For more than 200 million Spanish-speaking people living between Mexico and the United States, the 2026 World Cup, which began in Mexico City last week, and will finish near New York City, symbolizes something much larger than sports: the quiet emergence of a bilingual North American culture that politics still struggles to describe.
The very structure of the 2026 World Cup, which is jointly hosted by 16 cities spanning the U.S., Mexico and Canada, shows that Spanish-speaking America has never belonged to a single country. It has always existed as a vast cultural continuum stretching across borders, languages, media, music, commerce, generations and now increasingly, soccer.
And one of the most important forces spreading this culture has been Mexican television. What Bad Bunny and Puerto Rico are doing to American music, soccer and Mexico have been doing slowly but surely to sports and television in the United States.
In 1970, Mexico became the first country to broadcast a World Cup live, in full color, via satellite to the world. It was an enormously ambitious technological and political gamble.
Mexican mogul Emilio Azcárraga Milmo — known as “El Tigre” — understood before most television executives that the World Cup could become much more than a sports tournament. He convinced his father, “El León,” to secure official Mexican backing and approve the use of Intelsat, the single government-regulated satellite provider, to project Mexico as a modern media power to the planet.
That summer of 1970, Pelé’s Brazil, glowing in canary yellow on color television screens around the world, helped transform soccer from a regional passion into a truly global television spectacle. It was Pelé’s last World Cup, but it was the first time much of the planet experienced him live and in full color, thanks to the Azcárraga family’s Telesistema Mexicano, which would later become Televisa — shorthand for “Televisión Vía Satélite.”
More than 200 million people tuned in to watch Brazil win the 1970 World Cup. By some estimates this was double the audience that watched the previous World Cup final hosted in England in 1966, and more than four times the viewership of the 1970 Super Bowl.
The World Cup was entering that rare category of events capable of making much of the planet stop and watch together. But for much of mainstream America, soccer remained strangely invisible. Some experts argue that American sports evolved around commercial breaks, statistics and advertising-friendly television structures. Others believe soccer became associated with immigrants and foreignness at a time when Cold War-era America often resisted global mass culture.
Meanwhile, power inside FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, quietly began shifting away from Europe. In 1974, a friendship forged between Brazilian João Havelange and Mexicans “El Tigre” Azcárraga and Guillermo Cañedo de la Bárcena resulted in a new Latin American era. Havelange became FIFA president and Cañedo senior vice president. Under their leadership, FIFA rapidly expanded the number of participating countries while transforming broadcast rights into the organization’s financial engine.
Beginning with the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, Spanish International Network (SIN) — the Spanish-language U.S. network co-owned by “El Tigre” Azcárraga that would later become Univision — secured favorable agreements to broadcast the tournament in the United States en español. There, SIN discovered something mainstream American television still underestimated: Spanish-speaking audiences in the United States were already emotionally invested in the World Cup at a massive scale.
The ratings were strong. The advertising money was even stronger. By 1982, SIN’s annual advertising sales had surpassed $40 million, nearly doubling from just a few years earlier. That same year FIFA expanded the World Cup from 16 to 24 national teams, one of the first major reforms implemented under the leadership of Havelange and Cañedo. They understood that more countries meant more fans, more television audiences, more advertisers, more TV rights to sell and ultimately more influence.
By 1982, ABC finally purchased English-language rights to the Spain-hosted World Cup. But the network still treated soccer cautiously, even interrupting the final with commercial breaks — something many fans considered sacrilegious. Meanwhile, SIN respected the rhythm of the game, airing commercials only at halftime and allowing viewers to experience the match without interruption.
Spanish-language announcers narrated every emotion; for a few hours, families and communities across the U.S. could tune in and feel connected to the countries they had left behind. If Mexico, Argentina or any other Latin American country was playing a match, entire American neighborhoods, bars and cities erupted with the same prolonged scream: “Gooooool.”
Today, the World Cup is the largest sporting event on Earth. Television and streaming rights are worth hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars, and FIFA has become one of the most powerful organizations in global entertainment. Corruption scandals and political maneuvering surrounding FIFA have unquestionably damaged its image. But they also reveal the extraordinary scale of what the World Cup has become.
After decades of cultural hesitation toward soccer, the United States finds itself not only co-hosting the tournament, but emotionally and economically invested in it at a scale that would have seemed unimaginable a generation ago. This year’s World Cup is on its way to becoming the most lucrative sports competition in world history. Fox paid approximately $425 million for English-language rights to broadcast the competition in the U.S., while Telemundo paid about $600 million for Spanish-language rights.
The roots of that transformation can be traced back to the 1970s, when Mexican television executives bet on the World Cup and Spanish-speaking audiences in the United States, long before either was taken seriously by mainstream American media.
The 2026 World Cup is revealing a reality that has been growing in plain sight for decades: this part of America, overlooked by many, has long existed in Spanish. Ignoring Spanish-speaking America did not stop its rise. It simply postponed the moment when the rest of the country recognized its power.
Javier Marin is the author of Live from America: How Latino TV Conquered the United States, winner of the 2026 BookLife Prize for Nonfiction. He is co-founder of Tiempo News, a Spanish-speaking media organization serving Latino communities across the United States. This was written for Zócalo Public Square, an ASU Media Enterprise publication.
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