The dramatic match between the USA and Portugal captured the imagination of the entire country, and the overnight ratings back it up.
On Monday morning, ESPN announced that the match did a 9.1 overnight rating, the highest ever for a World Cup match on ESPN or ESPN2. That tops the 6.3 rating that the USA-Ghana match drew last week.
And on Monday afternoon, we found out the actual number of people that watched the match: 24.7 million. 18.2 million people watched the match on ESPN, breaking the all-time record set for an English language broadcast previously held by the 1999 Women's World Cup Final on ABC. To get to the 24.7 million number you must add in the 6.5 million who watched the match on Univision. Not even included in the 24.7 number is the more than one million people who watched the match on WatchESPN and the countless number of people who watched the game at bars or watch parties.
To put it in perspective, that's bigger than several major US sporting events (see list below).
