The Interview: Brian Phillips
The acclaimed author and writer for The Ringer joins me to discuss his new podcast series 22 Goals and more
I have been extremely fortunate over the years to work with and get to know many of the most talented sportswriters of the past two-plus decades. But for the longest time, there was only one sportswriter I would have described as a genius, and that was Steve Rushin, my old colleague at Sports Illustrated.
Brian Phillips is the second sportswriter I would describe that way. When he emerged a bit over a decade ago on his soccer blog Run of Play, I remember reading him for the first time and being dumfounded, wondering how someone so talented could just materialize like that, an American writing about soccer (not exactly the biggest sport here!) on a blog.
Usually, one of the biggest compliments I can give another writer is to say that I wish I had written the story you just wrote. But with Brian’s work, it’s more like: I know I’m not capable of writing the story you just wrote, which absolutely blew my mind. Anyway, that’s how I feel about Brian’s new podcast series 22 Goals, which we discuss below.
The entirety of the written interview below is reserved for paid subscribers. As always, you can still get the entire free audio version of my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to go for your pods.
Grant Wahl:
Our guest now is my favorite soccer writer. Brian Phillips has a phenomenal new podcast series for The Ringer that just debuted called 22 Goals, in which each episode uses a great World Cup goal as a window into an era of soccer history. I've already listened to the episode on Dennis Bergkamp's 1998 goal against Argentina, and I can't wait to hear more. Brian, it's great to talk to you. Thanks for coming on the show.
Brian Phillips:
Oh, my gosh. I am so glad that we are finally able to do this. I looked back in my email when we were scheduling this recording, and I found that we first started talking about going on a podcast together in 2018, so we've been trying to make this happen for four years. I think we were both at different jobs at that point. (laughs)
Grant Wahl:
True.
Brian Phillips:
And it's finally come true. Hello.
Grant Wahl:
Hello. It's so great to have you on and get a chance to talk about this because I listened to the Bergkamp episode, it's just one of the episodes, and it's phenomenal. I happened to be lucky enough to be in the stadium when it happened, and all of the stories about Bergkamp are just an absolute treat to listen to. Could you explain to our listeners what this 22 Goals series is and how it came about?
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Brian Phillips:
Yeah, so it came about pretty much because I was getting sort of personally overwhelmed by cynicism and pessimism about the game.
It just seemed like, especially going into this World Cup in Qatar where there's just been so much bad news, so much corruption. Just the whole thing has felt very dark at times. And I think it's really important to talk about that, I do not mean to sweep that under the rug in any way. But I was just feeling that for myself, like for my own sake, I wanted to find a way to reconnect with the joy of the game, to reconnect with what I love about it, with what makes me want to jump out of my chair with happiness when I watch it and kind of reassert that it's that stuff that is the essence of the game. It's not the corruption and cronyism and cynicism. The corruption and cronyism and cynicism are like, they're lice, they're parasites attached to the game, and I just wanted to get back to what seemed to me like the positive essence of all of it and find a way to tell some good stories about goals that I like.
So the basic idea is, just as you said, each episode starts with a goal, we take one goal, some of them famous, some of them not quite as famous, from a men's World Cup, and then use that as an endpoint for a story. We try to say, "Well, if the story ends here, what leads up to that? What do we have?" And just look at everything. There are lots of tangents and funny alleyways to go down, but it's just basically about telling the story of that moment in soccer and that player.
Grant Wahl:
And what are some of these 22 goals that you have chosen?
Brian Phillips:
Well, the list is tightly controlled at this point, I will say. Our social media team is not going to be pleased if I reveal all of them, but I can say that Episode 1 is about Diego Maradona. It covers two goals, you can probably guess which two: 1986, England. So the first episode is Maradona, and next week we are talking about Ronaldo, the Brazilian Ronaldo, one of my favorite players of all time and his comeback from injury and the return to the heights of the game in 2002.
So yeah, I can't go into a whole lot more detail than that, but it's a good list, probably will be controversial at some moments, some things got left off. I'm personally very relieved that Zlatan Ibrahimovic never scored a World Cup goal, because I would've wanted to do eight episodes about that, even if it could've been a tap-in in the first round, a group game that they lost, and I would've been like, "We just have to talk about Zlatan." So I was spared that, but otherwise, yeah. I like the list.
Grant Wahl:
And is it 22 episodes? How much stuff is this?
Brian Phillips:
So it's 19 episodes, because three episodes cover two goals each, so the first episode covers two goals, and then there are a couple of other moments where we talk about two goals at the same time, but 19 is the total. The math does work out. It was very important to me that we actually get the math right, so there were multiple drafts trying to figure out how that was going to happen.
Grant Wahl:
Now one of the revelations here is your podcast voice, which is terrific, and as I've learned personally doing narrative series, it's a real challenge sometimes to find your voice for a podcast, just because you are sort of reading off a script, but you don't want to be sounding like you are reading off a script. And you get it right, man. How would you describe that challenge?
Brian Phillips:
Well, first of all, it means a lot to me that you think so, because I would never have listened to one of your podcasts and thought this was something you struggled with, but it was definitely something I struggled with. I felt like that was the aspect of this that was probably the biggest learning curve for me. And I've been super lucky, just blessed to have a wonderful team of podcast producers and experienced podcast people at The Ringer to work with on this who have really been patient with me and helped me along, because I'm a writer. I've never considered myself a professional talker in any universe, and the whole podcast is basically just me talking, like it's not a chat show. So it was a lot of work to try to find a way to do the scripts in such a way that they would sound reasonably natural, even though it's all planned out in advance. Some ad libs.
Grant Wahl:
On your Twitter announcing the series, you wrote, "If you miss Run of Play, this is very, very much for you." And I nodded aggressively while reading that and I found you originally through your original blog, Run of Play. And I was just wondering, for our listeners who maybe haven't been exposed to that because they just learned about you from The Ringer, from your books, could you explain what Run of Play was?
Brian Phillips:
Absolutely. Yeah. I assume that's most people, because Run of Play hasn't meaningfully updated since about 2011. I think I posted a book announcement there in 2018, but mostly it's been dormant for more than a decade.
So Run of Play was where I got started as a sportswriter and as a soccer writer. Around 2007, I was mostly writing book criticism. I was writing poetry reviews, arts criticism type stuff, which was fascinating and wonderful, but I started to get frustrated with it because I just felt like I was sick of writing about other people's writing. It was just like, it felt like one level removed. I wanted to write about a thing. And I think my wife finally just got sick of hearing me complain about it, and one day I came home and Siobhan said, "All right, I started a soccer blog for you. Here's the address. Update it if you want to." Like, "Just stop talking about how you want to write about soccer and not contemporary poetry or whatever."
So I started a soccer blog in my living room and did that for several years and I felt like over the years it was the exact right moment to start a blog. It was before social media really took off, and we were able to build this community of sort of weird, offbeat, creative soccer writing that tried to find unusual angles and unusual ways to talk about the game. It was probably the most rewarding thing I've ever done. It was super fun, and I do feel like this series is a throwback to that era because it's zany, it's a lot of tangents, it's a lot of experimentation. Like I don't know what I'm doing with the podcast, so I'm totally just finding my way as I go so it feels like the same kind of endeavor. It's been great.
Grant Wahl:
I got to tell you, my feeling when I first saw your work on Run of Play when you were writing about soccer was one of these things that you don't get very often, which is, "This person is just somebody, I've never encountered this type of writing about soccer before." And I'm being honest here with you. Like, it was almost like I could not believe that I had never heard of this person who was American and wrote this amazingly well and distinctively about the sport.
I mean, we're a pretty small community of soccer people still in the United States media-wise, and so you think you know who's who, and suddenly this voice emerges and it still blows me away, that feeling of like, I think I was reading you about Pelé, among other things, so it's really a cool thing to have you right now doing soccer stuff again. And I do get the feeling, listening to this podcast series, it feels a little like reading Run of Play, as you had mentioned. And I guess what's fascinating to me is that you do so much of what you do so well, including what I've heard of this podcast series, without necessarily doing interviews. How do you pull this off?
Brian Phillips:
(Laughs) I think the #1 strategy I have is just be born a terrible interviewer.
Like, I felt, going into this, I know that most podcasts are driven by interviews, and I am terrified of doing interviews, basically, like I felt like my dream version of this, and this was kind of the moment when the idea that I could do a podcast actually clicked and became real to me. My dream version of this was basically just to write essays and then find an incredibly talented person to produce it and an incredibly talented person to write music for it, and then we would have like living essays, you know?
