The thrilling final day of the 2011-12 English Premier League season on May 13 attracted a total audience of 1.348 million viewers in the United States.
The US audience for the final round of fixtures, which saw Manchester City deny rival United the championship with two goals in stoppage time, represented a 72-per-cent increase on the total audience for the final day of the 2010-11 campaign, when the title race had already been decided.
US fans of the Premier League were offered unprecedented coverage of the final round, with nine of the 10 scheduled games being broadcast live simultaneously across the Fox network’s cable-television channels and digital services. However, pay-television broadcaster ESPN, through a sublicensing agreement with Fox, attracted the largest audience of the day for its live coverage of Manchester City’s 3-2 win against Queens Park Rangers. An average of 600,000 viewers watched the match on ESPN2, and coverage on the Spanish-language channel ESPN Deportes attracted an average of 189,000, according to audience measurement company Nielsen Media Research. The combined peak audience for the match was 987,000 for the final few minutes.
Manchester United’s ultimately fruitless 1-0 win at Sunderland was watched by an average of 161,000 on Fox’s FX channel and 167,000 on the network’s Spanish-language Fox Deportes channel. The combined audience across the two channels peaked at 214,000 for the closing stages of the game.
Across all Fox and ESPN channels, the average cumulative audience for all of the games was 992,000 on the English-language channels and 356,000 on the Spanish-language channels.
There were also 420,000 unique visitors to the Fox Soccer website on the final day – up from 111,000 on the final day of the 2010-11 campaign and an average of 173,000 on Sundays during the 2011-12 season. The website streamed live coverage of Everton’s 3-1 win over Newcastle United.