In an era where sports media increasingly prioritizes speed, clips, and quick reactions, journalist and podcast host Brian Landry is making the case for a slower, more deliberate approach. Based in St. Charles, Missouri, Landry covers soccer at professional, collegiate, and youth levels, and he believes the prevailing advice to go shorter and faster is costing the sport its most compelling narratives.
"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 perspective runs counter to the common wisdom in digital media, which often assumes audiences will not sit through long conversations. He points to his own podcast as evidence that listeners return for interviews that slow down rather than speed up. According to Landry, conversations about a player's path through a development program or a coach's thinking on building team culture tend to hold attention longer than a highlight reel.
"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 particularly high in soccer, Landry argues, because the sport is experiencing significant growth across the United States. New fans are following professional leagues, collegiate programs, and youth pathways for the first time, often without years of context. 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."
Landry's approach involves extensive research before a conversation begins, allowing him to ask about specifics—a coaching decision, a training method, a turning point in a player's development—rather than general questions that produce general answers. He also treats the person he's interviewing as the subject of the story, not merely 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."
He does not present this as a formula for others to copy, but rather as the pace his own reporting has settled into after years of covering the sport. 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 readers, Landry's stance raises important questions about the media they consume. In a landscape dominated by rapid-fire content, his work suggests that depth and patience can offer a more enriching understanding of soccer—and potentially help sustain the sport's growth by fostering a deeper connection among new fans. As soccer continues to expand in the U.S., the demand for nuanced storytelling may prove just as vital as the demand for instant updates.
