Between controversial rule changes, endless debates over refereeing, accusations of favoritism, and, finally, a post-match brawl that stained the end of Argentina’s nearly successful title defense, the 2026 FIFA World Cup generated controversy for almost everyone. Even Brazil’s familiar political polarization somehow found its way into the tournament, with CazéTV’s extraordinary popularity becoming ammunition for those eager, once again, to announce the “defeat” of TV Globo.

Depending on where one stood, the media battle almost resembled a convenient version of the final itself: young, irreverent CazéTV cast as the challenger, while Globo played the role of the old giant many wanted to see brought down. It is an entertaining comparison, but the numbers tell a much more complicated story.

Globo also suffered from something no broadcasting-rights strategy could control: Brazil’s performance on the field. The national team was eliminated by Norway 2–1 in the Round of 16 on July 5, disappearing from the tournament just as the most valuable knockout stages were beginning. Without Brazil, Globo lost its greatest audience driver two full weeks before the final.

That early elimination made a decision taken years earlier suddenly much more visible. Without Brazil concentrating enormous audiences around its broadcasts, and without the rights to every remaining match, viewers began encountering something that had been almost unthinkable for generations: important World Cup games that simply were not available on Globo. That created an easy narrative in which CazéTV had finally defeated Brazil’s largest broadcaster, although the truth is considerably more interesting.

Globo Did Not Simply Lose the Rights. It Abandoned the Old Model

The break began during the pandemic. In 2020, amid the economic disruption caused by COVID-19, Globo entered a dispute with FIFA over its broadcasting agreement and obtained a court order suspending a payment of approximately US$90 million. The existing contract was extraordinarily expensive and gave the company a level of exclusivity that had effectively turned the World Cup into part of Globo’s cultural territory in Brazil.

Globo and FIFA eventually reached an agreement in 2021, but the relationship had already changed. When the broadcaster renewed its agreement with FIFA in November 2022 for the cycle that included the 2026 World Cup, the new contract no longer preserved the old model of absolute exclusivity across platforms.

In 2023, Globo made its new strategy explicit by choosing to acquire only part of the expanded tournament rather than all of it. Its final package ultimately included 55 of the World Cup’s 104 matches.

Financially, the decision was understandable. Sports rights had become increasingly expensive, audience behavior was changing, and paying virtually any price simply to prevent competitors from showing the same event no longer necessarily made economic sense. The problem was that, by giving up the monopoly, Globo created an opening that another company would fill far more effectively than it may have anticipated.

Who Is Really Behind CazéTV?

It is tempting to tell this story as the tale of a streamer who talked about football from home and somehow defeated Brazil’s largest television company, but that version is incomplete. Casimiro Miguel is unquestionably the face, voice, and personality that made CazéTV distinctive. Its informal language, humor, sense of watching a match among friends, and direct relationship with a generation raised on YouTube and social media are essential to its success.

Behind that apparently spontaneous style, however, sits a sophisticated sports-media company: LiveMode. Founded in 2017 by Edgar Diniz and Sergio Lopes, executives associated with the creation of Brazil’s former Esporte Interativo network, the company developed a business model combining sports-rights negotiations, production, distribution, and commercialization.

In 2024, global investment firm General Atlantic led a minority investment in LiveMode alongside XP Private Equity. The corporate structure became even clearer in 2025, when LiveMode assumed full control of CazéTV and Casimiro became part of the ownership structure of the broader holding company rather than remaining a direct shareholder in the channel.

Casimiro therefore remains the project’s central personality and cultural force, but CazéTV can no longer accurately be described simply as “Casimiro’s YouTube channel.” It is a sophisticated and increasingly powerful media operation.

LiveMode also operates within the sports-rights business, including transactions connected to FIFA. Its position on different sides of that ecosystem, helping structure and commercialize rights while controlling a major broadcaster that acquires them, has generated questions within the industry about potential conflicts of interest. FIFA has publicly stated that it does not consider the model improper. Whatever one thinks of that debate, the 2026 World Cup made one thing unmistakable: the apparent informality on screen is backed by an extremely professional business operation.

CazéTV Had What Globo Did Not: Every Match

That may have been CazéTV’s greatest advantage. It became the only Brazilian platform with the right to show all 104 matches of the 2026 World Cup for free, while Globo held 55 games and SBT, returning to the tournament after years away, acquired a smaller package.

At first, the difference might have seemed relatively unimportant because Globo still had every Brazil match, the final, and a carefully selected group of major fixtures. World Cups, however, rarely follow scripts. An apparently minor game becomes the tournament’s great upset, an unexpected national team becomes the competition’s most compelling story, and a match that once seemed expendable suddenly becomes essential.

The further the tournament progressed without Brazil, the more valuable complete access became. For the first time in decades, Brazilian viewers again had a genuine reason to ask where a World Cup match would be shown, and the return of that simple question said a great deal about the end of an old broadcasting monopoly.

CazéTV’s Historic Digital Numbers

The scale of CazéTV’s digital growth was extraordinary. During the tournament, the platform repeatedly broke live-streaming records, reaching tens of millions of simultaneously connected devices during its biggest games. The France–Spain semifinal reached approximately 24.2 million devices at its peak, while the final between Spain and Argentina reached around 20.9 million.

