John Strong and Stuart Holden have become the soundtrack for the FIFA Men’s World Cup as the Fox Sports’ No. 1 broadcast team.
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The duo first started working together in Russia at the 2018 World Cup. Now, they’re attacking their third World Cup together.
“I never take for granted the opportunity that we have and sometimes it doesn’t honestly set in that we’re going to be the lead team for our third straight World Cup,” Holden said before this year’s tournament began. “We were kids at 32 years old. We’re both 40 years old right now heading into this and it’s still young compared to broadcasting duos in other sports, let alone the fact that I get to do it with my best friend.
“It’s kind of surreal for me to be a voice now of a tournament that I played in. Unlike John, I didn’t grow up dreaming of being a broadcaster. It’s something that has found me and that I have found and it’s something that I want to do until, to steal a word from Alexi Lalas, somebody pries it from cold dead hands.”
They have been on a whirlwind of a schedule to open this year’s tournament. They started at the USMNT’s opener against Paraguay, last Friday, then caught a red-eye right after the match to get to New Jersey for Saturday’s Brazil-Morocco game. After Saturday, they headed to Atlanta for Monday’s Spain-Cape Verde matchup and then to Kansas City for the defending champion Argentina’s opening game against Algeria, followed by a trip to Dallas for England’s opener against Croatia Wednesday.
Fortunately, they have Thursday off, allowing them to get to Seattle for the USMNT’s second group stage game against Australia.
“This is a job I love and I’m incredibly motivated by,” Holden said. “The weirdest moment for me was coming back from the World Cup in Russia, for my first time doing a big tournament as the lead and my daughter, was like 3 years old at the time and we’re in the grocery story, she runs away from me on the other aisle and I kind of yelled at her and somebody popped their head around and they’re like, ‘Dude, you’re the guy who called the World Cup final!’ and that was the first time somebody had recognized me purely for my voice and I realized the impact and as I said, the opportunity and the responsibility you have calling these games and it was that shift in my mentality from, I’m no longer and athlete, I’m a broadcaster. I’m a TV guy now.”
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The pair have already been on the call for a pair of high-rating events in the week alone. First, the USMNT’s opener drew more than 18 million viewers, according to Fox Sports, making it the most-watched FIFA Men’s World Cup telecast, and the Brazil-Morocco game pulled in 10,019,000 viewers to become the most-watched non-USMNT World Cup group stage game.
“What I can say with complete certainty is there’s no two people to whom this means more, and there’s no two people who have worked harder to do the best job possible this next month,” Strong said.
Whereas Holden made the transition from playing, after a career at Sunderland, Bolton and the Houston Dynamo, Strong’s career path was to become a broadcaster.
“I’ve always described it as two parallel paths,” he said. “There was the one path where being a play-by-play sports broadcaster, the only job I’ve ever wanted to have from a time when I was too young to understand why or what that meant or how to get there.
“Then the other path was sort of being exposed to soccer from a young age in a lot of ways and for a lot of reasons, I didn’t quite understand until I was much older. … I watched (the) ’94 World Cup, I watched 1998, I lived 2002 and by that point, I was already all in on that’s what I wanted to do. This is the opportunity and the privilege and the responsibility that I have been given because outside of my family, nothing is more important to me in life.”
Holden added that there is added pressure being the lead broadcasters.
“It’s a weird balance of pressure,” he said. “You have a great responsibility, your voice is going out to millions, your bosses have invested in you and invested in us, as a pairing, but then at the same time, just enjoying the moment. This is something I said to John a couple of weeks ago, I want to go into this and not try to overdo it, not worry about the prep, let the games be the games, have the confidence in the work that we have done as a duo and as a pairing and always knowing that we can fall back on each other. The biggest thing I’ve learned about this job, is it’s not me, it’s not him, it’s us and those are the things that make the best partnerships in sports broadcasting.”
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