Odd Lots - How the 1994 World Cup Transformed the Business of Football Forever

Episode Date: June 25, 2026

The last time the World Cup came to the US was 1994. Before then, the World Cup was an enormously popular event with surprisingly limited commercial significance; the 1990 tournament in Italy, for instance, lost money for broadcasters. But that all changed in 1994, when American companies sought to make their mark in the form of advertisements and sponsorships: firms like McDonalds, Mastercard, and General Motors saw the potential to reach a global audience through one of the world's most watched sports events. Today, we speak with Joey D'Urso — a freelance sports journalist and author of the recent book More Than A Shirt: How Football Shirts Explain Global Politics, Money and Power — about the 1994 World Cup and this year's competition, which is being held jointly, by the US, Canada, and Mexico. We also talk about other surprising stories of corporate and geopolitical influence in the world of football. Read more:Unilever, Pepsi Tap Celebrities, Players During World CupMexico’s Sheinbaum Invites Merlín the Duck to National Palace Amid Soccer Craze Only Bloomberg - Business News, Stock Markets, Finance, Breaking & World News subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at  bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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First of all, are we calling it football or soccer? I'm fine with either. I've except whatever. I don't feel strongly, but just for like consistency stake, I guess we'll just call it football on this episode. If you want, that's fine with me. I like that you're defining the terms beforehand. This is important. As long as we all are operating on this, I'm happy to call it football.

Busy time, obviously, coming back to the U.S. In the sports. In the sports world. In the sports world, I think when you landed back from our recent trip to Asia, it was literally like the final minutes of the Knicks winning. Yeah. It was nuts. I was driving through Lower Manhattan and everyone was spilling out into the streets, watching the game through like the windows of bars and stuff. And then, of course, when they won, you could hear the entire city just go nuts.

Yeah. So part of me is like, why aren't we doing a basketball episode? Right. Because it feels very much like New York is actually focused on basketball at the moment, even though. We obviously have a very big football slash soccer event. Yeah. And I was walking through my neighborhood. I live in the East Village last night.

Like everyone, it's very festive time in the city. Everyone was like sitting out and like outdoor bars and stuff. Like watching whatever World Cup match was on last time, obviously. Whatever World Cup match. I forget what was airing. Well, to be fair. Yes. You could lose track in this particular World Cup because it's the biggest ever World Cup.

What does that mean? So it means they have like the most teams play. the most games ever. Really? I can't remember the exact number, but I think it's almost 50 teams versus previously it was about 30 teams, 32 teams. Oh, I always sort of assumed that it was fixed. FIFA argued that this is about making the game even bigger, you know, diversity and inclusion and all of that. But if you were going to be cynical, and some people would argue you should be cynical when it comes to FIFA.

You could argue that it's about selling more ads, selling more tickets to more games. and also internal politics, so currying favor with some smaller nations for political reasons, all of that. That makes sense, actually, because I was sort of wondering, no offense to any of like, I was like, we're going to offend so many people in this episode. I can already tell. I was like, oh, it's pretty impressive that like Curse out made the World Cup and so forth. Did you see the Cape Verde game? The Cape Verde game, right. So that was insane.

So, okay, so part of the concern with FIFA expanding this to like 50 teams is that, well, you don't get the same, I guess, intensity that you would in a World Cup with a smaller group. And you get all these meaningless games like Curacao versus Germany. But then Cape Verde played Spain and it wasn't a dead rubber game. It ended up like being kind of an upset because Spain are supposed to be favorites for the entire cup. Yeah. I know. It was a die. Yeah. And so now I'm proud to say I'm a diehard Cape Verde fan. And I really want this whole like dead rubber thing to just blow up in FIFA's face. You know, One thing I'm aware of with football in general is that we could have an entire podcast on the money side of it. And, like, you know, people always say, oh, you should really do an episode on how, like, you know, whatever team and whatever league in Europe is now permanently going to be relegated because they've signed these financial.

And it's like, you know what? That sounds like really fascinating to me. But unless we were like really deep in it, that almost sounds like too niche, you know. And so. You know we had a really good newsletter all about this last year. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Whatever. What's it?

Financial engineering in specifically European football. But yeah, there's a lot of, let's say, money influence slash money games being played in football at the moment. There's so many angles that we get attacking from. Just earlier in the year, I went to my first Champions League match. I saw Athletico Madrid versus Arsenal in the Metropolitan Stadium in Madrid. amazing experience had the vibe to me of like an American like Big 12 college football match, which I think is an amazing energy, et cetera. Again, we are going to offend so many people with this episode.

I say there's a compliment. Anyway, let's get into money. I'll say one more thing about football, which is that I've never like really gotten hooked on it, but I've always thought the jerseys are the coolest of any sport. Particularly I liked when more of the jerseys had physical colors on them. I think that's gone out of style a little bit. But I also love, like, those old jerseys that have had, like, the flapped collars on them. And I just think they look cool as hell.

Yeah, I agree. And somehow on a football jersey, it doesn't offend me when I see ads the way it does, like, if I see an ad on American baseball jersey, I was like, oh, it's sort of like debasing. It looks, to me, it looks fine. Why? Do you just expect it? I don't know. Maybe it's like a subtle chauvinism or something like that. Or it's like, oh, it looks fine to see these corporate logos.

Now when I look at an NBA jersey with a logo, I'm like, they're sort of deepened. basing this sport. I don't know. But you just come to expect money to debase football. That makes sense. We're going to be talking about whether money has injected vivality or expanded the game or debased it or whatever, or at least how the massive amounts of money have changed the game. They're very excited to bring on the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with freelance football journalist Joey Durso, and he has a new book out called More Than a Shirt, How Football Shirts Explain Global Politics, Money, and Power. So Joey, thank you so much for coming on Nodlots. Thanks for having me, big fan of the pod.

