Fox is selling the World Cup to children before it sells the World Cup to adults. The Hollywood Reporter reported Tuesday that Fox Sports and Sesame Street are collaborating ahead of the 2026 tournament, giving the network's soccer rights a children's-TV flank months before kickoff. [1]
The logic is obvious and still worth naming. World Cup broadcasts are expensive because they gather families, casual viewers and people who will not watch club soccer on an ordinary Saturday. Sesame Street gives Fox a way to address the smallest viewers inside the household before the tournament becomes a wall of flags, brackets and betting-adjacent studio panels. [1]
MSM will treat the partnership as sports-entertainment synergy. X will split between sweetness and suspicion: Elmo teaching soccer, or Fox laundering a rights package through preschool nostalgia. The paper's read is more practical. Every major sports property now needs an on-ramp for the next audience, and children's television is still one of the few trusted bridges into the home.
That makes the collaboration less cute than strategic. Soccer in the United States has always had a youth-participation advantage and an adult-viewership problem. Fox's job in 2026 is to connect those two facts. Sesame Street is a tool for doing it without asking a four-year-old to care about federation politics.
The World Cup will arrive as a continental spectacle. Fox is starting with the living room rug.
-- AMARA OKONKWO, Lagos