So it was an experiment, and I think probably what made that click for me was listening to another Ringer podcast, which is Rob Harvilla doing 60 Songs that Explain the '90s, which I think is a wonderful show. Rob does interview someone in every episode, but before the interview there's an extended essay which Rob reads, and I just loved those so much and thought, "Well, I can rip that off shamelessly and make a show myself." So sorry, Rob, but that's how we got here.
Grant Wahl:
There are no rights to structure, so you're not stealing anything, my friend. What is your connection? How'd you get into soccer in the first place?
Brian Phillips:
I think, like a lot of Americans, I just kind of discovered it when it started being on TV more in the early 2000s. I did not grow up as a soccer fan. I didn't even grow up playing youth soccer, which probably a lot of people would say explains some of my takes on the game, because I don't always know what I'm talking about. Bbut I think, I was aware of the '94 World Cup, but I was mostly an NFL fan at that point, like I was in high school, I was mostly basketball, football.
And then I got a little burned out on American football, not so much basketball. Probably around the time of the 2006 World Cup, I was getting really into soccer, and I think from that moment, the final of that World Cup just kind of laid me open like no sports event I think I'd ever seen before, the head butt and the end of Zidane's career, and I think I had known who Zinédine Zidane was for about four weeks at that point, but it still was such an intense experience. And from that moment, I was just hooked. I really started following it more closely than any other sport.
Grant Wahl:
What in the soccer world do you like to follow on a week-to-week basis?
Brian Phillips:
That's a great question, and I think that because I'm not a soccer writer like full-time, always, like, I dip my toes into a lot of areas and do a lot of different things, I'm sort of able to just find my own way. And there are definitely times when I'm incredibly focused on one league or another league, like last year I was super into Fantasy Premier League, so I was watching the Premier League much more than any other league. But at other times I've just been like, "I want to watch Messi." So I just watched La Liga for a year and nothing else.
But yeah, last year, FPL just broke my heart and sucked me in. I was in the top thousand in the world after the halfway point of the season, and I was like, "I'm going to win. I'm so good at fantasy." Of course, it's all just luck, and the wheels came off completely, and I went in flames down the mountain. I didn't even finish in the top 50k, but for a while there I was really hooked. I'm not playing again this year, it was too painful.
Grant Wahl:
It's funny because I'm actually playing it for the first time this year, I got invited to join a league and I don't know what I'm doing.
Brian Phillips:
Yeah, it's hard, like knowing about the game doesn't really help you that much.
Grant Wahl:
So I've always had this question for people in the U.S. when it comes to soccer. How do you approach trying to write about soccer or podcast about soccer to a U.S. audience? Because I can remember having these conversations in the late '90s, early 2000s at Sports Illustrated with editors saying like, "Can't we just try to cover soccer like we would any other sport? We don't need to dumb it down or anything like that." And eventually we got there, I think. How do you approach trying to do this? And do you do anything because it's a U.S. audience?
Brian Phillips:
For the most part, I don't do anything because it's a U.S. audience. I mean, I tend to assume that a U.S. audience will be a little more forgiving of me if I like make fun of England for no reason, which I do regularly, but I don't dumb it down for a U.S. audience.
I would say when making this podcast, I was very conscious of the fact that there's a large soccer fan population in the United States that loves the game and knows a ton about the game and could name the back line of West Ham alphabetically in reverse, but maybe doesn't have quite as much experience of the history of the game because a lot of us came in relatively late. So I just kind of took that as permission to tell a lot of stories that will be familiar to people who have a really thorough grounding in soccer history, but that might be new to a big part of the Ringer podcast audience and even among really pretty hardcore American soccer fans who are not reading random books about soccer in the '50s or whatever.
Grant Wahl:
I think that's a great point because I do have to remind myself from time to time, when you're in a country that's creating lots of new soccer fans all the time, they can be into the sport but they may not be fully aware of the U.S. going to the World Cup quarterfinals in 2002 or something like that. And those stories are worth telling. And I also do think, by the way, that American soccer fans pay attention to more leagues than maybe fans even in England or Spain or Italy or Germany because they have such established leagues that they follow in those countries that may not follow each other's league. That the U.S. maybe has a bit more of that going for it.
Brian Phillips:
Absolutely.
Grant Wahl:
So it's an interesting cultural phenomenon. Where do you think the sport of soccer is in the United States at this point?
