P R O | SPORTS DATA
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Major football tournaments have long served as stress tests for television ecosystems. They concentrate attention, intensify emotions and expose audience behaviours with a clarity that routine programming rarely achieves. The combination of AFCON 2025 and the FIFA Arab Cup 2025 offered a particularly rich field of observation. Across Africa and the Arab world, millions of viewers reorganised their daily schedules around key fixtures, turning television into a shared national arena. Beyond sporting narratives, these competitions generated something of equal importance for the broadcast industry: clear, real-time signals on how audiences react to live sports, distribution strategies and channel positioning. Why AFCON 2025 and the Arab Cup 2025 mattered for audience analysis
AFCON remains Africa’s most powerful sporting and media event. The Arab Cup, meanwhile, brings together overlapping audiences, shared cultural references and major regional broadcasters, with Morocco emerging as the 2025 champion. Real-time audience measurement platform Audimatic has shared some charts on viewership. These reports focus on Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia, as these four markets were present in both competitions, enabling consistent cross-tournament and cross-country comparisons. Together, AFCON and the Arab Cup activate: • National identity and public broadcasters • Free-to-air versus international sports networks
[In Morocco],
Audimatic launched a public daily TV audience dashboard on December 1, 2025, providing open access to audience data in the four countries before and throughout AFCON 2025, while contextualising patterns already observed during the Arab Cup.
exclusive rights drive immediate match-time dominance, while ... international sports channels can assert broader leadership across multiple fixtures within a tournament
Morocco: Match rights versus structural leadership
For Morocco, two distinct audience curves illustrated different dimensions of viewing behaviour. The first graph (Figure 1) focuses on the Arab Cup final on December 18, 2025, between Morocco and Jordan. The trend analysis of the top 10 mostwatched channels during the match shows clear dominance by beIN Sports, which held the broadcast rights. Throughout the final, beIN Sports held the majority of live viewing, confirming the decisive impact of exclusive rights during high-stakes fixtures. The second curve (Figure 2) analyses the AFCON 2025 semifinal between Morocco and Nigeria, a match also won by Morocco. Here, a different pattern emerged. One channel,
AUDIMATIC • Mass simultaneous viewing • Intense emotional engagement They also allow observation of: • Audience concentration under peak demand • Channel leadership during high-pressure moments • Post-match audience redistribution • The strategic role of analysis and studio programming To support this analysis,
Audience of the Top 10 Most Watched TV Channels in Morocco December 18, 2025 Morocco 3 - 2 Jordan FIFA Arab Cup Final
2M MONDE
2M NATIONAL
AL AOULA INTER
BEIN SPORTS
AL JAZEERA
BEIN SPORTS NEWS
50
1st half time
AL KASS ONE
M6 1nd half time
ARRYADIA
MBC 5 extra time
40 30 20 10
12:00
13:00
14:00
15:00
16:00
17:00
18:00
19:00
20:00
21:00
22:00
Figure 1 – FIFA Arab Cup final Morocco-Jordan, December 18, 2025 23