Rebecca Lowe has been a mainstay on American television for years with the English Premier League on NBC. But her year in 2026 is shaping up to be one of the most profound in sports broadcasting.
Not only has she added the Winter Olympics and Kentucky Derby with NBC, but she will also work the World Cup this summer with Fox Sports for the first time.
But before that assignment begins, Lowe and the NBC crew will be on-site in England for the final day of the Premier League season this coming Sunday. After Arsenal clinched the title with Manchester City’s draw against Bournemouth earlier this week, the biggest story will be whether Tottenham Hotspur suffers a shock relegation or West Ham United goes down.
Lowe and the main NBC set will be live at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium for Spurs’ game against Everton where a point will be enough to earn safety with Robbie Mustoe and Tim Howard. Lee Dixon and Robbie Earle will be at Selhurst Park where Arsenal will lift the trophy at Crystal Palace. It’s the 13th consecutive season that NBC will broadcast every Premier League game on the final Sunday simultaneously at 11 a.m. ET across NBC networks, Versant, and Peacock.
Awful Announcing caught up with Lowe just before her flight to England to talk about her beloved Palace, the strength of the Premier League, preparations for the World Cup, and the best parts of traveling back home.
* This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Awful Announcing: Let’s start with your team in Crystal Palace and the excitement for the Conference League final. What would that mean to add a European trophy to last year’s FA Cup triumph?
Rebecca Lowe: The fact I’m even answering these questions is really crazy to me. Honestly, I’ve spent my whole life desperately hoping we stay up or desperately trying to go up, or somewhere in between, for years on end. Mainly my teenage years and 20’s we were down in the second division. The idea we could add a trophy to a cabinet that now has the FA Cup and the Community Shield, because as a Crystal Palace fan, I would say the Community Shield is a major trophy, although if you’re a Manchester City fan you probably don’t think that.
It’s still very surreal that we could even add a European trophy. This is Crystal Palace we’re talking about. This is the stuff of absolute dreams, 12 months and 3 trophies would be a lifetime of memories and I can’t really wrap my head around it. I won’t be able to go unfortunately because I have a number of World Cup commitments that week. I never in my wildest dreams thought I should turn those down because we might get to the Conference League final and now I can’t get out of them. Even if we win, I can’t even begin to imagine, it still won’t be as good as the FA Cup. For me, partly because it’s the cup I grew up with, it has the history and the heritage, and I was there in person. That will forever be the most special, but if we can add this too, we start being a big-time team over there!
Aston Villa just won the Europa League as well, there’s been such debate about the quality of the league this season and the style of play that looks like rugby at times. Do these teams’ European success say the league is better and deeper than ever or do you pine for the days of Klopp and Guardiola teams challenging for 100 points?
No, I don’t want that. I think this season has been great. I love a season where you have some of the big boys struggling that you didn’t expect and some of the teams like the Brentfords and the Brightons and the Bournemouths doing really, really well. It just shows there’s a lot of competition and it’s a good thing. It’s a good thing we have a new champion, we’ve had three champions in three years. There’s not another league in Europe that can boast three different champions in three years.
In terms of the style of play, I think we all get snobbish about football. We all want it to be the beautiful game, even though that sometimes can be a little slow. We all want this certain style of football. But it’s not in the rules. It’s ok to win a league with a set piece. It’s ok to win a whole season with set pieces. It’s ok to be more physical. Personally, it doesn’t bother me. Of course if you had a choice, you want everyone to play beautiful football. But there are ways of winning football matches that aren’t beautiful football and you just have to be clever and better than everyone else.
Speaking of style of play, Liverpool is in a crisis with Mohamed Salah calling out the team’s standards after winning the league last season. Do you see Arne Slot coaching next year and what needs to happen to rebuild?
I don’t think he’ll be the person to take it forward. First of all, there’s no way in my opinion a manager can come back when a star player, even though he’s leaving, has undermined him in public twice and in the second time where half the squad are liking the post. There’s just no way a manager can come back when half the squad are liking a post disparaging about him. Then you’ve got the fact that most of the stadium don’t want him either and we’re going to see that this coming Sunday, they’re going to be all about Mo Salah and he’s going to be a bit part. Not to mention the fact they might not qualify for Champions League. So it makes it very easy for the club to get rid of him.
