Not even close - the World Cup. The Super Bowl draws primarily from the US, with a TV audience of 50 to 100 million. The World Cup draws from the entire globe and an audience in the hundreds of millions. Thinking the Super Bowl is the most widely viewed sporting event is a wonderful example of national chauvinism.

Footnote: we checked the FIFA World Cup site and they report that the viewership for the 2002 World Cup exceeded 1 billion.

First of all, let me say that this is an absolute no brainer. (Except to all you grid iron fans in the US apparently)

From:

http://worldsoccer.about.com/cs/worldcup/a/wcupnews.htm

we see that the total viewership for the 2002 World Cup was 28.8 billion. There were 64 games at the World Cup giving an average of 450million viewers per match.

The statistics from

http://www.nielsenmedia.com/.../WorldCup_Final.htm

were not indicative of total global viewership, as it clearly states that the only countries included in the survey were:
Australia, Canada, China, Finland, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand and the United States.

Taking into account that most of the largest football viewing markets in the world, such as Brazil, Argentina, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, as well as the rest of Latin America and most of Africa and the Middle East, were excluded from this survey, the actual number of viewers of Wordl Cup matches would definitely greatly exceed the numbers stated in the survey.

Also, the statistics from:

http://www.forbes.com/.../0527fifa.html

show the number of viewers for the 2001 NBA Playoffs and Finals to be 2.5 billion. The 2.5 Billion people as stated here watched a total of 71 games in that year's playoffs and finals, compared with 1 billion for a single match at the 1998 world cup.

The fact remains that the Football World Cup is viewed by a much larger audience than the SuperBowl.

When you are talking about worldwide audience’s, Soccer is an International sport played around the world.Gridiron is not. The most popular and most widely played game in the world is soccer, or football.
I thing that the only people interested in the Superbowl, are America's. The rest of the world doesn't know who won, and doesn't care! Sorry boys.

This is not even an argument.
The world cup final match, and not more than one game people, yes a single event, a single final match, is in the billions against the 144 million of the super bowl.

World Cup Final in 2006 was viewed by 607.9 million at-home viewers per FIFA. I think that is about 4x the amount of people watching the Super Bowl.

http://www.fifa.com/.../...1_06e_tv_2658.pdf

Lets be realistic here the World watches the World Cup, only the US watches the Super Bowl.

In 90% of the world, football is the biggest sport (aka "soccer", where it's not). Some countries prefer other sports (US Football in the US, Cricket in India/Pakistan, etc). But, even though countries like India and the USA have a lot of inhabitants, they're not going to surpass the combined amount of viewers in Europe, South&Central America, Africa and most of Asia any time soon. This leads to the World Cup Final having over 10 times as many viewers as the Superbowl.

I am sure Forbes states that total viewership for the 1998 final was 1 billion which dwarfs the quoted 144 million viewers of the most watched super bowl.

Super Bowl, It like a National Holiday.

This is like comparing the size of California to that of Rhode Island. Superbowl draws millions in the U.S. but nowhere else. Superbowl draws 90 million. The World Cup hovers around 900 million. For every 1 Superbowl viewer there are 10 World Cup viewers.

UEFA Championshiips, Copa America and F1 all more than quadruple the Superbowl's viewer size.

Football (Soccer) is the fastest-growing college and high school sport in the United States!

The figures given by Nielsen only refer to 18 countries.
These do not include soccer crazy nations such as UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico etc to name but a few.

FIFA's website claims the avergae viewers per game during the 2002 World Cup was 352.6 million per match globally. This is for LIVE viewrs, not replays/repeats.

Link to article attached, see paragraph entitled 'Many audience records were broken'

fifa.com/en/marketing/newmedia /index/0,3509,10,00.html