I don't even know where to begin. I guess I'll say, like, do you have any hunch as to why it is that someone like myself is okay with seeing ads on a football kit versus other sports? Like, do you have any sort of intuition about why maybe we come to expect that or that's sort of cool? Is it kind of deep in your soul and your personal identity and you just feel it in a way that? Yeah, maybe that's just it. Maybe like I don't have like the sort of, you know, I agree. Europe was like a Detroit Tiger fan, for example. And if I saw like a big ad for like open AI or something on there, I wouldn't be that

into it or crypto.com or whatever, which seems to advertise everywhere. Maybe it's just that. Maybe it's just like what's in my soul or not. Yeah. Well, I see an interesting question, which sporting culture is more commercial corporate capitalist and which isn't because obviously the US in most respects is far more capitalistic than in Europe. But there's actually funny some ways to invert that.

One is sponsorship and one is like this draft system, which to us feels like communism. For us, you know, it's just the rich teams buy all the best players and that's how it happens and the rich get richer. Okay, so Joey, I can't help but notice that we're doing a football podcast, but you are in fact wearing a baseball shirt, which maybe says something about the difficulties. It's a Coney Island Cyclone shirt, which I love. Anyone who comes and visits New York has to go to a Cyclones game. But soccer has historically had some difficulty with breaking through into the U.S., right?

So it's getting bigger now. We have the MLS. We have all of that. We now have a World Cup that's taking place in the U.S. But we had one previously. And that was kind of an uphill battle to break into that particular market. Yeah, well, so soccer in the U.S. has quite a big, a long history, but it was basically wiped out by the Wall Street crash.

So it was big in, big industrial cities before that, big in kind of Philadelphia, New Jersey. And then it was wiped out because it was deeply linked to these industries that were hit so badly in 1929. And then it was kind of in the wilderness for half a century. America's own sports became really big. But yeah, it was sort of getting bigger and bigger. You know, Pelle came to play for the New York Cosmos in the 70s. Beck and Bauer as well. It was like the place to be.

My husband used to work for the Cosmo. Really? Yeah, he was a youth country. Yeah. But yeah, USA 94. And FIFA had long wanted to bring the World Cup to the US, even though no one really cared in the US about the sport, but because of money, because of business,

because the world's biggest companies, the world's richest of people, the world's biggest pool of wealthy consumers are in the US. and the sort of footballing snobs of Europe, of which I'm probably sometimes one of them, probably turned their nose up at going to the US. Italian 90 is very romanticised in England as, you know, Pavarotti and the beautiful sites of Rome and these gauche Americans, what are they doing with our beautiful World Cup? But it was kind of a success in many metrics.

The grounds were full. Lots of, I think, the Hispanic population would have helped a lot there. But a lot of just curious Americans, like women's football was huge in the US before it was big in Europe. So there was a lot of interest because of that. I think it was the Olympics before that that was big. So in 94, loads of massive American corporations made their debut at the World Cup. They paid up to $20 million to get involved, which might not seem a lot in the scale of football now,

but certainly was back then. You had McDonald's. It was her first ever global sponsorship. You had General Motors for the first time. Mastercard, who had a sort of pilot in 1998, converted that to a long-term commitment. It was a big commercial success, like Harvard Business School, wrote case studies about it. Despite the fact most Americans weren't interested, the opening game was interrupted by the O'Don. Jay Simpson car chase. But yeah, massive deal in World Cup history for commercial rather than

necessarily football reasons. First of all, I had not realized that actually there was a long football tradition in the United States prior to the crash. We could have probably done an entire episode just on that. But I do also remember, like, as a kid in like the 80s, like hearing about this guy named Pele, as a Trump is a big a Pele fan. That was pretty good. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. But what were the cosmos? And I was like, what league was that even? So I believe it was the NASL, the North American Soccer League. But it was kind of an exhibit.

It was kind of the Pele show and, you know, the Cosmos would go around to these different teams. And when Pele left, it all sort of fell apart pretty quickly. It was losing lots of money. And the US is just such a deep, rich sporting market. You know, there are like four, the big four, which would be American football, baseball, basketball and ice hockey. It's hard to penetrate that.

And it's very unusual. You know, Australia, I was there recently. It's maybe the closest parallel. But in Europe, in every European country, you know, I like cricket. You guys probably think that's incredibly obscure and sort of rusty British. But like cricket is tiny compared to football, as is rugby and all these other sports we have. Football is completely dominant in the vast majority of the world. The US is a wild exception.

So let's talk about that 94 World Cup. So like what was the lead up to that 94 World Cup in terms of making the case that it should be in the US? Like how long was that? I remember that World Cup. But like how long was that in the works and the fights and what had to happen for the World Cup? to finally go in 1994 to the US. Yeah, so it was a long time. It was like the mid-80s.

