Mexico v England pulled huge numbers in the US

L

LucasOdds

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Jan 7, 2025
Those viewing figures are absolutely wild. A Mexico v England round of 16 tie pulling that kind of audience says a lot about how big the game was, especially with the Telemundo numbers on top of it.

It also feels like a reminder that the right fixture can drag in loads of casuals and neutrals, not just the usual hardcore crowd. Fox probably looked at those numbers and started sweating a bit, especially with all the complaints about their coverage.

Either way, it sounds like a proper event game and one of those nights that people were always going to talk about afterwards.
 
Jon Strong gets away with it way too much and I genuinely do not get why people still defend him because every time I watch Fox it feels like he is either talking over the game or missing the moment completely, Stu Holden is no better either, he sounds like he is reading off a script half the time and then the whole broadcast just feels flat, the crowd noise gets buried, the rhythm is off, the ad breaks kill it, and somehow they manage to make a massive match feel smaller than it is, which is honestly impressive in the worst possible way because this was a proper event and Fox still made it feel like a chore to sit through
 
The numbers make sense when you consider how big the fixture was. A match like that rewards a broadcaster that stays out of the way and lets the atmosphere breathe. Fox clearly did not help themselves with the coverage, though.
 
I get why people are talking about the ratings because they are ridiculous, but honestly the game itself had that kind of pull before any broadcaster got involved. Mexico and England in that setting was always going to feel huge and people were always going to tune in because it felt like one of those nights where something proper might happen, and then you add in the USA game afterwards and it just becomes appointment viewing, it really does. Still, Fox somehow managed to annoy everyone watching it, which is classic, and I swear every time they get a big match they find a new way to make it more irritating than it needs to be, the sound is weird, the pundits are annoying, and the whole thing just feels cheap and overproduced and now i am just rambling because it genuinely winds me up
 
The interesting part is how close the combined total gets to some of the biggest broadcast numbers in the country. That suggests football is still capable of producing genuinely massive mainstream audiences when the fixture is right. The challenge is keeping those viewers once they have sampled it.
 
Honestly this is exactly the sort of match that proves football can absolutely smash it in the US when the stars align because Mexico and England is just one of those fixtures that feels massive even before kick off and then the atmosphere and the stakes and the whole thing just snowball into this proper event that everyone wants to see and Fox still somehow finds a way to make it all feel slightly dead with the weird audio and the awful presentation and the endless ad breaks and the punditry that makes you want to mute it and I know people always say that about US broadcasts but it really is true because if you take away the drama of the actual game then what are you left with really just a bloated TV product that does not trust the sport to carry itself
 
People keep acting like the losing side in these numbers is the broadcaster, but the real story is that the match itself delivered and Mexico still dragged huge interest because they are massive in the US and England brought the kind of profile that gets casuals watching too, so even if the game ended up being lopsided or tense or whatever, it was never going to be some dead rubber nobody cared about, and I think that gets ignored whenever people start dunking on the broadcast, because yeah Fox is clunky and Telemundo is cleaner, but the audience was there for the occasion and for the teams and for the sense that it mattered, which is exactly what football needs more of in that market
 
The combined audience being around 45 million is staggering. That kind of number shows how much pull a major international fixture can still have in the US.
 
It is a reminder that the right matchup matters more than people think. Mexico v England had history, profile and tension, so the audience was always going to be huge, imo
 
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