Football’s global popularity has been showcased again during 2024, with several major events among the most-watched on streaming platforms this season.
Recent research showed that football accounted for four of the top ten most streamed sports events this year, highlighting its status with fans worldwide. The top 10 is as follows:
- UEFA European Championship
- Summer Olympic Games
- Tour de France
- ICC Men’s T20 World Cup
- Australian Open Tennis
- Wimbledon Tennis Championships
- Africa Cup of Nations
- UEFA Champions League
- Copa America
- NFL Super Bowl LVIII
Euro 2024 Wins The Streaming Standings
The 2024 UEFA European Championship in Germany was the pick of the bunch, claiming top spot ahead the Paris Olympic Games and the Tour de France.
The cumulative global audience of around five billion viewers enjoyed a month-long extravaganza of top-class football featuring the best international teams in Europe.
The final between Spain and England drew a peak audience of 24.2 million viewers across the BBC and ITV in the United Kingdom alone, and a significant proportion watched on streaming services.
The tournament also shattered in-person records, with around 2.67 million spectators filling the stadiums during Euro 2024. This beat the previous record of 2.43m spectators set in 2016.
Interest in UEFA’s showpiece international tournament also extended to online searches, which peaked at a whopping 30.4m during the event.
The Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) was another major football tournament which proved to be hugely popular, claiming seventh spot in the top ten most streamed sports events.
AFCON garnered a cumulative global audience of over 1.4bn viewers, while the semi-final between Nigeria and South Africa attracted a unique audience of 10.3 million viewers.
Major networks such as the BBC, beIN Sports, Canal+, Sky Sports and New World TV jumped on the AFCON bandwagon, which provided a significant revenue boost to the tournament.
AFCON was a big hit on social media platforms, generating a staggering 2.1bn digital engagements. There were also 3.1bn views on TikTok videos.
Club football inevitably made its mark in 2024, with the UEFA Champions League claiming eighth position in the top 10 streaming standings.
Overall global viewership rose as the tournament progressed, with the quarter-final and semi-final games drawing audiences in the tens of millions.
CBS and Paramount+ in the United reported record-breaking streaming numbers throughout the competition, cementing the growing shift towards online platforms.
The final between Borussia Dortmund and Real Madrid garnered more than 450 million global viewers, while social media and search activity was off the scale.
The 2024 Copa America tournament also made its mark this year, accumulating a higher streaming viewership than the National Football League’s Super Bowl LVIII.
The US audience played a key role in helping Copa America grab ninth spot in the annual streaming standings, with fans eager to watch their team in action.
A group-stage match between the US and Uruguay attracted 3.78m viewers on FS1 – the most-watched non-World Cup match in FS1 history.
Copa America viewership in the US averaged 1.1 million viewers across the tournament, a sizeable increase from the 216,000 average recorded in 2021.
It was a similar story in Brazil, were viewership increased to 84.6m – an 82 percent jump from the 2021 edition.
Argentina’s run to the final captured almost 59% of television viewers, while the semi-final against Canada had similar viewing figures to their 2022 World Cup final.
The final word
Judging by the research, the growth in popularity of live streaming appears to have done nothing football’s status as the most popular sport in the world.
