Women's sports : is the audience there?

Will 2025 go down in history as the year of women’s sport? Given the series of major events that were scheduled this summer, there is every reason to believe so. The programme included major sports like football, cycling and rugby, with prestigious events such as the UEFA Women’s Euro (from 2 to 27 July in Switzerland), the Tour de France Femmes (from 26 July to 3 August), and the Women’s Rugby World Cup (from 22 August to 27 September in England), all with promising French teams. However, a number of factors need to be taken into account when analysing the audience figures for such events, including the location of the host country and the possible impact of a time difference; the timing of broadcasts, with some slots and days more favourable than others; and how far French sportswomen progressed in the competitions. Other decisive factors include the range of sports on offer, particularly high-profile events or the prestige of the channel broadcasting them, as well as criteria inherent to each competition, such as the popularity of the sport and the athletes taking part. 

Please note: Since January 1, 2024, the scope of TV audience measurement in France has changed and now takes into account the audience of all French households, including those without a television set, and the audience on home Internet screens. 

For the football tournament – considered the king of sports in television – involving the great European nations, the matches broadcast on the TF1 and France Télévisions channels performed well at attracting audiences, recording an average of 1.5 million viewers aged 4 and over and with the entire event attracting a total of 36.1 million viewers. This performance therefore surpassed that of the 2017 UEFA Women’s Euro held in the Netherlands – a competition broadcast solely by France Télévisions at the time – but fell short of the 2022 tournament held in England, which was broadcast by the TF1 and Canal+ groups. “There is an upwards trend for this competition, despite the 2025 tournament recording lower audiences than the 2022 Euro,” confirms Alyssa Normant, senior researcher at Médiamétrie. She explains this decline “partly by the fact that the French team did not progress as far in the tournament”, noting in particular that “the highest scores of each Euro correspond to team’s last match in the competition.” With 4.9 million viewers, the French team’s defeat in the quarter-final against Germany last summer was watched by fewer people than their defeat three years earlier in the semi-final against the same team, which clocked up 6.2 million viewers. But it drew a larger audience than their loss to England in 2017. It has also become more popular amongst female viewers, with the proportion of women watching rising from 38% to 43% of the audience in 8 years.

2025 Women's Rugby World Cup 

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This figure is fairly similar to that observed at the Women’s Rugby World Cup, where 44% of the audience watching the matches were women. Above all, the 2025 Women’s RWC “set a record in terms of both average audience figures and coverage,” points out Alyssa Normant, “with it undoubtedly benefiting from the blossoming popularity of this sport in France today.” Even if the scores still lagged far behind those of the 2023 Men’s Rugby World Cup – for which 53.5 million viewers tuned in, with an average of 4.8 million and a peak of 16.5 million viewers for the France-South Africa match –, France’s women’s team attracted 3.1 million viewers on average, and 3.8 million when they lost to England, who eventually went on to lift the trophy. The event reached 34.6 million people, which is 2.5 times more than the 2017 Women’s World Cup in Ireland, and 3 times more than 3 years ago. “The low scores in 2022 can be explained by the night-time broadcasting schedule,” explains the researcher. “The host country was New Zealand, which meant a significant time difference for French broadcasts.”  

2025 WOMEN'S TOUR DE FRANCE 

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