SBJ Media: Rebecca Lowe’s World Cup moment

I spent Friday night taking in Game 2 of the NBA Finals at the grand opening of Cosm’s new Atlanta space. I had visited the Dallas Cosm before and took in the technology there for the first time, watching NBA clips, Premier League clips, etc. But Friday’s Game 2 in Atlanta was the first full game I had watched at Cosm, and it was awesome. I didn’t mind the camera angles they used. It wasn’t dizzying or anything like that. You could watch reviews and the like on smaller screens put onto the dome screen.

My favorite part was looking around and seeing the jaw-dropped faces of folks enjoying the Cosm experience for the first time.

Right after finishing a conversation with Rebecca Lowe last week, my producers and I immediately turned to one another and started talking about how impressive she was during the podcast, which covered her World Cup role with Fox, Premier League work with NBC and more.

It was easy to see why Lowe was at the top of Fox’s list of TV talent to fill out its World Cup coverage this summer.

Here are some of the highlights from my conversation with Lowe from the recent SBJ Sports Media Podcast.

On where this sort of opportunity was on the list of things she might get to do or wanted to do:

“If you’re a soccer broadcaster, a World Cup has to be No. 1. A World Cup in your own country has to be absolutely at the top. But did I realistically think it was going to happen? No. We have the rights at NBC for Spanish-speaking World Cup [on Telemundo], but I don’t speak Spanish. And I knew that Fox had the rights for every World Cup in a foreseeable future, certainly when I first arrived [at NBC] 10 years ago. I wouldn’t say I’d given up on it, because I don’t give up on anything, but I wasn’t actively going to try to get it because I was with NBC. … But anything can happen I’ve realized in life.”

On the atmosphere she’s expecting when the studio show is live at USMNT matches:

“Living in this country for 13 years, I’ve managed to realize the difference between sport in Europe and sport in England and sport here, especially with football. My husband was the head coach of Sacramento Republic, a USL club, and I used to go all the time and the vibrancy -- and that was, I don’t know, 6,000 or 7,000 people. We’re talking 67,000 or 80,000 people that are going to be [in stadiums] at this World Cup. But the vibrancy, the way that Americans just approach everything, especially sports, is so pure, so positive. That’s just the way I find Americans approach most things in life, which is why we love it here so much. But the U.S. men’s national team are going to have a bigger following than I think anyone’s even realized yet.”

On expectations for Zlatan Ibrahimovic as an analyst for the first time:

“America is going to fall in love with this guy. I’m slightly worried that I’m going to have to go to break in the middle of an amazing point, and they’re going to go, ‘Rebecca, you’ve got to get in. You got to get in.’ And I’m thinking, ‘I don’t want to get in! I don’t want to get in!’ Because he’s going to be phenomenal. … [With] his insanely infectious [and] attractive personality ... I think you have yourself a brilliant pundit.”

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The data on the World Cup is coming fast and furiously from all corners of the business. Here are some research nuggets that stood out to me.

Globally, soccer is the most-popular sport, with 51% of people saying they’re fans, according to data from Nielsen’s Gracenote division. In the U.S., however, only 27% identify as fans. The upside domestically is that 37% expect their interest to grow in the coming year.

The FIFA World Cup Final could consume up to 7% of global internet traffic, notes Bank of America Global Research, as viewing shifts decisively from linear TV to streaming, mobile and social platforms. More than 90 petabytes of direct tournament data are expected to be generated during the event. Total data creation could top 2 exabytes once AI, simulations, streaming and social platforms are included. Global broadcasting rights for the World Cup are projected to be around $4.3 billion for the first time, up 26% vs. 2022.

U.S. interest in the World Cup and soccer remains comparatively low, with only 13% of online adults typically watching men’s World Cup games vs. nearly half in the U.K., and 28%–43% in other surveyed markets, according to new data from S&P Global Market Intelligence. Demographic patterns reveal a male-heavy audience, with splits approaching 70%-30% male-to-female in the U.S. and China, while India’s split is 57% to 43%. U.S. World Cup fans heavily favor American football (78%) and basketball (70%), while cricket dominates for fans in India (89%), baseball peaks in South Korea (64%) and European markets show the strongest overlap with tennis viewership.

