#99 The History & Politics of the World Cup w/ Alex Galarza & Matt Negrin
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 18 June 2018
⏱️ 69 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The 2018 FIFA World Cup is underway in Russia, so Ben sat down with soccer historian Alex Galarza and RTN favorite Matt Negrin to talk about the history of the World Cup. We discuss the corruption that has plagued FIFA, the controversy surrounding FIFA's decision to award the World Cup to Qatar, and what factors helped propel soccer into the world's most popular sport. We also share some of our favorite experiences at soccer matches abroad and celebrate the recent announcement that the United States, Canada and Mexico will jointly host the 2026 World Cup.
Dr. Alex Galarza is a Post-Doctoral researcher at Haverford College and former Fulbright scholar in Argentina whose specialty is the history of sport in Latin America and digital history.
Matt Negrin is a Digital Producer for The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and former freelance journalist who covered soccer around the world. Most importantly though, he is the record holder for "Most Appearances on The Road to Now (non-Bob & Ben category)".
Bob & Ben are going to take a few weeks off, but we'll be back with new episodes in July. In the meantime, you can see Bob play music with The Avett Brothers and catch Ben on the road at a comedy show. Thank you so much for your support!
The Road to Now is part of the Osiris Podcast Network. For more on this an all our other episodes, visit our website: TheRoadToNow.com
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is in the Loop, the Legion of Osiris Podcasts. |
| 0:07.6 | What does that mean? |
| 0:08.9 | Osiris is a community of great music and culture podcasts. |
| 0:12.6 | If you like this one, go check out others at osirispod.com and get in the loop. |
| 0:18.2 | Osiris is partnered with Relics Magazine at relics.com. |
| 0:25.8 | I'm Ben Sawyer and welcome to The Road to Now. |
| 0:29.5 | Today's episode is really exciting for me. |
| 0:31.7 | I'm a huge soccer fan and as a lot of you know right now, the World Cup is going on. |
| 0:36.4 | And so we figured it was a good time to go back and trace the history of this event of FIFA, |
| 0:43.2 | which is the governing body for soccer, and kind of how soccer became this global phenomenon. |
| 0:49.0 | By some estimates, over a billion people watch the 2014 World Cup finals, which is insane. |
| 0:54.8 | According to some perhaps inflated FIFA numbers, over 3 billion people, 3 billion people |
| 1:00.5 | tuned in to watch at least a little bit of the last World Cup. |
| 1:04.4 | And this is an event which has always captured my imagination, just a beautiful game, |
| 1:09.9 | people coming from all over the world |
| 1:11.1 | to play against each other. And I'll tell you, it has a crazy history. For those of you guys |
| 1:17.3 | who don't know about this, the organization FIFA has been mired in corruption charges for a very |
| 1:22.7 | long time. I'm recently a U.S. Department of Justice investigation went in and raided the offices in Switzerland, and uncovered all this corruption, forced the president out. |
| 1:33.9 | There was all these issues surrounding, taking bribes, where the World Cup was going to be. |
| 1:40.2 | And so I hope that you will listen to this episode and enjoy it, because it's as much a history of soccer as it is kind of the business of sports. |
| 1:48.3 | And what happens when this sport, that the players love becomes mired in this international world of money and corruption and payouts. |
| 1:57.6 | So this is a great episode, not only because of the topic, and of course I'm partial here, |
... |
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