FOX Sports unveiled the broadcast teams for the first week of the FIFA World Cup 2026 group stage on Thursday, locking in the voices that will open a tournament spread across 16 host cities and 104 matches. For the U.S. men’s opener, John Strong and Stu Holden will call Friday’s match against Paraguay from Los Angeles, with Jenny Taft reporting on site.
The assignment lands as fans start looking for where the biggest matches will land on television, and the first U.S. game is the one many in the sport had circled first. FOX will carry a special three-hour pregame show at 6:00 PM ET for the Americans’ first World Cup match on home soil in more than 30 years, a sign of how much weight the network is putting on the moment.
Mexico Fc also gets a marquee call in the tournament’s opening match in Mexico City, where Ian Darke and Landon Donovan will handle Mexico against South Africa on Thursday, June 11, with Alex Aljoe reporting pitch side. Live coverage starts at 1:00 PM ET on FOX. Elsewhere in the opening slate, Jacqui Oatley and Warren Barton will call Korea Republic vs. Czechia on FS1, while Darren Fletcher and Owen Hargreaves have Canada’s opener against Bosnia-Herzegovina on FOX on Friday.
FOX Sports is the English-language home for the World Cup in the United States, and the opening-week schedule shows the network spreading its top commentary pairs across North America before the full event even gets rolling. That approach also leaves room for more decisions later: said assignments will be announced weekly once the competition is underway, which means the first batch of matchups is only the start of the broadcast picture.
That matters because the tournament is too large for one announcement to settle the whole board. With nine commentary teams traveling and the first week now set, the remaining question is which voices will handle the rest of the 104 matches after the opening stretch. For now, FOX has shown exactly how it intends to launch the tournament — with its biggest games anchored by familiar names and the schedule still unfolding one week at a time.
