DALLAS -- One of the most important venues of the 2026 FIFA World Cup will never host a single fan.
Buried inside a construction zone in downtown Dallas, the International Broadcast Center is the tournament’s unseen control room. The 500,000-square-foot hub is where every match feed, Video Assistant Referee (VAR) review and stream of performance data is produced before they’re pushed out to the world. With the knockout stages underway, the building is still running close to capacity, even if almost no one outside the industry will ever see it.
But the IBC is more than a giant television control room. It reflects FIFA’s shift toward remote production, with replay, camera shading and other technical operations centralized in Dallas instead of duplicated at all 16 venues.
“The International Broadcast Center is the brain of the full FIFA World Cup 2026 host broadcast operation,” said Oscar Sanchez, FIFA’s head of host broadcast production and senior IBC manager. “Every camera that is capturing the game at the 16 venues is sent via different paths to here, and here it is distributed to the world.
“Every minute of the FIFA World Cup that the billions around the world are watching pass through here.”
Roughly 3,400 people work from the IBC each day, including rights holders, FIFA and Host Broadcast Services (HBS) staff, as well as the workers responsible for food service, security and keeping the facility powered.
The match schedule sets the rhythm. Teams start filtering in three to four hours before kickoff, but the building never really shuts down. Host-broadcast activity winds down “three hours after the last match of the day,” Sanchez said, yet the master control room runs 24/7 to serve broadcasters in Asia and Australia who rely on Dallas nighttime as their daytime. That keeps catering, cleaning, security, logistics and power teams on around-the-clock footing as well.
Feeds from 16 venues across three countries and four time zones are funneled into the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center and delivered to more than 200 media partners worldwide. Directors and camera operators remain at the stadiums, but FIFA has centralized much of the remaining work to North Texas.
“The actual production still lives at the stadium because the director and the camera operators are there, but the replay operation happens here, as well as the camera shading,” Sanchez said. “If we need to put up a percentage, 60 to 65% is done still at the venue, and 35% is done here, but then combined to leave to the media partners from here.”
Centralizing that work has changed how FIFA staffs the tournament.
“From the operational perspective, even environmentally, it’s convenient to have a hub like the IBC here in Dallas. Otherwise, we would need to have 16 teams and people traveling around and dealing with all the logistics of that. … The importance has been increasing.”
Complicated puzzle
Landing the IBC had been a multiyear project for Dallas. The bid process started in 2017 and took hundreds of meetings to put together, said Dallas Sports Commission Exec Dir Monica Paul.
What sounded simple on paper turned into a complicated infrastructure and governance puzzle. The city owns the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, Oak View Group manages it, and Inspire Dallas is overseeing construction of a new convention center on the same footprint. At the same time, TxDOT is rebuilding key I‑30 exits into downtown, and Dallas Area Rapid Transit has adjusted rail service at the convention center stop.
In December 2024, Dallas City Council approved a $15M package to fund upgrades to the convention center so Dallas could host the IBC. Events from the World Cup, including the IBC and FIFA Fan Festival, are expected to generate $2B in economic revenue for the region, according to FIFA, and that upside had to be weighed against the risk of building a temporary, highly technical broadcast campus in the middle of an active construction zone.
For FIFA and HBS, the physical build was essentially an 18‑month project. Design, contracting and construction for the internal footprint took about a year and a half. Broadcasters such as Fox and Telemundo began sending detailed space and technical requirements last summer, which in turn drove architectural drawings, permitting with the city and a January 14 move‑in date.
The building itself functions like a sealed campus. Dallas Fire‑Rescue has a dedicated medical team on site. In addition to host broadcasters and FIFA staff, the daily headcount includes logistics crews, cleaning and maintenance teams, power and connectivity vendors, and a steady flow of delegation visits from future event bidders and city officials.
On the technical side, the IBC is split into a series of specialized zones. One cluster of six video assistant referee rooms is tied in real time to all 16 venues. Each room is dedicated to a single match, staffed by a three‑person video match official team and replay operators, with FIFA staffers behind them to supervise and communicate with broadcasters.
“I have a tablet, and I’m communicating to the TV and broadcasters what the VAR is checking,” one official said. “I’m there to interpret it and make sure the clearest message goes to TV. It helps bring everyone on board of what’s happening.”
Next door, a data center links Dallas to a parallel operation in Manchester, England, where more than 150 staffers process tracking and event data in real time. That backbone powers a suite of products, from match stats on FIFA’s digital platforms to a players app and a new Football AI Pro tool built with Lenovo. Teams and analysts can query an internal large language model about highly specific tactical questions -- pressing on a particular opponent, spacing between lines, or how often they broke down a low defensive block -- and receive answers, visualizations and clips.
Though the IBC is not open to the public, delegations cycle through it daily, including future event bidders, city officials and small industry groups getting escorted walk-throughs of the VAR operations, data teams and broadcast compounds.
For the IBC staff, the work rarely looks the same two days in a row. Operations teams begin with communications checks to that day’s host cities, testing radio links between stadiums and the VAR rooms, confirming referee headsets and running through quality-control lists before the first kick. On heavy days, they rotate through shifts that might include sitting in a VAR room, moving into an operations bay to monitor the health of dozens of feeds, then troubleshooting weather delays that threaten to stack matches on top of one another.
“The focus really is to just make sure everybody has the information they need to deliver the World Cup to the globe,” Sanchez said.
