French free-to-air broadcaster M6 Group has announced high viewership for its coverage in France of the Africa Cup of Nations final, which Senegal won in dramatic fashion.
M6, which aired the match via a sublicensing deal with the tournament’s French rightsholder, pay-TV broadcaster BeIN Sports, said the final was watched by 3.4 million viewers – the highest figure for the competition in 18 years.
Go deeper with GlobalData
Discover B2B Marketing That Performs
Combine business intelligence and editorial excellence to reach engaged professionals across 36 leading media platforms.
The game was full of drama, with a missed penalty by Morocco’s Brahim Diaz coming after a 16-minute delay caused by Senegal’s players walking off in protest at the penalty being awarded to the host nation.
Morocco then conceded in extra time, with Pape Gueye scoring the winning goal.
The previous 2023 edition drew 793,000 viewers on W9, M6’s sister channel. By comparison, the Euro 2024 final between Spain and England attracted 7.7 million viewers in July 2024 on M6.
BeIN, meanwhile, said an average of 595,000 viewers tuned in to watch Sunday night’s match, with audience figures peaking at 756,000.
US Tariffs are shifting - will you react or anticipate?
Don’t let policy changes catch you off guard. Stay proactive with real-time data and expert analysis.
By GlobalDataBeIN has held the rights to AFCON since the 2008 edition, and regularly sublicenses final coverage, announcing French broadcaster M6 Group as its sub-licensing partner for the final.
The high viewership for the final comes after BeIN saw a record average audience of 698,000 (peaking at 858,000) during the semi-final match between Morocco and Nigeria – the highest audience for an AFCON match on the network.
Other notable matches that drew high viewership numbers for BeIN include Morocco’s quarter-final 2-0 defeat of Cameroon, which saw a peak audience of 784,000, while the second quarter-final between Nigeria and Algeria peaked at 708,000.
BeIN’s clip coverage of the tournament via social media and website also recorded a high figure with more than 800 million video views throughout the tournament – a 150% increase on the previous edition.
Elsewhere, a peak audience of 1.7 million viewers tuned into UK commercial broadcaster Channel 4’s coverage, with the game attracting more than 700,000 views on streaming platform E4.
Channel 4’s coverage of the tournament was spread across its main linear channel, the E4 and 4Seven channels, Channel 4 Streaming, and its Channel 4 Sport YouTube channel.
The channel won exclusive rights to air all 52 matches during the tournament, with its coverage produced by international sports marketing heavyweight IMG, the CAF governing body’s international media rights and sponsorship agency.
It was the first time the entire tournament was available free-to-air in the UK, with the last edition in 2023 aired by UK pay-TV heavyweight Sky Sports alongside public-service broadcaster, the BBC.
In Italy, the match recorded an average audience of 903,132 viewers between 8pm and 11pm on digital terrestrial channel Sportitalia, with audience numbers peaking just before 11am, coinciding with the late-stage drama and the Senegal players walking off.
Sportitalia’s rights to this year’s AFCON are part of its two-year deal with CAF, covering the 2023 and 2025 editions.
The viewership numbers come as AFCON continues to find a permanent slot on the international calendar, having been moved around to accommodate other FIFA-backed tournaments.
The 2025 AFCON was originally scheduled for mid-2025 but was pushed back six months due to a clash with the first edition of the expanded 32-team FIFA Club World Cup in the US, with FIFA prioritizing the new version as a commercially lucrative opportunity ahead of the country co-hosting the 2026 World Cup.
Morocco became a replacement host for this year’s edition, with the tournament originally given to Guinea before it was stripped of the rights in 2022 over serious concerns around security and infrastructure.
The 2027 edition of the biennial AFCON, meanwhile, is currently scheduled to take place across Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.
