Fox Corporation is getting an enormous bargain to broadcast the 2026 World Cup next month, industry analysts say.
It is paying less than $500 million to air the tournament, according to people familiar with the agreement who were not authorized to speak on the matter. Yet experts say the rights are worth as much as three times that amount, raising questions about how Fox secured such an incredible deal.
The answer stretches back to March 2014, when FIFA’s board convened in a soundproof room reserved for the most important decisions, deep in the subterranean layer of its glass-and-steel headquarters in Zurich. There, some of the most powerful figures in soccer were told that a decision worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the sport’s governing body was needed to make a problem go away, according to people with direct knowledge of what was said in the meeting.
A separate resolution, made in the same room four years earlier, was to blame. That’s when FIFA chose tiny but wealthy Qatar to host the 2022 World Cup, which would go on to create a conflict with Fox, one of its biggest broadcast partners.
Many of the details of the meeting, including the conversations that took place, and what Fox paid for the 2026 World Cup rights have not been previously reported.
Qatar’s searingly hot summers made it unsuitable to host an event traditionally played in June and July. FIFA officials would eventually acknowledge the problem by shifting the tournament to late fall, but the English-language rights in the United States had been won by Fox years earlier.
Fox, which had never broadcast the World Cup, beat ESPN, the longtime rights holder, in a bidding war to broadcast both the 2018 and 2022 tournaments. The rights, Fox had argued, were worth the record $425 million paid only if the tournaments were played on their usual summer dates. Now FIFA wanted to move the Qatar World Cup to a time when the American sports calendar is jammed with football, basketball and hockey.
With a crisis on its hands, the FIFA executive committee was presented with a way out. According to the people with direct knowledge of the meeting, Jerome Valcke, FIFA’s secretary general at the time, told board members “it had been agreed” to extend Fox’s contract to 2026 in exchange for the broadcaster not acting against FIFA should the World Cup dates be moved. Typically, rights are open to competitive bidding, which happens as tournaments draw near. But in the case of the 2026 World Cup, FIFA simply gave an extension more than a decade in advance.
That’s when in February 2015, FIFA announced that Fox, Telemundo (which owned Spanish-language rights in the United States) and its Canadian counterpart would all receive the rights to the 2026 World Cup. The price paid, according to people familiar with the agreement, was far below what the open market would have dictated.
A month later, that March, FIFA officially announced that the Qatar World Cup would be held in November and December. Two months after that, the entire FIFA leadership would end up being removed following a sweeping U.S. Department of Justice indictment alleging nearly two decades of corruption, mostly tied to the sale of television rights to competitions in North and South America.
But the deal with Fox to broadcast the 2026 World Cup was not impacted by the change in FIFA leadership nor by the indictment.
FIFA declined to comment for this article.
The World Cup, which begins next month in Mexico, Canada and the United States, is the largest, most extravagant sporting event on the planet. The 2022 final between France and Argentina was watched by roughly 1.5 billion people. Expanded for the first time to 48 teams, the tournament will include dozens more matches than was anticipated when Fox’s extension was agreed on, with the majority staged in the United States.
Fox’s total commitment for the 2026 World Cup is $485 million, including a bonus tied to the tournament being held in the United States — and the deal is unlikely to be repeated. Industry experts estimate the true market value today, had FIFA put the rights out to tender, at between $1 billion and $1.5 billion. John Skipper, who was president of ESPN from 2012 to 2017, said in an interview it could have gone even higher given soccer’s growth in North America. “FIFA has left hundreds of millions of dollars on the table,” he said, echoing the views of other industry experts in interviews.
Many of the details of the meeting and what Fox paid for the rights, have not been previously reported.
Fox declined to answer questions about the amount of the contract or FIFA’s decision to grant it the rights to the 2026 World Cup.
Nearly a decade after the deal for this summer’s tournament was agreed upon, FIFA’s earlier deals with broadcast rights holders surfaced in a New York court as part of the investigation by the Department of Justice into an extensive network of criminal behavior across dozens of countries that stemmed from a criminal indictment first unsealed in 2015.
Mr. Skipper testified in January 2023, when federal prosecutors alleged that former Latin American Fox executives had bribed FIFA officials for favorable access to lucrative television contracts to regional tournaments.
Until losing out to Fox, ESPN was the English-language home of the World Cup in the United States from 1994 to 2014. Having not paid rights fees for several editions, it agreed to a $100 million deal for the 2010 and 2014 tournaments, which by then had grown in America in popularity.
