Adam Beissel (@ExtraBeissHit) is a professor of sports leadership and management at Miami University. His primary research interests include: the political economy of Sport Mega-Events; Global Politics of International Sport; Sport Stadiums and Urban Development; Social and Economic (in)justice in College Sport; Sports Labor Markets and Global Athletic Migration. Beissel is currently working on two interconnected and interdisciplinary research projects critically examining the cultural and political economies of the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup joint hosted by Australia and New Zealand and the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup joint hosted by the United States, Mexico, and Canada.
Episode Description
The Women’s World Cup is about to kick off in Austrailia and New Zeland with the defending champion U.S. Women’s national team once again the favorite to win the whole thing. They will have to make it past the English, Spanish and German sides though, before they raise the world cup trophy high. A new book new out now explores the tournament with guest Adam Beissel.
+Full Transcript
Rosemary Pennington
The Women's World Cup is about to kick off and Australia and New Zealand with the defending champion US Women's National Team once again the favorite to win the whole thing will have to make it past the English, Spanish and German sides though before they raise the World Cup Trophy high. A new book out now explores the tournament and that's the focus of this episode of stats and stories where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics. I'm Rosemary Pennington. Stats and stories is a production of Miami University's departments of statistics and media journalism and film, as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me is regular panelist John Bailer, emeritus professor of statistics at Miami University. Our guest today is Adam Beissel, an associate professor of Sport Leadership Management at Miami University. Beissel studies the economics around sports, focusing on things like labor markets, globalization and economic injustice. He has published research on NASCAR stadium development and soccer. And he's the co-editor of a new book out from Rutledge, the 2023, Women's World Cup: Politics, Representation and Management. Adam, thank you so much for joining us again here on Stats and Stories.
Adam Beissel
Thanks for having me.
Rosemary Pennington
I know this book has been, I think, what, two years in the works, what made you decide to sort of put a book together about this tournament?
Adam Beissel
Well, I think the discussion and topics around sport mega-events and when I use that term, I'm talking about the Olympic Games or the FIFA Men's and Women's World Cup, I think it's a really emergent topic within all popular culture, particularly in the aftermath of the Qatar 2022 event, the most recent Men's World Cup and the issues around human rights, labor exploitation that happened with that, and not only the event itself, but all of the preamble how that event was awarded to Qatar, the corruption and bribery that infiltrated FIFA, and ultimately, this new era of FIFA that has potentially emerged in that aftermath. And so all of this kind of context, really drew the focus of myself as well as a few of my research collaborators to really hone in on this kind of post Qatar 2022 landscape as it relates to the men's and women's FIFA World Cups.
John Bailer
So tell us a little bit about how you framed your investigation.
Adam Beissel
Yeah, so the origins of the book spanned almost two years, and it grew out of our curiosity as researchers and scholars, we're quite an interdisciplinary group, myself, I'm based in the US. My colleague, Andy Granger, is a kiwi. He's from New Zealand. My other colleague, Verity, she's in the UK and then our fourth colleague, Julie Bryce, she's Cal State Fullerton, but did her PhD, like myself in New Zealand. So there's always been this kind of strong connection around New Zealand, which was one of the hosts of the 2023 Women's World Cup. And given our understandings and our familiarity with that context, and specifically sport in that New Zealand context, it sort of emerged on our radar as a really interesting, timely and crucial opportunity to study the intersections between politics, economics, and in this case, gender, as it relates to the 2023 Women's World Cup. And so it was sort of two years in the making. And what often happens with research involving sport mega-events is the research is done during and after the event. But what we really wanted to do was get together and try to provide a bit of an explanation for those who are doing the research during and after the event of how this all came into being, how and why was the big one, what were the politics behind and around the bid. And essentially, as we write, in our conclusion of the book, issue a call to action of scholars, activist fans to demand certain things from FIFA, the organizers, the host countries around a meaningful sustainable delivery of the mega event in advance of it, so that perhaps we can take some sort of meaningful action during the event itself.
