HDSportsGuide.com has published the first stage of the World Cup Television schedule. As far as the United States National Team coverage goes, the first and third will be on ESPN, while the second game (versus Italy) will be on ABC. It's nice to see the team get some network coverage.
All 64 games will be on TV in the United States and available in HD. ABC will air 12 games, ESPN will air 21 games, and ESPN2 will air 31 games.
How are ratings for the World Cup versus other traditional American sports?
Some stats from
Deseret Morning News:
WC2002:Four years ago, it was telecast in 213 countries, which carried a total of 41,100 hours of programming. The cumulative audience over the 25 match days was 28.8 billion viewers.
(That, of course, is several times the population of the Earth. So it counted a viewer each time he or she watched a match — and, obviously, many viewers watched two or more matches.)
The viewership for the World Cup final was pegged at 1.3 billion.
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ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC's coverage of the 2002 Cup averaged fewer than half a million viewers per game, with a high of 3.77 million for the USA-Germany match.
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The 2002 USA-Mexico game attracted 2.94 million viewers on ESPN and 4.2 million on Univision.
Super Bowl XL (2006) (often billed as the most watched sporting event in the world by the American-centric media):According to A.C. Nielsen, 90.7 million American viewers watched the game. Estimates of the worldwide audience range between 750 million and 1 billion (although the latter figure tends to be phrased in terms up "up to a billion viewers").
NCAA:[L]ast week's NCAA men's basketball tournament games reached the low eight figures, at most, for individual games and a couple dozen million cumulatively. Last year's championship game was seen by 45.6 million viewers in the United States.
(And there's not a big market for the games in other countries.)