In 1970, Mexico became the first country to broadcast a World Cup live, in full color, via satellite to the world. It was an enormously ambitious technological and political gamble.
Mexican mogul Emilio Azcárraga Milmo—known as “El Tigre”—understood before most television executives that the World Cup could become much more than a sports tournament. He convinced his father, “El León,” to secure official Mexican backing and approve the use of Intelsat, the single government-regulated satellite provider, to project Mexico as a modern media power to the planet.
That summer of 1970, Pelé’s Brazil, glowing in canary yellow on color television screens around the world, helped transform soccer from a regional passion into a truly global television spectacle. It was Pelé’s last World Cup, but it was the first time much of the planet experienced him live and in full color, thanks to the Azcárraga family’s Telesistema Mexicano, which would later become Televisa—shorthand for “Televisión Vía Satélite.” More than 200 million people tuned in to watch Brazil win the 1970 World Cup. By some estimates this was double the audience that watched the previous World Cup final hosted in England in 1966, and more than four times the viewership of the 1970 Super Bowl.
The World Cup was entering that rare category of events capable of making much of the planet stop and watch together. But for much of mainstream America, soccer remained strangely invisible. Some experts argue that American sports evolved around commercial breaks, statistics, and advertising-friendly television structures. Others believe soccer became associated with immigrants and foreignness at a time when Cold War-era America often resisted global mass culture.
Meanwhile, power inside FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, quietly began shifting away from Europe. In 1974, a friendship forged between Brazilian João Havelange and Mexicans “El Tigre” Azcárraga and Guillermo Cañedo de la Bárcena resulted in a new Latin American era. Havelange became FIFA president and Cañedo senior vice president. Under their leadership, FIFA rapidly expanded the number of participating countries while transforming broadcast rights into the organization’s financial engine.
Beginning with the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, Spanish International Network (SIN)—the Spanish-language U.S. network co-owned by “El Tigre” Azcárraga that would later become Univision—secured favorable agreements to broadcast the tournament in the United States en español. There, SIN discovered something mainstream American television still underestimated: Spanish-speaking audiences in the United States were already emotionally invested in the World Cup at a massive scale.