A 10-part World Cup guide to the business of global football from Samford University's Sports Industry Program.
On June 11, Mexico and South Africa walked out at the legendary Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, and the largest sporting event in the history of the world began. Forty-eight nations, 104 matches, three host countries, one trophy. Our own U.S. Men's National Team opened tournament the following day with a win against Paraguay in Los Angeles.
If this is your first World Cup, welcome. You picked a good one. But somewhere in the next weeks, watching all these national teams take the field, a very reasonable question is going to pop into your head:
Wait. Who do these guys actually play for the rest of the year?
It is the single most important thing to understand about global football, and once it clicks, the whole sport opens up.
Every footballer has two teams
Here is the difference between football and the major American sports. In the NFL, NBA, or MLB, your club or franchise is essentially your entire career. Patrick Mahomes plays for the Kansas City Chiefs, and for almost the whole year, that is the story. Now, to be fair, American sports do have national teams. Baseball players represent their countries in the World Baseball Classic, and the best NBA players suit up for USA Basketball at the Olympics. But those events only come around once every few years, plenty of stars sit them out, and they never interrupt the regular season. Your franchise has you, essentially year-round.
Global football is built the opposite way. Representing your country is not a once-in-a-few-years event that happens on the side. It is a parallel commitment that pulls players away from their clubs several times a year, every year. Every professional is essentially playing on two completely separate teams at the same time.
The first track is club football. This is the day job. For about ten months a year, a player is employed by a club, the club pays his salary, and he competes in that club's domestic league and, if the club is good enough, in continental competitions. Christian Pulisic's club is AC Milan, in Italy. He lives in Milan. He plays in the Italian league. Milan signs his paychecks.
The second track is international football. That same player also represents the country he is a citizen of. He earns no club salary for this. He answers the call a handful of times a year during what are called international windows, and every few years those windows build toward a major tournament. Pulisic's country is the United States. So for the next few weeks, he takes off the Milan shirt and pulls on the red, white, and blue.
Two teams. Two bosses. Running side by side, all the time.
Why the leagues go quiet
This is also why, a few times each year, the European leagues you may have started following suddenly go dark for a week or two. Those are FIFA international windows, dates set aside on the global calendar when clubs are required to release their players to go represent their countries. The clubs do not love it. They pay these players millions and then have to hand them over, injury risk and all, to play for someone else. That tension has a name in the sport: club versus country. We will come back to it later in this series when we talk about money.
For now, just know this. The World Cup is the one stretch every four years when country wins. Everything stops for it.
The beautiful twist
Here is the part that makes the World Cup so much fun once you understand the two-team system.
For ten months a year, these players are spread across rival clubs, often trying to beat one another. Come the World Cup, the lines get redrawn around nationality, and the results can be wonderful. Club teammates become opponents. Club rivals become brothers. A defender who spends his whole season trying to stop a certain striker might suddenly be setting him up for a goal, because this month they happen to share a passport.
And nowhere is the two-team system easier to see than on our own roster.
26 Americans, 10 countries, one shirt
Take a look at the squad Mauricio Pochettino is taking into this World Cup. These 26 American players earn their living at clubs in ten different countries. Eight play here at home in Major League Soccer. The other eighteen are scattered across England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Mexico, Scotland, and Spain.
Look down that "Country of Club" column, and you are reading a map of modern American soccer. Christian Pulisic and Weston McKennie earn their living in Italy. Tyler Adams and Antonee Robinson are in England. Folarin Balogun and Tim Weah in France. Their clubs are rivals. Their leagues are rivals. For most of the year, they are scattered across the planet trying to beat one another.
A few weeks ago, they all came home to get ready for the World Cup. They have been living and training together in Atlanta at the U.S. Soccer National Team training facility ever since.
That is club versus country in a single picture, and it is the structure sitting underneath everything else we are going to unpack in this series.
About the author: Darin W. White, Ph.D., is the founder and executive director of the Sports Industry Program and Center for Sports Analytics at Samford’s Brock School of Business. He is also a Hall of Fame college soccer coach who won a national championship and has spent a lifetime falling deeper in love with the beautiful game.
Part 1: How Global Football Is Governed
