You hear that? The silence - or, the tick-tacking of keys with nothing else but the air conditioner fan in the background? Do you know what’s missing?

There’s no soccer on. There’s no World Cup. My cell phone is black mirrored on the desktop instead of being propped up with the third game of the day on right now and it sucks.

For productivity sake, it’s great, but for my own emotional attachment, I really like being addicted to the World Cup for a month or so every 4 years, and that means I have to deal with the comedown, every time.

And it sucks, every time. You go through the stages of grief.

This summer is no different from other World Cup summers, and that one winter, which is a perfect segue into what this post is actually about - the non sports related aspect of the mourning process in these past two cycles. I don’t like this.

For the 2026 tournament, in particular, there was something about watching Gianni Infantino and his whole crew passing out the medals and awards at the end of the final match that really (really) made me feel sad. And gross. And - the thing where you look at adults and wonder how and why they ended up there, and simultaneously feel glad you’ll never be like them but also pained there should be people in such positions that are so hard to actually look up to as humans.

Gianni has come up before in an interview.

When Roger Mitchell came on the Intentional Investor he shared an anecdote from a direct encounter with Gianni from years prior, and then a story about a meetup with a friend after Gianni’s full rise where they debriefed.

The story of the character assessment juxtaposed to Roger’s own story is what got me.

Watching that medal ceremony, feeling those feels, still feeling annoyed, agitated, and aggravated by the Balogun red card incident and how it was handled, I felt myself shifting from feeling glad to not be like them, to being worried anybody else might be watching and thinking, “Hey, I’d like to be him someday.”

Not “I want that job someday” because I feel some hope in that aspiration - but anything close to “I want to be like him when I grow up.”

Part of what I was feeling in my gut was a need to tell a story that reminded people how you get there matters as much as getting there.

Roger’s full story had that. But I knew I could extract just the core of how somebody can be in the same universe without becoming a bad guy.

I liken the whole thing to Star Wars. Because sports are another cinematic universe of sorts, right? You have the BIG idea of the game and how you win or lose at the top, and then all the little story lines below it.

There’s a sports-like poetry to how one Skywalker grows up to become Darth Vader on the dark side, and another grows up to fight in opposition for the light. Dark colors versus light colors aren’t just for home and away jerseys. Everywhere you look you find the people involved not just on the fields, but in the margins of agents, managers, and leaders.

Drawn from our 2-hour conversation about his whole life, here’s a narrated part of Roger’s story, complete with the time he encountered Gianni, and the moments that turned Roger into the man he is today:

P.S. don’t forget to check out Roger’s work at Albachiara, read Sports Perfect Storm, and follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.