Leander Schaerlaeckens

speaker

344 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 12 Jul

Leander Schaerlaeckens’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Football Weekly · Is the USA ready for the World Cup? – Football Weekly podcast · 13 May 2026 podcast

And it's more likely to be $2,000.

And even in a country where the average household income is just under $84,000, that's a ton of money.

There just aren't that many Americans that can afford to go to these things.

And that's to say nothing of people who'd like to come here from elsewhere and have to pay for travel on top of that.

What we're running into in a lot of these host cities is that the local governments of the cities and of the states are not the same as they were when the tournament was awarded to the United States in 2018.

So that's what happened in New Jersey where the new governor sort of was handed this deal that had been agreed to by a previous government and said, here you go.

Here's what you're doing.

And all of these issues I think are downstream from the fact that FIFA has sort of in almost like a hostile takeover leveraged this entire tournament for its own benefit.

At the last World Cup in the United States, at most every World Cup, there's a local organizing committee, usually run by the domestic federation.

They will sort of get a bunch of people together and they will organize the tournament and then FIFA will be involved, obviously.

But what's happened this time around is FIFA has effectively moved in.

They opened headquarters in Miami.

They opened their little headquarters in Trump Tower, although that's more decorative than anything else, I think.

And then they created these local organizing committees within the host cities to kind of handle the dirty work and the unprofitable work, right, of transportation and fan fests and all the rest of it.

So there isn't kind of that organizational intermediary that's supposed to sit in between those two things that figures out stuff like security and transport and all the rest that you would normally have because FIFA decided what they really need to do here is swoop in and make sure that they kind of concentrated as many of the revenue streams within their own budget as they could.

I think it's a bit of both, unfortunately.

I mean, this tournament was very much sold to FIFA as a uniting event that, you know, during the first Trump administration, it was kind of the bid book says unity on the front.

And it was presented as something that would help bring North America back together after some struggles over a wall.

That mostly wasn't built in the end.

And the reason that we have three countries here is because the federations made a compromise, right?

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