Scuffed | USMNT, World Cup, Yanks Abroad, futbol in America - #585: ESPN legend Bob Ley joins the pod

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

Ley ran the PA system for the Cosmos in the late 1970s, was one of the earliest anchors for Sportscenter, hosted several World Cups on television and has been one of American soccer's great advocates. He sat down with Belz and talked about what he tells college kids about the future of sports journalism, the state of the USMNT, the potential impact of the 2026 World Cup, what pro/rel might mean for USL, and much more.Here's where you can send us a voice message for future episodes: https://www.speakpipe.com/ScuffedPodcast Skip the ads! Subscribe to Scuffed on Patreon and get all episodes ad-free, plus any bonus episodes. Patrons at $5 a month or more also get access to Clip Notes, a video of key moments on the field we discuss on the show, plus all patrons get access to our private Discord server, live call-in shows, and the full catalog of historic recaps we've made: https://www.patreon.com/scuffedAlso, check out Boots on the Ground, our USWNT-focused spinoff podcast headed up by Tara and Vince. They are cooking over there, you can listen here: https://boots-on-the-ground.simplecast.comAnd check out our MERCH, baby. We have better stuff than you might think: https://www.scuffedhq.com/store Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to the Scuff Podcast where we talk about U.S. soccer. Hey, everybody, we've got a really special guest today. He is one of the earliest anchors of SportsCenter on ESPN and became a fixture on that show. He started the show outside the lines, another massive ESPN outfit that many of you will have grown up on. He hosted the studio show for five men's world cups and two women's world cups. A lot of you will remember him best from 2010 and 2014. he was there for a lot of the key moments in the modern history of American soccer and nobody with his level of credibility and clout in American sports journalism

has given as much attention and enthusiasm to the game of soccer. Bob Lee, welcome to scuffed. Oh, my gosh, thank you. You embarrassed me. I appreciate it. Good to be with you. Yeah, thank you for your time. So when you first got involved with the cosmos in 1979, I think,

Well, that was having just been a season ticket holder for the prior two years. Okay. Yeah. How did you end up in that gig doing the public address system? My seats were Section 134, row two seats nine and ten. Two rows off the pitch. You could reach out and touch Carlos Alberto and Vimmer Iceberg and whatnot, and the Pelle would come along and slap hands.

One of my friends was a beat writer for the Herald News covering the Cosmos, and he told me they were looking for a public address announcer for the 1979 season. And I had been doing play-by-play on the local cable system where I was working, and my buddy Eric knew about this. And so I put a tape together and sent it in to Krecore, your premium, the general manager of Cosmos then, Krecore, the brother, of course, of Garo, your premium, the place kicker for the Miami Dolphins, if you remember,

who threw the single worst pass in Super Bowl history. The ball went backwards and was. returned for a touchdown by the Redskins. But Kreekor and Garrell were brothers. And so I went and interviewed with Krecore and Chuck Adams, the public affairs director of the cosmos. I proved that I wouldn't drool too much, and I kind of knew the game, and they hired me for $100 a game and two season tickets.

So I saved on the tickets, and I was making, you know, I was making $10,000 a year doing local sports. So I mean, I'm looking at how well, this is, and I settle, you know, 20 games here. little bonus. So that was fun. And, you know, it was 79. This was the era when they were regularly selling out the place. 75,000 people. Byron Munich came in on July 4th that year for a friendly, all sorts of people coming through. Jagger was still taking helicopters in with Steve Ross to the game rather than deal with the pedestrian traffic on Route 3. So it was the heyday. And it was, you know, and I'm 24.

And I'm the one that people are like, you know, reacting to. It's like it's a power trip. One night, we had a, in the middle of the summer, there was an electrical storm, and it's silly that they didn't stop the game, but they did. But all of a sudden, all the power went out and the emergency lighting came on. There was like 30, 40, 50,000 people there. And the instructions come down. They were going to turn on your sound system.

Keep everybody calm. Like, what the hell am I going to do? So I made some perfunctory announcement, but, like, you know, I could have started a, a, a shrieking science fiction meltdown scene if I had said the wrong thing. So it was fun. And it was, you know, to have been this the year before, a fan, literally a fan, right on the pitch,

and then the next year up in that booth. And then, that was what, 79, 99, 94, 15 years later to be working at that same level, one booth over calling the Italy Ireland game for the opener of the 94 World Cup at New Jersey was incredible. But to show you how unsophisticated things were a giant stadium in those days in 79, you know, now, of course, the stadium experience is totally choreographed. It's planned out to the, to the nth degree.