Rosemary Pennington
You mentioned that the recent men's tournament in Qatar influenced how things were set up for this current women's cup. Could you talk us through a little bit about what you're getting out there?
Adam Beissel
Yeah, so after the previous two Men's World Cups were awarded to Russia and Qatar, respectively. We now know that those events were awarded due to bribery and corruption, as you know, investigated by the US State Department. And so when that all happened, the house of FIFA collapsed, so to speak, and so FIFA as one of the largest nongovernmental organizations in the world, there are in fact more members of FIFA than there are of the United Nations look to redress its shortcomings and in many cases, try and protect its bottom line as sponsors and broadcasters were quite skeptical of all of the bribery and corruption that had infiltrated FIFA. And so in about 2016, they instituted a new governance reforms and they introduced a new president Gianni Infantino, and they released this FIFA 2.0 document, which is this very well branded, marketed sort of promotional effort to suggest, hey, we know this stuff happened in the past, but we're this new FIFA, and we have new priorities and a new agenda. And this event in particular is the first Women's World Cup that has really been delivered start to finish within this new FIFA 2.0 era. We'll also have the Men's World Cup 2026 In the US, Mexico and Canada, as well as subsequent events. And so that marker as a point of departure is really what you know kind of formulates a lot of the context behind what's happening within this event and the future events of FIFA.
John Bailer
So how did this new FIFA 2.0 play out in terms of the selection of New Zealand and Australia?
Adam Beissel
Well, if I can first explain FIFA 2.0, please. So FIFA 2.0 really intends to anchor FIFA as an organization that can use soccer or football for the social good, for the power of good. And it really separates the current FIFA organization away from the previous approach. And in the previous approach, I write about this in some of my journal articles. The previous approach was all about using football and the power of FIFA to penetrate new markets, to deliver soccer around the world, deliver soccer to Brazil, to South Africa, to Russia, to really, essentially grow that global presence. And part of that was due to the way that the leaders of FIFA had to get votes to be reelected and promised different events to those regions of the world. And what we saw was that that sort of market based approach or trying to make World Cups by building hundreds of billions of dollars of facilities of arenas was a flawed approach. So FIFA 2.0 introduces the power of soccer to do something different. And as they argue the power of soccer can be to unite people, to unite countries through shared visions to facilitate geopolitical relations between adversarial countries to thaw relations, as they may have deteriorated in recent years due to recent geopolitical events. And so there's been this transformation away from global placemaking toward what we kind of call peacemaking or this approach toward trying to celebrate the ways in which soccer can be used to foster peace, unity cooperation. Now the cynic in me and my colleagues sort of say, well, there's still a bottom line at stake here, right. And that this is really a marketing technique and a branding technique to shift the focus away from penetrating new markets, and ironically, actually go to markets that are already really developed that are going to generate more revenue for FIFA than ever before to recover their losses from that previous era, whilst all the way coming along and looking like they're this great facilitator of democracy and diplomacy, and shared partnership. And so what we're really trying to do with our focus on 2023, is kind of peel back those layers. When you see the branding slogans as one well, what does that really mean? And is that just creative marketing to try and shift the focus away from the realities of what people's agenda is toward a more publicly amenable, more socially accessible or tolerable approach?
John Bailer
So when you were looking through some of the stuff you had written about this sort of the preface of your book you were describing, there were a lot of firsts with this upcoming World Cup. It was the first women's world cup that had two nations as co-hosts, they expanded the field to 32 teams, the first that was being hosted in the southern hemisphere. So there's lots of firsts here, which is interesting. But you know, there's an aspect of how you decide where to place the cup? I mean, some of those decisions were independent, obviously, you know, the idea of 32 teams is independent of who's hosting it. So you did some exploration of bidding and evaluation. Can you talk about some of the data that might have been compared in that process?