It had lots of build-up time. I mean, the US, as we are seeing now, it doesn't need to build loads of stadiums, right? That's one huge advantage it has, unlike, you know, South Africa in 2010, built all these white elephant stadiums. And in many cases, that was a wonderful World Cup, end of apartheid Mandela,

but financially, a bit of a basket case. So the US was ready, even if it wasn't a big footballing country. But what it had to do was set up its own league, because it did not have a professional soccer league at that point. So it set up the MLS because of that. So real kind of, footballing desert at the time that it was preparing to host the World Cup in 94. So just to clarify, when it comes to, I guess, U.S. commercial advertisers, what exactly were

they trying to achieve here? Because if soccer isn't that big in the U.S. at that time in 1994, I assume they're not necessarily trying to target the American market. Like, maybe it's great that you're trying to popularize the game more in the country. But if you're an advertiser, I imagine sponsoring the World Cup in 94 is more about tapping into that global. audience that you're describing. Yes. If you, Coca-Cola and you want to sell it in Africa and Asia, it's the best billboard you could possibly imagine. It's been billed and, you know, whole villages in parts of the world where people don't necessarily have electricity at home, we'll be, will be watching it. It's the biggest advertising event in the world by far. But before 94,

it just wasn't really commercialized that ruthlessly. You know, tournaments lost money. There's a great story from, I think it's in the 74 World Cup in Mexico. This tailor, like a guy who sows clothes somewhere in London just bought half the advertising boards on the stadium in Mexico City just because like no one else had thought of it and he offered them like a nominal amount of money and they were like yeah sure and like when I do my research into the sort of history of football shirts and sponsorship the early days are often just kind of like that a team will win some massive trophy with the local beer company on it and then three years later there'll be no logo because it's literally just like some guy there's no process there's no marketing department there's

know anything. So I suppose football, FIFA, was leaving millions, billions of pounds on the table. Of course, there is a flip side that if you ruthlessly commercialize it to within an inch of its life, you're potentially risking harming the products itself. But that's maybe a separate podcast. Yeah, I suppose that's a separate podcast. No, I want to get into that later. Yeah, we could, yeah, we should get into that in the current state a little bit more. But talk more about some of these deals and how big they were and how unusual they were. So you go from like, okay, a Taylor in one World Cup to then a few World Cups later, it's Coca-Cola and it's the biggest. Yeah, and there were like $20 million deals and this kind of thing.

Yeah, so talk about like who were some of the big sponsors and like, you know, what were some of these deals. Yeah, yeah, and what were some of these deals that they signed in 1994? Yeah, so this guy on Rothenberg, who was the kind of seat, the guy running the bid, and he was very, who came from an NBA background and he was very commercially minded and he turned it into this big commercial event, I think, very effectively. But yeah, the sponsors are, you know, like the ones we see now, like Coca-Cola, like Visa. these huge multinational corporations that the World Cups hadn't really seen in the same extent before, and American companies,

which is what we see now. festival and we won't stop. Celebrate Pride. Turn up the love and listen to IHart Pride Canada. Your 24-7 radio stream and the only playlist you need for your Toronto Pride celebrations. Pride is so great because it gives a whole bunch of people this visibility that they've never had before. We have a ton to celebrate Toronto. Happy Pride. Iheart Radio. Get essential news on the people and companies pushing the tech sector to new frontiers. Hi, I'm Ed Ludlow. Join me for Bloomberg Tech, a daily podcast, focus.

exclusively on technology, innovation, and the future of business. Every weekday, we bring you the latest insights on Silicon Valley's top companies and conversations with tech's biggest decision makers. Listen to Bloomberg Tech on your commute home and stay ahead of the news cycle. Subscribe today on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen. So I want to go back to something you said about the 1990 World Cup and you mentioned that it was lionized or I guess looms large in a lot of people's football. memories, especially in Europe. What actually makes a World Cup successful? Like, what is that

essence that you can point to that means you can say something like, oh, people love the 1990 World Cup versus, I don't know, I don't want to name any specific World Cups as absolute failures, but you could pluck a few examples, I suppose. Well, I think the two big things are, A, your team winning or doing really well, and being in your 20s. Like most things in life, you look back on it, And I suppose lots of people who, you know, look back on 1990, who are in positions of power at the moment, and that's wonderful. For me, 2018 in England were in Russia, and England did surprisingly well after being dreadful for 20 years.

And the sun shone every day for three months. And it was just a party in England, which was fun. So I think a lot of it is that like social, cultural stuff. But, you know, on the broader sense, exciting games, close games. But like moments and people, you know, you look back to like Diego Maradonna. Do you know about the hand of God in 1980s? Yeah, beautiful. That was 86.

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

Most people are from, you know, parts of the world where they might tune in once every four years. And it's all about, you know, those characters and memories and people. And, you know, I'm thinking about 1990. The famous one in England would be Gaza's tears. I don't know if that means anything to you, but Paul Gascoe, the sort of maverick Englishman, who was like pretty sort of chaotic personal life. And he was brilliant, but sort of very flawed. And he got a yellow card in the semi-final against Germany.

That meant he couldn't play in the final. And he cried. And it's like, Gazers' tears. is this sort of, it's like a part of Britain's national story, like the sort of romantic view of football in that way. And, you know, England didn't get to the final. England lost that semi-final to Germany on penalties, which then happened again six years later. And this idea of like losing to Germany every time is like a very deep in the kind of national myth. And every country has its own.

Like I've just been in Argentina and like 86 with Maradonna and, you know, 2022 with Messi. The interesting one is 1978 when Argentina won the World Cup under military dictatorship as people were being tortured like a mild down the road. And that's kind of slightly airbrushed out of the story. But like, yeah, these people, these characters, I think is what really makes World Cups of everything else. Someone told me, this is probably fake, but it's like one of those things that people say. Apparently, some extraordinary number of people in England have 1966 as they're a pin card for their ATM machine. And then, like, you can just guess someone's pin because the last time England won the World Cup. Oh, totally. Yeah. This was something that always used to happen. For the 10 years

that I was in the UK, every time there was a World Cup, people would get really excited about bringing back the trophy. And you would get all the analysts at the banks with the sell-side research. And if they really wanted to get a bunch of clients happy, they would say that England was going to win the World Cup. According to their models. Yeah. Football's coming home. That's right. That's right. I know a few facts, yeah. Which is a kind of slightly misunderstood slogan, I think, because it's seen as this arrogance or this like, we invented it and we're this imperial people who are going to colonize you and win everything, which is actually this sort of extremely sort of self-deprecating to the point of like melancholic thing about how we never

