That’s the US perspective. But globally the final of the World Cup (which Messi played) was seen by more than 1.5B people (compared to <200M in the Super Bowl). It is a big name.
I have seen this first-hand before. Corps with good salaries but no public ranges. Every time they have to hire out of core competencies and the local market is not too strong for the roles, it can take up to a year for the whole process.
I agree with him, I consume most of my news using RSS and even in pages that do not have RSS (like soundcloud) there is a RSS server somewhere serving the feed.