It’s football versus fútbol — or football after fútbol — this weekend when the World Cup’s final matches and the National Football League *nearly* collide on American television.
And as a reminder, this is occurring only because the quadrennial World Cup was pushed later into the year because of host nation Qatar’s brutal summer heat.
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So while fans of each sport enjoy bickering over the popularity of their respective game — soccer is indisputably the most popular global sport while the NFL rules ‘Murica — what the scheduling and time zone differentials have produced is coverage of the World Cup’s biggest weekend edging awfully close to American pro football.
Fox has the media rights to both the World Cup and NFL games and has paid handsomely in fees to air both. While the network isn’t commenting, it’s standard practice to have contingency coverage plans for when major events threaten to overlap — especially tentpole programming.
Argentina beat Croatia 3-0 on Tuesday to advance to the final, and the France-Morocco semifinal is at 2 p.m. Wednesday. Croatia and the loser of France-Morocco play in the third-place match scheduled for 10 a.m. Saturday while the final is at 10 a.m. Sunday.
That final, which will command millions of U.S. viewers, will be the usual 45-minute halves plus the 15-minute halftime. What’s not known is how much extra time will be tacked onto the end of regulation to make up for injuries and other play stoppages. And if the game is tied at that point, there will be two 15-minute extra time periods. If still tied, that would be followed by penalty kicks to decide a winner — something that happened in 1994 and 2006.
Four of the 13 knockout-stage matches so far have gone past regulation time (and all of them eventually went to penalties), and three of the last four World Cup finals have also required extra time.
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On Sunday, Fox’s pregame coverage begins at noon and live NFL game coverage starts at 1 p.m. with the Falcons–Saints, Cowboys–Jaguars, and Eagles–Bears. CBS also has three 1 p.m. games with its own noon pregame show.
The World Cup third-place match on Saturday is also up against early coverage of the NFL Network’s three-game schedule that begins with Colts–Vikings at 1 p.m. and also features Ravens–Browns at 4:30 p.m. and Dolphins–Bills at 8:15 p.m.
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If Sunday’s final did go extraordinarily long and led directly into live NFL game coverage, or into it after an abridged pregame show, it could actually boost the NFL total. Live sports lead-ins are powerful eyeball boosters for networks.
Also, Fox could bump World Cup post-match coverage to FS1 if the game threatened to bleed too deeply into the NFL pregame coverage.
France’s 2-1 win over England on Saturday — a soccer rivalry atop centuries of co-mingled geopolitical history — averaged 8.85 million U.S. viewers on Fox and 3.1 million on NBC-owned Spanish-language channel Telemundo, for a total of nearly 12 million.
The last World Cup final — between France and Croatia, in 2018 in Russia — averaged 17.8 million U.S. viewers on Fox and Telemundo. The U.S. men’s national team didn’t make the tournament that year. The 2014 World Cup final (Germany-Argentina) averaged 18 million and 2010’s Spain-Netherlands final averaged nearly 16 million.
In Britain, the match averaged 15 million viewers in primetime on ITV1 and peaked at 21.3 million, per Deadline. The United Kingdom has about 68 million people across 27 million-plus TV households. By contrast, the U.S. has 121 million TV households, with a bit more than half subscribing to a cable bundle.
COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Army’s 20-17 double-overtime win over Navy on Saturday averaged 6.94 million viewers on CBS, which Sports Media Watch noted is the service academy rivalry’s lowest non-pandemic (2020) viewership since 6.3 million in 2014. Two years ago, the Black Knights and Midshipmen averaged 4.9 million on a weekend filled with college games because of the COVID-19 scheduling chaos.
The rivalry has been on TV since 1945 and has been played on the weekend after conference championship games, on the second Saturday of December, since 2009. That gives the game a chance at a bigger audience because of the lack of other games.
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Since its 1890 inception, Navy leads the series, 62-54-7.
The Heisman Trophy presentation on ESPN saw viewership continue to fall. Saturday night’s special that saw USC Caleb Williams win the trophy averaged 1.65 million viewers. That’s down from last year’s 1.85 million but better than the pandemic-roiled 2020 edition that averaged a record-low 1.52 million viewers (after being moved out of December and into January 2021), per Sports Media Watch’s data.
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The peak was 6 million in 2009 when Alabama receiver Mark Ingram won the Heisman. The prime-time presentation event averaged at least 4 million viewers from 2007-13, per SMW.