Adam Beissel
Yeah, so we did what we call a bid document analysis. And part of it is understanding the institutional politics of FIFA and their change in rules and how they now allocate sport mega-events for both the Men's and Women's World Cup. They have erred on the side of transparency, so they create a new evaluative criteria with different metrics that bids have to have to meet in the end for 2023. There only ended up being two official bids. There were about four, but then a couple of countries pulled out. Japan pulled out. Brazil pulled out, so it was just Australia, New Zealand and Colombia. So, in this effort to try and clean up its image, they brought about more transparency, that were values of sustainability, to make sure that, you know, they weren't building white elephant stadiums that would go into disrepair afterward, commercial viability was at the top of their priority list and how many tickets can be sold, how many tourists can be attracted. And so they came up with a new process. So part of our analysis is actually just kind of understanding what that process is, and perhaps trying to unpack some of the motivations behind why those criteria were set in the first place. And as we write, a lot of those criteria, we're always going to end, are always going to privilege Western white nations with fully developed commercial markets, already existing stadia, and the potential for travel and logistics and event expertise that are going to facilitate at the end of the day, more revenue for FIFA. And so it shouldn't surprise us that the next several international sport mega events, both within FIFA and even the IOC are all headed toward Western developed white nations, almost as a sort of blowback from the previous era, which was all about penetrating new markets taking the game to different constituencies around the world.
Rosemary Pennington
As you're talking, I was thinking about the fact that both New Zealand and Australia are nations that have aboriginal communities that have to factor in some way and how you think about issues of sustainability and representation and who these places are. So how are your authors, and how are your co-authors thinking about this issue? And how did FIFA navigate this as it was trying to decide where to locate this tourney?
Adam Beissel
That's a great question, I think, so the first thing that we really did then is once we understood that institutional context, we really dug into the bid documents themselves. So we pored through 10s of 1000s of pages of bid documents, evaluation reports. And I'll put this in inverted commas objective analyses from independent consultants that FIFA uses to score those reports. And a lot of what we focused on was the actual mediation and the branding of how specifically Australia and New Zealand, through their joint bid that they called as 120 23, were able to really mobilize, support politically, culturally, and among the people in those two countries and elsewhere around the world. In favor of hosting this event. We know the dubious history, the promises around sport hosting sport mega events. But what we found was that there was a concerted effort for the first time in a bid staging of a sport mega event to use social media to try and deliver specific and intended messages around branding around, in this case, gender empowerment, gender equity. And so we did a Twitter analysis where we collected weeks and weeks worth of Twitter data; we dredged it, we coated it, and what we found is that, as part of the mobilization to gain support and manufacture consent for hosting this event, gender, gender equality, women's sport, women's empowerment, which has a context in Australia, New Zealand, specifically in New Zealand, linking to government strategies under the former Prime Minister Jacinda Arden, were really powerful messages that were layered on top of the actual bid criteria and the technical components. And so, really, we're living in an era as we well know, right? That it's not just the facts themselves, right, but it's the messaging the signaling the packaging around it. And so, what Australia and New Zealand did successfully was package or brand this tournament, both in terms of women's empowerment, gender inclusivity, and also the power and potential to unite two nations and an entire region in Oceania. What we found also was in certain aspects, the incorporation of indigenous identity, indigenous iconography and messaging, but in subtly different ways between Australia and New Zealand. Both countries have their own disparate histories when it comes to indigenous history, Aboriginal rights or its Maori rights on the incorporation and acceptance of that in forms of popular culture. And in New Zealand, there was a much greater acceptance in terms of the bid documents using both languages celebrating Maori as part of this bid, there was a comparatively small or almost an absent aspect of that in the Australian context within that bid, so part of what we did then also was kind of peel back those layers of how is indigenous identity and culture being used, and or perhaps even exploited in the case of trying to generate the type of social good and transformative politics that a sport mega event might generate for those respective countries?
Rosemary Pennington
You're listening to Stats and Stories, and today we're talking with Adam Beissel about the Women's World Cup.
John Bailer
So you're talking about some of the media representations as kind of this effort to mobilize and gain support. How do you know if it works? You know, how do you look? I mean, you can count the number of tweets or likes or retweets or other things, but how do you know what are some of the things that you did to try to assess that impact?
