Entering the stadium before the World Cup finals, Jaime Fresnillo wasn’t worried about the conspiracy theories.

Yes, FIFA would try to steal the championship for Lionel Messi, that was a given – “We have seen it,“ said Fresnillo, a 35-year-old Spain fan who lives near Madrid. “We know the refs give favor to Argentina.” For days, viral videos clipped together critical calls that had gone in Argentina’s favor: an Egypt goal nullified, a Swiss player disqualified, Messi not getting penalized for a foul that had earned others a red card, various examples of players getting away with shoves and dives. The script, to many, was clear: a triumphant farewell for the 39-year-old legend, Gianni Infantino placing a medal around his neck, Donald Trump handing him the trophy.

But no team foils a plan like Spain. If even France’s forwards couldn’t crack the vaunted Spanish defense, what hope did anyone else have?

“We can beat 12 people on the pitch,” Fresnillo said, counting the referee as an opponent.

For a growing flock of Argentina skeptics, Spain stood as the last hope. Argentina made a lot of enemies on its dizzying run through the tournament. Even among a final four of former World Cup champions, Argentina seemed to draw the most ire. France, at least, had the decency to vanquish foes as swiftly and decisively as a guillotine. England, meanwhile, made victory look impossibly difficult, like a wrestler barely able to stand after the pin, their suffering a testament to a worthy adversary. Argentina, on the other hand, delivered torturous fates that left a scent of injustice.

Only once underdog darling Cabo Verde convinced the world they could topple the defending champs did Argentina plunge the dagger. Mo Salah’s Egypt constructed a hard-earned 2-0 lead from 80 minutes of commanding play, before Argentina wiped the board with three clinical strikes. Switzerland got a red card right after taking control of the match, then held on for a gallant 40 minutes, teasing the possibility of penalty kicks, until Argentina snatched it away with a last-second score.

For longtime Argentina haters, the backlash was overdue. There were plenty of reasons for the rest of the world to root against Argentina. The national team had honed the dark-arts traditions of dirty play. Footage from a few years ago showed players singing a racist song. FIFA was investigating Argentina fans who allegedly hurled racist abuse at the Cape Verde and Egypt matches. The country’s historical demographic policies explained why the roster included no Black players. Its current president is an ally of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.

A growing flock of soccer fans observed Argentina with suspicion. The team kept pulling off improbable victories, like a horror villain that survives every burial to doom fairy tale endings. With every miracle finish, the allegations got louder that the fix was in.

Argentina fans denounced the charges. “If you’re always winning, you’ll get a lot of hate,” said Steven Kodua, a 25-year-old software engineer from Ghana who adores Messi. “I think we deserve to be here.” While everyone else gathered to protest their team’s triumphs, Argentina supporters were busy catching their breath from yet another near-elimination experience. Argentina delivered ecstasy only after dragging their fans through long bouts of agonizing anxiety. “For the heart, it’s not healthy,” said Bautista Goycochea, 27, whose father had played on Argentina’s World Cup teams in the ‘90s.

To Argentina fans, the skeptics were missing the real story. Questionable calls happen all the time, and plenty of teams benefit. What defined Argentina’s wins, their fans said, was resilience. “A team that gives all of itself on the pitch,” Goycochea said. Players found an extra gear when the stakes were highest. Messi’s magic made anything possible, so how could anyone give up hope?

A likely story. But everybody’s on the watch for corruption these days, and you can’t be too careful. It so happened that Argentina’s dramatic journey might also please the powers at FIFA, and there was no shortage of evidence of corruption at the World Cup. Argentina fans couldn’t deny that.

“It’s all part of the tournament,” Kodua said. “There’s some truth to it if you look at what happened with the US.” FIFA overturned the suspension of a key American player after pressure from the Trump administration. FIFA said that an internal disciplinary committee made the decision. The US lost the next game anyway, which felt like justice prevailing over corruption.

Argentina, though, kept on rolling. Right into England, maybe the only team equipped with as powerful an arsenal of conspiracy theories. Messi had his World Cup moment in 2022, and what better way to amp up the drama than England bringing the trophy home for the first time in 60 years? England’s gritty, short-handed win over Mexico in the roaring drum of Estadio Azteca etched a signature moment worthy of championship lore. Jude Bellingham, the star 23-year-old midfielder who scored beautiful goals and hustled on defense, emerged as a worthy protagonist, embracing the stage with swaggering flair. Against Norway, the breaks seemed to fall for England, most controversially when the ball hit a camera wire and fell to England to set up a critical goal. Maybe the soccer gods finally favored England.

