It’s been surprising how much the men’s World Cup has been a boon to woso. Anecdotally, the effect seems large enough to have even reached my little corner of the internet, as traffic seems up on !nwsl@lemmy.world since the end of the tournament
On Instagram we saw almost 300% growth compared to prior years in our monthly average this summer around the men's World Cup and similarly 100% growth on YouTube, two priority platforms for us for the future of fandom," Berman said. "We had almost 40 million social impressions over the course of the campaign during the Summer of Soccer tour on NWSL channels with the hashtag #NWSLonTour. We had some record attendance that I'd like to share. The average match has drawn 11,174 fans year to date. It's the second-highest average attendance in league history with half of our season left to play, and that's behind only 2024, where we had 11,249 so we're we're close to beating that and we hope we'll have a strong second half of the season where we can celebrate this being our highest attended year on an average basis … From a viewership perspective, the NWSL came out of the break directly into the World Cup knockout rounds, which posed both an opportunity and some challenges. We're really proud that week 13 – which was, again, our first week back – was the No. 1 linear week of 2026."