World Cup Euphoria & A YouTube Sports Mystery

**John Ourand** (0:02)
You take a look at the TV numbers for these first-round games, and they're breathtaking. You had Ghana playing Panama on Fox, and you have four million people watching that. Ghana versus Panama, that's an impossible number to conceive.

**Peter Hamby** (0:22)
Welcome to The Powers That Be Daily, Pucks podcast focused on the intersection of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood, and the players who run it all. I'm Peter Hamby.
It's Wednesday, June 24th. Today, I'm joined by John Ourand with a look at the joy of the World Cup and huge TV ratings across games. A success story so far that's undercutting a lot of the negative predictions and criticism that preceded the biggest tournament in the world. John also tells me about YouTube not giving up his dreams to land a big rights deal with one of the leagues that would have them competing with Amazon and Netflix and Apple for sports viewers. We'll discuss all that and much more on today's episode of The Powers That Be.

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Happy Wednesday everybody and welcome to The Powers That Be. I'm joined today by my colleague, John Ourand, author of the Varsity Newsletter, host of the Varsity Podcast. We're going to talk about the expectations and the reality of the World Cup, which everyone seems to be loving so far. John, let's talk though about the World Cup. I'm loving it. I've always loved the World Cup. It's just one of my favorite things. I'm going to the game on Thursday, the USA game against Turkey over at SoFi Stadium. I'm going to wear my vintage 95 US men's national team jersey, 95-96. You can find it on my Instagram. You might have already seen it. I look fantastic. I'm such a World Cup fan. Look, there are some criticisms to be had about the World Cup, maybe by expanding the number of teams in the tournament. They've diluted the talent pool.
There is all this hype right now around the United States team, for example, but it's like, who have you really played? They do look great. I got to say, they do look great. But other than that, John, there were all these concerns heading into the tournament, the ticket prices and the resale prices, which are obviously expensive. But people have come from all over the world. So far, it doesn't seem like there have been that many political slash immigration issues, which I think was another concern. The Cape Verde goalkeeper was able to work with the State Department and Hakeem Jeffries to get his mom here to visit. There was a visa issue there. Is this an all-around success for the World Cup and for Fox? And Telemundo, which, of course, are broadcasting the tournament?

**John Ourand** (4:27)
Yeah, I mean, it's funny because you talk about how it watered down the quality of play because they added so many teams. But you take a look at these, the TV numbers for these first-round games and they're breathtaking. I hate to talk about ratings because I think that's such sort of like a hacky media reporter way of saying like, oh, look how popular it is.
You had Ghana playing Panama on Fox and you have 4 million people watching that. Ghana versus Panama, that's an impossible number to conceive.

**Peter Hamby** (5:06)
I went to a Mexican restaurant the other night with Katie and my daughter, and everyone in the Mexican restaurant was dialed into that Ghana Panama game. It was a nice little, I think like five o'clock viewing hour out here in California. The storylines are riveting no matter where you look, and I think the broadcasters have done a good job building up those narratives.