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🎙️ Return to the booth? Jon Gruden wants to return to calling games, but not as an analyst. The former Raiders coach recently said he would like to start calling games as a play-by-play announcer. “You know, Frank Gifford, he transitioned into the play-by-play role. I would like to transition. I had nine years of watching these guys —  [Mike] Tirico. And I’d like to give that a shot, man.” It would appear as if Gruden will get his wish. He will reportedly call a preseason NFL game next month for the Buccaneers alongside Ronde Barber.

👋 A Magic exit. David Steele, who called 37 seasons of Magic basketball between both television and radio, announced his retirement from broadcasting on Tuesday. The veteran play-by-play announcer served as the Magic’s television voice for 28 seasons after nine years as the team’s radio voice. Dante Marchitelli will serve as the new full-time television play-by-play announcer for the Magic beginning next season.

🎤 Halftime hold-up. FIFA is reportedly aiming for the first-ever World Cup final halftime show to result in just a 20-minute break from play: 11 minutes for the show and nine minutes for the setup and tear-down. Last year’s Club World Cup final halftime show took 24 minutes. Standard soccer halftimes are 15 minutes long.

Read more of today’s top stories at Awful Announcing.

Shortly after Spain took down France in the first semifinal of the World Cup, multiple reports surfaced about another powerhouse soccer country who had long since exited this summer’s tournament: Germany.

After a summer of searching, Germany’s Bundesliga agreed to a five-year U.S. media rights pact with Versant worth $20 million per year. The deal is a slight haircut from its prior agreement with ESPN, worth $30 million annually, which is in line with the trend across top-flight European leagues in the American market. Italy’s Serie A recently took a substantial decrease in its U.S. media rights fees to stay with Paramount+ for another year, and France’s Ligue 1 was forced to take the embarrassing step of renewing with the barely distributed beIN Sports channel two years ago after failing to attract any bidders from major U.S. media companies.

But what’s more interesting than the going rate of Bundesliga games in America is how this deal is structured. USA Network, the flagship channel under Versant’s USA Sports brand, will air at least 30 games each season, a solid complement to USA’s robust Premier League slate that it carried over post-Comcast spinoff. Then, the remainder of the 250-plus Bundesliga games that won’t be selected for USA Network will be streamed live on … Fandango. Yes, that’s right. The platform best known for selling you tickets to the movie theater and providing information about feature films will now hold 90% of Bundesliga inventory for the American viewing public.

If that seems weird to you, it might be wise to abandon your priors. Sports Business Journal reports that “adding sports to Fandango was something Versant had been thinking about since the NBCU split.” In other words, we can expect Fandango to start becoming a real player in future sports rights deals involving Versant.

For the uninitiated, Fandango is that platform that sells you movie tickets. But it’s also a streamer. The streaming service started as Vudu, a video-on-demand platform that allowed you to rent movies digitally rather than, say, running to the local Redbox to rent a DVD. (Remember Redbox?) Walmart purchased Vudu in 2010 and then subsequently sold it to Fandango in 2020. In 2024, the service was rebranded Fandango at Home and, just earlier this month, Fandango dropped the “at Home” to rename the service as simply, Fandango. Now, in addition to being able to rent or buy movies and shows from the platform, Fandango also offers advertising-based video on-demand in a model similar to Tubi or The Roku Channel, where viewers can watch shows and movies for free with advertising.

The good news for soccer fans is that Bundesliga games on Fandango will be accessible for free, no subscription required. The question now is whether anyone will actually tune in.

We’ve seen similar arrangements before. Not long ago, Roku was broadcasting MLB’s Sunday morning package before it returned to Peacock. But at just a $10 million per year rights fee, it was clear that Roku wasn’t attracting all that many viewers to its games. Ion, which is primarily a broadcast network, has seen some success with its women’s sports strategy. But it’s unclear how much of its viewership is coming from inclusion on linear FAST platforms like Pluto TV. Fox has experimented with some live sporting events on Tubi; it has simulcast World Cup games and Super Bowls, but there have also been exclusive CONCACAF matches and World Baseball Classic games on the service. Heck, CBS Sports Golazo has been around for years broadcasting live soccer matches from around the world for free, but it’s fair to say it hasn’t broken through in a major way.

In theory, these games being available for fans at no cost is great. If there’s one model that’s proven itself popular with people throughout the history of any medium of entertainment, it’s free access. But so far, it seems like sports on free platforms have faced a discoverability problem. Perhaps that’s because these deals are usually reserved for low-wattage inventory. There aren’t a ton of Americans thirsting for Brazilian Série A or WBC games not involving the United States. Bundesliga is certainly more desirable than those properties, but by how much is unclear.

For now, this has proved an interesting wrinkle in Versant’s larger sports strategy. As the company looks to find ways to grow its non-cable assets like Fandango, sports will play a crucial role. Fandango now opens up possibilities for Versant to take on rights deals with high-volume sports leagues without having to worry about sharing the property with another partner.

At the affordable price of $20 million per year, Bundesliga is certainly worth a gamble.

Fox’s John Strong sends Spain onto the World Cup final after a 2-0 win against France

Brendon Kleen examines how The Athletic has owned the World Cup beat like no other digital outlet has over the past month.

Shortly after the Trump administration’s successful efforts to lobby FIFA to reinstate USMNT star Folarin Balogun over Fourth of July weekend, The Athletic published a scoop on the ruling.

Longtime reporters Adam Crafton and Dan Sheldon broke the news of Balogun’s reinstatement hours before the U.S. faced Belgium in the Round of 16, a story that would come to define the country’s run in the World Cup.

By the end of the week, it had also become the most-read news article in The Athletic’s history.

The North American World Cup is a watershed moment in sports history and therefore a massive opportunity for the New York Times Co.-owned sports outlet, which aspires to own an even larger share of the online sports reporting and content landscape than it has since its launch a decade ago. Meetings aimed at making the most of this summer’s tournament began shortly after the Qatar World Cup in late 2022 and moved forward in earnest last spring. The company’s coverage, which involves as many as 70 reporters and editors in addition to several hosts and producers for video content, combines its New York and London-based newsrooms in what international Editor-In-Chief Laura Williamson called “the biggest thing we’ve ever done.”

Check out Brendon’s full column here.