100 days to the ultimate football (soccer) goal
My 100-day journey with CUNY’s Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program (EJCP) began with two layoffs. First, CNET en Español, the website I managed, was closed during an acquisition in late 2020. Then, I was part of the massive layoffs at Meta in 2022, which saw 21,000 jobs vanish.
During this time, I considered various projects I could undertake on my own. While I have extensive experience launching projects for others, both as a manager and as a consultant, I have never tackled the challenge independently.
So, I applied to EJCP.
This was not my first professional program at CUNY’s Craig Newmark School of Journalism. I was part of the second cohort of its Executive Program in News Innovation and Leadership in 2021–2022, and I believe CUNY is the only school addressing the journalism industry’s dilemmas, challenges, and issues head-on.
Personally, the main challenge was not figuring out the steps necessary to launch a project but finding the motivation to do it by myself. Despite my prior experience, I realized that having the support of like-minded individuals and the guidance of academics like Jeremy Caplan and mentors like Bola Awoniyi not only made the process smoother but also forced me to dissect, justify, and explain my idea in ways I had never been asked to do.
The idea of creating a platform for soccer fans came to me about two years ago, and I began exploring it when I left Meta. Instinctively, I knew that the first step had to be reaching out to potential readers to learn about their soccer-related interests. I began interviewing people to understand how they consumed information on the sport, but I was considering casting a wide net and tackling everything related to soccer, including multiple local leagues — a mammoth task. The idea included the 2026 World Cup in Mexico, Canada, and the US, but I struggled to finalize the scope of its coverage.
Once I started EJCP and heard professionals like Ariel Zirulnick, Director of News Experimentation at LAist, and Emily Goligoski, Head of Research & SVP at Charter, speak about audience needs, value proposition (see the matrix below), and user impact, I decided to focus solely on the 2026 World Cup and designed an audience survey to refine my idea based on people’s wants and needs.
I also learned much more than I possible thought possible about creating and deploying newsletters, hearing directly from the founders of newsletter platforms Substack, Beehiiv and Ghost, and getting a two-part masterclass from newsletter guru Dan Oshinsky, who confirmed something I learned before: every format, platform, and strategy can be as complex, detailed, and ambitious as you want, with almost no limits.
Throughout the course, I also learned immensely from the rest of my cohort and other instructors on topics such as podcast production, growth strategy, content planning, revenue models, and basic budgeting, among other things. These lessons are ones I can apply to any of my future projects.
At the end of the program, I launched COUNTDOWN TO 2026 (if you want to learn more, here’s the history and reasoning behind the project), an MVP (minimum viable product) to test my hypothesis and identify areas of interest. The strategy is to use other US-based soccer tournaments (like the upcoming Copa America and the Club World Cup in 2025) to grow the website and eventually expand into other formats and platforms, such as newsletters, podcasts, and videos, and offer original content people might be willing to pay for.
I chose to start with a website because it allows for constant tracking of audience interests and doesn’t require a fixed frequency or schedule (unlike newsletters, for example). Also, it’s the platform I know the best. I also wanted to give myself enough space to expand without committing full-time, at least not from the start. And I’ve given the project enough runway to build the SEO authority necessary to attract organic traffic and capitalize on it from early 2026 and throughout the tournament.
What comes next? I plan to keep populating the site with relevant content — closely tracking each post’s performance —, things I assume people are searching for, such as calendars, schedules, team jerseys, and how to watch the games. One of the main focuses will be creating specific guides for each host city to help people enjoy the Cup in the company of others and eventually reach out to local advertisers once I achieve sufficient volume.
The ultimate goal is to create a model for covering global sports events. If COUNTDOWN TO 2026 succeeds, I plan to do something similar for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles and the 2030 World Cup in Spain, Morocco, and Portugal.
