The hosts came out, but the fans stayed.
The World Cup quarter-finals welcomed the four largest English-language audiences ever, and continued to fuel a string of big shows for Fox Sports. Although they did not reach the record highs of matches involving hosts Mexico and the United States in the previous round, any fears that viewers would abandon the World Cup following the elimination of the host nation (including Canada, who were also eliminated in the round of 16) were unfounded.
Saturday’s match between England and Norway led the quarterfinals with 21.8 million viewers on Fox, based on final same-day Nielsen ratings. Argentina’s victory over Switzerland in the Night Cup brought in 18.15 million. On Thursday, France’s win over Morocco generated 10.25 million viewers in final numbers. Spain’s victory over Belgium on Friday attracted the smallest audience of the four, at 9.87 million.
All four of those matches topped the previous English record for World Cup quarter-final wins in the United States. France’s victory over England in the 2022 World Cup brought 8.86 million viewers to Fox on a Saturday in December. Recent changes to Nielsen’s measurement, including more complete away-from-home ratings and a big data element, tend to benefit live sports, but the England/Norway and Argentina/Switzerland matches, at least, far exceed the marginal gains those changes would have added to previous years’ figures.
Ratings for the Spanish-language quarterfinal telecast for Telemundo and Peacock were not available at press time. If trends from previous rounds continue, it will likely add 5 million or more viewers to each total.
Fox averaged 15.64 million viewers for the World Cup quarterfinals, up 150 percent from the 2022 tournament (6.25 million).
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