In a conversation with Colin Cowherd at SBJ’s CAA World Congress of Sports in L.A. on Wednesday, Fox Sports CEO & Executive Producer Eric Shanks said this summer’s FIFA Men’s World Cup will be the biggest sports event in his network’s history.
Shanks said Fox has been preparing for this summer “since the lights went out in Qatar” four years ago. He noted that on-field success for the U.S. would be “massive” for Fox, but that the network isn’t reliant on the home team.
“People are rooting just as much for the stars of the sport, for Messi, Ronaldo and Mbappe, as they are anything else. So I think it’s a really highly educated soccer market now in the U.S., especially when it comes to international tournaments,” Shanks said. “So we’re going to tell this country the stories of soccer around the world.”
The tournament will also present the hotly anticipated broadcast debut for Zlatan Ibrahimovic. Shanks said he was introduced to Ibrahimovic by RedBird Capital’s Gerry Cardinale; RedBird owns AC Milan, for which Ibrahimovic serves as an adviser.
Fox’s recruitment effort included Ibrahimovic spending time with the network’s “locker room” of talent, including Tom Brady, Derek Jeter, David Ortiz, Alex Rodriguez and Michael Strahan. Subsequent contract negotiations offered a potential window into what to expect from the outspoken Swedish soccer star.
“I said, ‘Do you have an agent, who do you want me to send the offer to?’ And he said, ‘Zlatan is my agent.’ So we dealt with Zlatan and Zlatan the agent,” Shanks joked. “When we finally got everything done, he called and said, ‘Okay, I am in and you can fire everyone else.’ So I think that’s the guy that we’re going to get on the air, which is going to be absolutely tremendous.”
Throughout a wide-ranging conversation, Shanks also shared insights on:
- His support for a 24-team College Football Playoff: “If you don’t get penalized for playing those big non-conference games early and there’s a bigger pool of teams that can get into a 24-team playoff, the schedule gets better in September. And then in November, you have more meaningful games because a lot more teams are in play to be able to get in.”
- Fox’s investment in IndyCar: “Everybody who’s a producer in here probably has a bucket list of things that they’ve always wanted to do, whether it was a World Cup, a Super Bowl. One of the last things on my list was the Indy 500. I mean, I grew up 45 minutes from the track. I got to know Greg and Roger [Penske] and convinced them over a very long period of time that we would be a great partner because the blueprint is there for IndyCar to be as big as it ever was.”
- The World Baseball Classic: “Look, it definitely blew away expectations. It even blew our sales guys’ expectations away, because they sold it really cheap this year. That won’t happen again.”
- The future of Fox’s NFL media rights: “We were the only network that was literally born to do the NFL. And now we’ve grown into this saying that ‘Fox is football,’ right? Whether it’s college, spring, NFL; the NFL has just become a huge part of our DNA. And I mean, who wouldn’t want to be partners with the NFL as long as humanly possible?”
