Guerrilla History - A Football Manifesto w/ Robert E. Wilson

Episode Date: October 24, 2025

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we have an extensive and fascinating conversation on football with Robert Wilson! This was a great conversation, not only if you are a fan of the sport.  We highly recommend you also check out the interview Robert did on Rev Left Radio. Be sure to also check out our past episodes on football, each of which featured Alexander Aviña: Football! Palestine, Copa América, & the Euros, The World Cup: Sport, Politics, History, and Propaganda, and Intelligence Briefing: The Beautiful Game Robert E. Wilson  is author of The Football Manifesto and The Supporters Trust League Manifesto. Check out Gaia Labs HERE. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory  We also have a (free!) newsletter you can sign up for, and please note that Guerrilla History now is uploading on YouTube as well, so do us a favor, subscribe to the show and share some links from there so we can get helped out in the algorithms!!

You don't remember den, Ben, boo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Welcome to Gorilla History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present.

I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Hachmacki, joined as usual by my co-host, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing great, Henry. It's wonderful to be with you. Absolutely. Always nice to see you, and always nice when we can come together to talk about football, which will be the topic that we'll be discussing. However, before I introduce the guests that we have and the topic, the more specific topic focus for today,

I would like to remind the listeners that they can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash gorilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can follow guerrilla history on various social media platforms, although, to be honest, I have not been able to put anything on the social media platforms for a while because of sanctions, but you can still follow us wherever you get your social media fix.

That's not true, not anywhere. You can get it on Twitter, you can get it on Instagram, and you can also subscribe to our email newsletter. Eventually, I'll be able to post on there again, I think. With that being said, we have a terrific guest today and a really fascinating topic. We're going to be talking with Robert E. Wilson, author of the Football Manifesto and the Supporters Trust League Manifesto,

So listeners of our sister program, which was hosted by our former co-host, Brett O'Shea, of RevLeft Radio, if you listen to RevLeft, you would have seen that Robert was also on Rev Left, very recently talking about the same project. And I highly recommend that you listen to that conversation if you haven't already, because we'll try not to overlap too much. Robert, it's nice to have you on the program. How are you doing today? I'm great, and thank you so much for having me. Absolutely. So like I said, in that conversation on Rev Left, you covered a lot of ground.

You and Brett talked back and forth for about two and a half hours. And so we'll try not to cover too much of the same ground. There is a lot to talk about which hasn't been covered, but we'll probably hit a few things in common. But listeners, again, if you haven't listened to that conversation, really fascinating conversation. Where I'd like to start with us today is talking just a little bit about the global dynamics. of football because the project that we'll be talking about and listeners this this episode will have a call to action and it particularly at the end so make sure that you stay listening for that call to action while there is a call to action that is focused mostly in the u.s we have to

understand that football is a global game capitalism imperialism or global processes all these things are all connected and many of our listeners are not based inside the u.s so what is the global historical context of football that will be useful for our listeners because many of our listeners also aren't big football fans themselves. What is that global historical context that will be useful as a background? And then how does the U.S. context fit within that? Well, to begin, I think we have to revert to when the quote unquote imperial core was in London and the The British Empire was the dominant presence globally and to, you know, kind of build on Lenin's notion of imperialism

as the last stage of capitalism. That global footprint that the British established from a material and imperial and colonial perspective was structured, obviously, to create and reproduce in certain venues around the world their particular notion of the basin superstructure. In other words, they wanted to create some kind of a model that could be replicated in these venues

that they intended to exploit. But, interestingly enough, wherever they went, they took sports with them as one of the tools to structure those particular colloquial. colonial empires, respectively, around the globe. And the interesting thing that I found out in my research is that the three sports that they basically relied on were rugby, cricket, and football. And I didn't realize this, quite frankly, until I began researching. I mean, it never occurred to me until I began reading. But if you look historically at where the quote-unquote sports took hold and then

became respective dominant presences as sports, it was fascinating to look at it. But in the countries where the British Empire decided to establish a white ethnic state, that is to say, a white cultural dominance in a given geographic area. outside the normal boundaries of what we consider to be the UK, the dominant sport that drove the empire was rugby. And I thought, well, that's fascinating. How could that possibly be? But it looks fairly consistent.

If you look at where rugby is dominant in the quote-unquote former UK colonies, some of which, of course, still consider themselves to be part of the UK, You've got Canada, you've got the United States, you've got South Africa, you've got Australia and New Zealand, all of which have rugby as the dominant presence, which is not to say that other sports are not there, but the dominant sport, the sport that kind of dictates the ethos of how that country manifests itself, both domestically and internationally, is rugby. And, of course, rugby evolved, depending on the country that you went to or go to. In Canada, rugby is now, you know, Canadian football. In the United States, it is basically symbolized by the NFL, which I consider and call American rugby. And so those sports not only became the dominant sports in those respective satellite countries of the U.S. UK Empire, but they also became dictating kind of ethoses of how those countries would act

in a domestic context and then in a global context. So if you look at, for instance, Australia, the model in Australia, and we all know that Australia committed mass genocide in the quote-unquote conquering of Australia, right, a similar Ethos and strategy took place, we all know in the United States, with the concept of manifest destiny, which, of course, kind of draws on, you know, an invented cosmic connection to what they shouldn't and are doing. So, quote, unquote, the genocide in the United States, which was massive. I mean, obviously, we don't know what the numbers were, but, you know, the conservative estimate is that North America, alone suffered, you know, a genocide in the neighborhood of 100 million souls over the course of two or 300 years. And so how that genocide is justified almost has a cosmic

justification when you think about the quote-unquote manifestation, manifest destiny conceptual framework. The reason I'm bringing this up is because we look at the rest of the world and the other quote-unquote places where the UK expanded its global empire, South America, Africa, India, quote-un-unquote, as VJ Prasad says, the browner nations or the darker nations, the two sports that were most in evidence and were used to, quote-unquote, mollify the natives and used as tools to control the population were cricket and football. And so even though in Latin America, for instance, where I live, football and the British culture here is marginal at best, I would say that in Latin America, even though the British, quote-unquote, brought the game to the region,

The country that probably has the greatest impact or legacy from the quote-unquote English presence in the region is Argentina, I think. I mean, you know, the quote-unquote Falklands War, we all remember. It's kind of like the last vestige of, you know, English presence in the southern hemisphere of the Americas. They brought it to Brazil as well, but they brought it via Brazilians who, and back in these days in the 1800s, the elite of Brazilian society usually sent their children to Europe for their formal educations at higher educational levels. So they would go to France or they would go to England. British, you know, British trained of Brazilians in England is really the cause of law. the sport was migrated back down to Brazil, you know, from the European continent. So taking this theory a little bit further, you know, despite the fact we're talking about

more of a global picture, the United States, with the transfer of the Imperial Corps from, say, London to the United States, basically what happened over the course of, you a little bit more than 100 years, is that football, quote-on-quote, became a second-tier sport in the United States, and American rugby became the dominant sport in the United States. And it became the dominant sport because it dovetailed incredibly well with the elite educational apparatus of the United States, which was a parallel apparatus that was literally imported from the Oxford Canaan. Cambridge elite institutional levels of the UK, of Britain, of England. So that elite level of where rugby was concentrated, which is at the absolute pinnacle of British

society, was brought to the United States in the Ivy League in the United States. So the real nexus, the headquarters of rugby in the United States was really the Ivy League, the Ivy League universities. And in particular, Harvard and Yale and Princeton, you know, those were the quote-unquote leading institutions for rugby in the United States. And because those leading institutions produce the leadership and managerial class of the entire country, at least certainly 100 and some odd years ago in the late 1800s, those same individuals who were playing rugby at their university, went on to become the captains of industry, the leaders and politics, basically the drivers of the financial system in the United States. And they realized that this sport, rugby, was something that carried with it exactly the kind of ethos and, quote-unquote, managerial

training that they needed to expand both domestically with the manifest destiny concept, but also internationally. So basically what it meant was that football became, American football, became, or American rugby, became the dominant driver of how the country wanted to, quote, unquote, manifested itself in the entire global, you know, sphere that we now call, you know, the world that we live in today, the capitalist worldview. So having said that, that's more or less the history of the use of the, you know, of the sport of rugby globally and we're still living with it. I mean, you know, not two weeks ago, the NFL played its first opening game in Brazil a couple of weeks ago. So the NFL is, you know, as crazy as it may seem, they're expanding globally or at least trying to.

I have serious doubts about how they're going to be able to do this, but that's another story. I think that, quite frankly, that sport does not represent right now a threat to the global culture of football, what we call football. I don't think it will ever, quote, unquote, win that battle for a number of reasons we can discuss. But I think that there's no question about the fact that that league and the power behind it because, you know, that league and all leagues in the United States, as you know, are owned by billionaires at the absolute pinnacle of power and influence in the United States and globally. And I think as long as that exists, you know, American rugby will be, quote, unquote, a force both in that country and internationally. Yeah, that's very interesting. I just wondered one quick question about this. You said something about how the particular sport, rugby, was kind of cosmically sort of connected with this imperialist or colonialist sort of order. And I think just to be more specific, it sounds like you're suggesting that rugby, really functioned in a particular way as maybe we could even say Marshall sort of training for a colonialist elite in

and was especially relevant and popular in places where there was a settler colonial kind of project vis-a-vis indigenous people. So North America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Again, let's, you know, remember that the South Africans were very invested in rugby. So it seems, you know, what do you think is, you know, distinguished, because that's in the era before it becomes a mass, you know, kind of, it does start with college elites in the United States. But so did, you know, football, actually, you know, kind of interestingly. Rugby and football in their earliest origins seemed to have been very closely related games have then started distinguished themselves.

And whereas rugby and its variants, American rugby, you know, kind of included, you know, started to develop in its own direction and for a more elite kind of set of athletes and practitioners. Football became populist earlier on. And maybe that connects up with the story of later why American rugby football NFL may attempt to expand. But there are a lot of reasons why it might not end up being so popular. But what we call soccer in North America or football globally had kind of similar origins, but it went in a very different direction. And lastly, I guess as a reflection, it would be good to talk about, like, you know, how does soccer football, you know, really develop and why does it become so popular? And what is its sort of cosmic ethos, if you were, you know, thinking of it that way, that distinguishes it from this more elite rugby game?

And, you know, if we have a chance, this isn't really to discuss cricket, is why, you know, why cricket got popular in these other contexts as it's all so. considered very much an elite game, but it spread, unlike rugby, in places like India, in places, you know, the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean, whereas these other, this other game just never, you know, took off. We don't necessarily have to talk about the cricket, but it's an interesting, it's maybe parallel a little bit to the U.S. baseball. Like, that was the early, you know, kind of sport that actually the U.S. spread in the early phases of its empire before it became a global hegemon in the, you know, 20s, 30s and post-World War II phase.

