WWE Smackdown Rating Ties Low Against FIFA World Cup, Audience Drops

The ratings for last week’s WWE Smackdown sunk from last week’s episode against the FIFA World Cup, while the viewership hit a five-month low. Friday’s episode earned a 0.20 rating in the 18 – 49 demographic and 1.038 million viewers per Programming Insider. Those numbers were down 16.7% and 4.7% respectively from the previous week’s 0.24 demo rating and audience of 1.089 million.

The demo rating tied the all-time low for the show, which was hit on Halloween 2025. Meanwhile, the total audience was the worst in five months since the January 23rd episode did 943,000. The top spot for the night went to the FIFA World Cup game on FOX, which brought in an enormous 5.92 demo rating and 18.037 million viewers. Second place went to the FIFA pre-game show with a 1.46/4.739 million viewers.

As a reminder, Nielsen made an adjustment to its Big Data + Panel numbers in late January, and even the original Big Data + Panel ratings makes ratings difficult to compare to pre-change weeks. That said, WWE Smackdown is currently averaging a 0.292 demo rating and 1.231 million viewers in 2026 compared to a 0.441 and 1.504 million for the same time period in 2025.