Mega Boxing PPVs
Superfights such as Floyd Mayweather vs. Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather vs. Conor McGregor remain the benchmark for pay-per-view economics, with those bouts generating around 4.3–4.6 million domestic PPV buys and more than $600 million in total revenue each.
The Mayweather–McGregor event alone produced a live gate of about $55.4 million at T-Mobile Arena, while the betting handle in Nevada was estimated at roughly $65 million, making it the most heavily wagered boxing match in state history and one of the most bet sporting events ever outside of the Super Bowl.
YouTube star turned boxer Jake Paul hit record numbers with his controversial bout with boxing legend Mike Tyson. The fight arranged through Most Valuable Promotions, Paul’s own promotions brand, streamed on Netflix ushering a new era in watching megafights on streaming services. It drew record numbers, but also a lawsuit. Netflix claims 60 million households tuned in to watch the show on the streaming platform, with 50 million for the Amanda Serrano vs Katie Taylor fight.
Because PPV pricing is high and piracy limits international measurement, these fights do not reach World Cup or Super Bowl live audiences, but their per-viewer revenue is unmatched in sports.
ICC Cricket World Cup
The ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup is one of the world’s biggest sports properties, ranking just behind the FIFA World Cup and ahead of most other events on pure viewership, while lagging somewhat in global betting handle and per-event ticket revenue compared with U.S. betting tentpoles and mega PPV fights.
The 2023 ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup was watched by about 518 million people on live TV across the tournament, making it the most-watched edition in the event’s history. The final between India and Australia drew around 300 million TV viewers, with peak concurrent TV viewership of about 130 million, plus a streaming peak of roughly 59 million simultaneous viewers on Disney+ Hotstar, which set an OTT record for live sport.
Kentucky Derby
The Kentucky Derby illustrates how a mid-range TV audience can still underpin massive betting activity and on-site revenue, with recent editions drawing an average U.S. TV audience in the high teens of millions and peak viewership over 21 million. The 2025 Derby set an all-sources handle record of roughly $349 million on Derby Day, including about $234 million wagered on the race itself and nearly $474 million when including the full week, figures that rival or exceed the legal U.S. handle for the Super Bowl even though the broadcast audience is much smaller. Churchill Downs’ broader Derby-week ecosystem now supports quarterly revenues approaching $1 billion for the parent company, showing how hospitality, ticketing, and on-track wagering combine to create one of the world’s most profitable single-race events.
The Olympics
We did not include The Olympics higher on this list only because they are structurally different from the other events. Instead of one match or one sport, they are a multi‑week festival of hundreds of events. The “biggest” metrics are cumulative rather than tied to a single game or final.
Independent research for Paris 2024 estimated that around 5 billion people—about 84% of the potential global audience with access—followed the Games in some form, across TV and digital platforms. Media rights holders delivered roughly 28.7 billion hours of Olympic coverage watched worldwide, with the average viewer consuming around nine hours, which puts the Olympics above events like the Super Bowl, Champions League, Rugby World Cup, or ICC World Cup when you zoom out to overall attention.
Betting on the Olympics is significant but more fragmented than football/soccer because wagering is spread over many sports and events with varying limits and popularity. Many regulated markets also impose tighter controls or outright bans on betting in certain Olympic disciplines (for example, age‑restricted events), which dampens volume compared with something like a Champions League final or Super Bowl that concentrates handle into a single, familiar market. Publicly disclosed betting data for the Olympics tends to be rolled into broad “multi‑sport” or “other” categories, so it is harder to get clear data.
How they stack up
Across key metrics, the World Cup final dominates in global reach, the Super Bowl leads in concentrated single-day revenue and legal US betting, and mega boxing PPVs still set the pace for per-viewer monetization. The Champions League final is the biggest global match involving two club teams. The Olympics sits as a bit of an outlier.
Main image credit: © Stephanie Scarbrough-Reuters via Imagn Images