But just I shouldn't probably have raised that at all because. No, no, I think that's a good. But that's, but the earlier question, really, about origins and also social origins of soccer football, of football, and how it developed in a very different way and what place that has had in the globalizing of that game. as a very popular game that's very different from the social role and the political role that you identified, I think, really so fascinatingly with rugby. Yeah, I think that I still think we have to go back to the British Empire.

The, you know, the societal split in England in particular is, I think, crucial in terms of understanding, the exportation of hierarchy. So going back to this issue of rugby, I mean, obviously, rugby, quote-unquote rugby, rugby, as you know, is a school in England. It's a preparatory school for the elite. And that's where, you know, supposedly it was invented as a sport. But even then, this is 150 years ago, more than 150 years ago.

even then the the sport of the masses was in fact what we call football and generally speaking never the twain shall meet that is to say the elite of the British Empire and in particular in England and we don't need to go into the history of Ireland and that kind of thing But, you know, the English were a very globally oriented culture in the 17th and 18th century. And what that meant for them, particularly in a domestic context, was it reminds me of this phrase that that the difference between rugby and football is, you know, it's gentlemen playing a hooligans game and hooligans playing a jooligans. gentleman's game, you know. That difference was an important difference in England. And I don't know, you know, whether we have time to delve into the issue of how English is spoken in England, right? But I don't need to tell you, you know for sure, because you've met the quote-unquote

educated classes that have come out of England, the literal speech patterns. of the upper echelon of the British or England society have a different kind of English than the quote-unquote masses who speak English in that country. And so the distinctions between rugby and football were stark, absolutely stark. And I think that they are still, to some extent, except that now we have the fact that football pretty much in every country around the world is the dominant sport, except in a few remaining

countries that were former, quote-unquote, you know, UK colonies. So having said that, you know, going back to your issue in dealing with the question of the cosmic, the reason I mentioned the cosmic is because the ruling class in every country in order to justify its position as the ruling class in any given country always taps into some notion of the cosmic to justify the hierarchy. So the quote-unquote, the kings of England or the kings on the continent always have a connection to the divine, right? The divine right of kings is not an accident conceptually. It was there as one of the quintessential. event inventions ever created by our species to justify the existence of hierarchy.

So, you know, the cosmic is simply used by the system to keep the system, quote, unquote, ordered in the way that the elite and respective countries want it to remain ordered. So having said all that, I think that, you know, the way this game has grown, football, simple to understand, because anybody can play it. You don't have to be a great athlete to play this sport. The thing that's striking and, like, shocking is when a great athlete does play it. It's like mind-boggling, you know, and it's mind-boggling because not only can you relate to it, because you've tried to do this, you know, on a Sunday afternoon in the park, or on a, you know, on a dirt street.

in a favela in Rio, you know, you've tried to do this. It is not easy to master the skills of this sport, but when they are mastered by these geniuses that we periodically produce, it's mind-blocking. It's just like mind-blowing. You can't really grasp the absolute, you know, physical challenge that this sport, you know, poses to all of us, and then you realize that there's some people who, come along, like a Maradonna or Pellé, you know, that are just freaks of nature. And they make this thing look, this thing that's unbelievably difficult. They make it look like an art form, you know,

or ballet. And I think that's why it's spread globally, because it's just mind-boggling in terms of its easiness to play. Anybody can play. But it also sets the stage for anybody who has played to realize what genius really is when people play it, you know. So I think that's why it's spread. I think the NFL will never get there for a lot of different reasons. And I should, you know, qualify what I'm saying as I'm a former American rugby player in high school and college. So, you know, I've got some kind of a perspective on that sport.

But, you know, it's interesting having lived in Brazil for a long time and having grown up in the United States, I mean, I was a. a sports fanatic in the United States. I love sports. I was totally addicted. But the connection that you make and the depth of emotion that you feel with football, I mean, there's just nothing like it. I don't care how many years you live in the United States. I don't care what team you fear for in the NBA or the NFL or hockey or baseball. It is just not the same. The emotional depth and breadth of what you feel when this sport is played at the highest level, there's just nothing like it.

There's nothing like it. And I'm saying this from having, you know, having spent over a quarter of a century living in Brazil and going to Madagana, you know, so many times that I can't, I've lost count, you know. So it's, I don't know what to say about that. I mean, it's hard to convince Americans of what they're missing. because they right now, they do not know what they're missing. Not to mention the low is associated with football are much lower than in most other sports, especially when we get to the conversation about relegation, which will come up later in this conversation when we turn back to the U.S. context. And just for you, Robert, I was present when my team got relegated from the top division for the first time after they had gotten promoted to the top division. I know.

Let me tell you, nobody moved from their seats. after the match finished. We were just, we didn't know what to do. It was remarked. Exactly. Because it was. No, exactly what you mean.

It's worse than that. We got relegated. We had a chance to, to pull level in like the night, I don't remember exactly, like the 92nd minute, second minute of stoffage time with a penalty kick, and our striker missed the penalty,

and that's what sent us down. Oh, shit. At home, in front of the, and the penalty kick was coming towards the supporters, supporters and the season ticket holiday. It was the worst. The worst. But listeners, we'll get to the story of relegation later when we talk about the U.S.

context. Yeah. I did want to take a wild tangent for just a moment. Something that I'm probably too well known for is my wild tangents rather than any actual insight. But you mentioned this divide that was present in England at the time and it reminded me

of a conversation that I had with one of my colleagues who also is my co-host of Tsars and Commissars, the other show that I've got a bunch of episodes recorded for but haven't released yet because we're waiting for the visuals for. He's a professor of Russian history and our desks are next to each other. Oh, wow, fascinating. And we were, we were talking, and he's a Russian guy, but we were talking about H.G. Wells is the time machine. So here's where the wild tangent begins. 1895 H.G. Wells published as the time machine now. H.G. Wells was

a socialist. H.G. Wells's political persuasion was colored by the fact that he grew up in an extremely poor family in England in the 1870s, 1880s, so poor that his family was relegated to like working underground. And when I say like working underground, I mean he was literally working underground from the age of 13 or 14 as an apprentice because the ruling classes of London did not want to see the poor people in the city so they would carry out production and things like that literally underground

so that they didn't even have to see the people I know still wild tangent not related to football at all but we'll get there actually I think it is but go ahead we'll get there we'll get there so the working classes and the working poor are underground

while the upper classes are on the ground now this relates to the time machine because listeners of the show who will have read the time machine know that in the far future, science fiction book, in the far future, humans have disappeared and two new species have kind of evolved away from them. There's the above ground people, the alloy, who the time traveler presumes are the descendants of the upper class who lived above ground and didn't have to do any work. So they have kind of devolved into these childlike

creatures that don't really know how to communicate and they're very weak. And then there's these underground people, the Morlocks who are, they're blind more or less because they live underground, but they're like monsters, they're cannibalistic monsters because they have been serving the alloy for hundreds of thousands of years and they are carrying out production still for the alloy in the far, far future, even though they are eating the alloy in the far far future. So, it's an interesting book, Robert, if you haven't read it. But in any date...

I have not. I have to confess. When I was talking about this book with Gennadi, the professor of Russian history, he was like, this is absolutely wrong. And I was like, well, Gnadi, it takes place in the year 821,000. Of course it's wrong. He goes, no, no, no. It's absolutely wrong that if H.G. Wells was looking from England in the 1870s, 1880s, there's no way that he could have assumed that the ruling classes would have ended up these powerless

weak creatures, because this is the birth of sport, professional, kind of semi-professional amateur sport. And the reason that sport was being created at that time was for the ruling classes to, one, work on their leadership abilities, but then also to maintain their strength and vigor for wartime. And then also have, you know, this other group of people. people that were also physically fit for wartime, but the sport was created for the elites. There's no way that they would have devolved into these weak creatures, and the underground people would be these strong monsters. And so, thinking about this divide that was intended with this interpretation of the ruling

classes are creating sport for themselves to develop leadership skills, physical robustness for wartime because being a war hero is like you would be the pinnacle of society if you were an upper class aristocratic war hero and on the other hand you have the poor who are relegated to being underground but some sport breaks out and it's the sports that require very little of an investment and i think that that's one of the main divides between things like football and rugby and it's not only because i mean rugby doesn't have too much equipment it's not like American rugby where you have a lot of equipment that's associated with playing it, but even the location that it is being played in. Football can be played literally anywhere. As you said, you can see

it being played on the streets barefoot in the favelas in Brazil every day by hundreds of people, thousands of people in an individual city on any given day. Rugby, on the other hand, is different. You know, you need a specific place that is set up to play rugby in, and that necessarily requires you to have some ability to get there at a time that's convenient for other people that have similar means, to have the means to be able to use such facilities, to have the right kind of shoes to play on that field. And that's not to say things like cricket where you have various other equipment that is necessary, including the bats and whatnot. So, like I said, a wild tangent. I'm hoping that I'm pulling it back together now. The point is that the social

divide that you discussed, and England is a social divide that I think also contributes to the reason why football is the sport of the working class and of the poor globally. But it's not the case in the U.S. Why is that, Robert? Why is football not the sport of the working class in the U.S.? This is the turn back towards your analysis that you did in your published materials? I think there's a, you know, you've got to have a historical digression to deal with this question, but I think that the... Digression is obviously fine. Did you not just hear what happened?

I just did. Exactly, right. Yeah, I think... Here's how I would respond to that. Because the situation in the United States with respect to football, in my mind, cannot be divorced from the evolution of American rugby.