The Heisman ceremony precedes bowl season, which begins Friday with Miami of Ohio against UAB at 11:30 a.m. on ESPN in the Bahamas Bowl, and No. 24 Troy against No. 25 USTA in Orlando’s Cure Bowl at 3 p.m. on ESPN.
Oh, excuse me, the HomeTown Lenders Bahamas Bowl and the Duluth Trading Cure Bowl.
If you’re interested in how this year’s bowls got their odder and more obscure corporate sponsorship names, and why, read here.
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NFL: One of the issues I’ve hammered on for a while is out-of-home (OOH) viewership. That’s people watching at bars, restaurants, hotels and viewing parties. Like families gathered to watch the NFL on Thanksgiving.
Nielsen didn’t begin measuring OOH (via audio signals embedded in broadcasts, picked up by Nielsen panelists using a Portable People Meter) until summer 2020, meaning older viewership records are actually lower than reality. The NFL has said OOH can add 10 percent or more to a game’s audience total.
And now the NFL, two weeks after everyone took a victory lap when the Giants-Cowboys game averaged 42 million viewers, says the holiday viewership was actually much bigger. The league didn’t disclose specific totals for the three games, but a person familiar with the data said Giants-Cowboys was more than 50 million viewers.
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The NFL did say in a statement that its specialized study — it hired Nielsen to conduct a custom survey using 5,800 TV households via NORC at the University of Chicago — calculated that the Thanksgiving games were watched by a combined average-minute audience of 44.1 million viewers.
That’s primarily OOH and 31 percent more than the originally reported total of 33.6 million. The survey, which wasn’t released in its entirety, shows that the three holiday games had more than 20 million additional viewers than the initial estimate, the NFL said.
The league did a similar custom survey after the Super Bowl in February to show an audience of 208 million viewers rather than the initial 112.3 million viewers reported by Nielsen and NBC.
“Quantifying the exact number of people watching NFL games on Thanksgiving presents additional challenges due to the fact that so many people gather in different group settings with family and friends,” said Paul Ballew, the NFL’s chief data and analytics officer said in a statement. “As was the case with our study around the Super Bowl, we feel this Nielsen custom survey helps provide a more complete picture of the total viewership for this unique day on the NFL calendar.”
So the mid-afternoon Giants-Cowboys last month apparently rocketed past the old regular-season record of 41.47 million set by Giants-49ers in December 1990 … but we don’t have any idea what OOH may have been then. Welcome to the chaotic world of TV viewership number-crunching!
The other two holiday games remain their own record-setters: Lions-Bills at noon on CBS set the viewership mark for the early game (31.62 million in initial reporting) and the Vikings-Patriots late game set the Thanksgiving prime-time game record (26 million in initial reporting).
The NFL is interested in these numbers to cement its standing as the most powerful domestic TV entity, showing fans, business partners and advertisers its hefty reach in a time of cord-cutting that’s reduced television households by 31 million over five years.
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“The tradition of family gatherings and NFL football on Thanksgiving Day is endemic to American culture,” said Jon Stainer, Nielsen Sports managing director for the Americas, in a statement.
Why is this counting-viewers-on-the-head-of-a-pin important? Beyond network and league pride, it signals to advertisers that the games are valuable commercial airtime, and the money brands pay the TV channels funds their media rights fees that fuel much of the NFL’s revenue-based salary cap system.
It also means the networks can sell future Thanksgiving NFL airtime at higher rates to advertisers. And industry insiders will be watching to see if the huge Thanksgiving audience numbers bleed into Black Friday 2023 when the NFL and Amazon Prime Video plan to stream a mid-afternoon game for the first time.
In the end, that’s what all of this is about: money. Live sports are entertainment like “The White Lotus” or “Yellowstone” but unlike everything else on television, live major college and pro sports have resisted the worst of TV industry audience declines.
Which means as networks and tech giants continue to try to get a handle on consumer habits and streaming, linear TV continues to pay the bills even as the audience overall shrinks.
Experts have long wondered how long networks can sustain spending millions and billions on live sports media rights, but for now, they’re writing the checks.
All viewership data is from Nielsen and Adobe Analytics, and other metrics via the TV networks, Nielsen, Sports Media Watch, ShowBuzz Daily, 506Sports.com and the leagues. All times Eastern unless otherwise noted.
(Photo of Argentina’s Lionel Messi: Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)