As national humiliations go, this was not the Suez Crisis but when BBC Sport announced it would be basing its World Cup coverage in Salford (the city in Greater Manchester, not the small town in Pennsylvania), cheeks were puffed out, eyebrows were raised, heads were shaken. The Daily Telegraph described the BBC's approach as the "work-from-home World Cup", while television network GB News claimed the corporation was "set to lose out" to rivals in signing up tournament pundits. For these culture-war critics, and others, the decision seemed to be another sign of Great Britain's 150-year decline, the BBC getting it wrong again and a victory for small-minded penny-pinchers. These sentiments were perhaps best summed up by Gary Lineker, the former England star who was meant to be the BBC's lead presenter for a seventh straight men's World Cup before a social-media mishap led to a high-profile divorce last year, when he said he was glad he would be presenting his new Netflix show from a bespoke studio overlooking New York's Times Square and not stuck in a "green box in Salford". It was a good line but it was wrong. His successors -- the revolving trio of Kelly Cates, Mark Chapman and Gabby Logan -- will not be forced to pretend they are somewhere exciting while sitting in front of a brightly lit green screen that is magicked away by video editors and overlaid with something worth watching. On the contrary, as I learned when the BBC invited some journalists to see their new studio this week. "It's not a green box in Salford, it's a beautiful, state-of-the-art studio, but that's fine, nobody had seen it until now," said BBC director of sport Alex Kay-Jelski, the man who joined the BBC from The Athletic in 2024 and ultimately made the decision for football to stay at home. In fact, the studio does not use green screens at all, so the presenter and pundits can wear green and/or sequins without fear of becoming invisible in the 'chroma keying' process. (Quick aside, if you are wondering why green screens are green, it is because green is the most distinct in hue from any human skin tone.) With its commercial rivals ITV having broadcast the tournament opener between Mexico and South Africa on Thursday, the BBC's first game is Canada versus Bosnia and Herzegovina on Friday, when Logan, former France striker Olivier Giroud and ex-England defender Micah Richards will try to prove that being perched high in a Brooklyn loft apartment (ITV's base for the next six weeks) does not equate to better football coverage. The key feature of the BBC's studio is a giant wraparound LED screen where you would expect the actual view of Times Square, Mount Rushmore, the Grand Canyon or, in ITV's case, Brooklyn Bridge to be. But -- and here's the clever bit -- this screen will show a picture of a downtown scene from whichever host city that evening's/morning's game is being played in. In the setups we were shown, the team can look like they are sitting on a pontoon in New York Harbor or Boston's Charles River, and the shot can be adjusted for the time of day and weather conditions. The studio is one of the biggest in MediaCity's dock10, which is one of Europe's largest studio complexes. The chairs, tables, potted plants, cameras and lights are all real (I checked) and there are even fans, out of shot, above the heads of "the talent" to trick their brains into thinking there is a breeze in the room. There have been upgrades in edit suites and production galleries to ensure BBC Sport can make use of the facilities beyond this summer -- on its Premier League highlights show Match of the Day, for example -- which, in Kay-Jelski's view, makes for a better use of finite resources than hiring an expensive room with a view in the States. Yet there will be some, maybe many, who will still knock the BBC for not being there. Dan Walker, another ex-BBC Sport presenter, contrasted ITV's "super-snazzy Brooklyn studio", used for the first time in England's final warm-up game against Costa Rica on Wednesday, with the BBC's decision to stay in Salford. "The location will have cost ITV a fortune and the BBC can't win. If they go then there is criticism every day about the cost and, if they don't go, they get hammered for staying at home," Walker posted on X. "Must feel very distant at the moment, though." But distant for whom? The talent or the audience? "If these people were sitting somewhere else, would your viewing be massively changed?" said Kay-Jelski. "We've still got pundits on the ground. Alan (Shearer, the Premier League's record goalscorer and lead BBC pundit/co-commentator) is there. Danny Murphy is there. Various commentators and journalists, too. "I don't think the answer from a financial and sustainability point of view is to say everyone can go. I don't think that's a very clever way for me to spend licence-fee money." This is the key