Host: Ezgi Toper

Transcript

SELIN: Football is life for people, you know

TALHA: Football is war without guns.

SELIN: It's called the beautiful game for a reason.”] 

EZGI: My name is Ezgi Toper, and this is “In the Newsroom”, a TRT Global Podcasts production, where I take you around our newsroom as I chat with my colleagues and go beyond the headlines. On Saturday, May 31st, all eyes will turn to Munich for the 2025 UEFA Champions League Final. Two giants, Paris Saint-Germain and Inter Milan, go head to head at European club football’s biggest stage. But let's take a look beyond the goals…beyond the glory… beyond the drama of this season finale. Let’s take a look at football’s real power: its ability to stir passion, cross borders, and keep reinventing itself. Moving from local pitches to global screens... from grassroots women’s leagues to new fan engagement strategies, football is still the world’s game. In this episode, we go beyond European football’s success to the success of the game itself. Why does football still matter and how does it remain relevant across generations and continents? Let’s kick it off.

TALHA: All right, we just have to clarify, because, you know, two American accents talking about football. This is not American football, no pigskin involved. This is association football, right.

EZGI: So you don’t call it soccer?

TALHA: We do not.

EZGI: Talha Duman is our Senior Sports Producer here at TRT World. He’s a Turkish-American journalist who’s been covering sports for over eight years, so naturally, he is my first stop in the office.

TALHA: You have more than two hundred countries. In every country, you see someone playing football.

EZGI: Right, that’s what I wanted to ask you. Out of all the different sports you’ve covered for TRT World, how has it been different covering football in particular? And why is football so popular? Where does this come from?

TALHA: To talk about the basics of the game. I think football is so easy to understand. You just have a ball. You know, twenty-two dudes kicking the ball around. Whoever scores more goals wins. It all boils down to the intrinsic need of wanting to belong, you know. When you think about Türkiye's two biggest clubs, Fenerbahce and Galatasaray, they play a game called the Intercontinental Derby. And the whole idea of the two clubs back in the day, early 1900s, was that Fenerbahce was more of a blue-collar team and Galatasaray more of like an intellectuals team, a more white collar team.

You can see multiple examples of that in world football, like in Scotland, in Glasgow, there's Rangers and Celtic. One side is notoriously known to have Protestant fans, while the other is mostly Catholic. Again, multiple examples in South America as well. And yeah, it all boils down to wanting to be part of a club.

EZGI: And belong to that community?

TALHA: Exactly, exactly.

EZGI: Football’s simplicity, accessibility, and unifying nature all contribute to its popularity across the world. But Talha warns, football, like many sports, stirs up strong emotions and creates division between sides.

TALHA: We have to talk about how in the modern world, even though there are two big wars, two big clashes going on internationally right now. I think George Orwell says sports or football is “war without guns.

EZGI: Talha quotes English novelist Orwell, who was deeply interested in the psychology of power and conflict. His take on football could be seen as positive – the sport may be a safe outlet for aggression and rivalry. In other words, an alternative to the horrors of real war. Or Orwell may be saying football mirrors the passions and blind loyalties that lead to actual conflict.

TALHA: When you watch football, like in any form of the game or at any level, it's war, you know, on the pitch.

EZGI: In what sense do you feel like it emulates war?

TALHA: Two sides trying to best each other. Political tensions always trickle down to sports. Always. The most basic example of this is when two national teams have a match, the referees can't be from either side.

EZGI: We've talked about football being an arena of war.

TALHA: Yes, yes.

EZGI: But it's also an arena of PR. So when we look at the marketing and the commercialisation of football, there's a lot you can you can examine I mean whether it's you know the sale of merch like these jerseys and everyone wanting to sport the colours of their teams or TV streaming being available so that anyone anywhere can watch most of the games. Then you have these platforms that charge so that you can watch these exclusive games. What, as a journalist,t is your perspective on this commercialisation of football? 

TALHA: The more money you get into a club, the better players you’ll have, the better your team will do, the better your team does, the more trophies they win, the more trophies they win, the more excuses to party, I guess. Yeah.

And to go back to feeling part of a big club, the big clubs, the very, very big clubs, your Real Madrids of the world, your Manchester Uniteds of the world. The reason you see their jerseys out and about in places like Istanbul is because of that, you know, the bigger they are, the more you get the feeling of wanting to be a part of that club. 

But I think the negative side of putting a lot of money into sports or wanting to get a lot of money into sports is you start seeing games behind a paywall. Whereas, compared to when I was a kid, you used to watch games on NBC, you know, national TV. No paywall.

EZGI: Right, it was more accessible.

TALHA: Exactly. And now, just to watch a game, you got to go through a lot of hoops and pay a lot of money. And I think that's hurting the game at the grassroots level. If a kid had nothing to do with football, his family didn't have money to watch football on TV and didn't have money to go to the games, how would they get exposed to football? To something that they arguably could be good at, great at, legendary at.

