Headlines Claiming Women's World Cup Final Had More Viewers Than Men's Are 100% Fake News
Many media outlets reported this week that more people watched the U.S. women’s team in its World Cup final Sunday than tuned in for the men’s World Cup final in 2018.
This is fake news.
CBS News published an article Monday headlined, “More people watched the Women’s World Cup final than the 2018 men’s final.”
NBC News followed suit with, “Women’s World Cup final ratings surpass last year’s men’s final.”
Even Fox Business joined in with a story Tuesday titled, “Women’s World Cup final most-viewed match this year, higher ratings than men’s final.”
All three outlets cited a Fox Sports news release.
Here is how they spun it: The women’s match drew nearly 14 million viewers on Fox in the United States, 22 percent more than the France-Croatia men’s final on Fox last year. Therefore, more people in the U.S. watched the women’s final than the men’s, right?
Wrong.
The men actually attracted a bigger television audience.
When combining the Fox ratings with those of the Spanish language channel Telemundo, the 2018 World Cup final had 16.6 million viewers, according to World Soccer Talk.
Meanwhile, the women’s final this year had 1.6 million viewers on Telemundo, according to the Los Angeles Times. Add that to the 14 million on Fox and it’s still about 1 million fewer viewers than the men drew in the United States.
This despite the fact that the U.S. team was in the women’s final while the men’s featured two European countries.
Worldwide, the number of people interested in the two games was not even remotely close.
Although the global number of viewers for this year’s women’s final will not be made public until October, there is good reason to believe it will be far less than what the men had in 2018.
In their 2015 World Cup victory over Japan, the women had about 25.4 million viewers — far more than what they had this year. Even so, that tournament drew 764 million unique viewers worldwide.
Meanwhile, the 2018 men’s final had 1.12 billion unique viewers across the globe, and the entire tournament had nearly 3.6 billion, according to FIFA.
That’s almost half of the world.
None of this seems to fit the progressive narrative that the women are somehow superior to the men when their talent level does not remotely compare.
The men would never lose to an under-15 boy’s team, something the U.S. women’s team did in an exhibition two years ago.
When it comes to sports, people like to watch the best competition possible — which is why the men continue to win in the ratings.
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