The conventional wisdom holds that linear television is dying, cord-cutting is terminal, and the streaming wars have rendered the old broadcast model obsolete. Fox Corporation's fiscal first quarter results suggest the conventional wisdom needs a footnote: live sports, particularly the biggest tournament on earth, still print money.
Fox reported $4.57 billion in quarterly revenue, a 22 percent year-over-year increase driven by two forces that cannot be time-shifted or pirated without losing their essential value — the FIFA World Cup and American midterm elections. The company's multi-week World Cup telecast, running through November and into December, has delivered the kind of captive, appointment-viewing audience that advertisers assumed had gone extinct with the DVD player.
The scarcity premium
What Fox has demonstrated is less about football itself than about the economics of attention in 2026. In an era when any scripted show can be binged, paused, or ignored entirely, live events command a scarcity premium that grows more valuable as everything else becomes commoditized. The World Cup — with its once-every-four-years urgency, its global storylines, its guaranteed drama — represents the purest expression of this logic. You watch it now, or you miss it forever.
The political advertising surge compounds the effect. Midterm cycles have become increasingly expensive arms races, and television remains the preferred delivery mechanism for the kind of saturation messaging that campaigns believe moves voters. Fox's news and broadcast properties captured a disproportionate share of this spending, particularly in competitive Senate and gubernatorial races where both parties are burning cash at historic rates.
What the numbers obscure
The results are impressive but not infinitely replicable. World Cups happen quadrennially; midterms, biennially. Fox's underlying business still faces the same structural headwinds as every legacy media company: subscriber erosion, rising content costs, and the perpetual threat that the next generation will simply never develop the television habit at all. The quarter proves that Fox can execute brilliantly when the calendar cooperates, not that the calendar will always cooperate.
Rival networks are surely taking notes. Disney's ESPN, NBCUniversal, and Warner Bros. Discovery have all made massive bets on live sports rights, wagering that the Fox playbook scales. The coming years will test whether the premium paid for NFL, NBA, and college football packages can generate Fox-level returns, or whether those rights have been bid up past the point of profitability.
Our take
Fox's quarter is a reminder that reports of television's death have been exaggerated — but only for those holding the right assets. The World Cup is not a strategy; it is a windfall. The real question is whether Fox, or anyone else, can manufacture this kind of moment rather than simply waiting for FIFA to hand them one. For now, Rupert Murdoch's heirs are laughing all the way to the bank, and their competitors are left hoping their own calendar gets this lucky.
