Some 128 million viewers tuned into Fox’s FIFA World Cup coverage this summer, a coup that boosted the broadcaster’s revenue 28% to $4.2 billion in its latest quarterly earnings. And yet, the tournament’s draw hasn’t prompted a headlong rush to funnel ad spend toward streaming and broadcast coverage of club soccer.
“It’s been steady for a couple of years; I don’t think there’s a huge uptick in soccer spending,” said Jim McNamara, svp of national video investment at media agency Canvas.
So far, English Premier League ad inventory continues to sell well, but demand is steady, rather than intense. “We have not seen or experienced any increased demand or inquiries,” said one holding company media buyer, who exchanged anonymity for candor.
Though the U.S.’ Major League Soccer (MLS) boasts Lionel Messi, many of the soccer stars that lit up the World Cup stage ply their regular trade in the English league. That should add momentum to its rising popularity in the U.S. NBC’s coverage of the 2025-26 season was the most-watched season in the U.S. to date, with each match gaining 535,000 viewers on average and April’s Arsenal-Manchester City matchup garnering 2.6 million viewers across NBC, Peacock and Telemundo, according to Nielsen Big Data + Panel.
“Interest is high,” said Marty Blich, executive director, head of U.S. sports investment & partnership at WPP Media.
But although English soccer’s top flight might be the world’s most popular, it’s by no means the only way for brands to reach soccer fans in the U.S. Come autumn, the Champions League will return — providing a better opportunity to watch World Cup luminaries going head-to-head with peers, rather than league minnows like Charlton Athletic — and offer another avenue for advertisers to reach fans. Next year’s FIFA Women’s World Cup, hosted in Brazil and streamed for U.S. viewers on Netflix, also looms.
And media buyers and marketers caution that the World Cup’s appeal among American audiences won’t transfer wholesale to the twisty storylines and smaller stakes of the Premier League, coverage of which typically lands early in the day for U.S. viewers due to the Atlantic time difference.
Domestic leagues offer convoluted plotlines and slow-burning dramas that play out in derby games whose significance requires a lifelong fandom or an acquired knowledge of English regional identities to comprehend. Clashes between Leeds and Chelsea (set for November) mean a great deal to native fans, but have less surface appeal to the passing viewer.
There are other considerations. Because the coverage falls over two calendar years, ad space against the 2026-27 Premier League season was available to advertisers at last year’s TV upfronts as well as the upfronts that just wrapped. Brands inspired by the response to the World Cup to buy up soccer inventory only had a “finite” amount to pursue, Blich noted.
That variety of options, as well as the broader toolset of digital channels available to advertisers, explains why brands don’t seem to be going hell for leather on the League.
“In my opinion we will need more time to unpack the true impact the 2026 World Cup will have on the marketplace and potential influence on brands across the vast and complex soccer landscape,” the first holdco buyer concluded.
To be sure, marketers aren’t steering away from the Premier League, which kicked off the 2026-27 season last Friday. “My understanding is they’ve had very healthy sales… I haven’t seen any lack of growth,” said another holding company media buyer, who asked to remain anonymous, citing client confidentiality.
B2B SaaS company Rippling, for example, included NBC and Peacock’s coverage of the League in a campaign it’s currently running to promote its software to executive buyers, per head of growth Neel Murthy.
“It’s a good way to get higher-income folks who tend to fall into this executive buying audience,” he said. According to Murthy, the decision to buy Premier League ad time was driven by his estimation that the sport attracts affluent viewers likely to work for companies that operate internationally.
“The Premier League straddles both of those,” he said. As such, it’s skipping a similar spend on MLS. “We also have buys [against] the NFL, MLB, WNBA, PGA. A lot of that covers the MLS audience,” he noted.
Similarly, McNamara noted that Canvas client, automaker Genesis, was set to run ads against AppleTV’s coverage of the MLS, following the inference that subscribers to the premium streaming service likely had higher incomes.
The size of MLS and Premier League fandoms in the U.S. is about equal, according to research published by Horizon Sport & Experiences and survey firm Certeza Global. The agency estimated that 45.9 million Americans consider themselves fans of a club in each league. But U.S. Premier League fans skew older, and typically enjoy a higher average household income ($91,000), than MLS followers.
“As much as they’re both soccer or football products, they’re two completely different assets,” said Kerry Bradley, svp at Horizon Sports & Experiences.
The EPL offers “scale and prestige and a more mature audience,” while MLS coverage can provide brands “a local buy that has proximity and a growth story,” she noted.
When brands are choosing to run ads against EPL coverage, they’re not necessarily deciding to run soccer-wide campaigns in the same way that brands like State Farm, for example, spread themselves out across both college football and NFL coverage.
Advertisers chasing fans more interested in the accessible international form of the game, meanwhile, don’t need to wait another four years. According to McNamara, Netflix is still offering Women’s World Cup packages, meaning some brands might be keeping their powder dry for a tournament that’s likelier to pull in an audience of American households than a wintry clash under the floodlights at St James’ Park.
“That’s certainly cutting into [budgets] for people that might have been buying Premier League this year,” he said.
What we’ve heard
“Many big tech partners have grown big audiences off of publishers, and there has been very little reciprocation. This is such a tremendous opportunity for it to be truly a reciprocal relationship.”
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Numbers to know
12.97 billion: The number of hours users spent watching YouTube Live, the most-viewed streaming platform, according to Streamlabs
97%: The proportion of the 20,000 most-visited websites on the internet without dedicated markdown support for AI agents or LLM readers, per AI visibility firm BrightEdge
74%: The percentage of workers worried they might be becoming too dependent on AI tools, per a survey published by agency group Acceleration
18%: The proportion of AI citations generated by Google’s AI Overviews that linked back to a social platform, according to research by Tinuiti. 13% of ChatGPT citations came from social, versus just 10% of Perplexity’s
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