With England’s FIFA World Cup 2026 team getting ready to fly home after losing 2-1 to Argentina in their semi final match at Atlanta Stadium on 15 July, the world is now looking ahead to Sunday 19 July when the Argentinians will take on Spain at the New Jersey Stadium in the final.

For the semi-finals and then the final of the FIFA World Cup 2026, BBC Sport’s presentation team has been and will be on presentation platforms in the respective host stadiums in Atlanta, and still to come, New York.

Speaking to SVG Europe from a hot and steamy Atlanta, Emma White, BBC Sport’s head of production, says the aim is to immerse UK viewers in the atmosphere of the tournament’s biggest matches.

She explains: “The real benefit of being on site is being able to bring that stadium atmosphere and fan experience back home to audiences. We want viewers to feel the energy inside the stadium. For our pundits and presenters, particularly when England are involved, that atmosphere is infectious, and that excitement really translates on screen.”

Rather than relying on a large studio set-up, the focus is on letting the stadium provide the backdrop.

“We’ve got quite a simple presentation set. It was important to create a bigger studio experience in Salford earlier in the tournament, but when you’re in the stadium, it really speaks for itself. The venue becomes the set and brings everything to life.”

BBC Sport presenters Kelly Cates, Mark Chapman and Gabby Logan are all on site in the United States for the semi-finals and final.

Location, location, location

The decision to move presentation on site reflects the significance of the tournament’s closing stages. White comments on the shift to the US for the end of this larger than ever World Cup: “We’ve been broadcasting from Salford throughout most of the tournament, but we felt it was important to be on site for the semi-final and final to give audiences a different experience for those major matches,” says White. “We’ve traditionally maintained an on-site presence at this stage of major tournaments, so we’ve continued that approach here.”

From Salford, a small but perfectly formed team has flown over to the US to provide semi-final and final presentation coverage from the host stadiums. White says on the team that has just flown over that, “there’s myself, a production manager, a couple of production coordinators, plus we’ve got a multi-platform broadcast journalist who’s come and a floor manager, the head of football’s come over – Stephen Lyle – and the on-air team of presenters and pundits.

“So not a huge amount of people,” she notes.

However, relocating a live operation at short notice has been a significant undertaking. “Moving from a set-up that was already well established in Salford and rebuilding everything over here in a matter of days has been a huge piece of work, particularly at the end of the quarter finals, and much of the logistical planning happened while the tournament was still unfolding.”

Her team has been working to the wire throughout the tournament, but the pressure has been especially high in the last week: “My role’s in charge of production management and that team have been overseeing all of the planning, all the logistics, across the whole event. Literally my team sat watching the last quarter-final match with their laptops, trying to make decisions about how we’re going to move all these people, and coordinate all these people to get them exactly where they needed to be, travelling the next day. So a huge volume of work to get through.”

24/7 challenges

For White, one of the biggest challenges has been managing an operation that has effectively run around the clock since the tournament began.

“The nature of the tournament has meant that production management has operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week; with different time zones and constant movement between host cities,” she says.

“We’ve worked together as a team and had a really strong effort, and suddenly we’re having to kind of pull that apart because half our team are still in Salford and some of us have peeled off to come out here to establish a new base, which has been a real challenge.

“The speed with which we’ve had to make decisions, particularly off the back of that quarter final; there was a huge volume of work that came through production management,” she says of the latter part of the competition and getting the teams on the ground around the US. “I was really proud of how [the team] responded to that and navigated getting everybody to where they needed to be; just the logistics of it was phenomenal.”

She continues: “My team have been like the engine room through the event for us. It’s all the detailed planning that people don’t necessarily see, moving large teams around the country, supporting colleagues who have been away from home for weeks, and resolving problems, finding creative solutions. That’s a fundamental part of our role.”

Even business continuity planning was part of White’s team’s role, she continues. “We’ve looked closely at business continuity throughout the tournament. We ran through different scenarios and rehearsed potential issues to make sure everybody understood the plans. We effectively created a war room environment to test different situations and prepare as thoroughly as possible.”

Pan-BBC Event Hub

Planning this event has been taken a long time, with BBC teams adopting a more integrated approach than ever before White says: “For this event all BBC stakeholders, from linear TV to social media and radio, have been joined up from the start of the planning process.”

White explains: “If I rewind right to the very beginning of 18 months ago when we really started planning the event, we’ve done this one quite differently. We set up what we called an Event Hub, bringing together leads from across the BBC – television, radio, digital and social media – from the very beginning of the planning process.”

The aim was to create a single, coordinated editorial and operational strategy. “We’ve always worked collaboratively, but in the past that has often happened more informally. This time we took a much more strategic approach to ensure we had a truly joined-up content plan.”

The result of the strategic planning means that White’s team – production management – have then been able to plan across the entire event. “It’s enabled us to plan across the entire event, including how we share talent. You might see a commentator working across radio, television and digital platforms for example.”

White adds on how else the Event Hub has been able to work together for the World Cup across the BBC’s resources: “Another really good example is our 3D experience. It’s such a tsunami of content, so how do we make sure this brilliant product gets out in front of the audience? We had lots of conversations about how do we promote it, how do we make sure that it’s really surfacing? And I think that’s landed really well and it’s been really successful.”

The interactive 3D game experience gives viewers more choice to explore the match both in real time, highlights and full-match replays. With the 3D experience, users are able to follow matches in a variety of unique ways, including tactical match view, a first-person player’s point of view, the user’s own control of the broadcast cameras, and a third person view of specific players.

For the matches being covered, viewers can follow in real time as well as rewinding back to key moments in the match. The technology offers a unique perspective on statistics as well as player movements, and how incidents and key moments look from a broad range of angles.

The final will be played at the New York New Jersey Stadium on Sunday 19 July 2026 at 8pm. It will air on BBC Sport and iPlayer.