​There were ample reasons to worry that the United States hosting the World Cup would be a fiasco. In the year and a half before kickoff, Donald Trump talked about annexing tournament co-host Canada and even invading the other host nation, Mexico; he was openly at odds with Iran, one of the tournament’s participants. Stringent travel rules were preventing fans from Senegal, the Ivory Coast, and Haiti from obtaining visas. Ticket prices were shockingly high. Hotels weren’t filling up as promised. FIFA introduced “hydration breaks” during matches, which felt like a transparent cash grab that could disrupt the flow of play by allowing more advertising. And in a country where soccer has always grown largely because of immigrant communities, the White House was overseeing aggressive sweeps to expel millions from those very groups. America—where soccer has long trailed behind other sports in popularity—looked set to be the most unwelcoming host in a tournament FIFA touts as “uniting the world.”
Then the games began.
Across global screens and social feeds, footage emerged of American stadiums filled with awe-struck, record-setting crowds. Through the first 78 matches, Sports Business Journal reported an average attendance of 64,511 per game—about 10,000 more than the 2022 World Cup. Stadiums averaged 99.7% occupancy, and FIFA claimed it had sold 6.5 million tickets. The supporters on site weren’t only expatriates or Americans with ties to other nations; they were Americans falling in love with the sport or rediscovering it.
Television audiences in the United States were breaking records as well. Nielsen ratings showed the U.S. men’s national team’s round-of-16 loss to Belgium drawing an average of 33 million viewers on Fox’s English-language broadcast, peaking at 41 million in the final 15 minutes. The Wall Street Journal noted that this figure surpassed the audience for the 2025 World Series and Game 5 of last month’s NBA finals. The Athletic highlighted that this was “the most-watched soccer telecast on one network in U.S. history,” eclipsing the previous record set just days earlier when 26 million watched the U.S. MNT defeat Bosnia. The run of upsets and dramatic games peppered these milestones with rapid-fire record-breaking moments that had not been achieved in a single tournament before.
And Americans weren’t just watching their own team. The England–Mexico clash on Sunday produced a 21.7 million-strong audience on Fox, with an additional 23.2 million tuning in on Telemundo. Fox posted a record-breaking average of 5 million viewers across the first 72 matches, while Telemundo averaged 4.6 million. Mike Mulvihill, Fox Sports’ president of insights and analytics, noted that after only two weeks, the “average Fox/FS1 World Cup viewer” had already watched more matches than in the entire 2022 tournament, a telling sign of growing engagement and interest that transcended national allegiance.