For most of his career, Kevin Callahan has built the World Cup somewhere else. As VP of Field Operations & Engineering at FOX Sports, he’s spent the last 12 years putting together temporary broadcast facilities for the network’s biggest events, three years out of every four; build it, run it for 45 days, tear it down, and start over for the next one.
The 2026 World Cup was different. Instead of building a temporary facility for the tournament, FOX operated out of its Pico headquarters in Los Angeles, a building that’s on the air every day of the year whether or not there’s a World Cup happening.
“This one was very different because we were working within the confines of our building,” Callahan says.
That meant planning years ahead of time instead of weeks, all while Pico kept its everyday broadcasts running without interruption. “For the past three years, every technology decision made within our Pico headquarters in LA was looking forward to this World Cup,” he says.
The 104 matches ran through two match control rooms – PCR 101 and 102, upgraded for the tournament with Grass Valley K-Frame CXP production switchers and Korona control panels, in keeping with the same ecosystem as the rest of the building’s GV switchers. For the studio shows, production ran out of two identical medium control rooms – PCR 203 and 205, built side by side so crews could walk between them. Those rooms added Mod I/O boards for extra SDI capacity to the Kayenne 4-stripe 35 source select panels and K-Frame XP video processing engines, needed because the AR stage introduces a real time delay whenever a presenter or video image appears in the LED wall, and the audio has to be delayed right along with it.
Stage B, FOX’s XR studio, ran on Grass Valley LDX 150 cameras that have now shot three consecutive World Cups. “The cameras on Stage B traveled the world since 2022,” Callahan said. “They were with us in Qatar, they were with us in Australia, and then they got installed here on Stage B.” FOX had purchased around 40 LDX 150 cameras, with 12 deployed on Stage B.
Those cameras were chosen for what FOX calls GhostFrame. The LED volume is fed by four different images layered on top of each other, so a phone camera catching behind the scenes footage sees a slightly doubled, soft background. The broadcast cameras don’t. “The way the cameras are set up with their shutter, they only see their own background,” Callahan explains. “So, it sees a perfectly clear image. That’s one of those differentiators that, as far as I know, to this point, no one else is doing yet.”
Across the tournament’s 16 venues, FOX built seven permanent sets. In addition, BRISK, short for Broadcast Remote IP Studio Kit, was used to cover 12 venues with six mobile ST 2110 flypacks that traveled the country, met up with each venue, put cameras and equipment on a stage, and sent everything back to Pico using JPEG XS. That was the infrastructure behind the broadcast.
What made this World Cup different for Callahan personally came down to something smaller. This World Cup also gave Callahan a personal first: he’d never actually seen Pico’s 18-foot countdown clock hit zero.
“This was the first time I’ve ever been in our building where the countdown clock hit zero,” he says. “Usually I’m out on the remote, wherever the event is happening, an IBC, a football game, a Super Bowl. This time I was actually in the building when it hit zero.”
“Within 45 minutes, we had four different desks, none of which were on the stage making TV,” Callahan says of FOX’s first day on air. “We were live from Venice Beach, we were in LA, we were in Mexico City, both inside and outside the stadium.” Looking back, that stretch is the moment he points to first. “What we do is take what is incredibly complex and try to make it look easy. And we succeeded in that.”
That same push showed up in the watch parties too, part of what made the coverage feel big. FOX pulled in reaction footage from international rights holders and ran it through Grass Valley Alchemist for frame rate conversion so it could drop straight into FOX’s production. The Alchemist is staying in the building for good. “In terms of workflows, we wanted to make sure that what we put in place for the World Cup is something that we can also build upon,” Callahan says. FOX has a college football game in London coming up in about two months, and a college basketball game in Rome later this year. “The international thing is certainly staying with us.”
Anyone in the U.S. who wanted to watch a match they weren’t attending in person had two options: FOX, or Telemundo. “You have a responsibility for the game and the event to make sure that you pull it off extremely well, because that’s what people were looking at,” Callahan says. “That’s what people saw as the World Cup if you came to America. So that was a special responsibility.”
Asked where this ranks against everything else, he’s worked on, Callahan says: “I think this is the top. When you do a Super Bowl, it’s one day. It is a big, massive event for one day.” What put it there, for him, wasn’t just the scale of it. It was watching the tournament’s reach play out in public. “Seeing on the news and seeing on social media what this became in this country is something special,” he says.
“We helped shape that World Cup experience for people throughout the world,” he says.
What stuck with him most, though, wasn’t statistical; it was the fans. Callahan is a lifelong New York Rangers fan who was in the building the night they won the Cup in 1994, and he says it doesn’t compare. FOX’s security team used to escorting athletes like Tom Brady, Derek Jeter, and Alex Rodriguez through crowds, told him about the scene outside the opening match at LA Stadium was unlike anything they’d handled before. After a quarterfinal involving France, around 5,000 fans waited 45 minutes behind FOX’s set hoping to see the talent leave, and FOX had to work with FIFA to walk them out through the stands and onto the pitch just to clear the area.
“You couldn’t sit there and figure out, pick any sport you want in America, pick whatever the most passionate fan base is for that team; you don’t have anything like that,” Callahan says. “Fans spent large sums of money between flights, tickets, and lodging to follow their team. And it’s not just one; it’s hundreds and thousands of fans doing that.”
After three years of planning the biggest broadcast days of his career, Callahan still came home most nights to the same short list. “My wife was still expecting me to walk the dog and take out the trash,” he says. “World Cup or not, some things don’t get a pass.”
