⚽ Football vs. football 🏈

Between a top-spot finish in the group stage, a sweeping performance against Bosnia and Herzegovina in the round of 32, and the president’s controversial intervention, last Monday evening’s USMNT game against Belgium had, to put it lightly, shaped up into a box-office clash.

• And though the US players’ performance on the pitch might not have lived up to the high drama off it, American soccer fans certainly showed up. 

• According to early estimates, the 4-1 defeat against Belgium was the most watched soccer telecast in US history, hauling some 40 million viewers on average across the coverage on Fox and Telemundo.

• That may be a record tally in the US for the sport that much of the world calls some variant of “football” — besting the 36.2 million who tuned in to watch the team’s previous knockout match — but it’s still peanuts in comparison to the sport that shares the same name in the States.

By comparison, this year’s Super Bowl has 126 million viewers, a sign that while the rest of the world loves football more than football, in the United States it’s clearly football that is more popular than football. 

The Takeaway

Still, it’s not like Fox is crying about it. Those hydration breaks are paying off, big time. Sportico projected that the company made $200 million in bonus sales during the group phase alone and is on pace to make $450 million just from the ads in the hydration break. That’ll make back much of the money that it paid for the rights to broadcast the tournament, $485 million, before accounting for a dime of the money they make from the ads that would normally play during your typical soccer game. Room to grow in the US, sure, but plenty successful already.

This week we’ll see the big finish to the World Cup, but soon enough we’ll be gearing up for training camp for the other football too. With tennis, baseball, racing, and more continuing all summer long and the NFL just around the corner, if you’re trying to make sense of the sports world, keep track of your event contract investments, and get brilliant insights into the data behind the score, you should subscribe to Snacks’ Scoreboard newsletter. 

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• Streaming wars heat up: Amid signs of declining subscriber engagement, Netflix is exploring adding live channels and bundling other subscription-based streaming services, including NBCUniversal’s Peacock, into its offering. To better compete with YouTube, Disney is exploring adding a free tier to its Disney+ subscription. 

• Housing affordability: The bipartisan housing affordability bill became law on Friday without President Trump’s signature. The law aims to make homeownership more affordable, primarily by boosting supply and encouraging homebuilding, as housing has become increasingly expensive with median prices for existing US homes rising to $440,600 in June, the highest on record. However, younger Americans are increasingly skeptical of homeownership as a tool to build wealth, as less than a quarter of Americans aged 18 to 39 say buying a home is a very good investment, compared with 38% of those over 60 years old, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center.

• 📊 Election: In a gambit that may be backfiring, British populist Nigel Farage announced he’d resign from Parliament to trigger a special election that he will compete in, claiming that his constituents rather than his peers should be the judge of allegations regarding his personal finances. It’s backfiring because his only competition appears to be a novelty candidate who wears a garbage can on his head and calls himself Count Binface, meaning that the election has become a bit of a sideshow. Markets price in a 40% chance Count Binface clears a quarter of the vote. 

• 🎵 Halftime: Shakira, Madonna, and BTS are helming the World Cup Final’s halftime show, and there’s still rampant speculation about who’s going to make an appearance. Markets think there’s a 22% chance that Sabrina Carpenter shows up, a 10% chance that Bad Bunny makes an appearance the same year as his Super Bowl halftime show, and a 6% shot that Drake performs. 

*Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC - probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.