On Tuesday, a crowd of Beltway power players—including House Speaker Mike Johnson, Sen. Joni Ernst, Sen. Maria Cantwell, and Rep. Debbie Dingell—gathered on the rooftop of a D.C. office building for Fox Sports’s World Cup kickoff party. Andrew Giuliani, the head of the White House World Cup Task Force, grabbed the mic and enthusiastically told the crowd that “this is gonna be such an incredible story, and not just of the incredible successes that happen on the field.” He added that he expects his role to fade into the background when the tournament starts on June 11.

Perhaps it was a moment of wishful thinking. The tournament starts in one month, and so far, Giuliani’s role has been very much in the foreground—and there’s no sign that’s going to change anytime soon. The World Cup has been besieged by a stream of bad press over the past several months, repeatedly dinged for everything from exorbitant ticket prices and slower-than-expected ticket sales to travel concerns and ICE enforcement.

And yet, in both public and private, network executives share an unshakeable belief that once the tournament kicks off, the deluge of sky-is-falling stories that precede almost every big international competition will slow to a trickle. “I can tell you right now, the noise will get louder between now and kickoff,” one sports business executive told me. “You’re going to see more stories hammering FIFA on ticket prices and seating charts. The first time somebody shows up in an airport and can’t get into the country, there’ll be a ton of visa stories. But once the games start, that will all fade into the background.”

The 2024 Paris Olympics offer a useful case study. Before the Games started, the press uncovered a ton of unflattering stories: The Seine was too polluted to host swimming competitions, Paris had removed homeless people from the city during the event, etcetera. Of course, these were all legitimate concerns (at least a few German swimmers’ gastrointestinal systems paid the price for competing in the river). But two years later, the Paris Games are widely considered one of the most successful on record, at least from a media standpoint.

That pattern is almost certainly looming in the minds of network executives at NBC and Fox, which collectively shelled out more than $1 billion for World Cup rights. Indeed, one day before the D.C. event, during NBC’s upfront presentation in New York (the network, via Telemundo, holds the World Cup’s Spanish-language rights in the U.S.), executives predicted that the domestic tournament will be the biggest non-NFL sports event to hit the U.S. in recent history. Obviously, nobody mentioned ticket prices.

On NFL media: “I don’t get all the hullabaloo about the NFL putting games on streaming. Do people think they have a right to watch all games for free? If so, why? That’s never been the case. I grew up on Long Island with an antenna on my roof. Each week I got the Giants game and the Jets game, and if it was one of those lucky weeks that allowed for a doubleheader, or one of those teams was on a bye, I might get another game. I could also watch Monday Night Football on ABC. Sunday night? Nope, that was ESPN (mostly) and we didn’t pay for cable. I’m not sure what weekends looked like in non-team markets, but I’m guessing only three or four games, too. If anything, it’s better now because there are the options to get Sunday Ticket or subscribe to as many streaming services as you’d like. Today I can watch all 272 regular-season games and all the playoff games from my couch—an option that definitely didn’t used to exist. Plus, you also get all the content those streaming services offer. It’s not just NFL on there! Seems like a win for consumers.” —A Varsity subscriber

More on NFL media: “I really enjoyed Peter Kafka’s appearance on the Varsity podcast, mainly because he’s the first person I’ve heard in a while who mentioned that you get the same NFL package you had 25 years ago at the same price: Sunday afternoons, Sunday night, and Monday night have always been on broadcast and basic cable, with all local games on broadcast. The extra services that you need are for more products, which is how every business in America is run.” —A Varsity subscriber

On pickleball as a media property: “Pickleball needs to do something about the sound of the ball. It sounds awful, like when David Attenborough got Wimbledon to change the tennis balls to yellow to make them show up better on TV. Are you getting any pitches on padel as a sports property? It’s much more popular across Europe than pickleball.” —A sports business veteran

Have a great weekend. See you Monday,

John