Effects of World Cup expansion to 64 teams
Jon Arnold and Seth Vertelney break down the effects of a 64 team expansion should it happen for the 2030 World Cup.
Sports Seriously
Growing up in Liverpool, England, Roger Bennett was fascinated by Ferris Bueller.
“It was very profound being a kid watching that movie,” Bennett said in an interview with USA TODAY Sports. “As a kid that was obsessed with Chicago, even though I’d never been there, it just kind of defined the sense of possibility of the city.”
Bennett recalled being drawn into the fictional character, played by Matthew Broderick in the 1986 John Hughes film “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” because of “the speed of thought, the speed of mind, the speed of mouth of Ferris. The aura of Ferris.”
Bennett moved to Chicago after college and is now the founder and CEO of the Men in Blazers Media Network. Embracing that same idea of possibility, the independent company started as a single soccer podcast and now has more than 100 employees distributing more than 20 shows a week covering all elements of the beautiful game: the Premier League, the U.S. men’s and women’s national teams, MLS, Liga MX and the NWSL.
Men in Blazers’ 2026 World Cup was ‘waking dream’ for founder Roger Bennett
Bennett, who now lives in New York, had his own Ferris Bueller moment this summer during the 2026 World Cup when Men in Blazers held one of their “Match Day Live” shows, which mirrored “College GameDay” complete with a Home Depot-sponsored bus, in Seattle. He led a crowd of thousands of fans with former Seattle Seahawks legend Marshawn Lynch in a “March to the Match” to the United States group match against Australia.
“I ran backwards through the whole march on the way to the game,” Bennett recalled, “shaking people’s hands, hugging people, talking to people. I said on the show, I will never come closer to feeling like Ferris Bueller.”
On the 39-day, 10,300-mile journey, Men in Blazers had a stop in Dallas with Dallas Cowboys legend Emmitt Smith and a show in Boston with Boston Red Sox Hall of Famer Pedro Martinez and USWNT World Cup winner Sam Mewis, who is the host of the network’s “The Women’s Game” podcast. There were multiple shows in Atlanta with rap heavyweights Big Boi and Ludacris and “Ted Lasso” star Brendan Hunt.
And that’s not all. Men in Blazers, which has 866,000 followers on Instagram and 450,000 subscribers on YouTube, partnered with Visa to publish City Guides for the World Cup host cities in Canada and the United States, highlighting restaurants, bars and local landmarks. Their social media accounts continued to provide witty commentary on the happenings on and off the pitch.
“The impact, I can say, for us was enormous,” Bennett said. “… It was like living a waking dream in many regards.”
Similar to Bueller, the high school kid who ditched school to explore the Windy City, Bennett is a man of the people. And that’s what’s made the Men in Blazers Media Network so successful.
According to the Sports Business Journal, the Spotify streams for podcast episodes from the Men in Blazers Media Network rose 500% from the beginning of May, a month before the World Cup kicked off, to mid-July after the tournament ended. The numbers grew 700% among women and 500% among listeners 18-24 years old.
Bennett explained what separates Men in Blazers from the pack.
“From the very beginning, not just putting (content) out into the world, but then listening deeply to the audience in return,” he said. “It’s not been about keeping up with social media. It’s really just been about having a staff that’s listening and responding and baking the opinions, the thoughts, the ideas, the user-generated content, the insights, the letters, the warmth into everything we do. So that’s been the joy of all of this.”
Men in Blazers started as a single podcast covering the Premier League. Bennett and co-host Michael Davies bantered about highlights, the “English Beef” fan at a Chelsea match, and being bald. The show aired on NBC Sports starting in 2014 and offered American fans an opportunity to engage with the English league like never before. Davies left Men in Blazers in 2024 to focus on other endeavors, but the foundation for the network’s ethos was set.
“Look, if you’re an English football fan, you get to go to the games. If you’re an American fan, if you’re watching the Premier League, you are mostly sitting at home in your pajamas with a coffee in one hand and a beer in the other,” Bennett said, “and we’ve really seen from day one our mission has to feel like we’re alongside the fans on the couch, talking to them, chatting to them, listening to them, hearing them, engaging with them.”
The 2026 World Cup was the largest tournament yet. Not only was there an expanded field of 48 teams, but the competition set viewership and attendance records. More than 6.8 million fans attended a match in person, breaking the previous record of 3.59 million fans back in the group stage.
The previous record was set in 1994, the last time the World Cup was held in the United States. Bennett said that, besides the fact there were more matches this summer, a major difference this go around was social media. He pointed out the way that the local communities were able to engage with the tournament, including Scotland’s Tartan Army taking over Boston and Lawrence, Kansas, embracing Algeria, not to mention international fans discovering Waffle House and Buc-ee’s, as evidence of how engagement was another level.
“Americans love a circus,” he said. “… The World Cup is an eclipse that sweeps the entire planet for 39 days. What was different was the extent to which it crossed over culturally off the field.”
For Men in Blazers, covering this World Cup was the culmination of everything Bennett has worked for and believed in: bringing football to the United States.