But like the guys running the board were just, you know, they're great guys, and we became good buddies. They were electricians. And check the mic out whenever. And whatever music do you want to play, they play. So I brought in some tapes, some cassettes from my car of Springsteen and Gordon. Hey, play Lee's. And that's what we're playing.

And like the idea that you would do that now was be insane. Yeah. Because everything is driven towards push people towards the concessions, towards the merch. We would just play, you know, whatever songs are in our car. That's crazy. So, so you were a fan already. How did you, I know a lot of people enjoyed soccer in that part of New Jersey in that era. But how did you become a fan in the first place?

I became the manager of our high school team. I didn't play. But we played in Brookdale Park. in Bloomfield. We played in the same conference, the Big Ten conference that back then, I'm going way in the week, with Columbia High School, with Gene Chisowitz was the head coach. And Cardi High School, of course, Cardi, you know,

John Harks and the whole lineage of people from that part of the world. And we weren't far from St. Benedict's Prep, with Tabramos played. So, you know, we knew we had a good style of play. And I just became enamored with the game. And Jim White, the head coach in Bloomfield, was great. It had me, taught me what I need to know about the game. I kept the touch chart, you know, so you could be a rough idea of how many times each guy touched the game.

It touched the ball during the game. And that's how I became a fan of the game. What did your parents do for a living? My dad worked for the General Services Administration, which is one of the many federal agencies currently being gutted by the occupant of the Oval Office. But now he was administrator, worked in New York City. and took a buzz, we were three. We lived three blocks.

If you watch the Sopranos, the last scene that was shot in Holsteens, that ice cream shop, we lived three blocks from there. And that shop, I used to hang out in that shop as a kid. So the idea that there'd be a mob murder in there was like, okay,

well, that's Wednesday in Bloomfield. So dad worked in the city, and my mom was a homemaker, but I was the oldest of five kids, so she had her hands full. Yeah. And they instilled a great love of education and achievement in me.

And we've all five of us with them pretty well. That's awesome. So when you were studying at Seaton Hall, did you know you wanted to do sports journalism? Or was it just journalism in general what you were interested in? I certainly had an interest in sports because I was doing play-by-play. I was a sports director at WSOU, but the idea of journalism, period, was important to me. I had a cousin who was a columnist for the New York Times, Russell Baker, who won a Pulitzer Prize with a book that was essentially his life story was the story of my mom's half of the family called Growing Up. And I won the Pulitzer.

And, you know, Russ was a great example to me of what could be achieved in the world of journalism and the power of the spoken word and the written word. So I was not expressly just into sports. I used to anchor on the local system where I was doing games, used to anchor election coverage as well and host civic programs with various mayors and whatnot. So you got a chance to do everything. Now, you're heavily involved with training the next generation of sports journalists. We're trying. We're trying.

Right. So I am curious, you know, I teach a adjunct. I teach a journalism class at a local college to, and I struggle with this question myself. This is why I'm asking. But what do you tell a college kid about the future of journalism? I think it's wider than just the question of the future of journalism. It's the ability to communicate. It's to have the right value system.

It's to have the right suite, S-U-I-T-E, of skills so that you're not relying on other people to take your story from concept through distribution. There's no denying. It's, you know, newspapers have had a rough 15 years and they're not going to get any better. But it's also true. It's what I call a digital democracy. If you can, you know, define and carve out a voice for yourself with credibility, everybody wants a hot take.

Everybody wants to be Stephen A. Smith. People forget Stephen A. Smith spent years as a beat writer and as a columnist being edited. and learning his craft. You've got to earn the right to have a hot take, and it's not a hot take. It's an informed opinion backed up by, you know, facts and reality. That's what we try and do. But, you know, it is an amazing field that is evolving, you know, five years ago. Who knew we'd be sitting here today?

