Andrés Cantor is heading into his 12th consecutive FIFA World Cup assignment, a run that will put Telemundo’s most familiar Spanish-language soccer voice back on the air as the tournament opens this week. The 63-year-old, who lives near Miami, is scheduled to call the United States’ opening match against Paraguay on Friday at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood.
For Cantor, the next month is built around the same moment that first made him a fixture in American soccer homes: the minute he gets in the car to call a game, he says, he is "the happiest man alive." He has been Telemundo’s lead Spanish play-by-play commentator for more than 25 years, and his arrival for another World Cup comes after a pre-tournament exhibition in which Antonee Robinson’s volley prompted him to stretch his trademark goal call for 23 seconds and then again for another 15.
That voice is now tied to some of the sport’s biggest nights. Cantor first rose to prominence in the 1990s during his debut stint on television with Univision, where his elongated "Gooooooooaaaal" became inseparable from the way U.S. viewers experienced soccer. He is not shy about the connection, but he draws a line at ownership. "I don’t own it," he said. "You can say that I make it mine."
He also pushed back on the idea that he invented the famous call. "I never said I invented anything. I just popularized it in the U.S.," he said, a reminder that the sound many fans identify with him was built over time, not dreamed up in a single moment. That matters now because Cantor is once again being asked to anchor Telemundo’s biggest stage, with eight group-stage matches over the next two weeks and a path that could take him to a third World Cup final for the network on July 19 in East Rutherford, N.J.
The emotional center of that journey is easy to trace in Cantor’s own words. "The day I’m not happy waking up knowing that I have to call a soccer game – wherever it happens to be or whatever league it happens to be – that will make me think," he said. "And that passion hopefully transcends onto the screen because soccer is my life and I have the same passion now that I had since Day One."
His World Cup past gives that enthusiasm extra weight. Cantor watched Argentina beat the Netherlands in Buenos Aires in 1978, then later saw Diego Maradona lift Argentina to the title in Mexico City in 1986 after what he called the greatest goal ever scored in the competition. Four years ago in Lusail, Qatar, Lionel Messi led Argentina past France in a final that added another chapter to the same tournament he is now about to cover again. For Telemundo viewers, the next test is simple: whether Cantor’s signature call can still turn the biggest moments into the loudest ones.
