It is said, probably more often than is necessary, that a team that loses a player to a red card must be prepared to suffer.

If there’s one clean, satisfying lesson to be taken from the World Cup action we’ve seen so far, it’s this one: Big games tend to be decided by the big dogs. Kylian Mbappé, Erling Haaland, Lionel ...

Though the emotional appeal of soccer is immediate and visceral, especially in the shortcut-to-passion context of an international tournament like the World Cup, the real richness of the game is ...

Heading into the 2026 World Cup, the Mexican national team had one mission: Finish first in Group A. Beyond the obvious motivation to not lose a game, finishing top of the group guaranteed that El Tri ...

This week’s episode of Nothing But Respect was recorded hours before Jalen Duren’s representatives committed to using the Sacramento Kings as an unwitting partner in scrabbling a bit of leverage from ...

Cade Cavalli, pitcher for the Washington Nationals, used “boy” Tuesday night in a taunt directed at Willson Contreras of the Boston Red Sox. Cavalli had caught Contreras looking at a third strike, and ...

The Miami Marlins are a winning baseball team. For now. That revelation comes after one of their finest months ever, a 20-6 run that began, hilariously enough, after being swept in a three-game series ...

On the morning of Game 1 of the NBA Finals, I received an email from the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission (better known as ...

Who among us has not attempted to start a whimsical community-oriented project only for it to devolve into a site of small scale authoritarianism? It happens all the time! It even happened in my own ...

On June 18, ESPN published a report that connected NFL free agent Mike Pennel Jr. to the death of a woman in the Dominican Republic. This week, the network retracted the article and issued a brief ...

Dai dai. Ikou. Dale, allez, let’s go. So says Shakira in the chorus of the 2026 official World Cup song “Dai Dai,” in which ...

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew ...