UEFA Champions League PSG Credit: CBS

Despite featuring two high-profile clubs, this year’s UEFA Champions League Final failed to capture the American audience.

Saturday’s match between Ligue 1’s Paris Saint-Germain and Serie A’s Inter Milan averaged just 2.04 million viewers on CBS, the lowest audience the network has had for the event since it started airing Champions League in 2021, per Austin Karp of Sports Business Journal. The audience was down 12% from last year’s Real Madrid-Borussia Dortmund match, which was the most-viewed stateside since 2011. CBS, however, stayed above the two-million-viewer threshold for the fifth consecutive season.

It should be noted that this was the first Champions League Final on CBS that included Nielsen’s expanded out-of-home measurements. All things being equal, Saturday’s game might have ended up below the two-million-viewer mark.

No doubt, the blowout nature of the match likely contributed to the poor showing. PSG took a 2-0 lead into halftime and blew it open in the second half, eventually winning by a scoreline of 5-0.

Looking at the big picture of the Champions League for CBS, it seems the network had a good year overall. According to Karp, “Paramount+ had its best streaming audience yet” for the whole tournament, although no exact data was provided.

Without knowing the exact figures, it’s challenging to see the success of the Champions League as a property for CBS. However, given that most games throughout the tournament are broadcast exclusively on Paramount+, it is likely a significant subscription driver for the streamer among fans of European club soccer. And given CBS’s investments in global soccer more generally with products like the CBS Sports Golazo Network, the Champions League is certainly core to the network’s greater live sports strategy.

About Drew Lerner

Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.