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Hey, remember when everyone was FREAKING out about the NFL’s rating drop early on in the season? Yeah, it turns out that decline in viewership was just a blip on the radar. In the grand scheme of things, it meant less than the lead the Atlanta Falcons got out to in the Super Bowl against the New England Patriots.
Speaking of which, 111.32 million people tuned in to watch the Super Bowl last year, making it the most-watched sporting event of 2017 so far, according to Sports Media Watch. The rest of the list? Practically all football. Ratings, shmatings.
The NFL claimed 13 of the top 20 most-watched sporting events this year, including the entirety of the top 10. Concussions? National Anthem protests? Rate of play? Doesn’t matter.
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Football remains the most popular sport by far in the United States and is clearly America’s true past time (sorry, baseball, you’re old and boring and you smell funny like my grandpa). Outside of the States is a different story, of course.
A whopping 3.2 billion people tuned in to the 2010 World Cup. That’s 46.4 percent of the world. A total of 24.7 million U.S. viewers watched the national team face Portugal in the group stage of the 2014 World Cup, CNN reports. While that is certainly an impressive number (Game of Thrones’ highest ratings top out at around 23 million viewers when all platforms are factored in a full week after initial viewing), there’s no denying that America, as a whole, could care less about soccer.
Long live the NFL!
