How Can Cord-Cutters Watch The 2022 FIFA World Cup? In Spanish, For Starters

Say, like many of us, the 2022 FIFA World Cup that begins Sunday sneaked up on you, given the unusual time of year and the demands of the approaching Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.

Say you fall in the same category as 54% of respondents to a recent national survey by YouGov that no longer subscribes to cable. And for sake of argument, let’s also say you don’t have regular live TV access, either via a digital antenna or a live TV streaming service.

And, while you’re generally not a live sports fan this, is one event you have always enjoyed watching and you want the tradition to continue. On short notice, what is your best recourse for making sure you can watch all the games?

For many Americans, the answer is turning to a new version of an old friend: The nation’s Spanish-language TV production, this time provided by Telemundo and available via NBC Universal’s Peacock Premium Service.

While FOX will air 34 of the tournament’s 64 games over the air — down from an all-time American high of 38 games over the air in 2018 — the network still isn’t reliably available with a digital antenna in every American household. The remaining 30 games will be on cable on FS1, and FOX has no independent streaming service equal to Peacock. Without cable or antenna, a streaming version of its production is only available via third-party live TV subscriptions that typically cost north of $60 per month or the Fox Sports App. The latter require user authentication to prove a viewer is also a paying cable subscriber.

By contrast, Peacock Premium will be streaming all 64 World Cup broadcasts from Spanish-language network Telemundo and sister cable station Universo, which are also NBCUniversal properties. Peacock’s service with commercials is available for $4.99 monthly. And with the World Cup condensed into 29 days this time around and the first 12 matches of the tournament available free on the service, a subscriber whose sole desire is to watch the World Cup could be in and out for only a one-month fee.

The overall share of Americans who would fall in the group of subscribing to Peacock solely for the World Cup might be small. But given the event’s stature, it can’t be that small. And in the bigger picture, it continues the national tradition of the world’s largest sporting event being more accessible to viewers in Spanish than English.

This is only Telemundo’s second time holding Spanish Language rights for the tournament. But its competitor Univision held the rights from 1990 to 2014, serving as a reliable World Cup home for a generation of Americans of any language who were not cable subscribers but recieved the network over the air.

And in the earlier portions of the digital age, Univision provided World Cup matches streaming from its website free of charge, without the user authentication required by ESPN and ABC then or FOX now.

And the emergence of Peacock as an affordable streaming option this tournament comes at an ideal time. Much like 2018 — which predated the 2020 launch of Peacock — the majority of games will be played during morning or early afternoon hours, when people are more likely to have more access to phones or computers than TVs.

And unlike 2018, the American team has qualified for the 2022 tournament. The Mexico national team (which has qualified for every tournament since 1994) generally draws higher ratings on Spanish-language TV than the U.S. national team, but the margins are smaller and the Americans are a clear second. In the 2014 tournament, the most-viewed Mexico game drew 6.8 million viewers on Univision against the most-viewed U.S. game at 6.5 million viewers.

If significant chunks of those kinds of audiences transfer to the streaming realm, we could look back on this as the First Great Streaming World Cup. And given how much easier it is to find a one-size-fits-all streaming option on Peacock, it will also be another where the American Spanish-language media led the way.