TOPEKA, Kansas — Paul Carr spends 10 to 12 hours each day during the World Cup compiling statistics, anecdotes and player information used during the official FOX Sports TV broadcasts.
Carr, the senior director of media and business operations at TruMedia, has prepared pages and pages of notes per match by combing through websites, contacting foreign journalists and collaborating with soccer researchers around the world over the last 15 months, but the work really ramps up right before the World Cup.
Carr works alongside two other people to provide the game notes that you hear on your TV during each match. This includes TruMedia’s Steve Swiatlowski and the voice of Sporting KC — Kansas City’s Major League Soccer team— Blake Aerni.
The trio of Swiatlowski, Aerni and Carr work together to rattle off complex numbers and statistics while always making sure to give a nod to the history of the game.
Carr’s favorite stat of this year does just that, referencing a pre-World War II era of soccer.
“Probably that Folarin Balogun became the first U.S. player with two goals in a World Cup game since Bert Patenaude had the first-ever World Cup hat trick in 1930,” Carr said. “And both games were against Paraguay, 96 years apart.”
Although Carr works mostly from home, he’ll make the short trek to Arrowhead Stadium this Saturday when Ecuador faces World Cup first-timer Curaçao. He has another nugget of historic information ahead of that matchup.
“Livano Comenencia’s goal for Curaçao vs. Germany was the first World Cup goal by a Caribbean nation since Jamaica’s Theodore Whitmore in 1998,” He said.
Despite being chock full of soccer stats and stories this is not the only thing Carr’s company does.
They license software to the Bill Simmons sports and pop culture outfit The Ringer and provide software and research notes for The Athletic — which is the sports arm of The New York Times.
Carr previously worked as a researcher for ESPN where he covered men’s and women’s World Cups on-site in countries including Brazil, South Africa and Germany.
He noted that soccer research in the U.S. lags behind its European counterparts and it helped him become a hot commodity in the data analytics, stats and research business.
Before joining ESPN, Carr worked for several radio, television and newspaper outlets in Topeka. This Kansas work — especially his time doing play-by-play for Topeka-area ballgames — still helps him today.
“It's massively important and helpful that I've called games before,” Carr said. “The mechanics are the same.”
Now he’s back in his hometown working remotely for TruMedia while continuing to build a reputation as one of the leading soccer researchers in the United States.
Carr cannot believe the spot he’s in at times.
“I was a communications major who wanted to get into sports media, who was pretty good with numbers and had a good memory for history and things like that,” he said. “So the researcher thing kind of fell into place at the right time.”
Despite the demanding schedule during the World Cup, Carr said working from home in Kansas still allows him to spend time with his family.
“To feel like a normal human, instead of almost a TV research robot for a month,” he said.
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