2022-12-20. Soccer as a Platform

It, dude? Did you see it?

I did. It was wonderful.

was madness. My wife was screaming, my son was crying. He's a France fan. My daughter didn't care one bit. Um, it was wild. It was, it was movie-like

Yesterday morning. Argentina led by Leno Messi. Beat France at the very, very end of the game. Yes,

it was, but it was a rollercoaster of a game.

Oh, it just, you thought, you thought Argentina was Absolutely. Had it in the bag. France looked terrible and then suddenly outta nowhere. They flipped it in five minutes and then just got rocket fuel

Rocket fuel. The momentum shifted. It was just a wild, wild game. And probably one of the greatest, and I've watched a lot. You don't want, you're more of a reader. Paul, I've watched a lot of sports. That was, might be one of the most exciting, um, like sporting events I've ever watched.

I, I've

can say that pretty

Confidence. Well, also for it to be the last, I mean to, for it to be the World Cup Championship

it was

be a game at that level was ridiculous. Pretty

Pretty. Wild.

Did you grow up a sports fan?

Yeah, dude, I used to, I used to get the post and not read the news in the post. I would flip it to the back. The font was like, make it 200

How old? How old are you?

13, 14, 15.

was, the news part was not for you.

It just felt far away and meaningless to me,

But the sports.

yeah, I didn't care. I just went right to the sports

Your parents didn't care. I know your mom, mom doesn't care about sports, so I, I didn't know your dad, but like I doubt he did. So you are just kind of walking around Bay Ridge going like, I think I'm gonna get into the Yankees. Like, what happened?

Yeah, I, well, your friends. My friends in school were like, I'm a Yankee fan. I'm like, okay, I don't know what that is. I'll join that club. Or maybe I won't. There was met fans, you know, and it was competitive. So you, you end up, you know, it's, I think it's human nature. You join, you join cliques, you join clubs, and I became a Yankee. When they had the longest stretch of not winning anything for like 18 years. So it's not like I was a bandwagon fan.

except for football, but it is an absolutely wild

whoa, I don't wanna talk about football and New York City. I'm a Jets fan. I'm a closet Jets

Mm-hmm.

Um, but yeah, football's weird in New York. But yeah, New York City is, I mean, the Rangers, the Knicks, and whatnot.

we just have, we have everything.

Well, this was, but then you're going back to this game. It was just on another level and, and you could feel the earth kind of rumbling because there's something so basic and universal about soccer. You can learn it when you're like

like

three weeks old. It's the most basic rules

No, no. You see that, you see there are YouTube videos and three year olds are playing and they're pretty good, right? The rules, I mean, so I'm not a sports person. I'm just not, never have been. Um, and I, although, you know, I like the Phils, I grew up, I grew up near Philadelphia. I like the Eagles, so I have, I have a little bit of connection.

That's wild.

Right. Like, just like, Hey guys, science is canceled for today. Yeah. Because of basketball.

and, and, and I'm guessing there are parts of Brazil when that game was happening. I mean, the whole city stopped. Everything stopped the whole country, I should say. Stopped to watch those games.

froze. Right? That's, what else are they gonna do? FIFA is the, so

oh,

Fed, ASEN International, the football association. It's the, the, the big one. It's the one that runs soccer.

It's like headquarters for the league, right? For the global League global

or

There are leagues in many countries. By the way, there's the Premier League in the uk. There's Bundes Liga in Germany, but this is the league that sort of oversees the national teams. and I watched the documentary Paul recently.

There is, there is a documentary on

a few, there's a few by the way,

the way. Oh yeah.

I'm watching it and then I've found myself saying, okay, this is impossible cuz this, this is an organization that is practically like a government, has immense power, immense influence. In fact, in many ways, transcends. nationalities and, and like nation national interests because it's freaking soccer. Everybody gets it. Everybody wants it. Everybody needs it and it's kind of a rotten place.

But, but instead, instead he just was friends with all those guys and helped them get soccer in

He was friends with all of them. And so I'm watching this thing and I'm thinking to myself, okay, this is way bigger than this rinky-dink org can even handle, and the world. I did client services, I would pay for lunches to kind of get on the better side of

on. Okay, so first of all, first of all, let, let's, let's frame this here, which is that a lot of people got arrested. There are a lot of money flying around internationally, uh, via fifa. And the issue was,

that,

Um, other countries, countries, uh, compete to see who will get the World Cup every four years and Qar. Got it. And Qar is this like tiny little Arab country,

very wealthy.

that has an unbelievable amount of money. And according to different reports, cutler's like, oh, we spent 8 billion on this. Other reports say they spent 280 billion.