win anything and it's all really miserable, which is sort of national character, I suppose. So I know to some extent we're talking about vibes and it's hard to pinpoint those exactly, but I'm really interested in the contrast between the 1990 World Cup and 1994. So you go from a very European, not that commercialized event to something that is much more American and there's a lot more focus on actually generating money. So how did those two events stack up against each other? This is what I'm trying to get at. Yeah. And then you hit this sort of, well, I mean, it's sort of the beginning. USA is the beginning of a process. It's the beginning of this exponential curve where like people are throwing around the figure 12 billion for this World Cup, when three World Cups ago, it was,

it was half that. It's many billions more than guitar. So the USA is not massive, but it's the beginning of the exponential curve in which the figure that what, you know, the 1990 World Cup in Italy, like, lost money. The USA-94 is this beginning of, I think maybe people didn't realize at the time what a commercial success it could be and how much money was potentially on the table from World Cups themselves. And that's when you lead it to FIFA itself becoming this much more ruthlessly commercial body. Maybe the right way to think about the compare and contrast is not 1990 versus 1994, but 1990 in Italy versus 1998 in France, both hosted by European stalwart soccer nations. How did those two differ with 1994 having split them in the middle and how much more commercialized and different was 1998 versus 1990?

Much more commercial and you have these big sponsors much more prominent in the stadium. So already much more commercial. I mean, the interesting thing about 1998 is that France now feels like a stalwart football nation. It kind of wasn't before 1998. And then in France, because it's a story of economic history and industrialization that France industrialized later than England and it was a country where most of its people lived. in villages rather than towns and cities. And football is everywhere and always a game of the city. It was spread by trams and trains inside cities.

It was initially a child of the weekend. The first workers to get weekends in industrial England were the people who played organised football first, the Saturday 3pm slot. France industrialised later, so it did not have that same culture. And there are pockets of it, you know, St Etienne in industrial town in the south of France. But really, France was not a big football country deep into the,

even in 1998. And then that changed overnight, but still even now, you know, You go to a small French city and it's just not a thing that people talk about in a way that it is in England and in Spain and Italy. Can I ask a very basic question? So you've said the word exponential a number of times in terms of the commercialization of the World Cup. FIFA is a not-for-profit, right? Like, technically it's a not-for-profit. We're debating this over the weekend.

Like, what is FIFA? It's supposed to reinvest its money like back into the sport. So what actually, you know, basic question here. but what's driving the urge to generate money from advertising revenue? So FIFA is a vehicle for funneling money from advertisers and TV to member associations. There are 200 and something member associations that make up FIFA. They vote for the president, Jenny and Fentino. The World Cup is this huge bonanza of cash, both in terms of tick.

So ticketing as this multibillion dollar thing is completely new. I mean, I'm sure you've heard a lot about ticket prices and lots of Europeans. They end up in outrage about that. Americans say that's just, you know, capitalism baby or whatever. But like, it's like two, three billion dollars now, which is completely new. And the advertising as well. FIFA is the kind of middleman. And then that money goes to member associations.

Got it. And it's one member, one vote. So if you're England, Brazil, Germany, you have the same vote as Cape Verde, Suriname. And it means that these countries have incredibly glitzy facilities. And it means that they tend to re-elect the president. Okay. So that makes sense. So in terms of corporate structure, is it the prime?

primarily, is that a for-profit organization, or is that yet another sort of nonprofit layer that sits above a bunch of privately owned clubs, which are for profit? That's correct. Yeah, it's a member association and it votes for its members. What about the MLS? Is that the similar structure where the MLS is a sort of nominally non-franchise system? Oh, it's a franchise system. So the U.S. sports model, which is where a franchise system where there's no promotion and relegation, which of course is deeply part of European.

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

I hadn't thought about that. That basically like that puts an implicit lid that there's a left-tail outcome for any club ownership that is just not possible in an entity like major league baseball or obviously major league soccer where you just permanently have that spot at the top. That's super interesting. Yeah. There's real stakes. And relegation is obviously very unlikely, but Champions League football, so the top four or five

teams in England go on to play in the Champions League, the European wide competition, which is hugely lucrative. and my team, Aston Villa, who are punching way above their weight at the moment and have qualified this year. But that means there's not a spot for, you know, Chelsea haven't qualified this year. Manchester United have gone several years without qualifying. They have this year. But that's a like left tail risk, which is really quite likely and means that you're not going to get that huge part of money next year and the odds are pretty high. The flip side is that teams in lower rated leagues could have that right sale outcomes.

They can be promoted. Do you remember we did that episode years and years ago with that Bitcoinser who bought like a team and like, Bedford, England or something like that. It was like the fifth team down with like his Bitcoin profits and he had dreams of like bringing them up. You know, like you could have like sort of like entrepreneurial football entrepreneurs who like bring their teams up. Yeah. So like it does seem like, you know, I think it would be more exciting.

I actually have an old friend or kind of a friend who owns a U.S. soccer club in a smaller league and he wants the U.S. to introduce like relegation and promotion on this idea that maybe that club could one day be a bigger, more valuable thing, but I have no idea if that could ever happen. Well, I guess the members would have to vote for it at the same, you know, in any other league. And it's a bit of kind of turkeys vote for Christmas. Okay, since we're on the topic of the Premier League and also right and left tail outcome, so you write across your coverage a lot about the influence of geopolitics on football, right? And I think at this point, everyone is familiar with the term sports washing.

