Blue-skying ruled the day at “The Global Game: The Future Of Soccer, Tech & Media,” a conference featuring stakeholders in the sport as it approaches a milestone in 2026.
Speakers throughout Thursday’s event had to invent new superlatives to describe their expectations for next summer’s World Cup. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy proclaimed that the championship game next July will be “the most watched event in human history – not sporting event. Event.”
Before dismissing the buzz inside Newark, NJ’s Prudential Center as just so many industry vuvuzelas, consider the reasons for the optimism of government officials, broadcasters and tech companies. Next summer’s World Cup will be the first quadrennial edition to feature 48 teams, up from 32. The tournament’s 104 games will be hosted by 16 cities across the U.S., Canada and Mexico, which will boost ratings, certainly here at home on Fox. Eight matches, including the July 19, 2026 championship, will also be played at MetLife Stadium in the media mecca of greater New York, bringing millions of visitors to the area.
New Jersey will see economic in the mid-single-digit billions, adding 14,000 to 15,000 jobs and drawing 1 million to 2 million visitors during the Cup, Murphy said. The state’s hosting of the FIFA Club World Cup, which culminates Sunday in the final between Paris-St. Germain and Chelsea, has served as a warm-up for the main global spectacle. “There’s nowhere on the planet, in my humble opinion, that’s more prepared for next year than we are now,” he said. “We actively sought out a major role in the Club World Cup this year to make sure we could take whatever we’re doing around the track.”
Watch on Deadline
Fox Sports is among those expecting records – not only in terms of viewership, but also its own promotional campaign. The network’s marketing chief, Robert Gottlieb, was asked during one of the day’s panels for a budget estimate for what Fox is spending on the blitz. He declined to offer a number, but promised that it would be “the largest and most expensive campaign we have ever done at Fox Sports.”
Fox mobilized Jon Hamm to play Santa Clause in promos for the 2022 Cup in Qatar, which had to be played in the late-fall due to the summer heat in Doha. Gottlieb said this year the entire U.S. Men’s National Team would be the focus of marketing efforts. “It’s such a huge moment in the country and for us as the broadcaster, it’s really important for us to be out there and own a piece of it in the psyche of the American public.”
Gottlieb also said Fox and others carrying soccer have had to be “a little cautious about the glut” across pay-TV and streaming. “Everybody wants in on this soccer market now, so you have Club World Cup, you have CONCACAF Gold Cup, you have the women’s Euros happening,” plus MLS and NWSL matches. “It’s a little tough for the non-core fan to discern the difference. … It may be a little confusing for the casual fan, but next summer of course it will crescendo with the World Cup.”
Tom Gorke, who spent a long stint as an exec at Viacom before taking his current position as Google’s Managing Director, M&E Content Partnerships. Due to his focus on helping Android and Google TV users find the programming they want, he said he is keenly aware of how confounding sports can be for the average viewer. “Sports rights are highly fragmented,” he said during a panel focused on streaming soccer. “Even World Cup rights, Telemundo’s got Spanish-language rights, English-language rights sit elsewhere.”
Social media can provide a more unified experience for soccer fans, a number of panelists observed.
Tim O’Mahony, director and head of international content for X, called the Elon Musk-owned social network “the world’s most powerful cultural signal.” It recently teamed with subscription streamer DAZN to present dozens of livestreamed matches during the FIFA Club World Cup and has a similar partnership with FIFA in the works for 2026. “People go to X first” for many things, chief among them major sporting events. “They interact with it. It’s felt, it’s debated, it’s memed.”
Fielding a question for the whole panel about how AI is influencing the live sports experience, O’Mahony didn’t go anywhere near the current controversy surrounding the company’s Grok chatbot. “Our company is now an AI company,” he said, alluding to xAI’s purchase of X last March. “Why it’s so exciting is, they have an incredible use case, like an everyday use case of how to train the AI model to improve it, to get better experiences for advertisers, for users, more brand-safe.” Musk, he added, “is getting heavily involved with it now. So, we are learning with him.”
Fighting piracy is one way AI has been a boost, O’Mahony said. The process of successfully getting an illegal stream taken down from X used to take an average of three-and-a-half hours. Now, with AI, the average is 40 minutes.
Not all of the talk was of this summer and next. The question of what comes afterward arose. Ricky Engelberg, a veteran marketing exec who is now a partner at Ryan Reynolds’ Maximum Effort, has seen the surge of soccer interest firsthand since coming aboard in 2023. The company’s investment in Wrexham A.F.C., a once-struggling club since promoted to the Championship (the second tier of UK soccer), has provided storybook fodder for FX docuseries Welcome to Wrexham.
While the U.S. is in “a peak football moment right now,” Engelberg said, Cup fever will eventually break.
“There’s just going to be a natural moment of feeling that it’s less of the energy than the ’24, ’25, ’26 buildup to it,” he said. The key for everyone banking on soccer, he continued, will be figuring out “how you navigate what ’27 and ’28 look like. … I’m a big fan of compounding. This will be a big deposit in the bank for compounding, but then the next leap will take more time than people probably think.”
Then again, another key date is already on the horizon: the 2031 Women’s World Cup will be hosted by the U.S. and Mexico.