World Cup media will be dominated by CAPEs and athletes
Opinion
Two distinct media voices will dominate the FIFA World Cup. Footballco’s EVP content and operations introduces the athlete creator and the creator analyst, pundit, entertainer (CAPE).
This summer, we are in for a spectacle.
For decades, the FIFA World Cup was a monolithic, high-gloss, linear ritual. “The Match” aired on broadcast television, while “The Analysis” aired on news outlets and in their studios, pushing made-for-TV content onto social.
Somewhere in there, for a precious few years, the best chat lived on Twitter. That old order is breaking down. The explosion of digital channels and the velocity of fandom surrounding them is challenging both traditional media and major social platforms while elevating new personalities in sport.
In Qatar in 2022, Linear TV reach fell by 11.9% compared to 2018, and it is likely to fall again this summer.
Social video is booming, but not sharing rewards equally: TikTok and YouTube signed “preferred platform” deals with FIFA, making other social feeds look like the cheap seats. And in the midst of it all, some salient voices publish directly on podcasts, YouTube, or Substack, forcing the big boys to import relevance they no longer create on studio sets.
We’ve seen this shift in fan behaviour firsthand. Our established media brands, such as GOAL, Kooora, SPOX, and Calciomercato, have been covering World Cups for more than two decades.
Sensing the change, we built creator-led brands such as GOAL’s Front Three, The Rondo, and FanZone, alongside athlete-powered programming, including the Beast Mode On podcast with Adebayo Akinfenwa and The Late Run, hosted by die-hard football fan and former Jacksonville Jaguars wide receiver Chad ‘Ochocinco’ Johnson.
We expect this summer’s tournament to further accelerate the trend, especially in Europe, where most games will kick off late at night. This summer, we are in for a spectacle – more accurately, a revolution.
Taking the field, the creator analyst pundit entertainer (CAPE)
As the mass authority of broadcast has waned, two distinct groups are filling the void for fans and gaining power in the media. The first of these is a new hybrid that I call the ‘Creator-slash-Analyst-slash-Pundit-slash-Entertainer’, or CAPE. A flamboyant acronym to match a colourful job description.
The CAPE is a new kind of media voice, more entertaining than a pundit and more insightful than an influencer.
These will be the creators who will use the tournament to become the hottest voices in sport. The evolution is how they will do it.
Sports media no longer reward expertise alone or virality for very long. To break out, creators need to blend entertainment with real analysis.
It’s not enough to have footballing insight if you cannot game the algorithm to earn distribution. It’s not enough to go viral if there’s no sporting substance behind it. Creators are already geniuses at developing simple visual formats (we’ve all seen them: on-the-street interviews, ladders, red carpets, metro cards) to grab attention. Harness that panache for virality and use it to deliver footballing insight, and you have something new: the CAPE.
The hybrid is already merging. Jolie Sharpe, a regular fan discovered in one viral England clip viewed 80m times, now has 400k followers, CAA representation, a broadcast contract, and was just named to Forbes 30-Under-30.
And no one did it better than Snoop Dogg. During the 2024 Paris Games, Snoop’s content outdrew the compendium of all Olympic sports from four years prior. Bonkers. The lesson here is not that football needs more celebrities (please no). It’s that the old boundaries between fan and pundit, entertainer and analyst are collapsing. Amid the turmoil, the CAPEs stand poised to seize authority.
Suiting up, athletes turned creators
Another group, already proximal to the game, are building new media power that will define World Cup 2026: Athletes.
For decades, TV studios cast legends to bring gravitas to on-air analysis. Now, athletes are bypassing traditional media, offering fans social-first programming that feels authentic due to its unscripted banter and lack of visual polish.
This trend isn’t about the athlete’s desire to build an audience – they have large social followings by the time they launch a show. It’s an opportunity born of a fundamental shift in where audiences place trust.
Fans are seeking more intimate connections to agenda-setters. They want personality, texture, inside jokes. And the time spent with this media – on connected TV at home, on podcasts during commutes – is developing a familial relationship between fan and athlete that is deeper than the broadcast relationship of yore, and, I predict, very hard to upset.
Some are doing it while they’re still playing. Erling Haaland finds the time to publish YouTube challenges where he goes undercover as the Joker for Halloween, kicks footballs at the Sidemen, and “reacts to football equipment from 150 years ago.”
As a generational Norway squad heads to North America this summer, Haaland’s YouTube channel will travel with them – and I expect he won’t be the only one. And so athletes, like the creators who came before them, are mastering rules of a new game: entertainment and algorithmic fluency.
The premium paradox
The prize for these new voices in football, as ever, is ad dollars. 62% of fans in the United States expect their interest in soccer to grow following the FIFA World Cup in their backyard. That’s a high CPM demographic. The athletes and CAPEs know it. The brand dollars follow, with a predicted $10.5bn surge in ad spend flowing during the tournament. Some voices will invariably cut through and walk away with more than their fair share.
But herein lies the trap. As creators and athletes compete for, and win, big budgets, they tend to dream bigger: nicer studios, better lighting, more complex shows with new guests, segments, and pizzazz – all expensive attempts to look important and justify the brand spend. This is the premium paradox.
dFans today value the message over the medium. In their effort to win out, some shows lose the weirdness and intimacy that made them compelling in the first place.
The risks for American voices are even higher. The domestic market remains vulnerable to shallow translations of football culture due to the country’s nascent football history. This will, I predict, create feeble brand campaigns targeting USA consumers at the cost of looking naff on the world’s biggest stage.
Winners and losers in the collab cup
The winners this summer will be those who understand that the FIFA World Cup is not only a contest among teams. It is a contest among show formats, personalities, media models, and claims to authority.
As ever, the old advantages still matter– live rights, scale, fame – but none of them guarantees relevance.
You need a personality, a format, and a credible opinion – attributes once owned by legacy media and now very much up for grabs.
When the final whistle blows at MetLife, we will know not only which nation won the cup but who owns the fan relationship.
James Lamon is EVP content and operations at Footballco