The Beautiful Game, the Brutal Business

By Dane Carlson, host of the Econ Dev Show and founder of Sitehunt, who loves the World Cup and unfortunately sees economic development metaphors everywhere.

There is a moment in every World Cup match when the country becomes a committee.

Not a nation. Not a fan base. A committee.

A large, uncredentialed, refreshingly confident committee, sitting on couches and bar stools and airport chairs, wearing shirts it bought this morning, explaining to the television what the manager should have done, what the striker failed to see, what the referee missed, what FIFA probably arranged, and why, if only anyone had asked, all of this could have been avoided.

Economic development people know this committee well.

It shows up late, sits in the front row, asks why the megasite does not already have rail, why the company did not choose us, why the incentive package was too rich or too cheap or too complicated or too simple, and why staff was not prepared for the one question nobody knew was coming until it came.

Yesterday’s U.S.-Belgium match was not merely soccer. It was a familiar civic drama staged with better uniforms.

The United States had spent years getting there. Years of camps, travel, qualifiers, friendlies, injuries, lineup experiments, youth academies, scouting arguments, federation politics, and private disappointments. Most people saw the game. Almost nobody saw the work.

Economic development is built on the same imbalance. The public sees the announcement. Or the loss. Or the angry Facebook post. Or the ribbon cutting with scissors large enough to threaten livestock. What they do not see is the long gray hallway of effort that came before it: the utility calls, the board briefings, the site visits in bad weather, the landowner who changed his mind twice, the consultant who needed an answer by Friday, the spreadsheet nobody loved but everyone later depended on, and the miserable little PDF that somehow controlled the future of 700 jobs.

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Soccer has stoppage time. Economic development has “just one more thing.”

Then, naturally, an elected official got involved.

This is not a criticism. It is a weather report.

In soccer, the report was that President Trump had entered the Balogun matter, because apparently even the world’s game now has a constituent services desk. In economic development, this is called Tuesday. A project moves quietly for months, known only to staff, utilities, consultants, and two people at the state who speak in acronyms. Then, when the possibility of winning becomes visible, the political atmosphere changes. The phones warm. The group texts awaken. Someone who has not attended an infrastructure meeting since the Obama administration suddenly has strategic concerns.

“Have we called the governor?”

“Does the company know we support jobs?”

“Can I be at the meeting?”

“Would it help if I said something?”

Maybe. Maybe not. Often the answer is yes, but later. Sometimes the answer is please, for the love of drainage, not yet.

The hard part is that elected officials can matter. They can break a logjam. They can show seriousness. They can make a company feel wanted. They can also arrive in the final minute with a trumpet, a camera crew, and a sentence that undoes six months of careful ambiguity.

This, too, is the game.

The Balogun controversy had another familiar flavor: rules, exceptions, interpretations, and the immediate suspicion that the rules are only rules until somebody important dislikes the outcome. Soccer fans call that corruption. Economic developers call it process.

Every incentive deal has its referees. State statute. Local policy. School district participation. Public notice. Clawbacks. Job thresholds. Capital investment definitions. Target industry criteria. Wage requirements. The deal may be thrilling, but the machinery is mostly procedural. Beautiful game, ugly binder.

And the public, understandably, hates the binder.

They prefer the story. They want a villain, a hero, a conspiracy, a turning point, and preferably a quote that fits on a yard sign. So when things go well, the story becomes destiny. When things go badly, the story becomes rigged.

Before the match, the country was ready to believe. The United States had a chance. The bracket had opened. The team had survived. The striker was available. The jerseys came out. People who had not watched ninety consecutive minutes of soccer since Landon Donovan was young suddenly developed opinions about pressing triggers.

This also happens when a community makes the shortlist.

For months, the project is a file name. Then it becomes a rumor. Then the rumor becomes a possibility. Then the possibility becomes a civic hallucination. Everyone imagines the announcement before the due diligence is finished. The restaurant owners picture lunch crowds. The school board pictures enrollment. The mayor pictures a lectern. The chamber pictures a banquet keynote. The newspaper, if one still exists, pictures three paragraphs and a stock photo of a hard hat.

No one cared until we might win.

Then everyone cared so much they nearly injured themselves.

That is not hypocrisy. It is human nature. People do not rally around process. They rally around proximity to glory. The trouble is that by the time the crowd arrives, most of the important choices have already been made. You cannot build a talent pipeline in the 78th minute. You cannot update your property database after the RFI has landed. You cannot discover that your “shovel-ready” site needs twelve months of utility work and still call it a misunderstanding. You cannot become Belgium overnight.

This was the cruelest part of the match. Belgium did not behave like a team impressed by America’s sense of occasion. Belgium behaved like Belgium. Organized, dangerous, talented, and deeply uninterested in our national subplot.

Economic developers understand this, too. Your community’s story may be moving. Your people may work hard. Your elected officials may care. Your staff may be underpaid, overextended, and heroic in ways no one will ever properly thank. But the other communities are not sitting still. They have land. They have power. They have rail. They have incentives. They have a PDF too. Some of them have better PDFs.

The site selector does not grade on effort.

Neither does Belgium.

That is one of the meanest and most useful lessons in the world. You are judged against the requirement, not against your improvement. It is wonderful that your community has come a long way. It is admirable that you are building capacity. It is touching that people finally recognize the importance of economic development. But when the whistle blows, the question is not whether you are better than you used to be. The question is whether you can compete now.

The scoreboard is primitive. Belgium 4, United States 1.

The work behind the scoreboard is not primitive. It is layers and layers of preparation, money, judgment, and timing. A single mistake can look like the whole story, because scoreboards are tyrants. A bad clearance. A defensive lapse. A goalkeeper’s error. A missed mark. Suddenly the entire national project is reduced to a frown and a replay.