Adam Beissel
Yes, what we did was we collected the geo locations of all of the specific tweets around the as one bid. And then what we did was we mapped it collectively. And what we found was that there were particular differences between the quantity and then the content of what was said in different geographic regions. What was interesting as it came down to the bidding for hosting 2023, you would probably expect that Western Europe would be aligned with the Oceania region, particularly Australia, New Zealand, part of the Commonwealth. But what we saw was a very different messaging happening across Europe. Part of that was between the politics of UEFA and FIFA. And so in the end, the bloc of voters in Europe voted against the Australia/New Zealand bid and for the Columbia bid. And part of that was around what messages were being sent. So it wasn't in what we did was it kind of twofold analysis. On the one hand, we looked at Twitter messaging from the actual bid account itself. So as one bid account, how it manufactured messages, how it tried to reach different constituents, but then we also had a separate analysis done by popular press media. And what we found was very different messaging around the potentials for hosting the event in Australia and New Zealand as opposed to in Western Europe. In certain areas of the world, there was still this, I'd say, legacy of, well, let's put this event in Colombia, because it would fit with the previous eras of delivering World Cups to new markets, to create opportunities for young girls and women in sport. And so that little subtle distinction in the messaging of the media was quite different when we looked at those popular press sources based on areas of the world.
John Bailer
So you know, one thing that seems like this big theme that comes out when I think about mega events is what do they do? You know, what's what? And by that? I mean, what's the impact of these? What are the kinds of measurable impacts that you will see? I mean, you hinted at it a little earlier, when you were talking about some of these the stadia that are built, that are used for matches, maybe and then are never used other than bus parking lots in the future in Brazil. Yeah. Yeah. So what are some of the measurable impacts of the World Cup? And did that play out in how they selected some of the hosts?
Adam Beissel
That's a fantastic question. I mean, the literature is pretty clear, right? You can't get an economist to agree on much of anything. But economists on the left and the right will concur that using a sports mega event as an economic driver is just a terrible return on investment. Now, that's despite many ex-ante studies that in advance consultants and tourism boards and chambers of commerce come in and say that there's going to be this billion dollars of tourism, and most of those statements are overblown, the costs are understated. And if there is revenue generated by these events, it's mostly taken out of that local region by the hosts themselves, whether it's the IOC or FIFA, right? So when you buy a ticket, it goes to FIFA. And so there is some ancillary spending around hotels and those things, but a lot of that spending is done by local residents of that area. And so what you see is a massive substitution effect shifting from one entertainment opportunity to another. So the simple explanation is that the economic impact of these things is vastly overstated. The costs are vastly understated. And in the end, does that mean that we shouldn't have these events? I don't know. I think the literature is pretty clear that there is some sort of world class feeling or feel-good effect that has generated from these, but we have to do is sort of parse the fiction from their reality and weigh up whether or not that feel-good factor is worth the 10s of billions of dollars that goes to host these events. And if we have that conversation, that's a little bit different than trying to sell us on this mythology that there's going to be some windfall profit for the host countries.
Rosemary Pennington
Speaking to that feel-good effect, I can't help but think about the fact that you know, you have the women's role, the women's national team in the US, right, who has been a favorite to win this tournament year over year. But it's also been embroiled in this, this conflict over pay right, and gender parity, and I wonder are going into the Women's World Cup? How does that play out? Large, larger, more large scale across the country? As far as women's sport goes? Is it becoming especially soccer? Is it more high profile? Is this World Cup, you know, this moment where we can feel good about women playing soccer, but then we'll forget about them for four years? Like how does that gender narrative sort of play out in relation to this?
