Record World Cup Audiences. So Why Did FIFA Need More Money?

0:06Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the next episode of Streamtime Sports. My name is Chris Stone. I'm the community lead joined as always by our CEO, Nick Meacham. Now, Nick, we've not had the chance between different holidays to speak since the World Cup ended. And today we were going to talk about some of the early viewing figures that we did have available to us from some of the national broadcasters, as well as some of the astounding amount of zeros in some of the social media and digital numbers. But in typical sports fashion, Nick, despite doing our best effort to be as prepared as possible, there's more breaking news.

0:34And last week we had the information that was, depending on who you ask, either leaked out to the media too soon before it could be properly discussed. But there was the FIFA Forward Enterprise program that I think lasted, Nick, all about 24, maybe 48 hours at best. So before we talk about some of the broadcast numbers and consumption numbers that we have available to us, Nick, we're going to start with the more breaking news, the juicier piece of news, at least certainly maybe the more controversial piece of news around the FIFA forward enterprise. And I think for anyone that's not aware of it, Nick, my understanding of it was FIFA was essentially going to set up a separate organization within the business that would be responsible for the commercial entities within, you know, scheduling, broadcasting, sponsorship.

1:18They would operate separate from the nonprofit version of FIFA. And I believe that equity stake was going to be a minority stake. They said that the private investors would not have any say, but we've talked about private equity enough, Nick, that even if they don't have say, they can certainly apply pressure. And I believe the initial advance payment was going to be$20 billion to FIFA, which they would then split across their member associations, I believe is what they call them. And that there'd be more money down the road, upwards of$40 billion, Nick, over the course, I think, to about 2037.

1:52Now, there are some political things tied in with that, with associations to family members within Donald Trump's family who would be a part of it. There is certainly a lack of clarity as to how that private organization be run with money and all these sorts of things. But ultimately, Nick, it lasted about 48 hours before being led by UEFA and others. It was pretty much shot down. But Nick, I interestingly, I'm one of those people, Nick, we won't get into politics. I know there's a few people in our circle that like to talk about politics quite a bit. I'm one of those like billionaires shouldn't exist people, Nick.

2:23But my initial thought, Nick, was screw FIFA. But then my second thought was, are they actually doing anything different than anybody else? When you start thinking about like La Liga and CVC, the NFL is now like private equity. I know there's a lot of nuance in all this, Nick, but my initial thought was not positive. And then when I put my business sportswear hat on, I was like, I don't like how they were proposing to do it. I had a lot of questions about it, but I don't know if what they were trying to do is necessarily wrong when you think about other things we've seen in the industry, Nick.

2:55I think you've said it pretty well. Look, I took a very bad week to take a holiday. I was on leave and I checked my phone. I tried to keep my phone away and intentionally stay away from it. And then I didn't have any of my work apps live and kicking, but I did have the SVT, the Swedish app, and it's come up on their news about this thing. I'm like, okay. Then I went down the rabbit hole of looking online and going, no, this can't be happening again. But it's having a serious sense of deja vu from the European Super League stuff. It's basically almost rinse and repeat a situation what happened before.

3:26But a couple of things quickly. I think the story broke from some reporting by Martin Ziegler. So he is a lot of – he's very well connected, as good a journalist as there is in sports, and he's broken a lot of these major stories. And I think he was one of the first to break this. Obviously, he got some tip-offs of what was going on. Some of the numbers you shared, I think, were slightly off the mark from what I understood. So I think the valuation was based at$20 billion. That's what it was, yeah. But they were looking to raise about$4 billion initially, which was basically going to be a cash injection to all the requisite member federations, member associations, which is like 211 of them.

