Rebecca Lowe: America is going to ‘fall in love’ with Zlatan Ibrahimović

Rebecca Lowe has exactly one concern about working with Zlatan Ibrahimović this summer, and it has nothing to do with whether he’ll be any good.

The NBC Premier League host appeared on Sports Business Journal’s The Sports Media Podcast with Austin Karp this week and offered her first real public thoughts on her most intriguing new colleague. She’s only spent time with Ibrahimović once — at a Fox production seminar in Austin at the end of March — but it was enough to put any concerns about how this would go to rest.

“I’m not worried at all,” Lowe said. “I think America’s going to fall in love with this guy. Slightly worried that I’m going to have to go to break in the middle of an amazing point, and they’re going to go, ‘Rebecca, you got to get in.’ And I’m thinking, I don’t want to get in.”

That tracks with why Fox went after Ibrahimović in the first place. When the network signed him in March, Fox Sports president Brad Zager told The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand that Zlatan was at the top of its list from the very beginning, that they put a blank slate on the board, thought about who they most wanted, and went for it.

“He may never have done studio before,” Lowe said. “He may never do it again, by the way. But he wants to do this, and he wants to work hard. Add in his insanely infectious, attractive personality, and I think you have yourself a brilliant pundit. Zlatan doesn’t fail at anything, so he ain’t going to start failing now.”

Lowe herself arrives at Fox for the World Cup as one of the most accomplished soccer presenters in the English-speaking world. She’s been the face of NBC’s Premier League coverage for 12 years, and 2026 has shaped up to be the most remarkable year of her broadcasting career. She served as NBC’s daytime host for the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics — her seventh consecutive Games in that role — and is also hosting After the Whistle with Brendan Hunt on Apple News, which returns for its third season timed to the World Cup. But the tournament itself, which she recently described in an interview with Awful Announcing as a “pinch me” moment she can’t quite believe is happening, represents something she’s never done — her first World Cup.

At Fox, Lowe will anchor a secondary studio while Rob Stone leads the primary desk, with a cast around her that includes Ibrahimović, Thierry Henry, Javier Hernández, Clarence Seedorf, and Peter Schmeichel. Fox is airing 70 matches on broadcast television with 40 games in primetime — the most for any World Cup in American television history — in what is also the final World Cup the network holds English-language broadcast rights to in the United States. There’s a lot riding on this summer going well for Fox, and the studio team its assembled is a big part of that bet.

Lowe, for her part, isn’t sweating it.

“I think you have yourself a brilliant pundit,” she said of Ibrahimović. “Because Zlatan doesn’t fail at anything, so he ain’t going to start failing now.”