Is the USA ready for the World Cup? – Football Weekly podcast

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0:47Hello and welcome to the Guardian Football Weekly. It's a month until the World Cup and we're getting lots of questions like, when are you going to talk about what's happening in the US? Well, even if we have covered it a lot in passing, consider this an official start. We're joined by two experts in the US to discuss ticket prices, Iran, visas, ICE, Trump, Gianni, public transport and general enthusiasm for the tournament. We'll also discuss the US side and their chances, grassroots football. All that on a bonus episode of the Guardian Football Weekly.

1:16On the panel today, Alex Abnos, Senior Sports Editor at The Guardian, our friend from Austin, Texas. Welcome, Alex. Hello, Max. I mean, not from Austin, Texas, but that's when we had our wild times together. Leander Schollekens, soccer journalist, author of The Long Game, US Men's Soccer and its savage four-decade journey to the top or thereabouts. And we'll get to Leander to whether it's got to the top yet or whether it'll get to the top this summer in a bit. Hey, Leander, how are you? Hi, Max. Barry is here, as always. Hi, Baz. Hi, Max. As with every major tournament, we have that tricky balance of wanting to enjoy the football without ignoring the political climate.

1:54We've talked about it before. We'll talk about it again, no doubt i'm going to start with this email from george who says hey max barry and everyone else monday marks one month before the world cup begins usually it feels like there's a lot more buzz around the tournament is it just me or does it feel very flat this time around any thoughts on why is it general apathy towards a grotesquely large competition being run by grotesquely shameless men who are turning it into an inevitable vanity parade is it because the premier league title race is still interesting is it the general negative news stories are you ticket prices that are streaming out from across the Atlantic.

2:25I also wonder how Mexicans and Canadians are feeling about it all. They're supposed to be co-hosts, but being treated like bit part players. And I suppose in the UK, like it is still the football season, right? We're not thinking about the World Cup and we won't for a couple of weeks, I guess. What's it like over there? It's not the football season. I mean, it is your football season that many people are paying attention to. I think as with many big events in the US, you know, the ramp up hasn't really started yet. I think you often find with tournaments like this, you see this with the Olympics too, it's very much not happening until it's on the absolute most eve of it happening.

3:02And then it's all that anybody is talking about. And it tends to go that way for the entire length of time that it exists. So, you know, is everybody on the street here talking about the World Cup? Not really. I mean, you know, you get, I'm certainly had more conversations about it in the last month or so than I have in the month previous, but it's not as if it's the only thing on everybody's minds right now. I think you'll see that change in a very, very big way, maybe in a couple weeks, and then exponentially more so in the next week. And then once the tournament starts, it's all anybody's going to be talking about because these games are going to be happening and they're going to be bringing people to people's doorsteps, sometimes literally.

3:41There's a little bit ways to go, but that's not necessarily a bad thing or all that unusual. Yeah. Would you go with that, Leander? There was a poll conducted a month ahead of the 1994 World Cup, which was the last one that was held here. And I found that 80 % of Americans at that time didn't know what the World Cup was or that it was going to be on their doorstep. So if we take a comparison, we are miles ahead of there where at least people know what it is. But there is a lot of other programming on. The NHL playoffs are going on. The NBA playoffs are going on. Baseball season is going. So it's just not something people are really thinking about as much with a few weeks to go, which is sort of as you would expect this time before World Cup.

4:20But you see little snippets of it left and right. You walk into stores or businesses that are sponsors and you'll see World Cup signage and stuff like that. So it's starting to creep into daily life very slowly. If we go through the major sort of political concerns to begin with, I guess Iran and its involvement, Alex, and, you know, Infantino basically saying, no, look, it's all fine. They'll be in America. I've decided this. And obviously, this is such a moving story. So don't we record this today? And then by the time it goes out, it may not be relevant. How do you see that playing out? Oh, geez.

4:54If I knew or if I had any definitive question. No, it's OK. If I had any sort of definitive vision for how this would play out, I would be probably doing something else. But yeah, I mean, it's really, really tough to say. As you say, there have been yet another volley of words between our various countries' governments. It's difficult to know what, if any, effect that will have on the soccer team's participation in the World Cup. One would think it would be very important, but if that was truly the case, I think Iran would have been out of the tournament a long time ago. I think it is in the best interest of a lot of different stakeholders for them to take place and for the tournament to go on uninterrupted.

