"We're in the C-Suite," Austin Franklin said, surveying his glass box in the middle of Times Square. He's not wrong. He and Kevin Akoto are getting paid $50,000 to watch every single match of this World Cup from a 32-by-16-foot cube with two 85-inch screens, reclining sofas, and a foosball table. Thousands applied. These two got the gig.
FOX set up the installation and selected Franklin and Akoto based on their content creation track records and, frankly, their ability to make a crowd feel something. Franklin has over 200,000 TikTok followers. Akoto, who quit his actual job for this, is closing in on 170,000. They weren't picked because they love football — plenty of people love football. They were picked because they know how to perform loving football in front of a camera.
It's not a holiday
104 matches. 39 days. No bathroom in the cube. That last part matters more than you'd think — four espressos a day will do that to a person.
They commute in from a nearby hotel each morning, navigate the Times Square chaos, and are expected to be switched on for everything from a Spain vs. Brazil heavyweight clash to a dead-rubber group stage fixture kicking off at midnight. "I'm just trying my hardest to stay on. As you can see, my voice is already gone," Akoto admitted. That's less than two weeks in.
Full meals aren't provided. If they want real food, they bring it themselves or hope a fan hands them something. The snacks are covered. The logistics of everything else? Entirely on them.
The part that actually works
What Franklin and Akoto have found — and what FOX probably hoped for but couldn't guarantee — is that the fans are doing half the job for them. Thousands packed Times Square for Senegal vs. France. Brazilian ultras pulled Franklin into their group mid-match and handed him a piece of their flag. "You're Brazilian now," one of them told him. Someone took their jersey off and gave it to him on the spot.
Franklin's video of a yoga class interrupted by the Norwegian Viking Army drumming through Times Square racked up 1.6 million views. That kind of content doesn't get manufactured — it just happens when you put two switched-on football people in the middle of New York City during a World Cup.
Akoto put it plainly: "It's just like coming together, throwing away the outside problems and just coming together and having a good time." Which is either a perfect summary of what the World Cup is supposed to be, or a very good line for the resume he's apparently already updating.
