BBC Sport has been instrumental in making the FIFA World Cup 2026 an epic one for England and Scotland fans. It shares its rights to broadcast this World Cup with ITV Sport, and has brought some amazing moments to BBC One and iPlayer so far in the competition.

One of those key moments was the England versus Mexico match at Estadio Azteca Stadium on Monday 6 July, which aired on BBC Sport at 2am instead of the advertised 1am, delayed due to a storm.

The BBC Sport programme director was Colm Harty, who brought every gripping moment of the battle on the pitch to viewers, with a peak audience of 9.1 million tuning in despite the early hours of play. The game was watched on average by 7.8 million people on BBC TV and BBC iPlayer, making it the biggest television audience ever for a live UK broadcast between 2am and 4am.

It was also the biggest day on record for the BBC Sport website and app with 15 million unique visitors and the biggest single day across BBC Sport’s social platforms with 330 million video views, plus BBC’s highlights streamed 5.9 million times on BBC iPlayer, the BBC Sport website and app, and on the BBC Football YouTube channel.

A peak audience of 1.1 million and 900,000 on average watched the re-run on BBC Two from 7.10am on Monday morning.

So far for the BBC, a peak audience of 16.3 million people tuned in to watch England’s 2-1 win over DR Congo, which aired on BBC Sport at 5pm BST, and was watched by an average of 14 million people. This makes that match the most watched item on the BBC in 2026.

Harty, BBC Sport’s lead football director, is series producer of Match of the Day outside of the World Cup. Phil Bigwood, BBC Sport executive producer, and Harty have been responsible for the setup of this production between them. Bigwood liaised throughout with FIFA and its host broadcaster HBS, so is based out of the IBC in Dallas for the duration of the tournament. Meanwhile, Harty is based in Salford, England, managing the remote production and studio at Media City studios (formerly Dock10), as well as directing studio programmes alongside other directors.

SVG Europe caught up with Harty to find out more about the BBC Sport production on the ground in the UK. There are five BBC Sport directors working on its World Cup coverage. Three of them are covering the main peak time programmes, and two are doing the overnight programme directing.

Says Harty: “They’re really experienced directors who’ve done Match of the Day and Champions League and World Cups before. I direct a lot of the programmes myself, but then I’m also responsible for the studio set up, production crew rotas, liaising with the team overseas and overseeing the production as a whole.”

Bringing action to the studio

The studio in Media City studios has several areas for the presenting team to work from. It uses a large LED wall rather than the usual green screen and has a lot of flexibility built into the design to provide variety for viewers throughout the tournament.

Harty expounds on the studio setup: “The way the studio is designed is to have three distinct areas, but all based around the LED screen. We’ve got the main studio area, which is the standard set up with everyone sat down around the desk. We also have a terrace area, which is a more relaxed space, and because the desk is mounted on hydraulics it can be raised to a standing height. That allows us to replace the chairs with high stools or have presenters standing around the desk. We did that for our first game post-match and it encourages a bit more of an informal debate and chat. And we’ve also got a separate analysis area ‘downstairs’.”

Harty continues on the UK-based production: “We can’t be out there on site because of sustainability and cost reasons, so what we’re trying to do is bring the cities into the studio, which is where the big LED wall comes in and having all 16 vistas of the different host cities. It’s about trying to locate ourselves in those environments.

“We’re really conscious that even though we’re in Salford, we’re very keen to get out into the stadiums as much as possible, so that’s where we’re trying to show as much footage of the fan colour, team arrivals and the player warmups as we can. We try to make the most of any presence that we have there, whether that’s doing comm-cams with commentators, or pitchside hits with Kelly Somers or Eilidh Barbour, making the most of all our overseas resources.

“So if we’ve got people [on location] from 5 Live, like John Murray and Paul Robinson, they can come down and do a hit into our TV programme, so it’s just bringing about all those things together and trying to give everyone a flavour for the tournament as well.

“We’re really keen to show the fans and atmosphere outside the stadium as well, like the brilliant Cape Verde fans and the Scotland fans out in Boston, and just trying to bring all that colour into the studio. So we’re bringing you all that excitement, vibrancy and warmth,” he continues.

In-studio interactivity

Harty says that for the England matches that BBC Sport does nothave, it has been able to start England reaction shows in the studio that begin just after the final whistle. Guests such as Wayne Rooney, Joe Hart and Micah Richards analyse the game by interacting with the LED screens in the studio.

Harty adds that interactivity with green screens is much harder for presenters to do as there is nothing to actually look at and connect with, as opposed to an LED screen: “It’s much harder to do because it’s not a physical environment, and that’s the advantage of LED; they actually have got something they can see and interact with. Myself and John Murphy, our designer and creative lead on [the studio], have been talking about how we can continue to refine it and make it look even better.

