Well.....I assume these stats are presented as the World Cup final itself compared to the average audience of the NBA finals and the World Series games. So a better comparison would be for the actual final game of each sport.
Don't know what that comparison would be.
Here's another report on the audience. I feel that the increased excitement for the Cup mentioned in this article comes from the fact that a whole lot of people are turned off by the NBA, and baseball lost a lot of fans from the '94 strike, steroids and the game itself is not as exciting as it once was, til the playoffs.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/07/08/MNGP8JS3UE1.DTL
