2018 FIFA World Cup

Today is the start of the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia (ending July 15). In the US, FOX has the English-language TV rights while Telemundo has the Spanish-language TV rights; fuboTV is streaming the games via its FOX partnership. Here’s the list of all the broadcast, streaming, and radio rights by country: link.

Team USA didn’t qualify for the first time since 1986, which is a big blow to FOX since casual viewers are unlikely to watch. It paid $400M to outbid ESPN in 2011 for the 2018 & 2022 rights plus the 2015 & 2019 women’s World Cup rights. Telemundo also outbid Univision at the time. The 2014 World Cup brought an avg TV audience of 4.3M to ESPN (+50% from 2010) and 3.4M to Univision.

In 2014, 3.2B people (45% of the world population) tuned in over TV for at least 1 minute and 280M tuned in online. 2.1B people watched for at least 20 minutes. The average audience per match was 187M. Those numbers exclude out-of-home viewing. (source)