Fox Sports is getting ready to stage the biggest production in its company history when the expanded World Cup begins Thursday, with 104 matches spread over five weeks and coverage built to reach viewers across Fox, FS1, Fox One and Tubi.
That scale matters now because the tournament has jumped from the 32 nations and 64 matches seen in Qatar in 2022 to 48 nations and 104 matches, creating a flood of live inventory for U.S. media partners. Zac Kenworthy, Fox Sports’ executive behind the project, said the company is preparing for what it sees as the largest production it has ever mounted, and the network expects two-thirds of all matches to air on its main broadcast channel, with the rest on FS1. Every match will be available on Fox One, while Tubi will carry select live games along with shoulder programming and Cup-themed shows.
Fox has had the World Cup since 2015, and it is treating this one like a different kind of event because it is the first tournament since 1994 to be played in North America. The company is using Stage B, its revamped production hub in Los Angeles, where an LED augmented-reality wall carries 50 million pixels and studio cameras will produce Fox’s first World Cup in high-dynamic range. Kenworthy said that setup should let the network go deeper into matches and present the game differently, while still making it feel alive rather than overloaded. He described the aim as “rich” and “quite different” from earlier Cups.
The boost for rights holders is obvious: more matches, more windows and more places to put them. FIFA’s decision to nearly double the tournament has not earned universal praise, though, because the added scale also changes the rhythm of the event and stretches the competition across a five-week run in 16 North American cities. Fox is counting on the wider menu to deepen engagement during a usually quiet stretch on the sports calendar, but the company also knows this is the last World Cup under its current rights deal, which expires after this year’s tournament.
The pressure is not just on production values. Fox averaged 3.6 million viewers for each of its 32 matches in 2022 and drew a record 16.8 million for Argentina’s win over France in the final, numbers that set a high bar for a much larger schedule. Telemundo, which has rights through 2030, averaged 2.6 million viewers that same year. Fox now has one tournament to turn a bigger field into a bigger audience, and then it has to prove those numbers can survive after the World Cup moves on.
