What has the largest TV audience: a Super Bowl or a World Cup Final?

Football and soccer’s denominations cause clashes in some parts of the world, but they have one thing in common, their respective most important games are world-wide massive events in which they raise the highest figures in terms of TV audience. But one of them prevails. Which one? Let us have a look.

Soccer, commonly called ‘football’ in the rest of the world, plays the World Cup in June-July every four years. The next edition in Qatar, in 2022, will exceptionally move to its fall season in November-December to avoid the extreme hot weather. The last World Cup played was in Russia in 2018, in which France lifted the trophy after beating Croatia for 4-2.

The event reported to have had 517 million people around the globe that watched the whole 90-minute match. Apart from that, the estimations assure that 1.1 billion people tuned in during the game. Both figures were published by FIFA by the end of 2018 in an article posted in their website.

On its counterpart, football has the NFL Super Bowl as the pinnacle of games. It consists in the final match to decide the season champion, played every February in a neutral venue. Tom Brady’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers will face reigning champions Kansas City Chiefs on February 7 to crown the next kings.

As per Nielsen, Super Bowl has an average of 98.2 million people in United States. The last edition, played between Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers, raised a slightly higher audience of 99.9 million people. Added to that, it’s calculated a mass of 50-60 million people outside of the United States that watch the game around the world.