The close of the NBA and NHL seasons usually signals a relatively quiet time in the U.S. sports landscape. Baseball, the WNBA, NASCAR and the domestic soccer leagues roll on, but the noise dies down through the summer.
Not this year. With the NBA Finals and NHL’s Stanley Cup Final both hitting multi-year ratings highs, and the men’s World Cup off to a huge start (in both English and Spanish), the summer lull for sports on TV will be postponed for at least a month.
In fact, not including Olympic years, June and July are setting up to be the biggest sports summer in more than a decade.
The Stanley Cup Final, won by the Carolina Hurricanes in six games, had its largest TV audience since 2019. The NBA Finals, which saw the New York Knicks take their first title since 1973, drew the most viewers since the end of the Michael Jordan era in Chicago. And the World Cup? It appears to be off to its best start ever in the United States.
It’s a rough measure at best, but the three audience totals above add up to just under 40 million viewers. In years with a men’s or Women’s World Cup since 2014, no NBA-NHL-World Cup combination has come anywhere close to that; the highest prior total was 27.75 million in 2014 (15.54 million for the NBA Finals, 4.7 million for the Stanley Cup and 7.5 million for the early days of the World Cup).
Swap in the Summer Olympics for the World Cup, and 2016 and 2024 (though not the pandemic-shrouded 2021 games) end up ahead of this year. That’s to be expected, as the Olympics almost always bring a ratings bonanza. But the men’s World Cup being in North America for the first time since 1994 has given a gigantic boost to the usual U.S. ratings for the event.
Several other factors have led to the big audiences, not least of which being that live sports are one of the few growth areas in linear TV. Changes in the way Nielsen measures ratings (including integrating out of home viewing and big data) that tend to give live sports a bump have helped too. But that’s not the whole story.
In the NBA, the finals matched a team from the country’s biggest market in the Knicks) with the San Antonio Spurs, who feature one of the biggest — literally and figuratively — stars in the league in Victor Wembanyama. Three of the five games brought in more than 20 million viewers, capped by 24.5 million for the fifth and final game on June 13. That hasn’t happened since 2016. As a result, the NBA got its most watched finals since 1998, which was Jordan’s last title with the Chicago Bulls, and ABC had its biggest finals audience in the 24 years it’s had broadcast rights.
The NHL didn’t the biggest names in its final, though both the Hurricanes and Vegas Golden Knights have been consistently strong over the past decade. But hockey is riding a pop culture-fueled wave as TV adaptations of novels Heated Rivalry and Off Campus, plus the burgeoning popularity of hockey romance books, have brought some new eyeballs to the league. An entertaining and highly rated Olympics hockey tournament in February probably helped keep attention on the sport too.
As for the World Cup, having the tournament in North America (the majority of games are in the U.S., with others in Mexico and Canada) is obviously great for TV schedules: The group stage so far has featured matches starting in the early afternoon on the East Coast and running into late night (or West Coast primetime), a great setup for broadcasters Fox and Telemundo (see record ratings for the opening matches for Mexico and the U.S. last week). Combining the English- and Spanish-language broadcasts, several games have topped 10 million viewers already, and both Fox and Telemundo are running way ahead of past World Cups. Fox has more than doubled the audience for the 2022 World Cup at the same point, and Telemundo and Peacock (which streams every Spanish-language telecast) is drawing three times as many viewers as in 2022.
Soccer may achieve the huge footprint that American football, baseball and basketball have in the United States. But the sport has also firmly established itself domestically — in addition to the homegrown MLS and NWSL, the best European leagues are widely available to U.S. viewers too, and the World Cup is, at least in TV-viewing terms, akin to a single-sport Olympics. Not a ton of people watch gymnastics or swimming year in and year out, but they gather in droves every four years to watch the best in the world get crowned.
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