First and foremost, if you go back 150 years, when, you know, the, quote-unquote, Europeans began to migrate to the United States. Most of the Western European countries had migrated to the United States did not send their elite to the United States. They sent, quote-unquote, the masses. And it was the masses who came to the United States

and were playing football in the United States. My hometown, interestingly enough, St. Louis, which is certainly back in those days, had a very, very strong French and Catholic influence and a very strong Italian and German population accounts for the fact that in some sense, even today, St. Louis, Missouri is arguably the capital of the sport in the United States,

despite the passage of time and what have you. In terms of a culture, now I'm saying that to say that what's happened over time is that American rugby, because, and it didn't happen from night today, but American rugby's social positioning by the elite of the society was profoundly structured around the notion of higher education. So if you had a higher education, and as you know, the United States is incredibly hierarchized in terms of education. So the Ivy League, League is still considered to be the pinnacle of the pyramid of higher education in the United

States. I mean, there are a few exceptions. You could say, you know, Cal Berkeley is up there. Stanford is up there. You know, what have you. But the fact of the matter is our educational system for higher education is without question the dominant presence for American rugby. And it is that way today. I mean, the university. system of the United States is the principal feeder mechanism for the NFL. And what we call college American rugby is its own, you know, finance and an economic generating engine. I mean, it generates literally billions of dollars a year that funnels into that, quote, unquote,

engine that we call the NFL. Well, whereas, quote unquote, football, the way it evolved, interestingly enough, was instead of the masses continuing to play the sport, it became a bourgeois suburban sport in the United States, particularly after World War II. And, you know, from World War II, I'd say, until basically the World Cup in 1994, there was a increasing trend of both suburban and women playing the sport. And I think women, as much as the suburban ethos of the United States, contributed to the growth of the sport in the United States. Now, you know, people don't talk about this very much, but in the early 70s, largely as a result of the civil rights movement in the United States and the women's rights movement in the United States, the U.S. Congress passed something called Title IX, which basically

obligated the university ecosystem around the country to allocate the same amount of capital for women's sports as did for men's sports. I think when that happened, it solidified the middle class, quote-unquote, capture to use kind of a frame of reference that goes to goes back to the Luz, this whole thing of territoriality. The middle class captured the sport. It was not a sport until post-Cup 1994 that had any kind of real national presence. I think after 1994, with the obligatory creation of Major League Soccer,

the sport began to take on a bit more muscle and presence. it's still really nowhere in terms of its presence in the United States. But it began to take on an organizational presence that basically elevated it from the grassroots poor. And of course, when you look at the United States today, the overwhelming class distribution, the United States is basically a middle class country, even today, right? I mean, the vast majority of people know how to read, the vast majority of people have, you know, a high school education, maybe not college, but certainly high school education. So the quote-unquote abject poor, which is where the sport was, when it was brought over from

Europe, the sport has migrated up the socioeconomic pyramid and basically left the abject poor behind. They don't have the resources to play any sport. And if you're living in the inner city, which is where most of the quote-unquote urban poor live, it basically means you're black and brown. And the only sport that's available for black people in the United States that are hardcore inner city residents, easier to American rugby or basketball. So I think over time, there's been a migration upwards of the sport of football in the United States to a more middle class venue and the poor have largely been evolved out of the picture. Just to add on to that, that's intentional, as you point out with the word collusion is the first

one that jumps to my mind. I'm not sure it's absolutely right, but you may believe that it is. You can tell me if I'm right or not using the word collusion between the major sports leagues in the United States. And I mean between the football league, MLS soccer, major league soccer, as well as the big sports leagues. And I'm putting air quotes around big sports leagues, MLB, NFL, NBA, so American rugby, baseball, basketball, not in that order. And you discuss this collusion in your work. Yes, yes. I think that it go into that. If we're talking about the way that, football has moved from being a poor inner city sport like it is largely globally to being a sport for the middle class. How do these other sports play into that? You mentioned that the

options except for basketball or American rugby in the inner cities is limited, but we haven't talked about the leagues and their impact on that as well. Yeah, I think that there's been, you know, needless to say, you know, within the context of professional sports in the United States, there's been an evolution as well. I mean, when I was growing up as a kid, baseball was a dominant sport in the United States. As time went on and television, you know, really came on the scene, it evolved away from baseball toward American football, American rugby. be. And basketball has always been there with a heavy presence, as is hockey. But hockey is much more culturally, I think, much more culturally, a Canadian sport than it is an American sport. And it's a cold weather sport. And in a major sense, hockey is in the best

cases is an outdoor sport. It's obviously played indoors now, but, you know, the quote-unquote the pickup games that you see in the northern part of the United States and Canada are played outside on, you know, ponds or small lakes or sometimes people even create their own, you know, water-strewn street and let it freeze over to play on it, you know. Having said that, that sport is not what you call, in my mind, a grassroots sport nationwide in the United States. I mean, in the United States, the strong venues for hockey are in the northern, you know, the northern strip of the United States from, let's say, you know, Minnesota and the Dakotas over to Maine. You know, when you get below that frost belt, not a lot of support for the sport, you know, at least on the

grassroots. Just one very small note that I want to add. And as somebody who comes from one of those, hockey locales in the United States. I'm from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan originally. Oh, wow. You know, that's definitely a hotbed. Yes, it's certainly, it's the birthplace of professional hockey, our claim to fame. Correct. That being said, I mean, because we don't have anything else in the UP other than forests

and trees, but we are the birthplace of professional hockey. In any case, hockey is a remarkably expensive sport to play. Very. Extremely, because it is not only about... It's arguably the most expensive. I would say it's up there. If it's not the most expensive, golf might be up there as well. But because of the fees associated with the courses.

But hockey is a remarkably expensive sport because you are constantly traveling to find other teams to play against if you're playing at a competitive level. And the equipment is all remarkably expensive. I was going to say the equipment. I mean, just the skates. I mean, the skates are, you know, let's face it. It's like they're engineering wonders. right so it's very impressive I mean there's no question about it yeah so I just wanted to throw in that aspect of it as well that's an impressive sport I mean I you know I haven't spent a lot of time

following the sport but I did I did you know see a number of Boston Bruins games when I lived in the Boston area when the Boston Bruins were really really something and they had this guy named Bobby Orr when I was when I was in law school and Bobby Orr was by any stretch of the imagination if you follow that sport. He was just a freak of nature. I mean, I've never seen anybody skate like that. I mean, it's just, even today, I mean, you know, I guess you could, you know, you've got Gretzky

and all these guys that have shown up afterwards, but Bobby Orr was like, I don't know how to describe it. He was just unbelievable on the skates. Anyway, having digressed, I'm not even sure I'm going in the direction of answering your question. But, you know, the basic notion is I think that the way the sports have evolved in the States, it got to the point by the late 80s that it was clear the trajectory that the NFL had. You know, so by the mid-80s, it was clear that baseball would never be a threat to the NFL.

Hockey would never be a threat to the NFL. And baseball would never be a threat to the NFL. And by the mid-80s, the thing that's really, really, you know, kind of fascinating about how the NFL evolved was that after World War II, you know, the NFL was literally, it was Lily White after World War II, right? And it had been Lily White for 15 years, you know, already when World War II ended. But after the war, you know, blacks came back from fighting in Europe and in the Asian theater. And there was also pressure from the civil rights movement to say, hey, what's going on? I mean, what do you mean blacks can't play sports? Come on.

You know, we've got black baseball leagues. We've got, you know, black basketball leagues. Why can't we play, quote, unquote, with the best? Are you afraid of us? So, you know, eventually the sports caved in. And by the 50s and 60s, blacks were playing American rugby in decent numbers. And by the 80s, blacks had surpassed percentage-wise the numbers of players on the field in comparison to whites. Right now, American rugby has always been pretty much a black and white sport.

I mean, there haven't been a lot of other ethnic groups that have kind of gone into that, that milieu of what that sport represents. There are some, obviously, some. Just as I digression, one of my favorite quarterbacks in college, and you guys probably don't remember this, one of my favorite quarterbacks in college was a Native American who played for the Washington. No, he played for the Washington Huskies, the college team, and his name was Sunny Six Killer. He was a great frigging college quarterback. But, you know, they basically black. Blacks and whites had and still have American rugby monopolized.

It's just that with the evolution of the sport, blacks have become the dominant on-field presence for that sport. So blacks today represent three quarters of the players in the NFL. And so by the end of the 1980s, and the NFL has always been a forward-looking league. I mean, these guys are, you know, they're not slouches when it comes to business. They realized what the demographic trends of the United States showed, which is that, you know, immigration was changing the complexion of the country. It was easy to see the projections into the future a decade or two ahead, and they realized that the quote-unquote white majority was, you know, being diminished year by year, decade by decade. So from their perspective in terms of generating revenue, they have built a revenue-generating juggernaut.

Even in the early 1990s, this was true, right? These guys are looking a decade or two ahead into the future, and they say to themselves, well, wait a minute, what's the pipeline of talent that is really selling our product? In the pipeline of talent that sells their product, the billions of dollars they generate annually in terms of revenue, is built on black labor. So protecting the black labor pipeline into the NFL became an absolute categorical priority. And long, you know, out of the blue comes FIFA. In the late 1980s and early 90s, FIFA, FIFA began. negotiating with this fledgling organization in the United States called the United States Soccer Federation, which had no presence at all anywhere in the United States firmament of

sports. They had no presence whatsoever. But they negotiated with FIFA to bring the World Cup to the United States in 1994. But they negotiated with a condition subsequent. And that said, well, we're going to give you the cup in 94, even though you don't have a professional football league, but you've got to promise that you are going to create a league after the World Cup as a condition subsequent of our grant of the Cup in 94. And so say, okay, fine, we'll do it, right? Now, the NFL, very astutely, saw this maneuver and realized it very astutely that if this sport, football, gained traction in the United States,

it would inevitably attract blacks in the inner city. because on the world scale, it's a compelling sport. As a matter of fact, if you play this sport and you're a world-class athlete, you're not just bound to the boundaries of the United States or any particular country. You can sell your services globally. And when you become a star, you don't become a star in the United States. You become a star globally. So the potential of black talent migrating into this sport was a real threat to the NFL.

And they thought, well, what better way to do this than to, quote, unquote, you know, kind of mosey our way into the situation where we can be, you know, behind, you know, the scenes. But we're nevertheless pulling the puppet strings on what's happening. And that's how they set up MLS, and that's how they set up and took control of U.S. soccer. It was basically a strategy that was done in the shadows without any, quote, unquote, obvious, you know, public announcement. But when you look at the history of what happened in the United States to the sport, it's clear that it was structured the way that it's structured, both in terms of MLS and in terms of U.S. soccer, with key people, I might add, that were put in place to make sure that things stayed on an even keel in both organizations. There were handpicked

people for years, not only structuring these two organizations or restructuring them in terms of U.S. soccer, but having handpicked people from, you know, the quote-unquote NFL puppet masters, as it were, choosing who would run the respective organizations. And, you know, one of those people, Don Garber, who was, you know, who was still the head of Major League Soccer, was the head of NFL Europe prior to his position as commissioner of MLS. That's not an accident. He was hand-picked because they wanted somebody who would, quote-unquote, structure this thing and run it the way we want it structured and run. And he did that. He did a great job. I don't think there's any question about the fact. I consider Don Garber to be the most valuable person who has ever worked

in the NFL. And as far as I'm concerned, he never left the NFL. He's still there, you know, even though he's getting paid by, quote-unquote, Major League Soccer. He's the most valuable player and the most valuable employee at the NFL as I speak to you. No question. He's laid the foundation for the largest television contract that the NFL signed two or three years ago. The largest television contract in the history of global sports was signed by the NFL three years ago. So he's done a marvelous job. Yeah, yeah.