5:36And I think that them being withdrawn from the tournament or kicked out of the tournament or however it happens would just come with a lot of questions and a lot of talking points, a lot of logistical issues that I don't think, frankly, a lot of people want to deal with. personally I want to see Iran play at this World Cup I think that they're just a fantastic story and are always a fantastic story because despite all of the sanctions that have been levied on them over so many years and despite their kind of pariah status sometimes deservedly so among the international community their soccer team has continued to be amazing and they're consistently one of the best in Asia they've earned their spot in this World Cup on the on the backs of their play on the field so i would kind of prefer they just sort of are allowed to see that till its conclusion

6:21Max Rushden:whenever that may be a couple of days ago the head of the iranian football federation said that they would play at the world cup subject to a list of 10 conditions they were laying out being met and the conditions didn't seem particularly unreasonable to me a lot of them are related to visas, fan travel, their anthem being treated respectfully, etc., etc. I imagine that the American administration might balk at some of those conditions. As things stand, they're due to play the three group games in the States, two in LA, one in Seattle. So I don't think their participation is in any way guaranteed yet.

7:09Max Rushden:It's too early to say. It's really interesting because I think the anthem point at least is 100 % directed mostly at the fans of them that they will be playing in front of because Los Angeles has the biggest Iranian diaspora population in the United States, many of whom I would say the vast, vast, vast majority are no fans of the regime that is currently in place. So if anybody's going to be booing or whistling or whatever during the Iranian national anthem, I would think it's going to be a lot of Iranian fans in Los Angeles. How FIFA plans to control that? I don't know how you do that. I know that at least with displays of political signage and shirts that are anti-regime, which I know is also on that list of demands, they do have a measure of control over that in the sense that they can see fans as they're coming in and pat them down and make sure they're not bringing in anything.

8:10But that's also nothing new because they did that in Qatar as well, because those games took place right in the middle of the Masa Amini protests. There were lots of people that were entering in that first group game against England wearing Women Life Freedom shirts. And then by the second game, most of them were no longer wearing those shirts or being made to remove them. And the makeup of the crowd changed in a very noticeable way from games one to two and then also to three. The difference now is that Iran cannot send their own people from the regime. People from Iran cannot travel to the U.S.

8:45in the vast majority of cases to try to affect the makeup of the crowd in the same way. So I think probably the Iranian football head was looking at this situation saying, FIFA, help us out here. because I think it's very likely that should they play in Los Angeles, especially, it's going to be sort of ground zero for a lot of political displays. Yeah, that's really interesting. And I suppose, Leander, what experience tells us about these major tournaments is once the football starts, everything else sort of disappears. And then we enjoy the football and we can worry about everything else later.

9:21But given the unpredictability of Trump, I suppose, and again, it's not a question that's easy to answer it's you just don't know if that will happen in this case it almost you know if you sort of think about russia or qatar right which obviously have their own human rights issues there's almost like a consistency with their leadership in a sort of which is do you understand the point i'm making in a sort of weird kind of way that trump is so unpredictable that you don't know specifically with the us exactly how mid-world cup he might make a decision on something feels like every world cup introduces its own set of issues right And I can't remember.

9:55This is going to be my fourth World Cup. I don't remember a single one where there wasn't some kind of problem and some kind of hand-wringing that was happening ahead of kickoff. And you're right. Then usually once the football starts to happen, we kind of forget about everything and we watch all the pretty soccer and we move on. It feels like this World Cup is inventing entirely new categories of issues that were previously unknown to man. And there's just so many variables this time around. And there's so little consistency from day to day in the leadership that's overseeing this thing. we are run by a regime that will change on a whim and and that answers to one man and that man is going to do what he's going to do depending on the last thing he was told or saw or heard um so it feels especially volatile so there's there's just a million different things to worry about i was going to say what are you most worried about the the ability for people to come to this world cup i mean aside from the cost of them aside from the cost of travel and the hotels is will people be allowed into this country?

