Trending

42 Million People Watched the USMNT Get its Ass Kicked by Belgium 

By Matt Schultz

Published: Jul 8th, 2026 · 11:50 AM EDT

---

A few days removed from Belgium whooping the USMNT 4-1 and ending its World Cup dreams, there are still plenty of questions left to be answered: How the hell did that happen? Did USA choke the game away, or were they merely outclassed by a better team, or was it both? Will the United States ever get over the hump and make the World Cup quarterfinals? Does the current roster have the bones of a foundation that can be built on, or is even that unrealistic? How can America close the talent gap? Is it possible, and if so, when the hell is it going to happen?

But with all these questions and more looming, there is one I hear all the time that I think we can finally put to bed: Will America ever really care about soccer? 

According to ratings from the USA-Belgium match, as reported by Dan Shanoff and Andrew Marchand for The Athletic, the answer is an emphatic yes. America just watched a whole lot of it:

Monday night’s 4-1 loss to Belgium drew an average of 30 million viewers on Fox, making it the most-watched soccer telecast in U.S. history. Telemundo reported 12 million viewers on its network, making it the most-watched USMNT game in U.S. Spanish-language TV history. The combined 40 million viewers — still not yet finalized by Nielsen to account for the full range of audience inputs — will likely eclipse any single-game U.S. sports broadcast this decade, other than the juggernaut that is the NFL.

The game’s audience Monday on Fox peaked with 36.895 million viewers in the window from 9:15-9:30 p.m. ET, presumably declining once the game’s outcome felt inevitable.

The Nielsen number will likely grow higher and combined with Telemundo will ultimately be near or surpass 40 million viewers.

These are some very high ratings, and they sound right to me. Anecdotally, everyone I know was all-in on this American team. It wasn’t just my diehard soccer buddies who wake up at 6 AM on Sundays to watch Premier League texting me about it. My non-soccer friends were talking soccer. My fiance was talking soccer. My fantasy baseball league group text (the league my dad’s been in since 1994 and I finally got the invite to join last year, filled with extremely non-soccer guys in their 50s) was talking soccer. For a good two weeks there, America was fully a soccer country, and it was a blast. 

It’s a shame USA’s World Cup run ended the way it did, but if we’re trying to find a bright side, I think that’s just it: The World Cup in America was a ratings juggernaut. It was a cultural moment. Millions of casuals like me watched and are now invested in this U.S. team. That doesn’t end here. I’m a soccer guy now. America is a soccer country now. That’s pretty good.