The 20 best-watched events of 2009: football, NFL, F1 . . . and badminton

By Nick Harris

31 January 2010

A new report detailing the most-watched sports events in the world on live TV in 2009 shows the Champions League final has overtaken the Super Bowl for the first time. They were No1 and No2 in the top 20, with the Bahrain F1 Grand Prix a distant third, then the men's 100m final from the athletics world championships, then the Wimbledon final between Roger Federer and Andy Roddick. The importance of Asia is highlighted by big numbers for sports including international baseball, and badminton. The list's compilers, Futures Sport + Entertainment, take data from 55 of the biggest and most economically significant TV markets, which together account for 90 per cent of the global audience. The average audience figures cited below are the number of people watching an event in its entirety, live, at home on TV, while the reach is the number of people watching part of the event live.

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For more information about the report’s authors and their work, their website is here.