These are really interesting figures, the most notable being that the Ireland v New Zealand game drew an audience close to what the Toy Show would on any given year.
It's a particularly key time for brands, venues, sponsors and, perhaps most importantly, clubs to consider how to maximise medium-to-long term engagement from a new captive audience to rugby union.
Grassroots participation is the foundation of any sport; the performances of Joe Schmidt and Andy Farrell's Ireland teams in recent years, despite giving up a sizeable deficit to some bigger, better-resourced nations, has been a huge success story, but to actually win a World Cup we perhaps still have a road to travel there. For reference, Ireland has less than a quarter of the number of registered players that World Champions South Africa can call on, and barely a third of the number of clubs that exist in New Zealand.
For simple population (SA) and 'national sport' (NZ) reasons, those are of course numbers we will never fully match, but it will be very interesting to analyse in the coming months and years if the disparity between viewership figures and participation numbers in rugby union in this country has been closed.
Record Breaking Results as VMTV celebrates its largest ever audience in its 25 years of broadcasting 🎉
#rwc2023 #recordbreaking #tvbroadcaster