Adam Beissel
That's a great question. I think we could point to the Women's Professional Soccer League here in the US, the NWSL and the just meteoric rise of that League. The league is still in its relative infancy, about 10 years now. And the value of the franchises in that league are going up exponentially. So just two years ago, the Washington Spirit were sold for $50 million, which was up almost 10 fold from earlier in the kind of mid-teens of what a franchise was worth. And then just a few weeks ago, the new expansion franchise that is going to be based in the Bay Area, the total investment was $150 million. So we're seeing a huge increase in just a short period of time of people wanting to get into the business of women's sport. And we see that within the NWSL. We see that in the growth of the WNBA. And I tell my students all the time, if you want a job in the sport industry, and you want to get into a growth area, it's women's sport. And the point I always make is it took the NBA and all the men's professional sport leagues a really long time to be economically viable. And then we point to the 1980s of the NBA as this like heyday, those games were on tape delay on cable television, in front of like 4000 and 5000 people. And if you track women's sport, particularly WNBA, and the NWSL, and you put them in the years, corresponding to when those leagues began, they're miles ahead of where the men's leagues were at that time. And so we're seeing that investment in the NWSL. We're gonna see expansion in the WNBA to go from 12 teams to 16 teams, more expansion in the NWSL and real opportunities for women athletes to continue to play sports. Now with that are still issues, right. And one of the issues that I'll point to when it comes to FIFA, FIFA makes the vast majority of its revenue over a four year cycle from selling the broadcast rights for the Men's and Women's World Cup. And historically, up until this year, they have sold the men's and women's broadcast rights together. And if you start breaking it down, what effectively happens is FIFA sells the broadcast rights for a four year cycle for about $4 billion. And if you add up the men's viewers and the women's viewers, the men's viewership is about 3 billion and the women's viewership is about 1 billion, right? So it's about somewhere around 30 to 33%. Now, in terms of the economic value of the Women's World Cup, right, you're looking at a billion dollars, right? If you extrapolate that out. However, FIFA doesn't see it that way. FIFA has historically seen it as we're selling the men's rights. And oh, by the way, you're getting the women's rights for free. And so even though the women generate about a third of the broadcast viewership for the World Cup that the men do, the pool of payout is only $7.5 million, right? So it's vastly smaller, and they talk about doubling it and going up and things like that, it's still proportionally way smaller. So this year was the first time where FIFA attempted to split the broadcast, right, because in theory, the value of what broadcasters and advertisers should pay for the women's rights should be about a billion dollars. And if we look at it in those terms, that totally changes how we invest in women's football, how much money FIFA makes and whether or not it trickles down to the different member associations to facilitate equal pay. The problem is that despite the viewership out there, and the absolute interest around the world in women's sport, the advertisers and the broadcasters aren't stepping up to the plate to pay FIFA the proper value of what those rights are worth. And so you have right now, as we approach the Women's World Cup, some issues in Europe about or any of the networks within Europe, and a huge consumer of women's football actually going to pay fair market value for what's already been demonstrated to be an appetite for women's soccer.
John Bailer
You know, I was thinking about the scheduling of this, and as someone who has gotten up at obscene hours to watch World Cups in the past, I wonder if that doesn't confound this. Yeah, I mean, if it was at a timezone that wasn't going to be, you know, brutally early or late from for a good bit of the world. And that might impact it. You know, so the other thing I wanted to say that you were talking about this, I was thinking about as a kid, the only soccer that I could see was soccer made in Germany on PBS, which was an hour every. Yes. Okay. Don't you know, this is a while ago. So clearly, you know, one thing that has changed in my lifetime, is the attention that this sport has received. And it's so there's been this lag of interest before it's had the entertainment value. And it seems like what you're describing, I wonder if maybe there is this lag so far, that there will be a ketchup period. That's what will occur. So thinking about, gosh, how has things changed? And is it just common to have this kind of lag of interest?
