The Press Box - What It’s Like to Cover the World Cup With Jason Gay

Episode Date: December 2, 2022

Bryan is joined by The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay to discuss the World Cup in Qatar and what it’s like to cover it. Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Jason Gay Associate Producer: Carlos Chiriboga Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The time has come to get ready for the 2022 World Cup. And what better way to prepare than by revisiting the World Cup's most amazing goals? I'm Brian Phillips. I'm making a podcast about the history of the men's World Cup, told through the stories of 22 iconic goals. The show's called 22 Goals. It's out now on the Ringer Podcast Network, and we're having so much fun. Hello, media consumers.

Welcome to Press Box final edition. Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with producer Carlos Chiroboga, who is filling in for Erica. Today's guest is an old friend who just flew in from covering the World Cup in Qatar. And he's absolutely not above making a joke about his arms being tired. It's the Wall Street Journal's jet-lagged Jason Gay. How are you, Jason? Thank you for being me here. I'm great, and I actually feel honored because I believe this is the first time I've been on the press box in a long time without anybody dying.

You know, usually I'm brought in for the Ulogy. Ulogy Corner, I believe, is my segment on Press Box. So thank you very much for the invite. You are definitely the let us pay respects to the beloved so-and-so guest on the press box. And we love you for that. Let us talk about the World Cup. Can you give me some press box scene from Qatar? I mean, context is important here because, of course, this is the smallest place a World Cup has ever occurred.

And everything that we kind of assumed going into it, that it would be strange and different and very unusual because of the compact nature, it's that, but almost like times 10. You can go to everything. And a number of correspondents have already gone out and done this. They went to four games in one day. You know, we were talking about Qatar being the size of Connecticut. The range between the stadiums is more like going from like, you know, New Rochelle to Bay Ridge. It's a very small thumbprint and it really just changes the dynamic around completely because ordinarily what you're doing covering a World Cup is getting on airplanes. You're going from region to region city to city.

You have a place like Russia, which had the last World Cup before that, Brazil. enormous countries. It's going to North America in 2026. That's going to be an Airplay World Cup. This is literally on a subway. So that is just incredibly unusual. And then you add the whole aspect of that it's occurring in November. And it's occurring at a time in the calendar when there's tons and tons going on. It was incredibly surreal to be covering the group stage of the World Cup and then be like, oh yeah, when we get home tonight, we can watch Ohio State Michigan, which is its own World Cup final in a way. It's just very strange, but it is the World Cup.

There's nothing quite like it. And it's always fascinating to cover. U.S. beat Iran on Tuesday, 1-0. Where do you put the U.S. men's team in the list of plucky American sporting heroes coming through in international events? You know, it's a funny thing because I think that they, consensus on the American team has shifted over time here. This is not necessarily a plucky team.

Are they playing a little bit above their heads? Yes. But there's enormous talent here. There is talent that is playing at the European level. Brian, you're supposed to jump in here and say, listen to the soccer talk from Jason. I'm just laying back. I couldn't do this 10 days ago.

I all, thanks to my fellow correspondence, Josh Robinson and John Clegg at the Journal. But, you know, they have a team. that has enormous talent, it's going to be a jugger dot come 2026 is the expectation. But I think it's not a situation where they're the mighty underdog against the powerhouses. I think that they showed against England that they are capable of running neck and neck, certainly from a fitness standpoint with some of these great teams. And so, you know, a game like the Netherlands, I don't think they're looking just to be a tourist. I think they're looking to win. How much postgame did you get to

experience in terms of media access after the Iran match? Well, so we divided it up. For some reason, they sort of split it. You had the opportunity to get credentialed for the press conference or the mix zone. And for people who aren't familiar with the term mix zone, it's sort of like the euro term for like, basically they shuttle the players off the field through the media, got led, and they talk to television, they talk to their local, and they talk to the throngs of people from other places. And then the press conference is kind of what we're accustomed to here, where you have a coach and kind of have the player of the game, get up there,

and talk. I was press conference guy. My colleagues did the mix zone stuff because they know a lot better more than I do. And I, you know, it's a very strange environment because you're dealing with people who are oftentimes, you know, coming right off of the field, the pitch, into a, you know, a group of people who, you know, might have questions applicable to the match, might have questions applicable to things that are coming up and then might have things completely from left field. And we saw that And some of the press conferences, the pregame press conferences for the Iran match where, you know, the questions went all over the place and they weren't necessarily applicable to what was going on on the field.

