The biggest sporting event in human history is happening right now, on American soil, and every brand in the country is asking the same question.

Do we get in?

The 2026 World Cup kicked off June 11 across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Forty-eight teams. Sixteen host cities. One hundred four matches. Somewhere between five and six billion viewers globally. And, per WARC, an additional $10.5 billion in global ad spend flooding into a single quarter.

The gravity is real. The temptation is real. And the instinct — get our brand in front of the whole planet while it's watching — is understandable.

But before you move a dollar, you need the honest version. Not the sales-deck version where live sports is a magic bullet and everyone wins. The real one. The good, the bad, and the ugly of running CTV during the World Cup.

Because live sports on connected TV can be the best money you spend all year — or the fastest way to light a budget on fire. The difference is knowing which parts are which before kickoff.

Let's break it down.

THE GOOD: Why Live Sports on CTV Is the Best Attention Money Can Buy

Start with why this is even a conversation, because the upside is genuinely enormous.

Live sports is the last appointment viewing left on earth. In a world built entirely around skipping — fast-forward, ad-block, watch-it-later — the World Cup is one of the few things millions of people watch live, at the same moment, unable to skip, fully present. That is the rarest commodity in modern media, and it is exactly what a CTV ad buys during a match.

The attention numbers are not subtle. CTV ads delivered during live sports outperformed their cable and broadcast equivalents by 66 percent in the 2024 to 2025 NFL season. Some events pushed past 116 percent. The same spot does dramatically more work simply because of where it runs — in a lean-forward, emotionally invested, real-time environment where the viewer is locked in.

Then there's co-viewing, and the World Cup is co-viewing at its absolute peak. People do not watch the World Cup alone. They watch in groups — bars, living rooms, watch parties, families gathered around the biggest screen in the house. One impression served into a World Cup match is not one set of eyes. It's the whole room. That multiplies the true reach of every dollar in a way no mobile feed can touch.

And the audience is massive and, crucially, arriving on streaming. Nexxen research shows 43 percent of expected World Cup viewers plan to watch via streaming. This is not a linear-only event anymore. A huge share of the largest audience in sports history is watching on connected TV — which means CTV is not the scrappy alternative to the "real" World Cup buy. It is a front-row seat.

Layer on brand safety, which live sports delivers better than almost any environment in advertising. When your ad runs around the World Cup, you know exactly what it's running against. No questionable content. No made-for-advertising junk. The most premium, most watched, most trusted content on the planet, and your brand sitting right next to it.

That's the good. Real attention, real co-viewing, real scale, real safety. When it works, nothing else in the media plan comes close.

Now the other side.

THE BAD: The Price, and the Problem Soccer Creates

Here's where the fantasy meets the invoice.

World Cup CTV inventory is expensive. Brutally expensive. Media buyers are forecasting streaming CPMs between $60 and $120 for the tournament, based on what the 2024 Summer Olympics and the 2026 Winter Games actually cost. Premium in-match streaming inventory has been commanding CPMs near $120. For context, entry-level CTV in normal programming runs $25 to $65. You are looking at potentially double or triple the going rate for the privilege of appearing during a match.

And most buyers have a ceiling well below the top of that range. One agency lead said the honest conversation starts the moment you creep past $70 to $75. Another put his clients' palatable limit at $50 to $60 for live sport. When the premium inventory is asking $120 and your discipline says $60, a lot of brands simply cannot make the in-match math work.

But the price is not even the worst structural problem. Soccer itself is.

Here is the paradox that makes the World Cup uniquely difficult. Soccer is continuous play. Two 45-minute halves with the clock running and almost no natural commercial breaks. Unlike football or basketball, which stop constantly and generate ad slot after ad slot, a soccer match produces very few in-game opportunities. So as the audience grows, the inventory does not grow with it. More people watch. The number of ad slots stays flat. Which means the price per impression climbs even as the reach explodes — the worst possible combination for a buyer.

More demand, chasing less supply, at a live event everyone wants in on. That is a recipe for exactly the CPMs you're seeing. The scarcity is not a temporary quirk. It is baked into the sport.

That's the bad. The best inventory is scarce by the nature of the game and priced accordingly, and for a lot of brands the in-match buy is simply out of reach.

THE UGLY: How Brands Actually Set the Money on Fire

Now the part nobody in the sales deck will tell you. Here is how brands genuinely waste money on World Cup CTV — the ugly, avoidable mistakes that turn a premium opportunity into a premium regret.

The first way is buying the hype without the strategy. Paying $120 CPMs for in-match inventory with no plan for what happens after the impression. A World Cup ad does not convert on impact any more than any other CTV ad does. It plants demand that surfaces later. Brands that pour their entire budget into the most expensive in-match slots, then judge the campaign on the same-day dashboard, will see a catastrophe that isn't real — and pull out, having wasted the premium without ever measuring the payoff correctly.