That's an amazing take, I think, really analysis. that flips, you know, flips the way one would look at it, you know, as, and it tells us a lot about, I think, where we're going to go later in this conversation about what ails soccer, football, football in the United States and your thoughts and suggestions about how to reverse that and to make it really a people's game again. But before we get to that, it seems that one other strand of historical analysis. would be useful and also to look at the global context and global picture. So following up on your original point that the social base for the game of football, early on, say, in the British imperial age and era was this kind of populist kind of working class participants and appreciators of the game, I wanted to do. to turn to this question of, you know, as a counter to how we get to the MLS is what the structure

of organized football clubs globally and their leagues are and has been. And so, as some people may know, football clubs were established early on. I mean, we have cases of these from the late 19th century, but many of them from earlier 20th century. Formation. often of workers, you know, creating their own club and team sponsored by their employers or other civic associations, having their own kind of local character and flavor of working class people. Maybe sometimes there might be a local patron, you know, like in this kind of more futile kind of to kind of when it becomes professional, sponsor the team. But really it was for the working. class community and it reflected and people identified with it from their community and had this kind of focus and organization. And from there, it has become increasingly commercialized as the

game has expanded, as it's been, you know, exploited for the capitalist ownership class of many of these clubs. But there always has remained some of this kind of local ethic, which is partly why I think when you and Henry were talking about, you know, the agony of regulation and the emotional registers of the game and why it's so compelling is partly because it isn't just the mechanics of the play, although I think, you know, I would say the continuous motion, the fact that there isn't stoppage, you know, for commercial breaks or long gaps between action and the relatively egalitarian structure of, you know, distributed team on a field rather than these kind of highly developed formations or masses, you know, like the rugby, you know, a very martial kind of style. It may have something very much to do with that, but accompanying it is the fact that football really reflected the people. So they invest in it in an emotional way, the civic identity.

This is our city team. Or if you're lucky to have more than one large team, you've got the rivalries and the derbies, you know. And so there is something very emotionally kind of compelling, partly because it has these roots, and that's part of the identity of the structure of the game. But going forward, there were different models for how these clubs could be managed and organized. And they, some of them, you know, still today, like the Bundesliga, have fan ownership or are or like Barcelona and Real Madrid. two of the greatest football teams in the world and most successful ones in the world are member-owned in some, you know, important way. And so I wondered if you could talk a little bit about the evolution of the structure of the game of football clubs. And I think I believe you also, in addition to the Bundesliga, look to what happened in Japan with the formation of the J-League, as also another touch point and model for different ways that in a more effective way could be organized. So I was wondering if you might talk about that before we then come back maybe later to the U.S. and your prescriptions.

But how do you see this kind of field of the club, the league, and the organization of football in its roots and in the global environment? Right. So let me start with, you know, in some sense, from the, from the, you know, shall we call them the football heights, let's talk about, you know, who's won the World Cup. I mean, if you look at who's won the World Cup historically for the men, it's either somebody from Europe or somebody from Latin America. I think that Europe is maybe one World Cup ahead now in terms of the split because Argentina won last time. The reason I'm bringing that up is because the club concept, I think, has its hardcore origins in Europe. And the exportation of the concept is largely due to colonialism. So I'm going to give Brazil as an example. Here in this country, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the sport became the equivalent of rugby in the United States. the sport in Brazil was played by elite private club members that barred blacks from entry into the club

so they were exclusively white clubs quote unquote sporting and social clubs and over the course of the early years, early decades of the 20th century people began at these private clubs began taking the sport, more seriously in terms of who was winning. And every once in a while, you would have a club that realized that there were blacks,

you know, that working for some of the companies that were, you know, owned by the, quote-unquote, club members. And if you put a couple of these blacks on your team, they didn't pay anything, but they would almost guarantee your victory on the field. So there became, you know, the competitive pressure between. clubs, even though they were, quote, unquote, white. And even though, you know, quote unquote, the black players are the, for Brazil's purposes, mulatto players, mixed blood players, were not allowed in the club. They began to be, quote, unquote, sprinkled on some

of the teams in these white dominated clubs. And eventually that led to, you know, the quote unquote, club culture being expanded to include non-club members who supported the club, right? Today, for instance, Flamengo, which is the club I'm a member of and pay monthly dues at, is the largest club in Latin America in terms of, you know, its quote-unquote support network. I think we have 80-something thousand dues paying members, I think, today. So that club model became, I would say in the Latin American region, that's the dominant club ownership model, you know, because these private clubs used to be private because Brazil has always been a black majority country, right?

So because there were so many blacks, these private clubs were a way for the whites to escape, quote, unquote, the black presence in the country. Right. And the same thing is true in Argentina. I mean, there's a long history here of, you know, how blacks have been genocided in Argentina and all that stuff will leave that off to the side. But basically the club culture that was brought from England with the sport was basically transformed to create the network of clubs that Brazil has today and Argentina has, Uruguay has, Chile has, Peru has. They're all, quote, unquote, private membership clubs. So if you pay money, monthly dues, you can join. In Flamingo's case, I should add, that Flamingo is, today, the richest club in Latin America in terms of revenue generation, but it's also got this model that I think is a killer model, which is a multi-sport club. It's a multi-sport football club. So they've, you know, Flamingo has sent, you know, swimmers to the Olympics. You know, this last Olympics in Paris, they won six medals in Paris. They got a gold medal.

in gymnastics, you know? So they take sports, generally speaking, very seriously. You don't have to go to the club and become a professional. They have a separate track for kids that want to take that, you know, that route. And it meshes well with the kids who are more there for recreational purposes. It's managed incredibly well. So that club model, I think, is a killer model for the United States. It doesn't exist in the United States today, but I think it's a great idea. It's kind of like when I was a kid growing up, I spent a lot of time at the local YMCA, which was, you know, a bunch of different kinds of sports, you know, and you just go there and hang out. You know, now this is, you know, this is the 50s and 60s, you know.

The YMCA and the YWCA don't have the same presence that they used to have at the community level today. But, you know, I think that the idea of bringing this model to the United States makes a lot of sense. Now, take the concept to Europe. Europe, obviously, as the sport grew, football became dominant in Europe, as opposed to rugby, right, which is absolutely fascinating. And I think the, you know, the obvious driver was revenue. People simply turned out for football in greater numbers because the masses supported the sport. So if you're building a, you know, a team in Birmingham, England, because the masses already support, football, if you build, you know, some infrastructure to attract those people, you're basically

monetizing them as consumers, and it just becomes a quote-unquote virtual or vicious circle, however you want to look at it. And that happened all across Europe, except for Germany. And for some reason, for some reason, and I, you know, I could be wrong because I haven't studied enough about the origins of the German Football League and how they evolved to where they are. But I think, you know, as curious as it may seem, I think that the 1918 German Revolution had something to do with the creation of these clubs because a lot of the socialist organizations involved with the attempted revolution in the 1819 timeframe had created social clubs that were more than just social clubs.

They were for sports as well. Now, a lot of them did not survive, you know, the onslaught of the Nazi regime, et cetera, et cetera. But there was a social cohesion that was created in Germany that I think survived Nazism. And actually, I think as a response to Nazism, was reinforced post-World War II. so that people began to support the idea as a countermeasure to what nauseism it stood for. They basically supported the idea of socialism in sports.

And that was eventually embodied in something by the 18, I think it was in 1980s, late, early 1990s. They established formerly the Bundesliga. When they established the Bundesliga, they established it with this rule that said, football clubs have to be controlled by the fans. And so now the entire Bundesliga subscribes to that philosophy, and every team, and now there are three exceptions, we'll leave those aside for the time being. Two of those exceptions were grandfathered into the Bundesliga.

You know, one team is owned by Bayer. You know, I don't need to tell you who Bayer is. And the other team is owned by Volkswagen, right? I don't know I can even go into the connection between Volkslagon and the Hitler. That's another story. But those two were grandfathered in, and now we have a third that's been, quote, unquote, that was promoted from the fifth division to the first, which is owned by Red Bull, right? But those are the only three exceptions. Every other club in the Bundesliga is owned by the fans, and of course, the one we know the best is Bayern Munich.

And in Bear Munich, as I'm speaking you today, recently became the largest fan-owned football club on the planet. They have 400,000 dues-paying members, which is amazing, you know, absolutely amazing. So that's the model that I think the United States deserves to have. I don't think the United States deserves necessarily to have, you know, this, this quote-unquote traditional billionaire sports ownership model where, you know, if you're a fan, you're basically a consumer, you know, they care about you on Sunday afternoon. and then for Monday through Saturday they simply are marketing to you

to make sure you come back on Sunday again. But there's no connection to the club like there is in Brazil, you know? And Germany, just to kind of bring the point home, Germany is the highest attended football league in the world. It has the least debt of any of the football leagues in Europe. And, you know, it's got this, you know, this wonderful kind of imprimatur

that it's, you know, it's a great model financially as well as socially because it works. I mean, 18, no, it's not 18. It's 32 out of the 34 clubs in the Bundesliga operate in the black as of last year. So it's an incredible business model as well as being a social benefit to the country because they pay taxes, you know. Now, I do want to say something about the German model just briefly because as the listeners know, I live in Tatarstan. I moved to Tatarstan, in part because I'm a fan of Rubin Kazan, the football club.

But prior to living in Russia, I lived in Germany. And I would attend matches, Borussia Muncheng Gladbach, which is the German team that I support. You know, I don't support them as heavily as I do Rubin, which I've been a fan of since 2006. But Munching Gladbach, I've been a fan of, to a lesser extent, since about 2010 or 2011 thereabouts. And so I was studying not that far away during my master's, same region of Germany. And so I would catch the train and go to the matches when I wasn't working in the laboratory or something like them. And it was a very interesting experience, not only because since the teams are majority fan-owned, they would have annual meetings of the shareholders, which means the fans, the dues-paying members,

and they would have boards elected by the dues-paying members that were the board of the club. They were beholden to the fans of the club every year. They would have to answer to the fans of the club. And so things like that were very interesting. But I just wanted to mention about this 50 plus one model, which is widely known within the football world that Germany operates on this 50 plus one model. This model is actually a bit of a compromise because as you mentioned, the Bundesliga, the top league and actually the top two leagues of Germany go back quite a ways. They go back to the 1960s under that name,

but of course they really only became their modern form after German reunification after the destruction of East Germany and its forcible integration into Germany. At the time, up until 1998, the clubs were entirely fan-owned and entirely run by supporters elected representatives. And again, all decisions would come to, all major decisions would come to annual board meetings, sorry, annual fan meetings, and then they would have a board that would make the more day-to-day decisions

throughout the year. However, as football became more and more of a moneyed sport going into the 90s, what German football clubs were seeing is that they no longer had the financial capital to compete at the highest level with some of the other football leagues. In the 90s, the Italian League, I know it sounds strange today, but because the Italian Football League, Seria is flat broke. But in the 90s, they were a powerhouse. They were powerhouse, for sure.

