🎙️ Check out these two All-In-style sports business riffs I did with my good friends Brent Peus Jr. and Dominyck Bullard.

A lot of ground covered across the first two episodes:

The “Venture Capital-ization of Sport”; How to Build an Enduring Platform; Scarce IP as a Moat; College Athletics Broken Economics; FIFA’s Money Grab, AI, and the Over-Commercialization of Sport.

We're going for a sort of whiskey-cigar-black coffee and wired headphones type of grit meets an Augusta National-Wimbledon-premium coffee table book type of prestige.

Subscribe below to chop it up with the boys and track the themes shaping sports, media, and entertainment.

I welcome any feedback, please give them a listen and send me your thoughts!

On the personal front: I’m getting married in less than a month!

I won’t have the bandwidth to write 5,000+ word essays, but 🧭 At the Center won’t be going anywhere. I’ve got something up my sleeve for you guys; stick around in order to find out just what that is.

Grateful doesn't even begin to explain how I’m feeling. Excited to marry my beautiful bride!

In December of 2022, 4 million people filled the streets of Buenos Aires. 

Had Argentina just won a World War? Been liberated by some authoritarian regime?

No. They had just won the World Cup.

Lionel Messi had cemented his GOAT status by climbing the last and most important mountain in football, bringing home the final and most consequential piece of hardware there is in sport: a World Cup championship.

But notably, the country celebrating was, by every measure an economist would reach for, collapsing in real time: inflation was sprinting past 100%, the peso was shedding value week over week, and the government was rationing the dollars its own citizens no longer trusted it to hold.

But none of that mattered. 

Argentina had won the World Cup, and the fledgling economy was all but a footnote to the volcano of national and civic pride which had erupted.

In 🧭 ATC_006 I described sports as the new religion, and the sporting calendar as a form of rhythmic civic liturgy. Across dozens of sports, leagues, and international competitions, collective participation abounds and binds strangers and kin alike into one cohesive body. 

The World Cup is that liturgy elevated to the uppermost, and by uppermost, I mean the literal scale of the earth.

This is the only enterprise in which the congregation operates on the order of nations. 211 nations, to be exact. A modern day World War recurring every four years, there is nothing like the beautiful game, and there really is nothing like the World Cup. 

As I write these words from my window seat on a ferry from Vancouver to Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, I look to my right and find a pristine view of the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf Islands.

But the people on this ship, especially the English family to my left, couldn’t care less about that.

The England vs. Norway quarterfinal just went to extra time.

The tension is palpable, and the Englishmen’s screams, ahhs, and “come on, ref”s are completely disregarding common travel courtesy. But again, none of that matters.

The World Cup is on, a father bonds with his sons around the one TV on this ship, and Bellingham’s goal in 93’ just sent their English pride to new heights.

Way to bring it home, Jude.

The 2026 World Cup has hit home turf for the first time in 30 years, and the one-two punch of Michelob Ultra-branded watch parties on the Santa Monica Pier and Trump convincing Gianni Infantino to review Folarin Balogun’s red card signals to me that USMNT fervor has hit an all-time high these last few weeks.

Didn’t you feel it?

By the time you read this essay, the Final is set but the champion has yet to be crowned. This places you, the reader, and me, the writer, in the same position: inside a story that has not finished telling itself.

This shared position is the exact condition this essay is written to examine.

The World Cup is the most complete machine humanity has ever built for facilitating collective belonging at global scale, and this machine of experiential binding is the subject of today’s essay.

Class is in session, let’s begin. 📝 📝 📝

We start by first understanding something that is intrinsic to the human experience: everyone puts something at the center, and in doing so, necessarily has to put something else at the margins.

These boundaries are the same whether we are talking about a knitting group who refuses to become a band, or a marriage that refuses to open itself up to affairs.

Things are defined by both what they contain and by what they exclude, which means every act of belonging intra-group is at the same time an act of exclusion.

Us vs. them.

For the World Cup, these boundaries are, in a very real sense, the exact same boundaries that you would find on a map.

There is no version of the World Cup that delivers belonging without drawing a line first, and this is a feature of the pattern of nationalism, not a bug.

Medieval jurists worked out a doctrine to explain how a monarchy could persist through the death of the man who wore the crown, and they named it the “King's two bodies.”

There is the natural body that ages and dies, and the body politic that does not.

"The king is dead, long live the king” is a description of the reality that a nation has fused into one body that outlives any individual in particular, and when 11 players walk onto a WC pitch, for 90 minutes they become precisely that.