Brian Phillips:
That's a really good question, actually. I don't know. I feel like young people I talk to are soccer fans more and more of the time. I think for a long time, and you remember this era probably better than anyone else, having been at SI when you were at SI, but for a long time there was this assumption that if you were an established older American sportswriter that soccer would be something you held in contempt. You would fire off the annual, "Why I hate soccer because it's a bunch of socialist weenies flopping around and not tackling each other" column. And that was the viral column of the late '90s, whenever.
I think that era is gone, and it's understood now that Americans can be soccer fans and that that's perfectly normal and okay, and I think when I talk to people in their twenties, I'm more likely to have a conversation with a passionate Arsenal supporter than a passionate Dallas Mavericks fan or whatever, like I think that people are engaged. I think there are still some big issues to be resolved about getting the games on TV reliably, like the fact that you have to subscribe to 36 different services and that Peacock is becoming Universal USA+ is becoming Paramount HBO, like it's just kind of an endless dance to try to find the games, although, as a tennis fan, I find soccer somewhat manageable in that regard.
And I think MLS is doing well. I mean, I don't look at the books of these leagues, like I have no idea who's making money, who's losing money, but I know I have friends going to LAFC games who just absolutely love it, and I just feel like I hear more and more of that, that people feel like they have local clubs, but they also have the ability to follow international leagues. And I think there's a great thing about being an American soccer fan that you touched on, which is that you can cherrypick a little bit more. You can decide, "I love my local club, LAFC or whatever, but I also love Bayer Leverkusen and I also love Ajax and I also love Chelsea." Like, whatever, and you can do that and it doesn't feel like cheating in the way it feels if you're a Yankees fan and a Mets fan or whatever.
Grant Wahl:
Will the U.S. men ever win a World Cup in our lifetimes?
Brian Phillips:
Okay, so we're about the same age, so let's see, we've got what? We've probably got optimistically 12 more World Cups to go? Yeah. I think, like 9 World Cups from now, it's going to be our moment. The players may not be born yet. No, we're going to win 2022. Are you kidding?
Grant Wahl:
I like the attitude. So another random question here. Now that Spotify has an official relationship with both The Ringer and FC Barcelona, they're on their shirts, can you, Brian Phillips, get special access to reporting on whatever the heck is happening inside Barça right now?
Brian Phillips:
You know, I have put my name forward to Daniel Ek, the CEO of Spotify, to become either the sporting director or perhaps the head coach of Barcelona, and those emails have gone unanswered, so I would say the question is undecided right now. There's some ambiguity, but nothing has come my way yet. Our podcast producers and I have been agitating for at least some gear, like at least throw us some shirts, like they must have extra Frenkie de Jong shirts to hand out, but no, nothing. Nothing. We're operating in an atmosphere of unwilling ethical probity right now.
Grant Wahl:
Oh, shoot. So what would it take to get you to cover soccer full-time? Because I would love to see that happen, and I realize you have all these other interests and I get it, but I miss your soccer writing and your podcast. I'm going to get my fill here now for a little while, but I'm a little concerned for after the World Cup.
Brian Phillips:
That is incredibly kind of you to say, and I have unbelievable respect for people who find a thing that they love and stick to it. But I'm just too much of a gadfly, I think, mentally, like I think if I do the same thing for too long, I just start to feel a little out of my head, and I find that my love for it starts to diminish, so I really like to jump from one thing to another, and I will never stop following soccer or stop covering soccer, like I will always come back to it, I hope, as long as people keep letting me as I'm doing with this show, but I don't know if I could do it full-time.
Just I'm kind of bad at the day-to-day business of it all, like I feel like I'm always three days behind on the news. I was just at a wedding last weekend and someone was like, "Well, who should we be looking out for at this World Cup? What team is going to be good?" And I said, "Italy." (Laughs) And then I was like five minutes into this conversation, and I was like, "Wait a second, Italy didn't qualify." You know, I've been doing a history podcast, I've been back in 1950 and I had to walk that back and say, "Actually, maybe Italy's not going to do well at this tournament." So maybe I should take breaks, is what I'm saying.
Grant Wahl:
They are the European champions.
Brian Phillips:
I know. That's why I said it. I was like, "Oh, yeah, they're on a roll, like that’s a young core…"
Grant Wahl:
Brian Phillips has a phenomenal new podcast series for The Ringer that just debuted called 22 Goals, in which each episode uses a great World Cup goal as a window into an era of soccer history. Brian, it is an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Congratulations on everything.
Brian Phillips:
Thank you so much, Grant, and it's an honor to be here. I'm so happy we were able to do it.