The ongoing 2022 World Cup in Qatar has reached 3.56 viewers across the globe according to SportsLens.com, beating the Super Bowl and the Olympics, and confirming the FIFA tournament as the biggest global sporting event.
The impressive fan base shows that Football, a truly global game, is played and followed worldwide like no other sport and despite the controversies on the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, hundreds of millions of football fans still tuned in once the matches started.
While Super Bowl is the biggest sporting spectacle in the world, combining sports and entertainment like any other event, FIFA World Cup is undoubtedly the most followed competition, and viewership figures confirm that.
According to FIFA, the average live TV audience for the 64 matches at the 2018 World Cup in Russia was 191 million. That is almost 30 percent more than estimates for the 2022 Super Bowl’s TV viewership, which was under 100 million in the United States, plus an estimated 30 to 50 million on the international level.
The 2018 World Cup finals, showing the clash between France and Croatia, drew an average TV audience of 517 million people, while the live coverage of the match reached more than a mind-blowing billion people worldwide.
Statistics show the overall reach of the World Cup even beats the Olympics. According to FIFA estimates, around 3.56 billion people worldwide watched at least one minute of 2018 World Cup coverage on linear TV or across digital channels. The Tokyo 2020 Olympics had a global reach of 3.05 billion viewers and the Beijing 2022 Winter Games had over 2 billion.
The FIFA data show previous World Cups, including Brazil in 2014 and South Africa in 2010 reached similar viewership numbers, meaning that Russia in 2018 was no outlier.
Regarding the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, viewership figures will probably be just as impressive. According to a recent Ipsos survey, around 5 per cent of people worldwide plan to watch any match of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar on any device.
The United Arab Emirates had the highest share out of any country surveyed, with 81 of the population who planned to watch the matches. Indonesia, Argentina, and Peru followed, with 8 percent, 79 percent, and 78 percent shares, respectively.
Europe`s leading football nations were far below these figures. The United Kingdom, Spain, and Italy had around 5 percent of sports fans planning to watch the World Cup matches, more than 46 percent in Germany and 39 percent in France.
The United States and Canada were the countries with the lowest intention of watching the tournament, with only 24 percent of adults planning to watch the matches.
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