WBC & Winter Paralympics Drive Record US Viewership for Fox & NBCUniversal

Venezuela’s stunning victory over the United States in the World Baseball Classic final on Tuesday drew a record average audience of 10.78 million viewers for Fox, marking the most-watched World Baseball Classic telecast in history.

The championship game, which saw Venezuela claim its first-ever WBC title with a 3-2 win, averaged 10.23 million viewers on the main Fox network, with an additional 550,000 tuning in on Fox Deportes, the network’s Spanish-language channel. The peak viewership reached 12.15 million during the game, according to Nielsen data.

The record-breaking audience significantly surpassed previous WBC viewership numbers. The semi-final matchup between the United States and the Dominican Republic, which averaged 7.37 million viewers on FS1, was easily eclipsed. The 2023 final, featuring the United States and Japan, averaged 4.97 million viewers across FS1 and Fox Deportes – less than half of this year’s final viewership.

The 2026 WBC final also drew a larger audience than the average viewership for the five-game 2023 Major League Baseball World Series, demonstrating the tournament’s growing appeal to American audiences.

Fox’s coverage of the entire tournament proved to be a major success, with five of the six largest audiences in WBC history occurring during this year’s event. The tournament averaged 1.29 million viewers across Fox’s network of channels, a 156 percent increase compared to the 2023 edition. This marks the most-watched World Baseball Classic ever on English-language networks.

The surge in viewership for the WBC comes as NBCUniversal also reported record numbers for the Milan-Cortina 2026 Paralympic Winter Games. The Games attracted 22.7 million total viewers across NBC, USA Network, and CNBC, a 90 percent increase from the 2022 Winter Paralympics in Beijing. Streaming viewership also saw a significant boost, with 99.4 million minutes streamed on digital platforms – five times the amount recorded during the Beijing Games.

Elsewhere in sports broadcasting, US men’s college basketball games averaged 433,000 viewers during the 2025/26 regular season, a 19 percent year-over-year increase. A Duke-Arkansas game on CBS drew 6.81 million viewers, the highest of the season. Women’s college basketball also saw a modest increase, averaging 238,000 viewers, with a South Carolina-LSU game on ABC attracting 1.7 million viewers. The final round of the Players Championship averaged 4.4 million viewers on NBC and Peacock, the highest final-round audience since 2021. France’s Six Nations win over England drew eight million viewers on France Televisions and 3.9 million on ITV in the UK. IndyCar’s inaugural Grand Prix of Arlington averaged 1.34 million viewers on Fox, helping the series maintain an average viewership of over one million for its first three races. NASCAR’s Cup Series race in Las Vegas, however, experienced an 8.6 percent decrease in viewership, averaging 2.77 million on FS1.