Nearly every bit of news that has slipped out about the World Cup has been bad or, at the very least, ominous. Ticket prices, more because of FIFA’s artificial supply control than a depth of demand, are absurd. Hotels that had anticipated record-breaking bookings are desperate for anyone to take a room. No one knows where Iran is going to train, or if they’ll be able to play at all. ICE may be showing up in the parking lot. After 30-plus years of waiting for the U.S. to host the World Cup again and secure its status as a soccer power, the vibes are downright rancid.
But I bet all heat cools — or at least simmers — once the games themselves start. (Eleven cities will see action, plus three in Mexico and two in Canada, from June 11 to July 19.) Partly that will be because of the games themselves: The World Cup is such an irresistible spectacle, and the matches are always so compelling, that once the ball is rolled out, fans have a tendency to focus on what’s happening on the pitch and ignore anything going on outside of it. But I suspect the real reason that the narrative will shift is something far more banal, corporate and American: It’s going to be a television ratings smash … and not entirely because of the soccer itself.
The most watched soccer game in the history of American television happened 11 years ago. It was the Women’s World Cup Final between the U.S. and Japan in July 2015, a fun, exciting 5-2 win for the U.S. team, giving them their third title. (They’d win their fourth, and so far their last, four years later; Spain won in 2023.) That was an incredibly popular team, with Alex Morgan, Abby Wambach and Megan Rapinoe, one that would end up becoming the first women’s team to receive a ticker-tape parade through the “Canyon of Heroes” in New York. But that’s not the only reason the match received record ratings, or even the primary one.
The reason was the game’s start time. The World Cup Final that year was hosted by Canada, and with the North American time zone, the final began at 7 p.m. ET on a summer Sunday. It’s basically the perfect time: People who had to work the next day were able to stay up and watch the whole thing — the ratings were actually highest as the game ended, leading into the awards ceremony — kids got to watch with their parents, and older people could make it to the end before falling asleep. There is a reason the Super Bowl begins at 6:30 p.m. ET every year: The time allowed for an experience we all could share, something people could enjoy in Maine and Hawaii, something that you didn’t have to necessarily plan your whole week around. No one who stayed up to watch the Women’s World Cup final had their workweek wrecked because they stayed up all night on Sunday.
But that World Cup remains the most recent one held in North America: The women played in France in 2019 and Australia and New Zealand in 2023, and the men played in Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022 — all extremely unideal time zones for American television ratings. Qatar in 2022 was even worse because, thanks to the heat in Qatar, the World Cup was moved to November and December, when it had to compete with American football. (The highest-rated game in 2022 was the Final — which got nearly the same ratings as the 2015 Women’s World Cup Final, mostly because it started at 10 a.m. ET and was over before football started.) Matches in Russia began at 6 a.m. and ended at 3 p.m., and in Qatar it was 5 a.m. and 2 p.m.
But this year, the World Cup is in North America. And thus the start times for matches are built for American television. If you’re in a major market like New York or Miami, that means 1 p.m., 4 p.m., 8 p.m., the occasional 9 p.m. start for matches on the West Coast, with the finals set up for 3 p.m. ET on a Sunday: Built for ratings success.
Thus, nearly every story you’ll read about the TV ratings — which are, fairly or not, the universal signifier of the success of an American sporting event — will be about how much bigger they are than those of the Cup in Russia or Qatar … and likely the highest ever. (That 2015 record is very much in jeopardy.) Because we put such value on these ratings, you should probably expect, then, the Bad News World Cup narrative to switch immediately to Ratings Smash World Cup once the games start. It won’t have anything to do with issues like Iran or ICE, or those sky-high ticket prices dropping (though that may happen, too). We can get all cynical about that, how ratings are the business goal of all this — Fox is estimated to pull in between $300 million to $500 million in ad revenue — and how oppressive that can feel. But it’s always good to remember: TV ratings at the end of the day are simply eyeballs — which is to say, people watching the game and, potentially, falling in love with this great game. And for soccer and those who love it, that’s certainly a win.