“We launched it on day one of the World Cup, but it’s a long tournament so we can improve it as we go,” continues Harty. “And in some ways, because it’s a new setup for us, we’re still learning the whole grammar of what it can do and how we can interact with it, so we’re trying different things. That’s what our bosses have been saying to us, ‘be brave, try different things, if it works, it works, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t, but let’s try and do different things with it’. So that’s what we’re doing.”

Having multiple areas in the studio in which to move around as well as several directors means that over the long duration of the World Cup, viewers can be constantly entertained with different views and perspectives.

Adds Harty: “It’s really useful to have other directors who are very experienced. These very good directors come in with their own critical eye and their own ideas about how things should be shot, so you become a team in how you can work with each other and bounce ideas around, ‘have we thought about trying it this way, or trying this shot?’. It becomes a collaborative process in terms of directing. It’s developing as it’s going and it’s good fun.”

Cooling break gaps

On dealing with the cooling breaks as a broadcaster that has no advertising to fill awkward gaps in play, Harty says his team of directors are utilising the broad range of talent it can access in front of the lens to make the breaks informative and interesting for viewers.

“In terms of the matches, we obviously have to stay with the world feed. The big difference, as I’m sure ITV and everyone will say, is those cooling breaks, the three minute breaks. We’re refining how we deal with those as the tournament progresses; [when it started] you didn’t quite know what was going to happen [in those breaks]. Sometimes [the world feed is] running a replay, and sometimes they’re just staying with the players drinking.

“What we’ve started doing now is bringing the guys in from the studio. We have our refereeing expert, Darren Cann, so if there’s been a controversial decision, he can come in. The other night we brought in Wayne Rooney and on another show we brought in Olivier Giroud just to give his expert insight into how France were playing and how a game was progressing.”

BBC Sport is using the cooling breaks to spread its reach as well. Harty explains: “We’re popping up a lot of QR codes during [cooling breaks], to point people to other areas of BBC Sport. This is a big World Cup for us in terms of expanding our digital reach, and those QR codes have been really useful; it’s pushing viewers towards our 3D immersive experience and our player raters, and they are a really good way of doing that. We’re using them to push people not just to watch the linear TV, but to go and find the whole wealth of material that we’re putting out elsewhere across all our platforms.”

Main event challenges

Each programme caters to an audience of football lovers as well as those with less regular interest in football. Harty comments: “This is a main event, isn’t it? You’ve always got to tread that line between the football nerds and the main eventers.

“I think that’s what BBC1 does well; I don’t think we would ever talk down to our audience. I think there is a base level of knowledge that you’d expect people to have when they come to watch a football match, so hopefully our analysis is illuminating even for people who aren’t a football expert. I think the point of analysis is to explain things to people that they wouldn’t necessarily know [X, Y, Z], but they can understand and the best pundits and analysts do that in a really simple, clear way. That is part of the challenge and hopefully that’s something we’re doing. We have got those deep dive analysis and more tactical aspects covered on the website in our website articles and explainers.”

On the challenges for the directing team in Salford, Harty says this was the first time the team had used an LED wall in this way, and preparing all vistas for every venue, posed some issues.

He explains: “The overnights, the hours, the length, and time constraints. At the start of this World Cup, we’re looking at 48 vistas for the 16 different venues from daytime, dusk and nighttime. So a lot of our time at the beginning of the tournament was spent making sure they looked right and then sending them away to get refined. That sometimes impacted how we prepared for the shows, but now that we’ve settled into a groove it’s fine.

“It’s all right to see the vistas in theory on a computer screen, but once it gets into the LED, that’s a whole different matter; then you’ve got to look at all the singles [camera angles] and you’ve got to look at how the two and three [camera] shots work, and all those kind of things. But we’ve settled into that now.”

He says that now in the rehearsals before programmes go out, the directing team is continuing to refine those shots and finding the best positions for augmented reality (AR) and graphics to get on screen.

He adds: “On Match of the Day I know exactly where to put my AR graphics; it’s second nature now. But this studio is all new to us so we’re finding new positions all the time and experimenting with what we can do with the studio.”

“It’s new for the camera operators and the graphics operators as well, who are all brilliant. They’re offering up different options and trying things out, such as more dynamic camera moves to get the best out of the environment.

“So those are the challenges, but that’s also the fun bit as well; it’s a new toy to play with and it’s a new experience, and if you didn’t try to do these things differently, it would end up becoming stale. You have to challenge yourself and try and innovate and do it better,” Harty concludes.