The 2026 World Cup: a festival of football; a moment to revel in upsets, spectacular goals, stars made, and reputations ruined; a test of Didier Deschamps’s unshakable addiction to Adrien Rabiot. But also: a celebration of America; a chance for Fox Sports to prove the haters wrong; a social experiment to see how long Thierry Henry can last on set with Alexi Lalas before resorting to physical violence. “This is going to be filled with American fans,” Lalas shrieked as Los Angeles Stadium began to swell with spectators before the US’s opening match against Paraguay. “This is going to be bursting at the seams with America!”
But where was the pomp, the bombast, the Americana? The US opening ceremony – the third and final installment in the trio of launch parties for this supertanker of a World Cup – didn’t quite live up to the Lalasian hype. This was a ceremony with all the charm of Rob Stone in his pocket square fake-smiling as he says the immortal words, “Brazil v Morocco, live tomorrow from New York New Jersey, brought to you by Verizon”: a ceremony that felt oddly flat, but was trying all the same. It was almost as if Fifa had absorbed all the pre-tournament criticism and decided: “You know what? We just can’t be bothered.” But Friday’s launch did still offer a sense for how this tournament will play out as a cultural spectacle. The early verdict: this is a World Cup built above all to accommodate the insatiable needs of American TV. Fox Sports is not simply the host broadcaster for this World Cup; it is the tournament’s very soul. If that’s the type of sentence that gives you hives, the next five weeks will best be watched on mute (or Telemundo).
Between the bloated 48-team format, the number of co-hosts, and the vast distances separating the host cities, sprawl is the theme of this World Cup, and Fox is doing its bit for the cause. There was not, truth be told, a lot of ceremony in this opening ceremony. Three songs spread out over the course of an hour didn’t give viewers a lot to get excited about, but Fox took those paltry raw materials and padded the opening day out into a bullying statement of intent about its plans for the tournament. Fox has brought in Rebecca Lowe, better known to US soccer fans as the host of NBC’s Premier League coverage, to add class and an(other) English accent to this summer’s on-screen proceedings. Part of what makes the NBC coverage work is that it is quick and succinct. But quick and succinct is not the Fox way. As the marathon lead-in to the opening ceremony began it rapidly became clear that even for Lowe, keeping Fox from its own worst instincts is going to be tough.
Despite being hours long, the whole production felt scattered, rushed, and unfocused – as if it was put together by a social media addict with both a five-second attention span and an endless appetite for “content” (which it probably was). This was World Cup coverage as an interminable series of TikTok zaps. “The American Outlaws are outside the stadium!” Lowe enthused over footage of a few jersey-clad dads in wraparound sunglasses weakly hooting on an LA side street. “We have two whole hours to go until kickoff,” she added, and it felt like a threat. There was a profile of USMNT super fan Eagleman (“When I put the eagle mask on, I feel I can let loose and be Eagleman”), a doctor who spent 21 years on active duty with the US air force. “The US military, always so supportive of US soccer,” Stone, sharing anchor duties with Lowe, gravely noted.
Brandishing an American football, Patrick Mahomes appeared on screen for a leaden segment about “this strange sport that the rest of the world calls football, but we call soccer”, a “joke” about the tedious soccer v football debate that Fox appears determined to re-inflict on its blameless viewers at least once a day over the course of the summer. A story looking back at the 1994 tournament began: “Gas was only a dollar a gallon, and there was only one type of milk” – another blow struck for the Murdoch media empire against the oat milk wokes. Lowe directed viewers’ attention to YouTube, where Nick DiGiovanni, Fox’s resident World Cup chef, had just hailed the chipa cheeseburger he put together for the US-Paraguay match as “one of his best inventions ever” – and who are any of us, not being familiar until this week with the existence of Chef Nick or his body of work, to disagree? Unfortunately, persistent outdoor audio problems meant viewers were deprived of the totality of Elmo and Cookie Monster’s answers when asked by red carpet reporter Charissa Thompson what the World Cup means to them. Down on the Los Angeles Stadium pitch, Landon Donovan hard launched his violent new head of hair.
One of the major challenges for Fox this summer is figuring out how to get the best out of its crowded roster of on-air “talent”. The network’s solution, it seems, is to have multiple sets in multiple locations, with each panel taking turns to discuss the same stuff. In the lead-up to Friday’s ceremony we heard reminiscences from Lowe, Henry, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, and Lalas, holding court from a perch in Los Angeles Stadium, about the 1994 World Cup, the last to be held on American soil; then we heard from Stu Holden, Carli Lloyd, and Tom Rinaldi, speaking from a parking lot outside the stadium, on the same subject; finally Stone, Donovan, and Clint Dempsey, on the stadium field, got to trot out their own set of lifeless anecdotes about the summer of ’94.
