The Thanksgiving holiday was an eventful period for NFL coverage, with last Thursday’s game between the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Giants reaching 42 million U.S. viewers on Fox Sports.
Fox Sports says that match is now the most-watched NFL regular season game on record – across any TV network. The viewer count, which includes both Fox Sports’ linear and streaming platforms, was up 49% over last year’s Thanksgiving matchup between the Chicago Bears and Detroit Lions, which drew 28.2 million viewers.
Last Thursday’s game overtook the NFL’s previous viewership record of 41.6 million viewers, who tuned into the 1990 Monday Night Football game between the Giants and the San Francisco 49ers.
Fox Sports last week also garnered record audiences for its FIFA World Cup coverage. Approximately 15.4 million people watched Friday’s U.S. vs. England match, which Fox says is now the most-watched men’s soccer match on U.S. English-language television on record.
Notably, the game surpassed the 14.5 million viewers who watched 1994’s World Cup final between Italy and Brazil. The U.S. team’s first World Cup match last week, against Wales, drew 8.3 million viewers on Fox Sports and 3.4 million on NBCUniversal’s Telemundo and Peacock, which host Spanish-language coverage for the World Cup.
The 3.4 million figure was slightly below the 4 million who tuned into this year’s inaugural World Cup match – between Qatar and Ecuador – on Telemundo and Peacock. According to NBCU, the game delivered an average-minute audience of 832,000 viewers, representing 21% of the average audience.
Last week’s viewership records come as live sports become more integrated into streaming. This year, the NFL’s Thursday Night Football debuted on Amazon Prime, the first game of the season averaging 15.3 million viewers – per Nielsen and Amazon’s first party measurement.
That figure is notable, as Amazon reportedly told advertisers it predicted TNF games would reel in an average audience of 12.5 million viewers.
The NFL’s Sunday Ticket package is also headed to streaming next year once DirecTV’s coverage rights expire. The league has yet to announce which streamer will carry those games, but media outlets have pegged Apple as the likely winner. Apple is reportedly seeking a broader deal than the existing arrangement with DirecTV, including offering Sunday Ticket in markets outside the U.S.