{"id":328904,"date":"2026-06-09T09:41:18","date_gmt":"2026-06-09T09:41:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/328904\/"},"modified":"2026-06-09T09:41:18","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T09:41:18","slug":"fox-2026-world-cup-tv-plans-include-stars-and-alexi-lalas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/328904\/","title":{"rendered":"Fox 2026 World Cup TV Plans Include Stars and Alexi Lalas"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAlexi Lalas is one of the best-known American soccer players of all time, but even he didn\u2019t watch his first World Cup<\/a> until he was 16 years old.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt was 1986, and Lalas was playing with his travel soccer team at the Pikes Peak Invitational Tournament in Colorado.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIn between the 700 games that you play over the course of four days or whatever, they brought in a television set to the lobby of the Holiday Inn, with the rabbit ears and everything like that, and set it up, and we were just sitting there and watching this,\u201d Lalas recalls.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe U.S. wasn\u2019t even in the event, but having grown up in Michigan, Lalas embraced team Canada, and was transfixed by the spectacle, even though he noted it seemed \u201cso far away.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s rather late for someone at 16 to see their first World Cup, but it just gives you an idea of where we were back then,\u201d he added. \u201cAs the saying goes, you\u2019ve come a long way, baby, and we certainly have.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tLalas is now the lead analyst for Fox<\/a> Sports<\/a>\u2018 coverage of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, and for the first time since he played the tournament in 1994, it will be played back on U.S. soil (as well as in Mexico and Canada).<\/p>\n

\n\tLalas is betting that the prime location can turn America into a country of soccer fans.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe stars are aligning here,\u201d he tells The Hollywood Reporter. \u201cEven when you look at the women\u2019s World Cup that was in Canada, time zones matter you know, and getting people when it is convenient and when they are at home matters in terms of more people coming into the tent.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cNow, you add the fact that we\u2019re hosting it and the fact that the time zones all line up beautifully, it means that when those people do come into the tent, they\u2019re going to come in en masse, and we\u2019ve got to make sure that we entertain them, that we keep them there, that we give them something to watch, that we excite them,\u201d he adds. \u201cWhen I say we, I mean what we are doing on Fox, and then the team on the field has to live up to that responsibility too.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFox is taking on the challenge, not only putting together the most star-studded broadcast team of any World Cup in its history, but putting more live games on broadcast TV than ever before. All 104 matches will be on TV, with most of them (70, to be precise) on the Fox broadcast network. The remaining 34 will be on FS1. All of them will also stream on Fox One.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs Lalas alluded to, many of the biggest matchups will air in primetime, providing maximum exposure to an American audience that may not have seen France\u2019s Kylian Mbapp\u00e9 or Norway\u2019s Erling Haaland. And of course the American team, led by Christian Pulisic, will get plenty of primetime play as well.<\/p>\n

\n\tZac Kenworthy, VP of production for Fox Sports<\/a>, says that for previous World Cups, like in Qatar 2022 and Russia 2018, the network tried to bring some of the character from the host countries into the broadcast. The network will do a bit of that with Canada and Mexico, but with the lion\u2019s share of games being played in the U.S., \u201cit allows us to do then is take that time and storytelling around the fandom in this country.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI know in Georgia, for example, around Atlanta, the Cape Verde community is very excited that they get to watch their team, who qualified for their World Cruise World against Spain,\u201d he adds. \u201cSo it\u2019s finding those pockets and those opportunities to story tell around those communities.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThis is on our watch,\u201d Lalas says. \u201cI want it to be a positive message that goes out to the world, and a positive message that we feel internally, and so I feel that we as Fox are making sure that as many people can see this as possible. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cObviously you\u2019ll see the number of games that are on Fox, that\u2019s important because I don\u2019t have to tell you, but in this day and age, where so much is behind walls and so many clickthrough things, I want it to be ubiquitous, I want people to be able to walk down a town and see that the games are playing on in the background, and you\u2019re flicking through, and there it is, there\u2019s the game,\u201d Lalas adds.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tAlexi Lalas<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto by Dimitrios Kambouris\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

\n\tBut it also means an on-air broadcast team that reads like an all-star team. The hosts will include\u00a0Rob Stone, Jules Breach,\u00a0Pien Meulensteen, and Rebecca Lowe (normally a host for NBC Sports who is on a \u201csummer transfer\u201d to Fox, as Stone quips). The analysts will include Lalas and other U.S. soccer legends like Carli Lloyd, Clint Dempsey and Landon Donovan. But it will also include French soccer icon Thierry Henry, and the charismatic Swedish star Zlatan Ibrahimovi\u0107.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWith these guys, when they speak, people stop and listen, so it\u2019s being smart about that and giving them the opportunity to present their best self going forward, it\u2019s just part of an ongoing conversation,\u201d Kenworthy says. \u201cObviously, Thierry is a seasoned broadcast veteran now [he has worked for CBS Sports and Prime Video], he knows what he\u2019s doing, he knows how to break the game down. He also understands that you can\u2019t talk X\u2019s and O\u2019s for an entire hour leading up to kickoff.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cFor Zlatan, the conversations are a bit different. He hasn\u2019t done broadcast before, so it\u2019s making sure that he\u2019s confident and comfortable to be himself,\u201d Kenworthy adds. \u201cHe\u2019s a star, right? He just sounds great, he looks great, he\u2019s a lot of fun to be around. We want to make sure that with these guys, you feel like you\u2019re watching a game with your buddies and you\u2019re having a good time, and I think they\u2019re going to elevate it just because of their star power.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFor Fox Sports, which is reportedly paying just under $500 million for rights to the event, it is an investment worth making. For Lalas, it\u2019s an opportunity to recreate that childhood experience of watching the matches for the first time, for a new generation.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cPeople still stop me on the street and talk about \u201994. Many years from now, there\u2019ll be older men and women that were kids, I hope they\u2019re looking back fondly and saying, \u2018remember that summer of \u201926, the games that we saw, the goals that we saw, the people that we met, the parties that we had,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s important, because it can be a touchstone type of thing that, yes, maybe turns them on to soccer, but more importantly, they associate soccer with a celebration that is the summer of \u201926.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alexi Lalas is one of the best-known American soccer players of all time, but even he didn\u2019t watch…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":328905,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133,10241,44648,154,3692],"class_list":["post-328904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-austin","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news","tag-fox","tag-fox-sports","tag-sports","tag-world-cup"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=328904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328904\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/328905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}