Just the other day, Adam, I was checked a couple of links, because we're having a seminar at Ced in a hall in about three weeks. Can we call it internship, Paloosa, trying to, We've come to a lot of good agreements with entities for internships for our students, ESPN, NBC Sports, Fox, whatnot. But we're going to, you know, show them what the future looks like. But, you know, here I am a 70-year-old grandpa sitting on my porch whittling saying, oh, TikTok, what's all that about? Well, I'll tell you what it's about because both MLB currently and a national football league are each looking for, in one case, a vice presidential and the other case, a manager level. director of influencing.

Jobs that pay up to $300,000 a year. So the message is there are all sorts of ways to tell stories to communicate. And I think it's incumbent on my generation who are seating the stage to your generation to understand that things change, just as they change in the 60s and 70s when we were coming into our own. And the 90s and 2000s as technology changed, it's changing yet again. And if somebody were to ask me, what's it going to look like in the year 2030, I'll make an intelligent guess. But, you know, you'll have no idea what the technologies are, what the platforms are.

And so for youngsters, you're coming into the field with a desire to do this, have confidence in your ability and understand that you have to make your own brand. You can't. No one's going to, you know, I'm a dinosaur. 40 years in one company with a pension plan. Come on. I won the lottery with that. my cohorts from that time. That's not going to happen anymore.

So you have to carve out your own brand, your own identity, which is great because you're not going to be stuck behind a desk for years upon years or have your way blocked by people above you who aren't moving out of their jobs. You're as good as your product. And if somebody likes you, boom, you can get anointed and move to your next gig immediately. Yeah.

Yeah, there is a lot of freedom in it, isn't there? But it's scary. I mean, for those that, you know, if you want the security of full-time employment and benefits and everything, yeah, and you may need it because of circumstances in your life, it means recalibrating some expectations. But that uneasiness and uncertainty exists not just in journalism, but throughout the economy. That's true. And so everything's being realigned. So you need to have the confidence in your skills. You need to have a broad-based education.

and it's one thing to study communications and TV and radio and journalism and whatnot, but what are you going to do with it? Do you have a cutting edge to your education? I mean, I've always told students who talk to me when they were in high school, you don't necessarily have to major in this. You major in history, you can major in finance, you can major in business, you can major in a number of different things. It'll give you a cutting edge so that when you're sent at your first job,

maybe your first job is working for a blog covering city council meetings. What do I know about city council meetings in the length of leave? lease agreements or whatever, whatever is in front of the council. Well, maybe I've studied some of this and I know it already. You know, you're not going to be coming out and doing exactly what you want to do most of us at the age of 22. If you're lucky, you will be. But, you know, you've got to be prepared for the reality. You know, you've got a lot.

You're in the business of managing your own career. Yeah. Nobody else is going to do it for you. You've got to do it for yourself. that challenge of that challenge of selection in journalism you know deciding what to pursue i mean certainly something you got a lot of reps at on outside the lines you know where you got to figure out what are we going to do the journalism on what's your best advice on how to home that is it just the broad-based education or as far as what as far as uh as far as as as as choosing which stories

to pursue you know well i mean it's i'm not i'm not you know i'm not going to tell stories at a school i mean When we head outside the lines on as a daily show, may it rest in peace. We paid attention to the ratings. We made story selections not totally driven, but the order in the show, the way you lay it out, the way you tell a story is driven by, I've got to wrap this story in something. I've got to put some sugar around this pill. So how do I do that? You have to understand that process.

You also have to, you know, it's a slow news day and nothing screaming at you. let's go for the mass appeal topic, but let's bring our own can't, our own angle to it as best you can. So there are market considerations, and I think it's foolish to think you can ignore them and just, I think there's a, we journalists, end quote, have a diva personality, and it's all too often. We think, we're doing God's work at every turn. No, not at every turn. There are times when we do important things that come to bear on the future of the country. but it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's really easy to get in the huff and say oh we're

journalists and yeah we are but you know we have to be realistic we're on a market based economy uh you know we work for publicly traded you know the question i used to ask classes when i would speak to them when i was working at ESPN you know why do we open the doors in the morning and turn on the lights at ESPN well it's to produce sports center it's produce outside no no no why do we open the doors and go to work and produce all these programs And the answer is to increase value for the shareholders with a Walt Disney company. It's that simple. And once you understand that, you know, you're not, you know, enslaved to have that as the foremost thought in your head.

