Despite its massive commercialization, the world of football has never been about making a profit.
Sports
Editors: Frank Andre Guridy & Bécquer Seguín
Skateboarding, We Hardly Knew You
Since its beginnings, skateboarding has always been multicultural—and always provided ways to resist rigid US norms and borders.
The World Latinx Athletes Make
Latinx athletes have forged new identities, cultivated community, and anchored themselves in spaces that were not created for them.
“Winning Is Not Uncomplicated”: Louisa Thomas on Sports
"The real value, the biggest value, of sport to me is that it is this gigantic arena for feeling."
What Counts, These Days, in Baseball?
As technologies of quantification and video capture grow more sophisticated, is baseball changing? Do those changes have moral implications?
The Black Rebel Athlete: Spectacle and Protest
As more and more protests make clear, the bodies of Black people playing sports are not outside history. Indeed, they never have been.
Swimming in the Anthropocene
Human bodies in deep water feel nature’s power and our own relative weakness. As seas rise, we should heed the swimmers.
Safe at Home in Late Capitalism
Baseball is ideal for explaining American economic precarity: the players try desperately to get home safe, but almost always fail to do so.
Distant Sports
Stories—with video!—of some of the most memorable, gut-wrenching, or downright remarkable moments in sports history over the past 40 years.
Counterhistories of the Sport Stadium
As large spaces where different sectors of the city converge, stadiums are sites of social and political struggle.
Babe Ruth’s New York @100
Ruth embodied a new and yet very old phenomenon—celebrity—in a technological era poised to capitalize on him.
Phenomenal Pleasure: Women and the Game
Watching the early minutes of the first match of the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup tournament, I was surprised to find myself tearing up ...
Public Thinker: Louis Moore on Athlete-Activists before and after Kaepernick
In late 2016, amid the furor over Colin Kaepernick’s on-field protests against police brutality and rampant ...
Stadium Arts
On the way into Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium during this year’s World Cup, spectators found FIFA’s flagship Fan Shop in an unlikely spot: at the feet of a monumental statue to Lenin. The irony was ...
Beautiful Games?
In the early ’90s, cable TV reached the Vermont woods. The wire running up our dirt road brought MTV, C-SPAN, and a regional station called the New England Sports Network (NESN), which aired ...
Black Athletes, Black Activists
Today the 2018 Winter Olympics kick off in Pyeongchang, South Korea. With a US president who has gone out of his way to attack black athletes and Black Lives ...
Going Deep: Baseball and Philosophy
Among the iconic images that memorialize one of the greatest moments in baseball history—Bill Mazeroski’s walk-off home run to win the 1960 World Series for the Pittsburgh Pirates—I have a special ...
How the Cubs Won
Sports history is made all the time—and most of it consists of phenomena that rank at the level of Trivial Pursuits: x number of homeruns, y number of strikeouts, a few hundredths of a second here ...
Cricket and the Future of India
“What is cricket?” Does it represent the past or the future of India? The first time the question appears in Aravind Adiga’s Selection Day, Mumbai scout Tommy ...
Soccer for Intellectuals
Baseball has Roger Angell. Boxing has A. J. Liebling. Yet soccer, puzzlingly, has no writer of such caliber, no one who has managed to find in the sport a comparably inexhaustible source of literary ...