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.
Due to political tensions, the two nations have rarely played against each other in recent years, Shah said.
Since late July, when the match was first announced, social media users in both countries have been calling for a boycott.
“No point in wasting time by watching India vs Pakistan,” read a typical post on X, one of more than 27,000 posts on the match as of Friday according to the trending section.
Shah said that hundreds of millions of people would still watch the match, adding that “the financial value of this game is still massive.”
“Twenty-seven thousand tweets doesn’t mean anything,” he said in a phone interview from Karachi, Pakistan. “I’m pretty sure that’s not the majority view, and I don’t think it will really dent the numbers for the game.”
On Friday, premium tickets ranging from $212 to VIP seats priced at about $4,500 were still available for purchase, according to ticketing website Platinum List. Typically, games between India and Pakistan sell out well in advance.
In February, a match between India and Pakistan at the Pakistan-hosted Champions Trophy generated 26 billion minutes of viewing time on television alone, according to the International Cricket Council (ICC), the global governing body of cricket. That number surpassed the 19.5 billion viewing minutes recorded when the two sides met during the ICC Cricket World Cup in 2023.
Though the Champions Trophy took place before the terrorist attack and armed conflict this spring, India’s matches were held in Dubai because the Indian team refused to play in Pakistan.
Fans from both India and Pakistan have mixed feelings about the match on Sunday.
Vidya Mansinghani, a 30-year-old graphic designer from Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, said she would normally have hosted a watch party with friends and cousins, but decided against doing so this time due to differing views within her social circle. Still, she’ll be watching from home.
“I am a patriot, and what happened in Pahalgam was extremely painful,” Mansinghani said, referring to the April terrorist attack in Kashmir.
“But at the same time, cricket is part of our culture. I just don’t feel it’s right not to support our own players,” she added.
Harris Arshad, 29, a project manager from Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, said he would be watching Sunday’s grudge match despite the calls for a boycott.
The match “should proceed despite tensions, as sports can bridge divides and promote goodwill,” Arshad said, adding that the neutral venue “ensures safety.”
“Canceling would harm cricket’s spirit and set a poor precedent for international events amid political issues.”