Economic development has the same cruelty. A community can spend years building relationships and then lose a project because the power timeline is wrong. Or because the rail spur is wishful. Or because the owner will not sign an option. Or because the building clear height is off by three feet. Or because the answer came two days late. Or because a company that said “workforce” really meant “incentives,” and a company that said “incentives” really meant “speed,” and a company that said “speed” really meant “the CEO’s brother-in-law likes another state.”

Then the committee asks why you failed.

This is when the temporary fans disappear.

Before the loss, they were all in. They saw momentum. They saw destiny. They saw a new era. After the loss, they remembered they never liked soccer anyway. It is boring. It is fake. The refs decide everything. FIFA is crooked. We should focus on football. Or baseball. Or pickleball. Anything but the thing that hurt us last night.

Economic development has the same exit ramp. If we win, it proves the community is ascendant. If we lose, the process was rigged, the company was greedy, the state failed us, staff blew it, incentives are immoral, incentives were too small, and the whole business is not worth doing.

Sometimes those criticisms are correct. Often they are emotional weather passing over a disappointed town.

Good economic development leadership requires knowing the difference. Was the loss bad luck, bad preparation, bad policy, bad data, bad infrastructure, bad politics, or simply a better opponent? The answer matters because each diagnosis requires a different cure. But the committee prefers one medicine for every illness: blame.

Blame is cheap. Sewer is expensive.

And somewhere in the middle of all this is the incentives conversation.

World Cup soccer is drenched in money. Stadiums, tourism, broadcast rights, sponsorships, hotel nights, security costs, public investments, private profits, and civic branding all come marching in together, wearing lanyards. Everyone wants the event, until they see the bill. Everyone wants the win, until they see the subsidy. Everyone wants the company, until the abatement hits the agenda.

This is the economic development paradox: people want outcomes that often require tools they dislike.

They want the jobs but not the incentive. The tax base but not the infrastructure cost. The visitors but not the traffic. The headquarters but not the politics. The World Cup but not FIFA. The striker but not the controversy.

Sorry, citizen. Package deal.

This does not mean every incentive is good. It certainly does not mean every public investment is wise. Some are lazy. Some are wasteful. Some are political souvenirs. Some are giveaways wearing a jobs hat. But the existence of bad deals does not erase the reality of competition. Communities do not operate in a moral seminar. They operate in a market full of other communities, many of whom have no intention of achieving purity before breakfast.

The question is not whether incentives are good or bad. The question is whether they are strategic, transparent, accountable, and attached to something the community actually wants.

In soccer terms: do they fit the system?

That may be the best bridge between the match and the profession. Stars matter, but systems win. A great player can rescue a moment. A great system changes the odds. Economic development spends too much time waiting for a star project and not enough time building the system that makes good projects more likely.

The system is not glamorous. It is site readiness. It is current data. It is a clean inventory. It is utility clarity. It is a workforce story that has numbers behind it. It is relationships with brokers, landowners, colleges, city staff, county staff, regional partners, and the mysterious person at the railroad who actually answers email. It is knowing which sites are real and which are civic fiction. It is knowing the difference between “available” and “the owner once said maybe.”

A team without a system looks energetic until it meets one with a system.

A community without a system looks ambitious until the RFI arrives.

Then comes the scramble. The beautiful, terrible, familiar scramble. Find the acreage. Call planning. Ask the utility. Check floodplain. Pull labor data. Ask whether the road is really a road. Update the map. Confirm the parcel. Make the PDF. Fix the typo. Change “shovel-ready” to “development-ready” because someone remembered lawsuits exist. Send it at 11:58 p.m. and hope professionalism is judged on a curve.

This is no way to win a World Cup. It is also no way to run economic development.

And yet, many communities survive on hustle because hustle is what they have. They are understaffed, underfunded, and expected to produce certainty from fog. They are told to compete for billion-dollar projects with part-time systems and full-time expectations. Then, when they fall short, the committee asks why they did not play like Belgium.

Because Belgium has been Belgium for a while, that’s why.

Still, there is hope in the loss, if we are honest enough to take it.

A bad result can be useful. It strips away romance. It forces better questions. Not “why does the world hate us?” but “where were we actually weak?” Not “who can we blame?” but “what must be true before the next match?” Not “how do we win the press conference?” but “how do we improve the machine?”

The next four years begin immediately in soccer. The next project begins immediately in economic development.

That is the mercy and the punishment of the work. You do not get to mourn forever. Another RFI is coming. Another company is looking. Another site selector is making a list. Another elected official is about to discover the issue at minute eighty-seven. Another committee is warming up on Facebook.

So you write it down. You fix what can be fixed. You stop pretending that enthusiasm is preparation. You build the boring things before the exciting things arrive. You thank the people who were working before the crowd cared. You tell the truth about the loss without turning it into a theology.

And you remember that the public scoreboard is never the whole story.

It is only the part that fits on television.

Behind it is the real game: the years of invisible work, the fragile coalitions, the expensive choices, the rules nobody reads until they are angry, the incentives everyone wants to debate after the vote, the elected officials who can both help and harm, the fans who arrive with hope and leave with theories, and the professionals who have to come back the next morning and keep building anyway.

That is economic development.

A little soccer. A little theater. A little politics. A little public finance. A lot of waiting. A lot of explaining. A lot of losing deals you thought you had. A lot of winning deals nobody thought were possible. A lot of people saying “we” when it works and “they” when it doesn’t.

And every once in a while, if the system is right and the timing is kind and the pass lands where it should, the ball goes in, the project lands, the crowd rises, and everyone swears they believed all along.