In the U.S., Fox’s English-language media coverage of the 2026 World Cup broke records. Fox announced that 38,937,000 people watched the final match between Argentina and Spain on July 19th on their network Fox. That was a dramatic 116% percent increase over the 2022 final in Qatar and a 179% increase from the 2018 final in Russia. These impressive gains in viewership, however, were dwarfed by what Fox referred to as their social viewers. By the end of the tournament, Fox reported 17.2 billion digital content views, a figure that combined views on Fox’s digital and social media platforms. This new audience construction included streaming—subscription-video-on-demand (SVOD) platform Fox One and free-advertising-supported-television platform Tubi—but also Fox’s apps and website, their YouTube channel, TikTok, Instagram and more. They also claimed 16.5 billion social impressions. 

Fox courted this audience with their own content, authoring 1,300 “stories” and “pushing” 27,000 posts about the tournament. Following NBC’s playbook during the 2026 Winter Olympics, Fox also enticed successful creators to produce content about the FIFA World Cup through their Fox Sports Creator Club. The Fox Sports Creator Club offered perks such as VIP experiences, access to talent, and collabs with Fox stations depending on the creator’s success. It also promised to share their content on Fox’s official social media channels—included within those 27,000 pushed social posts. Fox’s social media strategy illustrates how media rights holders are not only telecasting live sports events but are producing a wide variety of sports media texts to be distributed across different technologies and targeted toward new kinds of audiences. Increasingly, media rights holders like Fox are trying to claim their social media audience as evidence of their success, even though this audience is being commodified not by the network directly, but by the social media platforms. They are, essentially, promoting their own promotion.

Fox’s celebration of their “social views” epitomizes wider trends in Sports Mega Event mediation such as negotiation and struggle between the legacy networks, digital platforms, and the creator economy, new industrial imaginations of sports “fans” as digitally engaged consumers, and the wider fragmentation of the sports audience. David Rowe and Brett Hutchins argue that digitization has created “networked media sports”¹—a fragmented media space with new stakeholders and where distinctions between audiences and participants blur. When FIFA creates deals with platforms like TikTok to send 30 top creators to the games so they can shoot anything but the match, FIFA is no longer just licensing the athletic spectacle on the pitch, but the mediatized participant experience. And when Fox hires a highly popular creator—iShowSpeed (60.1 million followers on YouTube)—to host watchalongs on their Fox One subscription platform, the boundaries between the telecast and the experience further converge. Fox’s active pursuit of a social audience produced new forms of media and new arrangements between Fox and creators. 

At the same time, Fox’s (and FIFA’s) focus on social views raise important questions about who is economically benefiting from these arrangements? Fox? The creators? FIFA? Or the tech companies like Google, Meta, and TikTok that continue to benefit from the Sports Mega Event media being distributed through their platforms? 

¹ Brett Hutchins and David Rowe, Sport beyond Television: The Internet, Digital Media and the Rise of Networked Media Sport, Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies 40 (Routledge, 2012).