Fox Sports is Killing Soccer in America

For the Love of Pelé, Please Take the World Cup Away from Them

Quick programming note: I’m thinking about doing a mail bag newsletter in the next couple of weeks, so if you have any questions or topics you’d like addressed, please send them my way by replying to this email.

Soccer¹ has been expected to rise to mass popularity in the US since the 1994 World Cup. We were supposed to be a world power in the sport by now. But despite some high-profile or thrilling moments (mostly from the Women’s team), soccer’s growth seems to have stalled.

Experiencing this year’s European Championships via Fox might illuminate some of the reasons why…

Let’s start with the good news: Fox Sports’ coverage of the European Championships is vastly improved over last year’s Women’s World Cup.

The bad news: It’s still worse than every other presentation of soccer on TV, does nothing to grow interest in the sport, and continues to alienate the base of existing soccer fans.  

The improvement is largely down to one major factor: geography. The United States is not in Europe, and thus does not compete in this competition, so Fox’s unnecessarily US-obsessed POV is not nearly as big of an issue. (Long time readers: it’s not déjà vu, I wrote about this almost a year ago.)

That’s not to say they’re not still squeezing in as much American homerism as possible: Lead commentating team Ian Darke and Landon Donovan, for example, still spent several minutes talking about a US Copa America game (which wouldn’t be taking place for another week) during a tightly wound England-Serbia matchup that had plenty of unaddressed tactical talking points.

But that’s a nitpick compared to the three big sins of Fox’s coverage of the Euros thus far:

One-Note Perspective

Fox made a big deal via PR about use of a single studio for coverage of both the Euros and the Copa America, which starts a week later. The studio is in Los Angeles, 6,000 miles from Germany.

That decision makes clear Fox’s point of view of the competition: the Euros are just another sporting event, so they will highlight the most obvious storylines and stars. There is no narrative creation, no attempt to find interesting stories. Quips about visiting Scottish fans drinking lots of beer in Munich is about as much cultural exploration as we get.

Fox’s coverage insists that you view the competing teams as only that, a collection of 11 athletes, instead of the representatives and embodiments of nations and cultures.  

Take yesterday’s pre-game coverage of the Portugal-Czechia game. After studio host Rob Stone mentioned Czechoslovakia won the 1976 Euros, he tossed to a pre-recorded piece that I thought would explore the footballing history and evolving identity of the country since then, including the new official rebranding of the nation as Czechia (from Czech Republic) and that both they and Slovakia are both in the tournament for only the second time since partition. Instead, we got 30 seconds of coaching platitudes followed by soundbites from Czech players talking about how great Cristiano Ronaldo is.

(After commercial, the following segment was a 12-minute boiler plate profile and analysis of Ronaldo, one of the most famous people on the planet, a man with 632 million Instagram followers, and easily the most recognizable player in this tournament about which there is very little the average soccer fan doesn’t already know.)

FuboTV

Against all odds, Fox somehow found a way to make our experience of the tournament worse by removing themselves.

In an apparent bid to make back some of their financial commitment, Fox has sub-licensed 5 of the group stage games to FuboTV, a sports-centric streaming service with less than 2 million subscribers.

As if making it harder to find the games wasn’t bad enough, the cost of a 1-month FuboTV subscription is $80! This makes Peacock’s paywalling of that single NFL game look like charity.

To make matters worse, some nations (Ukraine and Georgia) wound up with multiple games on Fubo. So if you’re a Ukrainian-American, and your team improbably qualifies for the tournament after two years of war, fear, and uncertainty, you’re singled out to pay $80 dollars to watch your team’s first two games (after which you might already be eliminated from the competition).

The FuboTV coverage also seems to have been laughable, including not having an on-screen bug for score/clock.

The Alexi Lalas of it all…

Fox also demonstrated zero creativity in selecting on-air talent. It seems like they scanned through a list of American soccer personalities and just pointed at the names they recognized.

