Special Edition: World Cup's Biggest Moments & Final Match

**Leander Schaerlaeckens** (0:00)
World Cup finals are sort of these one-off supernova events, like you never know what's going to happen.

**Erica Mandy** (0:09)
Today is Saturday, July 18th, and tomorrow is the World Cup final. After more than a month of games across the US, Canada and Mexico, it all comes down to Spain and Argentina. But before the final whistle blows on this World Cup, we wanted to take a look back at the entire tournament so far. It's been a test of soccer's growing place in America, a showcase for some of the best players in the world, and a reminder that the World Cup can still bring people together, even as the tournament itself comes with plenty of complicated questions and controversies. Today, we're joined once again by Leander Schaerlaeckens, a longtime soccer writer who has covered the US men's national team at four World Cups now. He writes about soccer for The Guardian and The Ringer, and teaches journalism and sports communication at Marist University. He's also the author of the new book, The Long Game, The US Men's Soccer and Its Savage Four-Decade Journey to the Top or Thereabouts. Today, he helps us look ahead to the final, look back at the biggest storylines of the tournament, and think through what this World Cup may mean for the future of soccer in America and around the world.
Welcome to The NewsWorthy special edition Saturday, when we sit down with a different expert or celebrity every Saturday to talk about something in the news. Don't forget to tune in every Monday through Friday for our regular episodes, where we provide all the day's news in less than 15 minutes. I'm Erica Mandy, it's now time for today's special edition Saturday.
Leander Schaerlaeckens, thank you so much for joining us here on The News Worthy once again.

**Leander Schaerlaeckens** (1:34)
I'm so pleased to be back.

**Erica Mandy** (1:36)
Well, let's just start where things stand now, heading into the final match between Spain and Argentina. Do you think these teams deserve to be here and what kind of final are you expecting?

**Leander Schaerlaeckens** (1:46)
They do because Spain is clearly one of the best teams, both on paper and on the field, Argentina.
On paper, there are real questions going into this tournament if they still had it. And they keep facing opponents like England, as they did in the semifinal, where you think to yourself, you know, I'm not sure that they're good enough to win that game. They had a lot of trouble getting by Cape Verde and by Egypt. But these guys are just absolute pros in grinding out results. And that's why they're going to their second consecutive final. I would make Spain the slight favorites, but World Cup finals are sort of these one-off supernova events. Like, you never know what's going to happen. There's a real kind of curve ball thrown into the mix here, which is the fact that there is an awful lot of smog in New York at the moment and in New Jersey. That's blown down from Canada. I'm in New York's Hudson Valley, north of the city, and it's pretty terrible here. So that on top of it presumably being hot and humid because it's New Jersey in the summer, is going to be a real factor as well.

**Erica Mandy** (2:50)
When it comes to the smog, do you think there's any world where things get delayed, or is it more just it might impact the players and how out of breath they are?

**Leander Schaerlaeckens** (2:58)
In a just and responsible world, yes, you would want to see this thing delayed. I don't imagine it will be because billions of dollars of TV rights have been sold all around the world. It would just wreak havoc to broadcasters all over the world if there was some delay. FIFA is already, I think, pushing its luck a little bit by reportedly turning a 15-minute halftime, which is standard in soccer, into one that might run as long as half an hour so that they can accommodate Justin Bieber and Madonna and whoever else they've managed to contract for their halftime show. There's just no history at all of FIFA or really anyone in soccer thinking very much about the players and their safety when they make their decisions.

**Erica Mandy** (3:42)
Yeah, the halftime is going to be very Super Bowl-esque, it feels like.

**Leander Schaerlaeckens** (3:46)
Yeah, when they were sort of promoting this tournament, they went around saying it's going to be 104 Super Bowls in 39 days. They really meant that very literally in the sense that we're going to price gouge. After the World Cup finals over, they're going to cut up the grass and sell it for as much as $3,000 per square. They've always looked kind of enviously at the Super Bowl and the way that it's managed to even take the downtime and turn that into kind of a stand-alone event. So this feels like the final Super Bowlification of the World Cup.