MIAMI — Nearly seven years before this year’s World Cup began, Eli Velazquez, a sports television executive for Telemundo, was awakened by an early morning phone call from his boss six time zones away. It was earth-shattering news.

For the first time, Velazquez’s longtime employer, Telemundo, one of the main Spanish-language broadcast networks in the United States, had wrested away World Cup broadcast rights from Univision, its archrival. For the hefty sum of $600 million, the 2018 and 2022 World Cups were theirs. Still in bed, Velazquez, who had helped prepare Telemundo’s sales pitch, struggled to absorb the welcome, but overwhelming, news.

“I knew,” he recalled, “that our world was going to change dramatically.”

And it has.

The takeover of the World Cup broadcast in Spanish (Fox Sports has the English broadcast rights in the United States) has helped propel Telemundo’s rise as a major player in the world of Spanish-language sports media in the United States. It has also illustrated the big-money maneuvering in recent years by media companies hungry for a piece of the growing Spanish-speaking market. Nearly 58 million Latinos live in the United States, about 18 percent of the population.

Telemundo, whose origins date to the 1950s, recently moved into a new $250 million headquarters here, replacing its previous home in a former shoe warehouse in nearby Hialeah. With the acquisition of other rights over the past two years, Telemundo has been able to broadcast the World Cup, the Super Bowl and the Summer Olympics, for which it has the Spanish-language rights through 2032.