Roger Bennett joined Alex Rodriguez’s podcast a few months ago and broke the news with the calm of someone who’s waited decades to say it. A-Rod kept asking some variation of the same question — “When is this football thing finally going to take off?” — and Bennett, a Liverpool native, Everton fan and resident of Lower Manhattan for 30 years, had to tell him carefully: this has already happened.
Football is now the third most popular sport in the United States, behind only football and basketball, according to a Q4 2024 survey from Ampere Analysis cited by The Economist. A-Rod’s sport lagged behind, the same study shows. “I don’t want to be that guy who comes on your show, A-Rod, you’re an icon,” Bennett said, “and brings the news that baseball has fallen to fourth on the list, but I’m that guy.”
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This is exactly the moment. The 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup kicks off this summer in American stadiums, followed by the 2027 Women’s World Cup — one after the other — and Bennett, co-founder and CEO of Men in Blazers, the podcast turned 100-employee media empire, is in full “I told you so” mode.
“Football was for a long time the sport of the future,” he said, “and it has finally become the sport of the present.” The Women’s World Cup alone, he argues, will be “a cultural phenomenon” — Netflix has signed an exclusive US broadcast deal with FIFA for the 2027 and 2031 Women’s World Cups. “Football doesn’t sleep,” he says, “and now we won’t sleep either.”
The business case for why this matters is impressive. About 200 million people watch the Super Bowl. Five billion will watch the World Cup, while the opening weekend of the 2025-26 Premier League season on NBC Sports averaged 850,000 viewers across six matches — the most-watched season opener in history in the United States — with the Manchester United-Arsenal game drawing 2 million viewers across NBC, Peacock and digital platforms.
For any media executive, brand strategist or advertiser who still classifies football as “on the rise,” Bennett would welcome a conversation.
“When two teams take the field,” he says, “their nations, histories, politics and cultures take the field with them.”
That’s the spirit of his new book, “We Are The World (Cup): A Personal History of the World’s Greatest Sporting Event.” (We Are the World Cup: A Personal Story of the World’s Greatest Sporting Event, in literal translation)and also, he argues, why the World Cup will be a gargantuan commercial success regardless of what happens to the two teams that American fans care most about — the United States and England — whose elimination from the tournament, history strongly suggests, is not a question of “if” but “when.”
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De Liverpool a Lower Manhattan
Bennett arrived in the United States in 1994, the same year the country last hosted the Men’s World Cup — the tournament that was supposed to ignite the sport’s popularity overnight there. That didn’t happen, at least not right away.
What came next were three decades of slow, organic growth: a Major League Soccer that initially struggled to attract an audience, the growth of pay TV and streaming, the internet connecting Minnesota to Manchester and Los Angeles to Liverpool, the American women’s national team winning everything in its path and, finally, the Premier League becoming the main cultural export.
“England used to have an empire,” Bennett said wryly. “It’s kind of turned into having a royal family that keeps imploding… And now they just have football. It’s their biggest cultural export.”
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He grew up in Liverpool as a third-generation Everton fan — the club, he says, “ran in his blood” — which means he grew up understanding football not as entertainment but as identity, as a civic religion. To this day, he is surprised by the fickle and unfaithful nature of American sports fans.
This geographically unbound loyalty gave Bennett his mission. According to him, the American football audience has matured and become something unprecedented: a passionate fan base, global in its loyalties and which no longer depends on the performance of the local team to stay engaged.
A survey by Men in Blazers found that 54% of American football fans follow three or more teams around the world — a habit that is practically non-existent in Europe, where identity is geographical and passed down from generation to generation.
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Europeans, Bennett notes, find this genuinely incomprehensible. Americans, on the other hand, don’t understand why the habit would be so extraordinary. American fans make choices, Bennett said, without inherited obligation. “They weren’t born third-generation Everton fans like me, so it’s in my blood. They choose from scratch.”
The result is that Liverpool and Arsenal — clubs defined by authenticity, history and a certain amount of romantic pain — are the two teams with the most fans in the United States, while Manchester United, which arrived on American screens long after its glory years, is viewed with amused indifference.
“Most American fans have never seen the team win the league,” Bennett explained, a stark contrast to the club’s powerhouse status in literally the rest of the world.
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This willingness to start from scratch is, paradoxically, what makes American fans so receptive to backstories — and backstories are exactly what Men in Blazers has always sold.
Early in Men in Blazers’ history, when it was still a podcast, he and co-host Michael Davies received an innocent question via email: in which part of London is Newcastle?
