As Spain and Argentina walk out at MetLife Stadium this Sunday for the World Cup final, there’s a quieter story running underneath the scoreline: this is FOX’s last World Cup. The network’s current US broadcast contract expires after this tournament, and Netflix has already locked up the rights to the next Women’s World Cup. If you’ve been wondering when streaming would finally, fully take over live sports, the answer appears to be: right about now.
The scale of what’s actually being fought over here is hard to overstate. US men’s national team captain Tim Ream described this tournament to CBS News as effectively “a Super Bowl every single day for five weeks,” and he wasn’t exaggerating by much: roughly 5 billion people are expected to watch some part of this World Cup, building on the 2022 final alone drawing 1.5 billion viewers and nearly 6 billion social media engagements. When an audience that size is up for grabs, who actually gets to charge you for access to it stops being a footnote and becomes the whole story.
FOX’s $485 Million Bet on Its Own Streaming App
FOX paid $485 million for the English-language US broadcast rights to this World Cup, and rather than treating it as a straightforward TV rights purchase, the network used the tournament as the launch vehicle for FOX One, its direct-to-consumer streaming app that debuted in August 2025. All 104 matches stream live and on-demand in 4K through FOX One, priced at $19.99 a month (or $199.99 a year), with a bundle option adding FOX Nation for $24.99 a month. In late May, FOX also struck a distribution deal to make FOX One available as a Premium Subscription directly through The Roku Channel, putting it in front of Roku’s massive US device install base without requiring a separate app download.
Early numbers suggest the bet is paying off, at least in the short term. Industry tracking cited by the Los Angeles Times showed average World Cup viewership around 6 million, a 128% increase over the equivalent point in the 2022 tournament, while FOX Sports reported a 181% day-over-day surge in streaming traffic once the tournament kicked into gear. For a streaming app that’s not even a year old, those are the kind of numbers a legacy broadcaster building a digital-first future needs to see.
The Real Test Starts After the Final Whistle
Here’s the harder problem, one that media analysts have been flagging since well before the tournament even started: getting people to sign up for a World Cup is the easy part. Keeping them subscribed afterward is where these bets usually fall apart. NBCUniversal’s Peacock ran into exactly this after the 2024 Paris Olympics, a huge, temporary spike in subscriptions followed by a steep drop-off once the event ended and the must-watch content dried up.
Media strategist Mike Swainey, president of Decision Counsel, pointed to what actually worked for Peacock’s retention as the template FOX needs to copy: don’t just stream the event, package it with multiview options, curated highlights, and a continuous sports calendar that gives people a reason to stay subscribed once the tournament itself is over. For FOX, that means leaning on FOX One’s existing sports channels, including the Big Ten Network, and using the NFL preseason kicking off in August as a bridge to keep the app relevant the moment the World Cup ends. The stakes are real: at $19.99 a month, in a market where “subscription burnout” has become a genuine consumer fatigue point, a wave of post-tournament cancellations wouldn’t just be embarrassing, it would undercut the entire thesis of using major live sports to build a durable streaming subscriber base.
Why Netflix Buying the Women’s World Cup Actually Matters More
The more structurally significant story, though, might be what happens after FOX’s contract ends. This tournament marks FOX’s final cycle as the US English-language World Cup broadcaster, and Netflix has already acquired the rights to the next Women’s World Cup, its clearest move yet into live sports after years of dipping a toe in with boxing events and NFL Christmas Day games. Netflix’s own VP of Sports has separately confirmed real interest in bidding for the 2030 men’s World Cup rights as well, a tournament that will itself be a first: co-hosted across Spain, Portugal, and Morocco, spanning two continents.
That’s a meaningful signal about where sports rights are heading. For years, streaming platforms picked up secondary or supplementary rights while traditional broadcasters held onto the crown jewels. Netflix’s own sports push has followed a deliberate pattern of testing the waters before making a sehttps://nabil-it.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/vintage-electrical-and-electronic-appliances-in-an-2023-11-27-05-10-10-utc-e1734923695564.jpgus commitment: it dipped in first with a Jake Paul boxing event, then with NFL games on Christmas Day, building the technical and operational muscle for live event streaming at genuine scale before going after something as large as a Women’s World Cup. A pure streaming platform credibly bidding for the single biggest live sports event on Earth is a different kind of moment, one that lines up with a broader structural shift analysts have been tracking for a while now: traditional linear TV viewership is declining more than 3% annually, while connected TV (streaming delivered through smart TVs and devices) is growing upwards of 18% a year. NBC Sports has already flagged that the 2030 World Cup rights market is expected to command a significantly higher price tag than this cycle, precisely because streaming platforms with deep pockets are now credible bidders alongside traditional networks.
What This Actually Means for You
If you’ve felt like the number of subscriptions required to watch live sports keeps creeping up, this is why, and it’s not slowing down. A World Cup that used to be a single free-to-air broadcast in most countries is increasingly a stack of decisions: an app subscription, a bundle tier, sometimes a specific device partnership to unlock the cheapest access point. FOX One’s pricing structure alone illustrates it, DirecTV and Sling subscribers can log into FOX One at no extra cost using existing credentials, while everyone else pays the full $19.99 a month on top of whatever else they’re already subscribed to.
The upside, at least for now, is quality and flexibility: 4K streaming, on-demand replays, and multiview layouts that let you watch several group-stage matches at once are all genuinely better experiences than a single linear broadcast feed ever offered. The trade-off is that “watch the World Cup for free with an antenna” is becoming a smaller slice of how people actually access these tournaments each cycle, and if Netflix’s entry into World Cup bidding pans out the way its Women’s World Cup deal suggests, the 2030 tournament could look even more like a streaming-first event than this one already does.
The Broadcast Landscape, Then and Now
| 2022 World Cup | 2026 World Cup | 2030 World Cup (projected) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary US rights holder | FOX | FOX (final cycle) | Open market, streaming platforms bidding |
| Streaming option | Add-on to cable | FOX One, standalone app, 4K | Likely streaming-first |
| Direct-to-consumer app | No dedicated app | FOX One ($19.99/mo) | Expected to be the default access point |
| Streaming platform in the bidding | No major streamer bid | Netflix owns next Women’s World Cup | Netflix has confirmed interest |
The Bottom Line
None of this means cable is disappearing overnight, or that FOX’s bet on FOX One is guaranteed to pay off once the World Cup afterglow fades. But the pattern underneath this tournament is hard to miss: the biggest, most broadly watched live event on the planet just spent five weeks proving that a streaming app can carry it in 4K at scale, and the company best known for reinventing how people watch television at home is already circling the next cycle’s rights. Whichever way FOX One’s subscriber retention numbers land after Sunday’s final, the direction of travel for how you’ll watch the next World Cup is already pretty clear.
Are you watching this World Cup on a streaming app, cable, or an old-fashioned antenna? Tell us in the comments; we’re cuhttps://nabil-it.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/vintage-electrical-and-electronic-appliances-in-an-2023-11-27-05-10-10-utc-e1734923695564.jpgus how split our readers actually are.
Sources & Further Reading
- 2026 World Cup Will Boost Fox One—Keeping Subscribers Is The Next Test – Forbes
- Roku Expands Premium Subscriptions Experience with FOX One – Fox Corporation
- The 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup schedule and how to watch – CBS News