Those figures require an important caveat because connected devices on YouTube and traditional television ratings are different measurements. A television, smartphone, or computer may be watched by more than one person, while television ratings rely on panel-based statistical methodologies. The numbers, therefore, cannot simply be placed next to each other as though they measured exactly the same thing.

That methodological difference is precisely why the 2026 story is more interesting than a simple headline declaring one winner. The World Cup was consumed through several different forms of media, often by the same people moving between television, streaming, social media, and mobile devices.

Globo Was Still the Leader By a Wide Margin

During the Spain–Argentina final, Globo recorded 27.8 rating points and a 45.1% audience share in Greater São Paulo, while SBT finished with 9.3 points and a 15.2% share. In traditional free-to-air television, there was no collapse of an empire because Globo remained comfortably ahead.

Brazil’s matches also continued to generate enormous audiences, and Globo’s broader ecosystem, including TV Globo, SporTV, and GE TV, reached a vast portion of the Brazilian population during the tournament. Saying that CazéTV simply “defeated” Globo is therefore not supported by the numbers.

The opposite conclusion, however, would be equally misleading. Globo remained the biggest broadcaster, but it was no longer the only natural destination for the World Cup. That difference may seem modest when viewed through a single ratings figure, but it becomes enormous when considering how an entire generation now consumes football.

The Shock Was Not About Ratings. It Was About Hegemony

For decades, Globo did more than broadcast the World Cup. It defined how Brazil experienced it. Its commentators became part of the memory of famous goals, its presenters framed the personalities and controversies, and its opening sequences, theme music, reporters, and studio shows helped create what amounted to the official national narrative of each tournament.

Watching the World Cup in Brazil largely meant watching Globo. Even people who complained about the network were often complaining while watching it because there was no alternative with comparable cultural reach.

That changed in 2026. CazéTV had every match, SBT returned as a relevant broadcaster, and YouTube became as natural a place to watch football as television for a significant part of the population. Audiences moved among free-to-air television, pay TV, streaming, smartphones, computers, and Smart TVs, and the World Cup no longer culturally belonged to one destination.

The real shock was therefore not that Globo lost first place, because it did not. The shock was that it lost exclusive ownership of the national conversation around the tournament, something that for decades had seemed inseparable from its leadership.

The Irony of GE TV

Perhaps nothing reveals the scale of this change better than Globo’s own response. In 2025, the company launched GE TV, a free digital sports channel built around live events, entertainment, a more informal presentation style, and greater interaction with online audiences.

It would be simplistic to call GE TV a copy of CazéTV. Globo has its own ecosystem, rights portfolio, journalists, infrastructure, and decades of sports history. It is nevertheless impossible to ignore the strategic direction, because Globo moved aggressively into territory that had once seemed secondary compared with the overwhelming power of linear television.

Brazil became an important laboratory for the global transformation of live sports consumption: a country still deeply attached to free television, where a digital-native platform nevertheless became central to one of the biggest events on Earth. The question is therefore not whether television is dying, because the World Cup proved that it is not. The more relevant question is whether any single broadcaster can still concentrate the entire audience by itself, and the answer has clearly changed.

Globo’s “Mistake” May Also Have Been a Rational Decision

It is easy, in retrospect, to say Globo made a mistake by giving up complete exclusivity. Strategically, perhaps it did, but financially, the decision may also have been entirely rational. Paying tens of millions of dollars simply to prevent anyone else from broadcasting a tournament makes sense in a world dominated by a single television model, but it becomes harder to justify when audiences are already fragmented by nature.

Globo reduced its exposure to rights costs, retained the most commercially valuable matches, remained the television leader, and sold an enormous amount of advertising. From that perspective, 2026 was hardly a disaster.

The problem is that financially rational decisions can have strategic consequences that become visible only later. By no longer controlling the entire tournament, Globo allowed another player to build habits, language, brand loyalty, and cultural relevance around the single most valuable sporting event for Brazilian audiences.

The 2022 World Cup was the proof of concept, while the 2026 tournament became the confirmation. CazéTV demonstrated that a digital-first platform could distribute premium live sports for free, break audience records, speak naturally to younger viewers, and, perhaps most importantly, become a default destination for football. In the long term, that may be worth far more than winning a single night in the ratings.

Being the Biggest No Longer Means Owning the Event

In the end, almost everyone won something. Globo delivered enormous audiences and remained the market leader, SBT regained sports relevance and achieved ratings it would struggle to reproduce with ordinary programming, CazéTV broke digital records and consolidated a business model likely to influence future negotiations for sports rights, while viewers gained more choice.

That is why the most important media story of the 2026 World Cup may not be who “won” the audience battle during the final. Globo did not become small, it did not stop being the leader, and it did not lose its ability to gather millions of Brazilians around a screen. What it lost was something far rarer and much harder to recover: the certainty that, when a World Cup match began, the entire country would be looking in the same direction.

For generations, being Brazil’s largest broadcaster was almost the same thing as owning the World Cup. In 2026, for the first time, it became clear that those two things are no longer synonymous.