The World Cup has captivated the American 🇺🇸 audience along with everyone on earth. In fact, my youngest granddaughter is a terrific soccer player, according to her proud father, and her ecstatic grandpa.
There's a term, sotto voce, Italian for a hushed, almost whispered tone that has never described the voice of US fútbol, Andrés Cantor FIFA World Cup.
For nearly four decades, Cantor has done the opposite. He has stretched a single word, "¡Gooooooooooool!" into something between a battle cry and a love song, until it became one of the most recognizable sounds in American sports. Many fans assume he invented the call. He did not. He learned it from the legendary play-by-play voices of Argentine radio. What Cantor brought to it wasn't invention. It was conviction. He made the call his own, and in doing so, made it America's.
I know that part of the story firsthand, because I was the one who first forced him into the sports anchor chair at Univision.
Cantor was a child in Buenos Aires when he watched Argentina beat the Netherlands on home soil to win the World Cup. That roar, his own country lifting the trophy became, in his words to other interviewers over the years, an energy that has powered nearly five decades of broadcasts since. He moved to the United States as a teenager not long after, settled in Southern California, and eventually found his way to Univision as a writer and sports producer, where his career that began almost by accident would turn him into one of the most recognizable fútbol voices in the world.
I was an executive producer at Univision at the time. Cantor was our sports producer, working behind the scenes alongside anchors Jessi Losada and Mario Solis on our network newscasts. He wrote well, knew the game cold, and had loved it since high school. But Andres was not, at that point, trying to be the man in the chair.
We were in the middle of a hard push to boost the ratings when Losada called in sick on a day we could not afford it. I told him to get in or else. He did not show. So I turned to Cantor and told him he was anchoring the sports segment that night.
He said no. He told me he was not ready, and suggested the female news anchor should read the copy instead.
I did not budge, and here is why. Years earlier, my father, a serious sports fanatic who noticed everything, told me what actually separates a real sports anchor from someone just reading a script: He has to know the subject inside and out, and he has to pronounce every player's name correctly, regardless of ethnic backgrounds or nationalities. My father was not theorizing. He said it after asking baseball themed questions while meeting a sports anchor named Marv, a Hall of Famer known for his "Yes!" call and his marvelous years as the voice of the New York Knicks, whom I had the pleasure to produce sports segments for earlier in my career. After that meeting, my father gave his verdict in two words: "This guy."
I never forgot it. So that day in the newsroom, I thought of my father, looked at Cantor, and forced him into the sports ancho desk anyway. He went on the air. The rest is sports history.
What happened afterward is part of the broadcasting record. Cantor became the lone play-by-play voice of Univision's soccer coverage from 1987 to 2000, carried his signature call into the 1990 World Cup, and turned it into a cultural phenomenon during the 1994 tournament, hosted in the United States. The elongated "Gooooool" went from a broadcast-booth habit to a ringtone, a late-night television bit, a Volkswagen ad and a line on "The Simpsons," where Cantor voiced himself. He never owned the word. He just makes it globally unforgettable.
Now 63, Cantor is chairman of Futbol de Primera Radio and the lead Spanish-language announcer for Telemundo's coverage of the 2026 World Cup, his 10th tournament calling the game and his 12th overall. Nearly 50 years after a boy in Buenos Aires felt his country win it all, he is still chasing that same jolt, microphone in hand, somewhere in a stadium tunnel between matches.
That is also where this becomes a Father's Day story, and not just a sports one. Cantor's signature call was handed down to him by broadcasting elders who came before him, the way a trade passes through a family. His son, Nico, is now a soccer broadcaster also, covering this same World Cup for CBS Sports. Marv's son, Kenny, followed his father into the business as well, calling NFL and MLB games for Fox and, for years, hockey games on the same New York airwaves his father once owned.
And on my end of it, a piece of advice my father gave me almost in passing, about what makes someone the real thing instead of someone doing a good job as a sports anchor, is the reason a reluctant young producer became the most famous fútbol voice in America. Not because I was clever. But because I was listening to my father.
That is what fathers leave behind, more often than not. Not the headline moment, but two words muttered after meeting the right person: "This guy." The kind of thing you do not think you will need again, until one ordinary evening in a newsroom, you remember.
Happy Father's Day to my late father, to Andrés, to Marv, and to each and every dad whose quiet advice turned out to be exactly the real GoooOOOL.
IMAGE: AJSOTO Jr. - wearing on of his sports caps.