Women's World Cup

Attendance numbers for USA 1999 set new marks.

10 Biggest Crowds for Women's Soccer (as of Jul 10, 1999)
Attendance	Opponents	Site	Match	Date
90,185	USA-China	Pasadena, Calif.	World Cup	Jul 10, 1999
78,972	USA-Denmark Brazil-Mexico	East Rutherford, N.J.	World Cup	Jun 19, 1999
76,489	USA-China	Athens, Ga.	Olympics	Aug 1, 1996
73,123	USA-Brazil	Palo Alto, Calif.	World Cup	Jul 4, 1999
65,080	USA-Nigeria Brazil-Italy	Chicago, Ill.	World Cup	Jun 24, 1999
65,000	USA-China	Guangzhou, China	World Cup	Nov 30, 1991
64,196	USA-Norway	Athens, Ga.	Olympics	Jul 28, 1996
54,642	USA-Germany Brazil-Nigeria	Landover, Md.	World Cup	Jul 1, 1999
50,484	USA-North Korea Italy-Mexico	Foxborough, Mass.	World Cup	Jun 27, 1999
46,724	China-Sweden	Miami, Fla.	Olympics	Jul 21, 1996

The grand finale with an attendance figure of 90,185 is the largest crowd ever, across all sports, to watch a women's sporting event and the most-watched soccer game in U.S. television history.

The preliminary national ratings for the United States-China penalty kick decision was a 11.4 with a 31 share. The rating is the percentage of TV households in the United States tuned to a program, and each point represents 994,000 homes.

An estimated 11,300,000 homes and 40,000,000 viewers watched the U.S. women become the first host nation to win the Women's World Cup. As a comparison, those numbers are 20 per cent higher than the numbers of viewers that watched the men's World Cup final between Italy and Brazil, also hosted in the United States, in 1994.

The U.S. men in participation in three games in the 1998 World Cup did not approach the U.S. women's appeal this year. Certainly, the men's lack of success on the field and the venue of the tournament as France instead of the U.S. impacted those results.