"Soccer is America's sport of the future, and it has been since 1972." Roger Bennett has heard the question so many times he's turned it into a punchline — but the numbers coming out of this summer's World Cup road trip suggest something is finally shifting.
Men in Blazers pulled over 60,000 live YouTube viewers per USMNT knockout-stage pregame show. Their postgame van-recorded reactions claimed the entire Spotify top 10 for most-listened episodes. Total listenership was up nearly 300 percent year-over-year from May 1, per the platform. That's not a podcast doing well. That's a media operation finding its moment.
Why American soccer doesn't have a home — and why that's the whole point
The structural problem with US soccer fandom is real and unlikely to resolve itself anytime soon. The Premier League sits on NBC and Peacock through 2028. MLS lives on Apple TV. La Liga is ESPN's. The Bundesliga just landed on USA Network. Champions League, international competitions, women's football — all split across Fox, CBS, TNT, and whoever else can cut a check. There is no single destination. There probably won't be one.
That's where Bennett sees the lane. Corporate rights holders cover what they own. Most podcasts dig into one league or one corner of the game. Men in Blazers produces over 1,000 episodes a year across the full ecosystem — the NWSL, WSL, Liga MX, and beyond — through verticals like The Women's Game and Vamos with ESPN's Hercules Gomez.
"We've built a network that refracts those different realities, and wherever a ball is being kicked, 24/7/365," Bennett said. "All of these things are splintered, and my goal is to work with everybody in the United States as kind of like the centrifugal force, with our fanbase."
Live shows, real crowds, and a College GameDay comparison that actually holds up
The World Cup road trip wasn't just content production — it was deliberate audience-building. Live shows in tournament host cities with proper production values drew crowds and viewer numbers that justified the comparison Bennett made to ESPN's College GameDay. For a podcast that started, in his words, as "just tying two cans together with string," the jump is legitimately striking.
The origins go back to 2010, when ESPN president John Skipper turned soccer into a network priority and handed Bennett and co-host Michael Davies a show. Bill Simmons then put MiB on the Grantland podcast network, providing the audience push that started everything. The infrastructure built since — live touring, celebrity bookings, platform partnerships, dedicated verticals — reflects a company that took podcasting seriously before most in sports media did.
Bennett remains a visible presence across traditional media too, debating Stephen A. Smith between van-recorded shows this summer. All of it feeds the same machine. The soccer audience in America isn't small or apathetic — it's scattered. Whoever builds the deepest connection across all those pockets, regardless of which platform holds the rights on any given weekend, holds the real leverage. Bennett is betting Men in Blazers is already that operation.
