The reason why Super Bowl is more "popular" than world cup is the fact that maybe there are more people watching the world cup but it is aired everywhere around the world and the total combined could make up for a bigger audience however it is in every single nation and not compact in just one nation, so when you look at it Super Bowl is watched more than any country watches World Cup in just one nation.
Just to give an example, lets make up the numbers, World Cup gets 10 million viewers in England and 100 million in the world, Superbowl gets 50 million in USA, now numbers are made up of course but as you can see the difference between one nation thing and whole world thing. No company can make ads all around the world for World Cup but on Super Bowl american companies can make american ads to american people and reach more people.
Actually, one really important point to make here is television viewership is calculated different in the US (almost everyone does PPV and buys actual tickets so it's pretty clean data there) but take a country of similar population like Indonesia (300 million people) where there is a large population that watches free (either pirated or from public viewings that serve hundreds of thousands) and you miss out on all the #s of people watching football (trust me, the whole of Southeast Asia doesn't watch NFL). We also don't collect ticket #s enough here, and fake tickets is a big problem.
100 million world cup viewers worldwide completely doesn't capture the numbers from Southeast and South Asia, Africa and South America. Because we don't pay for our views.
P.S. Jesus Watford. Way to break our hearts. Two parlays out the window. And this was winnable but for lapses of concentration in injury time in BOTH halves.
PPS. Arsenal can't be arsed to win these days.
PPS Spurs anyone?