Throughout her long playing career with the United States Women’s National Team, soccer star Megan Rapinoe has been a huge advocate for many social causes, publically supporting the LGBTQ community and even kneeling for the national anthem just after Colin Kaepernick began his protest. So she’s used to dealing with haters, and she had a message for them last week.
Last week’s match between the USWNT and the Netherlands set a new record for the most-watched group stage match in FIFA Women’s World Cup history with an average of 6.429 million viewers. It was a pretty brutal blow for anyone who continues to baselessly insist that nobody watches women’s sports, and Megan Rapinoe took to her Instagram story to point that out.
“Welp. We been told everyone,” Rapinoe wrote on her Instagram story last week, according to The Spun.
It’s worth noting that the viewership numbers aren’t just impressive compared to other women’s soccer matches, they’re impressive compared to men’s sports, too. As NHL Zone pointed out on Twitter, you have to go back over four years to find an NHL hockey game with higher ratings than the USWNT vs. the Netherlands match.
“You would have to go back to Game 6 of the 2019 Stanley Cup Final (Bruins-Blues) to get an NHL TV # higher than this,” NHL Zone wrote on Twitter.
It’s clear that the USWNT has a lot of attention.
[The Spun]
