Darren Fletcher during TNT Sports' Champions League coverage. Credit: TNT Sports
By Sam Neumann on

Fox’s World Cup coverage has produced plenty of memorable moments, but one of the best stories of the tournament, according to The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis, has been the emergence of Darren Fletcher as one of its must-listen voices.

The English broadcaster spent more than two decades at the BBC and BT Sport before crossing the Atlantic for Fox, and if you haven’t had a chance to hear him yet, Curtis believes you’re missing out. Fletcher calls games alongside Owen Hargreaves, but unlike most play-by-play voices, he doesn’t just set the table. Fletcher has real opinions, he’s not afraid to share them, and he brings a genuine passion for the game that jumps through the screen. He’s also been brilliant at meeting American audiences where they are, dropping NFL analogies like Revis Island and Deion Sanders into his soccer commentary in a way that feels natural rather than gimmicky.

“I am a big, big supporter of World Cup announcer Darren Fletcher,” Curtis said on a recent episode of his The Press Box podcast for Bill Simmons’ The Ringer. “I don’t know how much Darren Fletcher you’ve gotten to listen to, but man, he has been fantastic for Fox during the World Cup. Did 20-plus years of broadcasting in the UK. His broadcast style is fascinating because he is the play-by-play announcer with analyst Owen Hargreaves, but a very opinionated play-by-play announcer — like he is rendering opinions, he’s arguing with the rules guy. He’s enthusiastic, but enthusiastic in an ‘I want to sink my teeth into this game’ way rather than enthusiastic in a ‘soccer is awesome, isn’t it’ way, which I love.”

 

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Fletcher has also been in the right place at the right time throughout this tournament. He was on the call when Lionel Messi became the World Cup’s all-time leading scorer against Austria — 40 years to the day since Diego Maradona scored the Hand of God — and on the call again when Messi surpassed Marta for the most World Cup goals in history by any player, man or woman. He had the Ronaldo call too, when Cristiano struck for his second goal of the tournament against Uzbekistan.

Awful Announcing readers should be familiar with Fletcher, whose call of the 2024 MLB London Series — a Mets-Phillies game that ended on a walk-off double play — gave American baseball fans a fleeting glimpse of what a British broadcaster sounds like on an American sport.

He has carried that same infectious quality into this tournament and then some, even if he infamously declared that Japan’s players thought they were taller than they actually were — right before Japan scored a header on the very next play — but had the self-awareness to apologize to every Japanese player on the field before the broadcast had moved on.

That said, Fletcher isn’t for everyone, being that he suggested during Argentina’s match that the Jordanian goalkeeper had essentially allowed Messi to score so he could dine out on the story for the rest of his life. There’s a version of Darren Fletcher that tips too far into self-indulgence, and he occasionally visits it. But this World Cup has mostly shown the best of him, according to Curtis.

“Good on you, Darren Fletcher, you’re doing some great stuff at the World Cup,” Curtis added.

About Sam Neumann

Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.

View all posts by Sam Neumann