GREAT TEW, England — The 2026 FIFA men’s World Cup will be the ultimate stress test for On Location, the hospitality company behind the Super Bowl, Olympics, and hundreds of other events. 

With games in 16 stadiums across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, the World Cup is like “104 Super Bowls in one month,” On Location president Paul Caine tells Front Office Sports on the sidelines of the IMG x RedBird Summit 2025, a three-day conference in the U.K. focused on the future of sports.

“It’s an insane undertaking,” Caine says.

Taking on an unprecedented challenge is nothing new for Caine, who has previously held executive roles at People magazine and Bloomberg Media. In fact, he faced a pretty unprecedented challenge when he first joined On Location in January 2020. That was just before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down live events across the country—not ideal when you’re in the business of curating live event experiences, with a focus on the wealthy.

“We took time during COVID to go through every product and redefine them from hospitality to experience,” he tells FOS. “That transformation lasted about a year.”

On Location, part of the TKO Group portfolio since February, has always been ambitious, but Caine says the transformation that took place during the pandemic changed the company—which started out as a niche NFL hospitality business in 2010—for the better. Today, the company works with 122 sports leagues and event hosts, including the NFL, NCAA, FIFA, NASCAR, IndyCar, MLB, and fellow TKO subsidiaries UFC and WWE.

On Location produces experiences at more than 700 events annually, and those experiences can range from $1,000 tickets to $300,000 (or more) all-access packages. 

For example, On Location offers an array of packages for the upcoming Super Bowl in San Francisco in February 2026. For $7,000, guests get a game ticket, pregame tailgate, and live entertainment. A $19,000 package adds better seats, chef-curated menus, premium bars, and appearances by NFL legends. The higher the price, the more exclusive the experience. Some high-priced packages include seats at the 50-yard line, for instance. On Location is on tap to offer Super Bowl experiences through at least 2036.

“We are constantly looking to push the envelope,” Caine says. “Let’s say we have Joe Montana as one of the NFL legends. The people who buy a package to sit on the 50-yard line will meet him face-to-face and spend time with him. The next level down, those people will see him in an interview onstage. So he’s still present, but you get different levels of access.”

In addition to the Super Bowl and World Cup, On Location will be the official hospitality provider for the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy and the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. 

At the World Cup, offerings vary. For $1,350 an individual can buy tickets to any single non-host nation match in the group stage and one game in the round-of-32 stage, while also receiving access to a pitchside lounge and other exclusive amenities (non-host nation match means it can’t be the U.S., Canadian, or Mexican teams). An $8,275, per person package gets you access to as many as nine games, including host nation matches, as well as all the same amenities. There are even higher tiers, such as the platinum package, although the details for what that means are not disclosed on the website.

For the Winter Olympics in Italy, packages can be specific to the competition you’re interested in (figure skating, ice hockey, etc.). Prices are not disclosed because the packages are curated depending on what the consumer picks out.

The On Location portfolio has grown exponentially since it began as an NFL-specific business, but Caine says the NFL remains the core.

“At the end of the day, the NFL is our heart,” Caine tells FOS. “If our heart stops beating, the body dies. The Super Bowl is still the best expression of who we are.”

Editors’ note: RedBird IMI, in which RedBird Capital Partners is a joint venture partner, is the primary investor in Front Office Sports.

GREAT TEW, England — Mike Pompeo was supposed to talk about “politics on the playing field” in his interview at the IMG x RedBird Summit on Wednesday.

But sports mostly stayed on the bench in the nearly hour-long discussion, during which the former U.S. secretary of state conceded that his then-boss, President Donald Trump, did not win the 2020 election. 

The conversation at Wednesday’s IMG x RedBird Summit 2025 started out as it had been billed, with Pompeo telling British journalist Alastair Campbell that he was a “mediocre power forward” back in the day. But Campbell quickly turned the subject to Trump, who was also in the U.K. that day, albeit for a state visit.

After Pompeo referenced Trump’s continued insistence he won the 2020 election in addition to 2016 and 2024, Campbell asked Pompeo whether he believes Trump beat Joe Biden in 2020.

“No, he didn’t win,” Pompeo said.

The admission stood in contrast to how Pompeo handled the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election. He famously said one week after Election Day there would be a “smooth transition to a second Trump administration” despite Biden’s victory and Trump’s failure to prove there had been widespread fraud in a court of law.

Following that admission, Pompeo brought up the upcoming 2026 FIFA men’s World Cup, which will be held in 16 stadiums across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Trump has taken credit for bringing the soccer tournament back to the U.S. for the first time since 1994, and while the bid was awarded during his first term, it was a collective effort among the countries involved, FIFA, and others. 

