Telemundo’s commitment to its audience during the 2026 World Cup is no.
In an interview with Business Sports Journal last week, Miguel Lorenzo, senior vice president of content for Comcast/NBC Universal’s Spanish-language broadcaster, highlighted the importance of “creating an authentic viewing experience” for the tournament.
At the time of writing this column, it was unclear whether Fox Sports, the other North American rights holder for the World Cup, would follow its rival or use the interruptions to increase its advertising revenue.
Continues after advertising
Daniel Cohen, responsible for sports media rights at consultancy Octagon, told The Athletic that Fox would recoup its entire investment through advertising alone.
According to their estimates, advertisements represent between 30% and 40% of the revenue generated by the World Cupwhile most of it comes from retransmission fees. He calculates that the 30 games shown on Fox Sports 1 will generate around US$70 million additional.
Fox invested US$485 million for World Cup rightsan amount that includes a bonus related to the tournament being held in the United States. This number, however, could be much higher.
Continues after advertising
Experts interviewed by The Athletic estimate that, if FIFA opened a new tender today, the rights would be worth between US$1 billion and US$1.5 billion.
Reporter Tariq Panja recovered this discussion from a behind-the-scenes negotiation between 2014 and 2015. At the time, FIFA agreed to extend Fox’s contract until 2026 in exchange for avoiding potential litigation if the 2022 World Cup was moved to the end of the year because of Qatar.
Fox, which had never broadcast a World Cup, defeated ESPN in the dispute for the 2018 and 2022 tournaments.
Continues after advertising
His argument was that theUS$425 million paid for the rights made sense only if they were played during the American summer, when no sports games from the country’s four main leagues take place.
The decision made 11 years ago also extended the privilege to Telemundo and its Canadian counterpart.
The broader context of these stories goes beyond the appreciation of sporting rights. They help explain how the industry tries to balance revenue growth, increasingly fragmented distribution deals and new ways of monetizing audiences.
Continues after advertising
From this perspective, the 2026 World Cup will be a great simultaneous test of the main theses that currently compete for the future of sports media: rights, distribution, platforms, creators and monetization.
As Nick Meacham noted in conversation with Chris Stone on the Streamtime Sports podcast, the most interesting discussion isn’t in the US$ 13 billion that FIFA projects to raise this cyclebut in the answers that the tournament can offer about where the industry is heading.
The illusion of absolute numbers
FIFA media rights almost doubled from US$2.4 billion in 2010 to a projection of more than US$4 billion in 2026. But when you adjust the curve for inflation and look at cycle-by-cycle growth, Meacham points out, the numbers are “less impressive than the absolute values suggest.”
Read more:
For 2026, the projected nominal increase is 14.1% in relation to 2022. In the previous cycle, between Russia and Qatar, the jump had been 24.1%. Going back to 2010, the difference is even more evident: after growing just 0.8% between South Africa and Brazil, revenue increased 13.7% in the following cycle.
The analyst points to a “broader trend of stagnation”, similar to what is happening with European domestic rights. He cites the late agreements with China and India as another point that reinforces his thesis.
Read more:
FIFA reached an understanding with India only last week when it announced Zee Entertainment as the broadcaster of the tournament. According to Reuters, the contract was closed for US$60 million, below US$ 100 million initially intended.
In China, the standoff ended on May 15. China Media Group has secured the rights to the next four World Cups (two men’s and two women’s) until 2031 for US$60 million. FIFA’s first expectation was around US$250 million.
A month ago, I mentioned that a possible blackout in these countries could affect regions that represented 22.6% of the World Cup’s global streaming reach in 2022.
The episode also exposes a broader issue: FIFA’s dependence on external partners to monetize its large-scale audience and doubts about FIFA+’s ability to transform into a relevant business in these markets.
Read more:
This discussion helps explain another piece of data highlighted by Meacham: the 175 individual broadcasting agreements signed by FIFA for the 2026 World Cup.
Spreading may seem contradictory in an environment dominated by global platforms, but it remains a fundamental part of the tournament’s economic logic. In the analyst’s assessment, this is not an inefficiency of the system, but a “structural necessity.”
Global agreements tend to generate “leaks” of value, while sponsorship revenue continues to be directly associated with the ability to guarantee massive reach on open television within each market.
The argument challenges one of the most widespread assumptions of the digital economy: that global scale necessarily replaces local structures. In the case of the World Cup, the dynamics seem to be reversed.
The more global the event, the greater the need for commercial, regulatory and distribution adaptations in each territory.
“Those working on global sports properties need to build for this complexity, not work around it,” summarizes Meacham.
The parallel ecosystem test
The dispersion of rights illustrates the complexity of the sports media ecosystem. In this scenario, FIFA’s decision to transform TikTok and YouTube into preferred distribution platforms is one of the most important tests in the sector, highlights Meacham.
The analyst argues that the question is not whether we should use these platforms, but how to classify them. And then comes the question: Are competitors cannibalizing your proprietary audience or distribution channels expanding your reach?
This is a reading that, in March. Instead of seeing platforms as direct competitors of broadcasters, he suggests interpreting them as parallel ecosystems, with their own languages, products and consumption dynamics.
From this perspective, FIFA’s strategy stops looking like a simple expansion of reach and starts to be seen as an attempt to build new layers of audience without necessarily replacing the old ones.
The ten-minute live window on YouTube will require special attention. As Carlo De Marchis noted in an article published at the end of May, this is enough time to monetize.
“YouTube ads run pre-roll and mid-roll. A ten-minute opening of a major international match can support multiple ad placements at premium CPMs.
Broadcasters earn revenue from the YouTube stream itself, in addition to any subsequent subscription conversions.”
And this period only works, explains De Marchis, because these platforms have built mechanisms to concentrate the audience even before the broadcast begins. YouTube does this via notifications and watch page, while TikTok delivers something equivalent with GamePlan, adapted to its format.
In Meacham’s view, the result of this experimentation will not just be an audience metric. The conversion rate between viewers and subscribers will indicate how much social-first distribution can add real value to rights holders, in markets with different public or paid models.
This brings us to one last question that the 2026 World Cup will be able to answer: Is “creator-as-broadcaster” a viable path or an outlier?
Meacham separates the structural from the circumstantial and cites the LiveMode/CazéTV operation as an example.
According to him, the channel was successful in Brazil because it started with an already built audience and a market in which traditional broadcasting had gaps. : is being built from scratch. It is this experiment that deserves attention.
Read more:
In the end, the real obstacle remains economic. Creator-led monetization, the analyst notes, is still far from the advertising volume that linear platforms and traditional broadcasters are able to capture in mature markets.
A month from now, at the end of the World Cup, the industry will better understand whether the model also scales.