And naval movements was a new one for me. Yeah. Even at an international competition that had a big geopolitical overlay like U.S. Iran. When you were, you know, you know, getting started out, you never went to a, let's see, a Longhorns press conference and asked about. naval positioning in the Gulf of Mexico. You never asked about that? I'm trying to remember if Mac Brown or Vince Young ever got that in 2005. I don't think so. I mean, I'm a great fan of press conference moments and the farther afield, the better as far as

I'm concerned. And, you know, I think that it's important for people to see the World Cup through the lens of a much bigger world than the U.S. And when you get questions like that and you have those moments, I think it's in three. I think it's interesting. And I thought you learned a little bit, too. I thought you learned something about Tyler Adams, the U.S. captain, and how perfectly he answered that question on, you know, how he felt, mispronouncing the country, first of all, but also in response to the question of representing a country with a history of discrimination. I thought that was his answers were terrific. Shoemaker and I were talking about this the other day about a sports writer who goes to an event like this.

how much do you want to cover the backdrop of the event, which we know in Qatar involves treatment and death of migrant workers who built these stadiums, involves human rights, involves how Qatar got the World Cup, and how much do you want to focus on the game that is on the pitch? Well, ultimately, you want to try to do both. You know, you might not necessarily be able to do both in one piece, whether it's a newspaper column or a television piece,

and certainly the constraints of deadlines and times to get into consideration. But it's impossible to separate the human cost of what's happening in Qatar and what has already happened in Qatar and the sort of messy dynamic that created this in the first place from the thing that's happening on the field. And I think that historically, FIFA, the organizer of it, has been able to rely on the idea that once the ball was dropped, so to speak, the page would be turned and all things would be forgotten. And I don't buy that whatsoever.

I think it's incumbent upon the media to remind people of what happened to get us here to this point. Now, does that necessarily mean in a piece about the United States advancing that it needs to be in the first 30 words of the piece? I don't necessarily think so. But I do think it is our obligation to jump in there now and again and sort of break through the sports chat aspect of it, the happy talk, quote, and give people a dose of reality. This is the theory I was trying out on Shoemakers, that in terms of, of print coverage of the World Cup. TV is kind of its own distinct universe. But in terms of print coverage, you will find everything you want to find.

You want to read about the larger story, the moral complexities of and moral tragedies of the World Cup, you can find that. And then you can find plenty about soccer. But sometimes they will just not literally be in the same piece at the same time. So that is kind of the question is, do you have to tuck that into every piece? you feel as a sports writer, I can do soccer today, and that's enough, and we can do the other parts tomorrow. You know, I'm not going to give you a hard answer on that, because I don't necessarily feel there

should be a rule on it. I feel like if you are deft enough and you feel that you can pull it off, by all means you should do it. If you don't feel it fits naturally into what you're trying to say, then do it, do something else the next day. But I think, and, you know, to broaden the point you were making about the, the rate, of coverage that existed at this thing. I mean, that is one of the real delights of looking at the media coverage of the World Cup,

is that you're getting perspectives from all over the world. And sometimes something that's viewed through the lens of the Western media is completely viewed a different way by your colleagues and other parts of the world. And I think that that is very healthy because, you know, you're coming from a place in the United States where we sort of, you know, we're used to feeling that we have the last word on everything, but not necessarily not necessarily so and not necessarily the most informed opinion. The U.S. in England had a nil-nill draw the day after Thanksgiving. You gave the match the Trumpian adjective medium energy. Yeah. I also wrote, if you took the dog for a walk,

mid-match, you didn't miss much. If you took the dog for five walks, you didn't miss much. How do you describe the atmosphere at that match? Well, I mean, the atmosphere was kind of decaffeinated, so to speak. I mean, we've talked a lot about in the media that there's no alcohol at these matches, which I do believe is contributing to a little bit of a quieter atmosphere. Certainly, the location of the time of year is also contributing to that. Another factor here, Brian, these games are going off at 10 o'clock at night, which is really late. It's quite up to my bedtime back in the States, 10 o'clock.

So it involves a degree of staying up. I found the audience or the crowd noise within the stadium for that night to be more muted than usual. Interestingly, however, I did get a fair amount of blowback from soccer fans about calling that match medium energy. There are some soccer fans who took great offense to it, found that match incredibly exciting, one of the great performances in American soccer history. I'm not here to, you know, challenge the opinions of people who have been watching this game for far longer than I have, but I think objectively, it was not, you know, some sort of thrill ride. It was a different kind of thing.

