How FIFA plans to broadcast 104 matches and maybe reinvent live sports TV

DALLAS: Call it what it is: the most logistically deranged live-broadcast operation ever attempted. One hundred and four matches, 16 venues spread across three countries, 39 days of football, and an expected global audience of six billion. FIFA’s Gianni Infantino has taken to describing it as “104 Super Bowls.” The people who actually have to produce it are choosing their words more carefully but their meaning is the same.

For the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the governing body is not simply scaling up what worked in Qatar. It is tearing up the old playbook and rebuilding around a single, centralised production nerve centre, a converted facility in Dallas, Texas, that Oscar Sanchez, head of host broadcast production at FIFA, has taken to calling “the 17th venue.”

The International Broadcast Centre (IBC) in Dallas will be the operational backbone of the entire tournament. Replay, graphics, camera shading, video assistant referee (VAR) operations, data processing and stadium entertainment all flow through it. More than 2,000 media partner personnel are expected on-site, alongside FIFA’s own production and technology teams.

Sanchez, who has produced over 10,000 football matches in a 25-year career and contributed to six previous World Cups, is not given to hyperbole. Speaking to IBC365, he was blunt about the scale of what lies ahead: “The FIFA World Cup 2026 is humongous. I genuinely haven’t found another adjective for it. This is the largest project we have ever tackled.”

Dallas was chosen with cold logic. It sits within three hours of virtually every World Cup venue, a geographic sweet spot that no other city in North America can match. That proximity matters enormously when the production footprint at each ground is this substantial: six feeds per match, more than 10,000 hours of additional content and shoulder programming, around 50 commentary positions per stadium, and routing infrastructure serving approximately 50 media partners per game.

“Obviously, cost matters,” Sanchez told IBC365. “Centralisation saves a lot of money in travel and logistics. The less we need to travel, the lower the operational risk — no flight delays, no weather disruptions, no logistical issues. But the bigger factor is consistency.”

Last summer’s FIFA Club World Cup in the United States served as a dress rehearsal and a useful reality check. It illuminated the staffing and logistics challenges ahead, provided an opportunity to evaluate new directors under tournament conditions, and gave FIFA and its production partner, Host Broadcast Services (HBS), a clearer read on the available American talent pool.

The upshot: rather than rotating a handful of crews around 16 venues in the traditional way, FIFA will deploy 16 dedicated production teams — one per venue — supported by seven centralised replay operations teams working out of Dallas.

Historically, World Cup production teams numbered six to eight, drawn largely from Europe. This time, FIFA has deliberately broadened the talent pool to include directors and crews from South America, Mexico, Australia and the United States. The thinking is partly philosophical and partly practical.

“We wanted to open more opportunities to people who live, breathe and enjoy football,” Sanchez said when speaking to IBC365. “Nobody can say that a country like Argentina, the world champion, doesn’t live and breathe football.”

Those stylistic differences between national directing traditions are real, and FIFA is not trying to iron them out entirely. South American directors tend to linger on coaches; European directors follow the ball and the players; French directors reach for ultra-slow-motion with an almost cinematic instinct. Rather than enforcing uniformity, FIFA and HBS are relying on extensive editorial guidelines and a quality-control operation that provides directors with live feedback and post-match reports for every game.

The mental game matters as much as the technical one, Sanchez insisted. “Anybody can direct a football match,” he told IBC365. “But when you realise you are going to a FIFA World Cup with 50 cameras and an audience that could reach a billion people, you need to go beyond technical knowledge. We need to analyse who is mentally ready to take on this challenge.”

One notable wrinkle: with 104 matches, English-language broadcasters will be stretched thin. FIFA is fielding 32 commentators, 16 play-by-play, 16 analysts in a deliberately more global, less English-centric mix than at previous tournaments. Their work now feeds not just live broadcasts, but highlights, clips, social media and digital content. “The greater challenge now,” says Sanchez, “is helping broadcasters efficiently locate and curate content quickly.”

FIFA’s official post-production hub will not, as it happens, be in Dallas. It will operate from London, principally to tap the UK’s deep pool of talent experienced in fast-turnaround matchday edits, and to cut HBS travel costs further.

The camera plan is as striking as the logistics. All 104 matches will receive premium coverage with 45 cameras per game, incorporating pole cams, cable cams, ultra-motion and super slow-motion systems, cine-style cameras, a RefCam and 360-degree rigs. Aerial and drone coverage will also be deployed, subject to the different regulatory regimes of the United States, Canada and Mexico.

The camera plan is explicitly designed for every platform, not just traditional broadcast. It is a lesson Qatar taught clearly: the most-downloaded image from the 2022 World Cup was a Lionel Messi celebration captured on an iPhone. Social and digital audiences are now at least as important as the billions watching on television.

