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Soccer’s post-World Cup viewership bump is real and, for the involved leagues and networks, spectacular.
Nielsen said its proprietary research found a broad-based lift in U.S. television audiences for soccer since Spain closed out its championship in the 2026 FIFA men’s World Cup nearly three months ago. The findings, which were exclusively revealed at the Front Office Sports Tuned In summit on Tuesday, show:
- Post-World Cup audiences for 10 Major League Soccer matches on Fox and FS1 have risen 55% among men 18–34 and by 29% among adults 18–34, two of the most coveted demographics among advertisers, compared with pre-tournament regular-season matches. That data does not include MLS coverage on Apple TV, which was brought out this year from behind a second streaming paywall.
- Viewership of England’s Premier League on NBC and the USA Network is up 30% among adults 18–34, including Spanish broadcasts.
- Audiences for Spain’s LaLiga on ESPN platforms are up 60% among adults 18–34 and up 42% year over year across all of its English- and Spanish-language broadcasts.
Overall, Nielsen’s own Fan Insights data found the number of U.S. residents identifying as soccer fans rose from 66.8 million in July 2025 to 75.2 million in July 2026, representing a 13% lift. Since 2022, Nielsen found that U.S. soccer fandom rose by 27%, an increase of 16 million fans, while MLS fandom rose by 28%, or 11.7 million fans.
“The journey started when the World Cup was granted—it didn’t start this summer,” MLS commissioner Don Garber told FOS editor in chief Dan Roberts on stage at Tuned In on Tuesday. “What we’re looking for as a sport is to grow the market. When I came into MLS, there was no market … our first goal was to build a market where we could come in and deliver something for local fans. And we did that over a period of time. … Now you’ve got to have the product that people care about. And frankly, that’s just about money and development.”
The extended fan interest in soccer is hardly surprising. The World Cup ended with record viewership in the U.S., with Fox seeing a 116% lift in viewership compared with 2022 with a tournament average of 7.74 million viewers, while Spanish-language coverage on Telemundo rose 143% to an average of 6.3 million viewers.
The title match between Spain and Argentina on July 19 averaged 66.4 million viewers, representing by far the most-watched soccer match of any type in U.S. history, and the largest audience on American television since February’s Super Bowl LX.
“Our data shows that fandom is not only reaching record highs, but it is also expanding rapidly among younger, diverse audiences and carrying over into major domestic and international leagues,” Nielsen global head of sports Seth Ladetsky said in a statement.
Following the final, leagues such as MLS made a concerted effort to leverage the incoming fan interest, and the North American league rolled out an extensive marketing campaign entitled “Thanks World, We’ll Take It From Here.”
Immediately following the World Cup, several teams saw boosts in ticket and merchandise sales. A Philadelphia Union spokesperson told FOS in late July that single-game ticket sales went up by 218% since the start of the tournament, while Nashville SC said it saw a 161% increase in online ticket sales during the same period.
Front Office Sports’s Margaret Fleming contributed to this story.
