| Andrés Martinez
Which countries account for the two biggest FIFA media rights deals for the 2026 men’s World Cup?
It’s a trick question. The answer is just one country: the United States. Or perhaps you could say the answer is the English-speaking United States and the Spanish-speaking United States.
It’s hard to overstate the extent to which the U.S. is already FIFA’s most important commercial market, as evidenced by the fact that two media conglomerates here each pay more than any of their counterparts elsewhere in the world for the rights to broadcast the World Cup. Precise figures are hard to come by, but it’s widely reported that Comcast NBC Universal has paid more than $450 million to air the Cup’s 104 matches on its Telemundo cable channel and its Peacock streaming service. Fox paid only slightly more than that, and less than it would have had to in an open bidding process, which didn’t happen because FIFA was forced to extend Fox’s previous deal with only a slight increase as compensation for moving the 2022 Qatar World Cup from summer to winter. It’s estimated that the roughly $1 billion FIFA is making from the U.S. amounts to about a quarter of its global media rights income.
We’re just a week into the tournament, but the networks must be pleased with their investment. Ratings have been stronger than expected, surpassing previous tournaments. An average of 27.5 million people watched the first U.S. game against Paraguay, when you add up the audiences on Fox, Telemundo, and their streaming platforms. Remarkably, that is 3 million more viewers than watched Game 5 of the NBA Finals earlier the same week, the most-watched NBA Finals in decades.
Telemundo accounted for a third of that audience, 9.5 million viewers. Conversely, for Mexico’s match against the South Africa that kicked off the entire tournament, two-thirds of the 20.6 million viewers opted for the Comcast Telemundo/Peacock broadcast.
These are staggering numbers for both networks, proving international soccer’s ability to outperform any non-NFL sport offering on U.S. television. What’s tantalizing (for both FIFA and its media partners) is the suspicion that there is still a great deal of upside to the sport in this country. The U.S. opener was watched by about a million more people in this country than the Qatar final between Argentina and France. But what might ratings look like for a quarterfinal, semifinal, or final match featuring the U.S. men someday, whether in a couple of weeks, or a subsequent World Cup? Will that audience be closer to that of an NBA Finals or a Super Bowl?
An equally intriguing question is how much longer FIFA can continue to treat the United States as two separate bidding markets. It’s been since the 1998 men’s World Cup, with ESPN and Univision, that FIFA has had separate English- and Spanish-language media partners in the United States.
But the arrangement looks increasingly awkward, given how technology has transformed media. It was one thing when the primary media partner could be assured that a Spanish cable channel’s audience was fairly niche, a lane apart, and that its broadcasts would not draw in casual fans who weren’t already regular viewers of that channel. But now the supposedly niche Spanish-language broadcasts aren’t just available on a cable channel unfamiliar to non-Spanish speakers; they’re featured prominently on the same Peacock streaming service millions subscribe to for English Premier League games, NBC’s Sunday Night Football, and the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
If I were a Fox executive, I’d be alarmed that I’d ceded almost 10 million viewers of the U.S. game to another network in my own country, and more than 13 million for the Mexico game. And I’d be mindful that Comcast NBC Universal has been working to grow its World Cup audience beyond its traditional Telemundo viewership. Think back to those NBC Super Bowl ads of Owen Wilson learning Spanish from Sofía Vergara so he could enhance his enjoyment of the World Cup, on Peacock of course.
Presumably the expectation that Fox shares the U.S. with a large Telemundo/Peacock audience is baked into the pricing of Fox’s media rights deal, but given how central Peacock has become to the mainstream of America’s media landscape, it’s starting to feel like FIFA is getting away with partnering closely with not one, but two of the traditional American broadcasters, NBC and Fox.
And that’s unlikely to be sustainable for long.