Electronic Arts is expected to be the biggest beneficiary of the FIFA World Cup 2026 across the games industry, despite walking away from its long-held exclusive FIFA license in 2022, according to new research from Ampere Analysis. The U.S. now accounts for 17% of EA Sports FC’s monthly active users across PlayStation, Xbox and Steam, making it the franchise’s largest country market by activity. However, EA Sports FC currently reaches only 6% of all U.S. gamers across those platforms, highlighting substantial long-term expansion potential. During the 2022 World Cup, sales of FIFA 23 grew by 40% in the U.S. (EA’s own data). Ampere data shows that global daily active users for the game were 20% higher when its official World Cup 2022 mode was added than for EA Sports FC 25 over a comparable period.

Fox Corp. this morning announced a new, multiyear deal with the NFL to air live games in Mexico starting this fall. And this isn’t just one package; it’s a ton of live content, including “Thursday Night Football,” Sunday regular-season games, Thanksgiving, NFC playoffs, Pro Bowl games and the Super Bowl. Also, Fox will air four weekly original programs dedicated to the NFL, developed especially to connect with fans in Mexico.

There has been lots of chatter about the future of the Fox-NFL relationship. Perhaps a deal gets done in the future that buys out the remaining years after the look-in following the 2029-30 season. That would get Fox to the end of the 2032-33 season as an NFL partner, and both sides could assess a future then.

But don’t just breeze past this deal in Mexico. This is a lot of content for an international market that’s very important to the NFL, and the league likely wouldn’t have given such tonnage to Fox if it didn’t see some sort of future with the company.

I love the new Super Bowl LXI spot that Disney/ESPN created using “Toy Story” IP, with animated versions of Joe Buck, Troy Aikman and Lisa Salters incorporated. It also got me thinking about the prospects for an animated alt-cast around the Big Game in February. ESPN and Beyond Sports already animated NFL regular-season games in the worlds of “Toy Story,” “The Simpsons” and “Monsters, Inc.”

So, if there is going to be an animated alt-cast, what might make sense? There’s a “Simpsons” film sequel in 2027, as well as the third “Frozen.”

But if you’re the NFL, you want any alt-cast to reach a broad audience, and one that might not normally be watching. So how about reaching into a galaxy far, far away?

“Star Wars” brings some of the most loyal fandom in all of entertainment, and Disney also happens to have another live action film coming out in 2027. Star Wars marketing efforts with the NBA, Minor League Baseball, La Liga and more have paid dividends for properties. Connecting the NFL with Star Wars IP on such a big stage would likely be a big hit, and it would probably bring a sizeable number of new viewers into a Super Bowl telecast.

Keep your eye on which direction Disney, ESPN and the NFL decide to go there.

I’m making my way through HBO’s docuseries on the USMNT titled “U.S. Against the World.” I really like it. It has elements of “Hard Knocks,” because it’s about the road to the games — as in we don’t know any results yet on the field. But for a casual soccer fan like me, it also has an element of F1’s “Drive to Survive” series, because I don’t know a whole lot about this national team. “U.S. Against the World” covers around a four-year time frame, stretching back to the team at the Qatar World Cup in 2022. If you really want to get to know the USMNT players, this is the film you need.

In last week’s newsletter, I talked with Howard Owens of Propagate Content, and something he mentioned in our chat that didn’t make the story about documentaries was that Netflix was able to fill a void in the doc space because he believed ESPN had become too close to leagues. Owens felt those relationships might have limited the storytelling coming from the “30 for 30” franchise. “It probably inhibited some of their original chutzpah. The original kind of juice that went into those series that had a little extra oomph,” he said. I will say that, while the quantity of “30 for 30” films has certainly slowed in recent years, ESPN Originals has still done tremendous work. The “E:60” special on former MLBer Jim Abbott won a Peabody Award, while the Katie Meyer story won a Sports Emmy. There also is going to be a strong push around the upcoming “30 for 30” Billie Jean King film, which even got its own moment at the Disney upfront. On the audio side, the “30 for 30” podcast “Murder at The U” became the company’s most-successful pod yet with around 4 million downloads.

It looks like Clay Travis is out at Outkick, at least as far as a day-to-day role, notes the Hollywood Reporter. Outkick will merge into Fox News Digital, and the question now becomes whether there’s enough interest around Outkick without the deep involvement of the founding voice. Travis will remain a Fox News contributor and will stay on Outkick’s eponymous FS1 show. But Outkick has never been part of the Fox Sports division, aligning with the Fox News side of the business given Outkick’s messaging.

