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Football’s staying home for the belt-tightening Beeb, while ITV and Gary Lineker’s popular podcast present from glitzy studios in New YorkIt is the biggest World Cup in history, and perhaps the most unpredictable. How will England and Scotland fare in the heat? Who drew Curaçao in the office sweepstake?And, crucially, will anyone notice that the BBC is broadcasting this giant sporting spectacle from 4,000 miles away in Salford?In an era of belt tightening, football is staying home for the corporation while rivals – including its former frontman Gary Lineker – showcase the tournament from glitzy studios in New York.ITV will show off its trendy Brooklyn base, with views of the Manhattan skyline, when it broadcasts Mexico against South Africa in the opening game of the 104-match extravaganza on Thursday night.Lineker, meanwhile, has signed a reported £14m deal with Netflix to stream daily versions of his incredibly lucrative The Rest Is Football podcast from a studio overlooking New York City’s Times Square.The former England striker turned media mogul had been due to front his seventh World Cup for the BBC until he left last May after another row about his social media posts.He appears not to regret the move, commenting archly in April: “I would have been in Salford in a green box and now I’m going to be in New York City overlooking Times Square with lots of great guests.”Yet while the BBC’s Salford studio may lack the stateside pizazz of its rivals – it is round the corner from a Greggs and a Holiday Inn – the corporation may yet win the battle for eyeballs.Presenters Gabby Logan, Kelly Cates and Mark Chapman will host matches from what the BBC calls a “brand-new, state-of-the-art immersive studio”, featuring a giant LED backdrop of each of the 16 host cities in the US, Mexico and Canada.Viewers expecting a backdrop of the Manchester ship canal will instead be treated to digitally enhanced vistas from Miami to Monterrey, with producers able to change the weather and time of day to match the conditions at each venue.For the post-match analysis, pundits including Wayne Rooney and Micah Richards will be cast on to what looks like a rooftop terrace or riverside balcony – complete with elevated fans blowing a gentle breeze to give the impression they are outside.“The actual end product that people are getting at home, I don’t really think it’s that different,” said Alex Kay-Jelski, the director of BBC Sport, as he showed off the studio to journalists on Tuesday.Predictably, critics have denounced the BBC’s plans. The Telegraph derided the corporation’s “work-from-home World Cup coverage” while two of its own hosts, Logan and Cates, admitted they would prefer to be at the stadiums for every game. Both have endorsed the BBC’s cost-saving approach nonetheless.Hosting the tournament from Salford would save “a few million” pounds and achieve a 19% reduction in its carbon emissions compared with the Qatar World Cup in 2022, Kay-Jelski said. “If I was standing here saying everything is going to be done from a studio in Dallas, you would rightly be saying to me: how can you justify that spend?”The BBC is expected to send one or more of its hosts to the US later in the tournament, particularly if England or Scotland advance, and several of its reporters and pundits will be on the ground throughout.The former England duo Alan Shearer and Danny Murphy will contribute to the BBC’s coverage from the US. Meanwhile, Rooney and Richards will be joined by pundits including Scotland’s Scott Brown and Rachel Corsie, as well as France’s World Cup winner Olivier Giroud in Greater Manchester.Somewhat awkwardly, Shearer and Richards will also appear alongside Lineker on The Rest Is Football, although the BBC has made clear it will not fund its presenters appearing on rival outlets.Kay-Jelski said the BBC had not struggled to attract on-screen talent for its coverage – “no one’s turned us down because they didn’t want to be here” – and that he was confident of being able to convey the atmosphere of the tournament from thousands of miles away.With some matches starting as late – or early – as 3am in the UK, the BBC’s World Cup team will be living in a bizarre quasi-US time zone. Staff have been encouraged to get as much rest as possible to avoid burning out before the quarter-finals, which kick off in Boston on 9 July.“Right now I’m incredibly happy,” Kay-Jelski said. “It’s a six-week, high-profile tournament – we’re going to get some stuff wrong and we’re going to get hopefully way more right. There is not a world in which everything can be perfect [but] I have no doubt we are doing more than ever before and it’s gonna be incredible. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be perfect. No one can attain perfection.”