That was also the beginning of when the Premier League, the English Premier League, started to become the moneyed league in not only Europe, but the entire. world. And Germany felt like they were getting left behind. So there was all of these discussions about, well, we can't bring in extra capital because we're fan owned, we're fan run. And so we had a lot of we there was a lot of big money interests within Germany as well as multinational corporations who were lobbying to have the Bundesliga be changed to this entirely privately held model that many of the teams, many of the leagues, most of the leagues globally operate on. However, because the fan power was so strong in Germany, they had to

reach a compromise because the fans were unwilling to relinquish a controlling stake in their clubs, even though most of the fans understood that they were being left behind from a financial standpoint. So this compromise was reached in 1998 that allowed private capital to purchase shares within the football clubs. But 51% or more of the club's ownership stake had to be maintained within the supporters' hands. So they are still majority fan-owned. Most of them are at the 51% mark within the Bundesliga. Some of them have more fan ownership.

And as you mentioned, there is a couple of exceptions, Bayer Volkswagen. So talking about Wolfsburg and Bayer-Levacusen, and then we have R.B. Leipzig. And supposedly the R.B. doesn't stand for Red Bull because of German-Lerkewson. law, but, you know, they're owned by Red Bull. Their abbreviation is R.B. Right. It's Red Bull, Leipzig. So it's still a majority fan owned, but even after this decision was made in 1998, there is still very frequent, and it happened all the time when I was in Germany, debate about whether that rule should be scrapped entirely because it's difficult for German clubs to expand to us beyond a certain point if they're entirely run by, well, not entirely, over half run by supporters funds,

supporters dues. But the fan power in Germany is something that is remarkably strong. And so there hasn't been any serious conversation as of yet of changing that rule. But I did think that it might be interesting for the listeners to know a little bit more about that history of the 50 plus one rule, how it came to be. And, you know, dynamics since 1998 when it was established, again, as a compromise. there wasn't that question there just you know no that's that's like serious and essential history

because one of the challenges that you know that the United States has is if in fact you're going to go to you know a fan ownership model you have to do it within the context of capitalism and as I mentioned in the conversation with Brett I mean it's really a question of reorienting cash flows that's really what, you know, the proposal is that I've got.

Because if you want to empower the grassroots, you can't do it on the basis of morality. You've got to do it on the basis of cash low. And so the idea of setting up a boondous legal model is exactly that. It's a compromise. You know, it's compromise with capitalism and what you need to survive, quote, unquote, in that country. because if you don't, you're going to be out of business. You know, they will put you out of business. You know, so the basic idea of fan ownership in the United States

is an idea that has to live, you know, in parallel with the realities of the marketplace. And the only way to live with the realities of the marketplace in the United States is to adopt a model that allows you to participate in the middle of a capitalist economy and survive while maintaining, you know, socialist values that allow you to grow and thrive. You know, there's no other way to do it. And, you know, maybe, who knows, down the way, there may be a way to restructure society as a whole. But this subset of society, I think, is the ideal mechanism to begin to rethink how the world works, at least in the United States, you know. I mean, the Imperial Corps is the Imperial Corps.

And if this idea gets off the ground, I shouldn't say, you know, I should say when this idea gets off the ground, there will be ample opposition in the marketplace to, you know, to undermine it, to belittle it, to critique it, and attempt to, you know, attempt to deconstruct it, you know. And so that has to be built into the business model as well. You have to basically be prepared for, you know, the onslaught. that will eventually come with any business model that isn't the traditional capitalist, you know, a business model. Well, you know, these big capital interests aren't going to be happy for any expropriation

to take place. So when I say this, I don't just mean that an option would be to expropriate the clubs from the private owners. That would be great. They're obviously not going to go along with that. But even in the instance of setting up supporters run clubs with the idea of this being a competitor to the existing structures, that's an expropriation of interest, an expropriation of fans in their view. And you are certain that they are not going to take that lying down because capital never does.

I agree with you. But I think there's a, you know, there's a subtlety there that I think has to be dealt with, which is that. based on the existing five leagues that we talk about, and in particular Major League Soccer, because of Major League Soccer's business model, they have literally turned their backs on football fans in the United States who were, quote-unquote, fanatic football fans, people that really come from football cultures. Anybody who comes from a legitimate football culture and who loves the beautiful game is basically not a fan of MLS.

and the vast majority of those fans in the United States who are like that, and my estimation is that we're talking about roughly the population of Germany in the United States or roughly 85, 90 million people in the United States basically are unaffiliated sports fans. They don't support the NFL, they don't support baseball, they don't support basketball,

they don't go to hockey games, and they can't stand MLS because for their purposes, MLS is like a B league, you know? So what do they do? They look at TV on, you know, they look at the EPL on TV, or they look at League MX on TV, but they don't spend their hard-earned cash on the Big Five leagues in the United States. And so, in a sense, when you say, well, you know, this new idea that I'm trying to push

into the marketplace in the United States is an appropriation, it's actually not an appropriation. It's basically a revitalization and offering an option to, you know, you know, 80 or 90 million people in the United States who have never had an option offered to them, you know, because MLS is reason d'etre is to make sure that that, that 80 or 90 million group of people don't get a product that they want. That's what they're there for. They're to make sure that those people in the United States who are true football fans never get that product. That's why MLS is there. They are there to make sure that those people do not get empowered and do not monetize. That's what they want. And so, you know, needless to say, I'm trying to shake the apple tree. And, you know, that's why I think it's so much fun, you know, because we can literally upset the apple cart. And it's an apple cart that they left there, not by accident.

They left it there on purpose. They didn't just, you know, do this by accident. MLS's business model is not a business model that was created by accident. It was purposeful, it is strategic, and it's doing exactly what it was structured and planned to do. Well, I have to say, as someone who has gone to a few MLS games, the Toronto FC, I've enjoyed them. You know, it's a sort of fun experience, but, you know, I'm not going to be a season ticket holder. I'm not going to really invest because the standard, the experience, the fee, around it, you know, it seems like maybe in the Pacific Northwest there's been some, you know,

more intense fan experience and they've tried to manufacture their own sort of ultras and all of that. But it just really doesn't feel like it's embedded in any, you know, real development of football talent in your own society. It's, you know, so I definitely get the same feeling that it seems as if perhaps they just don't want us. They don't want to, they don't want to, to give us, I love your analysis about like, you know, basically it's meant to prevent you from having a truly competitive and immersive identification and experience that you would invest in as a consumer, right? Because that's the condition for watching American rugby is, you know, to keep those consumers and the talent lines as you're pointing out. And basketball is not really

the same kind of competitor because it's a very different kind of athlete who can specialize you know, at the highest level in basketball, you know, and like six foot seven people don't make, you know, tricky wingers, you know, so, I mean, there's, so that feels true. So, in fact, actually, I would say I am exactly that consumer that you are describing, because I've become less interested in basketball and never was really that interested in American rugby and so forth. And so I am one of those people who watches the, Premier League and the Champions League matches, you know, at the highest levels of global talent, because it's still a very kind of colonial system since UEFA and its national

leagues, you know, really kind of hoover up as much as possible, you know, talent from around the world. And, you know, so it just seems to me, though, that it would be very difficult, however. So I really admire your proposals as an attempt to, introduce true grassroots fan ownership as models. But it just seems like it's going to be a high bar to get to the level of people consuming, you know, and enjoying the sports. But, you know, what I do like to do. And so maybe there is really a market for it is I still like, just like when, you know, I would watch major league baseball. I loved going to a minor league baseball game. Just because of the local feel, community, you know, but it's a very,

different kind of experience. It's not elite sports. It's like, you know, you're civic kind of, like this is our local team and, you know, you get to watch these youth talents. And so I'm wondering if maybe that's sort of the model by which, and it's, in fact, actually, if the MLS had actually developed out of creating a youth academy and a lot of clubs that were local, rather than these, you know, franchises with nothing at risk, because there's no relegation, and maybe this is the time to start talking about that, that investors model, right? You know, that like nobody wants to lose their investment. If they establish a big kind of club and the infrastructure and a stadium in a big city in the United States,

nobody who establishes those wants the risk of it somehow being downgraded to a lower league and becoming something like minor league, soccer or football. Whereas if they built the other way, up with fan support, local, you know, grassroots, you know, there would have been a slower direction, but it actually would have, it actually, and even now, it actually would provide an alternative that's meaningful for the people who really do love watching football in Europe is they also would love, you know, to be able to go to a local game, a local match and enjoy that kind of more community feel, which is maybe how it could. begin to grow up and develop that talent in a more organic sort of way.

So I'm wondering your thoughts about like where to fit into this model because you're right that there is a whole class of fans. Can one really convert them? You know, like directly into large club soccer at an elite level, football at an elite level in in North America when And, you know, maybe it seems the opportunity is in these more small-scale community-based fan support, fan-owned teams at a grassroots level growing and building up. So let me answer that question by going back to Henry's mention of the J-League, the Japan League that was created in the early 1990s. Because I want to try to address the issue of the quote-unquote barrier to entry, right? when the J-League was created in 1991, well, they created the quote-unquote legal framework in 1991, but the league didn't get launched until two years later in 1993.

The real crucial period of time is the 91 to 93 time frame. Because what happened, and I mentioned this in the conversation with Brett, is that these Japanese businessmen that went to the World Cup in Italy, came back with this idea of creating a professional league, in large measure because they received a response to the letter they wrote to FIFA after the 1990 World Cup, where they inquired about bringing the World Cup to Japan. And FIFA wrote back and said, eh, we can't really do a World Cup if you don't have a professional lead.