Shedding their individualism, a nation is made visible and indivisible, wearing a crest and crown that supersedes anyone’s singular identity, tying them to the generations that came before they were and to those who will come after they are.

Maradona and Messi. Pelé and Ronaldinho. Zidane and Mbappé.

Argentina. Brazil. France.

This same fusion is what basic military training manufactures when it strips a cadet of the self he walked in with and replaces it with a higher, national, collective identity. The rectangular piece of cloth we call a flag naturally evokes a higher calling.

Some might even call it sacred, and indeed the pitch is hallowed ground.

Rome understood this at the scale of empire. The Colosseum was not entertainment but an instrument for organizing civic identity, a “third place” where citizens gathered to remind themselves who belonged inside Rome and who belonged dead in the arena.

The World Cup is the current and largest form of that old machine, and its scale is no longer a city or an empire, but the populated surface of the planet.

But in order to understand how and why the machine can even reach that far, you must first ask why it runs on football, and only on football.

Two characteristics make the World Cup singular and unparalleled in nature:

Football is global because it costs nothing to play. A ball improvised from rags and a stretch of open ground are the whole capital requirement, which means every nation on earth enters the competition on materially the same terms.

Yes, there is nuance, football success can be very path-dependent, and the web of academy systems spread throughout the West certainly puts the richer nations at an advantage over others.

But by and large we can still recognize and appreciate that no other sport is as conducive to such global appeal. If you don’t believe me, just look at the lengths the NFL is going through to push flag football so that they can lower their barrier to entry.

The consequence of this is about as genuine a meritocracy as one could manufacture in sport, one which oftentimes supersedes economic output, military prowess, culture, and even the advantage of hosting.

The countries at the center of global football hardly reflect the countries at the center of world power.

I don’t see the USA, Russia, or China on this list, do you?

The three largest nuclear arsenals on earth are absent from trophy lifting, and 6 of these 8 countries have no nuclear weapons at all.

You may laugh at the inner American in me pointing to nukes to demonstrate my point here, but Uruguay ranks 68^th in the world by GDP and has a population of just 3.5 million, yet it wears two stars above its crest, the same as France and one more than England or Spain.

That which orders football answers to none of that which orders global power.

This is a pattern I will name the identity spectrum.

On one end you have identities that are ascribed to you. An ascribed identity is imposed and unchosen at birth: family of origin, sex, native tongue, ethnicity, and nation.

You have no say in the matter.

On the other end you have identities that you choose. A chosen identity is adopted and entered into by will: club, ideology, political party, profession, and higher education.

A few identities sit genuinely in the middle. Religion is among them because a person is usually born into a faith, yet conversion and apostasy are real doors out. Socio-economic class too, because a person is born into a rung, yet mobility still exists.

The reason there is nothing like the World Cup is because it is sport’s purest expression of ascribed identity.

You are entered into your fandom at birth.

I did not draft America as my nation. My identity as an American was imposed upon me, nurtured throughout my childhood, and is tied to many things beyond football. God bless America.

In this way, USMNT starts already in the green with me.

Club football is towards the opposite pole: oftentimes this fandom runs inter-generationally, but ultimately it is more of a chosen belonging than that of nation.

Fandom here can ironically fracture a nation from the inside: Real Madrid and Barcelona split Spain in half, just as City and United split Manchester.

Then the national team takes the field, and the superseding ascribed identity dissolves those lower identities and their boundaries in an instant.

When Spain met France in the semifinal, the Madrid and Barcelona line disappeared and Spain-against-the-world lit up in its place.

↓↓↓

An interesting footnote to this conversation is that this year, 76 French-born players represented other countries (Algeria, Haiti, Senegal, DR Congo) and Julián Quiñones became a Mexican star despite being born in Colombia.

While borders are firm, we of course know that nations are malleable, lines and lineage are blurry, and that we must be considerate of the consequences downstream of the messy and complicated history of humanity.

But even within these exceptions, you cannot elect a country you have no tie to.

While residence is a choice, the margin of determination of nation sits primarily inside the boundary of birth and blood, fenced in by ascription.

↓↓↓

“But what about other international competitions?” you might ask.

Okay, let’s take the Olympics.

Competition is spread across dozens of sports, many of which are incredibly niche or altogether individualistic in nature.

Track & field, swimming, gymnastics, and others are both individual and team sports, but if you are anything like me, lived experience reveals that we are naturally more keen on following people here, not teams.

Michael Phelps across 28 medals (16 of which are individual); Simone Biles’ Tokyo 2021 battle with the “Twisties,” or Justin Gatlin’s loss to Usain Bolt’s 9.63s 100m.