No one knows what's real.

No one knows what's real. But what people do know is that money just sloshed out of koor and, and also like Adidas or spent all kinds of various, like, yeah.

Which this was one event, which was a big one because it was like, where is the 22 world?

Well, what I know about FIFA is that there's this sense of mounting corruption over the last like 30, 40 years. Just people going, oh God, it's so corrupt. And then it just finally kind of burst. Yeah. With this World

it's also, it's worth noting if you follow fifa, they over also oversee the regional cups as well. The Africa Cup, the, there's one in North America and South America. I forget. Concacaf, I think it's called. And you have this voting system you have a bunch of votes that are given out to the Caribbean. Countries and territories and so, and it's one vote per nation. So you've got England with a vote and then like Turks and Caicos with a vote.

It's like the US Senate where, where Montana gets two votes and so does California.

it was rife for corruption. Right. And there's a lot of like, a lot of like backroom dealing going on as to who gets what. And

different assumptions in different countries about how money flows.

Okay. But let me ask you something. Isn't this, it's, it's a, it's an extra national body. It doesn't follow the laws of any one country. I, I don't know why they didn't, weren't more explicit and said, look, highest bidder gets the World Cup. Off we go and just money starts pouring in and, and what's the issue?

It would be simpler. I agree with you on that. Just, okay guys, it's all about money. anyway.

Comfort

Next year, Saudi Arabia, right next year.

Saudi Arabia wants it, by the way.

Oh, and then the usa and you know, every, everybody who's got money can have the World Cup makes sense, better airports, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a kind of like super capitalist logic to it.

What is the big deal?

Well, first of all, soccer is rules don't, people are running around on the field. The only reason that it's interesting to watch them run around on the field is that there's rules and constraint.

So you can have a respectable victory. It's important. That's trusted.

Otherwise, they're just running around with

I'm not doubting the re on the field. You need rules. Otherwise it's just a bunch of people

but C Cause I mean, and think about hockey, right? I'm gonna get thuggish men give them sticks and, and put them on ice. Without the rules. Everyone would literally, die. Okay. Soccer's a slightly more gentle game, but it's meaningless without that structure. Okay. Okay. So what is the purpose of fifa? Well, it's, it's a not-for-profit. First of all. It's not a for-profit organization and its goal is to further sport. What does that mean? It means to that sport has unifying.

they, okay, so this is worth saying again. It's a nonprofit, correct. It has a charter of what it's going to do and how it's going to govern itself. Mm-hmm. and in the charter, it does not say, you can give me envelopes of cash in a Caribbean hotel.

So you could say, wow, follow the rules on the field, but you know, of course it's gonna get corrupt. There's money moving around, it's global. What are you gonna do? But if you don't keep that standard up, corruption, and this is one thing you know from. Spending time in dealing with Lebanon,

Yeah,

a little drop of corruption in the water just spreads. It's like putting, it's like putting

it's contaminated

here's why. It's because once it's in there, then the ref can be bribed and he can look you in the eye and he can go, why? What? What's the big deal? You took all the money.

Yeah. Right, right, right.

And or the players can take steroids and

it's literally Lebanon. It's kind of understood as status quo that that's how things

work. Bribery based cultures,

So you have to have some ground rules that are open and, and signal to the world that we are going to play fairly,

or you'll lose the whole thing because people will turn their back on it if it gets bad enough.

So it's widely speculated. Frankly, it's not even much, I mean, there's like pretty good anecdotal evidence that Kata just literally pointed the money hose at FIFA and just unloaded bribe. Like they essentially bribed them to get the World Cup because

are, there are villas, they just, they just paid not even in, in dollars or pounds or euros. They paid in villas, like, just exactly. Just obscene amounts of money. And to cut her, they're like, look, we gotta up the brand here. Yeah. Right. We're, we're this little country. Al Jazeera isn't. Killing it the way we were hoping, so we should do something else.

lot of, lot of issues came

Yeah. But by the end of the World Cup, everybody's like, I hope Messi gets his day.