So because these, quote, unquote, this group of people that went to Italy for the World Cup were all C-suite types at various Japanese corporations, you know, Mitsubishi, Sony, et cetera, et cetera. You know, they were well connected in Japanese society. And they said, well, why don't we just create a league? And it turns out, as you mentioned, I think earlier Adnan, or maybe it was Henry, the corporations, many of the corporations in Japan, and these are mega corporations in many cases, had Friday night football games going on amongst the employees. you know, a lot of the C-suite guys didn't even know this until they started researching that some of the employees were playing on Friday nights with a keg of beer, you know,

at a local park, you know? So basically what they did was they hired the design department. The person that told me the story was living in Japan when this happened, supposedly told me this quote-unquote Sony aspect of the story, that Sony's design department was contracted by this consortium of, you know, C-suite types, to literally invent 10 brands and 10 teams strategically located through throughout Japan that would serve as the foundation for this new league that they were interested in informing with an eye to launching a new league in a couple

of years. So they literally invented the brands. They invented the mascots. They chose the colors. They went to an apparel company and designed the uniforms. You know, with, you know, the mascots. I mean, you can imagine what it was, you know, it was pure fantasy. It literally did not exist.

And they began selling these football kits and all of the merchandising, you know, with on mugs, on t-shirts, on pencils, everything you can possibly imagine, you know, in the corner of the Sony retail store network throughout Japan. And they publicly announced, well, we don't have a league yet, but it's coming. It's coming in a couple of years. so sure enough it came two years later and the stark impact of this story on me I can't describe because the guy's telling me this story he says well you know they sold 200 million dollars worth of merchandise in two years and I'm thinking holy shit that's like amazing he said

no no no that's not what's amazing what's amazing is that it was all walk-in sales there was no internet. And when he said that to me, when he said there was no internet, I thought, holy shit, maybe there's a chance to do something in the United States that borrows from that Japanese model of how to start a league, but do it on a mobile app. And that's basically what I'm doing. You know, I'm basically raising money on GoFundMe to get the resources, raised to do literally exactly what the J-League did in the United States

developed the kits, developed the corporate image, begin selling merchandise, quote-unquote on the internet, and developing new brands. And this is where I think the kicker comes from the United States. Because, I mean, you guys have

certainly heard of Carl Jung, right? So in some sense, Carl Jung is the inspiration, part of the inspiration for what I'm doing. It's kind of a combination of the J. League in Japan and Carl Jung, because Carl Jung talks about the collective unconscious. And I think the United States has an untapped deep wellspring of a collective unconscious that has never been tapped into, that brings literally the muscle and power of football to the United States in a market that is basically untouched.

And this is the, you know, the 80 to 90 million people I'm talking about that really don't get addressed by the existing sports establishment in the United States. If there's a way that you can connect with those people in their respective collective unconsciousnesses, they will show up en masse and support this idea. So branding for me is the linchpin of value creation for the entire vision of the project. And that's why I think, you know, branding is so important. Actually, in the book, in my book, The Football Manifesto, I have an entire chapter on branding and how and why, you know, MLS has failed on the branding side of the equation because all they've done is to adopt the existing branding model of the Big Four sports.

And that's why today in the United States, we don't have one world-class football team in the United States in large part because of branding, obviously the other part has to do with, you know, what the NFL really wants to have happened with this sport, because MLS is not structured to quote-unquote generate revenue. We're talking about a league that's had literally 30 straight years of losses, so, and which is not something that comes out in the newspapers at all, of course. Nobody reads about that.

All we read about is, you know, oh, San Diego just launched the franchise and they paid a half a billion dollars for the franchise. I mean, I'm from originally from St. Louis, which is in the state of Missouri. And as you know, Missouri is the show me state. So until I see exactly where that money went, I don't believe anything, right? But that's the latest, you know, that's the latest business, you know, accolade that MLS is promoting. Oh, we just sold San Diego for $500 million. Okay. You know, I'm, you know, whatever you say. But I, I don't see any way for, that team in San Diego, or for MLS to turn its business model around and begin maximizing revenue. They're just not structured for it, and they literally cannot do it. So, you know,

there's a vacuum. And the issue of the existing clubs in the United States, to go to your issue, I mean, this is all public information. You can go online and look at, you know, the MLS clubs. MLS has a series of, quote, unquote, lower division clubs under its, the arm of its, you know, called MLS Next. You know, and they have MLS Next Pro, you know, and basically what MLX is doing is they're trying to dive deep into the quote unquote football pyramid in the United States and get control of youth football. That's what they want. They want control of youth football. They want control of all of the flows, not just cash flows, but literally human flows of talent in the youth pipeline that's below them, you know, at the various levels below. So the reason they're doing that is because it's part of the same strategy.

They want to control the talent that this sport produces. And when you look at what's happening in the United States today, and I haven't spoken about the women yet because I want to talk about them in some length in some depth, the United States, after having 30 years of MLS and U.S. soccer running the country, right? They can't point in, you know, I don't want to malign anybody on the U.S. men's national team, right? But we haven't produced literally one world class player in the United States in 100 years, let alone the past 30. we don't have any, there's no man we can point to in the history of the sport in the United States that has become a global icon and a world-class player who could start on any national team and any club team in the world. It hasn't happened. We have never done it. Now, the women,

it's another story, completely another story. And one of the beauties of this business model that I'm working on is that the men and the women are basically being conceptualized as being in and under the same league umbrella and in and under the same club umbrella, just like Europe and just like Latin America. But right now, the United States, the men and the women are in separate leagues. That's not an accident, you know. They're in separate leagues because they want to divide labor. It makes it easier to handle collective bargaining agreements like that, you know? Not to say that there's a lot of money sloshing around for these players anyway.

There's not a lot of money sloshing around. And if you look at the collective bargaining agreement today for MLS, which is at least theoretically the standard bearer for the sport in the United States, each team in an MLS is limited by a salary cap of $5.9 million per team. The absurdity of that concept is limited. lost on the vast majority of Americans, right? I mean, they have a lot of bells and whistles. They've got the Beckham rule, and they've got a few other, you know, bells and whistles

they attach to the, quote, unquote, mechanisms of contracting players. And so you could ratchet up and say, oh, the average MLST is spending maybe 10, 12, maybe 15 million. Even Miami is spending, you know, even with Messi, who they're paying, you know, a fortune to, I think they're still under 20 million. And if you look at the details of what's going on in Europe, last year, Real Madrid, as you know, broke the record for revenues by any team in any sport, historically speaking, right? I think it was like $1.2 billion.

I think the Dallas Cowboys came close. But I think Real Madrid beat them because they generated it in euros and not dollars. But in any case, the amount of revenue that Real Madrid generated last year, which is a fan-owned club. There are 90,000 dues-paying members in Real Madrid. That was roughly a little bit more than half the revenue for MLS last year, right, for the entire league in the richest country on earth, right? So it's like, well, what is going on here?

And then you look at MLS's payroll. And MLS, you know, with 30 teams now, they've got, you know, something in the neighborhood of 850 to 900 players. that entire payroll of MLS, right, is roughly the equivalent of the payroll of Man City. So it's like, and nobody, nobody asks questions. Nobody says, well, why is this? It's just taken as the natural state of affairs. You know, it's kind of like reading Plato's Republic, you know, and listening to the idea of, quote, unquote, some people are born gold.

Some people are born silver and some are born bronze, and that reflects the natural hierarchy that we're born into, right? So the elite is a natural phenomena of society. That's exactly how people look at MLS. It's just a natural thing, which is the way it should be, because that's the way it is. And of course, it is the classic example in kind of the Nome Chomsky scent of manufactured consent. Right? Nobody realizes what's really happening because they haven't thought about it and read about it. And so it stays the way it is. Nobody challenges the status quo because they think it's a quote unquote cosmically ordained. You know? So now we've got a chance to, you know, drop the curtain, you know, a la the Wizard of Oz and show Oz for what he really is, which is. You know, people have been hoodwinked for 30 years into believing that they actually have football. They don't have football.

They have soccer. That's what they've got. They've got soccer. What we've got in the United States today is without question soccer. It is not without question football. This is not football. And we do not have a football culture in the United States. And that's what's missing.

There's a vacuum in that country for a true football culture. And that's basically what I'm working. working on to try to bring the fruition. I'm not sure if I answered your question on nine. No, no, that was great. I mean, that's, you know, but I do, I do want to emphasize that the quote unquote, the number of teams, soccer teams at youth level. And even, you know, you could even add in adult, you know, at the youth level, both boys and girls, I mean, there are quite literally thousands of teams scattered throughout the United States, thousands. you can even say tens of thousands.

They're just not, quote, unquote, structured properly. I mean, youth football in the United States generates about twice the amount of revenue, actually a little bit more than twice the amount of revenue that MLS does. MLS publicly announced via Forbes that they brought in $2 billion in revenue last year. I don't believe those numbers from Forbes

and that's into the story. But youth football is probably in the neighborhood of $5 billion revenue. annually. It's just that it's chaotic. You know, there are, you know, there's no quote-unquote master plan for the sport at the youth level in the United States. It's total chaos. Yeah, I have to say that like my son plays football. Oh, so there you go. And he is actually pretty talented.

And the difference, we spent a year abroad in the UK, the difference, the difference. in the coaching, the organization, the developmental format. It's just night and day, and it's just not organized in the North American environment where so many kids play. But they play it as their second sport

and partly because it isn't organized or developed to have genuine pathways for development. And it's not organized. And, you know, so somehow, a country that probably has more youth players

than almost any country nonetheless has the condition, as you said, where it has never really produced a world-class player, right, in the history of 100 years. It's unbelievable. AYSO and all of this other kind of stuff.

I mean, I was just joking with Henry that remarkably Canada is actually closer with having Alfonso Davies, who at least can play fire. I think you're right. I think You're right. I think Alfonso Davis is probably the best product that's come out of North America. I'm sure people in Mexico would complain about Hugo.

You know, Hugo, what's his name? The famous Mexican player that played for Real Madrid. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say North... Hugo Sanchez? I think it was Hugo Sanchez. I think it's Hugo Sanchez, yeah, yeah. But, I mean, it is really stark. And so something is happening to kind of short-circuit the development of players.

And I think you're really on to something, which I haven't heard from other. is really calling out and exposing what the MLS project really is, that it's structured to prevent, really, the development of football in North America and to keep it being soccer, right? So I think that's a great way to characterize it. But football is coming. Again, you had mentioned that the 1994 World Cup was pretty instrumental in changing the landscape

and requiring this solution of putting in place not a real football solution but, you know, a public nationwide soccer league in MLS. We're now on the cusp of another U.S.

as principal host, though it is a North American World Cup that's coming with two sites in Canada and I believe three three or four in Mexico where games, you know, matches will be hosted in 2026 in the summer, but it's principally going to be based in different U.S. cities.

