Overtime, FOX One Partner on Social-First FIFA World Cup Series Race to Glory for the Creator Generation

The collaboration produced more than 500 short-form videos across four cities through an iPhone-based workflow designed to preserve speed, spontaneity, and the creators' natural voices

When Peter Olson joined Overtime eight years ago, the company's core business was capturing high school basketball highlights on iPhones. This summer, many of the same production principles were applied on a considerably larger stage.

Overtime partnered with FOX One to produce Race to Glory, an unscripted, World Cup-centric competition series featuring prominent creators traveling to New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and Philadelphia for a collection of soccer-inspired challenges.

The project generated more than 500 pieces of original short-form content, including competition videos, behind-the-scenes moments, selfies, recaps, and other material distributed across Overtime, FOX One, and dedicated social channels.

For Olson, who is senior director, content, Overtime, the scale of the series demonstrated how far the social-first sports-media company had come without abandoning its roots: the production style that helped build its audience.

For us, he says, getting to the point where we're working with creators who are as huge as Sketch, Tota, and Rakai, on a production with a partner like FOX One, adjacent to something as large as the World Cup has been kind of surreal.

Race to Glory is an online content-creator competition featuring two main creator-led squads. Host Jolie Sharpe (right) interviews content creator Rose Ruland, one of the show's competitors. (Photos: Overtime)Although Race to Glory represented one of Overtime's most ambitious productions, the operation was still built around lightweight equipment, small crews, quick turnarounds, and a willingness to follow personalities rather than impose the conventions of traditional television.

It's not like we went from being this iPhone-driven highlight company to now doing everything completely differently, says Olson. A lot of the people working on this project were the same people using similar processes and thinking about the content through a similar lens.

That approach was precisely what FOX One wanted. As the streaming service prepared to carry all 104 World Cup matches, its marketing team sought a complementary way to introduce the platform to younger viewers without trying to create something bigger than the tournament itself.

They weren't trying to conform to us, says Annie Leanse, director, subscriber acquisition + brand media, FOX DTC, FOX Corp. They came to the table and said, This is what we're really good at, and this is how we think we could partner together.' That was really refreshing.

Lightweight Workflow Built for Speed

With eight contestants, host Jolie Sharpe, and occasional additional participants, Overtime could be following nine to 12 on-camera personalities during an individual challenge.

The idea was to mike each primary participant while retaining the ability to move quickly between locations and turn content around within days. Instead of deploying a conventional camera and audio complement, the team used external microphones connected to iPhones, with enough devices to accommodate approximately one phone for every two microphones.

The same producers who helped devise the challenges often captured the footage and edited it afterward. That continuity eliminated the need for extensive production notes or editorial handoffs.

One of my producers, Miguel, might be filming a moment with Rakai, says Olson. The next day, he's in Premiere, jumping to that moment and clipping it himself because he already knows it's going to be there.

The approach balanced production quality with the realities of a compressed social-media schedule. At some stops, the team captured eight challenges that needed to be edited within approximately 10 days.

We wanted the quality to be at a high threshold, says Olson. We wanted to make sure the sound was good, and we wanted it to feel professional and worthy of being a show with FOX One. At the same time, we were realistic about filming eight different challenges and needing them all edited in the next 10 days.

The resulting aesthetic helped place viewers inside the competition instead of at a distance from it. It feels like you're there, he adds. You're a fly on the wall in these challenges. There's a certain look and feel to shooting with an iPhone that's a little bit more personal.

Race to Engagement Gains

For FOX, the collaboration became one of the defining projects of a demanding month-plus campaign.

People keep saying it's our Super Bowl, Leanse says. I remind them it's 39 days of Super Bowls in a row. From a FOX One awareness standpoint, we needed to be splashy. We needed credible voices to help support us and a way to tap into a younger demographic for whom this is how they consume content.

Much of the series and supporting content was shot on smartphones by Overtime crew members.By the conclusion of the World Cup on July 19, the six-week Race to Glory campaign had generated 1,189 posts, 142 million views, and 8.2 million engagements for an overall engagement rate of 5.8%. The dedicated Race to Glory, Aura City, and Mud United accounts also attracted nearly 150,000 followers collectively.

The content performed especially well against established sports-media benchmarks. According to Tubular, Race to Glory posts on Overtime's primary TikTok account outperformed U.S. sports-media averages by 75% in both views and engagements per post. From June into July, the dedicated Race to Glory TikTok account generated 25 million views, more than every MLB team and 28 of the NBA's 30 teams on the platform.

The campaign's individual social accounts also gained significant traction during the

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2026/07/22/overtime-fox-one-partner-on-soc...
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