A star government witness, Alejandro Burzaco, a former Argentine sports marketing executive, testified that he had used inside information obtained from a powerful ex-FIFA official — now deceased, and secretly on his payroll for years — who influenced the committee making final decisions on TV deals. That information, Mr. Burzaco said, gave Fox a decisive edge in what was supposed to be a blind auction for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.
Fox has always denied any involvement in the sprawling bribery scandal and was not named as a defendant. “This case involves a legacy business that has no connection to the new Fox Corporation,” a company spokesman said at the time of the trial. In a statement to The New York Times Times, Fox said, “Fox won the 2018 and 2022 World Cup rights through a competitive bidding process. Period. Any insinuation that these rights were acquired through other means is false.
Under questioning from defense attorneys in 2023, Mr. Skipper acknowledged he had no direct evidence of wrongdoing. But upon returning to New York from Zurich after losing the bid, he said he screamed down the phone at Mr. Valcke and Niclas Ericson, FIFA’s head of television rights then. “Neither of them admitted to anything,” Mr. Skipper said. Years later Mr. Valcke would be found guilty in Switzerland on charges related to separate World Cup rights sales. Contacted by phone, Mr. Valcke said he did not recall the circumstances around the Fox deal.
Mr. Skipper said in an interview that top FIFA officials had also assured him that ESPN would be guided to be the “high bidder,” citing the network’s success in popularizing soccer in the United States. ESPN and Univision had jointly offered about $1 billion for the 2018 and 2022 tournaments in the second round of bidding. Fox and Telemundo offered a little more and prevailed.
“I testified that I had a handshake agreement with them, that they told me what a good job we did with the previous World Cups and would prefer we get it,” Mr. Skipper said about his talks with FIFA at the time. “So somebody could say, ‘You just wanted them to do the same thing with you that they end up doing with Fox.’” And the answer is, ‘yes.’ But I didn’t pay them any money.”
The courtroom allegations prompted some of FIFA’s most senior officials to explore whether the Fox contract could be rescinded, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.
FIFA officials spoke to the organization’s outside law firm, Paul Weiss, to discuss options. Contact was made with Fox and its lawyers. Fox was adamant the rights had been properly secured and even produced a letter of roughly 10 pages defending its position. Inside FIFA, there was also division over its legal position, and ultimately FIFA did not pursue the case further.
Far from being a disappointment, the Qatar World Cup proved a ratings and revenue winner for Fox. Qatar also spent millions of dollars on advertising on Fox and provided other support that included editorial coordination and help designing and constructing an elaborate set on Doha’s corniche that drew the envy of the other broadcasters, according to a person with direct knowledge of those efforts who worked for Qatar’s World Cup committee. A Fox spokesman said the company “paid for and built the Fox set in Qatar.”
Fox, for its part, avoided coverage of the controversies that plagued the tournament, from the corruption allegations to Qatar’s human rights record.
“We firmly believe the viewers come to us to see what happens on the field,” David Neal, Fox’s executive producer for World Cup coverage, said at the time.
On an earnings call after the tournament, Lachlan Murdoch, Fox Corporation’s chief executive, called the World Cup one of the company’s key growth drivers. Ratings were 30 percent higher than when the event was held during its traditional summer slot four years earlier, and a record 16.8 million viewers tuned into Fox’s English-language broadcast for the Argentina-France final.
Audience records are expected to be set, with soccer’s American popularity continuing to surge since FIFA and Fox struck their discounted deal more than a decade ago.
Daniel Cohen, who leads on sports media rights at the advisory firm Octagon, said Fox would recoup its entire investment through advertising alone, which he estimates represents only 30 to 40 percent of total World Cup revenues, with the bulk coming from retransmission fees. He estimated an additional $70 million from the 30 games on Fox Sports 1, the broadcaster’s sports specialty channel. The upside, he said, has few parallels in American sports, comparable perhaps only to the hugely profitable bet CBS and Turner made around the same time on March Madness.
“This is one of the most undervalued deals in the world,” Mr. Cohen said in an interview. He added that if the contract had gone to open tender, its value would be more than double what Fox paid. Viewership, he said, could rise 30 percent above the Qatar numbers.
“I think they will make hundreds of millions of dollars,” Mr. Skipper said.
FIFA is budgeting for record revenue of more than $11 billion — $4 billion more than the last World Cup. Some of those gains come from higher World Cup ticket prices, which have drawn complaints from fans and politicians worldwide. FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, has deflected criticism, saying 90 percent of FIFA’s income goes to fund soccer around the world.
“Well,” said Mr. Skipper, “10 percent of $11 billion is still a lot of money.”
