When Optus Sport bought the TV rights to the 2023 Women’s World Cup in 2021 for a mere $8million USD from FIFA, Clive Dickens from Optus made this comment about Optus picking up the rights to several major women’s football events, which has gone on to age better than Sir Patrick Stewart:

“Everybody’s asleep at the wheel, because they see this as a men’s-dominated game.”

Fast forward 2 years to last night’s Australia vs Denmark match, and what do you know, we get this:

The round of 16 victory over Denmark on Monday night in Sydney set a program record for the largest television audience for 2023 for free-to-air broadcaster Channel Seven.

The event drew an audience of 2.294 million people in major cities, eclipsing the popular rugby league State of Origin Game One on Channel Nine.

The 384,000 viewers on Channel Seven’s streaming service 7plus also set a record for an individual event on the platform.

Across free-to-air television and streaming platform 7plus, 6.54 million tuned in. The average audience was 3.56 million.

As far I’ve seen, the Monday night viewership didn’t include the Optus Sport figures, which still haven’t been released, so we can only summise the average viewership could be touching 4 million.

Still, to be the No.1 rated program of the year is a heck of an achievement, considering Monday night has long been a dead spot for sports broadcasting in this country, let alone 8:30 on a Monday night in winter, but it goes to prove that a football World Cup is a football World Cup, no matter what gender.

Now, for a comparison in the field of women’s sport, the only broadcast of an Australian women’s sporting event that can credibly match Australia vs Denmark is Ash Barty’s Australian Open final victory in January of last year, which OzTAM data states was viewed by 3.6 million viewers nationwide on Channel Nine, with 2.83 million in the 5 metro areas, peaking at 4.3 million, with an additional 241,000 viewers watching on 9Now….

Although, if you want even more context to that, if you combined the peak viewing figures of both Australia vs Denmark and the Barty vs Collins Australian Open Final….

You’d still fall short of the viewing figures for Cathy Freeman’s 400 metre final in 2000.

If the scribes are to be believed, that 400 metre final peaked at 8.8 million viewers.