The promotion of James Corden’s “fun” late night show was a persistent theme of the day’s programming. I counted at least three separate occasions in the buildup to last night’s USMNT opener on which Lowe threw to Zlatan for his thoughts on Corden and Sweden’s greatest ever goalscorer responded with words like, “I like him, I love him, he’s funny,” an evaluation that became less and less convincing with each repetition. James Corden: so funny Fox needs to remind its viewers every 10 minutes that he is funny. (Lalas, for his part, has declared the carpool karaoke king a “full-kit wanker”: begrudgingly one must offer respect to a man who is prepared to go on air and trash his employer’s star comedy recruit.)
Fox obliged long-time fans pining for the old hits by offering up some signature mispronunciations: there were several renderings of Paraguay as “Parag-way”, Pochettino came out as “Paunchettino” at one point, and no one seemed to know what to do with “Herzegovina”. But this is all part of the Fox World Cup charm: we all come together, from across the globe, and agree to pronounce “Paraguay” however the hell we want.
The early social media hype this World Cup has been all about the raw spectacle of foreigners encountering America for the first time (Lamine Yamal in a Walmart! Englishmen at the deli! Germans eating Chipotle! DUDE LMAO THIS IS A GAS STATION), and it seems depressingly inevitable that brands, as much as players and fans, will be at the center of the action throughout the tournament. Commercials are everywhere this World Cup, including during the hydration breaks. Friday’s “innovation” was to make it virtually impossible for the casual viewer to tell where the ads stopped and events on the field – the pre-match ceremony, the match itself – began. Eventually they all bled into one another, creating a ghastly mashup in which the Rinaldi “color” segments (“This summer we’re citizens of an interior geography – the United States of Being”), the airless paeans to the glory of America and global unity, and the weird little segments about people refurbishing old fussball tables and playing Cristiano Ronaldo up front for some reason (perhaps a sly comment on the aging Portuguese great’s wooden finishing?) melted into cable TV’s standard carousel of ads for semaglutides, SUVs, game shows, and medication for moderate to severe ulcerative colitis. Everything in this World Cup is designed to be an ad, or at least to feel like one: is it a Matthew McConaughey voiceover about the world soccer family, or a subtle promo for Michelob Ultra, sponsor of the Michelob Ultra Pitchside Club in Santa Monica? Maybe it’s both.
The ceremony proper got under way. “Welcome to the USA,” announced a raspy male voice in the stadium over a stylized map of the lower 48 states – a line that was presumably designed to convey hospitality, but ended up sounding more like the kind of thing you might hear in an ICE video playing in the passport line at the airport. Welcome to the USA: please leave your drugs, lies, tweets, opinions, and unlawful immigrant intent at the door. Future and Tyla, two singers I 100% had heard of before Googling them on Friday morning, performed their track Game Time. “Twenty seconds to game time,” they sang with more than an hour to go until kick-off. At some point there appeared a series of signs for “Route 66”, “Las Vegas”, “Holly”, and “Wood” on the pitch that looked like they’d been dragged in from a local elementary school production – a pleasingly half-assed artistic effort that summoned the spirit of Left Shark, thereby reconnecting this World Cup to the last big curtain raiser Katy Perry performed at a sporting event. Heritage matters.
In a ceremony of little substance, the only real highlight was the performance from Lisa, Anitta, and Rema of Goals, a song with a gurgling bassline and a refrain (“My fatty, my fit, my friends, my whip”) that helpfully centers what the American World Cup is really all about: aspirational consumerism. Fox cut back to the main studio as the song’s final bars drifted into the Inglewood air. “My nether regions are still vibrating from the bass, wow!” Lalas exclaimed, to Henry’s visible disgust – one of several vaguely porny verbal shots that the man Ibrahimovic calls “Alexis” has already managed to get off over the tournament’s opening 48 hours. The chemistry between Kate Abdo and her all-male panel is part of what makes CBS’s Champions League coverage so successful. Whatever hopes Fox may harbor of replicating that kind of wink-wink on-set flirtation over the course of this World Cup have suffered a seemingly fatal blow on first contact with Lalas’s genitals. Above all the World Cup is about delivering, and the early evidence suggests that what the Big L will be delivering this summer is regular updates about the state of his junk.
Flags held aloft in a circle, small children, hand holding: these are the key themes that any World Cup opening ceremony must hit, but we didn’t get a glimpse of them until the headline act took the stage in this oddly muted, phoned-in show’s final minutes. Perry gripped the hand of a small child and began to belt out the lines from Wonder, which the r/katyheads subreddit assures me is the best song off her 2024 album 143. At least, it seemed like she was belting the lines out. On TV the sound was distant and muffled, as if Perry was singing inside a bottle. “What a moment!” Lowe purred at the song’s conclusion. And she was right: if this World Cup opening ceremony was anything, it was above all a series of moments.
