THE NUMBERS

For two consecutive Tuesdays and Wednesdays in February (February 15/16; February 22/23, 2022) CBS covered the “UEFA Champions League” games along with a pre-game show that displaced “The Talk” on a national level and preempted “The Young and the Restless,” “The Bold and the Beautiful” and “Let’s Make a Deal,” primarily on the West coast. The latter three were either aired in overnight slots on CBS stations, aired on a sister station in select markets, or only available to viewers via the CBS App or Paramount+. “The Talk” did not air on either day. Sadly for the network, ratings were less than stellar for the sport.

To recap, the “UEFA Champions League” is an annual competition organized by the Union of European Football Associations as the remaining top 16 clubs in the European tournament each vie for the Coupe des Clubs Champions Européens (aka European Cup) trophy. Clubs competing this year include Chelsea (England), Liverpool (England), Manchester United (England), Paris Saint-Germain (France), Salzburg (Austria), LOSC Lille (France), Benfica (Portugal), and Bayern München (Germany), among others. The games were either aired exclusively on CBS (available to Paramount+ subscribers via their local CBS station) or Paramount+ only.

According to Nielsen ratings data available courtesy of the folks at ShowBuzzDaily, of the four competition games aired on CBS thus far the match between Club Atlético de Madrid vs Manchester United on Wednesday, February 22 performed the best among Total Viewers (856,000), Households (0.5 rating) and Adults 18-49 Viewers (266,000), the primary sales demo used to set ad rates for sports and other non-female centric programming.

Note: Daytime soaps, talk shows and game shows use Women 18-49 and Women 25-54 to set ad rates.

The lowest rated game was a mixed bag. In Total Viewers, the Wednesday, February 16 match between FC Internazionale Milano vs Liverpool FC was seen by just 727,000 viewers while the Tuesday, February 22 game between Chelsea FC vs LOSC Lille averaged merely 196,000 viewers in Adults 18-49 with an abysmal 0.4 Household rating.

By comparison, “The Young and the Restless,” “The Bold and the Beautiful,” “Let’s Make a Deal” and even “The Talk” attract as low as a 1.0 to a 2.4 rating in Households every weekday. In Total Viewers, each average from as little as 1.4 million viewers to as high as 3.7 million viewers.

CBS will again interrupt its daytime broadcast schedule on Tuesday, March 8 (Liverpool vs FC Internazionale Milano) and Wednesday, March 9 (Real Madrid vs Paris Saint Germain) for continued coverage of the “UEFA Champions League” games.

What follows is a breakdown of how the “UEFA Champions League” games performed in the ratings on Tuesday, February 15; Wednesday, February 16; Tuesday, February 22; and Wednesday, February 23, 2022. All times are for the 3:00 p.m. ET slot except where otherwise noted. Ratings for the pre-game show were not available at press time.

Adults 18-49 Viewers

Households

Total Viewers