Do you recall a manager having that dramatic a 180 where they are chanting his name and parading the trophy around the year before they are booing his every move?
Claudio Ranieri won the league and was fired about four months later, so it can happen, but not quite with the toxicity from both players and fans. This is just bizarre. And the other thing is when you win a title at Liverpool, you are never fired. They have never fired a manager who has won a title. If they fire him that also goes against the history of the club. But the fans up there are very influential. They don’t want him, so he ain’t coming back.
You’re on your way to Tottenham where the big final day drama is their relegation fight with West Ham. If Spurs go down, would that be the most shocking relegation in the Premier League era?
Without a doubt. It would be the second most shocking story of the Premier League era behind Leicester City winning the league. Clubs like Tottenham Hotspur are not supposed to get relegated, which is why we love the game, because the jeopardy is always there. And now they’re 90 minutes away from relegated. Even the club with the best stadium in the league, with the best training ground in the league, even they can end up playing Lincoln City next season. It’s an amazing story. I don’t think it’ll happen, I think they’ll get a point, but it could.
The other American sports of course don’t have relegation storylines, what is the mentality for you not going to a championship battle but one for survival as the main draw?
That is quite difficult for fans who don’t know much about soccer to get their heads around. We’re going to have a presence at Selhurst Park to see Arsenal lift the trophy and we’ll show the scenes, but we are focusing on essentially failure, aren’t we? We’re focusing on who’s going to fail, is it West Ham or Spurs? And that just isn’t in the vocabulary or vernacular of most American sports fans.
It’s all brilliant when you’re there for the trophy lift, but this is a huge part of European football to have relegation. I don’t mind it because on Sunday we’re going to go where the drama is and showcase to the states a situation that they’re not used to and who knows, maybe one day it will come into Major League Soccer, I hope it does. You could feasibly suggest you would get more fans doing Spurs than if we went and did Arsenal because it’s such a unique story for American sports.
As someone who has spent so many years in America now, what does it mean for you to travel back to England once again for the final Sunday of the season?
It’s lovely because I get to stock up on the English tea bags and all the biscuits. My little boy has given me a list of the English chocolates and crisps that he’d like me to bring back so that’s the most important thing. I get to see my mom and dad, which is lovely as well, because we’ll be in London where my family are. And just to remain in touching distance to the thing that we cover week-in and week-out, to actually smell the smells, see the sights, and remind ourselves that even though we’re in a studio in Connecticut most weekends, the thing we watch and love so much is as brilliant in real-life as it is from all the way across the pond.
All these grounds I worked at for years before I moved to America, so it is really nice. It’s very grounding. It’s very surreal because I don’t get back to England very much and it’s very quick, especially this year as I’ve got the World Cup coming up. But first and foremost it’s about that English chocolate.
With the World Cup coming this summer, how excited are you to work that tournament for the first time with Fox and how are you balancing prep with the end of the Premier League season?
I think 2026 has been the busiest, craziest, most intense year of my career. The Premier League, the Olympics, the Kentucky Derby, and with the World Cup it’s one of those things that tends to be a slow burn. I’ve known it’s coming for a long time so you receive certain articles and slowly but surely absorb information. As it gets closer, the ratio goes up. I’m doing a little more prep now than I have done in recent weeks, simply because I’ve been focusing so much on the Derby or the Premier League.
As soon as Sunday is over it’s 100% all in. I have a ton of research that has already been sent to me from Fox, but I have a separate e-mail folder which is labeled “World Cup prep” and all the articles are in there. Over the course of the next two-and-a-half weeks I will make my way through all the articles, as more are coming in by the way, and listen to different podcasts and get different perspectives.
In terms of excitement levels, it’s still pinch me time. I can’t believe I’m going to get the chance to do this. This is living out a dream. I never, ever expected it to happen and here we are in three weeks I’ll be on the air on opening day of the greatest event in the world in the country that I’ve made my home. It doesn’t really get a lot better than that.