Less than a week in, the 2023 Women's World Cup has already set a handful of audience records, both on the ground in Australia and New Zealand and around the world.
FIFA announced that it has sold more than 1.5 million tickets to the event, which exceeds the governing body's target. This year's World Cup already surpassed the France-set 2019 edition for ticket sales in early June when FIFA said it sold more than one million tickets. The figure means that the World Cup is expected to be the most attended standalone women's sporting event ever.
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The 2023 event currently boasts an average attendance of 28,721 per match after 16 games, which marks a 54% increase from attendance figures 16 games into the 2019 tournament. The World Cup also set domestic attendance records for women's soccer on opening day, when 42,137 watched New Zealand win in Auckland and 75,784 saw Australia's victory in Sydney.
The hype in the host countries is being matched by fervor across the world as fans tune in to watch their home teams. The U.S. women's national team's win over Vietnam averaged more than six million viewers on Friday night with more than five million of those viewers tuning in on Fox, who saw a 99% increase compared to the two million-plus who tuned into the USWNT's 2019 opener against Thailand. Telemundo set its viewership record for a Women's World Cup group stage match with an audience around one million. The USWNT were up against Lionel Messi's Inter Miami in primetime as the World Cup winner made his debut,
Across the pond, viewership for England's win over Haiti peaked at 4.2 million. It beats the audience that tuned into the Lionesses' opening match of last year's Women's Euro, which the team eventually won.
In Australia, the co-hosts' opening day win against Ireland earned an average audience of almost two million on television. More than three times as many people watched that match as did the number of Australians who tuned into the Ashes at the same time.
The World Cup is projected to set more television records, both at home and abroad, as the tournament progresses.