So the idea that certain governments, certain people, certain companies will sports, sponsor a football team to make themselves look good and maybe distract from other scandals. One thing that's interesting to me now is it kind of feels like sports washing can also go in the other direction where you can end up having geopolitical vulnerabilities. So if I think about Chelsea, you know, Chelsea basically lost their sugar daddy for lack of a better word in the form of Abramovich. And I think at some point there was talk about maybe sanctions in the UK against the Emirates and obviously Manchester United owned by Americans. And I imagine for some British people, Americans aren't that popular right now.

Does the influence of sports washing go in the other way? Well, I mean, Chelsea, yes, it was very embarrassing for them. Abramvirich was sanctioned by the American government. But fundamentally, Chelsea had won one league title before he came in in the early 2000s. They won five in the 18 or 19 years after that. So I don't think they'll be, you know, would they have taken that as a Chelsea fan at the start? I basically think, and this is maybe putting myself out of a job, no one cares that much. Interesting.

No one, like, people don't become a sports team to grapple with geopolitics. And it's kind of pretty terrible sometimes, I think, because like Newcastle United is probably the most egregious example because they're literally owned by the public investment fund of Saudi Arabia. And yeah, like that's been, I think, used as a propaganda vehicle for an autocratic state. And yeah, it's pretty bad. But I don't think fans care. And Newcastle United is like a very working class club with a really proud history and this sort of quite, you know, town that's had a rough few decades and a very proud, a very amazing institution.

And it's a very clever move for the Saudi investment fund to buy it because it has so much sort of authenticity and credibility. Was there some team that has Gazprom on their logo? Like on their kid. Well, God, you've teed me up because that's the whole first chapter of my book. Which team was that? That's Sholka in Gelsenkirchen in Germany where I travel and speak to lots of people. So yeah, the great thing there was they had Gazprom on their shirts.

And when I went there, two years after the invasion of Ukraine, lots of people were wearing blue stickers over the Gazprom logo because they were shamed by it. But yeah, Russian gas and German politics were deeply entwined for decades, best exhibited in the shirt of Shulka. And politicians and executives would wine and dine there. Germany was buying cheap gas from Russia, so both sides were getting something out of it because Germany doesn't have much natural resources. Russia needed the cash.

It all came crashing down in 2022. The one team that does still have Gazprom on their shirts is Red Star Belgrade and Serbia, who also play in European competitions. But of course, Serbia is much more Pally with Russia than the rest of Europe, so they don't see a problem there. So who did that team have to, did they get a new sponsor? Sholka, well, they lost loads of money overnight. It was like 10 million euros. And they'd been kind of declining for a while, but it was almost the straw that broke the

camel's back. And they went down to the second division in Germany, which was terrible for them because they're a huge club. So they took a huge financial hit from losing. that sponsorship. Close your eyes and you can hear the entire world come alive. 2026 FIFA World Cup is on and you can stream it all live on on TSN radio from the opening kickoff to the final Celebration. Every match, every moment. Listen to FIFA World Cup on TSN Radio.

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Subscribe today on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen. So speaking of Jersey history, I guess, one of the things that's come up in the current World Cup is Haiti's Jersey. So I think they had to redesign it because FIFA said it was too political. You're not allowed to have political slogans or like political meanings in Haiti apparently have a little graphic of men during the Haitian revolution. And one of them was like a very famous war hero, but not even explicitly, like maybe a very famous war hero. And I find this really interesting because obviously there's a lot of judgment involved when you say whether a jersey is

political or not. And no one is going after like the Netherlands for wearing orange and promoting Protestantism or something like that. So like how do they make those calls? And does it feel like they're picking on maybe smaller countries with fewer resources to fight against some of these decisions? Well, yeah, all these things are just kind of arbitrary judgment calls, you know, and there's a thing that football associations are constantly grappling with because there's people that have ripped their shirts off to have something to do with Israel, Palestine, and I can see why, but then when the Russia-Ukraine stuff happened in England, the kind of whole football community united around, we support Ukraine and flags and whatever else. So these things

are often can seem hypocritical, can seem contradictory. Those decisions are, it's just some person somewhere. You know, how do you objectively make a call like that? But yeah, you're right to flag the Netherlands. And it's a really interesting one. I've actually on Instagram, be doing a series that's like why each country plays in each color. And Haiti is,

they play in red and blue because it was the French tree color. And when they overthrew the French, you know, the slaveholder, incredible slave revolution in Haiti, and they ripped the white out of the flag, just to be left with blue and red. The Netherlands and the orange, the story is William of Orange,

who's kind of the founding father of the Netherlands. But in, I don't know if you, you know, the association of Orange in, in Northern Ireland and Scotland of the Protestantism and sectarianism and the club rangers, which represents the Protestant unionist half of Glasgow, while Celtic is the Irish Republican half, they play in orange, and it's quite inflammatory because it's associated with these sort of sectarian things. So yeah, the same shirt, the same color, but no one would say that about a Netherlands

national shirt, even though the origin of the story is similar. It's just these things have different meanings in different contexts, I suppose. Tell us about the Jersey and Columbia that had a murdered drug dealer on it. Yeah, so that was Envigado FC and the outskirts of Medellin, which the city, which of course gave the world, Pablo Escobar. But these days, it's a lovely place to visit.

I'd recommend it to anyone as a tour. I've heard everyone says it's amazing. It's great and just chilled and, like, great food, great vibes. But it was the highest murder rate in the history of organized statistics was Median in the 80s. Like, it was just people were being gunned down,

left, right, and center. Because Pablo Escobar and his cocaine cartel was running the show. But football was kind of a tool of all this. And Escobar owned the one club in Medellin, but other cartels owned clubs in Cali and other Colombian cities. But the story I was interested in was a bit later than that, was so Escobar was killed in the early 90s.

And one of the offshoots from this cartel was in Envergardo. And this guy was killed, you know, drug bosses are liable to get killed. And his son, as a loving tribute to his father, because they own this football club, put his face on the back. So on the back of the shirt was this like silhouette of this man's face, who was like a murdered drug cartel leader. And I went to a game there in the same. sort of humid stadium in the middle of the day. And I saw one, I was, I was like, I've made it

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

Can you get them off eBay or something? I imagine they're worth a lot of money. Oh, well, I mean, that one's just an incredibly of skill on the high fan because I like the story. But some of them, oh, hundreds and hundreds. It's a huge industry now. And the nostalgia of it. People want the kind of 90s ones from when they were kids. And yeah, it's huge industry.

Yeah, obviously people like football jerseys. And my personal favorite for this World Cup is the away kit for Curacao, which is this really nice pastel. yellow that I think I could get away with. But if I go to try to buy it, that's selling for like $300 now. Oh, it is nice. Yeah. And I think some of the other, some of the other popular jerseys, like one of the Japan ones that has like stripes on it. That one's also very cute. It's a real hips of choice. Yeah, they're really, they're really hard to find now and they're selling for a lot of money. What does that actually mean for fans? You know, if I'm a Curacao fan and I can't

get my hands on an away jersey unless I pay up like $300. That seems not ideal. Yeah. Well, it's an interesting debate that you hear a lot because, I mean, supply and demand, right? You know, they're selling the prices that they can get away with it. But in England, you get like politicians standing up and talking about how much a disgrace it is that the shirt is priced at that level. I mean, it's something that it means so much to people. And it's interesting to sort of the conflict between supply and demand and football, I think, is something that we're seeing a lot at the moment with this World Cup because, you know, Arsenal, who just won the league, who are in London, who are really popular.

a ticket there is like 60 pounds, maybe like $80. And they're just impossible. They're impossible to get. You need points. Like if you're just a random person from the US who wanted to go to an Arsenal game next season, you just can't. You might be able to buy in the secondary market, which is completely unregulated. You might get scammed. What they absolutely do not do is raise it to the market clearing price and charge $1,000

for it. Like that just doesn't happen because it's so deeply ingrained in sort of European sporting culture that that's like wrong. Whereas the US takes a different approach and this is what we've seen at this all cup. When I was in, when we were in Madrid, I did, you know, I got into that. Did you get a jersey? I didn't get a jersey. But, you know, when I went on Stubhub to buy my ticket and I got really stressed because

as soon as I bought the ticket, I got that pop-up that said away fans will not be allowed into the stadium. And it was like, what if they think of an away fan? I don't speak Spanish. Like, I got like, how they're going to give me a lie detector test? So I went and I bought a scarf of Atletti. And I wore that to the stadium. So that it's like, and then I felt okay.

And I got in no problem. And everyone was like, oh, be careful. phone their stub hub ticket. That might be fake, but I was able to get in. So my son is a big messy fan and he has a pink messy jersey. But then today on the walk to school, he asked me of messy with a goalie or not. Oh my God. So I was like, I was like, so he has this conception that there is this person in the world named Messi and he has a jersey who he really likes, but evidently quite clear. I mean, he's young. He like does not actually know anything about him. He just knows that there is this existence of like the jersey. But like, why is my son?

John Duran had this pink jersey. Well, a very clever bit of marketing from, so David Beckham is a part owner of, and that's an interesting sort of financial story, because when he joined LA Galaxy in 2007, someone put into his contract, whether it was him or he was maybe very well advised, that he would have the ownership rights when a new franchise was introduced into the MLS, and that became into Miami. And I believe he paid like $25 million, I think, which is basically just a huge bargain. That's now worth so many times more than that. and Beckham or again maybe someone advising Beckham

Settled on pink partly because apparently Miami is really pink or the buildings are pink but also because basically no other team plays in pink so many teams playing red Palermo and Italy playing pink but that's quite niche but no one so pink is just so iconic you just need to see like

the collar under a shirt and you know instantly it's a very clever bit of marketing but it's interesting you say about your son and messy because football coming from Europe the club is the first point of reference and that was certainly my own upbringing. And if your favorite player leaves, well, you kind of hate them when they come back for another team. It's all about the club and that's what you identify with first.

Whereas as football is becoming this bigger global thing, it's the individuals and Messi and Ronaldo who are both way past their best. And it's possible that this tournament, they could be not very good. Who knows? But the individual is now more important globally than the club, which is new. Interesting. Just going back to commercialization of the World Cup. So, you know, we've been talking a lot about. advertisers and extending, you know, the number of games played in order to expand, I guess,

the number of eyeballs on the game and all of that. There are other ways that FIFA is catering to the American market. So, for instance, we now have mandated water breaks. Which basically turns the game into like quarters, right? Something that looks a lot more like an American football game than it used to. How far could we go in terms of the, Americanization of, I guess, you know, traditionally European slash world football. So the other strange thing to me is games start late. They start like, not really late. They just start like five minutes late, which never happens in Europe.

And even in the, you know, these cultures like Italy, Spain, Argentina, where everyone's like late all the time and that's part of the culture, football never kicks off late. You got to build up the suspense in America. Keep them guessing. Yeah, maybe. But it's like I'm sitting on my sofa being like, where are they? Like, you know, I've got stuff to do.

Because they're like announcing and someone's singing the national anthem. Yeah, that does seem like an American thing where there's not real much connection to the nominal time of the sporting event of the actual kickoff or tip off. But the hydration thing, I mean, I'm trying desperately not to be sort of European traditionalists shouting at cloud, but hydration breaks are bad, I think.

They're really bad because they completely break up the flow of the game. I've been watching a few where it was kind of really exciting. You maybe had like an underdog hit against the ropes, like playing really well, and then it completely takes the pace out of everything. And I get it if it's 40 degrees, like in Texas, fine. But they're doing it in these air-conditioned stadiums.

They're doing it in Toronto when it was like raining. It's unnecessary. And I think it's really damaging. And I think like the rules of the game have barely changed in 120 years. It would be instantly recognizable if you went back to 1900. And it's a precious thing. And I think if you meddle with it a bit, you risk kind of ruining the whole experience. I have to say going to the game in Madrid, I really liked basically knowing what time the game was going to end.

You know, you get there at a certain time, 45 minutes. Plus a couple minutes, break, 45 minutes, plus a couple minutes, games over. And I thought like for planning my night, it was just very nice to not have to concern and it's just going to go. I guess there could have been like penalty kicks or something like that or overtime. But even then, like it could be two and a half hours. That's an absolute maximum. Wait, this actually just reminded me when MLS was just getting off the ground,

didn't they have like something where if you were doing penalty shootouts, you had to like dribble for ages? and it was supposed to make it more exciting. It's great. Yeah, you like that? I love it. Yeah, American Innovation done right. I mean, it's so cool.

If you watch on YouTube, you see these guys with these like really baggy shirts and they all just look like some of those players were like college players, you know, who ended up playing for the national team. And the way you do it is you get the ball like maybe around the halfway line and you just sort of run at the goal. Yeah. But it makes it much more even. It's harder to score. So it's like a 50, like a hockey, I think a hockey penalty is like 50-50. But a football penalty is like 80%. And it means most of the time, it's.

goes in. When it doesn't, it's like devastating for the person who misses. But it's a much more, yeah, it's fun. It's exciting. I'm well up for that. Like, you know, let the Americans do their thing. Wait, wait, wait. Now I have to run something by both of you. So I had an idea for making football more exciting for Americans. So the complaint that you always hear, or at least that my dad says, right, they don't score enough goals. Never mind that in the last Super Bowl, there were like two meaningful touchdowns or something. But whatever, there aren't enough goals in soccer. So what if you started awarding points for a corner. So if you get one point per corner, successful corner, and then you get three points for a goal.

I'm unconvinced about that. But the Spain Cape Bird was thrilling and that was nil-nil. Yeah, that's true. When you've got some Germany cross out, seven-one, by the way. You know what I, you know what I... The tension. The tension makes it. You know what I was introduced to?

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

No, why wouldn't you just have a penalty shootout? No, because then you just encourage attacking play throughout so that you're rewarded in the event of a draw. What do you think about that proposal? That in the event of a drawer. Yeah. Expected goal. Yeah, that's the tiebreaker.

Exactly. So the tiebreaker is expected goals. And therefore, you're rewarded for having played consistent attacking play throughout the game, even if, you know, it didn't materialize and the ball went off the post or something like that. What do you think about that? But when the team wins on it, so expected goals, which measures how good. But when team lose with a better XG, that's the thrill of it, right?

That's why you get more up. Sure, sure. Yeah, yeah. No, that's exciting. And I totally get that. And you're like, we should, like, if one team had better XG but the other team got more goals, fine. That's exciting.

But in the event of a tie, you go to the XG and then you're like, rather than like this sort of very defensive ball. People would find some way to game that too. And also, people are already up in arms about the VAR stuff. Yeah. Yeah, and by the way, I still can't say VAR without thinking of value at risk models. I thought that was exciting. During the game, there were two times where the referees went back and looked at a call that was made on the field. And I found a true. That was the interesting part for you.

The energy in the stadium was incredibly high waiting for those referee reviews. And I sort of thought it added to the fun of like being in the stadium while we were waiting for the calls. I think it's got better. I think it's sped up. I think at the beginning there are a lot of teetting page. and it was often really slow and often people in the stadiums. What they're doing better at now is communicating to the people in the stadium. Because I've been in a stadium where it just goes on for like five minutes. People are like texting their friends saying, what's going on? Are you watching on TV?

So it has got better. I think there are still like huge problems with a lot of these calls are fundamentally subjective, right? Yeah. Like an offside is objective, but so, you know, is a foul, a foul, is a handball? You know, if it bangs you on your shoulder there, it's not a foul, but if it's your hand, the things cannot be perfected through data or whatever else. So there will always be that tension there. It's funny he mentions texting people who are watching on TV.

So many of the fans that I saw were watching broadcast on their phone during the game. So that they would have like a little like stream on their phone. And so during the call. That's sad. Yeah, whatever. But they were like getting more commentary and stuff like that. No, that's wrong. And also, okay.

But on this note, you mentioned energy just then. How do we get a proper chant culture? going in American football or football which takes place in America. And I think even in the UK, some of the chanting is starting to go away a little bit, which is very disappointing. Yeah. Well, I think it's partly to do with the sort of who is in the crowd. You know, it's much more of a sort of big family event in the in the U.S.

potentially or the UK is becoming more so, whereas previously it would have just been mainly kind of big groups of young men who probably just chant more than families, to be honest. And that's changed. And that's probably a good thing for the most part. But certainly the culture has changed quite a bit. But yeah, I mean, some of these songs, some of these songs in English football have like a century of history of history. But yeah, I've been to become an MLS games and I thought the atmosphere was pretty good. I went to the New York Red Bulls and I was, I don't know, expecting a sort of the U.S., the energy drink company.

And it was pretty good. Like, I was impressed. The Cosmos games were always really good because people would bring like drum sets and stuff. But in terms of chanting, I have to say, in my experience, the ultimate champions are actually Japanese baseball teams. Oh, yeah. Because they do it like perfectly in unison. I really, really want to go to a gym. That's great vibes.

