Getty Image / Mamunur Rashid / NurPhoto
The 2022 World Cup Final in Qatar is being heralded by many pundits and fans as the greatest WC Final ever played.
Lionel Messi and Argentina emerged victorious as the 2022 World Cup Champions after the game went to a shootout. Scenes from Argentina’s National Team returning home are surreal. And as the World Cup Final ratings continue to roll in it’s evident this was one of the most watched events in human history.
In the United States, FOX Sports had a perfect storm of ratings on its hands. The World Cup Final ratings were (presumably) peaking as the game went to a shootout and that rolled directly into the NFL’s Sunday slate of games at 1 o’clock.
FOX Sports has yet to release TV ratings but the World Cup Semifinals ratings were up 27% over 2018 (6.53 million viewers on Fox), and the World Cup Quarterfinals ratings for France-England (8,855M viewers) were up 39% over 2018’s high mark.
World Cup Final Sets TV Ratings Records
The France-Argentina World Cup Final set an all-time ratings record in France. It averaged 24.1 million viewers in France and peaked with 29.4 million viewers.
The entire population of France is just 67.5 million people so nearly half of the country was watching the World Cup Final against Argentina.
Viewership numbers for Argentina have not been released but based on the footage from Buenos Aires it’s safe to say that over 50% of the entire country was watching the World Cup Final against France. The total population of Argentina is 45.81 million. Assuming half of that and we’re looking at 52.305 million viewers just between France and Argentina alone and that’s just a guess.
It’s very likely this World Cup Final was the most-watched TV event in history once all of the TV ratings roll in. As just a teaser of the popularity, Lionel Messi’s most recent Instagram post is now officially the ‘most liked Instagram post of all-time’. It surpassed ‘the egg’ which has 56.9 million likes. Messi’s Instagram post has 62.7 million likes and counting.
Twitter engagement was exploding during the World Cup
An employee for Twitter released a look at the Twitter engagement stats throughout the World Cup and the numbers are staggering.
There were 147,000,000,000+ impressions across the #WC2022 conversation globally. 147 BILLION people discussing or reading about the World Cup on twitter!
After France scored its first goal in the World Cup Final there were 24,4000 tweets per second being sent out about the World Cup Final.
The most talked about players, in order from 1 to 5, were Lionel Messi (#1), Kylian Mbappe, Neymar Jr, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Tottenham’s Son Heung-Min.
In terms of global use, Brazil reigned supreme. Brazilian fans sent the most tweets followed by Japan, Argentina, United States, and France.
Twitter reports that the 2022 World Cup saw an increase of 226% more impressions than the 2018 World Cup. They also report that this was the biggest digital event ever for Fox Sports.
I will update this article if/when Fox Sports releases their ratings which are expected to be massive.