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Credit: Fox Sports
It’s been very easy, and not unreasonable, to spend the first week of this World Cup being annoyed at Fox.
The network botched its handling of FIFA’s new hydration breaks in the tournament opener, returning from commercial after play had already resumed, not once, but during both stoppages of the same match. Fans have been unhappy about the ad-stuffed hydration breaks themselves, a complaint that has nothing to do with Fox specifically but everything to do with the experience of watching the tournament on Fox. And there’s been a growing piece comparing Fox’s disfavor with Telemundo, the Spanish-language broadcaster that skipped the in-break commercials and has been rewarded with no shortage of “just watch it in Spanish” sentiment online.
All of that is fair, but if we’re going to throw Fox a bone on something this World Cup, it should be this: the outdoor sets have been genuinely good. Not good for a soccer broadcast on an NFL-shaped network still figuring out the sport after a decade of trying. Just good, full stop.
Fox said this was the plan all along, with production VP Zac Kenworthy telling the Philadelphia Inquirer prior to the biggest production in company history that Fox was going to build around getting the desk out of the studio and into the crowd for the matches that mattered most.
“There’s a real concerted effort on our part to be as present as possible for the marquee matches,” Kenworthy said. “Of course, I know this is a World Cup with 48 teams — there are plenty of big matches. But when you look at the calendar, the real marquee games and where it makes sense for us to be, also taking travel into account, the goal is to be as mobile as we can.”
And mobile on Friday in Seattle, Fox was.
Rob Stone, Carli Lloyd, Clint Dempsey, and Alexi Lalas were set up outside Lumen Field hours before kickoff, with USMNT scarves and kits packed in behind them as far as the camera could see. Think about what makes College GameDay and Big Noon Kickoff actually worth watching; it’s not Kirk Herbstreit or Dave Portnoy, it’s the 20,000 people who woke up at 5 a.m. and painted their faces and have been standing in the same spot since dawn, people for whom this Saturday is the only thing that has mattered all week.
Stone, who is hosting his 13th World Cup across a 28-year career split between ESPN and Fox, understands that as well as anyone in American sports television
“College football and soccer have always, to me, been kind of blood brothers,” he told The Inquirer. “They run in the same circles: it’s the same amount of passion and that energy and that tailgating and that tribalism. So I’m really excited that Fox is saying, ‘Let’s get out with the people’ and really do have our finger on that pulse.”
That energy is impossible to fake and pointless to try. Seattle has it for soccer in a way almost no other American city does. The Sounders have spent 20 years cultivating a supporter culture that shows up in matching scarves and sings for 90 minutes straight, and those same people arrived outside Lumen Field on Friday and turned all of it toward the national team.
And that’s really the point of all this. Fox didn’t create that atmosphere, but when it leans on what it already does well, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, the result can be what we saw in Seattle. And when a spade’s a spade, we’ll call it a spade.
The post Fox’s outdoor World Cup sets are elevating its tournament coverage appeared first on Awful Announcing.
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