Football News

This summer’s hottest rivalry no longer belongs to the BBC and ITV, but football’s online and streaming presenceFor the first time since the BBC and ITV began sharing World Cup coverage in 1966 their local rivalry will not be the main broadcasting battleground this summer.In keeping with the first World Cup staged across three countries the expanded 48-team tournament will play out as a global media event, with YouTube and TikTok broadcasting live action for the first time and Netflix streaming a daily TV show, Gary Lineker’s The Rest is Football, with the previously homespun podcast relocating to Times Square for almost six weeks.The former Match of the Day presenter will be joined by The Rest is Football regulars Alan Shearer and Micah Richards in the first programme, available from 6am in the UK on Wednesday, but big-name guests including Harry Maguire, Frank Lampard and Patrick Vieira have been booked for later in the tournament.Richards has joked about the World Cup’s looming “podcast wars” because his Sky Sports colleague Gary Neville’s Stick to Football will also be based in New York for the tournament, but Netflix’s involvement in The Rest is Football is a gamechanger that should take that podcast to another level, and a much larger audience.The US-based streaming company has paid £14m for 40 daily episodes, which will feature interviews and reporting from venues as well as the standard football chat, over fear of losing much of its usual audience to the World Cup.Stick to Football appears to have reduced its ambitions, and after broadcasting some shows on ITV during Euro 2024 Neville’s banter-fest with Ian Wright, Roy Keane and Jill Scott will be available only on YouTube and limited to 12 programmes given their commitments to ITV.The bigger picture in the podcast wars is Netflix’s growing interest in live sport and it has a good relationship with Fifa, having bought exclusive rights for the next two Women’s World Cups.“Netflix didn’t have a way to capture a World Cup audience because they don’t have the live games,” says Tony Pastor, co-founder of Goalhanger, the production company behind The Rest is Football and the rest of the successful podcast stable that generates more than 70m monthly downloads across its 14 shows.“They want to be part of the World Cup conversation and have a daily offering, to give their audience a reason to turn on each day and not park the channel for six weeks.”Lineker and co will be under pressure to deliver big numbers for Netflix given the size of the investment, but the 65-year-old is well equipped to cope, having presented live coverage for the BBC at six World Cups and played in two.The rest of the industry will be watching closely, because any move from Netflix to add more football content to a sports offering that has focused on one-off events such as Major League Baseball’s opening night, NFL’s Christmas Day game or entertainment crossover such as WWE and celebrity boxing will have profound implications.“The Rest is Football on Netflix is fascinating,” says Alex Kay-Jelski, the BBC’s director of sport. “If a show like that can do well on a big streaming platform then it will be a significant development.”The BBC’s tournament plans are more modest, its coverage based in Salford until the final week of the tournament, with the Match of the Day hosts Kelly Cates, Gaby Logan and Mark Chapman sharing presenting duties.With a redundancy programme under way that will result in about 2,000 BBC staff losing their jobs, financial constraints were a factor, as were environmental considerations.The BBC’s focus will be on sustainability and investing in its products for the long term, with a new studio opening this week and a range of new digital services on offer as it seeks to engage a younger audience.Pundits such as Wayne Rooney should ensure its TV coverage packs a punch, and Thomas Frank’s first media appearances since being sacked by Tottenham will generate headlines.“We’ve built a 24/7 World Cup content machine, which is better connected and integrated than ever before,” Kay-Jelski says. “There will be something for everyone, whether that be live TV coverage, Radio Five, YouTube shorts, news and analysis, or interactive World Cup games.“If we had £200m to spend then maybe we would have done things differently, but we’re very happy with where we’ve ended up. We cannot just focus on a six-week tournament, we have to invest for the long term. So we’ve built a new studio which will be used by Match of the Day, providing a real legacy from the World Cup.“I’m still not sure where we would have gone even if we had decided to build a studio over there. You could make arguments for Miami, LA, New York or Mexico City. It’s such a sprawling tournament that I’m comfortable with being based in the UK, at least initially.”ITV is taking a more old-school approach with its team, led by Laura Woods and Mark Pougatch, based in New York. Its director of sport, Niall Sloane, will be attending his 11th World Cup 40 years after his first, when his duties included operating a camera behind the goal at the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City when Diego Maradona punched the ball beyond Peter Shilton. “That was a frantic 20 minutes,” he says with a smile.Sloane says there is too much football on television, with the expansion to 48 teams and increase from 64 to 104 matches not a development he welcomes.ITV, which will show 51 matches to the BBC’s 54 with both sharing the final, should get off to a strong start because it has Thursday’s opening game – Mexico v South Africa – and England’s first match, against Croatia, next Wednesday, the BBC appearing to have gambled that Thomas Tuchel’s side will go the distance. ITV has rights to three quarter-finals, including the first two picks, and the BBC has the first pick of the semi-finals as well as England’s games in the last 32 and last 16 should they qualify.Although the BBC is likely to win the ratings head-to-head the World Cup will provide a major commercial boost for ITV at a time when its takeover by the US media company Comcast, which owns Sky, is in its final stages.ITV’s audience of 10.2 million for England’s Women’s Euro 2025 semi-final win over Italy was its biggest of last year, a figure which should be comfortably beaten this summer.“We will be producing lots of shorter content, but it will still be a while before we lose the significance of two lots of 45 minutes,” Sloane says. “As sport has grown in popularity the importance of live events has increased. There are not many TV programmes that deliver double digit viewing figures these days, but major football tournaments are definitely one of them.“It will be a good tournament, but I’m not sure the extra 16 teams will add much to it. There will be some games that are not at the level you would expect at a World Cup, which worries me slightly. There is quite a lot of flab.”Given the bloated schedule – and the fact that 40% of matches will kick off after midnight in the UK – Fifa’s new social media package feels prescient. YouTube and TikTok have secured rights to livestream the opening 10 minutes of selected matches, by the end of which many of those watching may have dozed off anyway.