I think that it reminded me almost a little bit of, remember that Super Bowl a handful of years ago where the Patriots beat the Rams like 13 to 10? And everybody called it a snooze fest. But then like 24 hours later, you had this backlash of football Congress Sunday who were like, that was one of the great defense matchups of all time. And if you can't appreciate that,

you don't know the first thing about football. It had that kind of vibe. I got to tell you, this is when I miss the soccer trolls that were a big part of the. the sports media eight, 12, 16 years ago. Yeah. Because they would have had that column ready for the daily paper the next day. Like you're telling me the score was zero to zero.

And I was supposed to enjoy that. Is it? Soccer's boring, man. Soccer's terrible. This stick. This sport is weird. They would have had that column absolutely loaded up. 100%.

And there was a little bit of that energy online. That wasn't terribly hard to find. You had some people, pretty high profile people. media sort of scratching their heads and saying, oh, this is what it's all about. And it is your job when you're there to explain the circumstance and the stakes and why, in fact, there was, you know, some real tension out there. But like, you know, at a certain point, you got to call, you know, call it for what you see it as. And yeah, I mean, I, I mean, you'll laugh, but there were some people who said, you sound like a 90s dinosaur, take yourself back to America and send someone who cares.

And I was like, I'm not, I'm not the enemy, man. Like, I really want to. to be here. I admire this team. I think they have a great story to tell. I'm not, you know, I'm a caveman in some ways, but not that one. I don't, I miss a soccer troll. I, you know, I think sometimes you need all points of view to be represented, if only to eventually get to the good point of view. I mean, the other thing you hear is like, oh, well, you just must hate soccer. And I'm like, look, I may dislike some things, but I have been to more soccer games in the last like four years of my life when I include all my family, my children, my friends, I mean like soccer is a huge part of my life. Now, am I an expert in it? I will never claim to

be. Am I an expert in the international game? Can I tick off the rosters and the coaches of the histories of each? No. However, I have enormous appreciation for it. I think that sort of, you know, soccer crank definitely is in, you know, if not hibernation is close to extinct. I don't miss it as much as you might. We have kind of replaced the soccer crank with a different type of journalistic figure. You mentioned this in one of your columns, which is the person who desperately wants to write a think piece about what it all means. Yeah, yeah. With every American result in a World Cup.

So is that the era we're in now where it's like we've come to a consensus broadly, at least about soccer and about American acceptance of it? but now we have to treat every World Cup like a referendum on where soccer is in the American experience? Well, that was sort of driven by, I was struck by what, after the England game, 0-0-0-0-draw, you know, Christian Pucillich and Greg Burrhalter come off the pitch. This is the U.S. coach and the U.S. star. And the first questions they're asked about is, can you contextualize this in the history of United States soccer and what this means for the way that soccer is viewed around the world? And I'm not trying to this far as the people who ask those kinds of questions.

They're legitimate interesting questions. They're far more interesting than asking people about corner kicks. However, I was just sitting there saying no other sport has this equivalent. You know, Raphael O'Dahl does not walk off the, you know, court at the French Open, and someone asks them to contextualize this in the history of tennis. They ask him, like, how he felt that day. And it is sort of funny how, you know, soccer has become freighted, and especially American soccer, which has been, you know, very fraught over the last.

half decade with missing the World Cup in 2018, you know, it has been freighted with this, you know, sort of big feeling of doomsday, that we have to get it together, that if we don't do this now, we're never going to do it. And the stakes are enormous for the coaches, for the programs, for the style of play, for all the people who are out there playing. And I can't help but think that the players must find it a little bit exasperating, that, you know, they must have friends in other sports and they're like, hey, you know, our buddies will play baseball. Don't get asked these kinds of questions. What's going on?

Can't you just ask it? What is it about this team that got you a draw? Can't we just have a basic post-game question instead of having to write your think piece for you? But I also think that part of this is like, you know, it's filling this space that in prior generations was occupied by things like boxing, by baseball, by, you know, way longer ago era horse racing where the mystique and the atmospherics were so intoxicating that you had you kind of sort of like got this high where you felt that you had to make it into a bigger thing than it

necessarily was it was impossible to not feel that there were metaphors everywhere right and i think that you know it does and i'm as guilty of this as anybody it does you know heighten your senses and make you feel like you know that if i'm going to reach this is a time to reach. And I, you know, again, I'm as guilty of it as anybody. I just think it's a little funny. That's a great point. And I've always felt this about soccer writing is that part of the allure for the American sports writers, it does feel like it's fresh ground to write in, right? And to explore and to create your own style and think about, whereas there's so many questions about football and baseball are basically settled or have been beaten to death. The first World Cup match I went to was

in 2014, it was the opener of Brazil, and Brazil was the home team. And it was the most charged, electric, exciting sporting event I had ever seen. And at that point, I felt like I'd seen a lot of sporting events. I could not believe it. It felt like I was in a spaceship that had just lifted off, you know, and was going to outer space. It was that charged and exciting. And there's just nothing like it. And, you know, that's what you'll live for if you do this kind of thing. You want that kind of vibe. I want to ask you about American soccer fans you encountered because the ones we saw on television, especially during the Iran match on Fox, looked like, and I'm not the first one to think this, actors who had been hired to play

