We Spent $85,389.22 on the World Cup, Was it Worth it?

@jacksettleman
अंग्रेज़ी1 दिन पहले · 20 जुल॰ 2026
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TL;DR

Jack Settleman provides a transparent look at the $85,389 cost of covering 33 World Cup games, detailing how sponsorships and YouTube revenue led to a break-even result while generating 127 million impressions.

The Final Numbers are in from the World Cup Tour

Jack Settleman - inline image

The journey is complete. Casey went to 33 World Cup Games in 39 days.

We decided to scrap the plan of going to the 3rd place game (which was a banger) and thankfully we did.

Because of the fires/smoke/storms, a lot of flights got cancelled.

Could you imagine if Casey set out on this journey and missed the final?!

Jack Settleman - inline image

He still doesn’t understand that he went to a game every day of the World Cup and not “everyday”.

Although, there is an argument that going to a WC game did become mundane to him that his usage is fair.

I’ve been very transparent on the $ and #s of this WC journey and so now that the final numbers are in, it’s time to break it all down.

In today’s newsletter:

  • How much we spent sending Casey to 33 World Cup matches
  • How much we made
  • Was it worth it?

The Numbers

Jack Settleman - inline image

The final #s are in!!!

We spent $85,389.22 sending Casey across North America to 33 World Cup Games.

Wait till you see where our revenue landed, it’ll blow your mind.

The original budget for the trip was $68,000 so we spent $17,000 more than we budgeted for.

Budget vs. Actual

Tickets: $38,000 → $44,000

Flights/Hotels: $17,000 → $27,500

Other: $12,000 → $14,000

If you recall back to the first financial update, it was tickets that were going to put us way over budget.

It ended up being flights and hotels that changed the equation!

A big part being that we made a shift to the Azteca for a can’t miss match that added around $6,000 + the most expensive ticket of the World Cup (besides the Final)

Jack Settleman - inline image

Here’s a preview of the was it worth it section coming down below:

Yes. Top performing video of the entire series

A note - we employ 14 people of which a large majority worked on this project.

Sean (operations) booked every single flight, hotel, car service, bag drop

Matt, Ryan, Danny (editing) crushed daily vlogs

Riley and Paige (social) were on every single day of the WC with Casey

Dawson (IcyVert) reviewed every single edit to give feedback and notes while supporting Casey from home with additional distribution

So, there’s more costs to pull this tour off as well as opportunity cost.

The Tickets

On June 22nd, I wrote a financial update because tickets had spiraled out of control.

Our pre tour projection was $38,000 for tickets.

On June 22nd, we were projected to spend $91,000 on tickets!!!!!

After the tour, we spent $44,000 - so what happened?

On June 22nd, I highly debated just hitting buy on the rest of the tour as tickets seemingly wouldn’t stop going up.

But as an experienced crypto holder, I had the same fomo feeling I’ve had in that world before and trusted they’d come down.

Then, after the group stages, all our world travelers went home and tickets started to drop like crazy.

For perspective, we paid $750 to send Casey to the semi-final between Spain and France.

We paid $1,200 to send Casey to Netherlands/Sweden in the group stage!

Also, I have to mention Jake from XPTickets.

He and XPT saved our ass.

This isn’t a paid promotion but I hope to work with them going forward because their site helped us a ton.

They gave us 50% off tickets for 4 matches which saved us a couple thousand bucks but Jake used their fan to fan marketplace (in beta) to grab us some seriously under market tickets.

$5,500 for the final when the get in price was closer to $7,500.

Revenue

When I ran the numbers, my jaw dropped.

Our 2 partners, Trove and Harry’s, drove $75,000 to the business. A special shoutout to Trove, one of my favorite partners we’ve ever worked with. Their product is fantastic and they got our Snapback packs up so quick in the app.

$85,389.22 - $75,000 = $10,389.22

The only other revenue we had was YouTube adSense:

Jack Settleman - inline image

$10,389.22 - $10,189.74 = - $199.48

What are the odds that the YT revenue essentially got us to break even?

I said we have the final #s but we actually still have 2 YT videos left to be posted.

The video from yesterday’s Final and then our recap video.

We’re on our way to Profit Town, USA!!!

And that’s without the big win that came in last week.

Casey has been sourced to do a low 5-figure deal with Apple Sports.

At Snapback, we currently let all talent keep their brand deal $ as long as the product is not a competitor to an umbrella partner and that the deliverables do not require Snapback involved.

Also, we let all our talent keep their content monetization $ (Twitter, YouTube ad sense, Tik Tok Creator Fund, IG/FB).

This may seem standard but Casey definitely wouldn’t be able to create all that content without the backing of our team so I think it’s a nice perk.

All in all, Snapback will make about $500 on the series.

Casey will make $17,000 + his salary over the last 40 days + he didn’t have a single expense besides rent.

Not bad for someone who went to 33 World Cup Games!!!

He did lose $1,700 on his daily betting series but he hit Ferran Torres first goal scorer live yesterday to go even on that too.

What a run for the kid.

Rate the Tour 1-10?

I asked Casey this question on the way home from the Final yesterday.

He said an 8/10.

I mentioned above, while we made a few hundred bucks, we had a ton of opportunity cost here.

We essentially locked up our video editing team for a month and a half, same with our social team as well as Casey.

Here were the goals coming into the World Cup:

  • 40,000 YT Subscribers
  • 40,000 Social Followers
  • Profit on the series
  • Bring a celebrity guest to a game
  • Secure press for the tour
  • Break a World Record

Results:

  • 11,000 Subscribers gained / 40,000 ❌
  • 77,400 followers gained / 40,000 ✔️
  • $500 profit ✔️
  • Cam Jordan ✔️
  • NBC, Gronk/Jamies, Fox 4 ✔️
  • Went to 27 straight days of World Cup Matches ✔️

My grade: 9/10

The only thing lacking from the whole World Cup was the YouTube.

We definitely miscalculated how competitive it would be on that platform and in general for that matter.

Besides AwayDays, one of our favorite channels, all the soccer creators on YouTube had a down trend in content. Ellis and co were smart in that they only do 5 hand picked videos and they performed exceptionally well.

With the recap content to come, we hit 127M impressions across the tour.

If you want to click through the content, here’s a publicly accessible dashboard

The Biggest Win

In an earlier newsletter, I mentioned how we have all these metrics we measure off of but what is unique to Snapback is that we do a little vibes based measuring too.

And the vibes were immaculate.

We had more people reach out about how awesome this series was than any of our content before.

I had a genuine conversation with someone in the industry who repeated himself 3x to communicate the seriousness of his comment.

He said: “Don’t worry about the cost, keeping making content like this. It is so awesome and it will pay off”

And I agree. This was such a big brand moment for us to continue to establish why Snapback is unique and what we do.

This also pushed the team to the limits. We now know what we can execute on from top to bottom.

It created a new all-star creator. I’ve been begging Casey to create for 2 decades and he finally yesterday told me he likes doing it.

And while the YT numbers weren’t where we wanted, the impact was.

Thank you all for reading!

If you want to receive this newsletter to your inbox: https://jacksettleman.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Jack Settleman - inline image
Jack Settleman - inline image
Jack Settleman - inline image
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