And, of course, the quarterfinals and the semifinals will all be in U.S. city. So it's principally a U.S. dominated World Cup. And so I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts about, you know, whether FIFA, you know, is FIFA just completely satisfied with the MLS model? Does it seem to be making any requirements or what do you think is going to be the impact or consequences of the World Cup 2026? And how would you characterize the difference

between now and 1994 when it happened? And I will just say that I did attend the Qatar World Cup, which I thought was actually a marvelous World Cup. It turned out to be on the field. it. He's amazing. Yeah, it was. And part of, and the, the experience for fans was wonderful because it was all in one place. Like, you could just go see games, he matches. You don't have to travel far away. And you actually mixed with fans from around the world. Whereas this next one that's coming up, it's so dispersed across North America that, you know, it's going to be in some ways just sort of disappearing into, you know, the vast kind of, there won't be a, a, a sense of the World Cup is happening, except in this kind of media sort of way. The fan experience, if you're in a city in one of these cities, I mean, are you going to encounter tons of other supporters in the streets? And, you know, there was like a real camaraderie and a special

kind of experience that happens when the World Cup is hosted in smaller locations, you know. So at any rate, those are just some of my thoughts. I just wanted to give you in kind of as we move to a conclusion here as bookends. The 1994 story versus, okay, where are we with 2026 and any other thoughts that you have about? Bill, I want to respond to you, and I also don't want to forget about Henry's reference to promotion and relegation. I want to somehow weave that into the picture. So one of the, you know, first of all, in terms of comparing the two World Cups, as you probably know, the 1994 World Cup, when it was staged in the United States, was the most successful World Cup at that time financially, right? Because they filled all of the stadia.

The outpouring of support was huge, absolutely huge. And it blew FIFA's socks off. I mean, I don't even think FIFA was ready to really deal with the fact that it was as successful as it was. Having said that and going back to this issue of promotion and relegation, the original president, I shouldn't say the original, But the last president of the United States Soccer Federation was a guy named Werner Fricker who had been in office for a good period of time when the United States won the rights to the World Cup in 1994. He's the guy that kind of got the ball rolling. However, when that ball was formally passed to the United States, the United States was granted

the rights to the World Cup in 1994, and this quote-unquote, promise of 1996 and a new professional football league in the United States was on the table, the forces that B began to mobilize. And very shortly after the award of the World Cup, a gentleman by the name of Alan Rothenberg, largely hand-picked by the powers that B, ran for office at the United States Soccer Federation and won and basically took control of the U.S. Soccer Federation in, I think it was 1990. And he's basically the guy that carried the ball forward for the creation of the league, at least preliminarily, right?

So he was, you know, he was there for the World Cup in 1994. I'm not exactly sure when he left. But he had also been the quote-unquote head of football for the 84 Olympics in L.A. And the 84 Olympics in L.A. was a huge success for football. And so he was kind of tapped with that in mind. He was a good organizer, good people person, so to speak, and so he was tapped. But having said that, you should know that existing prior to the award of the World Cup in 1994,

Werner Fricker had come up with a master plan for a professional league in the United States that was modeled on Europe. it had pro rel it had promotion and relegation structured into the model and of course when he got quote unquote kicked out of the organization by democratic methods right nobody knows how to manipulate democracy better than the than the liberal establishment right all of a sudden out of the blue promotion relegation is no longer present in the conceptual framework of the league how did that happen? Why did that happen? So basically what happened is that by the time the 94 World Cup was over, and there really had to be some muscle brought to bear on the creation of this league concept, a couple of leading law firms in the United States with backing from, you know, basically some of the leading owners in the NFL, particularly Robert Kraft, who owns the New England Patriots and the United States. Lamar Hunt, who then owned the Kansas City Triefs. They were the quote-unquote principal drivers. There were other investors around, but those were the principal drivers of what was going on. They hired a law firm. Alan Rothenberg was deeply involved with the structuring of the league.

And when the league got structured, it didn't have promotion and relegation. And, of course, subsequent, we've heard this argument that, oh, my God, these people have invested billions of dollars in the league. They've paid fortunes for the franchise fees. They've paid fortune for the, for the, for the, for the, for the, for the, for the, for the, for the, for the, for the, for the fact-X involved with the stadia. We can't all of a sudden relegate these people down to some, you know, inconsequential league below MLS. Well, here's the rub on that story. First of all, MLS created an organization around 2000, 2001, after Don Garber had taken over as commissioner.

They created an organization called. called Soccer United Marketing, which is a standalone, just like MLS, a standalone LLC, a limited liability corporation in Delaware. So MLS had two standalone LLCs in Delaware, one MLS for the league and one, quote unquote, soccer United Marketing, or some, which was there to generate revenue. And the reason they decided to create some was because between 1999 and 2000, the league was having financial difficulty. They weren't able to generate revenue. They were losing money. Now, of course, that hasn't stopped. Losing money has continued. They have lost money for 30 straight years. But some began, quote unquote, an attempt to

counterbalance that. And so with that counterbalance, they began looking for deals, you know, buying the rights to the World Cup, for instance. or buying and negotiating with Mexico for Mexico's rights in the World Cup. They basically began to accumulate assets. Now, there's a very interesting story that has to do with promotion and relegation in the context of private equity, right? Because if you look historically at the sport of football in the United States and MLS in particular, basically, MLS is like kryptonite to private equity in the United States.

They don't want to touch MLS. they don't want to touch it, right? But there's an exception. In 2011, 2012, roughly, one of the major private equity firms in the United States called Providence Equity Partners decided to take a leap into the quote-unquote umbrella of MLS and invest in sum.

So private equity took a 25% stake in some in around 2012 under the assumption that $150 million, I mean, that's what was in the newspapers, that $150 million would close some of the gaps that MLS was feeling on the cash flow side, and eventually it would get paid back. Well, they did get paid back. Five or six years later, Providence equity exited that investment of 25%. Their stake was diluted down to 20% because MLS kept expanding,

because quite frankly, the only quote-unquote revenue, real revenue, in lump sum, in lump sum terms at Eminemus' conjamminary, and still is this way, is franchise fees, right? So basically they grew while that investment was maturing, and then five or six years later, I think it was 2018 or so, 2017, roughly, Providence equity exited, and they got something like a three or four X return on the investment. You know, they tripled, almost quadrupled their investment over $150 million, million, and it gave some a valuation when they went in of $600 million, and when they exited, some had a valuation of over $2 billion, roughly. I'm not remembering what the numbers were, but it was a significant increase in value.

What that means by definition is that some, as the revenue-generating arm of MLS, is worth more in terms of market value on a revenue basis, on a cash flow basis, on a comparables basis, than MLS itself, right? So MLS is a loss leader. It doesn't make money. Meanwhile, we have this new phenomenon, which has occurred over the past 10 years, which is that you have major private equity investors

in the United States crossing the pond to Europe to invest in football in Europe. Today, as I'm speaking to you, I'm pretty sure about this number. Today, a majority of the EPL is owned by foreign, capital, most of it from the United States. And they're also investing in France, in Italy, and in Spain. The only country they have not invested in is Germany, because Germany does not tolerate private equity investment in their fan-owned model. Having said that, every league,

every team in Europe that private equity is invested in has promotion and relegation. That risk is there, right? The absurdity of not having promotion and relegation in the United States is related to the idea, oh, that we don't want to prejudice our billionaire investors. But the fact of the matter is the billionaire investors in the United States are not making money. What money they do make and what losses they generate is being upstream to them above the LLCs pursuant to the universe to the Internal Revenue Code of the United States. The IRS code allows for losses and gains to be upstreamed above the LLCs and passed on to the investors as tax loss carry forwards, which can then be offset against non-football related income in their other business

operations. And obviously, all of these guys are billionaires, so they've got money coming in from all over the place, right? They just use the tax loss carry forwards to offset their taxable income and reduce their tax burden. Right. So there's like no incentive to change the structure. There's no incentive to change MLS because everybody's making off like a bandit, even though they're generating losses. So the, the idea that they don't want to do this because they don't want to quote unquote prejudice their, you know, or expose themselves to risk because of promotion of relegation is nonsense. Because they're not making any money anyway, you know. So it's nonsense. It's nonsense. It's

It's a nonsense argument. It's the kind of argument that the press in the United States obviously doesn't take the time to look at because that tells a story that is a story that MLS doesn't want in the marketplace. So promotion of relegation, I think, is an important part of the calculus. It's a crucial portion of what football culture is. And that's part of the idea that I'm bringing with this new concept. it'll get us to, again, that concept, which is the call to action for the listeners in just a second. But before I get into this closing question, I just want to mention, since you were

talking, Robert, about the dynamics of club purchases that are taking place in Europe, just to dive in a little bit deeper onto that for a second. Really, what we're seeing at the current moment is two primary ways in which the dynamics are changing in terms of how not only private equity, but just ownership stake in clubs in Europe is changing today. One of those is the multi-club model. So this is where you have these private investment groups. And again, most of the private investment groups are U.S.-based. So, for example, Boston Sports Group, Providence Investment.

These major investment groups buy up not just one club in one country. They may buy multiple clubs in one country, but more commonly they will be by a few, a club here, a club there in different countries. And this, again, serves a couple of different functions. One is that, well, you know, some of the smaller leagues, they'll buy the team in it. And maybe they want to just sweep up league titles every year in that league because the league is a smaller league. And, you know, you don't need as much capital to basically buy the league title.

But typically what happens is those are used as talent pools. They bring in young developing talent to these places. They develop the talent without really worrying about having huge money players there. It's all about the youth. And then they can sell those youth players either to their affiliated clubs. So they have basically a first purchase option at the bigger clubs, the clubs in the bigger leagues. Or they can just sell them for massive amounts of profit to clubs abroad. The bigger clubs on the other hand typically also don't run very much in profit.

and often they will run at a loss because they're having to buy extremely expensive players, expensive transfers, expensive wages. But again, these losses are offset in a couple of different ways. One is through tax carry forwards as you were pointing out when you're having losses in one part of your investment portfolio. And also because those smaller clubs often are run on the interest of making profit by selling young talented players. They buy young players for very cheap, very young talented players. They get them experience. They sell them on. Those clubs make a profit. The bigger clubs, the really, you know,

the top level names like Chelsea Football Club, for example. You know, Todd Boli is the owner of Chelsea Football Club, but there's an investment group behind him. Yep. This is the team that everybody knows, but Todd Boli also is the lead investor in multiple other clubs in multiple other countries. And this is one of the dynamics that we see is this multi-club model, and that's not to go into the whole Red Bull story. You know, we mentioned RB Leipzig earlier, but there's also Red Bull. Salzburg, you're in Brazil.

