World Cup kickoff: Goals, greed, and geopolitics, with ESPN’s Sam Borden

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**Sam Borden** (1:39)
To me, the World Cup is in a lot of ways, the great equalizer among the massive disparity that exists in the way that people live day to day around the world. I like imagining a thing where for a couple of hours or a couple of weeks or a month, everybody just wants the same thing. Everybody just wants a goal. Everybody wants to win. Everybody wants to dream another day of how far they could go. I find some beauty in that and I like the simplicity it offers.

**Bob Safian** (2:18)
That's Sam Borden, Global Sports Correspondent for ESPN and an investigative reporter who helped crack open corruption inside World Cup organizer FIFA.
Sam has had an insider's view on the most impactful storylines and inflection points at World Cups from Brazil to Qatar. Today, we dig into this year's tournament, which kicks off Thursday from Team USA's prospects to controversy around ticket prices and more. This is part one of our two-part dive into the World Cup on Friday's episode. I sit down with US Soccer Federation CEO JT Batson. That conversation will be available exclusively on Rapid Response. So for Masters of Scale listeners, be sure to click over and listen. For now, enjoy the passion and bite of ESPN's Sam Borden. I'm Bob Safian and this is Rapid Response.
Sam, thanks so much for being here.

**Sam Borden** (3:20)
Thanks for having me, Bob. I appreciate it.

**Bob Safian** (3:23)
So the World Cup is finally upon us. US hosting alongside Canada and Mexico. It's gonna be hard to match the drama of the last World Cup within a messy, leading Argentina to victory. Are you rooting for Argentina to repeat, or are you all USA all the time?

**Sam Borden** (3:41)
You know, Bob, I would say that the big secret of my life that I'll share with you, if you promise not to tell anybody else, despite being a sports journalist for over 20 years, I am actually not that big a sports fan. You know, I love the drama and the stories and the emotion that goes with big time sporting events and, you know, courage and overcoming adversity. But I have to say that I am not particularly invested one way or the other in what team wins or loses. I do have a little bit of a soft spot for France because we lived in France for a few years and my girls, you know, kind of got into the French national team. But generally speaking, I root for games to end on time and me to get home as quickly as I can.

**Bob Safian** (4:36)
Well, you've covered global soccer as a game and as a business across 40 some countries. So I want to ask you about some of the societal and cultural impacts that swirl around this year's games.
First though, have you seen Nike's new rip the script video for the World Cup, the star-studded video? Have you seen it yet?

**Sam Borden** (4:58)
No, I don't think I've seen that one. But it is really interesting to see how invested the business world gets in soccer every four years, particularly in this country, where for the intervening four years, it's a little bit like the Olympics. It's like for a month, every four years, it's the biggest thing in the world. You see all of these activations and corporate opportunities around this sport that, for the other three years and 11 months, oftentimes struggles to make the same kind of an impact.