Alexi Lalas is one of the most famous American soccer players of all time, but even he didn’t watch the World Cup for the first time until he was 16 years old.
It was 1986, and Lalas was playing with his soccer team in the Pikes Peak Invitational Tournament in Colorado.
“Of the 700 games you play over four days or something, they brought a TV into the lobby of the Holiday Inn, with bunny ears and everything like that, and they set it up, and we would sit there and watch this,” Lalas recalls.
The United States wasn’t even in attendance at the event, but having grown up in Michigan, Lalas embraced Team Canada and was transfixed by the spectacle, though he noted it seemed “so far away.”
“It’s too late for a 16-year-old to watch the World Cup for the first time, but it gives you an idea of where we were at that time,” he added. “As the saying goes, you’ve come a long way, baby, and we sure 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 on American soil (as well as in Mexico and Canada).
Lalas is betting that the prime location could turn America into a country of soccer fans.
“The stars are aligning here,” he says. Hollywood Reporter. “Even when you look at the Women’s World Cup in Canada, time zones matter as you know, and having people over when it’s appropriate and when they’re at home is important in terms of more people coming into the tent.”
“Now, add the fact that we’re hosting it and the fact that the time zones all line up beautifully, it means that when these people come to the tent, they’re going to come en masse, and we have to make sure that we’re entertaining them, that we’re keeping them there, that we’re giving them something to watch, and that we’re getting them interested,” he adds. “When I say we, I mean what we do at Fox, and then the team on the field has to live up to that responsibility as well.”
Fox faces the challenge of not only putting together the most star-studded broadcast team of any World Cup in its history, but also putting more live matches on broadcast television than ever before. All 104 matches will be broadcast on television, the majority (70 to be exact) on the Fox broadcast network. The remaining 34 will be on FS1. They will all also air on Fox One.
As Lalas hinted, many of the big matches will be broadcast in prime time, providing maximum exposure to an American audience that may not have seen Frenchman Kylian Mbappé or Norwegian Erling Haaland. And of course Christian Pulisic’s American team will get plenty of prime-time action as well.
For previous World Cups, such as Qatar 2022 and Russia 2018, the network has tried to bring some personalities from the host nations onto the broadcast, says Zach Kenworthy, vice president of production at Fox Sports. The network will do a little of that with Canada and Mexico, but with the lion’s share of the games being played in the U.S., “doing that then allows us to take that time and tell stories about the fanbase in that country.”
“I know that in Georgia, for example, around Atlanta, the Cape Verdean community is very excited because they were able to watch their team, which qualified for the Cruise World Cup against Spain,” he adds. “So it’s about finding those pockets and those opportunities to tell stories about those communities.”
“This is under our watch,” Lalas says. “I want it to be a positive message that goes out to the world, a positive message that we feel internally, and so I feel like we as Fox are making sure that as many people can see that as possible.
“Obviously you’re going to see how many games there are on Fox, and that’s important because I don’t have to tell you, but in this day and age, where there’s so much behind walls and so many things being clicked on, I want it to be everywhere, I want people to be able to walk into the city and see the games being played in the background, and you’re scrolling through it, and there it is, that’s the game,” Lalas adds.
But it also means an on-air team that looks like an all-star team. Hosts will include Rob Stone, Jules Breach, Pien Meulensteen and Rebecca Lowe (usually an NBC Sports host who is on a “summer move” to Fox, Stone jokes). Analysts will include Las Vegas and other NFL legends such as Carli Lloyd, Clint Dempsey and Landon Donovan. But it will also include French football icon Thierry Henry and the charismatic Swedish star Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
“With these people, when they talk, people stop and listen, so it’s smart to give them the opportunity to put their best foot forward, it’s just part of an ongoing conversation,” Kenworthy says. “It is clear that Thierry is now a veteran in the broadcasting industry [he has worked for CBS Sports and Prime Video]He knows what he’s doing, and he knows how to break the game. He also realizes that you can’t talk X’s and O’s for a full hour before kick-off.
“For Zlatan, the conversations are a bit different. He’s never broadcast before, so he makes sure he’s confident and comfortable being himself,” Kenworthy adds. “He’s a star, right? He looks great, he sounds 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 friends and having a good time, and I think they’re going to elevate that just because of their star power.”
For Fox Sports, which is reportedly paying just under $500 million for the rights to the event, this is an investment worth making. For Lalas, it’s a chance to recreate the childhood experience of watching matches for the first time, for a new generation.
“People still stop me in the street and talk about 1994,” he says. “Many years from now, there will be older men and women who were kids, and I hope they will look back fondly and say: ‘Remember the summer of ’26, the games we watched, the goals we saw, the people we met, the parties we had.’ “This is important, because it can be a touchstone for things, yes, maybe it turns them on to football, but more importantly, they associate football with football. Celebrated in the summer of 26.”
