RT\u00c9 has secured the exclusive Irish free-to-air rights to the 2030 FIFA World Cup, which will be hosted across Spain, Portugal and Morocco with three centenary games to be held in South America.<\/p>\n
The announcement comes following the success of RT\u00c9’s coverage across television, streaming, radio and digital platforms for the 2026 tournament that culminated in Spain’s 1-0 win over Argentina in Sunday’s final.<\/p>\n
The game generated over 1.4 million streams on RT\u00c9 Player, making it the most-streamed single event in the platform’s history.<\/p>\n
Across the tournament as a whole, audiences generated 23.4 million streams, an increase of almost 15 million streams and nearly three times the audience achieved during the 2022 FIFA World Cup, which recorded 8.5 million streams.<\/p>\n
The top-performing matches of the tournament were Spain v Argentina (average audience of 1 million, 65% share on RT\u00c92, and 1.4 million streams on RT\u00c9 Player), England v Argentina (average audience 949k, 60% share on RT\u00c92, and 1 million streams on RT\u00c9 Player) France v Spain (average audience of 873k, 61% share on RT\u00c92, and 1 million streams on RT\u00c9 Player) and England v Norway (average audience of 787k, 72% share on RT\u00c92, and 1 million streams on RT\u00c9 Player).<\/p>\n
Throughout the tournament on RT\u00c9 Sport Online and on RT\u00c9 Sport social channels, there were 91 million video views across all social platforms to date. This includes over 6.8 million views of highlights and analysis on the RT\u00c9 Sport YouTube channel.<\/p>\n
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With so many kick-offs late at night and in the early hours of the morning, highlights of the tournament generated 1.6m streams on RT\u00c9 Player, while other FIFA World Cup content including unseen moments, clips and Up All Night added 345,000 additional streams on the platform.<\/p>\n
Kevin Bakhurst, Director General, RT\u00c9 said: “We are delighted that RT\u00c9 has been successful in securing rights to the 2030 FIFA World Cup for Irish audiences after what has been a very successful 2026 World Cup with record numbers of people enjoying RT\u00c9’s coverage.<\/p>\n
“The huge number of streams on RT\u00c9 Player throughout the tournament has been one of our big success stories this year and has highlighted the value of our investment in the service in recent years.<\/p>\n
“We look forward to bringing the next FIFA World Cup to Irish audiences, including the Republic of Ireland’s qualification campaign which we hope will be successful.<\/p>\n
“Live sport – free to air – continues to provide national moments and conversations – enjoyment and entertainment to Irish audiences – paid for by your licence fee, public funding and commercial revenue.”<\/p>\n
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Listen to the RT\u00c9 Soccer podcast on Apple Podcasts<\/a>, Spotify<\/a> or wherever you get your podcasts<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"RT\u00c9 has secured the exclusive Irish free-to-air rights to the 2030 FIFA World Cup, which will be hosted…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":559595,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-559594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=559594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559594\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/559595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=559594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=559594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=559594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}