Roger Bennett’s World Cup odyssey started on June 10 when he left his home in New York and headed to Los Angeles with a packed itinerary that included stops in Seattle, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Atlanta again and eventually East Rutherford, N.J., for the final game on July 19.
By the end of his trip, he will have logged many more miles than most of the teams in the tournament.
It has been a hectic month for Mr. Bennett, an affable Liverpudlian who spent years building a mini soccer-media empire in the United States. There is barely enough time to look around and remember what city he is in.
As a soccer podcaster, writer, author of several books, filmmaker, founder of the Men in Blazers Media Network, and a tireless backer of American soccer, Mr. Bennett, 55, has never been more in demand.
Last week he hurriedly returned a phone call from Boston, apologizing that he had barely 30 seconds before getting on a downtown stage with Pedro Martinez, the Hall of Fame baseball pitcher, ahead of the France-Morocco quarterfinal.
He has been rushing from hosting a nightly show to a morning show to a live show with celebrity guests (like Ludacris, Jon Stewart, Victor Wembanyama, Ryan Reynolds) in different cities, and he has also been asked to share his insights on dozens of other media outlets, including ESPN, “Morning Joe,” CNN and Barstool Sports.
“It’s been an ultramarathon every day,” he said. “But I’ve learned that you can go without sleep for up to a month if you are in communion with an energized audience.”
The Men in Blazers podcast is the flagship of his various ventures, with 2.3 million followers, according to the media analytics firm Blinkfire, and engages its audience at a rate almost twice as high as the social media platforms of the FOX Network, the official broadcaster of the World Cup in the United States.
This World Cup has been seen as a critical event for soccer in the United States, and Mr. Bennett is uniquely positioned to make sense of it all, and to capitalize on its growth.
He grew up a football lover in Liverpool, England, but he moved to Chicago in 1993 after graduating from college. From that moment on, he spent most of his adult life casting a hopeful but critical eye on the winding path of soccer in the United States.
It is a long way from the days when there was virtually no soccer on television. On July 5, a combined American television audience of 45 million tuned in to FOX and Telemundo for the England-Mexico game, a record number for a game that did not involve a U.S. team.
“Watching America fall in love with football has been the story of my life,” he said last month speaking in the Men in Blazers offices in Manhattan’s Flatiron district. The next day, he would leave for Los Angeles and the U.S. team’s opening match there on June 12.
With his steady flow of humorous metaphors, similes and analogies, Mr. Bennett assesses the growth of the sport here with the panache of an attacking midfielder. When he first came to the United States and saw a gaping soccer void, he felt like “an arctic char out of water.”
Growing up in Liverpool in the 1980s felt, in his words, like living in black and white, while the United States was beamed over in Technicolor.
He loved rap music, Tracy Chapman and the Chicago Bears of the N.F.L., the team that initially lured him to Chicago. A few months after his move, the 1994 World Cup opener was played in his adopted home. He had no money for a ticket, but he wandered down to Soldier Field anyway, just to catch the vibe.
Many predicted half-empty stadiums at the first World Cup in the States, but Mr. Bennett saw enthusiastic families throng to the game. Later, on television, he saw the wild uniforms the team wore for the tournament — a stonewashed denim-look jersey with blood-red shorts worn by the likes of Marcelo Balboa and Tony Meola. He was hooked.
“They had chewing gum, they had swagger, they had mullets and straggly beards,” he said. “They looked like the Hootie and the Blowfish road crew on tour, and I was like James Bond looking at Ursula Andress coming out of the ocean. I was like, ‘That’s for me.’”
But then the soccer void returned the moment that World Cup ended, like “a circus that came and went.” Mr. Bennett was an ocean away from Everton, his favorite club team in England, and there was virtually no way to watch English football in the United States at the time.
“I didn’t know if I could hack it,” he said. “I loved America, but it was an absolute ache. Life without football was life without feeling, a sense of connectivity, a sense of meaning, a sense of ritual.”
He eventually settled in New York around 2000 and found the Kinsale Tavern on the Upper East Side, which showed English and European soccer. Life began to change, and he was struck by how the game was consumed in New York bars.
“The fandom here is grounded in love,” he said. “It’s young, passionate and hungry. I’m blown away by how knowledgeable American fans are — as long as it happened after 2013.”
He began to see other little signs. More kids in soccer jerseys, more live games on TV. He noticed a growth spurt during the 2002 World Cup, when more people in New York began gathering to watch at bars and restaurants — even for matches at odd hours, because that World Cup was hosted by Japan and South Korea.
His own career mirrored the growth of the game in the States. He began writing about soccer for ESPN, and in 2010 he was asked to start a podcast. He barely knew what that even meant, but it grew exponentially. That was the year that he publicly demonstrated his devotion to the U.S. team by rooting hard for the Americans to beat England (they drew, 1-1) as he watched live with the actor Matthew McConaughey.
By 2014, while at the World Cup in Brazil, Mr. Bennett wedded his love for the American team to the country at large. The United States had been put in a tough group with Portugal, Ghana and Germany, that year’s eventual champion, and Mr. Bennett made a declaration on his show. “I said, ‘Lord, if you let us get out of this group of death, I will become an American citizen.”
They did it, and so did he, completing the paperwork in 2017, he said. By then, Men in Blazers was rolling and he didn’t just love American soccer. He was American soccer, in a sense, or at least one of its most passionate and humorous voices. The network now also includes a women’s soccer platform and Vamos, a channel focusing on the “Hispanic-American soccer community.”
As he travels across the country now, by plane and on a specially kitted-out Men in Blazers bus, he has been “astonished” by the success of this World Cup, by the level of the soccer on the field and the record-breaking mass of viewers and spectators.
He marveled at how America seemed to rediscover the world through international soccer fans, and the world seemed to rediscover America, “one Popeyes chicken basket, one In-N-Out Burger at a time,” he said. “It’s been the World Cup of Love.”
The Iranian team, which faced travel restrictions, would disagree. Also, the world turned against Mr. Bennett’s American team after FIFA controversially overturned Folarin Balogun’s red-card suspension before its game against Belgium. Then the United States was humiliated, 4-1.
Mr. Bennett said the loss left a sour taste, but all the hubbub has already started to fade. The controversy, that is — definitely not the sport.
“When I moved here in the ’90s, to be a soccer fan was to be an outsider,” he said. “It was a hardy bunch of lifers holding on to one another for dear life. This World Cup will erode that forever, and to be a soccer fan will be as normal as being an N.F.L. fan.”
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