Adam Beissel
I think so. I mean, David Barry's an economist at Southern Utah, he talks about this all the time, it just takes a really long time to build a league. And the problem is in women's sport, you have to demonstrate the ratings before you get any type of investment. But if we look at the NFL or any of these upstart football leagues, they're signing, you know, million dollar TV contracts before they even have teams and outs. It's almost like, well, we see this as an investment. And all I think we are trying to advocate for the investment of women's sport, it's like, well, let's treat it the same way. Let's view women's sport as an investment because guess what? It will pay dividends, and we already see it paying dividends. And so there's this double standard where we just throw money at men's sport without any history or without any rhyme or reason, just the expectation that someday it's going to turn a profit. Most of the MLS teams in North America do not make a profit, almost none of them do. Many of the NHL teams don't make a profit. But when it comes to women's sport, and the idea of well, we shouldn't invest in women's sport, because it's not profitable. We hold that to a different standard. And I think we just need to shift that narrative and events like the Women's World Cup in the US women are doing really well. It can in some way shift that narrative to show, hey, there is an appetite for women's sport. There's a billion people around the world tuning into this event, how about we start marketing it and promoting it, because we know that when we market and promote events, people turn up, I can point to this campus right here. When we hosted the Oklahoma softball team a few weeks ago, we promoted the event, they sold tickets, we brought in a really major target, a really notable opponent, and it was a sellout, right? You promote, and you market women's sport, and people will tune in. And I think that's what we're slowly starting to realize within that sports media landscape is it's not the best way to prove it, and then we'll invest. We need to shift that narrative to invest because we know that that audience will come following that investment.
Rosemary Pennington
Before we close, I do want to give you an opportunity, you said the book sort of ends with a call of action for researchers. So I want to know what your call to action is.
Adam Beissel
Yeah, some of the things we're working through now are the ways in which gender and gender narratives are being propagated by FIFA, the host countries around this corporate social responsibility of look at us, we care about women's sport. But if we look around at all the different member associations, whether it's equal pay in the US or the issues with the Canadian women's soccer team, or Spanish women's soccer team or abuse allegations in many of the countries around the world. With our women's soccer team, there are still real deep seated issues that need to be targeted and addressed. And so we can celebrate bringing countries together and we can, you know, trot out gender equality, but like, is this just this? Is this genuine? Is this meaningful? Or is it to maybe introduce a new term to the lexicon is this just gender washing this event are we just sort of throwing gender out there as a way to clean up FIFA as image without any sort of substance behind it, we have a history of this right when the NFL had a series of arrests in the early 2000s. They did the crucial catch campaign as a way to sort of soften its image. And I do want us to think through during the event, the ways in which gender and these women's empowerment narratives are being propagated by FIFA, the host countries and whether or not there's actually going to be meaningful change, whether it's economic investment, marketing, a women's sport, or just the opportunities for women in Australia, New Zealand specifically to go play sport and engage in physical activity after the event is over. And so I think that's part of this call to action is let's not take this messaging, this mediation at surface value, we really need to delve into this and hold FIFA feet to the fire and the different organizing committees to make sure that there is an actual legacy that is left after the event has concluded.
John Bailer
So you know what I'm hearing you say, Rosemary wants to throttle me right now, because she was ready to bring it to a close, I can't help it. But you know, it sounds like we gotta keep that there has to be follow up, there has to be kind of purposeful follow up to the holding of these events, that it's not enough to just say that there's the flash, the celebration of the flash, there has to be kind of thoughts in advance of the execution of these mega events, about what you expect to change, and then have a plan to kind of evaluate it.
Adam Beissel
And that's a perfect segue into informing the listeners that what we've done with our first book is everything you need to know before the event takes place. And now we're in the process of planning a second book of everything that happens during and after the event. So we can all go in and we can ask these critical questions. We know how this event was put together. We know how Australia and New Zealand won the event. We know that social media was a powerful tool. And all this branding and messaging around the politics and management of this event. We're really powerful in getting it there. So what's going to happen? And then how do we hold FIFA and these countries accountable after the event to leave that meaningful legacy in a way that brings that type of transformative social change that they'd like to assert in their, you know, pamphlets and their promotional materials. But we don't know if there's actually any substance behind that style.
Rosemary Pennington
Well, we'll have to have you on again when that book comes out. Thank you so much for being here today, Adam. Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University’s Departments of Statistics, and Media, Journalism and Film, and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter, Apple podcasts, or other places you can find podcasts. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the program send your email to statsandstories@miamioh.edu or check us out at statsandstories.net, and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.