“From the very beginning, I sensed the nature of that there was an audience, there was a hunger, there was a real passion,” he said, adding that he feels like a certain sports icon living in his purpose. “… It feels like being Tony Hawk, just skating on the most enormous half pipe. It’s an incredible time to be building this network in this sport in this nation.”
Men in Blazers leads organic Premier League coverage for American fans
A question on the minds of many Americans during the World Cup is what club they should support after falling in love with the drama of football? Men in Blazers was ready to provide tools for fans to figure out which Premier League club they should root for, including a guide comparing the clubs to NFL teams. Arsenal is the New England Patriots because “their old glory era ended. Their new glory era … just beginning?” and Brighton is the Los Angeles Chargers because “the football is good, just not as good as the weather.” And there’s a quiz to match your personality with a club. I got Bournemouth with a note saying, “they play fearless football, discover stars before everyone else, and make the big teams sweat. Go ahead, dream big, and ruin someone else’s perfect weekend.”
The week ahead of the Premier League season kickoff, Bennett and the Men in Blazers team did a media tour in England with the Premier League clubs. Bennett credits the trust the platform has created not only with fans, but with the clubs, as what opens these doors. He called the Prem “the telenovela that the world is captivated by” and was looking forward to “meet essentially with the lead characters.”
He pointed out the significance of capitalizing on the World Cup momentum ahead of the season kickoff.
“In this moment, preseason, every fan feels hope,” he said. “Every fan makes the case that this will be their season. So to be able to be the mouthpiece for the fans in America as they really engage with their teams for the first time since the World Cup is a joy.”
The tour started in London with live Q&As with Premier League champion Arsenal and then Chelsea.
The Tottenham stop featured a Men in Blazers landmark. The network live-streamed the club’s friendly against Hoffenheim on its YouTube channel on Saturday, Aug. 15 and got 61,000 views. Bennett said the broadcast, the network’s first time live-streaming a match, was “a real milestone for us.”
The tour journeyed up north to Manchester United and Manchester City, home of World Cup darling Erling Haaland, before hitting up Liverpool and ending on Monday, Aug. 17 at Bennett’s favorite club, Everton. He’s a third-generation supporter.
“They’re kind of like the Chicago White Sox of English football,” he described. “They’re a team that don’t always win but when they do, you dance as if you’re at your own kid’s wedding. It’s a beautiful way to approach football, sports, life.”
A year ago, Men in Blazers sold out its New York event with Everton. Returning home and hosting a show at the club’s Hill Dickinson Stadium with Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, James Garner and Hayden Hackney was “incredibly humbling” for Bennett, especially because it would be the first time his mum would see a Men in Blazers event in person.
“It’s very deeply meaningful,” he said.
Men in Blazers’ full steam ahead for 2027 World Cup featuring USWNT
Even though the men’s World Cup is over, Bennett said he and the Men in Blazers team are “already knee deep in planning the women’s World Cup” for next summer, which he said is “going to be absolutely enormous.”
The tournament will feature 32 teams and be hosted in Brazil. Bennett called the South American country “the spiritual home of football, which gives it just such a depth of storytelling.”
Unlike the United States men’s team, who tied their furthest World Cup run when Belgium knocked them out in the round of 16, the United States women’s team has won a record four World Cups.
“We are the one nation in the world whose football fandom has been beautifully and remarkably driven by the success of the women’s team,” Bennett said. “That 1999 team gave football its first lasting cultural moment in the United States.
“America loves winners. They love nothing more than winners, and this team is a team that wins.”
In the 2023 World Cup, the USWNT was knocked out in the round of 16 by Sweden in a penalty shootout. Bennett addressed what happened to the team, which was powered by legends Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan.
“The team have been so inspirational, many other nations have followed their pathway,” he remarked. “This is amazing. This is great for the game. There’s now true competition. And last World Cup was the reckoning, where the world showed that not only they caught up, but they had tactically and athletically created challenges to this team from across Europe, from South America, from Africa.”
Men in Blazers’ mission to bring football to United States paying off
Even though everything about the Men in Blazers Media Network is organic, Bennett admits it’s a lot of hard work. He compared his journey to one of this summer’s blockbuster films.
“I watched ‘The Odyssey,’ like millions of Americans,” he said, “and I was like, all they had to do was get a Trojan horse, fight a couple of giants, and then get back to their home island. This one’s taken even more, or it feels like it’s taken more in comparison.”
But Bennett is seeing the fruits of his labor. Doing an interview with USA TODAY is a full circle moment.
“I love USA TODAY,” he said in his office that has a painting of Tracy Chapman’s debut album next to a still from when Ferris Bueller is at The Art Institute of Chicago. “Genuinely. When I used to get stuff sent back as a kid from America, it was it blew my mind that newspaper to see something so modern, so thoughtful, and so colorful. I’ve always loved it ever since then.”
He recalled reading a report when he first came to the United States in the early 1990s that soccer was the 67th most popular sport in the country. In 2024, two years before the World Cup kicked off, The Economist published a report that said the beautiful game passed baseball as the third most-popular sport in the United States.
“Everything I loved about this nation was here: the music, the food, you know, the style, the swagger,” Bennett said. “The one thing that was missing was football, and to watch it climb from 67th to third, and to play a small role in that journey, it’s really been the mission of my lifetime.”