Ultimately everyone went back to the game. Yeah. And it was, it was, I mean, they lucked out because it was a spectacular world cup, like so many exciting dramatic moments. So at the end of the day, everyone wanted to watch good football

Qatar knew this. They're like, we're gonna, there's no way for us to get this without just shooting money everywhere. We're gonna get it. We'll build the stadiums. We know how to do that. And then everyone will have their stuff To say, and we'll, you know, have the weirdest opening ceremony that anyone has ever seen in the history of the World Cup. Don't even talk about it. If people want to see it, just go find YouTube. Yeah. But uh, yeah, no, it, they rep the brand and they did good.

Oh, do they? Oh yeah. Well they got all those stadiums now. Yeah, sure. Knock yourselves out.

and you know, one of the stadiums is getting disassembled because it's made out of containers and going to Ecuador.

A lot of the stadiums don't, they don't have the need for that kind of capacity. I watched the whole thing

You can fit the whole country in the big one.

Yeah. And so what they're doing is they're taking like the top layer of the cake and like sending them to like poorer countries so they can, which I don't know what poor country's can do with like sections of a stadium, but that's not the point.

We'll, we'll, we'll figure that

We'll figure that out. So let me ask you this. Why, like, why don't we delete FIFA and get going again?? Not to say the Olympic committee is better, but I mean it's, I think it's much more connected to governments. So there's oversight, there's stricter oversight. People like boot you out, like they'll boot you outta there. Like they booted Russia out cuz they were, they found them. You know, why can't we just reset the thing? This

is the nature of power of giant platforms. You've got clusters of people, and if you say, I wanna reset it, there are people who will say, I don't want you to reset it.

They've claimed the

platform. You can't. You cannot. Just reboot things in the world as it is. You can say you should. I obviously look, FIFA should be rebooted. They should start again, and they should hire someone who has tremendous moral standing, who is independently wealthy to start from scratch. It's a disaster.

It's, but.

disaster, but what are you gonna do otherwise? So, so you gotta do that, and then you gotta do it in the next four years. And you have to do it in such a way that it doesn't lead to like a worldwide revolution as you take away people's soccer.

right? Right.

So what the hell are you gonna do? You're gonna say you're gonna, you're gonna

the world has claimed it.

So what you're gonna do is you're gonna go, well, we have instituted the reforms that are necessary, and then we'll find out if that's a liar. Yeah.

Right. I mean the world is committed to it. It is. I mean, you just used the word platform.

this is a thing and I I, I, you know, when it's the Yai Ford advisors, right? Why are we talking about sports? So I'm glad to get you there. There is a,

I like sports.

I know. Me too, a little bit. A little more than I used to. I really enjoyed this World Cup, which I didn't expect. So partially cuz I'm over here working with you and you're like, Hey, guess what,

Brazil, Ecuador or

definitely watched more soccer than we used to when we were running an agency. So there is a game designer named Frank Lance. Who, uh, is sort of a theorist of games but has also created his own games. And somebody interviewed him once and this really stuck with me and they asked him kind of, you know, what, what kind of games do you really admire and what do you, and they were thinking video games cuz he's a video game guy. Okay. And he went basketball.

It's a culture.

It's a culture. It's a p it's a key part of culture and it's a culture unto itself. It's a

part of fashion. It's a part of music. It's a part of a lot of things, right? It's, it's not. just. Game tomorrow night, 7:00 PM It's much more than that.

That's right. And so the, you know, the critical thing about basketball is it brings people together in a way that they find meaningful with rules and success and failure and aspiration. You may never be a good basketball player, but you can admire and respect people who play basketball and think about what makes them better than others. And that is, frankly, for a lot of people. A big part of their life.

There's this great, um, short documentary that Earl Morris famous documentary filmmaker made about this funeral home that like, like fits beautiful. Coffins with like if you're a Green Bay Packers fan, like it's just decked out and it's just like, it could be one giant football. It's kind of insane.

want to be buried in the delivery of their teams. Okay. That, I mean, that's a no, but that, what does that tell you about humans? And you, we can laugh about it, but what it tells you is that, This is an organizing principle for humans and I, I feel that when we talk about social media and when we talk about platforms and we talk about technologies, things like Google or Microsoft, but especially your Facebook and right now Twitter,

well, these are social places where you have identity and you're connecting with others, right? Like Yeah. And we

we lose track of the thing that matters most, which is that there are.

rules. There are rules, but they can't be, you can't turn the screws too much though. No, you can't. You gotta let them have their culture and their space.

can moderate and you can boot and you can send. But like, yeah, on Twitter, one of the big rules was that it had to be short, had to write 140 and then later 280 characters. Yeah. You know, Facebook, so all, and I think like there's this tremendous anxiety. I almost think we would do ourselves better. rather than freaking out about social media all the time as a culture. And it is tricky the way it interacts with politics. But then again, sport interacts with politics too.

team. Mm-hmm.

on and on. So putting that aside for one second, like think about Twitter in the same way you might think about basketball.