10:56Will people be allowed out of this country for that matter? Once they get here, will they be allowed to leave? Will it feel like a World Cup? The organizers have kind of been boasting that this is going to feel like 104 Super Bowls in 39 days because it's such a big event and they're kind of trying to put it on an American scale. But what you see at the Super Bowl by and large is that it's only doctors and lawyers and executives who can afford to go to the thing, right? and so is it really going to be that celebration of the sport that we all hope to see or is it just going to be fully gentrified and a one percent world cup that's what i'm really worried about ticket prices then such a massive talking point anecdotally alex or orleana do you know people who bought tickets and are going to games and have bought tickets for prices that aren't absolutely extortionate i've heard from people that have managed to snag tickets that are that they consider to be not totally ridiculous so i don't know anybody that's shelled out we've heard stories from other people that I don't know personally that have shelled out thousands upon thousands upon thousands of dollars for tickets.

11:57And to those people, I say, good on you for having the money, I guess. But Gianni Infantino had a quote the other day at the Milliken conference. This made the rounds because it was just so self-evidently ridiculous that he said that you cannot get into any game in the US, a college game is what he was referring to, but he's saying a college or professional game for less than$300. And it is so, the reason I say it's so self-evidently ridiculous, because like every single person, every single American that has lived in the U.S. for any amount of time, that has ever gone to a sports game anywhere in the U.S.

12:35knows that is just false. And a FIFA spokesperson was telling me that he was referring specifically to college football and professional football. And I think even in that case, it doesn't apply. Like the only game that might apply to is the college football national championship game. And it's I mean, how many people are really going to go to that? It's just it's just a ridiculous statement to make. I think FIFA are taking the existence of dynamic pricing, which is true, it does exist in North America, and it is used to raise ticket prices. And they're using that as sort of an excuse to raise the prices as much as possible to generate as much revenue as possible.

13:12But this idea that Americans are just used to paying these prices just because dynamic pricing exists is just not true. It's just not.

13:24Max Rushden:I looked at FIFA's resale site a couple of hours ago. So the very cheapest ticket available for the final on FIFA's resale site is just shy of£7 ,000 sterling. For the third place playoff, it's£686. for the semi-finals £2 ,000 now with apologies to our Austrian friends they appear to be the coldest ticket in town as far as group games are concerned so you can get a ticket for Austria-Algeria £135 and Austria-Jordan £135 and Jordan-Algeria£140 I'm not trying to condone FIFA's gouging in any way, but if they cap the prices on their resale site, one presumes the tickets will just end up on some other resale site at similar prices.

14:27I think in that case, though, more tickets would probably clear down to what is a reasonable market value because it feels like there's a decent amount of games where there's still inventory that hasn't been sold at all. a few days ago there were still tickets to be had for the u.s opener against paraguay that just hadn't sold in the first place but they were going at eleven hundred and twenty dollars a piece which is extraordinary i know some people that are going to go to the world cup i know a lot of them that aren't because either they don't have the disposable income or it just isn't worth their while at that cost because for a family of four best case scenario you're looking at a thousand dollars to get yourself to a game and it's more likely to be two thousand dollars and even in a country where the where the average household income is just under eighty four thousand dollars that's a ton of money there just aren't that many americans that can afford to go to these things and that's to say nothing of people who'd like to come here from elsewhere and have to pay for travel on top of that it is really wild to have this discussion about the biggest sporting event that's happening in the u.s this whole year happening at the exact same time that affordability and general life stuff is also such a big talking point politically pretty much everywhere.

15:39I mean, granted, I live in New York City, so I'm like, I listen to the affordability mayor every single day. But the reason that he won on that is because it's a thing that people are talking about. And it's just like these two realities can't exist at the same time. Americans are struggling to afford things. That is a fact. These tickets are too expensive. That is also a fact. FIFA making all sorts of excuses like we're used to this just it just doesn't wash to me at all fifa tripled the price of its best available tickets the world cup final making 32 970 seats available it previously had a uh a high price of 10 990 for category one and i suppose the thing is is that like i love football but like a game can be bad and like there's a there's a sort of amount you can spend on something like it doesn't matter how nice the steak is if you've spent like a million dollars on it right if if the if you're sitting there in your seat thinking i paid ten thousand dollars for this and it's you know and it's still nil nil matt hughes reporting that outside of uh fifa's marketplace ticket prices appear to be falling according to ticket data.com which tracks prices from a number of resellers including stub hub seat geek and vivid seats the cheapest available for 87 of the 91 matches in the usa and canada had fallen over the past 14 days it's so hard if you are a fan of a team that don't often qualify for a world cup i think i feel for like you know scotland fans say you know who go well when is our next one okay there are more teams in the world cup who knows by the next world cup she only might have 200 teams in here but like you just don't know when your next world cup will be yeah well our mate barris

