has done its “part to bring the game where it is today” and that “FIFA recognizes that we played a significant role.”
“Whatever the future holds, I think Fox is always going to be a major supporter of soccer in America,” Mulvihill said. “Obviously, we have significant international rights going forward, whether the FIFA relationship continues or not. So I think in all of our relationships, we try to take seriously the idea that we are the steward of something that people care about a lot and feel passionately about. And I think we’ve lived up to our responsibility to be a good caretaker of the game.”
The World Cup final between Spain and Argentina blew away not only expectations on audience size, but also any other game in the tournament with a combined 62.8 million viewers. Among Fox’s slate of matches, two surpassed 30 million viewers, five broke 20 million and 11 matches surpassed 15 million.
Overall for Telemundo, the World Cup delivered the 15 best soccer matches in Spanish language history in the U.S. Forty-two game telecasts attracted at least 6 million viewers, up from just two in 2022.
Staying hydrated
Much of the discussion around World Cup hydration breaks focused on the added revenue opportunity for Fox, as games began to draw big audiences.
During the World Cup final between Spain and Lionel Messi’s Argentina, Powerade (distributed by FIFA Tier 1 partner Coca-Cola) was listed as the sponsor for the hydration breaks in the full screen before and after ads. The hydration break in each half featured the picture-in-picture approach, with an ad taking up the larger box to the lower right and live action from the stadium in the smaller box to the upper left.
A Fox Sports logo bumper ran before and after the three ads in the first half and four ads in the second. The first-half ads were for Bank of America, Dove and Adidas. The second half ads were for Verizon, Lay’s, Michelob Ultra and The Home Depot. The BofA, Lay’s and Home Depot ads all featured David Beckham, while Messi starred in the Michelob Ultra ad with Billy Bob Thornton.
Mulvihill told SBJ there was “no significant loss of audience” when hydration breaks came on during the tournament, regardless of whether the game went to full-screen ads or picture-in-picture. “The audience behavior was very much in line to what we see in traditional commercial breaks across all of our relationships,” he said.
