PARIS—Teenage World Cup winner Kylian Mbappe is giving his bonus to an association that puts sports in the lives of hospitalized children.
The head of Premiers de Cordee (First in Line), Sebastien Ruffin, says two weeks before France clinched the World Cup he was informed that Mbappe would give the group his bonus if the team qualified for the quarterfinals.
French Football Federation chief Noel Le Graet confirmed in Sunday’s Le Journal du Dimanche that other associations also would benefit from the France forward’s largesse—“about €300,000 [$350,000].”
Mbappe mentors the kids, and Ruffin said the player has “very good contact” with them: “I sometimes feel he gets more pleasure playing with kids than they do.”
The World Cup final, meanwhile, was seen by just over 16 million people in the United States on Sunday.
While that made the Sunday morning telecast on Fox and Telemundo the most-watched program of the week, it represented a significant drop in viewership from the 2014 World Cup finale, which featured Germany and Argentina. That game had 26.5 million viewers on ABC and Univision, the Nielsen company said.
While Croatia was a compelling underdog story, the small country probably wasn’t a big television draw. The World Cup in general had to fight for attention in the United States because the US team did not qualify this year.
The Fox telecast of the finale reached 11.3 million, with the remainder watching the Spanish-language station.
The company Eurodata TV estimated that 163 million people in Europe and China watched the World Cup final, with China leading the way with 56 million. Even with two European teams competing, Eurodata said the World Cup final was less popular in that region than the competition four years ago. There was no worldwide estimate of viewership yet.
In France the final game against Croatia was seen by 19.3 million people—smaller than the audience for the Euro soccer final two years ago, Eurodata TV said.
The 1.6 million people who watched in Croatia represented a nearly 90-percent market share—meaning 90 percent of the televisions in that country were tuned in, Eurodata said.
NBC was the winner for the week in US prime-time viewing, averaging 4.3 million viewers. CBS had 4 million, ABC had 3.4 million, Fox had 2.1 million, ION Television had 1.4 million, Telemundo had 1.13 million, Univision had 1.05 million and the CW had 900,000 viewers.
Fox News Channel was the week’s most popular cable network, averaging 2.69 million viewers. MSNBC had 1.58 million, USA had 1.48 million, HGTV had 1.4 million and TBS had 1.07 million.