Goal songs and guesswork: how the 2026 World Cup is filling the broadcast vacuum
As group games resume in the United States, Canada and Mexico, BBC Sport's Chris Sutton is back with score predictions — and the broadcaster is leaning on a darts anthem to fill stadium dead air.
When the second round of group games kicked off across the United States, Canada and Mexico on 18 June 2026, two very different things were happening inside the same stadiums. On the pitch, players were adjusting to a tournament that has stretched the World Cup from 32 to 48 nations and dispersed its matches across three host countries. Off the pitch, broadcasters and tournament organisers were improvising the small rituals — goal music, half-time filler, in-stadium entertainment — that keep a 64-match group stage from feeling like a slog.
The split-screen tells you something about where the 2026 World Cup actually lives. The football is one story; the broadcast product around it is another. Both deserve a closer look.
A darts song in a football ground
BBC Sport's Ask Me AMA column on 18 June tried to answer a question that has been bubbling since the opening weekend: why, when England score, does the stadium sometimes sound like a darts final? The short answer is licensing. FIFA holds the rights to a small set of goal songs it can pipe through venue PA systems without negotiating individual club or publisher deals, and the selection has produced some unlikely bedfellows — including, reportedly, the kind of arena-rock staples that the Professional Darts Corporation has used for years.
The logic is mechanical. Tournament organisers cannot clear every national association's preferred anthem in time, and they cannot ask broadcasters to play their own goal music in-stadium because that would muddy the broadcast feed. So they fall back on a short, neutral, aggressively catchy catalogue. The result is the strange situation where a player in an England shirt is saluted by a track more associated with a tungsten-tossing crowd in Sheffield.
Whether that matters to the football is a different question. It matters to the broadcast: a stadium that goes quiet between goals is a stadium that drifts off the air, and the production teams know it.
Sutton's scoresheet
The other half of BBC Sport's output on 18 June was more familiar terrain. Chris Sutton, the former Celtic and Blackburn striker turned pundit, published his predictions for the second round of group games, running through the fixtures in the format he has used at every major tournament since the mid-2010s — a verdict, a confidence percentage, and a one-line rationale drawn from his own playing experience.
The exercise is, deliberately, light. Sutton's column is not presented as serious modelling; it is presented as the voice of a former centre-forward who has been in the dressing room. The BBC's editorial bet is that the format sells a kind of embodied authority that statistical models cannot. The accuracy rate is secondary to the entertainment value of seeing a former professional argue, in print, that a 0-0 draw is more likely than the bookmakers think.
The pattern is worth noting because it is the pattern of most tournament journalism at this stage. The group phase is the part of a World Cup where there are not yet any eliminations, where the stakes are still abstract, and where audiences want a guide rather than a verdict. Sutton's column is a guide. So are the wall-to-wall previews on every other broadcaster. The substance arrives later, in the knockout rounds.
The counter-narrative
The cynical read is that both pieces — the goal-music explainer and the predictions column — are filler, and that the BBC knows it. A 48-team tournament has more group matches than any World Cup in history, and the broadcaster is paid to fill the hours between them with material that is cheap to produce and reliable to clear. Sutton's predictions cost the BBC a column and a byline. The goal-music explainer cost a researcher and a sub-editor. Both generate the same kind of click.
There is something to that, but it understates the structural problem. The 2026 World Cup is, by design, an enormous tournament: more matches, more venues, more travel, more teams whose football the average English-speaking viewer has not seen in two years. The information gap between casual fans and the people who follow the qualifiers is wider than at any World Cup since 1998. Somebody has to close it, and if broadcasters choose to close it with darts songs and prediction columns, that is a choice about resource allocation, not about laziness.
What the coverage is actually about
Strip both pieces back and they share a thesis: the 2026 World Cup is being watched as much as it is being played, and the watching is the product. FIFA sells broadcast rights. Host cities sell exposure. Sponsors sell adjacency. The football is the content, but it is the content inside a frame — kick-off times, goal songs, pundit formats, half-time graphics — that determines whether anyone sees it.
The structural change underneath all of this is the expansion from 32 to 48 teams. The expansion added 16 fixtures to the group stage alone, stretched the calendar, and forced every rights-holder to think harder about how to keep an audience engaged across weeks of qualifying-stage football. Sutton's column and the goal-music explainer are both, in their way, answers to that problem. Neither pretends to be more.
The honest read is that the World Cup has always been a hybrid event — a football tournament wrapped in a broadcast product — and that the 2026 edition is simply the first one where the wrapper is doing more of the work than the sport, because the sport has been told to expand to fit it. The football will be settled on the pitch. The framing is being settled right now, in pieces like these, and the audience will judge both.
— Monexus is tracking the 2026 World Cup as a story about broadcast product as much as football; BBC Sport's goal-music explainer and Sutton's predictions column are useful because they make the wrapper visible.