4:06So basically a nice big fat check to give away 20 % of the future commercials of this new commercial entity. And I think they would need to put more in to then actually run and operate this initiative. But to your point, yeah, we've been here before. We've seen other examples of it. It's not the actual concept is pretty alike. Several examples we could probably point to. You think about La Liga, we think about volleyball would be one of the obvious ones that stands out. volleyball world we've covered on this podcast a number of times and through other channels where that was separated out from the the federation and they could the commercial side completely separate and run that there and there's other examples that do exist the international federation level and indeed other examples that exist at a national uh governing body level so yeah actually the approach is is not um atypical what we have seen but the caveat to all of this is just because you can get money doesn't mean you should and in this instance another example of fifa's like i think it's something like five billion dollars is sitting in the bank right now they don't need cash injection to like invest into development they have five billion sitting there that's just collecting interest that they could definitely start distributing themselves first before starting to give away um a part of this massive enterprise that is already a cash cash machine, basically.

5:30And I think the revenue is up nearly double from the last cycle. So it's on a huge trajectory. What's this money going to actually do? And we can go into the, like, we can go into the whys here, but it is astounding of all organizations to look to consider this type of thing in sports on paper, but you are right completely. It has been done before. And I think from everything we've seen up until this point, it's no surprise that FIFA's, in the thick of this, and particularly Amfantino with everything we've seen around hydration breaks, who he's been standing next to at all the requisite World Cup matches, et cetera, et cetera.

6:06Well, in terms of the valuation, Nick, and you are right the way you phrased that, do you feel like that$20 billion is accurate? Do you feel like that would be getting FIFA its money back? Because I think one of the things we've talked about, Nick, is quite often some of these valuations that come in, they can be really difficult for those organizations to match those valuations, or whether or not FIFA was going to struggle to get that much money anyways. I guess that's maybe part of the question, to your point, is why would they actually need all of this? I mean, there's obvious answers. It's right in your pocket right away.

6:36But, you know, it just comes across a certain way. Yeah, if you play that caveat of in good faith, there's good faith in intent here, which is we'll go down the other line in a second. But if it's good faith that they seriously, and Infantino from all the reports are that No one around him appears to have known that this was happening. You know, his off-siders or off-siders or insiders or advisors, whatever you want to call them, are basically quick, it's been super fast to distance themselves from this situation. I'm trying to think of where they could go. He's been adamant that the statements that have come out, this is to drive the development of football right across the globe.

7:17Again, I'll point to the same things. There's already billions being distributed. does this really move the needle in the future? And the question is, I mean, so the answer could well be, yeah, it could definitely move it. But what we never see coming out of FIFA, we never see really coming from international federations these days, is any talk about the development of sport. This is the first time you'll hear about it. Otherwise, all you hear is it's reached billions of fans. We generated billions of dollars of revenue. That's all you'll hear. You won't, oh, we now have all this participation growing in these countries.

7:53That's what I'd love to hear from some of these presidents of different federations of how they are developing, making kids more active. But that's the job of a federation president, not just to drive revenue. And that's where obviously we've seen symptom after symptom of this mindset of revenue, revenue, revenue is all that it's really needing to drive the growth of sport. But we saw, we've seen countless examples of just having more money for the sake of having it doesn't lead to immediate results or long-term results unless they have an incredibly robust plan in place. And again, we've seen for countless of times that people like FIFA and I probably could point to a few other federations have lacked a lot of substance behind how that money is being invested and used country by country.

8:41On the bad faith side, I mean, quite frankly, everyone's got to wonder what's going on here. Why would anyone want to be selling off part of FIFA for an immediate cash check when you have billions and billions in the bank just sitting there? Questions have to be asked as to who's going to benefit from this, not just member associations, but who else? Because there's no, for me, no logical reason why you would do this. And at the valuation you talked about, I think$20 billion valuation on the FIFA World Cup as an enterprise is cheap, given some of the stuff we've seen. Like, what's the Dallas Cowboys worth these days?

9:20What have we seen for an NBA team? Like$10 billion for an NBA and NFL team of late. You're saying that the FIFA World Cup's worth two Seattle Seahawks? Please, come on. No, absolutely not. And I think, I guess maybe the question comes back to you, Negan. We've talked about the European Super League in a similar way. Do you think this ultimately kills this potential option for FIFA in the future? Or simply, something like this might come about in the future? Because I think, again, we talked about this. I don't know if it's necessarily what they were trying to pull as much as the how. But you also think of things like they did invest a lot of money in FIFA+.

9:56We know that there is an appetite from FIFA to increase the value of their media rights in different ways. So I guess it's just, is this the end of this particular option? or is it just maybe for Infantino to do this, but someone else ultimately comes looking to do this? Because like I said, I don't think it's inherently a terrible thing. It's just the optics of it were not very well presented in this case. Well, it's definitely trying to hit, I'm trying to think of the right analogy here, like strike while the iron's hot. So come off the World Cup, record revenues. Many will suggest that the next World Cup will have difficulties getting close to those sort of revenue numbers because there's always been a commercial bubble that exists around anything based in the US.

10:39Obviously, the event's scaled as well. So in terms of maximum value, as FIFA is perceived right now, this could be potentially it, potentially. The next cycle, you've got it in Morocco, Spain, Portugal, technically Uruguay and Argentina. Argentina, maybe, I can't remember. Basically, it's a multinational event again. um i i yeah i think that there's a i'm trying to strike with the eye on top but again out of any organization in sports i just can't see where the value of this is now if the message was we want to separate fifa out and decentralize its power and control on the commercial sitting within the federation and run it completely separately and run it as a commercial business and then let the federation focus much more on governing the game and so forth they would have more argument and more value to the messaging merit than it would what this looks like which is effectively just selling a cut of already extremely successful commercial enterprise that many would argue is on such a trajectory revenue wise this investment's not going to drive that up even further.

11:57It is simply an upfront check for the now. So say what you want around Infantino and what we've seen from FIFA and what we've talked about over the last couple of years, this makes no sense to many of us other than a cash grab and really is one of the things that really hurts sports, frankly, in this day and age where we see more of this investment come in and fans don't want to see it. Fans don't want to see billions of dollars being distributed through to other investors and private equity firms and other billionaires. They want to see that money either not being spent by them or being filtered into ways that have a positive impact on them somehow, someway.

12:33And this isn't it. Yeah. Well, speaking of the fans' sake, slightly off-piece, I'm curious to get your opinion on it because we have not spoken about it. The halftime show and the pregame entertainment, I don't think I saw a single person either A, asked for it to begin with. I certainly didn't see anybody during the show talk about enjoying it. Like if that's what the trade-off would have to be for that$20 billion, because assuming that's what it is, right? They want to make it an entertainment. They want to rise the ticket prices, things like that, Nick. God, that was rough, Nick. I watched Halftime Super Bowl show every year, but this wasn't it.

13:13I think they're just trying too hard with some of those things, really. They wanted to create its own identity, different to what the Super Bowl is and try and be the next Super Bowl and have that credibility and prestige. yeah just just missed the mark again um didn't read the room it feels like they are at times just completely disconnected from the rest of the real world with some of the stuff we we continue to see in here coming out of there and and i've heard i've spoken to people at fifa over the years or have been at fifa and uh it's a pretty much a bit of a nightmare situation to be involved with so i'm not surprised this type of stuff pops up i don't know i i think everyone was expecting the worst and it was probably I think matched my expectations of what I was going to expect so I don't know how they I actually would love to think of what could be the way that could be done and that would really work and I actually think there's ingredients there that were smart, you know, they had an array of major global stars rather than just the one big show although that was quite a cool concept they just tried way too hard and pulled too many gimmicks out of the hat And it just fell flat.

14:23Yeah. Well, Nick, we've already started to receive some numbers. We will get more official numbers from Nielsen over the course of maybe even by the end of this week, you know, by the time this podcast comes out. But we will hear things about the success of the tournament in terms of some of its viewership numbers. So we're going to go and kind of break some things down. We'll start with the traditional broadcast, work things into sort of the broadcast versus streaming because there's some interesting numbers there. And then we'll go into the social media numbers where there are some truly eye-watering large numbers.

14:51Nick, but just in terms of talking about the traditional broadcast and kind of focusing on a few markets here in America, Fox Sports reported to have 7.7 million average viewers per match, which was 116 % increase from 2022. One that I thought was interesting, Nick was Telemundo being operated by Peacock, which is the Spanish operator in the U S saw 143 % increase from this tournament to the last one. And there's actually some really shocking numbers, Nick, about how Telemundo and Peacock was performing across it. I think the Mexico-England game was the largest game that ever been on that channel as well.

15:24But if we look further across not just the average match, but the finals, there was 62.8 million people in the U.S. across all Fox Sports' audiences. That includes Fox Sports as well as Fox Telemundo, which would make it the largest soccer game in the history of the USA. It's quite a massive event in that scale. In the U.K., in the semifinal, which was the England heartbreaking loss against Argentina. That had 21 million viewers, which was on par with the England-Spain final of the years in 2024. Interestingly, that had an 85 % audience share. So seemingly, if you were watching TV in the UK, you were watching that game.

15:59And then in Spain, there was a record-breaking viewer of 15.7 million average viewers and held an 87 % audience share. So Nick, record-breaking numbers across multiple different nations, the US being the main one there. But Nick, I think with some of these broadcast numbers, I think maybe the question for me is, you know, how impressive maybe are they necessarily? Or is this just the World Cup's the World Cup and it's always going to perform? I mean, with some of those traditional broadcast numbers, have you seen anything else that's come out and perhaps surprised you? No, I think seeing those numbers, I do think there's a little element that has surprised me that is that they have performed so well because of the length of the tournament.

16:41I did expect the numbers perhaps at the final stage to do quite well, frankly. And we have seen that whilst everyone has a new record that they share with consumption these days, because consumption in general terms is going up in all facets. So it's difficult to delineate whether that means it's actually relative to current consumption trends, whether it is actually as big a record as it makes up. but no major surprises in terms of just the level of some of the performance numbers I think it's just interesting to see the scale of how big the Spanish audience and how big that does that number is it's not a surprise to me that Telemundo is such a big player because that's we've seen countless numbers of that sort of stuff as well but at that scale it just shows wow what a what what an impact that has to the overall audience mix in the US so it's tough to delineate and really like you've got the views you've got ratings you've got all these other numbers to put together and and it is the best thing you can try and do is compare apples with apples where you can i think that the crux of it is in the u.s it did really well it probably expected to do really well i'm very intrigued to see what the fifa's numbers look like soon when they release their we've been we've reached seven billion people this this this time around you know versus what they did for the world cup uh last time which we did a podcast on and also for the club world cup but you know i think one thing i would take away is that streaming is clearly now completely etched into the ecosystem there is no you know discount on audience that you would expect from like free to wear uh sorry ota and ott based services it's completely um sort of discriminated or delineated that's not the right word uh completely basically it's all all meshed together now so basically it It doesn't really matter what platform it's getting distributed.

18:34It's going to get the audience it's needing. So I think it's just another sort of sign of validation of all of that. Nick, I've been watching this guy on TikTok going totally off piece, but he talks about homogenized. So that's, I think, what you're talking about, Nick, is when you take all those numbers, you've homogenized everything. I was going to say homeostasis. That's not the word. Homogenized. That's it. There we go. We're adding new things. But to your point, Nick, on the digital side of things, But there's a completely different set of numbers, I think, that tells maybe perhaps a more interesting story in terms of the how.

19:09Fox reported on their digital platforms that they had 17.2 billion views, making it the largest digital event in their history. So that includes some of the streaming platforms or social media platforms. The BBC came out and said that they had 237 million streams of this World Cup, which doubled the number in 2022. ITV said they had 468 million streams from 21 million users, making 16 out of 20 of ITV's biggest shows this year have been the World Cup. In terms of connected TV, really interesting statistic from YouTube, Nick. I'd be curious to know, because we talked about broadcast deals, but they said that they reported 550 million viewers on connected TV, which I think is interesting.

19:51as we think of YouTube being a mobile first platform, some of those connected TV numbers. And then just on the streaming side, there was a record broken for concurrent viewers from our friends at Kaza TV during the Brazil versus Japan game, which had 21 million concurrent viewers on Kaza TV. So some of the interesting numbers there, Nick, is the growing prevalence, as you said, of streaming numbers versus just the traditional linear broadcast. Everyone's got really good at shaping a different story now on these numbers. That all sounds great. I am intrigued to hear, you know, not just the records, but also what were the expectations?

20:30Were the numbers actually aligned with what they were expecting? Now, those numbers weren't often shared publicly in most of those instances. But YouTube are looking at using this whole story and experience as a gateway, as an engine to drive more and more live rights onto their platform. And I'm still catching up, but obviously saw the deal announced with YouTube and Peacock, where Peacock now is going to be available through YouTube Premium. Again, leaning into more and more of these live sports being available through YouTube's premium proposition. So I think this is just going to be another example of where for the next few years, for the next set of major events, YouTube will be using this as a catalyst, these numbers, to really try and push both for the rights owners but also other creators, other broadcasters to start broadcasting more live sports on their channels because they're able to get the audience numbers, bring a serious critical mass to the platform.

21:26Because YouTube also helps visibility. When they get a pretty set of rights, you work with YouTube, you talk to YouTube, they will help amplify that even further. And no question they've done so here. And with those numbers, Nick, how much of this is streaming is growing the number of viewers versus it's simply diversifying the way people consume things? And if it is that latter, What does that mean in terms of a couple of different things? A, the media rights values, if we're seeing streaming versus linear broadcast, or even from a measurement perspective, because as you said, we're, I think, probably more than ever struggling to just have one metric to talk about everything.

22:01Because even the statistics I talked about with Fox, they'll tell you that's the combined numbers. So what is that combined number of linear broadcast versus streaming views? Just, you know, what does that all mean in terms of overall viewership? Whether, like I said, whether that's a positive or just simply a diversification. And then what it means on the back end when you're talking to, you know, rights holder, or sorry, broadcasters, platforms, sponsors, all those sorts of things. I think everyone's a little bit unsure of what to take from it all. I think, you know, you have to be both in the streaming landscape and over the air, like just point blank.

22:37where I live here in Sweden, I don't have access to actual over-the-air TV. I've only got it through streaming. So I have access to all the requisite platforms that probably use a error, but I couldn't get my connection working to get the local channels served to me. So I'm only using the streaming product. So for example, the World Cup, I would not watch probably or would have struggled to watch it without that connectivity. So I just think you have to be taking a multi-distribution approach. That's why Sky did the deal with ITV to have multiple channels and touch points to also get their content in different places that serve different audiences.

23:12And I think you just got to be everywhere now in some way, shape or form. So whoever's buying rights has to take a multi-distribution approach. Otherwise, they're risking leaving opportunity on the table, frankly. For sure. And then Nick, the last sort of area I want to go into and just again, curious to dive into this is some of the numbers on social media, Nick, and they are absolutely bonkers. So I'm hoping you'll just stick with me as I read off some of these numbers because they are pretty incredible. So we had both TikTok and YouTube as preferred platforms. We discussed beforehand sort of what we thought those would be.

23:46And I think there's still even amongst these numbers things to figure out. But according to numbers that TikTok went and distributed for Friday, the official FIFA World Cup account generated 28 billion views and 1.7 billion likes. Their account gained 55 million followers during 2026. the world cup hub which we talked about they were creating that sort of bespoke place for people to come reportedly had 520 million visits with 96 million fans participating in the panini card collecting experience and overall using sort of the hashtag or just world cup content in general they said had 1.2 trillion with a t views on tiktok um some absolutely just crazy numbers And then when we look at YouTube, do you want to talk about TikTok before we go into YouTube or should we throw all the numbers out there, Nick?