That’s how we end up with one of the world’s most boring men, Landon Donovan, as the lead color commentator. I don’t normally like to quote social media trolls, but they really sum up Donovan’s broadcasting failures better than I ever could. My favorite: “Landon Donovan does color commentary with the enthusiasm of someone being held at gunpoint.” Spot on.

But I would take a lifetime of listening to Landon drone on than have to suffer one more minute of Fox’s most prominent studio analyst: Alexi Lalas.

Lalas is the anti-Charles Barkley.

If Charles Barkley is the G.O.A.T. of sports studio analysts, Alexi Lalas is the L.A.M.B. (Least Accomplished Mediocre Broadcaster).

While Charles was an on-court legend and perennial All-Pro, Lalas was a middling defender in his playing career, whose most notable achievement was selfishly sabotaging locker room camaraderie during the 1998 World Cup because he wasn’t good enough to play.

While Charles speaks unvarnished truths from his heart, Lalas is all bombast and blowhardery (entering the OED in 2027), contorting himself to find the most clippable takes.

While Charles beautifully mixes tactical game analysis with appreciation for the metanarrative and historical contexts, Lalas deals in reductive takes and racist/sexist/homophobic dog whistles (like his tirade that the US Women’s National Team was too “unlikable.”)

While Charles proclaimed he was not a role model despite being charming, likable, and self-aware enough to know how lucky he was to get rich playing basketball, Lalas teaches young potential fans that soccer people are elitist, vainglorious windbags.

Why, Fox, Why?

What’s remarkable about Fox’s approach is that it indicates they have absolutely no interest in growing their audience. They’ve paid their billions in rights fees to get these events, and they will do the bare minimum necessary to eke out a tiny profit instead of attempting to fully capitalizing on these assets.

They know what kind of viewership they will get for the next World Cup based on casual fans tuning into US games. You would think, now that they have the other premier international tournament, they would use it as a vehicle to create broader interest in the sport, making them less reliant on the US team’s performance in 2026. Instead, they seem to be phoning it in. Their insistence on treating it as purely a sporting event won’t attract new viewers, yet they also doing everything possible to alienate the most passionate soccer fans.

Shouldn’t Fox’s business interests compel them to make the most of this moment, to get the biggest possible return on their investment?

Exploring the ridiculous series of events that led to Fox’s soccer ownership might give us the answer…

How Did We Get Here?

Russia and Qatar get World Cups thanks to (proven) bribes.

Then Fox is awarded US rights to those tournaments, also thanks to (proven) bribes.

FIFA moves the date of Qatar World Cup to November because all those bribes led officials to turn a blind eye to the potentially deadly summer heat in the Middle East (along with the human rights violations and borderline slavery in construction of the Qatar stadiums).

The November reschedule pisses Fox off because it’s not as valuable to them in the fall, so they threaten to sue.

Even though Fox doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on, FIFA are so terrified of having their execs being deposed in the US (because of, you know, all the bribery) that they give FOX an additional World Cup (2026) for only a nominal fee increase and without even opening up to competing bids.

That 2026 tournament, taking place in the US and in a media landscape where sports rights are selling for record amounts, winds up being worth at least twice as much what Fox pays for it.

So maybe that’s the reason Fox DGAF? They got the media rights steal of the century. There’s no need for them to care because a windfall is guaranteed after they paid cents on the dollar.  

It’s a shame, more than 30 years after the last US World Cup, that soccer fans and players have to suffer as a result.

Weekly Prompt(s)

Despite its broadcaster’s, ahem, limitations, the 2026 World Cup in North America might be the biggest sporting event ever. What can a brand start doing now to play a role in the moment, either officially or unofficially?

How can a brand help find and tell the interesting stories around the Euros or World Cup that Fox ignores?

---

This Week’s Whimsies

Part Three of the brilliant “Culture is an Ecosystem” series examines the role of criticism.

Ana Andjelic on the “Brand Stack” and how to coordinate vision, mission, and promise.

This list of the most influential podcasts is like a mosaic of our evolving pop culture.

Happy Juneteenth to everyone!

1. Non-American readers, I’m sorry but I need to call it soccer in the interest of avoiding confusion.