USA’s victory over Japan in the Women’s World Cup title game has crushed the US ratings record for soccer

Nielsen estimates that Fox Sports averaged 25.4 million viewers for the lopsided 5-2 result, which gave the US its third Women’s World Cup championship. Viewership peaked with about 31 million from 8:30-8:45 p.m. ET.

The 25.4 million tune-in was a huge 88% higher than that for ESPN’s coverage of the same women’s teams in the 2011 title game (13.5 million) and 41% higher than the United States-China women’s championship game on ESPN in 1999 (18 million) — the two other times the US reached the final. It also shatters the previous English-language viewership record for soccer in the United States, set last year when 18.2 million watched the US-Portugal contest on ESPN in the group-play round of the Men’s World Cup. Add in the roughly 1.3 million watching on Telemundo — the largest-ever audience for a women’s soccer match on a Spanish-language network — and the match attracted 26.7 million viewers in the States.

By comparison, the recent NBA Finals on ABC peaked with 23.25 million viewers for its sixth and final game. And no NBA game has drawn a larger audience since 2010. Similarly, no Major League Baseball game has drawn more viewers since the 2004 World Series. Excluding the NFL postseason, the only higher-rated sporting events in the US in 2015 were the three games of the College Football Championship on ESPN (33.25 million for Ohio State-Oregon in the title game and more than 28 million for two semifinal games) and the men’s college basketball title game on CBS in April between Duke and Wisconsin (28.26 million).