Over the past six months, Fox Sports has made a significant effort to enhance its World Cup studio analyst roster, given the additions of Rebecca Lowe, Thierry Henry, Zlatan Ibrahimović and Javier (Chicharito) Hernández. On Thursday, the company plans to announce another addition with an equally massive name in the global soccer world.
SBJ has learned that Fox has hired Clarence Seedorf, the Dutch footballing legend, to work as a World Cup studio analyst this summer. Seedorf has been a regular part of Amazon Prime’s coverage of the Champions League in the U.K. as well as its coverage of Italian football. The Athletic recently called him “the best football pundit on TV right now.”
It’s somewhat of a homecoming for Seedorf, as he also served as an analyst for Fox Sports during the sports division’s coverage of the 2018 World Cup in Russia.
“I feel we need to educate people at home, for the things they might not know, because they have never lived it,” Seedorf recently told The Athletic. “So being close to the pitch, seeing warmups, seeing certain elements of the game -- it gives me the ability to be able to transmit things that one at home might not see, or didn’t think about. I think it’s a privilege to be able to do that.”
Seedorf is the only player in history to win four Champions League titles with three different teams -- Ajax (1995), Real Madrid (1998) and AC Milan (2003 and 2007). He represented the Netherlands in the 1998 World Cup in France, and his managerial career includes a stint at AC Milan, Real Club Deportivo de La Coruna (a second-division Spanish team) as well as the Cameroon national team. Seedorf’s broadcast work also includes time at the BBC, Globo TV, ESPN and TV Azteca.
Fox Sports will air the World Cup from June 11 through July 19, with all 104 tournament matches airing live on both Fox (70 matches) and FS1 (34).
When Lowe chatted with SBJ for a 90-minute interview in January, she called working the Olympics and the World Cup in the same year “the pinnacle of my career.” The prospect of Lowe, one of the great working studio hosts today, teaming up with Henry and Seedorf, both widely praised for their commentary, has massive promise for soccer viewers this summer.
