AT&T Stadium is seen before a Copa America Group A soccer match in June 2024 in Arlington.
Elías Valverde II/Staff Photographer
IRVING — As this summer’s FIFA World Cup draws ever closer, the unprecedented magnitude of the 39-day global event — and particularly what it will mean for D-FW — is beginning to come into focus.
On Tuesday, I moderated a World Cup panel at the two-day Connected America 2026 event at the Irving Convention Center, where I dove into the scale of the 48-team tournament that will be played in 16 venues across three countries.
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The three panelists — Kevin Callahan, vice president of field operations and engineering at FOX Sports; Daniel Lawson, senior vice president of global solutions at Verizon; and Bryce Carter, chief information security officer for the city of Arlington — detailed how technology and connectivity are essential to deliver a successful World Cup. And they explained why coordination with scores of stakeholders across many sectors is critical.
AT&T Stadium, which will be called Dallas Stadium during the World Cup, will host nine matches, the most of any host city. FOX Sports is the official U.S. rights holder for the 104 matches in what will be the largest World Cup in history.
“For FOX Sports, this is far and away the largest event that we’ve ever undertaken,” Callahan said. “We’re looking at it in multiple ways — that it’s 104 Super Bowls taking place over 39 days.”
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That comparison is apt, he said, because of the size of the venues, the scale of production, the number of feeds required, the access restrictions and security aspects.
“But at FOX,” Callahan said, “we relish those challenges.”
Industry leaders said the worldwide viewing audience for the World Cup final could exceed 1.5 billion. Lawson, who resides in D-FW, said the World Cup will “likely be the most-watched sporting event in the history of the planet, the most-watched live event in the history of the planet.”
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Lawson, Callahan and Carter provided a window into the countless tech-heavy puzzle pieces that need to come together behind the scenes to make a successful World Cup.
As Lawson painted the picture of match day, “the pitch is in good shape, the lines are painted, the goals are in place, but everything else requires a ton of technology, and it’s a constantly moving target, because broadcasters always have amazing and innovative ideas. ‘Well, what if we give them this view? What if we gave them that view? How do we give people this experience? ‘
“And that requires connectivity, and that requires investment in building and doing all those types of things, so it’s not something that you just snap your fingers for. It is a hugely complex set of technologies and partnerships across the ecosystem,” Lawson added, “which, if we do it right, nobody notices. If they don’t notice us, then we’ve done a great job. It should be an invisible experience.”
Some 80,000 miles of fiber
Lawson, who has been with Verizon for 25 years, said the company is the official telecommunication services sponsor for the World Cup and providing all underlying connectivity and technology for the tournament to operate.
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“You think about having to connect every single one of those stadiums back to what would also be hosted here in Dallas at the International Broadcast Center, which is where all those feeds will come from, each of the stadiums, all the different camera settings in each of the stadiums,” Lawson said. “We’re talking, conservatively, 80,000 miles of fiber that’s being leveraged to connect all the stadiums.”
Verizon made network upgrades, adding more 5G spectrum to boost capacity by an estimated three to five times across all host stadiums. To enable fans to more easily watch game highlights, check player stats, use mobile concession payments and share moments on social media, Verizon also installed thousands of antennas under seats, as well as ball-shaped antennas to provide 4G and 5G coverage for fans in higher sections.
Private 5G networks will be deployed in host stadiums for various uses, including enabling the so-called referee view body cameras.
For fans taking mass transit or enjoying watch parties in surrounding communities, Verizon deployed nearly 140 small cells and temporary cell sites to boost coverage and capacity.
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Lawson said connectivity will be critically important outside the stadium but just as important inside the stadium.
“Our expectation is, this is rough science, there will be about 50 terabytes of data uploaded during the match, which is about the equivalent of streaming high-density, high-quality video for about three years,” he said.
The most important connectivity, both inside and outside the stadium, is for law enforcement, first responders and other public safety officials, he said, adding that Verizon partners with more than 45,000 state, local and federal agencies across the U.S.
FOX’s countdown clock is ticking
Inside the FOX Sports’ offices in Los Angeles is a countdown clock in the lobby marking the preparation time left until the World Cup kicks off. But planning started long ago, and Callahan is at the center of it.
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To frame the scale of the undertaking, Callahan said that for the 2018 men’s World Cup in Russia, FOX Sports alone transmitted more data than existed in the Library of Congress at the time.
Troubleshooting is critical.
FOX has been using proactive monitoring for a few years to try to anticipate a degradation in signal and move it to an “alternate path” ahead of the viewer ever noticing.
Callahan said they have backup to survive even a “drunk fan cutting what they think is a rope that ends up being our fiber going back into the broadcast compound.”
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Callahan, who joined FOX in 2013, has seen it all.
“We’ve lost signals due to squirrels,” said Callahan. “We’ve lost signals due to — this one was actually here at Fort Worth at the NASCAR track. [People] saw the fiber strung up, and they needed to hang their lantern on something. So they just went ahead and tied the knot and hung their lantern on it. And then we’ve even had hot coals dumped over a wall to fiber and melt the fiber.
“We’ve lost a bit of fiber to a street sweeper. All sorts of things can happen where we are hopefully prepared for every scenario, but every scenario has a different backup contingency.”
Arlington using AI at stoplights
Carter of the city of Arlington is working with hundreds of entities in coordination efforts. He said FIFA alone has at least 100 working groups, all meeting at different times during a given week.
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Carter said the city has created some “best practices” guidelines that they sent to about 200 public and private entities.
“Arlington is not done hosting big stuff,” Carter said. “So we’re always strengthening for every event. And I think the World Cup will be the ultimate challenge for anyone that’s hosting, absolutely.”
He said Arlington will have a “real-time crime center, a real-time traffic center and a real-time security operations center.” Communication will occur in all directions.
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“We’ve also invested in, from a traffic perspective, we have a service called ‘NoTraffic’ that puts AI at all the different stop lights and that helps optimize how the traffic flows throughout the city, or specifically the entertainment district,” Carter said. “That’s been something our public works team has been working very hard on … and it’s been a smashing success. I think it’ll be very helpful during the World Cup with the sheer amount of volume.”
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Carter echoed Lawson’s sentiments: The less fans notice connectivity and logistics, the more successful the World Cup will be in the eyes of fans.
“You get your ticket, you go in the stadium, everything’s safe and protected,” Carter said. “It’s because all of that coordination happened behind the scenes.”