“Why would an American know that Newcastle is a proud northern industrial region, post-coal, post-steel, post-shipping, hollowed out since the 70s and 80s after the miners’ strikes, and where football has become virtually everything in terms of national pride?”
“We realized that our mission was to talk about football week after week, I think with emotional intelligence, but also bringing the context, the dreams, the desires, the subtext, the geography, the history, the sense of enchantment.”
‘The American Century of Football’
All of which means this World Cup will be huge regardless of whether the United States team goes far or falls early — and Bennett is brutally honest about which outcome seems more likely.
The US men’s team has won exactly one knockout game in the history of World Cups. Four years of automatic classification as host country produced a string of unimportant friendlies, despite the almost cursed label of a “golden generation” of players.
“We have the best individual players we’ve ever had,” said Bennett, who offered a diagnosis of something wrong with the American football mentality. “When we face a big team, we still have an inferiority complex. Imposter syndrome.”
Bennett remembers becoming an American citizen after promising to do so live on ESPN if the United States managed to get out of the “group of death” at the 2014 World Cup. “They did it. And so did I.”
Bennett is also brutally candid about his home country’s chances. He said he views the England team with the dark tenderness particular to someone who has seen them eliminated on penalties his entire conscious life.
He mentioned a book on his shelf called “40 Years of Shite.” (40 years of m…, in literal translation) and compared England’s annual World Cup cycle to a favorite analogy from his friend John Oliver, a Liverpool fan: “England is like Charlie Brown trying to kick the ball while Lucy holds it. Only the English seem to enjoy the pain.”
The English, he said, invented the sport and have spent nearly 60 years convincing themselves that a divine right will hand them the trophy. They won once — controversially, at home, in 1966, a day Bennett notes is as far away as Uranus but still discussed as if it happened last Tuesday.
His verdict: “I can imagine England winning the World Cup as much as I can imagine the New York Jets winning the Super Bowl.”
And still — the party will be gigantic. “The World Cup will be a huge success whether this American team falls in the group stage or goes far,” Bennett said. What he calls “America’s hybrid identities” that make the country such a vibrant and extraordinary mosaic means that many Americans will be rooting for, for example, Korea, Japan, Colombia and even Mexico. “That’s the crazy place we’re in.”
Bennett calls this the beginning of “the American century of football,” and the evidence is hard to dispute. Most Premier League clubs now have at least American ownership.
The same happens in other European leagues. Ryan Reynolds could be on his way to the elite with Wrexham FC. But Bennett clearly sees the tension created by this — what he calls modern football’s main fault line: the collision between the sport’s deeply local, historically rooted culture and the global rush for money that often accompanies American ownership.
The smartest owners, he argues, are those like Fenway Sports Group, who arrived at Liverpool, quickly understood what they didn’t know and won two league titles and a Champions League.
The warning example is the owner who arrives running over, “openly talking about transforming football clubs from low-performing content platforms into high-performance content platforms”. That kind of view, Bennett said, “shows a profound misunderstanding of what they bought into — and fans will make that clear almost immediately.”
This tension also appears in the World Cup itself, where ticket prices were defined according to the logic of the American sports market — supply and demand, Madison Square Garden style seats — in a sport whose working-class roots run deep.
“Football is a working-class sport, and fans revolt against this type of mentality. These are two cultures colliding, and this reaction and counter-reaction will define the future of the sport.”
Building the Backstory Machine
This summer will also be big for Men in Blazers. In partnership with The Home Depot, the network will travel the country from Los Angeles to Seattle to Texas in a custom, co-branded bus, broadcasting live from a first-of-its-kind traveling mobile studio every day of the tournament.
The network has grown from two men recording in a closet to a 100-plus person operation, with platforms dedicated to the Premier League, the Champions League, the U.S. men’s national team, women’s soccer and the Hispanic soccer audience — each serving as a distinct community rather than a single bloc.
Men in Blazers launched The Women’s Game in 2024 and Vamos in 2025 for Latin American football audiences, while the broader network reported 44% annual growth in total impressions in 2025. Women’s football, says Bennett, is “one of the biggest stories I’ve witnessed in my life.”
There is no other football country in the world, he argues, whose football identity has been as shaped by the success of its women as that of the United States.
In the end, his dream is simpler than all that: “The dream of seeing the United States win the men’s World Cup in my lifetime is probably the thing I think about most.” He paused. “We can dream.”
Either way, the world is coming. And, for the first time in the little more than 30 years since Roger Bennett landed on these shores, the United States is truly ready.
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