Jenny Taft is headed into her sixth World Cup for Fox Sports, and this time she will be working inside the U.S. men’s camp for the full tournament. The reporter and host will follow the team through training, interviews and live reports while trying to keep the distance that makes a reporter a reporter.
That assignment matters now because Taft is not just showing up for a few matches. She said she will wake up, go to training, film interviews, live report from training and then get a player at the team hotel for a one-on-one before another interview tied to the night match. In her words, it is a marathon of long, long days with a lot of content. The setup also means she will mirror the team’s travel schedule, including flying to Seattle for the second match against Australia if the squad goes there.
Taft’s latest tournament is the third men’s World Cup in her career, after she covered the 2015 World Cup in Canada with the U.S. women and the 2018 World Cup in Russia. She has said the appeal of the event is that nobody really knows what is coming next, whether it is a player, a story, a goal, a save or a Cinderella run. That uncertainty is part of why she keeps coming back, even after years of doing the job.
Her access this time is unusually close. Taft said Mauricio Pochettino has given her a lot of room to stay at training, even when other reporters are asked to leave, and she called that trust important. At the same time, she said she is still there to break news, not simply blend in with the team. That balance is the whole assignment: close enough to see everything, but still expected to report what matters when it matters.
Taft’s past World Cup work has also carried a personal thread. She said she interviewed Kylian Mbappé in French during the 2018 World Cup in Russia, after learning French in a program from kindergarten through fifth grade in Edina, Minn., and spending a month in France during an exchange program in middle school. Her route to this role runs through Boston University, where she graduated in 2010 after playing lacrosse, then moved on to Fox Sports North in Minnesota before later being offered the Bruins reporter role for NESN in 2013 and flying to Los Angeles for an audition as Fox prepared to launch FS1.
For Fox Sports, Taft’s assignment gives the network an experienced reporter with a track record in high-pressure tournaments and a direct line into the U.S. men’s camp. For Taft, it means another summer built around the team’s rhythm, the daily churn of training and hotel interviews, and the one thing a World Cup never guarantees: a script that holds.
Related coverage of Fox Sports’ World Cup plans can be found in its broader broadcast lineup, including the network’s first-week teams and its World Cup tracker.
