While we Canadians may have trouble with penalty shootouts in our beloved hockey games, we apparently don’t have the same issues with soccer games. According to the numbers, four million people watched as Fabio Grosso scored the game winning penalty kick to give Italy its fourth World Cup title – the largest Canadian audience ever for a World Cup match. CTV, which aired the game, reported a national average of 2.84 million viewers which was also a record high for the event and a 98% increase in viewership of the World Cup since 2002 when CBC carried the event.
TSN and Sportsnet also benefited from high audience numbers helped in part because all 64 finals matches were broadcast live and in HD. TSN raked in over a million and a half viewers for England’s quarter-final loss to Portugal while Sportsnet scored a slightly smaller audience high during the Germany-Italy semi-final match of 1.180 million viewers.
For a list of the top 30 TV shows for the week of July 3-9, 2006, according to BBM, please click the links below:
