By Johnny Askounis/ info@eurohoops.net
The FIBA Women’s World Cup 2026 in Berlin achieved unprecedented global impact by breaking all major metrics.
More details were shared on Thursday.
Per the press release: “The FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup 2026 in Berlin, Germany was the most successful edition in history after setting incredible new highs across all major metrics.
The competition perfectly highlighted the phenomenal global growth of the women’s game.
Fans turned out for the 2026 showpiece in unprecedented numbers and that made the most-attended Women’s World Cup of the modern era. A total of 236,015 fans attended, surpassing the 145,519 spectators recorded in 2022.
The tournament average attendance of 6,556 spectators per game was also a record.
These impressive figures were achieved despite the last edition in Sydney, Australia featuring 38 games, compared to 36 games in Berlin.
Broadcast growth
There was also exceptional broadcast coverage of the event.
In the USA, on TNT, the group-stage game between the USA and Italy was the most-watched women’s basketball game in TNT network history, with 1.3 million average viewers. Meanwhile, the final had an average audience of 1.2 million viewers, peaking at 1.5 million, despite clashing with the start of the NFL season and the US Open tennis final. Overall tournament coverage across the linear network and HBO Max reached an impressive 12.3 million viewers.
The extensive coverage of FIBA Women’s World Cup 2026 on TNT’s digital platforms such as Bleacher Report and House of Highlights was significant in raising awareness of the 2026 edition.
For the four semi-finalists, fans had the opportunity to watch the games across a wide range of broadcasters and formats, including free-to-air television, pay-per-view, streaming services with Courtside 1891 on DAZN and social media.
In France, an outstanding peak audience of 1.84 million tuned in to watch France take on the USA in the Final, with an average audience of 1.4 million for the game on TF1’s TMC channel. The games were also broadcast on beIN SPORTS.
In Spain, TVE’s broadcast of the thrilling Semi-Final between Spain and the USA reached almost 1.3 million viewers across linear and digital services. Many more viewers watched Movistar’s coverage of the Final weekend as Spain claimed third place.
In the host country, ProSieben’s broadcasts of Germany’s Semi-Final and the Third-Place game each reached more than a million people, supplemented by significant audiences tuning in on Magenta.
The four games across the Final weekend reached a combined audience of almost 800,000 across Magenta’s platforms.
The highest live audience of the competition was recorded on China’s CCTV-5, when an average of 14.1 million viewers watched China’s group-phase game against Czechia.
Social Media records
The FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup 2026 was a runaway success, smashing attendance and engagement records. The extraordinary global growth of the women’s game was perfectly highlighted by a record-breaking edition of the flagship tournament.
Records were set across all aspects of social media compared with 2022, not least as the competition surpassed 3.3 billion overall impressions. This represented an increase of 175%, with the total almost tripling compared with the previous edition.
Engagement increased nearly fourfold compared with Sydney 2022, reaching 60 million, while video views also soared to 1.4 billion, an increase of 195%.
Follower growth was another reason to celebrate, with numbers increasing sixfold compared with 2022. The event now has an audience of close to 900,000. During the 2026 edition alone, the event gained 400,000 new followers across its various social media channels.
One of the most fascinating outcomes was that the FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup Instagram account has grown to become the largest across FIBA’s women’s social media landscape. It now has 222,000 followers, half of whom are female – a very rare achievement in the sports business industry.
Official website records
Engagement levels across the tournament’s official website were also striking.
Website traffic more than tripled compared with 2022, with sessions reaching 4.9 million.
Page views topped 20 million, a staggering seven times higher than in 2022. With page views growing even faster than sessions, this reflects how visitors are browsing more deeply and consuming more content during each visit than they did previously.
This was underscored by a near six-fold increase in editorial page views, which surpassed 1.85 million. Fans had access to more content on the website than ever before, with the number of editorial pieces published doubling compared with four years ago.”
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