Fox Rides World Cup to $4.57B Quarter as Thanksgiving Hopes Fade
The FIFA men’s World Cup predictably delivered a sizable financial bump for Fox, but the critical Thanksgiving holiday potentially holds much less promise for the media company.
The Fox Sports parent entity said early Monday that it generated $4.57 billion in revenue for its fiscal first quarter that ended Sept. 30, up 22% from the comparable period last year. Advertising revenue grew 47% to $2.08 billion, and net income soared 57% to $957 million, with the World Cup meaningfully driving all of those figures.
Despite an ugly exit by the U.S. team in the round of 16, the World Cup ended with an average of 7.74 million viewers, up 116% from the 2022 tournament in Qatar. English-language coverage of the July 19 championship game between Argentina and Spain averaged 42.5 million viewers on Fox Sports, representing the most-watched programming anywhere on U.S. television since February’s Super Bowl LX.
“Sports, as expected, drove a considerable amount of the engagement across the entire Fox platform this past quarter,” Fox executive chair and CEO Lachlan Murdoch said Monday in an earnings call with analysts. “We began the quarter with a historic broadcast of the FIFA men’s World Cup final, the most-watched soccer telecast in U.S. history.”
On the call, Murdoch confirmed that Fox is now “looking at the rights for [the] 2030 and 2034 [World Cups] in a disciplined manner, as we would with all sports rights.”
Thanksgiving Issues
Fox, meanwhile, is eagerly looking forward to the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, which will feature a broad slate of college and pro football on the network. The centerpiece of that programming is the late-afternoon Thanksgiving Day NFL game between the Eagles and Cowboys, a broadcast that has far less curb appeal than before.
When that game was announced in May at the network’s upfront presentation to advertisers, the company had aspirations of it breaking last year’s Chiefs-Cowboys game in that time slot to set a new viewership record for an NFL regular-season game. Those hopes now look considerably dimmer as Philadelphia and Dallas are both having far worse seasons than expected.
The Eagles are 2–6 after a Sunday night loss to the Commanders, and are potentially in line to miss the postseason for the first time in a non-pandemic season since 2016. The Cowboys, meanwhile, fell to 3–5 after a Sunday home loss to the Cardinals.
Still, Murdoch sought to put a hopeful spin on the upcoming matchup, calling it a “blockbuster” game. Fox is also distributing the Thanksgiving game on its free Tubi streaming service, which does not normally show live sports, in a move to expand consumer reach for the broadcast.
Two years ago, Fox aired a late-afternoon Thanksgiving NFL game between the Giants and Cowboys, with both teams coming in with losing records. That broadcast averaged 38.8 million viewers, which led the regular season that year, but was far below the average of the 57.2 million viewers that the Chiefs-Cowboys game delivered for CBS in that slot last year.
The best 2026 Thanksgiving game as of now looks to be the primetime matchup between the Chiefs and Bills on NBC. That network landed this year’s revival of one of the league’s top rivalries after it had aired on CBS for several seasons.
Streaming Progress
Murdoch also lauded the results of the company’s Fox One streaming service, which debuted in August 2025, though the company has not broken out the individual financial performance of the service. He said the subscription-based Fox One has been almost entirely additive to the company’s existing base of television viewers.
“I think, in summary, Fox One has hit it out of the park. It’s executing on the strategy we laid out extraordinarily well,” he said. “I think it’s something like 97% of new subscribers of Fox One do not have a cable subscription. That’s a tremendous result.”
Fox, however, warned of forthcoming, sports-related subscriber churn with the service.
“As you move forward, the Fox One subscriber base is going to be somewhat seasonal with sports seasons coming and going,” Murdoch said. “I would just sort of press a sort of modest note of caution with that as we move forward.”
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