World Cup shatters Canadian, U.S. ratings

TORONTO — The numbers show the Women’s World Cup was embraced at home and around the globe.

TV records were set on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border.

TSN says Sunday’s final, won 5-2 by the U.S., averaged 2.1 million viewers according to preliminary figures — making it the mostwatched Women’s World Cup final for a Canadian audience. Some 7.7 million viewers tuned in at some point, with the average audience peaking at 2.8 million for the final minute of the game.

TSN says Canada’s five tournament matches averaged 2.3 million viewers. That rose to 3.2 million for the quarter-final loss to England, which set a record for the country’s most-watched Women’s World Cup match ever. Like the final, it was the most-watched program on Canadian TV that weekend.

The network calls it Canada’s mostwatched FIFA Women’s World Cup ever. The audience was nearly four times that of the 2011 tournament in Germany.

Fox says the final was also the most-watched soccer match in U.S. history, according to Nielsen. The telecast averaged 25.4 million viewers and peaked at 30.9 million.

That breaks the previous U.S. soccer mark of 18.22 million set by the U.S.-Portugal match at last year’s men’s World Cup. It also shattered the previous record for a women’s soccer match (1999 Women’s World Cup final, 17.975 million) and the 2011 Women’s World Cup final (13.5 million) which also featured the U.S. versus Japan.

Fox says Sunday’s U.S. audience exceeded every game of the NBA Finals as well as the 2014-15 broadcast season average of every show in prime time, including Sunday Night Football, and the prime-time average of the Sochi Olympic Winter Games.

It was the most-watched telecast since this year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament championship game on CBS (28.3 million).

In all, Fox says 43.2 million viewers watched all or part of Sunday’s final. The network averaged 1.824 million viewers per each of the tournament’s 52 matches across all its networks.

According to FIFA, other countries also enjoyed record TV numbers.