In catering to two separate wings of soccer fandom, Fox and Univision may be building an audience that is more than the sum of its parts.
For American television, the quadrennial pairing of the UEFA Euro 2024 and Copa America soccer tournaments was a golden opportunity. The tournaments fueled each other; Euros during the day led into Copa at night, Copa then set the stage for the Euros the following day. While it was nothing new for Univision to broadcast both tournaments, that had not previously been the case on English-language television. ESPN carried the Euros for years, while Copa America aired on Fox Sports (or going further back, beIN Sports).
Last week’s finals delivered two of the biggest sports audiences all year, more than ten million combined for the Euro final and north of 13 million for Copa America — the latter scoring over six million each on FOX and Univision. Underlying the success are two distinct strategies for pulling disparate audiences to the same product.
Univision and Fox have sharply different approaches to soccer coverage. Fox aired the Copa and Euros under a “Summer of Soccer” branding, part of a concerted effort to focus specifically on international summer tournaments. Fox began a few years ago to approach soccer as two separate entities, a club sport that operates year-round and an international sport that takes place primarily during the summer, Fox Sports president of insights and analytics Michael Mulvihill told Sports Media Watch. “We obviously have pushed our chips in on international.”
The same cannot be said of Univision. “For us,” Univision president of global sports Olek Loewenstein told SMW, “soccer is not a thing that happens in June and July and then you disappear and come back [next] June and July.” The Copa and Euros are the peak of a year-round soccer lineup that will soon shift to the Leagues Cup, Liga MX and eventually the Champions League. Those peaks are still considerable, but for Univision the focus is on providing a “stable offering of soccer throughout the year.”
The dual approaches are a result of the networks’ different audiences. While soccer is the #1 sport among Spanish-language viewers, it is further down the list among the English-language audience. Thus, the Univision audience consists of the passionate, year-round fan while Fox must instead pick its spots, finding the right events at the right time of year to attract an audience that might otherwise be focused on football or basketball. “We’re reaching sort of a more casual, general sports fan audience than they might be,” said Mulvihill.
International tournaments are particularly suited to that casual audience, taking place during a relative dead period on the sporting calendar and featuring national teams that are much more recognizable to the general sports audience than club squads. “I think that when American soccer fans think of Mbappe or Harry Kane or Cristiano Ronaldo,” Mulvihill argued, “they tend to think of country first.”
Fox pursued that casual fan with unprecedented daily exposure on its broadcast network, persuading local affiliates that the tonnage of matches on broadcast this summer will ultimately pay off two years from now during the 2026 World Cup. “Fortunately, we have a really high level of cooperation from the affiliate body,” Mulvihill said. “We clearly benefited greatly from having so many matches on the broadcast stations.” (The Euros primarily benefited from that over-the-air exposure, as Copa America matches largely aired during primetime windows and Fox did not want to tread too heavily on its entertainment division.)
Contrast that approach with Univision, which placed the majority of the Euros on its VIX streaming service. With its audience of soccer aficionados, Univision is able to take a more targeted approach scheduling tournaments based on how best they fit with other soccer programming. Univision uses VIX as its home for European soccer, making it a logical destination for the Euros. Copa America made more sense to carry on the Univision linear networks, which carry other North American events like the previously mentioned Leagues Cup and Liga MX.
Given the different strategies, audiences and languages, it makes little sense to view Fox and Univision as being in competition. The two networks ultimately complement each other. “I think there’s plenty of room for both networks to be successful and to serve different audiences,” Mulvihill said, “not just different in terms of the obvious language barrier, but maybe the intensity of year-round fandom.”
Indeed, the intensity of fandom may be a bigger difference even than language. Loewenstein noted the “large number” of non-Spanish speakers “that come and want to watch the games with us, just because of the sheer passion that comes across from the narration of our talent, of the way we cover the sport. For us, this is the most important sport there is.”
It would seem apparent from the numbers this summer that both approaches are working, but it should be noted that there is of course nothing new about the dual approach to broadcasting soccer. Fox and Telemundo have both carried the FIFA World Cup since 2015 and ESPN and Univision did so previously. Nearly every international soccer tournament of any significance is carried by two wholly separate English and Spanish-language media companies.
It is entirely possible to simply chalk up the summer success to the return of the USMNT to Copa America and the return of Copa America to the U.S.; to the constellation of stars in both tournaments; even to Nielsen out-of-home viewing. Even so, knowing how to adequately take advantage of one’s good fortune is as good a strategy as any, and a particularly important one as the ultimate soccer showcase approaches in two year’s time.
