Jonathan Liew
speaker
674 appearances
5 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 7 Sep
Jonathan Liew’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Then, you know, you have things like ticket prices, you know, four figures, five figures even for some of the big games.
You have little things like the prices of train tickets, shuttle buses, parking, this sense that a tournament that has always been
thought of itself as being for everyone, global, universal, uniting, it's become a tournament essentially for the super rich, has shown its disdain to the ordinary fan.
So yeah, these are just a few of the issues before you even get into some of the sporting issues like the heat and...
bloated 48-team tournament, which is going to lead to a lot of, I think, quite meaningless games, certainly in the final round of group games.
So I think it all feeds into this sense that everyone has a favourite World Cup memory.
Everyone has this idea of the World Cup idealised in their mind.
Whatever it was supposed to be, it's not this.
I think you're spot on.
And that's something that is particularly new about this tournament.
You know, eight years ago in Russia...
FIFA was able to persuade Putin to relax his incredibly strict immigration laws and allow fans traveling to the tournament, visa-free travel, free public transport across Russia.
In the past, when Brazil were hosting in 2014, they were able to threaten local venues with the stripping of hosting rights if they didn't get their construction projects on schedule.
FIFA has always been able to exert this leverage on host countries because, to a large extent, those countries needed the World Cup.
They wanted to use it for the global projection, for the prestige, for the tourism revenue.
And these factors aren't really applicable to the US.
The US doesn't really need this World Cup.
The GDP boost it's going to get is minimal, about 0.1%, according to some estimates.
And it has no real desire to...
seemingly, to want to project itself in a more friendly or softer or more appealing manner to the rest of the world.
Showing 161–180 of 674 · page 9 of 34
← Previous
Next →