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With Spanish-language rights to World Cup, Telemundo gets a running start on 2018

The FIFA World Cup does not start for more than a year, but Telemundo President Ray Warren already is focused on using the popular event to gain market share among the Spanish-speaking audience in the United States.

WARREN
“I hope they hear footsteps because we’re coming,” said Ray Warren, making a clear reference to Univision, the Spanish-language network that held World Cup rights for more than three decades before Telemundo picked them up.

Owned by NBCUniversal, Telemundo surprised the media business in 2011 when it outbid Univision by paying $600 million for the Spanish-language rights to the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. In 2014, Telemundo added the 2026 World Cup, too, in a process that angered other U.S. networks because FIFA did not make those rights open for bids.

Last September, the network tapped Warren as the sports division’s president and assigned him the task of getting the network ready for next year’s event.

Warren said he is in the final stages of hiring a creative agency and a media agency to lead the network to the event. He tapped NBC’s top Olympic producer, Jim Bell, as the executive producer of Telemundo’s World Cup coverage.

Telemundo’s Spanish-language broadcast rights in the U.S.

FIFA: World Cup 2018, 2022, 2026 and Women’s World Cup 2019, 2023; Men’s Under 20 World Cup and Men’s Under 17 World Cup 2017, 2019, 2021, 2023, 2025; Women’s Under 20 World Cup and Women’s Under 17 World Cup 2018, 2020, 2022, 2024, 2026; Confederations Cup 2017, 2021, 2025; Futsal World Cup 2020, 2024; Beach Soccer World Cup 2017, 2019, 2021, 2023, 2025
IOC: Summer Olympics 2020, 2024, 2028, 2032
CONCACAF: World Cup Qualifiers through 2021 (including the majority of matches featuring away qualifiers for Mexico and the U.S.)
EPL
LIGA MX: Club Pachuca
Boxeo Telemundo

Source: SportsBusiness Journal research
Warren also hired Bill Bergofin as Telemundo’s senior vice president of brand and content development, where he will develop content around the event.

“We’re not just going to do games,” Warren said. “We’re going to create programs around the programs. We’re not going to turn it all off and turn it back on three or four years from now.”

Last month, Univision outbid Telemundo for the Spanish-language rights to the UEFA Champions League, agreeing to pay about $35 million a year as part of a three-year deal.

Despite missing out on that deal, Warren said, Telemundo will continue to be an active bidder for soccer rights.

“We’re not going to get smaller — you can’t shrink to greatness,” he said. “We’re going to get bigger in Spanish-language sports, specifically soccer.”

Soccer, in particular, is an important part of Telemundo’s strategy.

“For the Spanish-language audience, soccer is No. 1,” Warren said. “Everything else is No. 2. For us, it’s really not sports as much as it’s soccer.”

Warren plans to hype his network’s coverage of next year’s World Cup by relying on some of the big events NBC Sports Group will carry next year, including the Super Bowl and the Olympics.

To illustrate the importance that the network is putting on the World Cup, Warren referenced countdown clocks that have been installed at television stations and offices across the country. The clocks carried a message that simply said: “World Cup Ready.” Warren kept the clocks but changed the slogan.

“A week or two after I got to the company, I said, ‘At this point it’s not about being World Cup Ready. It’s about being World Cup Great,’” he said. “‘World Cup Ready’ was a little bit too passive for me. That’s just not my style. Nobody asks me what ‘World Cup Great’ means.”


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