You know, someone told me I should probably fake, but it's like one of those things that people say, apparently. Like, I don't know, some extraordinary number of people in England have 1966 as their pin card for their machine?
Absolutely. And that, like, you could just guess everyone's pin, because the last time England won the World Cup, this was something that always used to happen for the ten 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, and if they really wanted to get a bunch of clients happy, they would say that the building was going to win the world Prize according to their model.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, football's coming home.
That's right, that's right. Yeah, I know a few. I know. Yeah, yeah. Which is a kind of slightly misunderstood slogan, I think, because it's seen as less arrogant. So that's like we invented it and we're the imperial people who are going to colonize you and win everything, which is actually 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 not national character, I suppose.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway. First of all, are we calling it football or soccer? Are we saying, you know, I'm fine with either. I've accepted whatever. I don't feel strongly. But just for like consistency's sake, I guess we'll just call it football on this episode.
If you want, that's fine with me. I like that you're defining the terms beforehand. This is important.
It doesn't. As long as we all are operating on, let's say I'm happy to call it football. Busy time, obviously, coming back in the sports and the sports world. Sports world. I think when you landed back from our recent trip to Asia, it was like literally like the final minutes of the Knicks winning.
Yeah, it was nuts. I was driving through lower Manhattan and everyone was spilling out into the streets, watching the game through like the windows of bars and stuff. And then of course, when they won, you could hear the entire city just go nuts.
Yeah. So part of me is like, why aren't we doing a basketball episode? Because it feels very much like New York is actually focused on basketball at the moment, even though we obviously have a very big football/soccer event.
Yeah. And I was walking through my neighborhood. I live in the East Village and I saw it like everyone, it's very festive time. And the city, everyone was like sitting out in the outdoor bars and stuff, like watching whatever World Cup match was on last time. Obviously, whatever World Cup match, I forget what was airing.
Well, to be fair, you could lose track in this particular World Cup because it's the biggest ever World Cup.
So it means they have like the most teams playing the most games ever. I can't remember the exact number, but I think it's almost 50 teams versus previously it was about 30 teams.
32 teams, sort of, I assume. Yeah. So FIFA argue that this is about making the game even bigger. You know, diversity and inclusion and all of that. But if you were going to be cynical, and some people would argue you should be cynical when it comes to FIFA, you could argue that it's about selling more ads.
Oh, yeah, of course, selling more tickets to more games and also internal politics. So currying favor with some smaller nations for political reasons.
All of that then makes sense, actually, because I was sort of wondering, no offense to any of them. Like I was like, we're going to offend so many people in this episode. I can already tell like, oh, that's pretty impressive that like, curse them in the World Cup and so forth. Did you see the Cape Verde game, the Cape Verde game.
Right. So that was insane. So okay, so part of the concern with FIFA expanding this to like 50 teams is that, well, you don't get the same, I guess, intensity that you would in a World Cup with a smaller group. And you get all these meaningless games like Curaçao versus Germany.
Yeah. But then Cape Verde played Spain and it wasn't a dead rubber game. It ended up like being kind of an upset because Spain are supposed to be favorites for the entire cup.
I know it was a, yeah, yeah. And so now I am proud to say I'm a diehard Cape Verde fan, and I really want this whole like dead rubber thing to just blow up in FIFA's face. You know, one thing I'm aware of with football in general is that we could have an entire podcast on the money side of it and like, you know, people said, oh, you should really do an episode on how like, you know, whatever team and whatever league in Europe is now permanently going to be relegated because they've signed these financial. And it's like, you know what? That sounds like really fun. That's fascinating to me. But unless we were like really deep in it, it almost sounds like two news, you know?
And so, you know, we had a really good newsletter all about this last year. Yeah. All about like whatever financial engineering in specifically European football. But yeah, there's a lot of, let's say, money influence, money games being played in football at the moment. There are so many angles that we get attacking from and does it.
Earlier in the year, I went to my first, I went to a Champions League match, Atlético Madrid versus Arsenal at the Metropolitano Stadium in Madrid. Amazing experience. Had the vibe to me of like an American like Big 12 college football match, which I think is an amazing energy, etc. Again, we are going to offend so many people. It's great. I say this episode, I say it was kind of fun. Anyway, let's give them money. I'll say one more thing about football, which is that I've never like really gotten hooked on it, but I've always thought the jerseys are the coolest of any sport in particular. I liked when more of the jerseys had physical colors on them. I think that's gone out of style a little bit, but I also love like those old jerseys they've had, like the flat colors. And I just think they look cool as hell.
Yeah, and I agree. And somehow on a football jersey, it doesn't offend me when I see ads the way it does. Like if I see an ad on a good American baseball jersey, I was like, oh, that's sort of like debasing it. It looks to me, it looks fine. Why do you just expect it? I don't know, maybe that's like a subtle, a subtle like a subtle chauvinism or something like that. Or it's like, oh, like fun to see these corporate logos. Now, when I look at an NBA logo with an NBA jersey with the logos, like they're sort of debasing the sport, I don't know. And it's, but you just come to expect money to deface football.
