During the first week of the World Cup, the first 12 games shown on FOX, FS1 and Tubi (ad-supported streaming also owned by Fox Corporation) reached an average of 6.7 million viewers152% above the tournament group stage average in 2022.
The United States team’s rout in its debut reached 18 million viewers on average, making it the most-watched English-language broadcast in the tournament’s history in the country.
Add the draw between Brazil and Morocco which surpassed 10 million viewersconsolidating itself as the most watched game by a foreign team in the USA, and the opening between Mexico and South Africa, with 6.3 million, the most watched debut of the tournament.
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The audience records boost the advertising machine that Fox has become during the World Cup.
According to media buyers interviewed by Sportico, a 30-second commercial during hydration breaks is generating, on average, US$ 275 mil na Foxwith spaces in the broadcast of the USA-Paraguay game reaching US$850 thousand each.
The publication’s estimate is that Fox is earning about $2.5 million in additional advertising revenue per match that doesn’t involve the U.S. team, while the three U.S. group stage games should generate an extra US$23 million only at these mandatory intervals.
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As I showed here two weeks ago, the expectation is that just the 30 games shown on Fox Sports 1 will add $70 million.
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Amid historic milestones, Fox announced last week the acquisition of Roku for US$22 billion.
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In the words of Alexander Sherman, from CNBC Sports, the move transforms Fox from a company largely focused on news and sports into one of the largest aggregators of streaming services for connected TVs in the world.
Roku accounted for 44% of all streaming hours on connected TV devices in the US in the fourth quarter of 2025. In the country, 40% of new TVs sold run Roku OS. Globally, more than 100 million homes use some of the company’s products.
This type of monetization at scale helps to understand why Fox’s most relevant asset is no longer just in the content, but in the layer that controls its distribution and ability to generate advertising.
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Understand the deal as a “control, not content” agreement. As analyst Ian Whittaker highlighted, Fox is looking to leverage its position over the distribution network.
“Sport collapses time”
The billion-dollar acquisition in the context of the most fragmented World Cup in history reinforces why sport defies the laws of gravity of modern media and collapses time. This is a clever analogy brought by James Mortimer that helps to frame what is behind the operation.
For Mortimer, when media is analyzed through the lens of a Meta-level advertising engine, the value of sports fundamentally changes.
In the pure subscription era, streaming platforms treated sports rights as a subscriber acquisition cost (CAC). In this model, sport was essentially a .
In the transition to AVOD (video on demand with advertising), this logic is reorganized: sports rights are no longer a simple marketing cost and begin to operate as “critical advertising technology infrastructure”.
New global advertising revenue data from Madison & Wall, released last week, indicates that global advertising revenue is expected to increase 8.3% in 2026, reaching $1.42 trillion. By 2030, the global market could reach US$1.72 trillion, with a CAGR of 5.6%.
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Growth in 2026, according to the study, is driven by cyclical sporting events, including the World Cup. The most relevant data, however, is another: this jump tends to slow down, even with peak events.
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That’s why Mortimer defends the Fox acquisition as not just a combination of assets. The business is connecting different layers of the attention economy.
“On one side, Fox brings the NFL, MLB and the World Cup. On the other, Roku adds a digital interface, user data and programmatic ad insertion technology to more than 100 million homes,” he argued.
From the fragmentation of streaming to the reinvention of distribution
Before unraveling this thesis, it is worth looking at the recent trajectory of Fox itself in the streaming wars cycle.
In 2019, the company sold most of its entertainment assets to Disney for $71 billion, including studios such as Avatar and X-Men, the FX channel, National Geographic and its stake in Hulu.
At the time, as the 365247 Sports blog noted, the market believed that the future of media would be defined by catalog scale. Fox, at that moment, seemed to have left the race.
Seven years later, the industry reorganized in another direction. Disney, Warner and Paramount began to compete for subscribers in a model pressured by costs and margins. Fox, on the other hand, maintained its focus on one of the few consistently valued assets: live sports.
Fox grew its adjusted EBITDA to a record $3.62 billion and generated more than $2 billion in annual free cash flow while maintaining consistent profitability.
Returning control as a competitive advantage
The Murdoch family’s caution was recalled by Whittaker to highlight that Fox’s controllers always had a long-term vision “and, at times, were willing to go against the markets.”
Today, Lachlan Murdoch’s new bet is a demonstration that the future of media requires control over the entire chain: content (Fox Sports and Fox News), ad-supported streaming distribution (Tubi) and access infrastructure (Roku).
Mortimer describes this movement as the beginning of a new modus operandi, in which sports leagues begin to demand equity participation, sharing of advertising revenue and access to data in exchange for broadcasting rights.
“They will no longer just accept checks with fixed amounts; they will demand participation in the advertising system”, he argues.
In this scenario, technology giants (Apple, Amazon, Google) and surviving traditional players (such as Fox itself) compete in a “zero-sum game for attention supremacy” in which sport remains the only asset with a simultaneous audience on a global scale.
As the analyst summarizes, the leagues hold unique capital that is “not replicable, only acquired”. Therefore, funds such as Silver Lake, CVC and sovereigns have spent the last few years buying stakes instead of just waiting for pricing via transmission rights.
This dynamic triggers a vulnerability for companies that only hold broadcasting rights and live at constant risk of disintermediation by whoever controls the device where the content is consumed.
Ultimately, Mortimer is spot-on in reversing a dominant Silicon Valley narrative. The thesis that television was just an “economic accident” of the analogue era is incomplete. And the Fox-Roku merger indicates almost the opposite: “access control, in fact, has always been the business model.”