point. For the uninitiated, people in the UK must pay a licence fee of £180 ($240) a year to own a television or watch online streaming services. That money is used to fund the BBC and, while there is a vocal minority who would defund the BBC tomorrow, the vast majority of Brits still like and consume it every day. And most importantly, we have not thought of a better way to fund it. For example, in return for a monopoly on the licence fee, the BBC cannot run adverts. For decades, that gave ITV a monopoly on the UK's advertising market, an arrangement it greatly enjoyed. This delineation of territory has blurred as the number of commercial channels has exploded, and also because the BBC's international-facing outlets have been allowed to carry advertising -- one of many initiatives introduced to wean the BBC off the licence fee. Others include encouraging it to be more "commercial" in its commissioning, so it can sell programmes and formats for programmes abroad (essentially, anything involving Sir David Attenborough). There has been progress on that front but licence fees still account for about 60 per cent of the BBC's near-£6billion total annual revenue. The other popular suggestion is the BBC should move behind a paywall, like Netflix, Sky, The Athletic and so on. But the other big quid pro quo the BBC offers in return for taxpayer cash is a public-service commitment to cover everything from local crime to long-forgotten crises on the other side of the planet, while delivering children's programming, edgy drama, experimental comedy, all while showcasing British talent and providing the most balanced coverage of major national and international events possible, despite being sniped at from all directions for being biased. So, in terms of funding, the licence fee remains the best of a bad bunch of options. But the BBC is in one of its semi-regular crises. Ex-Google executive Matt Brittin is taking over as director general, just in time for the next renewal of the BBC's royal charter, the 10-year deal it does with the government to keep the licence fee-based funding model in place. The BBC knows it cannot enter those negotiations without cutting 10 per cent off its current budget, or about 2,000 jobs. When you put it in those terms, what choice did Kay-Jelski have? Plenty, according to Lineker. "Come on, money's tight?" he said when The Athletic spoke to him last month about his post-playing career, exit from the BBC and Goalhanger podcast empire. "It's the World Cup. It's the biggest television event you get every four years. The top half-a-dozen audience figures this year will be from the World Cup. They could do it if they wanted to." Sure, but do the presenters need to be there? "Look, we didn't always go," he said. "I think in 2002 (when the World Cup was in Japan and South Korea), we didn't go out until the quarter-finals. But if there's a major news event, you've got to be there. You don't want to compare this, but if you look at what's been going on in the Middle East, the newsreaders go out. "I don't want to be critical of the BBC, I love the BBC. I know they'll make it look amazing but when you're in a green box, it's very difficult to get any enthusiasm and energy in the studio." I put that to Kay-Jelski. "I'm not saying there is no value," he said. "I'm just saying the budget isn't infinite and we have to make sensible and difficult decisions sometimes. I don't even see this one as a difficult decision. I just think it's really sensible. If I was stood here and said, 'Everything is going to be done from a studio in Dallas', you would rightly be saying, 'How can you justify that spend?'." Of course, the real savings come not through keeping presenters at home, but the hundreds of technical staff that would be needed to run the operation. Roger Mosey, one of his predecessors as BBC Sport tsar, revealed in an article in The Spectator this week that he sent 437 staff to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Full disclosure: I was one of them but I did work really hard. For what is worth, Mosey thinks Kay-Jelski has got this right. The final word on this particular debate should probably go to Logan, who will become British TV's first female host of a World Cup final next month. "There are many, many good reasons why you would stay in one place in the UK for sustainability reasons," she said to a group of reporters last month. "As you all know, (this World Cup) will be very expensive. We have to think about that -- the belt is being tightened all the time." She then reminded us that the BBC has done this before, most notably for the last Women's Euros in Switzerland. The BBC's coverage of that tournament, which she fronted, won a BAFTA in April. "It's worked really, really well, and we've seen huge audiences enjoying that coverage," she added. "I think we're in a good hybrid situation."