As soccer continues its rapid expansion across the United States, journalist and podcast host Brian Landry is challenging the prevailing wisdom in sports media that shorter, faster, and more frequent content is always better. Landry, who is based in St. Charles, Missouri, contends that the rush to publish quickly is causing the sport's most compelling narratives to be left untold.
"A sixty-second clip can tell you what happened in a match," Landry says. "It can't tell you why a player made that decision, or what a coach went through to build the team that made it possible. Those answers take longer to get, and longer to tell."
Landry's argument runs counter to the standard advice in digital media, which holds that audiences will not sit through long conversations. He points to his own podcast work as evidence that listeners actually return for interviews that slow down rather than speed up. Conversations about a player's path through a development program or a coach's thinking on building team culture, he says, tend to hold attention longer than a highlight reel, not shorter.
"People already know the score by the time they find my show," Landry says. "They're not coming for the result. They're coming for the part of the story that doesn't fit in a headline."
The stakes are higher in soccer specifically, Landry argues, because the sport's growth across the United States means new fans are following professional leagues, collegiate programs, and youth pathways for the first time, often without years of context. He warns that fast, surface-level coverage can leave those fans with a narrow view of the game, one built around results instead of the people and decisions behind them.
"Soccer in this country is still being introduced to a lot of people," Landry says. "If all they ever get is the score and a clip, they miss the part of the sport that makes people stay fans for life."
To counter that trend, Landry's reporting leans on research done before a conversation starts, not just questions written on the fly. He says this preparation lets him ask about specifics—a coaching decision, a training method, a turning point in a player's development—instead of general questions that produce general answers. He also treats the person he's interviewing as the subject of the story, not a mouthpiece for a result.
"If you ask someone to explain a scoreline, you get a scoreline answer," Landry says. "If you ask them to explain a decision, you get a window into how they think. That's the part worth recording."
Landry does not present his approach as a formula others should copy. He describes it simply as the pace his reporting has settled into after years of covering the sport across professional leagues, collegiate athletics, and youth development. He points to the growing role of technology and analytics in soccer as an example of a topic that gets flattened by speed. A number on a screen is easy to post quickly, but what that number means for a player's development or a program's coaching strategy takes longer to explain well.
"The data is only useful once someone takes the time to explain what it's actually showing," Landry says. "That part doesn't happen in a headline."
For an industry increasingly driven by algorithms and engagement metrics, Landry's perspective raises a critical question: whether the pursuit of speed is ultimately costing soccer the very stories that could deepen fan loyalty and sustain the sport's growth in the United States.
