Roger Bennett’s message to A-Rod is one for the country: Soccer has already overtaken baseball in America

Roger Bennett walked onto Alex Rodriguez’s podcast a few months ago and delivered the news with the calm of a man who had been waiting decades to say it. A-Rod kept asking some version of the same question — “When’s this soccer thing finally going to take off?” — and Bennett, Liverpool-born, Everton-supporting, and Lower-Manhattan-dwelling for the past 30 years, had to break it to him gently: it already has. Soccer is now America’s third most popular sport, behind football and basketball, per a Q4 2024 research from Ampere Analysis cited by The Economist. A-Rod’s sport trails, the same study shows. “I don’t mean to be that guy coming onto your show, A-Rod, you icon,” Bennett said, “and be the person to bring the news to you that baseball has been pushed to number four in the list, but I am that guy.” It is very much that moment. The 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup kicks off this summer across American stadiums, followed by the Women’s World Cup in 2027 — back to back — and Bennett, co-founder and CEO of Men in Blazers, the podcast that became a 100-person media empire, is in full prophet-vindicated mode. “Football, for so long the sport of the future,” he said, “is finally the sport of the now.” The Women’s World Cup alone, he argues, will be “a cultural phenomenon” — Netflix has signed an exclusive U.S. broadcasting deal with FIFA for the 2027 and 2031 Women’s World Cups. “Football doesn’t sleep,” he says, “and now neither will we.” The business case for why that matters is staggering. Roughly 200 million people watch the Super Bowl. Five billion will watch the World Cup, while NBC Sports’ opening weekend of the 2025-26 Premier League season averaged 850,000 viewers across six matches — the most-watched opening weekend on record in the United States — with the Manchester United-Arsenal match drawing 2 million vi