Gold Cup Keeps Tournament Soccer Rolling

With the FIFA Women's World Cup concluded, the next international men's soccer tournament on U.S. television — the CONCACAF Gold Cup — is underway in the United States and Canada, and both Fox and Univision are seeing early ratings achievements

Fox Sports 1 reported 986,000 viewers for the group-stage match on Tuesday in which the defending title holders, the United States, defeated Honduras by a score of 2-1. Fox said the game was the ninth-most watched soccer match overall on Fox Sports 1 and the most-watched Gold Cup group stage match on any Fox property, beating the 2013 USA vs. Cuba contest that aired on the Fox broadcast network (821,000). The adults 18-49 viewer number was 558,000. The match was the biggest ever men's soccer result for Fox Sports 1, topped only by Women's World Cup performances.

Univision, meanwhile, averaged 2 million total viewers (1.2 million viewers in the adults 18-49 age group) for the USA-Honduras match, which also was simulcast on the Univision Deportes cable network. Univision said that was the most-viewed USA match in the group stage of this tournament ever, regardless of language. The Panama-Haiti match that aired on Univision Deportes Network averaged 500,000 total viewers (296,000 in the demo), according to Univision.

For the full story go to Multichannel.com.

Kent Gibbons

Kent has been a journalist, writer and editor at Multichannel News since 1994 and with Broadcasting+Cable since 2010. He is a good point of contact for anything editorial at the publications and for Nexttv.com. Before joining Multichannel News he had been a newspaper reporter with publications including The Washington Times, The Poughkeepsie (N.Y.) Journal and North County News.