Major League Baseball has canceled its planned 2026 London Series, with Fox Sports’ World Cup broadcast commitments playing a key role in killing the international games.
The Yankees and Blue Jays were supposed to play June 13-14, but West Ham’s final Premier League match against Leeds is May 24. According to the AP’s Ronald Blum, that tight turnaround made converting the soccer field impossible, and Fox couldn’t accommodate a later June date because of World Cup coverage.
Commissioner Rob Manfred confirmed the cancellation on Tuesday during Front Office Sports “Tuned In” event.
Fox Sports president Eric Shanks recently called the 2026 World Cup “the biggest logistical undertaking” in Fox Sports’ history. The expanded tournament spans more than a month across North America, with dozens of matches spread between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Fox is planning a massive production effort with multiple broadcast locations following the tournament around the continent, plus its main Los Angeles studio.
All that World Cup programming doesn’t leave much room for anything else.
The London games have become a rare bright spot in MLB’s international expansion efforts. The Yankees swept the Red Sox in the first London Series back in 2019. COVID wiped out the planned Cardinals-Cubs series in 2020, but the games returned in 2023 with the Cardinals and Cubs splitting two games, followed by the Mets and Phillies doing the same in 2024.
Last year’s series caught fire thanks to British announcer Darren Fletcher, whose call of the Mets-Phillies finale went viral. Fletcher, who primarily covers soccer and boxing for TNT Sports UK, delivered an emotional call of the game-ending double play that drew praise from American audiences.
“The only drawback now is that I won’t get to commentate on baseball now for two years because the London Series is taking a year off, then it comes back. So I probably won’t call another baseball game until 2026, which I’m devastated about because I enjoy it so much,” Fletcher told Sports Illustrated after his viral moment.
Unfortunately, the 2026 cancellation extends that timeline further.
This marks the second time MLB’s European plans have fallen through. The league also scrapped Paris games after failing to find a promoter.
Despite the setbacks, Manfred emphasized MLB’s continued interest in European expansion.
“We remain interested in Europe. We think London is an important jumping off point for us,” Manfred said during his Q&A session. “We have a facility that has come a long way since the first Yankee-Red Sox game. It’s a much better ballpark now than it was due to their willingness to make investments in that. We continue to believe that there’s an opportunity there and that we can get at the developed economies in Europe through that London entree.”
Meanwhile, MLB is close to wrapping up its next round of TV deals. Manfred said the league has agreements in principle with NBC for wild card games and Sunday Night Baseball, Netflix for the Home Run Derby, Apple for regular season games, and ESPN for a package that includes local rights in five markets.
Fox Sports has been the leading player in international soccer coverage since winning World Cup rights away from ESPN beginning in 2015. However, beginning in 2027, Netflix will air the next two women’s World Cup tournaments, having surprisingly won those rights last December.
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.