But you got to understand that's what it's about. Yeah. And, you know, Disney stock. I checked Disney stock yesterday. My gun, it was in free fall along with everything else as you and I are having this conversation with the tariffs and whatnot. But you've got to understand the reality of where, you're going to understand the reality of where, journalism as a calling, as a vocation, as your area of interest exists in an ecosystem that has undergone incredible, cathartic, spasmodic change in the last 15 years.

It, month by month, year by year. I'm not even talking about the pandemic, just technological changes. And the bundling and the streaming. You know, there are going to be three NFL football games on television on Christmas Day, and they'll all be on streamers, Amazon and Netflix. You go back five years, nobody had an idea that was going to happen. Right. And the streamers being involved in the football process, they've got more money than God.

They're going to reshape, you know, they're the competition for the ESPNs of the world. And by the way, most companies, every company would kill to have ESPN's challenges and problems for all the things that are written and observed about ESPN. I mean, they're in a very strong position. They're rolling out the new app and whatnot. But it's a challenge for everybody. And you could not have predicted three to five years ago what the challenges would be today. You just wouldn't. Yeah.

It's the pace of changes. It just seems like it's accelerating. Going back in history a little bit, you were there for Paul Caligari's shot heard around the world, Port of Spain, Trinidad right? Weren't you? I was not at the game, no. Oh, no. Okay. No, it was not.

I did the highlights back in Sports Center. In fact, Roger Bennett on Men in Blazers has kindly preserved. It must have been over-caffeinated that day, me doing the highlights. But no, I was not in Trinidad. I've never been to Trinidad. John Paul Dillac Camera was there. J.P. was there. So what do you remember about that night, at least, like in doing the highlight?

I haven't seen that clip of you doing the highlights. I just, you know what? When I saw the highlight, I had no recollection of doing the highlights. You do, it's, it's, it is a, it is a. It's an absolute, I guess, psychological, biological truth. If you, you know, you do X,000 editions of SportsCenter, you can't keep them all in your head. Right. We knew it was big.

There's no doubt about that. And, you know, Paul, you know, we'll go to his grave with that, you know, that great accomplishment there. And that guy, we could all just in our minds, I see that ball lofting into the net. But I don't think there was a full appreciation through the culture of the importance of it. In the soccer world, yeah. But, you know, the slice of America that gave a damn about soccer in 1989 was very discreet. Yeah. Very slim.

Yeah, well, so let's get into that a little bit. How would you describe the impact of hosting the 1994 World Cup and what impact should we expect? from 2026? Well, it's still the most, I think it's still the highest attendance. I'm not sure if it still is with inflation adjusted dollars the most profitable, which is by far the most important thing to FIFA and those lords of bribery still. Of course. But it left the U.S. Soccer Federation with, I believe, $30 to $40 million in the bank, the ability to do so. I'm still I'm still amazed that they didn't start M-I-SL or MLS, major league soccer, the next year and waited until 96.

I still think they squandered some of the momentum by waiting in another year, and it's still amazing that they did that. But what was amazing to me was the awakening in the minds and the hearts of so many people who had heard about soccer, read about soccer, and had never been to a full international. And you go to a game with Nigeria playing Argentina. I believe that was Maradona's last game.

It was up in Foxborough. I did that. And that was the game after which he later tested positive. But you see and sense and feel the emotions, the chanting, the groups of, you know, everyone wearing the same colors, the Tifos in the crowd, all of that. There's no way to tell anybody about that unless you've experienced it. because it's such a sensual overload. Italy, Ireland, the opening game. Now, I did that.

My God, it was hot and humid. It was a giant stadium. And a place I'd done dozens of games from. I've done football games from there, high school football and all the Cosmos games and whatnot. And we expected, oh, my God, it's Italy, it's North Jersey, poor Irish. How many people are they going to be able to get tickets for?

Turns out they had like 70% of the tickets that day. The place was, the banners were all. all over the place. And the emotion just grew with the game. And of course, it was a one-nothing Ireland win. But the sense in that stadium that day was electric. You couldn't describe it to someone. And so many people would later say to me, I had no idea.