If you like the cyclones, it's great. I know. That's definitely high up on it. Actually, one last question. My understanding, so obviously football has become more popular in the United States today in 2006 than it was in 1994. My understanding, and tell me if I'm wrong, is that if you go to a typical American football fan, there will be some people who are like really into, they'll have their favorite Premier League team

or their favorite European team that they're really into. Or there'll be some who are like really into the. MLS, but that there isn't a lot of crossover that's still like you're sort of either into European football or American MLS, but not really, you're like kind of one or the other. Is that the case? I think that's true. And the MLS has real pockets. I think like in the northwest, in Portland and Seattle, it's long being big.

There are other places where it's particularly strong. And yeah, and I think there is sometimes a bit of a sort of culture war between, I mean, you get this in Europe or in England of teams who support their small local team versus the big team on TV. Yeah. But I think one interesting thing with European leagues is that the English league is currently like eating everyone else's lunch. It's just like becoming this sort of winner takes all. All the TV revenue is flowing there. And it's really harming sort of Spain and Italy.

And these huge football institutions like A.C. Milan have less money than these like tiny English teams. I feel like you don't hear about the Bundesliga at all anymore. Right? Like you never, I feel like the Munich just win it every year. So it's kind of boring. Okay. Well, anyway. I just want to go back to the big will FIFA kill the golden goose question. It's sad. In my head, I'm doing a gold golden pun, but you can't even tell on the podcast. So I apologize for mentioning that at all. But how far can you actually push commercialization? And as we see FIFA especially try to make more space for advertisers through,

they haven't said this explicitly when they talk about the hydration breaks. They say it's for the welfare of the players and all of that. But like it certainly looks like they're making defined space for ads. at what point does it mean that you start to lose some of the magic of the sport? I'm sure you've been asked this question a ton and you probably thought about it a ton. Yeah, well, I think it can happen. I basically think the World Cup is like, well, for me, it's like the pinnacle of human civilization and the greatest cultural event on earth. And it is the biggest cultural event on earth by an absolute mile.

So I think it's pretty hard to mess it up. Like you just need two teams, a pitch, get some fans in. You know, it's not some great, like you don't need to think too hard about how to do it in four years' time. but the more you meddle with it, the more you tinker at the edges. I don't think the whole thing would come like crashing down overnight, but I do think if you keep meddling with it, then children will become less into it than their parents did, and very slowly you could sort of chip away at the edges of it.

There are obviously so much more attention, distractions these days that someone's sitting still for two hours is harder to convince them to do. But yeah, I think in the short term, they can probably rinse even more cash out of it, to be honest, because it's just such a perfect event. All right, Joey Dursa, thank you so much for coming on the odd lots. I'm glad we got a World Cup episode. And there's so much going on in the world right now,

but it could have easily done a bunch of a million AI episodes. And I'm glad we covered the World Cup and you were the perfect guest. So thank you so much for coming on the online. Thanks for having me on doing it. Tracy, that was a lot of fun. Many interesting points. One thing I thought was interesting is the idea of the fandom of the player rather than the team emerging over time.

You get these global superstars like a Messi or a Ronaldo or maybe like a Beckham or something. Yeah. But then the rhetor is you're not a real fan. No, you're not. But like, you know, like from the perspective, then they like take their money with them from one city to another. I could see that really changing the game or sort of like changing the nature of like people's relationship with the sport. Yeah. But again, like if I was going to be cynical about this, it makes it even more about the money.

I'm not defending it. No, no, no. I'm not saying there's a good thing. I'm saying that's an interesting shift in. how people relate to the game. And I'm saying an effect of that will be that whoever has the most money and can afford like the best player just gets them and gets even bigger, even more money. And it's this like self-reinforcing cycle, which is what we're seeing in a lot of European football at the moment. By the way, material culture trivia for you on the pink jersey point. Do you know that pink

used to be much more of a gender neutral color, even more of a masculine color than a feminine color. Really? Yeah. Do you have any idea when that changed? I think in the like early to mid-1900s. Kind of interesting. I'd like to learn more about that. We should also have Joy on back again, maybe in quieter days, talk about the connection between football and the stock market crash on the 1920s.

Yeah, that was interesting. I had no idea. Maybe I'll go find, I'll Google that and read more on that. But I'm very curious about that. But no, it was a really fun conversation. Who are you supporting in the World Cup? I don't know. You know what?

I've really been, like, so busy. I just, like, you know, we've been traveling and the next. And so I'm like, I need this weekend. We're recording this. To really think about it. No, no, for real. Like, I haven't watched a World Cup match yet. So it's June.

We're recording this on June 16th. I need this weekend to, like, sort of reset every or this week to reset and sort of get my bearing. It's like, okay, what World Cup matches am I going to? I just have not had the, had the mental space to allocate. Like, you know, I remember like in 2010, I was going to bring it up. I loved that one with the Vuvon. That was the one in South Africa. Vuvulas.

That was the, I love that one. And like everyone in Brooklyn with their, I thought that was great. That's my nightmare. Being in a football stadium with someone with a Vavuzala, like behind me. Yeah. What did the Cape Verde jerseys actually look like? Wait, I want to see. Oh, they're blue.

Could be better still. Cape Verde for the, for the win. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy All-Awey. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wisenthall.

You can follow me at the stalwart. You can follow our guest, Joey Derso. He's at Joseph M. Derso and check out his book, More Than a Shirt, How Football Shirts Explain Global Politics, Money and Power. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez, at Carmen Armad. Dashel Bennett at Dashbot, Keel Brooks, and Kevin Lazzano at Kevin Lloyd Lazzano. And for more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Oddlots for the daily newsletter in all of our episodes.

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