Men’s football in the Summer Olympics is limited to U-23, 16 teams, and does a fraction of the numbers of the World Cup. Meanwhile, hockey (which is not a global sport) in the Winter Olympics zeroes in on just 12 of the 61 IIHF members, a drop in the bucket to FIFA’s 211.

Most of the time, individual feats of excellence are the most celebrated wins of Olympic competition.

This dynamic naturally inhibits global collective participation, the lynchpin upon which the World Cup thrives.

In the World Cup, even the greatest players alive are absorbed into something bigger than themselves: Argentina's Messi, Portugal’s Ronaldo, France’s Mbappé.

Just look at the 19-year-old, Real Madrid superstar Lamine Yamal who, in his first ever World Cup tournament, has scored just 1 goal.

But again, it doesn’t matter. Because Spain is in the Final.

Ahead of their matchup, Yamal told Mbappé to fear Spain, not him. He is not after winning the Golden Boot; he wants Spain to win the World Cup.

Yamal has become a part of a body and tribe rather than the center of it.

Undivided attention is a precondition for collective participation, and football is the only sport that reliably commands that attention from the whole earth at once.

Layering nationalism and civic pride on top of this scaled collective participation is why the World Cup is the only event structurally capable of carrying belonging at this scale.

But a machine of this size, intertwined with all its nationalistic glory, does not come without its fair share of consequences.

Boundaries are constantly tested, and they become most visible precisely where the boundaries of nations’ ideologies, religious beliefs, and economic systems diverge.

Look no further than the following examples from this year’s World Cup alone:

FIFA and political controversy are inextricably tied to one another, and this structural reality is not going anywhere. Saudi Arabia hosts in 2034, and based on Qatar 2022’s human-rights protests, Infantino will be in for it.

Human beings do not merely observe the stories that matter to them; we participate in them.

For Christians this looks like Easter and Christmas; for Americans this looks like Thanksgiving and the 4^th of July.

For Argentina, this looked like 4 million people in the streets of Buenos Aires.

The World Cup facilitates participation in our own stories in a way that nothing else can. 

For a brief moment, these stories become the truest thing about our lives, and our active participation in them become the most real part about our day.

Let’s reminisce on the story of Qatar 2022.

↓↓↓

Argentina hadn’t won a World Cup since Diego Maradona in 1986. Lionel Messi, about to shock the world by transferring to Inter Miami, was still considered by many at this time to be the GOAT even though the clear asterisk on his resume was zero World Cup Championships.

France was defending their Championship title, fresh off a 2018 victory in Russia wherein a 19-year-old Kylian Mbappé proved himself to be the heir-apparent of football. By the time he faced Messi in 2022, he had already racked up 5 goals and 2 assists in the tournament.

The long-standing Messi vs. Ronaldo debate was quickly supplanted by the narrative of King vs. Prince. The archetypes were writing themselves.

Could Messi cement his status above even that of Pelé by bringing home the long lost treasure? Or would the new kid on the block steal what seemed to be rightfully his?

Although the Prince scored a hat-trick, went down swinging in penalties, and was awarded the Golden Boot, it was the King, Lionel Messi, who came out on top and reigned supreme.

Please re-live the passion and excitement from that game by watching the highlights; you won’t regret it.

The story we live in is the story we live out, and the story that Argentina lived in is the same story they lived out as they flooded the streets of Buenos Aires.

I’m still talking about this story 4 years later because stories survive when they carry meaning densely enough to be told again.

We are just cavemen sitting around a campfire, telling the stories that are the most true to us.

These stories are remembered because they approximate something true about the human experience.

The true, the good, and the beautiful. Loss and inheritance. National history and politics. Victory and defeat. The return of the King.

Which brings us back to where we sit today, the part where you and I are inside of a story unfinished together.

Both scripture and lived World Cup experience tell me that we, though many, are one body, and individually members one of another.

The World Cup is the most complete mechanism human beings have ever built for convening collective belonging at global scale, and it works because football is the only thing that is both universal enough to admit everyone and singular enough to embody the pattern of nationalism.

Rome built a version of this machine and nationalized the hearts of everyone in the empire. Football built the World Cup machine and has reached the whole earth.

The next time you see a crowd lose itself in its national team victories and defeats, do not scoff, mock, or turn your nose up at it. These people are not getting overly excited for no reason. 

Consider yourself lucky enough to witness in real time nationalism taking center stage and another human actively participating in their own story.

The beautiful game.

If you enjoyed reading 🧭 At the Center, please consider subscribing:

And if you know someone who might enjoy learning the patterns shaping sports, culture, and capital, please forward it to them using the link below: