How the 1994 World Cup Transformed the Business of Football Forever

18:57Do you know about the hand of God in 1986? Yeah, beautiful.

19:00Tracy Alloway:That was 86. That was in 1990. That was the first World Cup I paid attention to. And I like I knew about. And then he had a pretty disappointing 1990 World Cup. Like it was Argentina was pretty mediocre that year. Right. But I was like pretty obsessed with like Maradona that year. And I was sort of as a young kid disappointed that he didn't wasn't couldn't bring back the magic. Yeah. And I think particularly as the game extends. So I'm from, you know, an English background where I went. I've been going to see my club Aston Villa since I was like four years old. And it's so like deeply in my blood that, you know, like, but that's a tiny, I think that's a minority of the people who watch the World Cup.

19:32Most people are from, you know, parts of the world where they might tune in once every four years. And it's all about, you know, those characters and memories and people. And, you know, I'm thinking about 1990, the famous one in England would be Gaz's tears. I don't know if that means anything to you, but Paul Gascoigne, the sort of maverick Englishman who was like pretty sort of chaotic personal life. And he was brilliant, but sort of very flawed. And he, got a yellow card in the semifinal against germany that meant he couldn't play in the final and he cried and it's like gaz's tears is this sort of it's like a part of britain's national story like the sort of romantic view of football in that way and you know england didn't get to the front semifinal england lost that semifinal to germany on penalties which then happened again six years later and this idea of like losing to germany every time is like a very deep in the kind of national myth and every country has its own like i've just been in argentina and like 86 with maradona and you know 2022 with messi the interesting one is 1978 when argentina won the world cup under military dictatorship as people were being tortured like a mile down the road and that's kind of slightly airbrushed out of the the story but like yeah these people these characters i think is what really makes world cups above anything else someone told me i this

20:38Tracy Alloway:is probably fake but it's like one of those things that people say apparently some extraordinary number of people in england have 1966 as their a pin card for their atm machine and that like you can just guess someone's pin because the last time England won the World Cup. Oh, totally. Yeah. This was something that always used to happen. For the 10 years that I was in the UK, every time there was a World Cup, people would get really excited about bringing back the trophy. And you would get all the analysts at the banks with the sell side research. And if they really wanted to get a bunch of clients happy, they would say that England was going to win the World Cup according to their models.

21:18Tracy Alloway:Football's coming home. That's right. That's right. I know a few facts, yeah. Which is a kind of slightly misunderstood slogan, I think, because it's seen as this arrogance or this like, we invented it and we're this imperial people who are going to colonize you and win everything, which is actually this sort of extremely sort of self-deprecating to the point of like melancholic thing about how we never win anything and it's all really miserable, which is sort of national character, I suppose. So I know to some extent we're talking about vibes and it's hard to pinpoint those exactly, but I'm really interested in the contrast between the 1990 World Cup and 1994.

21:49So you go from a very European, not that commercialized event to something that is much more American. And there's a lot more focus on actually generating money. So how did those two events stack up against each other? This is what I'm trying to get at. Yeah. And then you hit this sort of, well, I mean, it's sort of the beginning. USA is the beginning of a process. It's the beginning of this exponential curve where like people are throwing around the figure 12 billion for this World Cup. When three World Cups ago, it was it was half that. is many billions more than Qatar. So the USA is not massive, but it's the beginning of the exponential curve in which the figure that what, you know, the 1990 World Cup in Italy, like lost money.

22:27The USA 94 is this beginning of, I think maybe people didn't realize at the time what a commercial success it could be and how much money was potentially on the table from World Cups themselves. And that's when you lead it to FIFA itself becoming this much more ruthlessly commercial body.

22:41Tracy Alloway:Maybe the right way to think about the compare and contrast is not 1990 versus 1994, but 1990 in Italy versus 1998 in France, both hosted by European stalwart soccer nations. How did those two differ with 1994 having split them in the middle and how much more commercialized and different was 1998 versus 1990? Much more commercial and you have these big sponsors much more prominent in the stadium. So already much more commercial. I mean, the interesting thing about 1998 is that France now feels like a stalwart football nation. It kind of wasn't before 1998. And then in France, because it's a story of economic history and industrialization that France industrialized later than England.

23:22And it was a country where most of its people lived in villages rather than towns and cities. And football is everywhere and always a game of the city. It was spread by trams and trains inside cities. It was initially a child of the weekend. The first workers to get weekends in industrial England were the people who played organized football first, the Saturday 3pm slot. France industrialized later. So it did not have that same culture. And there are pockets of it, you know, St. Etienne, an industrial town in the south of France. But really, France was not a big football country deep into the even 1998.

23:51And then that changed overnight. But still, even now, you know, you go to a small French city, and it's just not a thing that people talk about in a way that it is in England and in Spain and Italy. Can I ask a very basic question? So you've said the word exponential a number of times in terms of the commercialization of the World Cup. FIFA is a not for profit, right? Like technically it's a not for profit.

24:13Tracy Alloway:We're debating this over the weekend. Like what is FIFA? It's supposed to reinvest its money like back into the sport. So what actually, you know, basic question here, but what's driving the urge to generate money from advertising revenue? So FIFA is a vehicle for funneling money from advertisers and TV to member associations. There are 200 and something member associations that make up FIFA. They vote for the president, Gianni Infantino. The World Cup is this huge bonanza of cash, both in terms of tick. So ticketing as this multi-billion dollar thing is completely new. I mean, I'm sure you've heard a lot about ticket prices and lots of Europeans are up in outrage about that.

24:52Americans say that's just, you know, capitalism, baby or whatever. But like, it's like two, three billion dollars now, which is completely new. And the advertising as well. FIFA is the kind of middleman. And then that money goes to member associations. Got it. And it's one member, one vote. So if you're England, Brazil, Germany, you have the same vote as Cape Verde, Suriname. And it means that these countries have incredibly glitzy facilities and it means that they tend to reelect the president.

25:17Tracy Alloway:OK, so that makes sense. So in terms of corporate structure, is the Premier League, is that a for profit organization or is that yet another sort of nonprofit layer that sits above a bunch of privately owned clubs which are for profit? That's correct. Yeah, it's a member association and it votes to vote members. What about the MLS? Is that the similar structure where the MLS is a sort of nominally? It's a franchise system. Oh, it's a franchise system. So the US sports model, which is where a franchise system where there's no promotion and relegation, which, of course, is deeply part of European sport.

25:51It means the valuations of clubs are much lower because you can get relegated. and Tottenham Hotspur, who are a very big club in England, extremely close, came close to getting relegated, which means you fall out of the Premier League and into the league below. My husband is a Spurs fan. So this has been a painful year. Don't want to bring up any trauma. I read stuff around the time saying that even that Spurs came close to relegation is going to harm the valuation of Manchester United and Chelsea and these other teams because it feels possible in a way it didn't a year ago. It just felt they were like too big to fail.

26:22Tracy Alloway:I hadn't thought about that, that basically like that, puts it implicitly that there's a left tail outcome for any club ownership that is just not possible in an entity like Major League Baseball or obviously Major League Soccer, where you just permanently have that spot at the top. That's super interesting. Yeah, there's real stakes. And relegation is obviously very unlikely, but Champions League football, so the top four or five teams in England go on to play in the Champions League, the European wide competition, which is hugely lucrative. And my team, Aston Villa, who are punching way above their weight at the moment and have qualified this year but that means there's not a spot for you know chelsea haven't qualified this year manchester united have gone several years without qualifying they have this year but that's a like left tail risk which is really quite likely and means that you're not going to get that huge pot of money next year and the odds are pretty high the flip side is that teams in lower rated leagues could have that right sale outcome they can be promoted we did that episode years and years ago with that bitcoiner who bought like a team in like bedford england or something like Like the fifth team down with like his Bitcoin profits and he had dreams of like bringing them up.

27:26Tracy Alloway:You know, like you could have like sort of like entrepreneurial football entrepreneurs who like bring their teams up. Yeah. So like it does seem like, you know, I think it would be more exciting. I actually have an old friend or kind of a friend who owns a U.S. soccer club in a smaller league. And he wants the U.S. to introduce like relegation and promotion on this idea that maybe that club could one day be a bigger, more valuable thing. but I have no idea if that could ever happen. Well, I guess the members would have to vote for it. It'd be the same, you know, in any other league. And it's a bit kind of turkeys voting for Christmas.

27:59Okay, since we're on the topic of the Premier League and also right and left tail outcomes. So you write across your coverage a lot about the influence of geopolitics on football, right? And I think at this point, everyone is familiar with the term sports washing. So the idea that certain governments, certain people, certain companies will sponsor a football team to make themselves look good and maybe distract from other scandals. One thing that's interesting to me now is it kind of feels like sports washing can also go in the other direction where you can end up having geopolitical vulnerabilities.

28:33So if I think about Chelsea, you know, Chelsea basically lost their sugar daddy, for lack of a better word, in the form of Abramovich. And I think at some point there was talk about maybe sanctions in the UK against the Emirates And obviously Manchester United owned by Americans. And I imagine for some British people, Americans aren't that popular right now. Does the influence of sports washing go in the other way? Well, I mean, Chelsea, yes, it was very embarrassing for them. Abramovich was sanctioned by the American government. But fundamentally, Chelsea had won one league title before he came in, in the early 2000s.

29:09They won five in the 18 or 19 years after that. So I don't think they'll be, you know, would they have taken that as a Chelsea fan at the start? I basically think and this is maybe putting myself out of a job no one cares that much like no one like people don't become a sports team to grapple with geopolitics and it's kind of pretty terrible sometimes I think because like Newcastle United is probably the most egregious example because they're literally owned by the public investment fund of Saudi Arabia and yeah like that's been I think used as a propaganda vehicle for an autocratic state and yeah it's pretty bad but I don't think fans care and Newcastle United is like a very working class club with a really proud history in this sort of quiet, you know, town that's had a rough few decades and a very proud, a very amazing institution.

29:50And it's a very clever move for the Saudi investment fund to buy it because it has so much sort of authenticity and credibility.

29:56Tracy Alloway:Was there some team that has Gazprom on their logo? Like on their kid? Well, God, you've teed me up because that's the whole first chapter of my book. Which team was that? That's Schalker in Gelsenkirchen in Germany, where I travel and speak to lots of people. So yeah, the great thing there was they had Gazprom on their shirts. And when I went there two years after the invasion of Ukraine, lots of people were wearing blue stickers over the Gazprom logo because they were shamed by it. But yeah, Russian gas and German politics were deeply entwined for decades and best exhibited in the shirt of Schalke.

30:29And politicians and executives would wine and dine there. Germany was buying cheap gas from Russia. So both sides were getting something out of it because Germany doesn't have much natural resources. Russia needed the cash. It all came crashing down in 2022. The one team that does still have Gazprom on their shirts is Red Star Belgrade in Serbia, who also play in European competitions. But of course, Serbia is much more pally with Russia than the rest of Europe. So they don't see a problem there.

30:54Tracy Alloway:So who did that team have to, did they get a new sponsor? Schalke, well, they lost loads of money overnight. It was like 10 million euros. And they'd been kind of declining for a while, but it was almost the straw that broke the camel's back. And they went down to the second division in Germany, which was terrible for them because they're a huge club. So they took a huge financial hit from losing that sponsorship.

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34:33And one of them was like a very famous war hero, but not even explicitly, like maybe a very famous war hero. And I find this really interesting because obviously there's a lot of judgment involved when you say whether a jersey is political or not. And no one is going after like the Netherlands for wearing orange and promoting Protestantism or something like that. So like, how do they make those calls? And does it feel like they're picking on maybe smaller countries with fewer resources to fight against some of these decisions? Well, yeah, all these things are just kind of arbitrary judgment calls.

35:06you know where and there's there's a thing that football associations are constantly grappling with because people that have ripped their shirts off to have something to do with israel palestine or and i can see why but then when the russia ukraine stuff happened in england the kind of whole football community united around we support ukraine and flags and whatever else so these things are often can seem hypocritical can seem contradictory those decisions it's just some person somewhere you know how do you objectively make a call like that but um yeah you're right to flag the netherlands and it's a really interesting one i've actually on instagram been doing a series that's like why each country plays in each color.

35:39And Haiti, they play in red and blue because it was the French tricolore. And when they overthrew the French, the slaveholder, incredible slave revolution in Haiti, and they ripped the whites out of the flag just to be left with blue and red. The Netherlands and the Orange, the story is William of Orange, who's kind of the founding father of the Netherlands. But I don't know if you know the Association of Orange in Northern Ireland and Scotland of the Protestantism and sectarianism and the Club Rangers, which represents the Protestant unionist half of Glasgow. while Celtic is the Irish Republican half.

36:09They play an orange and it's quite inflammatory because it's associated with these sort of sectarian things. So yeah, the same shirt, the same color, but no one would say that about a Netherlands national shirt, even though the origin of the story is similar. It's just these things have different meanings in different contexts, I suppose.

36:23Tracy Alloway:Tell us about the Jersey and Columbia that had a murdered drug dealer on it. Yeah, so that was Envigado FC on the outskirts of Medellin, which the city, which of course gave the world Pablo Escobar. but these days it's a lovely place to visit i'd recommend it to anyone as a tour i've heard everyone says it's amazing it's great and just chills and like great food great vibes but in the it was the it was the highest murder rate in the history of organized statistics was medellin in the 80s like it was just people were being gunned down left right and center because pablo escobar and his cocaine cartel was running the show but football was kind of a tool of all this and escobar owned the one club in medellin but other cartels owned clubs in cali and other colombian cities but the story i was interested in was a bit later than that was so escobar was killed in the early 90s and one of the offshoots from this cartel was in envergado and this guy was killed you know drug bosses are liable to get killed and his son as a loving tribute to his father because they own this football club put his face on the back so on the back of the shirt was this like silhouette of this man's face who was like a murder drug cartel leader and i went to a game there in the sort of humid stadium in the middle of the day and i saw one i was i was like i've made it this far I really hope I get to see this shirt.

37:32And right at the end, I saw it on the back because it's quite old. It's like 10 years old. But they were sanctioned by the American government. They were on this thing, the Clinton list, which is when foreign entities can't deal with US companies. So that means like banks and everything else. It's really tricky to be on that list if you're sanctioned. So they had no sponsor for a while after that. So they had like the silhouette of the drug cartel leader, no sponsor because they were sanctioned by the Americans. And now they're owned by someone else. And they're just, we should say, a normal football team.

37:59how much do those jerseys actually sell for now can you get them off ebay or something i imagine they're worth a lot of money well i mean that was just an incredibly obscure one that i found because i like the story but some of them oh hundreds and hundreds it's a huge industry now and the nostalgia of it people want the kind of 90s ones from when they were kids and yeah it's huge industry yeah obviously people like football jerseys and my personal favorite for this world cup is the away kit for curacao which is this really nice pastel yellow that i think i could get away with but if i go to try to buy it that's selling for like 300 now and it's nice yeah and i think some of the other some of the other popular jerseys like one of the japan ones that has like stripes on it that one's also very cute like they're really choice yeah they're really they're really hard to find now and they're selling for a lot of money what does that actually mean for fans you know if i'm a curacao fan and i can't get my hands on an away jersey unless i pay up like $300.

38:57That seems not ideal. Yeah, well, it's an interesting debate that you hear a lot, because I mean, it's supply and demand, right? You know, they're selling the price that they can get away with it. But in England, you get like politicians standing up and talking about how much a disgrace it is that the shirt is priced at that level. I mean, it's something that means so much to people that it's interesting to sort of the conflict between supply and demand and football, I think is something that we're seeing a lot at the moment with this World Cup, because, you know, Arsenal, who just won the league, who are in London, who are really popular, a ticket there is like 60 pounds maybe like 80 and they're just impossible they're impossible to get you need points like if you're just a random person from the us who wanted to go to an arsenal game next season you just can't you might be able to buy in the secondary market which is completely unregulated you might get scammed what they absolutely do not do is raise it to the market clearing price and charge a thousand dollars for it like that just doesn't happen because it's so deeply ingrained in sort of european sporting culture that that's like wrong whereas the us It takes a different approach.

39:51And this is what we've seen in this World Cup.

39:53Tracy Alloway:When we were in Madrid, I got into that. Did you get a jersey? I didn't get a jersey. But I went on StubHub to buy my ticket. And I got really stressed because as soon as I bought the ticket, I got that pop-up that said away fans will not be allowed into the stadium. And I was like, what if they think I'm an away fan? I don't speak Spanish. I got like, are they going to give me a lie detector test? So I went and I bought a scarf of Atleti. And I wore that to the stadium. So that is like and then I felt OK and I got in no problem. And everyone was like, oh, be careful with your stub hub ticket.

40:24Tracy Alloway:That might be fake. But I was able to get in. So my son is a big Messi fan and he has a pink Messi jersey. But then today on the walk to school, he asked me if Messi was a goalie or not. Oh, my God. So I was like, I was like, so he has this conception that there is this person in the world named Messi. And he has a jersey. Who he really likes. Who he really likes. But evidently quite clear. I mean, he's young. He like does not actually know anything about him. He just knows that there is this existence and likes the jersey. But like, why is my son drawn to this pink jersey? Well, a very clever bit of marketing from, well, so David Beckham is a part owner of, and that's an interesting sort of financial story because when he joined LA Galaxy in 2007, someone put into his contract, whether it was him or he was maybe very well advised, that he would have the ownership rights when a new franchise was introduced into the MLS.

41:12And that became into Miami. And I believe he paid like$25 million, I think, which is basically just a huge bargain. that's what now worth so many times more than that and beckham or again maybe someone advising beckham settled on pink partly because apparently miami is really pink all the buildings are pink but also because basically no other team plays in pink there's so many teams playing red palermo and italy playing pink but that's you know quite niche but no one so pink is just so iconic you just need to see like the collar under a shirt and you know instantly there's a very clever bit of marketing but i was interesting you say about your son and messi because football coming from Europe, the club is the first point of reference.

41:49And that was certainly my own upbringing. And if your favorite player leaves, well, you kind of hate them when they come back for another team. It's all about the club. And that's what you identify with first. Whereas as football is becoming this bigger global thing, it's the individuals and Messi and Ronaldo who are both, you know, way past their best. And it's possible that this tournament, they could be not very good, who knows. But the individual is now more important globally than the club, which is new. Interesting. Just going back to commercialization of the World Cup. So, you know, we've been talking a lot about advertisers and extending, you know, the number of games played in order to expand, I guess, the number of eyeballs on the game and all of that.

42:28there are other ways that fifa is catering to the american market so for instance we now have mandated water breaks which basically turns the game into like quarters right that something that looks a lot more like an american football game than it used to how far could we go in terms of the americanization of uh i guess you know traditionally european slash world football So the other strange thing to me is games start late. They start like, not really late. They just start like five minutes late, which never happens in Europe. And even in these cultures like Italy, Spain, Argentina, where everyone's like late all the time and that's part of the culture.

43:08Football never kicks off late. You've got to build up the suspense in America. Keep them guessing. Yeah, maybe. But it's like I'm sitting on my sofa being like, where are they? Like, you know, I've got stuff to do.

43:16Tracy Alloway:Because they're like announcing and someone's singing the national anthem. Yeah, that does seem like an American thing where there's not real much connection to the nominal time of the sporting event to the actual kickoff or tip off. But the hydration thing, I mean, I'm trying desperately not to be sort of European traditionalist shouting at cloud, but hydration breaks are bad, I think. They're really bad because they completely break up the flow of the game. I've been watching a few where it was kind of really exciting. You maybe had like an underdog hit against the ropes, like playing really well.

43:46And then it completely takes the pace out of everything. And I get it. If it's 40 degrees, like in Texas, fine. but they're doing it in these air conditioned stadiums. They're doing it in Toronto when it was like raining. It's unnecessary. And I think it's really damaging. And I think like the rules of the game have barely changed in 120 years. It would be instantly recognizable if you went back to 1900. And it's a precious thing. And I think if you meddle with it a bit, you risk kind of ruining the whole experience.

44:09Tracy Alloway:I have to say going to the game in Madrid, I really liked basically knowing what time the game was going to end. You know, you get there at a certain time, 45 minutes plus a couple minutes break, 45 minutes plus a couple minutes, game's over. And I thought for planning my night, it was just very nice to not have to concern it was just going to go. I guess there could have been penalty kicks or something like that or overtime. But even then, it could be two and a half hours. That's the absolute maximum. Wait, this actually just reminded me when MLS was just getting off the ground, didn't they have something where if you were doing penalty shootouts, you had to dribble for ages and it was supposed to make it more exciting?

44:49it's great yeah you like that i love it yeah american innovation done right i mean it's so cool if you watch on youtube you see these guys with these like really baggy shirts and they all just look like some of those players were like college players you know who ended up playing for the national team and the way you do it is you get the ball like maybe around the halfway line and you just sort of run at the goal yeah it makes it much more even it's harder to score so it's like a 50 like a hockey i think a hockey penalty is like 50 50 but a football penalty is like 80 percent and it means most of the time it goes in when it doesn't it's like devastating for the person who misses but it's a much more yeah it's fun it's exciting i'm well up for that like you know let the americans do their thing wait wait now i have to run something by both of you so i had an idea for making football more exciting for americans so the complaint that you always hear or at least that my dad says right they don't score enough goals never mind that in the last super bowl there were like two meaningful touchdowns or something but whatever there aren't enough goals in soccer so what if you started awarding points for a corner so if you get one point per corner successful corner and then you get three points for a goal oh i'm unconvinced about that but the spain cave heard was thrilling and that was nil nil when you've got some by the way you know what i you know the tension makes it you know what i was

46:08Tracy Alloway:introduced to our producer kell showed me this before the atletic game which i'd never seen that there is this very like predictive, essentially, I don't know, machine learning AI type thing where at any given moment, there's like this swing and you can see like who has the momentum. What are these charts called? Like the momentum chart. Yeah, that's the momentum charts. And you could say like, so that you could see like a team in this position would have scored a goal like 70%. XG. Yeah. And I was thinking maybe a nice way to add some more attention is that in the event of a draw, that you award the victory to the team that had the greater momentum throughout the game.

46:47No, why wouldn't you just have a penalty shootout?

46:49Tracy Alloway:No, because then you just encourage attacking play throughout so that you're rewarded in the event of a draw. What do you think about that proposal? That in the event of a draw... Yeah, that's the tiebreaker. Exactly. So the tiebreaker is expected goals, and therefore you're rewarded for having played consistent attacking play throughout the game even if, you know, it didn't materialize and the ball went off the post or something like that. What do you think about that? But when the team wins on expected goals, which measures how good... But when team lose with a better XG, that's the thrill of it, right?

47:23That's why you get more upsets. No, no, sure, sure.

47:24Tracy Alloway:Yeah, yeah, no, that's exciting. And I totally get that. And you're like, we should, like, if one team had better XG, but the other team got more goals, fine. That's exciting. But in the event of a tie, you go to the XG and then you, like, rather than, like, sort of very defensive ball. People would find some way to game that, too. And also, people are already up in arms about the VAR stuff. Yeah. And by the way, I still can't say VAR without thinking of value at risk. I thought that was exciting. During the game, there were two times where the referees went back and looked at a call that was made on the field.

47:56Tracy Alloway:And I found a true— That was the interesting part for you. The energy in the stadium was incredibly high waiting for those referee reviews. and i sort of thought it added to the fun of like being in the stadium while we were waiting for the calls i think it's got better yeah i think it's sped up i think at the beginning there are a lot of teething pains and it was often really slow and often people in the stadiums what they're doing better at now is communicating to the people in the stadium yeah because i've been in a stadium where it just goes on for like five minutes people are like texting their friends saying what's going on are you watching on tv um so it has got better i think there are still like huge problems with a lot of these calls are fundamentally subjective right yeah like an offside is objective, but so, you know, is a foul a foul?

48:36Is a handball, you know, if it bangs you on your shoulder there, it's not a foul, but if it's your handball, things cannot be perfected through data or whatever else. So there will always be that tension there.

48:46Tracy Alloway:It's funny. He mentions texting people who are watching on TV. So many of the fans that I saw were watching broadcasts on their phone during the game so that they would have like a little like stream on their phone. And so during to call it sad yeah whatever but they were like getting more commentary and stuff like that that no that's no that's wrong and also okay but on this note you mentioned energy just then how do we get a proper chant culture going in american football or football which takes place in america and i think even in the uk some of the chanting is starting to go away a little bit which is very disappointing yeah well i think i think it's partly to do with the sort of who is in the crowd it's much more of a sort of big family event in the US potentially, or the UK is becoming more so, whereas previously it would have just been mainly kind of big groups of young men who probably just chant more than families, to be honest.

49:39And that's changed. And that's probably a good thing for the most part, but certainly the culture has changed quite a bit. But yeah, I mean, some of these songs, some of these songs in English football have like a century of history. But yeah, I've been to some couple of MLS games and I thought the atmosphere was pretty good. I went to the New York Red Bulls and I was, I don't know, expecting a sort of the US, the sort of energy drink company. And it was pretty good like i was impressed the cosmos games were always really good because people would bring like drum sets and stuff but in terms of chanting i have to say in my experience the ultimate champions are actually japanese baseball teams oh yeah i've heard they do it like perfectly in

50:11Tracy Alloway:unison i really really want to go to a japanese that's great vibes if you like the cyclones yeah i know that's definitely high up on actually one last question my understanding so obviously football has become more popular in the United States today in 2026 than it was in 1994. My understanding, and tell me if I'm wrong, is that if you go to like a typical American football fan, there will be some people who are like really into, they'll have their favorite Premier League team or their favorite European team that they're really into. Or there'll be some who are like really into the MLS, but that there isn't a lot of crossover that's still like you're sort of either into European football or American MLS, but not really you're like kind of one or the other is that the case i think that's true and the mls has real pockets i think like in the northwest in portland and seattle it's long been big there are other places where it's particularly strong and yeah and i think there is sometimes a bit of a sort of culture war between i mean you get this in in europe or in england of teams who support their small local team versus the big team on tv yeah but i think one interesting thing with european leagues is that the english league is currently like eating everyone else's lunch it's just like becoming this sort of winner takes all all the tv revenue is flowing there and it's really harming sort of spain and italy and these huge football institutions like ac milan have less money than these like tiny english teams yeah i feel like you don't hear about the bundesliga at all anymore right like you never well munich just win it every year so it's kind of boring okay well anyway i just want to go back to the big will fifa kill the golden goose oh yeah yeah question it's sad in my head i'm doing a goal golden pun but you can't even tell on the podcast So I apologize for mentioning that at all.

51:48But how far can you actually push commercialization? And as we see FIFA especially try to make more space for advertisers through, they haven't said this explicitly, when they talk about the hydration breaks, they say it's the welfare of the players and all of that. But like, it certainly looks like they're making defined space for ads. At what point does it mean that you start to lose some of the magic of the sport? I'm sure you've been asked this question a ton and you probably thought about it a ton. Yeah, well, I think it can happen. I think it probably I basically think the World Cup is like, well, for me, it's like the pinnacle of human civilization and the greatest cultural event on Earth.

52:27And it is the biggest cultural event on Earth by an absolute mile. So I think it's pretty hard to mess it up. Like you just need two teams, a pitch, get some fans in. You know, it's not some great like you don't need to think too hard about how to do it in four years time. But the more you meddle with it, the more you tinker at the edges. I don't think the whole thing would come like crashing down overnight. But I do think if you keep meddling with it, then children will become less into it than their parents did. And very slowly, you could sort of chip away at the edges of it. There are obviously so much more attention distractions these days that someone sitting still for two hours is harder to convince them to do.

52:58But yeah, I think in the short term, they can probably rinse even more cash out of it, to be honest, because it's just such a perfect event.

53:05Tracy Alloway:All right, Joey Durso, thank you so much for coming on OddLots. I'm glad we got a World Cup episode in. There's so much going on in the world right now, but it could have easily done a bunch of a million AI episodes. And I'm glad we covered the World Cup and you were the perfect guest. So thank you so much for coming on NABLA. Thanks for having me. I enjoyed it.

53:34Tracy Alloway:Tracy, that was a lot of fun. Many interesting points. One thing I thought was interesting is the idea of the fandom of the player rather than the team emerging over time. You get these global superstars like a Messi or a Ronaldo or maybe like a Beckham or something like that. Yeah, but then the rhetorics, you're not a real fan. No, you're not. But like, you know, like from the perspective, then they like take their money with them from one city to another. I could see that really changing the game or sort of like changing the nature of like people's relationship with the sport. Yeah. But again, like if I was going to be cynical about this, it makes it even more about the money.

54:11I'm not defending it. No, no, no. I'm not saying there's a good thing.

54:13Tracy Alloway:I'm saying that's an interesting shift in how people. Right. And I'm saying an effect of that will be that whoever has the most money and can afford like the best player just gets them and gets even bigger, even more money. And it's this like self-reinforcing cycle, which is what we're seeing in a lot of European football at the moment. By the way, material culture trivia for you on the pink jersey point. Go on. Did you know that pink used to be much more of a gender neutral color? I didn't know that. Even more of a masculine color than a feminine color. Really? Yeah. Do you have any idea when that changed?

54:46I think in the early to mid-1900s. Kind of interesting.

54:50Tracy Alloway:I'd like to learn more about that. We should also have Joy on back again, maybe in quieter days, talk about the connection between football and the stock market crash of the 1920s. Yeah, that was interesting. I had no idea. Maybe I'll go find, I'll Google that and read more on that. But I'm very curious about that. But no, that was a really fun conversation. Who are you supporting in the World Cup? I don't know. You know what? I've really been like so busy. I just like, you know, we've been traveling and the Knicks. And so I'm like, I need this weekend. We're recording this. To really think about it.

55:23Tracy Alloway:No, no, for real. Like I haven't watched a World Cup match yet. So it's June. We're recording this on June 16th. I need this weekend to like sort of reset. every this week to reset and sort of get my bearings like okay what world cup matches am i gonna i just have not had that had the mental space to allocate like you know i remember like in 2010 i was gonna bring it up i loved that one with the vuvuzelas that was the one in south africa vuvuzelas yeah that was i love that one and like everyone in brooklyn with their i thought that's my nightmare being in a football stadium with someone with a vuvuzela like i could see Yeah.

55:56What do the Cape Verde jerseys actually look like? Wait, I want to see. They're blue. Could be better. Still, Cape Verde for the win. Shall we leave it there?

56:08Tracy Alloway:Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. You can follow our guest, Joey Durso. He's at Joseph M. Durso. And check out his book, More Than a Shirt, How Football Shirts Explain Global Politics, Money, and Power. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armandashel Bennett at Dashbot, Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks, and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And for more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Odd Lots for the daily newsletter and all of our episodes.

56:41Tracy Alloway:And you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg slash Odd Lots. And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we do sports talk, I guess, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

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