On a bright Seattle morning in June, thousands of soccer fans thronged a stage near the city’s downtown. Eventually, they were going to watch the US men’s team beat Australia in a World Cup match.
But first, they wanted to see Roger Bennett.
Bennett is the cofounder and front man of Men in Blazers, a soccer media company that started as a podcast 16 years ago. And for a certain kind of American soccer fan, Bennett has become an unlikely influencer — a bald, bespectacled, 55-year-old suburban dad who acts as a host, translator, and hype machine for the sport.
In Seattle, the pre-match rally played a lot like ESPN’s College GameDay show, and that’s no accident. ESPN’s popular college football pregame road show is the explicit model for Men in Blazers’ World Cup road show: live crowds, celebrity guests, local color, and a branded bus — the same one ESPN uses during the fall, reskinned with soccer branding — that doubles as a traveling studio.
But Men in Blazers is not ESPN. It is not Fox or Telemundo, which paid hundreds of millions of dollars for the US rights to show World Cup games.
Men in Blazers can’t show you the World Cup. So it is trying to host everything around it.
Another word for this strategy is “shoulder programming,” and it’s not new: Sports media has always had smaller shows built around the big show. It’s now common throughout entertainment, which is why there are at least 20 podcasts dedicated to Apple TV’s Severance.
But Men in Blazers is doing shoulder programming really well, at the exact moment soccer in the US is having its biggest moment.
Bennett, a Brit who moved to the US in 1993 and became an American citizen in 2018, is the nexus for the whole thing. His broadcast style has a group chat vibe, veering between “this is the year we win it all” boosterism and “we’ve got a long way to go” reality checks, shot through with self-deprecation and in-jokes. And he’s constantly engaging fans, encouraging them to write or call in or to show up for his events.
The 10 World Cup live shows his company is hosting are core to the company’s business model. They bring big brands — the bus is sponsored by Home Depot, the tour is underwritten by Bank of America — in touch with hardcore fans in person. Then that connection gets distributed online to a much bigger audience.
Men in Blazers is still small compared with the companies that own big sports rights. But it is not tiny: It has more than 100 employees and raised $15 million in venture funding a couple of years ago to expand ahead of this World Cup.
And while Men in Blazers hasn’t paid for soccer rights, it is happy to draft behind the bigger companies that have. Its shows often run on Comcast’s NBC and Peacock, which have the US rights to the UK’s Premier League — the world’s most popular soccer franchise, and the one Men In Blazers spends most of its time on. During the World Cup, the network can repost official clips from Fox’s coverage on Twitter/X. But Men in Blazers’ bigger emphasis is on Instagram and YouTube, where it doesn’t have match footage to lean on. There, the product is Bennett, the fans, and the reaction to the thing everyone watched somewhere else.
You can see evidence of that audience sync on social media, where Men in Blazers posts drive much more interaction than other sports networks, including those that own rights to show the games.
Blinkfire, an analytics company for marketers, says Men in Blazers has been punching above its weight on social during the first couple weeks of the World Cup. From June 11 to June 27, Men In Blazers generated 24.2 million likes, shares, and comments across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and X — less than Fox Sports, but from an audience about one-sixth the size. On Blinkfire’s engagement-per-follower ranking, Men in Blazers came in first, nearly doubling Fox.
Bennett says those stats are the result of a deliberate strategy note he got early on from bestselling author and YouTube pioneer John Green: “He told me the most important thing about growth is measuring the depth of your emotional connection with your audience, versus the breadth.”
Likes and shares aren’t a business — a lesson many people in the media industry learned over the last 10 years. But they do give you — and Men in Blazers’ sponsors — a sense of how intensely its fans are paying attention.
“The intimate nature of the podcast has allowed us to be a profound friend to those falling in love with football,” Bennett says.
All of this is working out better than Bennett could have hoped for, with the US winning its World Cup group stage and swelling the ranks of American fans. It’s also entirely possible that the US could leave the tournament as early as Wednesday night. It will be favored to beat tiny Bosnia and Herzegovina in a knockout game, but it has also been unable to beat any team from anywhere in Europe for some time.
So the immediate test for Men in Blazers will be whether the party keeps going when the US goes home. The larger test comes after the World Cup, when the bus is parked, and the most casual fans have gone home, too. Does Men in Blazers need American soccer to keep getting bigger, or can it keep growing by gathering the audience that already exists?
Either way, the company has already found a lane in modern sports media. It can’t show fans the World Cup. It’s succeeding by giving them somewhere to go before and after.
Read the full article here
