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The Kickaround’s Andy Swift (left), Lars Sivertsen (center) and Peter Welpton have been running The Ticket’s World Cup coverage all summer.<\/p>\n
The Kickaround<\/p>\n
The Ticket\u2019s Peter\u00a0Welpton has had a busy summer.<\/p>\n
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He\u2019s been co-hosting an hourlong nightly show on the sports talk station, mixing in time with the local news on Fox 4 and also writing on a semi-daily basis about a subject he knows and loves:\u00a0World Cup soccer<\/a>.<\/p>\n Welpton and co-host Andy Swift run The Ticket\u2019s soccer show, \u201cThe Kickaround,\u201d with longtime Norwegian contributor Lars\u00a0Sivertsen, who traveled across the Atlantic to pitch in with Peter and Andy for the tournament.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n The show, which began in 2014, typically airs Saturdays. In honor of the World Cup coming to town, they added nightly Monday-Friday shows as well as the occasional Sunday, too. That\u2019s upwards of 44 hours of World Cup talk for the station’s beloved \u201cP1s<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n For Welpton, it\u2019s the culmination of four years of buildup. With the World Cup nearing its pinnacle as teams square off in the quarterfinals, Welpton visited with The Dallas Morning News to discuss, among other things, his busy month-plus, the unceremonious ousting of the United States<\/a>, the future of soccer in the U.S. and how Dallas and all of North Texas has handled the grand event that is the World Cup<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n You\u2019ve been on \u201cThe\u00a0Kickaround\u201d for over 10 years. How did you get your start at The Ticket, and how did the show come about?<\/p>\n \u201cI was actually an employee at\u00a0The Dallas Morning News.\u00a0I was a director of digital at the time, and the project owner\/project manager of the original version of the\u00a0SportsDay Talk app<\/a>. \u2026 When that was going on I was working hand-in-hand with Jeff\u00a0Catlin, the operations manager for Cumulus in Dallas and the program director of the station. Before I started at the paper, I was in the radio business for 20-something years. I\u2019ve been doing it part-time ever since, so I know how it works.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n \u201cOne day, when we were talking about the app, I jokingly said to Jeff, ‘Will you ever let me come on The Ticket and talk soccer?’ And he said, ‘Why in the world would I ever spend any airtime talking about soccer?’ And I said, ‘Because the World Cup\u2019s about to come, and you can make money on it.’ And he said, ‘Oh, put a pitch together and we\u2019ll look at it.’<\/p>\n \u201cSo I ran home and spent the next two hours putting a pitch together, and within a week we\u2019d all sat down and come up with an agreement to do a nightly show on the station. In fact, my pitch had been a weekend wrap-up show. It was Jeff\u2019s idea to turn it into a regular nightly thing. We did that for Brazil in 2014, and it was a huge success. Such a success that it led to us turning it into a weekly Saturday show later that year. We\u2019ve been doing it ever since, and this is our fourth World Cup where we\u2019ve pivoted into a daily-nightly wrap-up show.\u201d<\/p>\n It kind of seems like you guys have found a secret weapon in Lars. Can you talk about how you connected?<\/p>\n \u201cOne day I was listening to a soccer podcast out of England, this was maybe pre-pandemic, I don\u2019t remember. But there was this guy on this podcast, I just loved his voice and his delivery and insight, and one day he completely caught me off guard when he referenced a guy who, at the time, was an FC Dallas player. He\u2019d previously played for a Norwegian club, it might have even been Lars’ hometown club\u2026 I just thought that was so funny that he mentioned [an FC Dallas player] that I, as they say, I slid into his DMs on Twitter. I said, ‘Hey, you don\u2019t know me, but I heard you say this today, and man, he\u2019s really caught on with the fans here, you\u2019d think it\u2019s interesting. ‘ … That just kind of began an online back and forth, and then finally one day I said, ‘Hey man, would you like to come on this radio show I do here?’ He gladly accepted and it just kind of spun into this thing.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019d say for the last year we\u2019ve been working really hard to figure out how we can get him here to Dallas for the entire tournament. A ton of credit goes to [Catlin] and the people at the Cumulus office in Dallas in sales and management for coming up with the budget to afford to have someone like Lars come over for the entirety of the tournament. And I can\u2019t tell you how pleased I am, Andy and I both, that Lars has been able to fill it out for us this time.\u201d<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Now to the bummer part: Does the U.S. loss to Belgium erase the momentum the team had built through the first few weeks of the tournament? Is that going to be all U.S. fans remember?<\/p>\n \u201cWell, I hope not. I do think [the Belgium game] was such an antithesis to everything we\u2019d seen out of this team in the tournament. What really struck me after the game was that I finally had the explanation for this weird nagging feeling I\u2019d had about this team in the prior four games. \u2026 I\u2019d never seen the U.S. national team play like this before, it\u2019s really weird that they\u2019re this good. And unfortunately, [the Belgium game] was a far more familiar feeling for those of us that have been watching this team dating all the way back even to the 1990 World Cup.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m sure as more time goes on I\u2019ll ponder about it more, but the reality is: The Paraguay win, the Australia win, before the red card in the Bosnia game, those performances are unfortunately kind of the outliers for the U.S. men\u2019s team. Those are not the normal things. What we saw against Belgium is far more common, and here we are again at the Round of 16 and they just kind of ran into the wall again. And really the disappointment is more how they went out than the fact that they went out at all.\u201d<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n What can a disappointed U.S. fan who\u2019s already looking for silver linings to take into the 2030 World Cup\u00a0look forward to?<\/p>\n \u201cWell, before the tournament, people asked me what I thought would constitute success, and for me, it was finally beating a reasonably impressive European side in a Round of 16 game. The fact that they didn\u2019t do that, to me, makes this particular performance \u2014 I\u2019m\u00a0gonna use a strong word here\u00a0\u2014 a failure.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t necessarily mean it, because they also achieved a lot of things in this tournament: They won games, they won their group, they won a knockout game, even if in this tournament the context of that is a little wonky. Those are all successes.<\/p>\n \u201cI think we also started to feel better about our pool of players, in terms of looking at our starting lineups. We see guys playing for the biggest clubs in the world, several Champions League players on the team. That really is a significant progression for a guy like myself who remembers when the national team was made up of some pros, maybe one played overseas, a bunch of semi-pros and even college students. The fact that we\u2019ve come that far in my lifetime is significant to me, but I\u2019m also several generations older than a lot of people who are very impatient and just expect and assume that the U.S. can suddenly spit up an international power in the sport. It just doesn\u2019t work that way.\u201d<\/p>\n