After the Knicks swept the Cavaliers in the NBA Eastern Conference Finals, ESPN quickly pivoted and put a special “State of the Union” version of “The Pat McAfee Show” on ESPN in prime time where Game 5 would have been. I watched it, and it was good. McAfee has developed great range on commissioner-level topics. But while this sort of thing was popular for sports business types, the audience came nowhere close to the size of what a live game would have done. Sources tell me that on ESPN alone, McAfee’s special did just 278,000 viewers in the two-hour prime-time window (does not include any YouTube numbers). Just for a comparison, two nights earlier, Game 4 of Knicks-Cavs did 7.2 million viewers. Moral of the story: No studio show — even with ESPN’s biggest star — can compare to a live playoff game. But fear not McAfee fans! His show’s numbers last month, across YouTube and ESPN, were up 25% vs. the same period last year. That bodes well as McAfee’s contract is about to come up, with Ari Emanuel now his agent.

Texas’ sweep of Texas Tech delivered the second-best Women’s College World Series Finals yet, with ESPN averaging 2.2 million viewers. That’s down just a touch from last year’s three-game set, which remains the record (same matchup). Game 2 on Thursday night averaged 2.5 million viewers across ESPN/ESPNU, marking the best college softball game on record.

Over the last three years, 89% of the NBA’s official YouTube page viewers are male, and 52.7% are males ages 25-44, according to data from Tubular (not team pages). Around 14.4% of NBA YouTube viewers are males under 25, compared to 16.1% of the NBA’s overall audience being under 25. For the Knicks’ YouTube page, 92% are male, and 49.3% are males 25-44. For the Spurs’ page, 89% of YouTube viewers are male, and 49% are in the 25-44 age demo.

The UFL finished its regular season averaging 645,000 viewers across ABC, Fox, ESPN, FS1, NFL Network and ESPN2, up just 1% from last season. That can likely be attributed to gains from Nielsen’s Big Data this season.

Here are some interesting numbers from Nielsen’s Gracenote. As of April, 258 sports channels were considered FAST channels, up 12.2% year-over-year. Since the start of 2025, sports programming on FAST channels, including individual games, has increased 18.5%. Meanwhile, looking at SVOD/OTT services, Disney+ has pulled back on sports distribution, reducing its sports catalog at the game and event level over the past year by 23.4%. Finally, 51% of Americans say it’s getting harder to find the video content they want to watch because there are too many services available. Also, 53% of Americans say the amount of streaming services and content is overwhelming, and 34% say the amount of services and content is having a negative impact on TV enjoyment.

• Allen & Co. investment banker Steve Greenberg is profiled as one of SBJ’s Champions of Sports Business in this week’s magazine, and my colleague Chris Smith delved into how Greenberg back in 1994 resigned as deputy commissioner of MLB and partnered with Brian Bedol to launch Classic Sports Network, the independent cable channel that would air historical sports broadcasts.
• The Heat are the latest NBA team to choose an over-the-air template for 2026-27 after finalizing a package Monday with Warren Buffett’s lone broadcast station: Miami’s WPLG Local 10, reports SBJ’s Tom Friend.
• Telemundo will not be cutting away to commercials during FIFA World Cup hydration breaks, which are being used for the first time. Fox Sports has not yet made a decision.
• The Fox One streaming service is preparing for its largest product moment to date with the FIFA World Cup, writes SBJ’s Rob Schaefer. Amit Dudakia, SVP and Head of Product for Fox’s DTC business, recently joked that the World Cup “feels like another launch” just nine months after the vMVPD launched.
• The Knicks’ come-from-behind win over the Spurs in Game 1 of the NBA Finals delivered the best Game 1 audience since 2018, with ABC averaging 16.9 million viewers.
• Paramount Skydance added Canada to its list of countries where it airs UFC, reports SBJ’s Adam Stern. Starting next year, Paramount+ will air UFC’s numbered events in Canada -- meaning only the 13 premier annual events and not the second-tier Fight Night shows.
• CBS Sports and Italy’s top soccer league, Serie A, exercised an option to extend their U.S. media rights deal by one year through the upcoming 2026-27 season, notes SBJ’s Alex Silverman.