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Credit: FS1/Fox Sports
Fox’s top World Cup studio team will leave its Los Angeles home base and take up residence at tournament venues starting July 4, when the round of 16 begins, according to The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand.
That means Rebecca Lowe, Thierry Henry, and Zlatan Ibrahimović — who have largely been anchored in the LA studio through the group stage — will be set up at stadiums for the final two weeks of the tournament. Alexi Lalas, who has already been traveling for United States matches alongside Rob Stone, Clint Dempsey, and Carli Lloyd, will rejoin the full team on the road.
The outdoor model Fox has deployed — for marquee group-stage games — has been one of the better decisions the network made coming into this tournament. When Stone, Lalas, Dempsey, and Lloyd set up outside Lumen Field ahead of the U.S.-England opener in Seattle, the crowd stretching behind them produced something that looked, as radio host Damon Bruce put it at the time, like College GameDay on an SEC campus.
Per Sports Business Journal, the FIFA World Cup Pregame show averaged 2.4 million viewers across Fox, FS1, and Tubi through the group stage — more than double what Fox drew for the same show four years ago. That puts it just below ESPN/ESPNU’s College GameDay average last season (2.7 million) and above Fox’s Big Noon Kickoff average during the college football regular season (1.8 million).
As Marchand notes, Fox Sports president Brad Zager had originally considered taking the main studio team on-site for every broadcast, including the group stage, but pulled back after the tournament expanded to 48 teams, with the sheer volume of matches making that a logistical non-starter.
The desk going on the road also means the desk goes together for the first time. Lowe told TalkSport this week that running the Fox panel across six weeks of group stage has been like herding cattle — the most unpredictable show of her 25-year career — and she’s maintained throughout that the animosity viewers think they’re watching is not what it looks like. So even if Henry and Ibrahimović have spent the group stage making their feelings about Lalas abundantly clear — and the wider media has piled on accordingly — the full four-person desk converging on-site for the first time, in front of a live crowd, with actual stakes on the field, is either going to vindicate her read or make for very compelling TV.
The round of 16 begins July 4.
The post Fox reportedly bringing its full World Cup studio team on the road appeared first on Awful Announcing.
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