EZGI: The football industry is massively profitable – it's one of the highest-revenue sports sectors in the world. This profitability comes from multiple revenue streams, including broadcasting rights, as Talha points out. For example, the Premier League's domestic broadcasting deals alone have been worth over £5 billion for each cycle, with international deals bringing in even more.

EZGI: When we talk about sports being such a profitable industry, I think it's important to also look at the fact that it's selective in what it's investing in. When we look at these smaller leagues from more developing countries or these countries that maybe aren't offered as much financial opportunity. I just wanted to know what your take is on this divide in these top European leagues and these smaller leagues and their funding. Is this ultimately sustainable for the sport? Is this hurting the sport at its grassroots as well?

TALHA: I think that's a very good question. The more money a club gets, the bigger it will get. And the only way that big clubs can actually stay competitive is to play other big clubs. And in Europe, that almost became a thing a couple of years ago, where like a select few clubs tried to establish a new league called the Super League. Like your Juventus's, your Manchester City's, all those big clubs came together and said, “hey, you know, the most amount of money we get is whenever we play each other in the Champions League. And the money we're getting from the Champions League, from UEFA, is not to our liking. We could probably get more bank, you know, probably go to the bank and come back with heavier pockets if we establish a new league amongst each other and just play with each other exclusively.”

SELIN: Well, I really think that the financial disparity makes it kind of boring to watch sometimes

EZGI: Selin Tuter, our Sports Output Producer at TRT World TV, joins in. Her and Talha sit right next to each other and frequently work together to cover sporting events around the world.

SELIN: Even in like one league, one domestic league in a country, you'll have one or two teams that are super rich that are getting all these players and all the other teams are just bad. Not necessarily to this degree, but when you're talking about the French league, for example, you have Paris Saint-Germain, one of the richest clubs in the world. At one point, they had so many, so many amazing players on hand, you know, including Lionel Messi, including Neymar. And they were just dominating the French league. And to me, that made the French league boring to watch because you know the results. You know this one side is always going to win. 

And as you mentioned, this also goes with national teams as well. You know, it really starts in the grassroots level, but if one country doesn't have enough money or resources to spend for, let's say, the youth teams, obviously they're not going to be as strong as a team let's say, you know, the England, the Spain, the Spain for example they have a lot of young players, but you know, Spain and England and France and Belgium, all these teams, they have so much money that they can invest in their youth that the kids then turn out to be worldwide stars. And in other countries, for example, you don't have that kind of money. So you don't have that kind of infrastructure to begin with

EZGI: Yeah, it's like, it's harder to break into that cycle once it's already in motion and in flow.

SELIN: Absolutely, and you know, at the end of the day, it comes down to, you know, when teams like Morocco, let's say, succeed against the really rich countries, the colonisers of the world in a sense. When that happens, you just start to see passion winning against money, which again, makes for a great story.

TV SPORTS ANNOUNCER: A Moroccan marvel….For the first time in the history of the World Cup there will be an African Nation in the semi-finals, and Portugal are out, and Cristiano Ronald is out.

EZGI: So, something else, when we talk about certain players, certain teams, not being as invested in, we also have to talk about the fact that football, like many sports, is very male-dominated.

SELIN: Absolutely.

EZGI: And women's football has notoriously been underinvested in and underappreciated, I would say. 

SELIN: Certainly under-appreciated. 

EZGI: How do you feel about that? As a football fan, as a woman, as a female sports journalist, I mean, there's so many layers to this.

SELIN: Resources are starting to get poured a bit more into women's teams in Türkiye and worldwide. Because interest is rising. Probably not at the level that we want it to be yet. But, you know, I think slowly and slowly people are noticing, hey, these are really good players. Hey, this game is just as fun to watch as the men's, sometimes even more fun. You know, when you think about women and you think about all the women who won Ballon d'Ors, for example, they're all incredibly talented and they're super fun to watch. The teams are super fun to watch. The teams are super fun to watch.

EZGI: Selin recently finished work on a documentary titled “Defy, Believe, Inspire: Galatasaray's Champions League Journey,” about Turkish club Galatasaray’s Women's team that was founded in 2011 – 106 years after the men's team was formed. 

SELIN: I actually remember it getting formed because around the time I was still in college and I remember reading the news thinking, “this is huge, this is amazing.” It's expanding here in Türkiye as well. Because we already had the Fenerbahçe and the Besiktas teams, who were successful and some local teams as well. But you know, once Galatasaray also taps in, you're thinking, okay, almost all the big clubs in Türkiye now have women's teams, which is huge.

And what this team had succeeded is, in only about three years, they became the first Turkish team to join the new format of the Women's Champions League, which is just a huge, huge success because you're still talking about a team that is not known as much. You know, maybe not a lot of Galatasaray fans know that they have a women's team. 

EZGI: And the team has been killing it! They even finished the 2023 to 2024 Turkish Super League season as champions. The Lady Lions finished the season two points clear of second-placed Fomget for the first-ever women’s football championship in the club’s history.

