Adam Friedland didn’t expect the World Cup to turn into a second job, but he’s not walking away from it now that it has.
Friedland launched The Adam Friedland Show Presents: The Beautiful Pod with The Ringer’s Chris Ryan last month, a six-week miniseries built around the tournament that ran alongside the relaunch of his main show on Spotify. The arrangement grew out of a conversation with Bill Simmons, who runs talk strategy for Spotify and had been looking for The Ringer to have a World Cup show of its own.
“We were talking to Bill, and it was floated that they didn’t have a World Cup podcast,” Friedland told Front Office Sports. “So we kind of came up with a loose idea. I’m not sure if it was theirs or ours. It’s all kind of a blur now. But it’s been so fun — I got to be honest with you.”
Asked whether he’d keep doing sports content once the tournament wrapped, Friedland didn’t rule it out.
“Yeah, I can’t say anything for sure right now, but definitely,” he said.
The show found an audience during a tournament that’s already reshaped how Americans consume soccer media. Spotify’s Newsroom says that U.S. soccer podcast listening is up nearly 400% since the World Cup began in June, and The Adam Friedland Show climbed as high as No. 14 on the platform’s U.S. comedy chart over the same stretch, despite Friedland telling Spotify’s For the Record he has “absolutely no qualifications whatsoever.”
“I’ve always been interested in doing something like this,” he said. “Like, what do you do when you watch sports? You make jokes. It’s the most obvious thing in the world to me. This is kind of a facsimile of what I’ve been doing my whole life.”
That’s fine by Ringer standards. In a piece on the network’s 10th anniversary, Awful Announcing’s Brendon Kleen argued the company has never been in the business of telling people what to like so much as making them feel like they’re already in the room, a philosophy editorial director Chris Ryan — Friedland’s co-host all summer on The Beautiful Pod — has boiled down to treating his own commentary as one long, continuous podcast. Kleen pointed to The Ringer Fantasy Football Show and Ringer Tailgate as the two shows that pull it off best, building cult followings on chemistry and kinship while still threading the needle between parasocial and smart.
Whether Friedland can build that same kind of following at The Ringer — or elsewhere — as he potentially pursues more sports content remains to be seen, but he’s not treating the door as closed. He told FOS as much when asked if he’d stick with it past the World Cup, and nothing about the way The Beautiful Pod performed this summer gives The Ringer much reason to talk him out of it.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.