17:15Max Rushden:the gym has told me about scottish fans he knows of who aren't going uh some of them because uh They've had their collars felt in the past and are worried that they won't get visas because they've got criminal convictions. And others because it's just prohibitively expensive. So what they're going to do instead is pitch up in Benidorm, the Spanish holiday resort, for the duration of the group stages. And I'm sure they'll have a lovely time and it'll cost them a fraction, like a very small fraction of what it would have cost them to go to the States. I know England fans who never miss a tournament, who are skipping this one because of the expense.

17:58Max Rushden:I know of one fellow who works at the Guardian who isn't going. He said he can afford it, but he just doesn't fancy it because of Trump and Infantino and ice and whatnot. You know, Ireland haven't qualified. I would have been interested to see how many Irish would have traveled if they qualified. but you know that there are so many Irish in America they would still be massively represented in the stadiums if even if the fans weren't from Ireland but they're not there so it's relevant New Jersey transit ramping up the prices for fans to commute out to the stadium because FIFA it's going to cost them about 50 million quid of taxpayers money to ferry people to and from matches so just all the additional expense on top of already overpriced tickets makes it it doesn't make an attractive proposition at all yeah just on that public transport thing alex is that um because there was a bit of a sort of to and fro between i saw one governor uh you know posting a video and then FIFA replying.

19:08Like, who is right about this? Can everybody be wrong? Yes, yeah, yeah, for sure. Is that an acceptable answer? I mean, I will say, I think I understand where the New Jersey government is coming from. They were sort of grandfathered into this deal to host World Cup games without any real plan for how this was not going to cost the state and its taxpayers a huge amount of money. So they needed to make it up somehow. and they decided to make it up that way. So I have a degree of understanding for why things played out the way they did as far as that goes. I don't know if a$150 train ticket is necessarily the most clean and best way to go about recouping some of that money, especially considering that other cities in other ways have shown that you do not have to necessarily submit to every single thing FIFA wants you to do in order to extract the most revenue possible out of the tournament.

20:06We've seen in Atlanta, Mercedes-Benz Stadium is a huge, amazing arena that is famed throughout the United States for, even by U.S. standards, to have very cheap concessions. Snacks, Cokes, the amount that you pay for them inside the stadium is almost exactly what you would pay outside the stadium. And that's a rarity in the U.S. And FIFA came in, from what I've been told, and said, hey, you actually need to charge way more for all of the beer and all of the sodas and all the snacks if you're going to want to host World Cup games. And Mercedes-Benz Stadium just said, no, we're not going to do that, because then we would not be Mercedes-Benz Stadium.

20:43And they won that. And snacks in Mercedes-Benz Stadium are going to be cheaper than they are for any other World Cup venue. Kansas City is building a whole bus network in a city that has no real functional public transportation to speak of outside of one streetcar line downtown. And to access it for the duration of the tournament, you'll need to pay something like 50 bucks. And that's for unlimited rides. Now, 50 bucks is not nothing, but it is, considering that they're creating something from nothing and allowing you unlimited access to it for the tournament, it's a little bit closer to what you would expect to pay for that.

21:17What we're running into in a lot of these host cities is that the local governments of the cities and of the states are not the same as they were when the tournament was awarded to the United States in 2018. So that's what happened in New Jersey, where the new governor sort of was handed this deal that had been agreed to by a previous government and said, here you go, here's what you're doing. And all of these issues, I think, are downstream from the fact that FIFA has sort of, in almost like a hostile takeover, leveraged this entire tournament for its own benefit. At the last World Cup in the United States, at most every World Cup, there's a local organizing committee, usually run by the domestic federation.

