As many as 500 million people could tune in Sunday to watch a cricket match between bitter rivals India and Pakistan, a number that would dwarf the viewership numbers for this year’s Super Bowl by almost four times.
About 127 million people watched the last Super Bowl in February, according to Nielsen — relatively unimpressive by the standards of cricket, one of the world’s most popular sports.
“On a bad day, [the match] will get you something like 300 million viewers,” Farees Shah, a host of the “Shiny Side” cricket podcast, told NBC News. “Typically, if you look at the best game we’ve had so far, the highest viewership, it’s easily five times the Super Bowl.”
Tensions are often high at sporting events between India and Pakistan, nuclear-armed neighbors with a combined population of about 1.7 billion that have fought several wars since they were established as independent states amid the end of British colonial rule in India almost 80 years ago.
But this latest match, a group stage game at the Asia Cup, is especially fraught as it’s the first time the two South Asian teams are meeting since their countries fought a deadly armed conflict in May.
The four days of fighting were set off the previous month by a terrorist attack in Indian-controlled Kashmir that killed 26 people and which India said was carried out with Pakistan’s support, which Pakistan denied.
Coaches for both teams say players are focused on the cricket at the eight-team tournament, which India won last year. India was also supposed to be the site of this year’s Asia Cup, but it was moved to the United Arab Emirates city of Dubai because of the recent India-Pakistan conflict.
