Sebastian Salazar on the Magic of Broadcasting and Concerns for the World Cup | OneFootball

A veteran in the industry, we sit down with Sebastian Salazar to discuss his journey in sports media, his Mexican-American background, and his thoughts about the upcoming 2026 World Cup. 

It was December 2016, and Herculez Gomez was preparing for the final match of his career, an MLS Cup Final between his Seattle Sounders and Toronto FC.

The veteran striker made over 370 appearances over his 16-year professional career, but he wouldn’t record one on that night in Toronto, as he was an unused sub in Seattle’s penalty shootout victory.

Also on the sideline during the match was Sebastian Salazar, who was on his first assignment with ESPN. Little did they know it, but the duo would cross paths sooner rather than later.

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Born and raised in Bethesda, Maryland by an American father and a Mexican mother, Salazar supported the U.S. and Mexican national teams and also enjoyed following his club team DC United, who ruled the embryonic stages of Major League Soccer with an iron fist. After graduating from Walter Johnson High School, Salazar headed to rural Pennsylvania for college, balancing academics and athletics as a member of the Westminster College soccer team. His college career featured a Presidents’ Athletic Conference title in 2002, and individually, he was a two-time all-conference award winner for the Titans.

However, Salazar knew that his future wasn’t on the playing field, but in the broadcast booth. After polishing his skills with Westminster’s TV and radio stations, Salazar cut his teeth in the industry in markets like Dalton, Georgia and Winchester, Virginia, and then he landed a job with the top regional sports broadcaster in his hometown, Comcast SportsNet Mid-Atlantic.

He’d go on to work with DC United in 2012 and cover the U.S. women’s national team at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, before eventually making the move to ESPN later that year.

Salazar emerged as a regular on ESPN FC as well as one of the worldwide leader’s go-to sideline reporters. It was here where he’d link up with Gomez, co-hosting the biweekly “Fútbol Americas” show in addition to the women’s spinoff of the show, “Fútbol W,” alongside former USWNT player Ali Krieger.

During his time at ESPN, Salazar covered a multitude of sports in English and Spanish from the FIFA World Cup to the Little League World Series, before departing at the end of 2025.

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He’s spent the past few months balancing his time between raising his 3-year-old son in Bethesda and covering the NWSL as the host of ION’s “Saturday Night Soccer,” while also continuing his relationship with Gomez as the co-host of the “Duel Nats” Podcast in the Men In Blazers Network. On top of it all, he’s helped build Defiance FC, a non-profit semi-professional soccer team in Maryland that aims to create an accessible pathway for players of all backgrounds.

We sat down with Salazar to discuss his broadcasting career, the experience at ESPN, and his thoughts on the upcoming World Cup.

Urban Pitch: When did you realize that sports broadcasting was going to be your true calling?

Sebastian Salazar: I was born in 1983, so I’m really a child of the ’90s, which is the beginning of the cable television era. The fact that there was a channel fully dedicated to sports in my living room from the time I was 6 to 7 years old — I remember us getting cable was pretty significant. That was something that was always of interest to me, even just as a consumer as a kid, I loved it.

As I got into adolescence, around middle school, as I started to play sports, I realized I might be a good soccer player or basketball player, or whatever it is, but I’m not gonna go pro. What’s the closest thing to it?

I don’t know if this was the right answer, but to me at the time it was sports broadcasting, the general idea of being a sports broadcaster. I think very early on in my youth, I thought that this was something that I wanted to do, and I pursued it a little bit through high school. The idea of it was definitely behind my college choices and all that. From a young age, I think the idea of being a sports broadcaster and obviously as somebody who loves soccer but most of all the sports, eventually becoming a soccer broadcaster was something I always strived for, even if I didn’t really say it out loud or put it as a goal.

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Talk to me a little bit about growing up in a Mexican-American household. You must have had some split feelings whenever there was the U.S.-Mexico games going on. Did you kind of get a sense that you were half American, half Mexican?

I think the experience of being, in my case, Mexican-American, but for a lot of people, just anything-American — wherever you might be born, or wherever one of your parents might be from just really opens your eyes to other things, to a different part of the world. And for me, a huge part of that was soccer. My dad grew up in Western New York. He was born in 1949 and had really no access to soccer as a consumer until he met my mom, which was in his late 20s. She started talking about it to him and what it had meant to her and her teams, and all that. For me as a kid, that was my entryway to soccer.

Had it not been for my mom and her being Mexican, I think I still would have been addicted to a sport, I just don’t know that it would have been necessarily soccer. She’s the one that had it on the TV all the time. The great luck of being Mexican in the United States in the ’80s and ’90s is that while if you were Italian, or German, or English, or French, or anywhere, it was tough to watch your teams play. But Univision has been a powerhouse in this country for a long time, and you could watch Club América almost every weekend. That attachment to the game was very easy for me at a time when I think it maybe wasn’t for a lot of people, because my mom was from Mexico.

