Fox Sports delivery of Women’s Euro 2025 scores in the USA

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“If you build it, they will come.”  The line has become such a mainstream part of popular culture in this country, it’s almost cliché. 

In the 1989 film Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner’s character Ray Kinsella hears a voice that utters those words, and it leads him to build a baseball field in an Iowa cornfield. 

It is the line I think of as I watch major networks and other media outlets commit resources, talent, promotion, airtime, words, audio, video to their presentation of women’s sports. 

Occasionally the resources and the resulting audience kind of sneak up on you. Such is the case with the UEFA 2025 Women’s Euros on Fox. The network committed a considerable amount of airtime on its linear over-the-air channel, which aired the final and all games from the quarterfinals forward plus a dozen group games. The rest aired on FS1. 

Last week’s semifinals, England’s come-from-behind shootout win over Italy and Spain’s overtime win over Germany, drew a total of about 1.5 million viewers — almost triple the number of people who watched the women’s Euro 2022 semifinals, which aired on ESPN2.

Women’s Euro 2025 on Fox (semifinals)
England 2–1 Italy (Tuesday afternoon)
👥 793,000 average viewers
🔺 Up +178% from 2022 (285,000)
⏱️ Peak: 1,072,000 viewers (5:15–5:30 pm ET)
Spain 1–0 Germany (Wednesday afternoon)
👥 782,000 average viewers
🔺 Up +174% from 2022 (285,000)
⏱️ Peak: 1,032,000 viewers (5:15–5:30 pm ET)

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The group-stage games, according to Fox, drew more than 300,000 viewers on average, which is almost twice the audience numbers from 2022. Germany’s quarterfinal win over France drew 925,000 viewers.

Early this week, we should get the viewership numbers for the final, and will pass them along. England beat Spain with a 3-1 penalty-kick shootout, after they played to a 1-1 tie through 120 minutes. The game kicked off at about 12 noon ET, an attractive start time for a summer Sunday. 

Fox not only made the tournament available to more households with broadcasts on its flagship over-the-air channel, it made it look and feel big-time. Fox promoted it. It put talent in the studio and in the announce booth. 

It too was a great opportunity to help Fox promote next summer’s men’s FIFA World Cup in the USA, Canada and Mexico. In some respects, it must be bittersweet for Fox. Netflix swooped in and grabbed the next two FIFA Women’s World Cup tournaments, in 2027 and 2031. The media rights for the 2030 FIFA Men’s World Cup in Spain, Portugal and Morocco have not yet been announced.

Sure, it would have been nice to have some of the Fox announcers on site. Sure, it would have been good to have some of the studio talent on site. With the exception of a few people in Switzerland, most of the work was done from the Fox studios in Los Angeles, including all the live game announcing.

(A quick reminder here that the 2015 Women’s World Cup final – the USA’s win over Japan in Canada — remains the most-watched soccer match in American television history, with an average viewership that day of nearly 27 million people.) 

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It would have been a 20^th-century (or first 15-20 years of the 21^st century) decision to put your quote-un-quote ‘No. 1’ soccer team of John Strong and Stuart Holden on Sunday’s final. They have done many of the men’s high-profile games on Fox for a number of years. JP Dellacamera and Aly Wagner called the Women’s World Cup final in 2023. 

At Euro 2025, Jacqui Oatley and Lori Lindsey did more games than other announce teams, including three of the four quarters and both semis. They called the final. A good choice by Fox, which has considerable depth in announcers (Strong, Holden, Dellacamera, Oatley, Lindsey and many more). They can create any combination of those announcers and offer a highly professional presentation.

Big questions going forward. Does Netflix pick off much of Fox’s talent for the next two women’s World Cup tournaments? Almost certainly. And who pays the hefty price tag to get the media rights for the 2030 men’s World Cup?

Implied in that question is whether ESPN has the resources remaining – after paying for the NFL and the NBA – to invest in a sport that, while not on the same scale as those two major leagues, is regularly getting bigger pieces of the television pie.   

Sometimes, that piece of the pie shows up on your plate when you least expect it. 

In 2025, it came from the women in Europe — in a summer when a whole bunch of men’s games dominated the American soccer conversation. 

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