Luke Wileman is the new TV voice of U.S. national team games on HBO Max and TNT

The new voice of U.S. national team broadcasts has a lot of experience with American soccer, but he might not be well-known to a lot of fans yet.

That will change in a few days.

Luke Wileman, a veteran of Canadian sports channel TSN, will be the lead play-by-play voice for U.S. men’s and women’s team games on HBO Max and TNT. He will debut next Tuesday when the U.S. women play their first game of the year at upcoming World Cup co-host New Zealand (10 p.m., HBO Max).

“I can’t wait to get started,” Wileman told The Inquirer. “It’s a role that gives a lot of responsibility, because national team games have so much interest from coast to coast and have the ability to unite people across the country. … I think with both the young talent on the women’s and the men’s teams right now there are only big times ahead for both programs.”

An England native, Wileman has worked for TSN since 2011 and has lived in the Toronto area since moving to Canada in 2006. He has called games at multiple women’s World Cups and soccer at the Olympics, and is planning to be in New Zealand and Australia for TSN this summer. (Canada was drawn in Australia’s group, along with the Republic of Ireland and Nigeria.)

» READ MORE: U.S. Soccer’s new TV deal with Turner Sports will put games on HBO Max and TNT

That includes the Canadian broadcasts of some the U.S. women’s team’s most famous wins: the 2012 Olympic gold medal game and the 2015 World Cup semifinal and final.

“To see pretty much every seat in Vancouver taken by U.S. soccer fans for that [2015] final, and Carli Lloyd put in that performance, that was an incredible moment and one of my one of my career highlights,” Wileman said. “For a long time, it’s been a program, obviously, that has been at the very highest level.”

In the men’s game, Wileman has been TSN’s lead MLS voice for many years. He called games in the recent World Cup, has done Concacaf Gold Cups in the past, and has hosted studio coverage of the English Premier League, the UEFA Champions League, and the European Championship.

Before coming to Canada, Wileman spent six years as a reporter and broadcaster for the BBC.

Wileman will continue to call MLS games for TSN. It’s not too much of a scheduling conflict, because MLS doesn’t play during most FIFA men’s windows (though it will during some this year).

As for analysts, WBD Sports has hired a quartet of well-known ex-pros: Shannon Boxx and Julie Foudy from the women’s game, and DaMarcus Beasley and Kyle Martino from the men’s game.

Boxx is the only newcomer to broadcasting from the group, but she was a star player for the U.S. women: four World Cups from 2003-15, and three Olympics from 2004-12.

Foudy has a long history on TV, having been ESPN’s lead women’s soccer analyst from 2006 through last year. Though the network no longer has any major women’s soccer rights, the 1999 World Cup star remains with ESPN in other roles.

» READ MORE: Ex-Union players Sébastien Le Toux, Maurice Edu to call MLS games on Apple’s streaming platform

Beasley got into broadcasting recently after a long playing career that included four World Cups and many years in MLS and Europe. Later this year, he will join Boxx and Foudy in the National Soccer Hall of Fame.

Martino never reached the others’ heights on the field, but he found a home in the broadcast booth. After being the Union’s inaugural local TV analyst in 2010, he worked for Fox and ESPN, then went to NBC when it acquired MLS rights in 2012. He stayed with the network from then until 2021, on its coverage teams for the English Premier League and Olympics. Now he is returning to the TV world.

Sara Walsh, who has worked on Fox’s soccer coverage and previously hosted ESPN’s “SportsCenter,” will be the studio host. Melissa Ortiz, previously of Fox, FuboTV and ESPN, will be the reporter. She was in Qatar doing social media content for Fox and U.S. Soccer.

Both women are former college soccer players. Ortiz played professionally for a time, and earned 28 caps with Colombia’s national team in the 2010s.

“I’ve always felt that the best broadcasts are when it’s basically like your friends chatting about sports,” Wileman said. “Hopefully, I can build up those relationships pretty quickly. And there’s such a wealth of experience with the people that have been put together, that it shouldn’t be any problem in terms of being able to build that chemistry fairly quickly.”

The games that WBD Sports has the rights to are those that U.S. Soccer controls. In short, that’s home and away friendlies (including the women’s team’s SheBelieves Cup); the men’s team’s Concacaf Nations League group stage games; and men’s World Cup qualifiers.

The last of those won’t matter in the short term, though, because it’s expected that the U.S. men won’t have to qualify for the 2026 tournament they’re co-hosting with Canada and Mexico.

Unfortunately, there’s a new hitch in the broadcasting plans. The original announcement said every game in the contract would be streamed on HBO Max and some would also be televised on TNT. But it turns out that for now, the TNT games won’t be on HBO Max.

It’s not by WBD or U.S. Soccer’s deliberate choice. The issue is the nature of the distribution deals that WBD has for TNT and other platforms its owns. For now, some of the live sports properties that are televised on TNT and sibling channel TBS can’t also be streamed on HBO Max. A source said the company is working to change that in the future, though it’s not clear how long the fix will take to implement.

» READ MORE: Lynn Williams, Midge Purce return to the USWNT for this month’s trip to New Zealand

This much is certain: the situation is not the same as CBS’ choice to keep its NWSL games that are televised on CBS Sports Network off streaming platform Paramount+. And the only TV channel that will carry games in WBD Sports’ deal is TNT. The games won’t be bounced around other channels.

“We want to make the user experience and awareness for fans as seamless as possible,” said Raphael Poplock, senior vice president of business development and strategic partnerships at WBD Sports’ Bleacher Report. “So having TNT as the consistent linear network is a priority for us.”

And while HBO Max is the centerpiece of this deal, it’s clear that WBD Sports as a company still values traditional television broadcasts of live sports.

“Now that we have HBO Max, we like to be able to utilize both [streaming and TV] and try to reach our fans and our customers wherever they are,” said Doug White, WBD Sports’ vice president of sports program planning. “But we know that the screen that that is still most prominent in the eyes of most viewers, most fans, is linear [TV].”