Fox Sports is preparing the biggest World Cup production it has ever put on in its company’s history for the 2026 tournament, and every one of the 104 matches will stream on Foxone. Zac Kenworthy, Fox Sports’ vice president of production, said the network is building out coverage for the event’s expanded 48-team format, which begins Thursday and runs for five weeks across North America.
The scale alone explains why Fox is moving so aggressively. The 2026 men’s World Cup will include 104 matches across 16 cities, nearly double the 64-game tournament the United States and the rest of the world watched in Qatar in 2022. said two-thirds of the matches will air on its broadcast network, with the rest on FS1, while Foxone, launched last year, will carry the full slate for viewers who want the tournament in one place.
Kenworthy said the setup will be very different from what viewers are used to. Fox is revamping its Los Angeles hub around a 50 million-pixel LED augmented-reality wall, and the company says its studio cameras, some sourced from Cosm, will help deliver the first World Cup in high-dynamic range. That is meant to make the presentation feel richer and more immersive without crowding the matches themselves, a balance Fox is trying to strike as it spreads the tournament across broadcast, cable, streaming and its free service Tubi.
The programming payoff is obvious. In 2022, Fox averaged 3.6 million viewers for each match and drew 16.8 million for Argentina’s win over France in the final. Telemundo averaged 2.6 million viewers that year and will also benefit from the expanded schedule, but the two broadcasters are not in the same position after this summer. Fox’s current World Cup rights deal ends after the 2026 tournament, while Telemundo’s runs through 2030, leaving Fox with one shot to turn a larger event into a larger television moment.
That is the real pressure point inside the production push. Fox has carried the World Cup since 2015, and Americans’ appetite for top-tier soccer has only grown since the last North American World Cup in 1994. But the company is making its biggest bet just as its rights window closes, which means the size of the audience Foxone reaches in 2026 may matter almost as much as the matches themselves.
