How the 2026 FIFA World Cup Tightened the Bond Between the FOX Sports Digital, Linear Teams

Having attracted upwards of 17 billion views throughout the tourney, the broadcaster is pondering how to apply its Always On' social-video feature to other sports

The massive numbers that FOX Sports delivered on the linear-TV side of the 2026 FIFA Men's Cup ledger tell only half the impressive story. On the digital side, the broadcaster's coverage redefined digital sports consumption, generating more than 17.2 billion content views on FOX Sports' digital and social platforms, becoming the most digitally viewed event in the broadcaster's history. On Sunday alone, FOX Sports logged 542 million social-video views, its largest single-day number.

Making that success happen took a company-wide effort, and FOX Sports Senior Director, Digital Production Operations, Ricardo Perez-Selsky credits the company's best collaboration between digital and linear ever.

Between FOX Sports EVP, Production Operations and Technology; Dustin Myers; SVP, Field Operations and Engineering, Kevin Callahan; and EVP, Field and Technical Management and Operations, Mike Davies and their whole team, says Perez-Selsky, the coordination between logistics and technology represented a collaboration that hasn't happened before.

Tying the broadcast and digital backends together helped FOX Sports make the Always On livestream - available exclusively on FOX Sports YouTube channel, TikTok (starting Round of 32), Tubi, FOXSports.com, and the FOX Sports App - stay live for 974 consecutive hours and generate 1.2 billion total minutes of watch time across platforms. It also paid dividends for linear viewing.

The team set out an ambitious plan of being always on, which is something our bosses and exec team wanted, Perez-Selsky explains. They knew that was going to be a top-of-funnel driver to FOX One, to the broadcast, to more in-line content, and content on-demand. But to keep a livestream going that whole time takes a big team effort to coordinate - between true live content, taped content, the programming of that, and the types of innovation that we were able to do while being live. It was unparallel to anything we've done previously.

The FOX Sports World Cup digital studio was a beehive of activity during the 2026 FIFA Men's World Cup.A key moment in the evolution of the coverage during the World Cup came in the Round of 32 when the Star Player Cams became available. That was huge, says Perez-Selsky. We had a massive loyal following in the YouTube comments and chat who really wanted shots of the coaches, which we were able to integrate, even during the Star Player Cam. But being able to see the movement of the biggest stars of the game - like Messi, Mbapp , Yamal - on the field was great.

FOX Sports also built a graphics engine enabling the feed to pull data from FIFA and turn it into on-screen statistics. We were displaying stats like how many miles traveled, how many passes, pass accuracy, heat maps, he says. The best part about this is the support it gave to World Cup Now specifically, our flagship digital show for halftime and postgame. Now you have this beautiful lead-in coverage with our Star Player Cam, and that built-in audience carried over into our halftime show and postgame show. We were able to drive some robust numbers because of that.

As the tournament moved on and the number of matches dropped each day, the approach to programming a 24/7 YouTube channel had to change. We had a lot of great segments across digital that we were able to program, says Perez-Selsky. A good case in point is the Jameis Winston series. We had 15 episodes, and that gave us a big block where we could showcase everything Jameis Winston has done up until that point in the tournament.

The team also created segments with the best social video from across all FOX Sports social platforms, videos getting tens of millions of views on social. We created a one- or two-hour-long rip of all the best social highlights, he notes, citing the best from the FOX studio broadcast, the best moments of the game, fan reactions, key-play breakdowns from the broadcast team, like the best of Zlatan and Thierry Henry throughout the tournament.

When the World Cup had a two-day break, the FOX team turned to highlights. We called it Binge the World Cup' and used our condensed match highlights from Game 1 through Game 85, Perez-Selsky explains. It gave fans a chance to watch the best of the best from every game in a span of 24 hours.

In terms of stats, fans watching on the FOX Sports YouTube channel generated more than 2 million comments, with half of all livestream viewers choosing to watch, enabling live chat to engage with other fans on a second screen. Perez-Selsky says that shows an engaged fanbase coming to the stream to talk and be part of a community. He and the team wanted to foster that community and love of the World Cup with the Always On strategy. The question they are asking now is how does it apply to other FOX Sports programming efforts?

Moving forward, he points out, this should be the model for how digital and linear work together, not just from a technical and logistics standpoint but also from a creative standpoint. We were creating content for television in a lot of these cases, so producers on the linear side were working with producers on the digital side and tech managers on the digital side were working directly with tech managers on the linear side. I'm hoping this will be a model for how our organizations work together.

Reflecting on the massive effort by the digital side of FOX Sports, Perez-Selsky calls it an immense success. Establishing an always-on philosophy across our other sports is certainly something we'll be looking to take advantage of. College football and the NFL are coming up, and it's about diving deep into the numbers, looking at

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2026/07/23/how-the-2026-fifa-world-cup-tig...
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