There's a Red Bulls or Red Bull here. There's a Red Bull, New York. There's Red Bull franchises around the world. And also, the other main dynamic is nation states. And we talked about this in one of our conversations. And I should have mentioned at the top of the conversation, listeners, that we have a trilogy of football-related episodes with Alex Avina. In at least one of those episodes, we talked about nation states buying clubs for, what's the word that we used? Sports laundering.

What is that? Yeah, it's like sports laundering. Yeah, sports washing. Sports washing. So I can cut this out. So we have these nation states which will buy clubs for the purpose of sports washing. They don't care if they make a profit because it's the government of the UAE, of Qatar, of Saudi Arabia that are owning these clubs outside of their own countries. Does not matter if they make a profit.

These are run by the public investment funds of the country, sovereign wealth funds. and the purpose is then that they launder their reputation. People look at what a wonderful project. Let's look at PSG, PSG, just yesterday, as of the time of recording, one of PSG's players just won the Bolognaudor. That's right. The top award, individual award and football. Their team won the UEFA Champions League for the first time.

That's the biggest club competition in Europe. they're owned by Dum-dum-dum-Dutter they're owned by Cutter so this is and they're run brilliantly I mean a wonderful incredibly smart model

today in the past they had a little bit of a crazy model with you know buying a bunch of players that don't work together at all but today their club is one run wonderfully and people around the world are in awe of how they're run

and they pray raise Qatar for how they're running the club. So these are two dynamics that we see is this multi-club model with these private investment groups operating clubs in various countries around the world. And we also see nation states. So, you know, just something to add into what Robert was saying. But Robert, we've already had you on for about two hours. I want to make sure that we give you a moment to tell the listeners where they can find

your work and also what you would encourage. them to do, to take part in this project that you're kicking off on your own? So you can find what I'm doing in a number of venues. I'm going to list them. The first and most obvious link is a website called Urban Refugee, altogether, Urban Refugee.com. That's the e-commerce site for the league. And the league's quote-unquote name is the football Supporters Trust League. And the football supporters trust league is basically an organization that would be the traditional league umbrella for the sport, for clubs underneath it. We are simultaneously, as I'm speaking to you, creating 16 clubs that will be launched by mobile app. That organization,

which I abbreviate as STL, is complemented by three other organizations that you'll see on the website. One is called TUSA, the football supporters trust of the United States, which is basically an organization that's modeled on the U.K.'s and Europe's idea of fan ownership and, you know, club, quote unquote, fan involvement in clubs. They have a model in Europe and the U.K. that has literally been created by the government in Europe and the U.K. to foster fan involvement with the sport. So we're doing that in the United States has never existed before. We have another organization called the Federation of Clubs in the United States,

which is basically the organization for licensing clubs that want to become, quote-unquote, professional clubs. And then we have Urban Refugee, which is the website, which is basically the, quote-unquote, arm of the league for commercialization, for e-commerce, for streaming,

for real estate, and what, of course, I haven't mentioned in this conversation is real estate and how important real estate is because one of the challenges in order to quote-unquote create value for these clubs in these communities where we build is to break the model

that MLS has created because MLS has created a league where the average stadium size is about 23,000. That's for 30 teams. That includes, of course, seven or eight NFL venues. So the average size is 23,000. Well, it turns out that the average size

in the second division league in the UK and the second division league in Germany is a little bit more than that. It's about 24,000 or 25,000 on average. So what that means is that MLS really is a second division league by global standards, right? If you look at the Brazilian top division league, the German top division division league and the English top division league,

they all, in terms of stadium size, the average stadium size, is a little bit more than 40. In England, the average crowd size is about 39 or 40,000. Germany still has the largest average crowd size in the world at 42 or 43. And Brazil is, you know, picking up the pieces at around, you know, the mid-30s in terms of crowd size. So we need to create value and we need to create real estate to do that value creation process. And what I hope that your audience will do will be to go to the Urban Refugee website and click on the tab that says go fund me because what we're trying to do is to raise $5 million from the grassroots in the United States and have the grassroots lead this charge

to restructure football in the United States and basically fund the first state. which is to repeat the J-League model in the United States and launch these clubs with a mobile app. Now, there's a second strategy involved with this notion of the football supporters' trust league, and that is there's a private equity component, which is largely the world I come from, historically speaking, professionally.

We have to raise a substantial amount of capital to not only do a role-up and consolidation of the sport in the United States and make it, quote, unquote, work like it should work, but we also need to develop real estate. So right now we've got the idea is to raise the first five million, to get the word out, do the social media campaign, set up the legal vehicles, get the quote-unquote, you know, image out there like the J-D did, but using a social media campaign that's, you know, wily and very, very astute to make it happen. And then we need to raise a substantial amount of capital. and right now that capital is somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 billion to do the real estate buildout

so that we have the infrastructure in the United States to build the stadia that we need, somewhere between 12 and 18 new stadia that would average, on average, roughly somewhere in the neighborhood of 45,000 to 55,000 seats, that would be coupled with these new branded clubs because the one thing we're bringing is new brands to the sport

that, again, tap into that, quote-unquote, union, you know, collective unconscious that for our purposes will monetize and let the fans become owners of football clubs in the United States in a way that they've never been empowered before. That's basically what we're doing. Please go to urban refugee.com. Click on the GoFundMe, five bucks, ten bucks, ideally five hundred or a thousand would be better. But anything you could afford obviously will accept and you'll know that it's going to this new, this new business model to bring the game back to the people and empower people at the grassroots for this port.

That, of course, will all be linked in the show notes. Now, Adnan, can you tell the listeners where they can find you in your other show? Well, firstly, I want to thank Robert for coming and talking about not only the history of the game and the organization of the game, but for, you know, promoting a vision of an alternative that's often lacking when we just critique what is wrong with the structure of sport under capitalism, but trying to figure out some ways in which the game can be returned for the joy of the fans and to express their feelings and sentiments.

I think that's wonderful. And I think I can imagine that in a fan-supported league, football league, where fans are more in control, we wouldn't have the atrocious scenes that we have in other places where people holding up a Palestine flag to express solidarity with, you know, people suffering genocide or, you know, shut down and ejected from the stadiums. But you have some venue for the expression of people's solidarity, people's feelings and sentiments, while they also enjoy some relaxation and joy from work at the highest level in the beautiful game. So I have to say, I think it's wonderful, and I hope that we'll have you on back again to talk about maybe as we get closer to the World Cup, you know, thinking a little bit more about, you know, what this spectacle will mean, you know, how it's being exploited and appropriated. And what are some ways, you know, to try and both enjoy it, but also become more active in a model that would be healthier. also, you know, not just for the club game, but also for the kind of national, international sports competition.

So I look forward to that. But in the meantime, I just, you know, in the lead up to the Qatar World Cup, we had an analysis of what the Qatar World Cup meant with Alex Savina. I was thinking in advance of the upcoming World Cup. Why not bring Robert and Alex together and we can have a round table. That sounds great. That would be an honor. So, I'm a big fan of Alex, even though I've never met him. Oh, well, you will then. You will.

Yeah. We'll make it happen for sure. So anyway, you can follow me, you know, on Twitter at Adnan A. Hussain, 1S, H-U-S-A-I-N. There is a kind of MP in the UK who a lot of people are disappointed with and they think sometimes it's me. He spells it incorrectly with two S's, so don't mistake me for him on Twitter. and also I have a companion show that I think people, listeners to guerrilla history, will be interested in. It's also on YouTube, but I know you are all listeners. You can also listen to the show, adnanhussein show.lybtsin.com, and it's just the Adnan Hussein show, and you can find it on any of your Spotify or Apple podcast platforms,

as well as on YouTube. And we do a lot of similar things, and we also do live streams. If you enjoy that and want to, you know, be online and have your questions posed and participate in the discussion, please go to, you can follow it on X live, but if you want to be part of the discussion, go to at aden, YouTube.com slash at Adnan Hussein show. And I'm hoping we might have Robert on for a kind of live sort of discussion as well at some point. Listen, I am totally game to do that, Adnan. Just let me know. Well, we'll have you on. I'll be in touch. And so anyway, listeners, you'll get another fix, too, in that kind of...

We don't have to talk about football, by the way. We can talk about other things. Okay. Great. And Adnan, just as a funny aside before I read myself and the show out, I had a comrade who also is a friend and former guest on guerrilla history text me and say, by the way, Henry, is Adnan secretly an MP in the UK? I said, unless he's really holding out some information from me, I don't think so. As far as I know, no. I know you did your sabbatical in the UK, Adnan. But as far as I know, you didn't get elected while you were there. So, you know. Yeah, there's been remarkable amount of confusion on that point. I mean, he spells his name differently and he's definitely not somebody I would want to be fully associated with. So please do distinguish listeners. And, One S, one S-A-I. You're clearing this up.

Adnan is not secretly a legislator in the UK. With that being said, you can find me on Twitter listeners. Like I said, I haven't been able to tweet in ages because of internet restrictions and things like that. But you can follow me anyway at Huck 1995. As for the show, Robert, you want to see something. Can I give a shout out to Brett? Of course, please. For introducing me to both of you.

Brett was, like, incredibly kind and supportive, and I really, really appreciate his introduction. And I also, I'm like, you know, speechless in terms of my appreciation for the two of you. So thank you so much. Absolutely, a pleasure. And we're delighted, and we should thank Brett for putting us in touch with you.

He did a recent episode, but he actually wrote to us and said, oh, you've got to have Robert Wilson on. I know you guys love football, although I think he may have said soccer in the he was texting he was texting with me and we know Brett is not really up on the parlance

that's not his game but I mean he and many people don't yeah don't pay attention to sports or whatever but we actually really love football the beautiful game so we were delighted to be put in touch and so we thank we thank Brett and Rev left

and people should go back and listen to that episode with Robert and I thank you so so much I should also just remind the listeners one last time that we, again, have a trilogy of football-related episodes with Alex Avenia that if you were interested in this conversation, you should go and check out. We had one titled The Beautiful Game. We had one that was looking forward to the Qatar World Cup, which was almost four years ago at this point, which is remarkable to think about how time flies. And we had one in advance of the Euros as well, which was a couple years ago. but we'll hopefully have Robert and Alex on together in the near future. Listeners, guerrilla history, you can support us by going to patreon.com

forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And again, you can find the show on Twitter, Instagram, and our email newsletter, gorilohistory.substack.com, although who knows when I'll be able to access things. Again, living in the most sanctioned country in the world is sometimes a very interesting experience. With that being said, listeners, and until next time, solidarity. Thank you.