Becky Sullivan

speaker

135 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 17 Jul

Becky Sullivan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Planet Money · Can World Cup mania grow MLS in the U.S.? · 17 Jul 2026 podcast

And basically that idea was give away a million bucks, like March Madness brackets, but for the World Cup. matched

And I think credit where credit's due, that would get a lot of people's attention. matched

So ultimately, the Chicago Fire decided that the best thing to do was neither of those things, but instead to spend over $2 million to throw basically one of the biggest World Cup watch parties in a non-host city. matched

And so Dan, to come back to why he is talking to us from somewhere a little noisy, he gave me a tour of that party space. matched

So yeah, so where we are right now, this would be the watch party area. matched

So you can see you've got bars in here, bars outside, probably 30 TVs. matched

So they have rented out this entire bar that is way more than just a normal bar. matched

It essentially takes up an entire city block in Chicago. matched

The inside alone would already be just a gigantic sports bar, one of the biggest you've ever seen. matched

There's also this huge outdoor area. matched

It's essentially this giant beer garden centered around what essentially looks like they've taken the Jumbotron from the arena where the Chicago Bulls play and just set it on the ground in the middle, showing games on all four sides. matched

It is so much bigger than the watch party that was on the barge. matched

And so we are going to call the Chicago Fires World Cup Strategy the Costco Sampling Strategy. matched

And ideally for the Fire, they are selling soccer to people kind of like a bulk product. matched

I mean, they're hoping to convince people to, you know, not just come to one game, but to eventually become season ticket holders, buy merch for years to come, that kind of thing. matched

It's mixed, honestly. matched

I mean, here's the thing. matched

The study found that sometimes domestic leagues did see a bump in attendance, but sometimes the bump went away after a little while, like it disappeared. matched

And in some countries, somehow, like Italy in 1990, they somehow saw a negative effect. matched

fewer people came in the years after yeah and so maybe people had used up all of their soccer energy and money on the big tournament matches i don't know but the point is there is actually no guarantee at all that just having the world cup in your country will help you as the domestic soccer league and so i think you can argue that that's why these teams are spending so much money to do whatever they can to try to bring in new fans matched

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