That makes sense. We're going to be talking about whether money has injected vitality or expanded the game or debased it or whatever, or at least how the massive amounts of money have changed the game. We're very excited to bring on the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with freelance football journalist Joey D'Urso, and he has a new book out called 'More Than a Shirt: How Football Shirts Explain Global Politics, Money and Power.' So, Joey, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.
Thanks for having me. A big fan of the pod.
Do you have any hunch as to why it is that someone like myself is okay with seeing ads on a football kit versus other sports? Like, can you sort of give any sort of intuition about why maybe we come to expect that or that's sort of cool?
Well, is it one sort of deep in your soul and your personal identity and you sort of feel it in a way that maybe it is interesting.
Yeah, maybe that's just it. Maybe like, I don't have like the sort of, you know, I grew up as like a Detroit Tigers fan, for example. And if I saw like a big ad for like OpenAI or something out there, I wouldn't be that into it or Crypto.com or whatever, which seems to advertise everywhere. Maybe it's just that. Maybe it's just like what's in my, what's in my soul or not.
Yeah, but I did. Interesting question. Which sport, which sporting culture is more commercial, corporate capitalist and which isn't? Because obviously the US in most respects is far more capitalistic than in Europe. But there's actually funny some ways to invert that. One is sponsorship and one is like this draft system, which to us feels like communism for us. You know, it's just the rich teams buy all the best players and that's how it happens. And the rich get richer.
Joey, I can't help but notice that we're doing a football podcast, but you are, in fact, wearing a baseball shirt, which maybe says something about the difficulties.
It's a Coney Island Cyclone, which I love. Anyone who comes and visits New York has to go to a Cyclones game.
But soccer has historically had some difficulty with breaking through into the US, right? So it's getting bigger now. We have the MLS, we have all of that, and we now have a World Cup that's taking place in the US. But we had one previously and that was kind of an uphill battle to break into that particular market.
Yeah. Well, so soccer in the US has quite a long history, but it was basically wiped out by the Wall Street crash. So it was big in big industrial cities before that, big in kind of Philadelphia, New Jersey. And then it was wiped out because it was deeply linked to these industries that were hit so badly in 1929. And then it was kind of in the wilderness for half a century. America's own sports became really big. But yeah, it was sort of getting bigger and bigger. You know, Pele came to play for the New York Cosmos in the 70s.
My husband used to work for the Cosmos.
Yeah. He was a youth coach.
Yeah, yeah. USA 94 and FIFA had long wanted to bring the World Cup to the US, even though no one really cared in the US about the sport, but because of money, because of business, because the world's biggest companies, the world's richest people, the world's biggest pool of wealthy consumers are in the US. And, you know, the sort of footballing snobs of Europe, of which I am probably sometimes one of them, probably turn their nose up at it. Going to the US, Italia '90 is very romanticized in England, as you know, Pavarotti and the beautiful sights of Rome and these, these gauche Americans, what are they doing with that beautiful World Cup? But it was kind of a success. In many metrics, the grounds were full. Lots of, I think the Hispanic population would have helped a lot there, but a lot of just curious Americans, like women's football was huge in the US before it was big in Europe. So a lot of, there was a lot of interest because of that. I think it was the Olympics before that that was big. But then commercially, it was a huge hit and FIFA got these big sponsorships for the first time, these big companies like, you know, Coca-Cola, Visa got interested. And it's just the pool of the world's biggest companies, the world's richest people, and they desperately wanted to bring it back. And they finally succeeded in 2026.
You know, it's funny. I, first of all, I had not realized that actually there was a long football tradition in the United States prior to the crash. We could have probably done an entire episode just on that. But I do also remember, like, as a kid in like the 80s, like hearing about this guy named Pele as, you know, Trump is a big Pele fan.
Yeah, I thank you, thank you. But what, what, what were the Cosmos and now what it was like. What league was that?
Even so, that was I believe it's the NASL, the North American Soccer League, which was there sort of. But it was kind of an, it was kind of the Pele show and, you know, the Cosmos that go around to these different teams. And when Pele left, it all sort of fell apart pretty quickly. It was losing lots of money and the US is just such a deep, rich sporting market. You know, they're like for the big four, which would be American football, baseball, basketball and ice hockey. It's hard to penetrate that. And it's very unusual. You know, Australia, I was there recently, is maybe the closest parallel. But the vast majority of players in Europe and every European country, you know, I like cricket. You guys probably think that's incredibly obscure and sort of fusty British. But I'm a bit like, is cricket is tiny compared to football, as is rugby and all these other sports we have. Football is completely dominant in the vast majority of the world, and the US is a wild exception.
So let's talk about that '94 World Cup. So like how long, what was the lead up to that '94 World Cup in terms of making the case that it should be in the US? Like how long was that? I remember that World Cup. But like how long was that in the works and the fights and what had to happen for the World Cup to finally go in 1994 to the US?