The second way is the timing trap, and it is vicious in a tournament. The whole event pivots on one unknown that no one can predict: how far does the United States go? A deep run by the host nation galvanizes casual viewers and drives CPMs up. An early exit dampens enthusiasm and softens prices across the back half. Brands that dump their entire budget into the group stage at peak prices, or that get caught overpaying for a knockout round their audience stopped caring about, are exposed to a variable they cannot control. The tournament's price curve is a live thing, and buying it blind is how you overpay.

The third way, and the ugliest, is measurement you didn't build in advance. CTV attribution runs probabilistically, through household IP matching. The tools that handle it — the DSP configuration, the household retargeting, the attribution integration — have to be set up before the campaign launches, not bolted on after the final whistle. Brands that run World Cup CTV with no measurement scaffolding get the worst outcome in advertising: they spent the premium, and they have no idea whether it worked. They cannot tell demand they created from demand they captured. They cannot separate the World Cup lift from the summer baseline. They just have a big invoice and a shrug.

And the fourth way is creative that doesn't earn the moment. Running the same tired spot you've been flighting since spring, into the most expensive, most attentive environment of the year. If you're paying a live-sports premium for peak attention, and your creative is generic wallpaper, you paid for a front-row seat to be ignored. The attention is only worth the price if the creative is worth the attention.

That's the ugly. Every one of those mistakes is avoidable. And every one of them happens, at scale, every single tournament.

The Smart Play: The Backdoor Most Brands Miss

So here's the part that turns this from a warning into a strategy. Because the honest answer to "should you run CTV during the World Cup" is not yes or no. It's how.

The mistake is assuming the only way in is the $120 in-match slot. That's the front door, and it's guarded by Fortune 500 budgets. But the World Cup is a building with several entrances, and the smart money uses the side doors.

The biggest one is shoulder programming. The pre-game, post-game, highlights, and analysis content surrounding the matches has been running at $30 to $40 CPMs through connected-TV partners — roughly half the cost of buying inside the games themselves, and a fraction of the in-match premium. That's not the scraps. That's a huge, engaged, World-Cup-primed audience at a price a normal brand can actually justify. Because soccer has so few in-game breaks, much of the real ad opportunity was always going to live in the shoulder content anyway.

The second door is retargeting. You do not have to pay the premium to be in the match to reach the people who watched it. Using DSP household-level targeting, you can identify the homes that consumed match content and retarget them with your message on other CTV platforms, later, at a normal CPM. Let someone else pay $120 to reach the household during the game. You reach the same household for a fraction of that, in the days after, when your creative isn't competing with a live match for attention.

The third door is the less-contested formats. Home-screen takeovers, squeezeback units, in-app inventory on the Fox Sports app that carries every match and its surrounding content. These avoid the most-fought-over in-match slots and bring the cost down while keeping you tied to the tournament.

And the creative barrier — the thing that used to keep smaller brands off big screens entirely — has collapsed. During the 2025 NBA Finals, a prediction-market platform aired a national spot produced by one person in two days for roughly $2,000 using AI tools, then poured what it saved into media. A broadcast-ready commercial is no longer a five-figure prerequisite for showing up on the biggest stage in sports.

The World Cup was never actually reserved for the brands that can absorb $120 CPMs. It just looks that way from the front door.

So Should You Do It?

Here's the honest decision framework, stripped down.

Run CTV during the World Cup if you can enter through the smart doors — shoulder programming, retargeting, and less-contested formats — and if you've built your measurement before kickoff, and if your creative actually earns the attention you're paying for. Under those conditions, you get a slice of the largest audience in sports history, in a premium co-viewing environment, at a price that makes sense.

Do not run it if your only plan is to pay the in-match premium, judge it on the same-day dashboard, and hope. That's not a World Cup strategy. That's a donation to Fox.

The tournament is not a magic bullet and it is not a trap. It is a market — with a front door priced for giants and several side doors priced for everyone else. The brands that win it are not the ones who spent the most. They're the ones who understood the building.

The Final Take

The World Cup is the rarest thing left in media. Billions of people, watching live, at the same moment, unable to skip, fully present, gathered in groups around the biggest screen in the house. On connected TV, that attention is measurable, targetable, and brand-safe in a way no other environment can match.

That's the good, and it's very good.

But the inventory is scarce because soccer barely stops, the in-match CPMs are brutal because demand outruns a supply that cannot grow, and the ugliest mistakes — buying hype without strategy, ignoring the timing curve, skipping the measurement, phoning in the creative — turn a premium opportunity into an expensive lesson.

The answer isn't to sit it out. The answer is to enter through the side doors, build the measurement first, respect the price curve, and bring creative worth the moment.

The whole world is watching the same thing at the same time. That almost never happens anymore.

Just make sure that when you show up, you did it the smart way — not the expensive way.

Cory Poccia CEO, CS & Co. Marketing Studio™

The CTV Performance Guy