24:35I mean, let's go to TikTok. I'd say one of the numbers that actually stood out to me, I mean, the trillion number is ridiculous. Like I don't even know what that means. It's just too many zeros to me. I couldn't write it out. I'd probably get it wrong if someone asked me to write out how many zeros it is, but it is a lot. Did you get a chance to use any of those different, the preferred platform channel or the hub? So I mentioned I tried the YouTube one just to see if I could watch the 10 minutes and if it would send me over. And if you listened to that previous podcast, you didn't, I'll really quickly say it.

25:04I found it really difficult, even though my parents at home are YouTube TV subscribers. Instead of just syncing me up to YouTube TV at 10 minutes and try to take me to the Fox One platform, which I understand, but also just found it a little bit sort of herky jerky when you could have just pulled me over to YouTube TV, which is obviously owned by you guys. I did not check out the FIFA hub. I did not try to do any of the first 10 minutes on TikTok. Now, obviously, I saw a ton of content on there. But again, it wasn't always on FIFA's own channels. It would have been on whatever billions of views came from non-official TikTok channels.

25:39Well, the number that they've also shared is that they generate 465 million views for official broadcasters on a live stream. So that starts to give you a picture of what that funnel sort of looks like. of you know we talked about you know basically some sort of variation of affiliate marketing basically of getting people to consume the live match and filter that to official broadcasters now again no idea what the target was for that but it's not an insignificant number 465 million views i would love to see the detail of who basically maximize that opportunity but there's no question that that is a significant number that broadcasters could have tapped into whether that has turned into subscribers whether that means that people have stayed on platform we don't have those details but it's definitely something you'll probably hear a lot more from from tiktok's perspective anyway for the time for the for the near future as they try and really push this idea of live streaming as a as an entry point into the official uh broadcast and who does this i suppose benefit the most i'm just thinking in terms because like what it's almost hard to comprehend, Nick, what 1.2 trillion views on TikTok accounts for in value.

26:50Whether that, as you say, that's the story you can go to tell broadcasters because TikTok has provided the 465 million views directly from broadcast channels. Like what does that even provide for them? I got to go to an event with Meta the other week in New York City where we were talking about social media followers and things like that and whether or not they actually see ROI on that or it's just good marketing like i don't even know where to begin you know is that something that is better suited for advertisers and sponsors not necessarily the rights holders like it's such an incredibly large number nick it's hard to even really comprehend how i would even begin to use that if i were in a negotiation if i was fifa or if i was tiktok like just really it's such a bizarre not bizarre just incredibly large number anything it is i would say the main way they're going to get value from it at that scale is very much the sponsorship outlook.

27:43Not really advertising because TikTok's not a platform like that per se, although I'm sure you can buy advertising space through TikTok channels, but for the rights owner themselves to maximize value, they will be looking to do sponsored content related sales, whether it be through official year-round sponsorship products through to more one-off deals. You're seeing a lot more brands now do like collab posts where they'll get on Instagram. I'm not sure about TikTok where they get added to and added if they are connected with social media posts. So I'm doing the highlights and it'll be linked with a club.

28:22Oh, sorry, with a brand who wants to get access to that audience and visibility by sheer association. And they're able to add that in, which is a huge needle mover for those brands who just basically can effectively do a views by. by doing a deal with the requisite rights owner. So it does open up opportunities to drive more revenue through different types of digital sponsorship, sponsored content, ad sales, by having that sheer scale there. But also if they can add, filter out that mix and be able to drive people to their official platforms, it also does serve more of a direct purpose for the broadcasters who have been a little unsure of what service this will provide for them other than giving TikTok more live sports and moving people away from their respective own digital platform.