Yes.

It's a platform. It's a system and it's a set of rules. And I think one of the reasons that everybody is really freaking out about Elon Musk is he changes the rules every day. So Twitter is a sport.

Truly

Basketball is a platform.

I mean, it is.

The Middle East has a remarkable number of challenges.

I'm Lebanese, as you know Paul,

it hardly ever comes

There's this really, really amazing short documentary called Lebanon Wins the World Cup.

To be clear, I don't think Lebanon has ever even, has it ever fielded a team in the

it's 1982, Brazil, Italy, world Cup and Lebanon is in the throes of just an absolutely brutal civil war. That's kind of, it's not even a civil war, it's just factions in gangs. Like, it's just utter chaos and, and, and just madness. And the game between Brazil and. Italy, Uh, kicks in. This is the documentary's about, and the whole country. The Beirut, the city, the capital of Lebanon just fell absolutely silent. And this includes Israel was occupying Lebanon at the time too.

And

by the way, there, it's not like there was satellite tv, it was radios and maybe some TV watching and observing this game. And for that brief moment,

everyone

Everyone sort of shed the team uniform of whatever faction or group they were affiliated with, watched this game and then the like minutes after the game ends. The rumbling kicks in again.

Sure. The bomb star, the

bomb, start again. Right. And, and so sport is, you know, I've heard the theories, like, if we didn't have sports, man, we'd all kill each other. I, I kind of think that's right. I think that's real. I think we need that outlet. We need to belong to something and and soccer is kind of the ultimate platform, right? Like it is. It is one of those things that you can walk in anywhere and talk about it and be like, yes, yes, I know, I know, I know.

Look, the proof in that is that sport more than most other, many other kinds of public events spills into violence.

Soccer is known for having bad outbreaks of violence. That's

I mean, when people go see a movie, typically they don't, there's no riot. No. It's a lot of people together watching a movie, but they don't punch each other in the face. But if you get a lot of people together at a soccer game, who, boy, it can get real bad. Right? So I think there are these emotions are, are, are there, and they're always close to the surface. One of the most, um, nerve wracking experiences I've ever had was going to a Ranger's playoff game with you and your.

it was

it just, you could feel a seething in the air and it didn't feel good. It felt grim. Just grinding.

it is, there's, it's gladiatorial is the way I would put it. It was just intense and a lot at stake, and it was just a lot of intense, like, it was almost like a violent energy

There is a great book. It's by Bill Buford, it's called Among the Thugs, and it's a narrative. He, he embeds himself with soccer hooligans in the eighties.

Oh my God.

And they're not good people. No, no. It's a rough scene. But he describes this moment where the mob is about to turn violent and just kind of the absolute electricity as a human just feeling This. Turn and that he was in it and everybody's got their sticks and they're gonna lose their minds and so, so so, okay. Well, um, ways to think about sports. Go watch. Where can I see Lebanon wins the World Cup?

I don't think you, I, you could search for it on the internet. I don't know if it's like available to stream. It might be. I think Vimeo had it on there for a bit, but they might've taken it down,

You know, there are other ways to get digital assets you can find online, but we can't really talk. Yeah, we won't talk about

Yeah. Um, we are building a. Paul, we are, it's called a board, and we have another podcast called The Aboard Podcast, which we're, we're taking you on the journey of a startup and us figuring stuff out as we go out into the world. Uh, you'll find it on all, in all the usual places, but we're really happy you're listening to Ziti and Ford Advisors. And hit us up. How do they hit us up, Paul?

Hello, it's yadi ford.com is good. We still have at Gidi Ford on Twitter for as long as it remains, and they don't block us, no mastodon yet. But you know, just get in touch. We're ready to give advice. So, you know, shoot us an email.

Have a wonderful day. Congratulations to Argentina.

Tina, congratulations. Nice to see Massie. Get his big win.

One more call out. Congratulations to Morocco. Amazing run. First African team to make it to the semi-finals.

All right, let's get outta here.

Have a great day. Bye.