How a Curious FIFA Boardroom Deal Handed Fox an Astounding Bargain

[Celerity]

A decision to stave off litigation between Fox and FIFA turned into a bonanza worth hundreds of millions of dollars in discounted World Cup rights to the broadcaster.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/24/world/europe/fifa-world-cup-fox-broadcast-rights.html


FIFA headquarters in Zurich in 2024. Credit...Michael Buholzer/EPA, via Shutterstock

Fox Corporation is getting an enormous bargain to broadcast the 2026 World Cup next month, industry analysts say. It is paying less than $500 million to air the tournament, according to people familiar with the agreement who were not authorized to speak on the matter. Yet experts say the rights are worth as much as three times that amount, raising questions about how Fox secured such an incredible deal.

The answer stretches back to March 2014, when FIFA’s board convened in a soundproof room reserved for the most important decisions, deep in the subterranean layer of its glass-and-steel headquarters in Zurich. There, some of the most powerful figures in soccer were told that a decision worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the sport’s governing body was needed to make a problem go away, according to people with direct knowledge of what was said in the meeting.

A separate resolution, made in the same room four years earlier, was to blame. That’s when FIFA chose tiny but wealthy Qatar to host the 2022 World Cup, which would go on to create a conflict with Fox, one of its biggest broadcast partners. Many of the details of the meeting, including the conversations that took place, and what Fox paid for the 2026 World Cup rights have not been previously reported. Qatar’s searingly hot summers made it unsuitable to host an event traditionally played in June and July. FIFA officials would eventually acknowledge the problem by shifting the tournament to late fall, but the English-language rights in the United States had been won by Fox years earlier.

Fox, which had never broadcast the World Cup, beat ESPN, the longtime rights holder, in a bidding war to broadcast both the 2018 and 2022 tournaments. The rights, Fox had argued, were worth the record $425 million paid only if the tournaments were played on their usual summer dates. Now FIFA wanted to move the Qatar World Cup to a time when the American sports calendar is jammed with football, basketball and hockey.

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