The success of women’s football is also noteworthy in the US, where football – or “soccer” – has struggled to gain a foothold. 

SELIN: Just to bring back the US conversation, I remember a lot of girls played soccer in the US. Just a lot of girls played soccer. A lot more than I’ve seen anywhere else up until that stage. It was a very common extracurricular activity. But even then, it didn’t translate into the jobs and sectors and whatnot.

The US national team, the women's national team, is one of the most successful teams in the world. And up until very recently, they didn't have the same kind of pay that the men's national team was getting, that they are significantly more successful than, by the way.

EZGI: In the 2023 Women’s World Cup, female football players were paid on average 25 cents for every dollar earned by men at their World Cup the year prior. That’s according to a CNN analysis. 

But even this is an improvement from 2019, when data by FIFA showed that female football players were earning eight cents per every dollar earned by men. 

Geography also plays a factor in pay. The average salary of a football, or soccer, player in the US was around $345,000 per year in 2021. But top European leagues such as the English Premier League and the Spanish La Liga are paying their players around $3 million to $5 million per year. In other words, MLS players earn roughly 10 times less than players in top European leagues.

TALHA: I think the US is an untapped market for football. And you can even see Lionel Messi, arguably the best player of this era – don't tell Ronaldo – has brought in a different audience to the Major League Soccer competition. And so yeah, they're just slowly trying to inch in. 

So for starters, the 2026 World Cup will be in the US and Canada and Mexico. I mean, there's going to be a bunch of different locations. And leading up to that, there will be something called the Club World Cup in 2025 over the summer for the Northern Hemisphere, of course. The 2025 competition is more like a soft launch of what's to be expected in 2026. And so they're trying to bring the excitement stateside.

SELIN: The FIFA president very recently was talking about how they may adapt a halftime show.

EZGI: A halftime show at a football World Cup?

SELIN: Yeah for the final. I don't know if I like that personally. 

TALHA: With football, it's kind of against the spirit of the game because you have like, traditionally fifteen minutes in between halves where people can get water or drinks or go to the bathroom. Players can get motivated to the second half, talk tactics, Okay. strategies, whatever. But if it turns into a thirty-minute halftime show, I don't know, that feels like appeasing to U.S. audiences more than anything. 

EZGI: Especially if we have like celebrity pop stars, tremendous artists coming to perform. I'm not sure what they're planning, 

TALHA: I'd be OK with Beyonce.

EZGI: I feel like that would be pretty cool.

SELIN: I think they'll learn from other sports like Formula One for example. If you make it a spectacle, Americans will tune in. The way that Formula One has tapped into the US market is sort of turning their Grand Prix into major events.

You had that race in Las Vegas, but there were concerts beforehand, and the whole weekend turned into a whole, I don't wanna say a carnival, but a party-like environment, with the concerts, celebrations, different games.

EZGI: The food, all that jazz. The music, for sure, is a huge aspect.

SELIN: The celebrities, the influencers, and whatnot. And it sort of worked for the US – for Formula One in the US. And I think that football is gonna have to be somewhat similar as well. Like I've said, you bring in players like Lionel Messi, and that's increasing viewership. 

EZGI: This is another tactic to increase US interest for football employed by Major League Soccer: Signing European legends to US teams. 

Former English football player David Beckham, who made headlines after signing with US club “LA Galaxy” in 2007, has been promoting the popularity of soccer in the US for years. Recently, he made US team “Inter Miami” a globally recognised brand. In 2023, he signed world-famous Argentine footballer Lionel Messi into the team, creating shockwaves through Europe.

TV SPORTS ANNOUNCER: I would like to introduce to you your number 10, Inter Miami’s number 10, America’s number 10, the best number 10 in the world, Lionel Andres Messi.

EZGI: And when we think about football and its global dominance. Is it even possible for another sport to challenge that? Or do you think football will just always be the most popular sport around the world?

SELIN: I really think it will be football forever. Because when you think about other sports that are growing, they're somewhat expensive. You know, even like watching F-One. You can't just become a Formula One driver. Like you, like casually, yeah, I was go-karting and then like Ferrari picks me up. Like, that doesn't happen. But football, you only need a ball. And with how widespread it already is and how people are passing it through generations, and now more women are getting involved, I really think it's not going to be overtaken by another sport. And you can quote me on that.

EZGI: Whether you’re playing in the streets with nothing but a ball or following a team that’s been passed down through generations, or a team that has just started, football brings people together in a way few other sports can. But there are still some untapped markets for football to expand and grow within, and there are still more audiences around the world that are yet to catch the football fever. 

Drawing in the interest of more women, more Americans, and more smaller upcoming leagues can only make the sport richer. While other sports may rise in popularity or have their moments in the spotlight, football’s universal nature, combined with the passion it evokes, ensures its place as the world’s true “beautiful game.” 

Thanks for tuning in. Until next time, I’m Ezgi Toper, and this was “In the Newsroom” by TRT Global Podcasts.