American soccer fans in kind of a medium budget movie. It's like, why don't you dress like Uncle Sam and have a sign that says, we call it soccer? Yeah. That'll look like a real good. real fan. Did you have any encounters over there? I hear what you're saying. There were quite a few like statute of liberties. There were people who addressed as bald eagles. You know, you saw quite a bit of that. My question is, if you have gone to this length to travel 7,000 miles to Qatar, you have spent many thousands of dollars, presumably to acquire tickets, hotel rooms, plane tickets, and the like. Are you really going to wear your cargo pants and Everlane hoodie to the game? I think you're going to do it up, right? It's kind of like going to a destination wedding, okay? You can't

be too cool for school if there was ever a time to throw on the red, white, and blue blazer. This was it. So to counter your cynicism, I would say this was an incredibly enthusiastic crowd. These are the sort of like the peak fans. You know those people that Taylor Swift was trying to identify to sell tickets to, the super fans or whatever it was? You know, that's what these fans were. You and I also have very juvenile senses of humor. So did you enjoy the term pelvic contusion that got trotted out for a key injury during the World Cup? Yes, although I did see, or, you know, to update a little bit, he was asked about this to describe, to specify what a pelvic contusion was. And it was not what the assumed injury was.

It was not an undercarriage injury to use another euphemism. It was very funny to watch. everybody on Twitter just come out and say it and everybody on television and in print dance merrily around it and say here is what we think happened. Yes. There's two different worlds going on there. Yes. For sure. Do you like covering international events like these?

I know there's like a certain coolness to I went to the World Cup in 2022. Where does this rank on things that I really want to cover for you? way, way, way up there. I mean, you know, yes, it's great. It's great to be in a place where you're very much aware that 99% of the people you encounter don't care where you work, don't care what you represent. They're not following you. You're a very small speck of sand on the beach.

I think that's incredibly healthy. I get a huge kick out of how there are just different, you know, traditions and rules with media. I'll give you an example when Saudi Arabia won. They're upset over Argentina. You know, when the Saudi Arabian coach, Irving Renard, came into the press conference. He was greeted by a loud round of applause. Now, if this happened in the United States, Brian, you know there would be Columbia Journalism School Tribunals. This is not tolerated in this country.

But I found it hilarious and kind of great. Listen, if you're not going to applaud that and, you know, what are you going to applaud? I found it. I was not applauding myself. I want to be clear, but I found it enormously entertaining. There was one moment like that. And you were not watching this, but the Fox broadcast of the U.S. Iran game. Toward the end, John Strong, play-by-play announcer goes, somebody get it out of there when they were trying to clear the ball. And it really felt like he went just for a moment into the college football Homer announcer thing where you were directly addressing the team. from the broadcast booth. Put me in coach, or actually I just want to be your coach

and tell you what to do at this moment. It was kind of amazing. I mean, I get it. Listen, you know, there are so many artifices, and this is something you've written about a lot, there's just so many artifices around, you know, sports media and sports television in particular and the idea of broadcasting sports, you know,

and there's sort of like voice from the mountaintop that is supposed to be, you know, neutral. And as Joe Buck has told us over the years, impossible to actually render anything neutrally anyway. So, you know, there's some part of me that feels that's probably a little refreshing. Before we go, let's talk college football because we're going to get some clarity on the four-team college football playoff on Saturday. But we are staring at a future, which is going to have a 12-team college football playoff. What strikes you about 12 college football teams advancing to the postseason?

I mean, to me, this represents the complete and final victory of television as the power within college sports. You know, this has been a drama decades in the making, right? Television has long been an incredibly influential aspect of college sports. But this is happening basically at the behest of TV. You know, fans might say that they're interested in it, but what really is drive, in this to this point is the fact that it will be an incredibly lucrative television product for college football. And, you know, there's no going back from it. Once they started with the four team, it was inevitable that they were going to get there. The questions, you know, the sort of existential

