Fox 2026 World Cup TV Plans Include Stars and Alexi Lalas

Alexi Lalas is one of the best-known American soccer players of all time, but even he didn’t watch his first World Cup until he was 16 years old.

It was 1986, and Lalas was playing with his travel soccer team at the Pikes Peak Invitational Tournament in Colorado.

“In between the 700 games that you play over the course of four days or whatever, they brought in a television set to the lobby of the Holiday Inn, with the rabbit ears and everything like that, and set it up, and we were just sitting there and watching this,” Lalas recalls.

The U.S. wasn’t even in the event, but having grown up in Michigan, Lalas embraced team Canada, and was transfixed by the spectacle, even though he noted it seemed “so far away.”

“It’s rather late for someone at 16 to see their first World Cup, but it just gives you an idea of where we were back then,” he added. “As the saying goes, you’ve come a long way, baby, and we certainly have.”

Lalas is now the lead analyst for Fox Sports‘ coverage of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, and for the first time since he played the tournament in 1994, it will be played back on U.S. soil (as well as in Mexico and Canada).

Lalas is betting that the prime location can turn America into a country of soccer fans.

“The stars are aligning here,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Even when you look at the women’s World Cup that was in Canada, time zones matter you know, and getting people when it is convenient and when they are at home matters in terms of more people coming into the tent.”

“Now, you add the fact that we’re hosting it and the fact that the time zones all line up beautifully, it means that when those people do come into the tent, they’re going to come in en masse, and we’ve got to make sure that we entertain them, that we keep them there, that we give them something to watch, that we excite them,” he adds. “When I say we, I mean what we are doing on Fox, and then the team on the field has to live up to that responsibility too.”

Fox is taking on the challenge, not only putting together the most star-studded broadcast team of any World Cup in its history, but putting more live games on broadcast TV than ever before. All 104 matches will be on TV, with most of them (70, to be precise) on the Fox broadcast network. The remaining 34 will be on FS1. All of them will also stream on Fox One.

As Lalas alluded to, many of the biggest matchups will air in primetime, providing maximum exposure to an American audience that may not have seen France’s Kylian Mbappé or Norway’s Erling Haaland. And of course the American team, led by Christian Pulisic, will get plenty of primetime play as well.

Zac Kenworthy, VP of production for Fox Sports, says that for previous World Cups, like in Qatar 2022 and Russia 2018, the network tried to bring some of the character from the host countries into the broadcast. The network will do a bit of that with Canada and Mexico, but with the lion’s share of games being played in the U.S., “it allows us to do then is take that time and storytelling around the fandom in this country.”

“I know in Georgia, for example, around Atlanta, the Cape Verde community is very excited that they get to watch their team, who qualified for their World Cruise World against Spain,” he adds. “So it’s finding those pockets and those opportunities to story tell around those communities.”

“This is on our watch,” Lalas says. “I want it to be a positive message that goes out to the world, and a positive message that we feel internally, and so I feel that we as Fox are making sure that as many people can see this as possible.

“Obviously you’ll see the number of games that are on Fox, that’s important because I don’t have to tell you, but in this day and age, where so much is behind walls and so many clickthrough things, I want it to be ubiquitous, I want people to be able to walk down a town and see that the games are playing on in the background, and you’re flicking through, and there it is, there’s the game,” Lalas adds.

But it also means an on-air broadcast team that reads like an all-star team. The hosts will include Rob Stone, Jules Breach, Pien Meulensteen, and Rebecca Lowe (normally a host for NBC Sports who is on a “summer transfer” to Fox, as Stone quips). The analysts will include Lalas and other U.S. soccer legends like Carli Lloyd, Clint Dempsey and Landon Donovan. But it will also include French soccer icon Thierry Henry, and the charismatic Swedish star Zlatan Ibrahimović.

“With these guys, when they speak, people stop and listen, so it’s being smart about that and giving them the opportunity to present their best self going forward, it’s just part of an ongoing conversation,” Kenworthy says. “Obviously, Thierry is a seasoned broadcast veteran now [he has worked for CBS Sports and Prime Video], he knows what he’s doing, he knows how to break the game down. He also understands that you can’t talk X’s and O’s for an entire hour leading up to kickoff.

“For Zlatan, the conversations are a bit different. He hasn’t done broadcast before, so it’s making sure that he’s confident and comfortable to be himself,” Kenworthy adds. “He’s a star, right? He just sounds great, he looks great, he’s a lot of fun to be around. We want to make sure that with these guys, you feel like you’re watching a game with your buddies and you’re having a good time, and I think they’re going to elevate it just because of their star power.”

For Fox Sports, which is reportedly paying just under $500 million for rights to the event, it is an investment worth making. For Lalas, it’s an opportunity to recreate that childhood experience of watching the matches for the first time, for a new generation.

“People still stop me on the street and talk about ’94. Many years from now, there’ll be older men and women that were kids, I hope they’re looking back fondly and saying, ‘remember that summer of ’26, the games that we saw, the goals that we saw, the people that we met, the parties that we had,” he says. “That’s important, because it can be a touchstone type of thing that, yes, maybe turns them on to soccer, but more importantly, they associate soccer with a celebration that is the summer of ’26.”