By David Owen in Monte Carlo
October 8 – Viewing figures for this year’s FIFA World Cup in Brazil set records in several key football markets, Niclas Ericson, FIFA’s director of TV, has told the Sportel Convention in Monaco.
In comments made less than a week after an independent expert told INSIDEworldfootball that the global TV audience for Brazil 2014 was “up slightly” on South Africa 2010, Ericson said FIFA was “getting confirmation that in many of the main markets we have absolute records”.
One of these seems sure to be the USA, where Ericson indicated that FIFA had seen numbers matching National Football League (NFL) play-off games and also World Series baseball numbers.
“We are breaking through in one of the markets where we are not the Number One sport,” he asserted.
FIFA has already disclosed that the match between the USA and Cristiano Ronaldo’s Portugal was the “most watched football match ever on US TV”.
It said that ESPN and Univisión had achieved a combined audience of 24.7 million.
It said this was “higher than any of National Basketball Association (NBA) finals” and “higher than average of 2013 World Series”.
With in-home viewer reach in the USA put at 94.5 million for the 2010 tournament, it now seems highly likely that this measure will have exceeded 100 million for Brazil 2014.
The audience reach of the World Cup in the USA had already climbed by close to one-fifth between 2006 and 2010.
Ericson recently reported that Brazil 2014 had achieved “very, very good figures across the Americas and Europe”.
In Asia, where the time-zone was not generally conducive to high ratings, he said FIFA was “encouraged by what we saw”.
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