questions about what it means about college football are valid ones. I mean, I think that, you know, 12 teams is interesting in the respect that you're going to do a couple things. You'll involve a lot more teams. You'll maybe have this opening round or two of home playoff games, which I think will be enjoyable, it'd be a real kick to see, hypothetically, Alabama have to go to Columbus in the middle of January. It'd be pretty funny to watch. But I do worry about the diminishment of a lot of the things that make college football great. And college football, you know, they say as a year old hometown, you know, keep it weird. And there are lots of weird things about college football. And I feel like, you know, for example, you know, you're coming off of this Michigan, Ohio State game,

well, if you had an environment or a 12-team playoff, that game would have felt a little bit differently on Saturday. And it wouldn't mean that it was meaningless. It doesn't go from being like an important thing to an unimportant thing. But maybe it's like diminished 20% if you know that both teams are locks

to go out of the playoff and have a very strong likelihood of playing each other again. And if you diminish the great things about college football, and let's make no bones about it, the rivalries, those rivalry weekends, and you went to one this year, they are the greatest thing about college football, not these foolish playoff games and neutral sites, zero. The rivalry weekends are the most important.

And if you take 20% out of them, 15% out of them, it's a different product. And whether that would be worth it in the long term will be interesting to see. The other aspect of this, too, is, you know, I get the idea that, you know, everyone imagines a Cinderella and an upset and stuff like that. But have you been sitting around the last five years, Brian saying, you know what, I really don't think I know who the college football champion is this year. You know, Alabama, you know, or Georgia last year, like, gosh, you know, if it only had been a 14-team field, then Georgia would have really earned that. I thought they earned it very

solidly. They made a very convincing case to me. I did not need to see them play three more games. It's so true. And I feel when we have this conversation among sports writers, the first thing I always say is why does, let's say, Penn State, Tennessee, these teams that would be in a 12th team playout this year, why do they deserve to compete for the national championship based on the regular season they had? And somebody inevitably comes back to me and goes, well, you saying it's not fun to watch Alabama play one more game? I'm like, no, no, no, no, I know college football is fun. Extra NFL playoff games are fun, but what happens is you get the bears in the playoffs. We know this from the NFL. Or in the NBA, we get more teams with losing records.

in the NBA playing game. We already had teams with losing records in the playoffs. So it's deserving versus fun. And those are actually two different arguments about this whole thing. Most recently, you had people going kind of bonkers about the fact that the baseball playoffs were these quick and dirty formats. You had the five game series and you had the quick, like, best out of three formats, which some people thought, what are we doing here?

We're knocking out teams at 105 games. What's going on? But I love that. I love that element of chance. You know, I just think that like the way that the game, is structured. And I get the idea that like, okay, if you wind the net here, you know, increase the ability of other schools to recruit because there'll be more teams in the mix. It won't all be just funneling to the teams that are going to make a four-team playoff. That feels a long way off. And I just

find it hard to believe that we're not going to be sitting at the end of this thing, looking at the Georgia's, the Alabama's, you know, the LSUs and Michigan's and Ohio States, as much as it kills me to say Michigan. Here's the ugly truth here. We need a different college football playoff season every year depending on the year. So this year, if everything holds to form on Saturday, it's the perfect year for a four-team playoff.

We got four teams and nobody really cares about anybody else. Make a case for Tulane if you want to. We don't care about Tuloss, Alabama, all that stuff. There are some years, let's take the year my alma mater triumph in dramatic fashion in 2005 where you just needed two. Yeah.

You didn't need more teams than you just needed a game between USC and Texas to settle at all. If you remember the 2011 LSU team, they won all their games in the regular season, beaten all these ranked teams, and then they had to play Alabama. No, no, no, no. We need to as a zero team playoff that year. We need to do like the old UPI thing before the bowl games. You're the national championship.

We're done. We're, oh, it's over. Right. That's what we need, a flexible system. And look, there's another part of this too, which is, you know, not to get completely existential, is that, like, what do we love about college football? Is college football some sort of like, you know, finite thing where we have to get clarity, or is it the argument, right?

Is it the kind of thing where we sit there and still argue 30 years later about the Colorado Buffaloes or whether or not a school, you know, should be recognized for an undefeated season or should have been in the mix for an undefeated season? I think, you know, the moment they led in a playoff, the moment they expanded from beyond that sort of two-team championship you described, and you had this double structure of a playoff and the bowl games, you just completely neutralized the bowl games. You made them utterly meaningless. I know people don't like hearing that, but it's just categorically true. You rendered them, you know, impotent, and you are going to bring this day on. And so, you know, we're going to get it.

And again, there are things about it that I like. I love the idea of home playoff games. I think that's going to be really, really exciting. So, you know, fingers crossed. Jason Gay, we can always trust. you to hang a think piece on any exciting sporting event and do it with me because I love to too. Jason, thanks for coming on the press box. Thanks, Brian.