🏆 Getting CONCACAFed Forever
I'm joining USA Today! And the newsletter lives on!
I remember sitting in the Miami Airport when I turned on paid subscriptions to this newsletter. Then I refreshed. And refreshed. And refreshed.
Once I’d given readers a chance to actually, you know, read the plea I’d written for financial support, the number went from 0 to 1. Then, it kept ticking up.
I was so relieved. I had built a community. Better said, I gave an existing community a place to come together.
The community got stronger than I ever expected. Goofy bits about Concacaf became things people said to me in real life. Broadcasters cited the publication on-air. Concacaf kept credentialing me. The community kept growing.
That community backed my 2022 World Cup coverage. It sent me to places like Nicaragua where few reporters are able to go. I have joked I’m the only journalist in the world with datelines from Los Angeles, Paramaribo and Springdale, Arkansas in the same year.
But the truth is, I never thought I’d be writing this newsletter for this long. Started as a (barely) pre-pandemic scratch pad where I could write whatever stories I’d been discouraged from writing for lack of audience, it was a thrill to see the audience swell from hundreds of free subscribers, to hundreds of paying subscribers to thousands of free subscribers consistently opening and reading the email the moment it hit their inbox.
Yet, I always suspected a full-time job with a media outlet would be the best possible scenario for me and the type of work I love to do.
Getting CONCACAFed is not ending, but it is changing.
I’ve accepted a role with USA Today as the National Soccer Writer.
There, I’ll be reuniting with Seth Vertelney, a teammate at Goal who understands the joy of the Concacaf region. But he and the accomplished USAT sports team also will help me point the skills I’ve acquired fending for myself on this beat toward some of the biggest stories in the sport.
Our hope is to become a place you type into your browser and go to on purpose because you enjoy reading and watching the things we create.
It’s going to be a very good home for me as we embark upon this thrilling stretch of the 2026 Men’s World Cup, the 2027 Women’s World Cup and the 2028 Olympics - with Gold Cup and Copa América sprinkled in between.
There will be space at USA Today for even some of my stranger stories, but some of my quirkiest Concacaf bits may not be exactly right for the audience of a national newspaper. The editors at USA Today are allowing me to keep the newsletter going, so those pieces will still have a home here.
My current plan is to send two-three posts a week:
Monday - #MexicoMonday: An in-the-weeds round-up of the Liga MX weekend with occasional El Tri thoughts
Thursday - The Conca-catch-up: A spin around the region with updates and analysis from Central America and the Caribbean.
Some Fridays - A recap of what I wrote that week at USAT and/or a feature too depraved for the non-Sickos of the USAT audience
Plus, I’ll continue to maintain my video channels on TikTok/Instagram/YouTube, with boosts from the USAT social and video squads.
That also means I’m still looking for a partner that will allow me to make new editions of Football Cities. Please get in touch if you work with a brand in the travel/food & beverage/sports space or if you’re an individual who wants to sponsor a future edition. Just hit reply on this email.
A huge thank you to editors who took pitches from me, colleagues who kept me sane during six years (!!!) of the freelance rat race, my wife and son - who have never really known me off of the #grindset … I’m working to be a gentler, less-stressed me - and to all the premium subscribers who trusted me to tell them a story they didn’t know they would want to read.
I’m turning off paid subscriptions and looking into porting this newsletter over to another provider. When I started this newsletter, Substack was new enough that I actually spoke to one of the founders of the company about joining up. We’d have a different-sounding conversation now.
In this brutal business, things are always changing. Media outlets come and go. Writing jobs pivot to video. Video jobs pivot to AI. AI jobs pivot back to writing. Who knows what things look like in a few years?
What I can tell you is we’ll still have a place to bring this community together. I don’t think Chuck Blazer or Jack Warner planned it when they were pulling off shenanigans in the 90s, but while media projects are temporary, Concacaf is eternal.
See you over at USAT and back here Thursday when the community comes together to keep on Getting CONCACAFed.
This is great! Congrats! Don't be shy about sending links to some of those USA Today to us here too so we don't miss them!
Congratulations - well deserved!