TSN's SportsCentre comes to mind first. Perhaps Sportsnetnews. Maybe even Sports Update on the lesser-known The Score.

But what many sports fans don't know -- and this is one of the best-kept secrets in Canadian broadcasting -- is that the show that draws arguably the biggest, and certainly most international audience, is taped each night in a tiny studio at Global TV's Winnipeg headquarters.

It's called Fox Sports World Report. The 60-minute show airs on Fox Sports World Canada, Fox Soccer Channel, and Fox Sports Middle East. It's available in 25 million homes in the U.S. and has another two million viewers in such exotic locales as Bahrain, Ghana, Nigeria and Kuwait, to name a few.

While many of you might not know of Michelle Lissel, one of the show's anchors, we can tell you that television comic Drew Carey does. For the record, he's a big fan.

So are countless soccer faithful who attended this month's World Cup, where Lissel, a former CKND sports reporter, has been stationed the last 37 days.

"I could not believe the amount of people who've come up to me and said, 'Hey, Michelle, how are you?' " Lissel said when reached yesterday at her hotel room in Berlin, the city where tomorrow's World Cup final between Italy and France will be played.

Yet few, if any, of those loyal viewers would have a hot clue that the show they tune in to every night from Omaha to Oman is produced in Winnipeg, of all places.

"It's an unknown oasis of soccer in Winnipeg," said the show's producer, Luke Crofford. "We live in a football and hockey town, so we enjoy a little bit of anonymity here. But if we go outside this market, there's a better chance of being recognized. It's kind of freaky, actually."

Lissel, who has also been doing occasional live hits from Germany for Fox News, was in Chicago last May for a friendly between the U.S. and England when some guy on the field after the game tugged at her jacket.

"I turned to look... and there was Drew Carey. He said, 'I'm pleased to meet you. I'm a big fan of the show.' " she recalled.

"As I was walking away, I turned to my cameraman and said, 'Did you see who that was?'

"In Chicago, they stop you on the street. In Winnipeg, it's, 'Didn't you used to be on television?'" Then there's analyst Bobby McMahon, who has developed such a following on the show that he was flown to L.A. to provide his World Cup wisdom for the Fox Soccer Channel, which also airs the Winnipeg broadcasts each night.

"It's like that saying: 'A prophet has no honour in his own land,' " offered Dermot McQuarrie, senior vice-president of production and programming and executive producer for Fox Sports International, when reached by phone at his Los Angeles office.

"Anybody who you talk to about the channel knows who (anchors) Michelle, Carlos (Machado), Jeremy (St. Louis) and Mitch (Peacock) are."

As for the Scottish-born McMahon, "The people love him."

"I'm a cheap icon," retorts McMahon, who began appearing on the show in 2001 after being told by the show's original architect, Global sports director Joe Pascucci, "I think we're going to need some filler."

That was when the show, in it's infancy, was designed to offer Canadians who subscribed to the new channel a nightly wrap from the world of soccer, rugby, tennis, motocross and other international sports.

Naturally, sportscasters weaned on North American staples of NHL, CFL and NFL were a little leery of the concept.

Lissel's initial reaction? "Do I have a choice?"

"I knew of Manchester United and Real Madrid," she added. "I didn't follow it (soccer) at all." Needless to say, pronunciation was a problem in the early days, what with a myriad of foreign leagues and names to learn. Pascucci remembers listening to British soccer reports on the Internet. Lissel phoned Danish and Belgian consulates in Ottawa to check proper pronunciation.

It was a lot of trial and error, "but we all learned," Pascucci said.

They must have, because after just a year on the air in Canada, the show, which now focuses almost exclusively on soccer, was bought by McQuarrie, thereby exposing the Winnipeg product to a worldwide audience.

Unlike many big-budget sports news shows, Fox World Report Canada consists of just eight staff, including rotating anchors Lissel, Machado, Peacock and St. Louis, who tape seven days a week, 364 days a year, taking only Christmas Day off.

It goes without saying that while they might all have started out as soccer neophytes to varying degrees, they've become quite versed in the sport by necessity.

"The viewer knows when you're talking crap or just reading the words," McQuarrie said. "You can see it in their eyes. But when (the Winnipeg anchors) read it, they read it with confidence. That comes over on the program."

And to think it comes over in Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. It comes over in Florida, Libya and Morocco.

Concluded Pascucci: "Amazing, isn't it, for a show out of Winnipeg?"

If only Drew Carey knew.

randy.turner@freepress.mb.ca