21:57They will sort of get a bunch of people together and they will organize the tournament. And then FIFA will be involved, obviously. But what's happened this time around is FIFA has effectively moved in. They opened headquarters in Miami. They opened their little headquarters in Trump Tower, although that's more decorative than anything else, I think. And then they created these local organizing committees within the host cities to kind of handle the dirty work and the unprofitable work, right, of transportation and fan fests and all the rest. So there isn't kind of that organizational intermediary that's supposed to sit in between those two things that figures out stuff like security and transport and all the rest that you would normally have because FIFA decided what they really need to do here is swoop in and make sure that they kind of concentrated as many of the revenue streams within their own budget as they could.

22:50Can I ask about ICE? Alex, Baz mentioned it. It has fallen out of the headlines around the world. That doesn't mean they're not wandering around the streets in the US. I don't know. And there was a concern in the lead up that they might operate as security. There were lots of concerns that they would use World Cup games as an opportunity to, you know, basically pick off undocumented migrants off the street or, you know, any diaspora, you know, supporting their country. So I just wonder what the latest is on that. Yeah, I mean, you're totally right that ICE is not quite as in the focus as it has been.

23:24And certainly when we spoke in Austin and in the months previous, they are still very active. You know, the ICE raids have not gone away. These things have not stopped happening. They're maybe a little bit less in frequency, a little bit less in headlines. And personally, I've always been a little bit dubious of the idea that they would use the World Cup as a mass staging ground for raids. I think that this is not an unreasonable fear. I just don't see it happening for a number of reasons, mainly because it would cast FIFA in a really, really bad light. It would end up blowing back on the Trump administration in a way that I think they really wouldn't enjoy.

24:02And also, this has been a fear for every major event that's happened in the U.S. since Trump took over for his second term. It was a fear for, I think, both Super Bowls, or at least, yeah, certainly the most recent Super Bowl. There was a fear that ICE would have large-scale operations outside of San Francisco. That ended up not really happening. There was a fear that they would be doing similar sort of operations outside of Club World Cup games. Granted, Club World Cup is a very different traveling sort of identity of fan that you get than the World Cup, but we didn't really see it happening.

24:34I think ice is way more likely to operate in places where not quite so many cameras are, basically. If you were to be scared of ice while traveling in the United States of America for the World Cup, I would be more scared of them away from the stadiums when you're just out and having an otherwise lovely time. Leander, there was a point in that email about, you know, Canada and Mexico feeling a bit part player. And I'm very conscious that, you know, we don't have any Mexicans or Canadians on this panel, for example. And, you know, we will, of course, address that as we lead up to the tournament.

25:05But do you get that sense that, you know, they are bit part players in this? Or is it just, you know, U.S. politics, U.S. life is just a much more dominant force globally anyway? I think it's a bit of both, unfortunately. I mean, this tournament was very much sold to FIFA as a uniting event that, you know, during the first Trump administration, it was kind of the bid book says unity on the front. And it was presented as something that would help bring North America back together after some struggles over a wall that mostly wasn't built in the end. And the reason that we have three countries here is because the federations made a compromise, right?

25:47They figured out that if they went in together and unified their three bids for the World Cup, then they were all basically guaranteed to get the World Cup. And then they kind of divvied up how many games they would each get. So Canada and Mexico were always going to get fewer games. But they have definitely been overshadowed by everything that goes on in the United States. I mean, you can see it in the fact of how little Johnny Infantino has bothered to spend time with the heads of state of Canada and Mexico, whereas he's constantly at the White House. He's been to Mar-a-Lago, I believe. He's just always a presence around Trump.

26:22And so you can usually tell how FIFA feels about things and what's important to them by kind of tracking where Infantino shows up and where he doesn't. Okay, that'll do for part one. Part two, we'll go on the pitch for a bit. and concentrate on the USMNT.

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27:20Welcome to part two, the Guardian Football Weekly. Leander, your book, it is, you know, four-decade journey to the top or thereabouts. So you need USMNT to get to the top, ideally for your book sales, amongst other things, or thereabouts, or thereabouts. That would be optimal. I would appreciate it very much. But I think realistically, the top for this team at a 48-team tournament probably means the quarterfinals. I don't know how you feel, Alex. Yeah, that's about right. I mean, quarterfinals would be more knockout wins than they've ever had before. So sure, let's go with that. Okay, so the group of Paraguay, Australia, Turkey.