Get Paid $50K to Watch the World Cup (Seriously) ⚽️

The World Cup is less than 50 days away, and apparently, hotel bookings are already running far below projections. That’s what happens when you try to charge Europeans $105 for a train ticket.

In today’s newsletter:

🗞 The Big Story: Get Paid $50K to Watch the World Cup (Seriously)

📉 Biggest Loser: This Team Just Played Baseball in Prison

🏆 Winner’s Circle: How a Missed FG Saved a Man’s Life

The easiest way to make $50,000 is by watching every single World Cup match this summer. Seriously, let me explain.

Fox Sports just made headlines for announcing a position they’re calling “Chief World Cup Watcher,” and even though it’s just a thinly veiled advertising stunt to promote their streaming service and the hiring site, Indeed, the job is actually very real.

But what’s in the fine print?

Topline Numbers: For starters, the headline salary of $50,000 is legit. The job listing also includes relocation assistance, which covers:

This is on top of your salary during the 50 days you’ll be expected to live in New York City.

In total, this role lasts from June 6th to July 26th, during which you’ll watch all 104 World Cup matches, averaging 105 minutes per match, which equates to an effective wage of around $274/hour.

But it turns out that simply “watching soccer” is only a small part of the job.

What’s the Catch? What the headlines don’t tell you is that you’ll actually be watching every game from a plexiglass cube in the middle of Times Square, where thousands of tourists per day will undoubtedly be stopping to take pictures, and bang on your walls.

The listing also says it’s looking for someone who:

But honestly, I think they summed this job up best when they wrote: “If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to live in a zoo exhibit, but with climate control and better Wi-Fi, this is your moment.”

Why is this professional baseball team playing inside a prison?

Well, it’s actually one of the coolest full-circle moments in sports.

Origin: This is the Old Joliet Prison. Located less than 40 miles outside of Chicago, it opened as a maximum-security prison in 1858, serving a variety of purposes, ranging from holding Civil War prisoners to serving as the backdrop for the “The Blues Brothers” movie and the TV show “Prison Break.”

However, after closing in 2002, this site has largely sat abandoned, that was, until last week.

Modern Updates: See, in order to host a baseball game in an abandoned prison, the Joliet Slammers, the independent professional baseball team hosting the game, had to literally build a baseball field from scratch in the prison courtyard, which was made extra difficult by the fact that the vacant facility doesn’t have electricity or running water.

Not to mention, the actual area to play the game is laughably small by pro baseball standards, with left field measuring in at 230 feet, and right and center field at 280 feet.

To remedy this, the team installed 25-foot-high netting around the outfield and introduced new rules for this specific game that dictated that a home run only resulted in a ball being hit on or over the prison's roof.

Still, the lack of permanent seating, lights, and even a scoreboard didn’t stop over 25,000 fans from requesting tickets, even though just 5,500 people could fit around the field for the actual game.

Historic Roots: However, by far the coolest part of this exhibition game is that the Joliet Slammers wore these black-and-yellow jerseys to pay homage to the baseball games that reportedly took place daily at the prison throughout the 19th and 20th centuries while it was still operational.

In fact, according to the city’s historical museum, the prison’s baseball team would play games against other prisons, and even outside teams, including the Chicago White Sox, once in 1940.

Making this game almost 100 years later is a true full-circle moment for the city.

How did a missed kick save a man’s life?

I’m not kidding you, this story is even crazier than it sounds.

Setting the Scene: Like millions of people during Week 13 of the NFL season, Mark Toothhaker got home from work on December 1st, sat down on his couch in Lexington, KY, and turned on the Monday Night Football game between the Patriots and the Giants.

Now, this game was pretty much over before it started, with the Patriots leading 17-0 after the first quarter, but then, with 6:28 left to go in the first half, Giants kicker Yongway Koo lined up for a 47-yard field goal that resulted in one of the most embarrassing lowlights of the NFL season.

Now, like most of us watching, Mark found this whiff so hilarious that he started rewinding the broadcast to watch it again; however, he suddenly was laughing so hard at the missed kick that he had a seizure. He recalls feeling like he “got electrocuted” as his wife dialed 911 and paramedics took him to the hospital.

However, once he got there, the news didn’t get any better.

Diagnosis: The reason Mark suffered this unexpected seizure was that a precautionary CT scan revealed that he had a tennis-ball-sized tumor on the left side of his brain that had moved 6mm to the right.

So, he was quickly transferred to the University of Kentucky’s hospital, where the tumor was surgically removed and biopsied for cancer.

Now, luckily, the tumor turned out to be benign, meaning Mark was back home by the end of the week with no lasting damage. However, as he pointed out in an interview with CBS News, Youngway Koo really did save his life, since sitting at home on his couch was the best place a seizure like this could have happened.

At least the Giants did something good last season.

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👋🏻 Happy Friday!

From a marketing POV, I’m genuinely curious how this Fox Sports campaign plays out. I think they go with a creator who has between 50,000 and 150,000 followers. Essentially, someone who knows what they’re doing but hasn’t quite “broken through” yet.

Personally, it would take more than $50K to get me in a glass box for 50 days.