“He wanted this; he chased this in his first term,” Pompeo said.

Campbell, the interviewer, wasn’t ready to let the talk fully turn to sports; he brought up Trump’s interest in buying Greenland. Pompeo, who is not part of the second Trump Administration, said he can’t speak for the president. “I get it that it ruffles people’s feathers,” he said.

The tension in the room led one audience member to interject, asking, “I’m sorry, is this about politics on the playing field?”

Campbell replied that there was a lot to talk about with the former secretary of state. 

At about the 30-minute mark, Campbell opened up the floor for questions. While sports did come up—Pompeo joked he knows just enough about cricket to seem competent when traveling the world—the conversation remained mostly centered on politics, from China as a global threat to whether global democracies are losing confidence in themselves and their institutions.

Pompeo—who now works at Torridon Law and its related advisory firm Torridon Group—steered the conversation back to sports as the hour concluded and ended on an optimistic note, saying, “One thing that has the capacity to move us in a positive direction is engaging in sport.”

Editors’ note: RedBird IMI, in which RedBird Capital Partners is a joint venture partner, is the primary investor in Front Office Sports.

GREAT TEW, England — When Charlie Neiman joined Amazon in 2016, the company had never streamed a live sporting event, and there wasn’t even a budget to try. A decade later, Neiman leads a global live sports giant that aspires to one day broadcast a Super Bowl.

“It’s been a wild ride,” Neiman tells Front Office Sports at the IMG x RedBird Summit 2025, a three-day conference in the U.K. focused on the future of sports.

It wasn’t “preordained” that Amazon would find this much success in sports, Neiman says. It started with early experiments in Europe with Premier League rights, but it has evolved into a strategy that touches nearly every major league in every major market in the U.S. 

Amazon’s NFL relationship began in 2017, with an agreement to broadcast 10 regular-season games on a nonexclusive basis. Today, Amazon exclusively broadcasts Thursday Night Football and will have one wild-card playoff matchup as part of a $1 billion per year media-rights deal. It’s gearing up for its first season under the NBA’s new rights deal, which will see Amazon Prime Video exclusively broadcast 66 regular-season games, games from the in-season tournament, plus playoff games. Starting next year, it will be a domestic broadcaster of The Masters. It also has agreements with the NWSL and WNBA.

All in all, Amazon now has some form of live rights for the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, WNBA, NWSL, The Masters, NASCAR, ONE Championship, and Overtime Elite.

“Looking back, we’ve really gone from zero to 60,” Neiman says.

He credits Amazon’s willingness to take big swings. “We’re a big company, but we’ll take bets,” he says. “Sports is one of them. You can’t dip your toe in sports. These things are expensive; they take engineering resources. If it works, you pour gasoline on the fire.”

Amazon is looking to build on the foundation it has developed by reshaping what a sports broadcast can be. During his panel at the conference—which was titled “Vision 2050” and also featured the head of product marketing and live media at Nvidia, among others—Neiman talked about proprietary AI models that are already powering new NFL features. For example, Amazon’s data tools can predict with high accuracy when a defender is about to blitz.

“If we see a player deviate from a normal path that we would see in our model, it highlights the player,” he said during the panel. “And with remarkable accuracy, we’re able to predict if someone’s going to blitz.”

Amazon also offers a feature that grades the difficulty of touchdown passes, with the aim of making games easier for casual fans to follow without disrupting the core viewing experience, and has plans to add other features.

“The goal is to make it as simple as possible, so that my parents, who are not necessarily football fans, can understand it,” he tells FOS.

The company intends to expand that approach into its basketball broadcasts—which will feature former NBA stars like Steve Nash, Dirk Nowitzki, and Blake Griffin—although Neiman wouldn’t divulge specifics. The challenge, Neiman says, is figuring out what NBA fans want that’s distinct from football viewers. 

“You can imagine there’s going to be similar things to come for the NBA broadcasts, but we’re not ready to say when and what that is,” he says. “We’re fans ourselves—basketball nerds—and we want the broadcast to feel authentic to that culture.”

One trend that Neiman isn’t so sure Amazon will immediately jump on is buying equity stakes in the leagues it covers, particularly behemoths like the NFL and NBA.

“More interesting to us are the emerging leagues,” he says. “Emerging leagues need partners to help grow and build infrastructure. With how rights fees have gone lately, the incentive is sharing in the upside.”

Editors’ note: RedBird IMI, in which RedBird Capital Partners is a joint venture partner, is the primary investor in Front Office Sports.