How Fox Got The World Cup For Half Price
The 2026 World Cup is already the most successful tournament in FIFA’s 122-year history. The all-time attendance record (4.6 million) was broken before the knockout stage even began, and FIFA has been bragging for months about its projected $13 billion in revenue and $10 billion in profit from this World Cup cycle — roughly 2-3x higher than its previous revenue and profitability records.
What you’ll read online is that Fox is also a big World Cup winner. More than 100 million Americans have watched World Cup action on Fox so far. Team USA’s Round of 32 match against Bosnia-Herzegovina averaged 24.4 million viewers, making it the most-watched English-language soccer telecast in U.S. history, and Fox will likely make close to $1 billion in revenue from advertising deals alone.
But that’s not the whole story. The truth is, Fox is only going to make so much money off this year’s World Cup because FIFA gave the network a billion-dollar discount on its media rights fee. FIFA didn’t even open the bidding to ESPN or NBC, and Fox is paying roughly the same fee it paid to broadcast the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, except this one is worth 3x as much because it is in North America.
The real story is much more interesting. It involves bribery charges, FBI investigations, secret underground meetings, and hundreds of millions in profit.
Here’s what happened…