Yes, it was a long time. It was like the mid-80s, had lots of build-up time. I mean, the US, as we are seeing now, it doesn't need to build loads of stadiums, right? That's one huge advantage. It has, unlike, you know, South Africa in 2010, built all these white elephant stadiums and in many cases that was a wonderful World Cup, end of apartheid, Mandela, but financially a bit of a basket case. So the US was ready even if it wasn't a big footballing country. But what it had to do was set up its own league because it did not have a professional soccer league at that point. So we set up the MLS because of that. So real kind of footballing desert at the time that it was preparing to host the World Cup in '94.
So just to clarify, when it comes to, I guess, US commercial advertisers, what exactly were they trying to achieve here? Because if soccer isn't that big in the US at that time in 1994, I assume they're not necessarily trying to target the American market. Like maybe it's great that you're trying to popularize the game more in the country. But if you're an advertiser, I imagine sponsoring the World Cup in '94 is more about tapping into that global audience that you're describing.
Yes. If you're Coca-Cola and you want to sell in Africa and Asia, it's the best billboard you could possibly imagine. It's been built and being a whole villages in pretty, you know, part of the world, but people don't necessarily have electricity at home. We'll be, we'll be watching. It is the biggest advertising event in the world by far. But before '94, it just wasn't really commercialized that ruthlessly. You know, tournaments lost money. There's a great story from, I think it's in the '74 World Cup in Mexico. This tailor, like a guy who sews clothes somewhere in London, just bought half the advertising boards on the stadium in Mexico City just because, like, no one else had thought of it. And he offered them like a nominal amount of money. And they were like, yeah, sure. And like when I do my research into the sort of history of football shirts and sponsorship, the early days are often just kind of like that. A team will win some massive trophy with the local beer company on it, and then three years later, there'll be no logo because it's literally just like some guy. There's no process, there's no marketing department, there's no anything. So I suppose football, FIFA would just leave. It was leaving millions, billions of pounds on the table. Of course, there was a flip side that if you ruthlessly, ruthlessly commercialize it to within an inch of its life, you're potentially risking harming the product itself. But that's maybe a separate podcast.
Yeah, I suppose that's a separate point. I want to get into that later. Yeah. We could. Yeah, we should get into that in the current state a little bit more, but talk more about some of these deals and how big they were and how unusual they were. So you go from like, okay, a tailor and one World Cup to then a few World Cups later, it's Coca-Cola and it's the biggest.
Yeah. And they were like $20 million deals and this kind of thing.
Who were some of the big sponsors and like, you know what? Like what were some of these deals. Yeah, yeah. And what were some of these deals that they signed in 1994.
So this guy, Rothenberg, who was the kind of the guy running the bid, and he was very, he came from an NBA background and he was very commercially minded. And he turned it into this big commercial event, I think, very effectively. But yeah, the sponsors, you know, like the ones we see now, like Coca-Cola, like Visa, these huge multinational corporations that the World Cups hadn't really seen in the same extent before. And American companies, which is what we see now.
So I want to go back to something you said about the 1990 World Cup. And you mentioned that it was lionized or I guess looms large in a lot of people's football memories, especially in Europe. What actually makes a World Cup successful? Like what is that essence that you can point to? That means you can say something like, oh, people love the 1990 World Cup versus, I don't know, I don't want to name any specific World Cups as absolute failures, but you could pluck a few examples, I suppose.
Well, I think the two big things are A, your team winning or doing really well, and B, being in your 20s. Like, like most things in life, you look back on it. And I suppose a lot of people who, you know, look back on 1998 who are in positions of power at the moment, and that's wonderful for me. 2018, when England were in Russia, and England did surprisingly well after being dreadful for 20 years. And the sun shone every day for three months, and it was just a party. And in England, which was fun. So I think a lot of it is that like social, cultural stuff. But, you know, on the broader sense, exciting games, close games, but like moments and people, you know, you look back to like Diego Maradona and you, you know, about the Hand of God in 1986. 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, they did was pretty mediocre that year. Right. But I was like, I was pretty obsessed with like Maradona that year. And I was sort of as a young kid disappointed that they, he didn't, wasn't, they 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, that's a tiny mind. I think that's a minority of the people who watch the World Cup. Most 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, thinking about 1990, the famous one in England would be Gazza'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, and he couldn't. That meant he would, couldn't play in the final. And he cried. And it's like Gazza's tears is this sort of, it's like a part of Britain's national story. I like the sort of romantic view of football in that way. And, you know, England didn't get to the 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, it's 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 and a military dictatorship, as people were being tortured like a mile down the road. And that's kind of slightly airbrushed out of the story. But like, yeah, these people, these characters, I think is what really makes World Cups of anything else.
You know, someone told me I should probably fake, but it's like one of those things that people say, apparently. Like, like, I don't know, some extraordinary number of people in England have 1966 as their pin code for their ATM machine.
Absolutely. And that like, you could just guess someone's pin because the last time England won the World Cup, this was something that always used to happen for the ten 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. Yeah, yeah. And if they really wanted to get a bunch of clients happy, they would say that the building was kind of in the air according to their models.
