FIFA to livestream World Cup matches to licensed sportsbooks

A detail about the booming sports betting industry that often goes underreported is sportsbook operators’ ability to stream live game broadcasts on their platforms. Launch the FanDuel app during any old NFL Sunday, and you’ll be able to watch whatever game you’d like.

This feature, of course, is key for live wagering. Sportsbooks don’t want to discourage someone from betting just because they can’t watch the game, after all.

And for the first time, this technology will be coming to the biggest sporting event in the world. On Monday, FIFA announced it was partnering with Stats Perform, a British sports AI and data company, to handle live data and streaming for betting platforms during the upcoming World Cup.

According to the announcement, Stats Perform will “distribute official betting data and live streams stream all 104 matches at the expanded FIFA World Cup 2026.” The partnership also includes the 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup and several other smaller FIFA-sanctioned tournaments.

Fox, of course, owns exclusive rights to broadcast the World Cup in the United States. However, users can now watch matches within sports betting apps. These streams typically include a “world feed” designed to air in various global markets, rather than using a home broadcaster like Fox in the United States, so viewers in a sportsbook app will see a different broadcast than what is on Fox.

The partnership is another sign of sports betting’s growing influence on the world’s top leagues and competitions. No doubt, there’s a lot of money to be made providing streams to sportsbooks, and that’s attractive to organizations like FIFA.

But if viewing sports on these platforms becomes more popular and begins to take away from traditional television audiences, there could be a problem. Companies like Fox pay billions of dollars for the exclusive rights to air these events, and if people are simply turning to sportsbook apps to watch games, that hurts the bottom line.

So far, not enough people are watching games on sportsbooks for that to matter. But putting events like the World Cup on these platforms could start to change that.