The RefCam, internally branded Referee View and developed by FIFA’s football technology and innovation team was considered a standout success at the Club World Cup. Featuring AI-enabled image stabilisation to reduce motion blur, it is included in the host broadcast feed but will be used sparingly to preserve its impact.

Broadcast technology vendor EVS will supply its AI-powered effects system XtraMotion, capable of generating super-slow-motion content from any camera in the rig. The latest version adds a cinematic shallow-depth-of-field effect applicable to standard footage. Operators trigger the effect from the LSM-VIA remote controller with a single button. Two replay specialists are developing a consistency guide for HBS’s EVS operators.

First-person view drones were tested but ultimately sidelined by regulatory and insurance hurdles. Their future remains under evaluation.

A clean world feed from every stadium will be sent back to the IBC in Dallas via Verizon’s contribution network. Centralised replay and graphics are then produced at the IBC before distribution to rights holders via IP (using SRT protocol) and satellite. In a first for FIFA, remote partners will be able to access the same router as those physically present at the IBC.

Replay operators will work from Dallas rather than from the stadiums, with on-site backups for redundancy. The logic is straightforward: concentrating the world’s best replay operators in a single location improves both consistency and quality. Those teams are organised into language clusters English, Spanish, French/German and others. Graphics operations are likewise centralised, produced by specialists from AE Live.

Lenovo, the tournament’s official technology partner, has delivered a set of innovations that reach well beyond branding. Most visually striking are the AI-enabled 3D player avatars it is providing for integration into match broadcasts during semi-automated offside technology replays.

Tested at last year’s FIFA Intercontinental Cup in Qatar, the system involves scanning each player’s body in a one-second process before the tournament begins. The scans generate unique avatars — matched in appearance, dimensions and proportions to each individual that will be deployed during offside reviews. Previously, VAR replays relied solely on player-tracking data; the updated system means television viewers and stadium fans will see a visually accurate representation of the player during reviews, rather than a generic silhouette.

Lenovo has also delivered Football AI Pro, an AI-powered data analytics tool available to coaches, players and analysts from all 48 competing nations. Trained on hundreds of millions of FIFA-owned data points, it generates insights via text, video, graphs and 3D visualisations. The pitch to smaller footballing nations — the likes of Curaçao and Cabo Verde — is that it levels an analytics playing field that has long tilted sharply in favour of European and South American football’s established elites.

FIFA is not alone in rethinking how the World Cup gets made. Rights holders are also under pressure from sustainability commitments, shrinking budgets and the seductive promise of increasingly sophisticated virtual production technology.

The BBC’s response is to move away from traditional green-screen presentation and toward a fully LED-based virtual production environment at Dock10 in MediaCity, Salford. Much of the broadcaster’s presentation output for the World Cup will originate there, with teams deployed on location only for the latter stages of the tournament.

John Murphy, design director at BBC Sport, told IBC365 the approach was shaped by the scale of the tournament and the realities of travel and sustainability. “We’re still doing hybrid coverage,” he explained. “But this approach makes much more sense operationally.”

The project builds on lessons learned during Euro 2024 in Berlin, where the BBC successfully blended XR graphics with real-world scenery including the Brandenburg Gate as backdrop. Replicating that sense of place inside a studio, Murphy admits, is a fundamentally different challenge.

“In Berlin, we had the advantage of using a real location and layering XR elements into it,” Murphy told IBC365. “This time, we’re starting with a blank canvas, so the question becomes: how do you create something that still feels authentic?”

The answer is a hybrid visual approach — LED volume technology, physical scenic elements, real-world imagery, AI-assisted processing and Unreal Engine-style environments — aimed at building what Murphy describes as “a space and a feeling” that reflects the cultural identity of the host nations. The production setup features four cameras, a jib, Mo-Sys camera tracking, LED walls, LED flooring and HDR workflows throughout.

Early plans to use actual camera footage as virtual backgrounds ran into problems with parallax and perspective accuracy. The production pivoted toward game-engine-generated environments built from processed still imagery and AI-enhanced assets. Dock10 and Pixotope are central to the technical workflow, alongside graphics provider AE Live.

Murphy was refreshingly candid about the learning curve involved. “We probably went into it a little naively,” he told IBC365. “You quickly realise this is not just an extension of green-screen production. There are many more partnerships, technologies and dependencies involved.”

Critically, the BBC is not treating this as a one-off investment. The LED infrastructure is expected to feed into future football production Match of the Day included long after the final whistle in New York.

Six billion viewers. One hundred and four matches. A converted facility in Dallas that is somehow the tournament’s most important venue. The 2026 World Cup will be remembered on the pitch for goals, drama and the inevitable penalty shootouts. Off it, it may well be remembered as the moment live sports broadcasting stopped being a big production and became a genuinely industrial operation.

(The information for this article was sourced from IBC365)