Could aliens watch the 2026 World Cup from space?

Yes — but only if the aliens are close enough, and even then what they can “watch” depends on how they observe it.

If they’re in our Solar System, they could potentially receive the broadcast with only a small delay, depending on distance. A craft near Earth would be close to real time; from Mars the delay would be minutes; from Pluto it would be hours.

If they’re in another star system, they couldn’t watch it live. Any radio or TV signal would still travel at the speed of light, so a world 4.2 light-years away would see the 2026 matches only around 2030. Farther away means a longer wait.

There’s also a major detection problem: broadcast signals spread out over distance, so their strength drops according to the inverse-square law. By the time a signal reached another star system, it would be extremely faint, and detecting it reliably would likely require an enormous receiving system — potentially an antenna array spanning several square miles or even larger, depending on the distance and how sensitive the aliens’ equipment is.

Could they use a telescope instead? Not to watch the game in detail from light-years away. To resolve a stadium from a nearby star system, an optical telescope would need to be unimaginably large — on the order of wider than Earth’s orbit — because of diffraction limits.

Bottom line: aliens nearby in the Solar System could plausibly watch; aliens in another star system would have to wait years, and both signal-detection and image-resolution limits make detailed viewing extremely difficult.