When you talk about the rivalry, as my dad started to become a big fan of the game, he started to coach my teams, he becomes a big U.S. men’s national team fan. My mom is a huge Mexico fan, and of course, I learned the game through my mom. Mexico was always my favorite team, and for a while, I really viewed the U.S. as the ultimate rival. There was a turning point for me in my late teen years when a buddy of mine from my club team went and played on the USA’s U-17 World Cup team, and I was really excited to root for him, and the U.S., and I was following them in that tournament.

The 2002 World Cup was a really tough one for me, because I’m a die-hard Mexico fan, and going to high school at Walter Johnson High School, in a sea of U.S. fans. I’m not quiet about being a Mexico fan, so I had to eat that one for a long time, and probably still am in some ways as a follower of El Tri. I was back home for the summer. Even to this day, all my buddies are still my buddies from WJ, and middle school and beyond that. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing or what that says about me, but it is what it is.

My boys were ruthless with me, because Mexico had been playing great in that World Cup. The U.S. had not played great in the group phase, other than the shock win against Portugal. I really believed in that Mexico team, and so I was really confident leading up to it. I had to actually face it from two ends. When I got back to college as well, my college teammates were of course willing and ready to remind me of the result. I think, maybe that’s an insight into my personality. I’ve always been hearing it from U.S. fans ever since 2002.

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What do you feel was your first, ‘Welcome to the big leagues’ moment at ESPN? Was there any real shock to the system during your time there?

It was immediate: ESPN is huge. It’s massive with its impact and platform. I got there in late 2016, and my first assignment was the 2016 MLS Cup. My first day, I’m doing taped hits, I do a couple in English, I do one in Spanish. The English one is on SportsCenter, it runs very quickly, but they give MLS Cup its little minute. I get a bunch of texts from my buddies in the soccer space, and I also get a text from a buddy who’s got his cousin in Argentina who saw me pop up down there and sent him a picture. He’s like, “Yo, this is your boy!” My uncle in Mexico is at a bar, and says, “That’s my nephew!” He texts me a picture, and so I remember that first assignment being like, Oh my God, this is everywhere.

It wasn’t even a social media sense, which of course, blows up too many times over and over again. But that first assignment was crazy. That summer, I did two things: The Little League World Series, which I’ve done every year since, and just absolutely enjoy and love. It’s the greatest assignment there possibly could be, and I’m not a baseball guy by nature, but my God, it’s just wonderful. Even if you don’t like baseball, if you live in the Mid-Atlantic area, or even if you don’t, go spend a couple days in Williamsport during the Little League World Series, it’s absolute magic.

In 2017, Barcelona and Real Madrid played in Miami, their first Clásico outside of Spain since the ’80s, and ESPN rolled out SportsCenter and their entire wheel to the Hard Rock Stadium. As a broadcaster who had, in Dalton, Georgia, humbly carried his big bag and his tripod and his camera to a high school football shoot to try to get it on the evening news, to see that in Miami was amazing.

And then to see it at the Little League World Series, because it’s even more impressive there, they build it in Williamsport for that event, this huge television compound, and then execute this incredible broadcast. To see the broadcast machine at that scale at work, as a broadcast junkie, as a nerd of the industry. Wow, man, right away, it was like, Oh my God, I’m a minnow, and this is the Pacific Ocean.

Photo by Stephen Dunn/Allsport/Getty Images

Lastly, after covering the World Cup from Russia and Qatar, what are your expectations for this World Cup? What do you expect your role to be?

I have some events lined up, we’re gonna continue the podcast for Men in Blazers. I’m doing the NWSL package, and they break for the first month of the World Cup, but not the back end of it, so I’ll be working on Saturday NWSL coverage for ION throughout the back end of the World Cup. The show that I have with Herc that we’ll be doing through the World Cup is part of Vamos and Men in Blazers, and they’ll be doing coverage throughout the World Cup as well, so I’m sure I’ll be helping out with that in some regard. I’m doing some watch party work for different corporate sponsors of the World Cup, so I’ll be in and around it, but I don’t have tickets yet.

I think that’s one area where I haven’t really made plans yet as I’ve waited to see what exactly I’m going to be doing for the entirety of the World Cup. But as far as my expectations go, I have to say I’m worried. I’m a product of the ’94 World Cup: what I do for a living, who I am as a person, and so much of my identity springs from the ’94 World Cup. My parents were super middle class and could afford to get me into all the games at RFK, and it changed my life.

Every day, I start to doubt and worry for those middle class parents and others who are not going to get to do that this summer. It was such a formative experience for me, it was such an amazing experience, it truly changed my life. It made me the soccer fan that I am. I just feel like a lot of American kids are about to miss out on that because of the way that the tickets are being priced, and the access to them. I think a lot of times, when we talk about World Cup ticket prices, we focus on who to blame, and rightfully so. But what’s important is the impact of it.

Photo by Shaun Botterill/Allsport/Getty Images

There’s a huge percentage of this generation of American kids that won’t have the same experience that I had in 1994 that changed my life, and I’m devastated by that. At a time when we should be so excited about what’s coming, everybody should have their tickets in hand, waving excitedly. It pains me that, knowing that the sport is in a place where so many more kids love it now than they did in ’94, that so many more of those kids are not gonna have access to it. It’s just a shame.