One of the most important venues of the 2026 FIFA World Cup never hosted a single fan.
Buried inside a construction zone in downtown Dallas, the International Broadcast Center was the tournament’s unseen control room. The 500,000-square-foot hub was where every match feed, Video Assistant Referee (VAR) review and stream of performance data were produced before they were pushed out to the world.
The IBC was also a reflection of 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. “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 passes through here.”
After the World Cup final, the IBC was already on the clock. FIFA and Host Broadcast Services spent roughly 18 months designing and building out the internal footprint, but teardown was scheduled to move much faster. Sanchez and John Newkirk, senior international broadcast center manager, put it at about 35 days. FIFA’s own plan called for two months to dismantle the temporary structures, with about 90% of partitions, electrical and lighting fixtures set to be recycled or reused.
Still, much like Dallas-Fort Worth’s broader World Cup story, scale was a central theme when FIFA formally opened the IBC before the tournament.
Roughly 3,400 people worked from the IBC each day, including rights holders, FIFA and HBS staff, as well as the workers responsible for food service, security and keeping the facility powered, Newkirk said.
The match schedule set the rhythm. Teams started filtering in three to four hours before kickoff, but the building never really shut down. Host broadcast activity wound down “three hours after the last match of the day,” Sanchez said, yet the master control room ran 24/7 to serve broadcasters in Asia and Australia who relied on Dallas nighttime as their daytime. That kept the ancillary services workers on around-the-clock footing as well.
Feeds from 16 venues across three countries and four time zones were funneled into the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center and delivered to more than 200 media partners worldwide. Directors and camera operators remained at the stadiums, but FIFA centralized much of the remaining work in 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 changed how FIFA staffed the tournament.
“From the operational perspective, even environmentally, it’s convenient to have a hub like the IBC here in Dallas,” Sanchez said. “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 was a multiyear project for Dallas. The bid process started in 2017 and took hundreds of meetings to put together, said Dallas Sports Commission Executive Director 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 oversees construction of a new convention center on the same footprint. At the same time, the Texas Department of Transportation was rebuilding key Interstate 30 exits into downtown, and Dallas Area Rapid Transit adjusted rail service at the convention center stop.
In December 2024, Dallas City Council approved a $15 million 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, were expected to generate $2 billion 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 with the design, contracting and construction for the internal footprint. 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 Jan. 14 move‑in date.
Those broadcaster requirements went well beyond square footage. Networks specified how many people they were bringing, which furniture layouts they needed, the networking they required and even HVAC specs for server rooms that had to be chilled to specific temperatures. Those details dictated the shape and size of each compound, and the size of rights holders-based staff in Dallas versus at the venues. The building itself really functioned more like a sealed campus.
On the technical side, the IBC was split into a series of specialized zones. One cluster of six VAR rooms was tied in real time to all 16 venues. Each room was 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.
Next door, a data center linked Dallas to a parallel operation in Manchester, England, where more than 150 staffers processed tracking and event data in real time. That backbone powered 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 could 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.
The system was walled off from the open web and designed to decline questions when the necessary data was not available, steering users back to what FIFA’s own tracking and event data could support.
Delivering to the world
Inside a central equipment room, all audio, video and data from the venues came together so it could be routed among stadiums, Dallas and media partners’ home bases. Every signal traveled on multiple separate paths, so if one route failed, another could take over.
Some feeds started at the venues and flowed into Dallas, including match cameras and audio. Others were created or processed inside the IBC and then sent to stadiums or remote facilities. Moving replay, camera shading and other live functions into Dallas meant more signals were riding that network than at past World Cups, which made the backup paths even more important.
On top of that backbone sat the master control room, a 24/7 hub in which operators did daily technical check-ins with each venue, watched the health of the feeds and made sure the right mix of world feeds and custom services reached each rights holder. The idea was to let broadcasters focus on coverage and commentary, while FIFA and HBS handled the routing and fixes when something went wrong.
FIFA and HBS also tried to cut down how much gear broadcasters had to haul into each stadium. They offered ready-made interview and presentation spots where the host broadcaster handled the cameras, lights and transmission. Broadcasters mainly sent on-air talent and a small crew, then used the IBC’s systems, including an internal router, to pick up the specific feeds they bought, even if their technical teams were working remotely.
For the IBC staff, the work rarely looked the same two days in a row. Operations teams began 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 rotated 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 threatened to stack matches on top of one another.
For Dallas, the IBC was only part of the media picture. Directly beneath FIFA’s footprint, the city ran its own host city media center inside the convention center for journalists who did not have IBC access. More than 2,000 media members registered there, Paul said.
“One of our main goals is really to try to continue to position the Dallas and DFW area on a global stage,” she said. “There’ll be a lot of metrics that come out about that, but this [IBC] helped us.”
Those numbers are still to be tallied. But inside the IBC, the scoreboard and metric for success were simple.
“The focus really is to just make sure everybody has the information they need to deliver the World Cup to the globe,” Sanchez said.
