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Source: www.cablefax.com, July 2019
If you haven’t heard about the US Women’s National Team record-setting 2019 FIFA World Cup, you haven’t been paying attention. The team became the first since Germany in 2007 to win back-to-back World Cups, and now holds four of the eight total titles. They’ve also set record viewership numbers. The US victory over the Netherlands pulled in 14.271mln Fox Sports viewers for the 11am broadcast. It is the most-watched English-language match since the USA’s 5-2 victory over Japan in 2015, which pulled 25.4mln viewers on Fox in primetime.
Fox Sports really believed in the power of the Women’s World Cup, putting a record amount of the games on broadcast over cable. “This is a tournament that eight years ago had zero games on broadcast,” Mike Mulvihill, evp and head of strategy and analytics for Fox Sports, told Cablefax. “We wouldn’t put those games on broadcast unless we felt like it was worthy of being on our biggest stage. It reflects our belief of their being a lot of momentum behind the event. We really treat it like what it is, a world class event worthy of the Olympics or the Men’s World Cup.”
On the streaming platforms, the match became the most-streamed FIFA Women’s World Cup in history, up 402% over the same match in 2015 with an average minute audience of 289K. Viewership was also way up in Spanish-language broadcasts, which Telemundo evp, sports content Eli Velazquez attributes to a higher level of play over the years. “Team USA and the work that they’ve done over the years, they’ve basically set the table for other parts of the world to understand that this is a beautiful game that they too should be playing,” he explained.
Total audience delivery on Telemundo came in at 1.6mln viewers for the final, up 22% from the 2015 final. Telemundo Deportes’ coverage yielded a TAD average of 301K, up 27% over 2015. Led by the USWNT, its coverage delivered four of the five most-watched FIFA Women’s World Cup matches in Spanish-language history. “Our svp of marketing, Bill Bergofin, did an amazing job of understanding that we needed to tap into this movement,” Velazquez said. “We campaigned around the difficult history of women’s football players getting the due that they deserve. Our campaign highlighted how hard they had to work to make the national team, how hard they had to work in spite of not an equitable attention to the women’s game verses the men’s game, especially when you talk about compensation.”
The USWNT is currently suing the US Soccer Federation over gender-based discrimination. “These women are going to play football just as well, and frankly some of them better, than the men last summer,” Velazquez said. Streaming trends in soccer also saw unprecedented growth, with digital live streams throughout the tournament close to eight times that of the entire 2015 tournament. It delivered a record-setting 35.3mln minutes across Telemundo Deportes’ digital videos. “Streaming trends in sports is related to content consumption in general in the world, which is the power of choice and convenience,” Velazquez said. “I believe streaming will continue to increase, as we move into the future the lines are getting blurred between linear and digital, it’s all just content.”
The success of the women’s tournament means Telemundo plans to emphasize coverage even more on women’s sports in the future, especially coming up on the 2020 Olympics. “This demonstrated to us that we need to double down on our Olympic coverage,” Velazquez said. “In 2004, we focused on the men, especially basketball and football. Now looking at 2020, it’s a much more equitable trend. If we want to give those audiences the experience that they’re looking for regardless of gender, it needs to be equitable.”