And there were a lot of converts with that experience who suddenly understood, you know, what soccer was. They said, no, these aren't club matches. It's not like you're not going to have a run. riot, you're not going to get caught in a fight between two groups of fans. It never happens with internationals rarely, right? It's always club matches where the violence occurs. Right. And everybody just, you know, so many people, friends of mine, acquaintances, who went to games,

wherever, Dallas, New England, L.A., San Francisco, Jersey said the same thing. I had no idea what the atmosphere and the experience was like, I'm addicted. And that's great. And that the cup is coming back. Actually, I got to tell you, though, I must say, and I kind of agree with my friend Roger Bennett here, I am a little surprised at the excitement needle hasn't moved a lot. No, that's what I was interesting. And also the anger meter hasn't moved a lot with the way the national team has performed recently. If you're a proper footballing country, you're going to get pissed off that this, I don't know, what are we playing, Pachitino, 9 million, 8 million, 7, whatever it is.

Yeah, it's a lot. It's, yeah, it's more than anyone else has ever been paid for that position. And these are the results you're getting in the only thing that matters. I mean, the, I remember the Brazilians, the heart, the, you know, the, to the last gas, Brazilians were so proud of the way Brazil played in 1982. Bozogo Bonito. Yeah, they didn't win the cup. Italy won the cup.

And it's about, it's about results. And I'm surprised that we haven't had. more concern, because that's the fun of it. That's, you know, being a fan, being invested. And Juergen Cleansman used to talk about that quite often. He said, I want my players, when they go to the bakery, when they go for the dry cleaners, to get a little guff of things aren't going well. Right.

And I don't know that that's happening. So I certainly listen. They're going to sell out the stadium because the money is there. I've already seen the extortion at ticket offers that FIFA's offering if you buy into the club championship this summer. You have a guaranteed opportunity to buy a ticket to the, you know, to, to the World Cup in 26 for like $10,000 or something. Yeah, it's, it's absurd. So, the best seat I have had for the last ever World Cup since we've no longer done the ESPN in front of my Samsung, my 75-inch Samsung, the bathroom's right over there. There's no line as far as I can tell.

And the beers are right behind me in the kitchen. Yeah. And they're not $20 beers. Right. So are you going to go to any games in 26? Are you going to stick to the same song? I may. I'm certainly not in the market to be purchasing them at these prices. So, I mean, you know, perhaps, but it's a full day's investment to go to one of those games. And you've got to be in for the whole trip. But yeah, we'll see. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it does seem different now. Soccer is widely disseminated. You know, people are, kids are wearing messy jerseys all over the country. But the energy for the national team maybe isn't what it was back in 90s?

Well, I mean, the thing is. The men's national team, I should be clear. Yeah, exactly. But to be a soccer consumer, which largely now means that you're a young male, I say a young 40-under male, that's the prize demographic for Madison Avenue and for all purveyors of commerce. And so it's a perfect sport for that. I mean, I remember when we were, my gosh, we were doing games in the field.

We wanted to watch an English match that happened that morning. I remember Seamus and I, Seamus Mallon and I, I think we're in Vancouver. I was Ty Keel and I, it might have been for the qualifier that got us into France in 97 when we're in Burnaby. And so we have to go to a pub that morning. It's six in the morning, local time, and pay $10. Canadian to have our bacon and eggs and the matchup there. The difference being now these days, any game you want, you can sit right there in front of your Samsung and dial it up as long as you pay for that service. If there is a game being played, you have access to it. Now you'll have to

pay for it through a streamer. So all of this has saturated the marketplace, has driven, I mean, my hat is off to what NBC has, the way they have treated the EPL with such a, respect and such high level of endeavor. And Rebecca Lowe, who I cherish is a good friend. We work together on the 2011 World Cup. I'm thrilled that, you know, she has been the focal point of anchoring all of this and what they do, such a great job. But I suspect they will tell you that, you know, as all of these other leagues have access to the streamers and CBS and Paramount and whatnot, you know, the slices of the pie get smaller and smaller for everybody. I mean, it's inevitable. So as far as where the national, and plus, look, the real issue for the U.S. national team right now is they don't have to,

they have no competitive matches. They have to win. They've qualified. Well, that's, you know, by being a host, that's, that's a curse. That really is. And I, you know, I really wonder. I really wonder what, you know, what the level of play will be. I, you know, disappointed. I want to see people get angry that the national team isn't playing better. Let's point some fingers. Let's have these debates. Let's talk about, you know, what is the coach giving us the straight poop and who's underperforming and who should be here and who's not.

Those are debates. That's half the fun of being a soccer fan. The other half is sitting in the stands and cheering and watching your team. You know, but having these arguments and having these discussions, that's what it's about. I mean, we're having those arguments on our little podcast, but it doesn't seem like they're being had, you know, at a higher. profile level. No, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, I think that's the case. I mean, you know, the cognoscenti. Those who know the sport, yeah, they'll have it. But, uh, it's not necessarily in the

barbershops or the first thing in the bar, unless you're in an Irish bar in south Boston or something like that. Uh, I got some questions from listeners. Ben from Chapel Hill asks, I was hoping you could describe how much or little advocacy you had to do internally within ESPN over the years in order to get soccer coverage on air and broadcast it as professionally as the other sports? And did this change over time? You know, people talk about, I think I'm generously given a little bit too much credit for whatever advocacy I did, which principally was on a day-by-day basis with highlights being available, inclusion into the show. Please don't make fun of the game.

you know, and the names and funny highlights. Inevitably, you know, it could become the, it would become a punchline or something. So, hey, you know, we've got this highlight from Champions League today. It's available to us. It's a pretty big match, whatever it is. This would be, you know, early 80s, mid-80s. Maybe we should include it.

And, you know, you'd have to, it was a matter of who was working that day, whether they were agreeable to that. Now, eventually, the commercial value of soccer became apparent to the people running programming. But, you know, I would, and, you know, as a courtesy, people would check in with me and get checked for my opinions on this or that. But, like, I think it was important just, you know, for the credibility of the sport to establish it in the newsroom so that, you know, it's not just that it's not just that foreign game. But, you know, it was tough to do because we didn't have a domestic league. The only thing going in the 80s was indoor soccer. That was gym class as, you know, Precky and Steve Jungl and all those great heroes.

I mean, you're talking to one of the few people who actually broadcast an NASL indoor game. Cosmos actually had a team. Then they actually went to MLS and folded it mid-season. I remember going to the All-Star game in Cleveland that we were in Cleveland or Kansas City, wherever we were, and Ray Cleveka, the coach of the cosmos were there, and suddenly he was a coach without a team, they folded midway through the year. And that's where soccer was. So to the extent that you know, soccer would invite criticism and satire, sometimes, you know, it deserved it if a team with a name as beloved as cosmos couldn't finish an indoor season. But what is this indoor game?

Come on. And we played this in gym class. And listen, if you've never been to an indoor soccer match, 15, 18,000 people, well played. Like Dallas, I used to do games for the Cleveland Forest. It's a great, exciting experience. Right. But it has as much relation to the World Cup final as me kicking the ball around with my grandkids. Right.

Yeah. It's like a little bit more like hockey almost. Yeah, you're playing angles off the board and, you know, and you've got shifts and changing on the fly. It's an exciting sport. with a discrete set of skill sets that you need, but it's not the outdoor game. Yeah.

How much Michael Pearsall from near Albany asks, how much growth in soccer interest do you imagine USL going to promotion relegation will, you know, foster. MLS is behind an Apple TV firewall. If ESPN really pushed for promotion relegation battles, could it reach general sports fans instead of just the cognoscenti? I don't know that you're ever going to see promotion relegation in American soccer because who's going to invest in it if your value, if you're going to put even a USL club, say somebody came to you and wanted you as a major minority investor, you put a half million, two million dollars of your well-earned money into. something, but you can get relegated and suddenly what you've just put in has just gotten chopped in half, if not less.

I don't know. I think promotion relegation is a great feature for European soccer, where, by the way, the American owners are taking over, obviously. Right. And the majority premiership teams now have, if not majority, American owners, substantial American ownership interests. So I'm not sure that that is the way to build interest. You know, I have some familiarity with Albany and that market.

There's talk of trying to build a downtown stadium. Good luck. That city needs a hell of a lot more than just a soccer stadium right now. Rebecca Lobo nailed it, which he said, you know, there's not a lot to do in that city. But, you know, it would help to have a soccer team. I don't know, again, you want to expand your interest beyond just those who can sit down and name the U.S.L. of teams. You want the casual fan. How best to get them, win games and have a star player. And then the next two reasons are win games and have a star player. It's a pretty simple concept.

