First U.S. Women’s World Cup match draws combined audience of 6.26 million on Fox, Telemundo

LOS ANGELES — The United States’ 3-0 victory over Vietnam in the Women’s World Cup drew 6.26 million viewers, making it the most-watched soccer telecast in the U.S. since last year’s men’s World Cup final.

It is also the largest combined English- and Spanish-language audience for a U.S. women’s group stage match.

Saturday afternoon’s match in Auckland, New Zealand — which kicked off at 9 p.m. EDT Friday night — averaged 5,261,000 viewers on Fox, making it the second-most watched group stage telecast since Fox started covering it in 2015. Fox and Nielsen said the audience peaked at 6.5 million for the final 15 minutes.

The largest Women’s World Cup group stage broadcast on Fox remains the 2019 U.S.-Chile match, which averaged 5,337,000.

Fox and Nielsen said it is a 99% increase over the first U.S. group stage match four years ago in France against Thailand, which started at 2:30 p.m. EDT.

The Spanish-language audience of 1 million across Telemundo, Peacock, Universo and Telemundo streaming platforms was the most-watched for a group-stage match and was surpassed only by the 2015 and ’19 final. The Spanish audience was also nearly double what it was for the 2019 Thailand match.

Telemundo is a division of Comcast Corp.’s NBCUniversal.

The total audience numbers also include 307,831 who watched via streaming on English- and Spanish-language streaming.

The next U.S. match is Wednesday night against the Netherlands.

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More AP coverage of the Women’s World Cup: https://apnews.com/hub/fifa-womens-world-cup and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports