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It is the biggest World Cup in history, and perhaps the most unpredictable. How will England and Scotland fare in the heat? Who drew Curaçao in the office sweepstake?
And, crucially, will anyone notice that the BBC is broadcasting this giant sporting spectacle from 4,000 miles away in Salford?
In an era of belt tightening, football is staying home for the corporation while rivals – including its former frontman Gary Lineker – showcase the tournament from glitzy studios in New York.
ITV will show off its trendy Brooklyn base, with views of the Manhattan skyline, when it broadcasts Mexico against South Africa in the opening game of the 104-match extravaganza on Thursday night.
Lineker, meanwhile, has signed a reported £14m deal with Netflix to stream daily versions of his incredibly lucrative The Rest Is Football podcast from a studio overlooking New York City’s Times Square.
The former England striker turned media mogul had been due to front his seventh World Cup for the BBC until he left last May after another row about his social media posts.
He appears not to regret the move, commenting archly in April: “I would have been in Salford in a green box and now I’m going to be in New York City overlooking Times Square with lots of great guests.”
Yet while the BBC’s Salford studio may lack the stateside pizazz of its rivals – it is round the corner from a Greggs and a Holiday Inn – the corporation may yet win the battle for eyeballs.
Presenters Gabby Logan, Kelly Cates and Mark Chapman will host matches from what the BBC calls a “brand-new, state-of-the-art immersive studio”, featuring a giant LED backdrop of each of the 16 host cities in the US, Mexico and Canada.
Viewers expecting a backdrop of the Manchester ship canal will instead be treated to digitally enhanced vistas from Miami to Monterrey, with producers able to change the weather and time of day to match the conditions at each venue.
For the post-match analysis, pundits including Wayne Rooney and Micah Richards will be cast on to what looks like a rooftop terrace or riverside balcony – complete with elevated fans blowing a gentle breeze to give the impression they are outside.
“The actual end product that people are getting at home, I don’t really think it’s that different,” said Alex Kay-Jelski, the director of BBC Sport, as he showed off the studio to journalists on Tuesday.
Predictably, critics have denounced the BBC’s plans. The Telegraph derided the corporation’s “work-from-home World Cup coverage” while two of its own hosts, Logan and Cates, admitted they would prefer to be at the stadiums for every game. Both have endorsed the BBC’s cost-saving approach nonetheless.
Hosting the tournament from Salford would save “a few million” pounds and achieve a 19% reduction in its carbon emissions compared with the Qatar World Cup in 2022, Kay-Jelski said. “If I was standing here saying everything is going to be done from a studio in Dallas, you would rightly be saying to me: how can you justify that spend?”
The BBC is expected to send one or more of its hosts to the US later in the tournament, particularly if England or Scotland advance, and several of its reporters and pundits will be on the ground throughout.
The former England duo Alan Shearer and Danny Murphy will contribute to the BBC’s coverage from the US. Meanwhile, Rooney and Richards will be joined by pundits including Scotland’s Scott Brown and Rachel Corsie, as well as France’s World Cup winner Olivier Giroud in Greater Manchester.
Somewhat awkwardly, Shearer and Richards will also appear alongside Lineker on The Rest Is Football, although the BBC has made clear it will not fund its presenters appearing on rival outlets.
Kay-Jelski said the BBC had not struggled to attract on-screen talent for its coverage – “no one’s turned us down because they didn’t want to be here” – and that he was confident of being able to convey the atmosphere of the tournament from thousands of miles away.
With some matches starting as late – or early – as 3am in the UK, the BBC’s World Cup team will be living in a bizarre quasi-US time zone. Staff have been encouraged to get as much rest as possible to avoid burning out before the quarter-finals, which kick off in Boston on 9 July.
“Right now I’m incredibly happy,” Kay-Jelski said. “It’s a six-week, high-profile tournament – we’re going to get some stuff wrong and we’re going to get hopefully way more right. There is not a world in which everything can be perfect [but] I have no doubt we are doing more than ever before and it’s gonna be incredible. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be perfect. No one can attain perfection.”