Yeah. Yeah. So you touched on it a little bit, but what's your assessment of Pachitino's 10 years so far? You touched on it actually pretty significantly. Yeah, but I mean, I haven't followed it that closely. I think he clearly knows what he wants to do. He's clearly communicated it to his star players. And, you know, the one thing that when Yergen was head coach and trainer and manager and that technical director, and we would, you know, we would chat with him and, you know, the analysts would tell him, You've never been through the maw of qualifying in Conca Calf.

I remember interviewing Yergen Cleansman after where were we? Honduras, a bad qualifying loss late in the match, 2-1. And he looked like he expected to come down there and, and no, they left the grass high. They started the game at 3 in the afternoon in the tropics. It's like broiling. This is Conca Cacaf, baby. Pachitino doesn't have to go through that. So that's one thing he doesn't have to worry about learning.

You know, the thing is at the top levels of soccer management is it's kind of like the way baseball manager jobs used to be. Now, of course, in baseball, the thing is hire the young coaches who are basically not quite taking dictation from the analytical people. but, you know, we're hiring a lot of managers in their late 30s who are baseball gamers. But the soccer gamers, guys like Pontchitino will always have their next job. As Boris would say, Militinovich, a coach must always have his bags packed. I still remember walking into the green room in Brazil 2014. And I hadn't seen him. At there, there's Boris.

You know, he just popped up. But the coaches at that level always will fare well. So, you know, we need some representative results here that show, you know, who the team is going to be. You know, the advantage that he has is that this player pool has never been deeper or wider. It used to be big flipping news when, hey, we've got two or three players playing in the premier show. Well, now, yeah. at First Division throughout Europe, you've got players, and impacting and playing and scoring in Champions League. And the idea that this would be, well, I'll say commonplace would have really enthused people like you and me 20 years ago.

Like, we're going to be at a point in 2025. We'll not be unusual to have a couple of Americans score at a Champions League week of matches. So we're there. So we have a better team. but the answer to your question won't be provided until next June, whenever the first match is, because none of the matches they play in the meantime mattered. And that's a problem.

You've been talking about that for a long time. I just went back and read your interview with Grant Wall, and you were mentioned it back then. Yeah. Yeah, what was I talking about? The lack of competitive matches. Yeah, the sort of, the sort of. of the tragedy of not going through qualifying, having to go through qualifying.

The tragedies are strong words. The stories are great because, you know, the, the, the fervor in the air when you're playing in Costa Rica. And I never got to Aluenza, the old stadium. They played the one game I was at in Costa Rica. They were in a, the new stadium that, oh, the Chinese built for them for $300 million, about 15 years ago with marble floors. But Honduras and Mexico, I mean, I, I was there at the first time the United States won in Azteca. It was a friendly after the London Olympics in 2012, myself, Alexi and Casey. I don't know why the Mexican Federation scheduled a friendly, because it basically gave everybody in the U.S. pool of players a free shot of learning what it's like to play at altitude in this maelstrom. I mean, well, we know why they

did it, Cheching, because American soccer is the ATM of the Western world. That's why everyone comes here every summer to play because we can fill the big house with 100,000 people and charge $150 a ticket. Everybody goes home happy. We see the football they leave with the money. But that game in 2012 was amazing. That's Charlie Davies scored in that game, right? No, that was Charlie Davies was 2009. That was a qualifier.

Okay. Yeah, yeah, 20. That was a 2-1 loss. I was seated. Alexi and I were seated actually watching the first half of that 2009 game. But we then had to leave at halftime to go to our broadcast location, which was on the edge of the parking lot with Aztec in the background. We climbed up the common stairwell of an apartment building to get to the roof where we'd rented a spot. We're walking past people putting out their milk bottles, getting their mail.

And you're at, you're at, you know, 7,000 feet of. above altitude. And then you're climbing five, you know, I barely made it. Alexi, who was a world-class trained. He was, you do that two or three times. You say, I'm not going back down. I'm staying up here. The things we did to provide backdrop and context for our broadcast.

Those are great stories. I mean, you can't, you can't replicate those. And the 2012 match, we ended doing our on-camera and the last parts of the game after Ian and Taylor were done doing the play-by-play under a huge umbrella because we hope that was beer they were throwing at us, that yellow liquid, but we can't be too sure. Oh, man. Yeah. Well, man, we could talk for a long time, or at least I could, but we got to end here, I think.

Bob, thanks for doing this. I appreciate it. And thanks everybody for listening. We'll see you.