What To Know
- The NBA Finals, NHL Stanley Cup Final, and World Cup all achieved record-high summer TV ratings.
- The NBA Finals drew its highest numbers since 1998.
- The U.S. men’s soccer team’s first game set a new record for English-language World Cup broadcasts in the U.S.
The summer months tend to be a quieter time for sports ratings, but not this year, as the NBA Finals, the NHL Stanley Cup Final, and the 2026 FIFA World Cup have attracted record ratings.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, citing Nielsen figures, the NBA Finals, which saw the New York Knicks defeat the San Antonio Spurs to win their first title in 53 years, drew 20.6 million total viewers. This was the highest viewing figures for the NBA Finals since 1998, at the height of Michael Jordan‘s Chicago Bulls fame.
In fact, the NBA Finals as a whole achieved mammoth ratings, with three of the five games bringing in over 20 million viewers. That hadn’t happened since 2016, and it led ABC to its biggest finals audience in the 24 years the network has had the broadcast rights.
The Stanley Cup Final, won by the Carolina Hurricanes in six games, also saw a huge ratings increase this year, attracting 5.2 million viewers, the largest TV audience since 2019. As the outlet noted, hockey is having a pop culture moment with the recent TV adaptations of hockey-romance novels Heated Rivalry and Off Campus.
Meanwhile, the World Cup, which kicked off on June 11, drew 14.2 million total viewers across its opening weekend, the most on record. The tournament has likely seen a boost due to being hosted across the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
The U.S. men’s team’s win over Paraguay is the most-watched match of the tournament in the U.S. so far. It’s also the most-watched World Cup broadcast ever for English-language audiences in the U.S., averaging more than 18 million viewers across Fox, FS1, and Tubi.
Combining the three audience totals, just under 40 million viewers have tuned in for June’s major sporting events. In the years with a men’s or women’s World Cup since 2014, no NBA-NHL-World Cup combination has come anywhere close to that figure, per THR.
The highest combined total in previous years 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).