Beating the defending champs seemed an essential checkpoint on England’s road to glory. All the more fulfilling to do it against a rival with a track record of breaking English hearts. But no, turns out England was still just a recurring character in Argentina’s story, discovering new ways to fail with every hair-brained scheme. If the scrutiny on Argentina had gotten too hot, who better than England to supply a credible victory? Anyone who watched the match could see for themselves that England had blown it all on their own, retreating once they took the lead, inviting Argentina to attack, while the whole world was shouting at them not to go inside the haunted house.

But Spain stood as the ultimate test. If Argentina beat Spain, there might be no shaking the allegations. Spain seemed perfectly suited to disarm Argentina. Spain’s disciplined passing could keep the ball away from Messi, and Spain’s best player, Rodri, specializes in patrolling the area Messi roams. Spain rarely scores early enough to set up miraculous comebacks. Spain feels most comfortable in a nil-nil impasse, dancing around like a matador before a calculated death blow. No team protects a lead like Spain.

Many of Messi’s biggest fans are from Spain, where he played his best professional years at FC Barcelona. Spain fans from Barcelona say the conspiracy theories about Argentina are a shame. “It takes some of Messi’s magic away,” Tony Bensadon, a 35-year-old fan, said. “I love Messi.” Spain’s Atlético Madrid supporters, for their part, have much love for the six Atlético players on Argentina’s team. In Spain’s La Liga, no foreign nationality is more represented than Argentina. For all Argentina’s enemies in the soccer world, they ended up in the final against a crowd that has nothing but respect for them. And could there be anything worse for a team that thrives on adversity?

Fresnillo said he was “expecting Argentina to be rough at the start to see how the refs react.” He anticipated Spain’s starting 11 having to go up against a referee working as Argentina’s 12th man. Instead, it turned out to be Spain up a player. At the most important match, the most consequential call went against Argentina: a red card disqualifying key midfielder Enzo Fernandez. Maybe against another team, it would have felt like a prologue to Messi’s greatest trick yet. But this was Spain. After 105 scoreless minutes came Spain’s inevitable winner.

Surely anyone watching would have a hard time believing that FIFA tried to rig the match for Argentina. In defeating Argentina, had Spain also proven their innocence? By spoiling Messi’s farewell, had Spain vindicated his magic?

Spain seemed to stand as proof that the tournament was not rigged, because why would FIFA choose Spain? Even some of the most serious soccer fans I know find Spain dull to watch. Its first World Cup title, in 2010, came after a goal in the 116th minute broke a scoreless tie. You know exactly what you’re getting with Spain. Spain made too much sense, the lowest betting odds from the start, the reigning European champions who regularly beat France.

Or maybe that was the point. Nobody looks too closely when Spain wins. Spain had the perfect cover to dispel suspicions. Maybe too perfect.

**

Days later, I’m still disoriented by the tournament’s absence. Covering the World Cup was a joy. Armed with media credentials, how could I not try to attend as many matches as possible? Gridlocked crowds at Penn Station, red-eye buses from Philadelphia and Boston, a three-mile hike through a thunderstorm in Mexico City – trivial costs for priceless experiences. I filed stories from a shawarma shop in Toronto, the New York City subway, and three airports. I ended up speaking with 149 fans from nearly two dozen countries, all tracked on my precious sourcing spreadsheet. Some of them repeated a motto cherished among World Cup veterans: “We were meant to meet.”

Across stadiums, new friendships formed and new rooting interests took root. Ecuador and Côte d’Ivoire fans swapped jerseys. Senegal and Iran fans danced under Palestinian flags. England and Mexico fans chanted “Fuck Argentina!” Spain and Argentina fans booed Trump at the final. Everybody bonded over how expensive everything was.

I wrote about some of the people I’ll remember, in stories for The New Yorker and The Washington Post. In Philadelphia, Edwin Hernandez, a 26-year-old from Ecuador, ate his first cheesesteak. In Boston, Jacob Kwaw, a 48-year-old musician from Accra, led Ghana fans in song while the Black Stars held firm for a stunning draw against England. In Toronto, Bara Sow, a 39-year-old fan from Senegal who couldn’t attend his team’s matches in the US due to the visa ban, marched to the stadium in a sea of green shirts. In Mexico City, Jesus Aquino, 35, was among dozens of Mexico fans waiting in the concourse to congratulate England fans after the greatest match any of them had ever seen. Before the final in New Jersey, Rene Morales, a 41-year-old Argentina fan from Guatemala, hoped to buy tickets outside the stadium but found nothing in his price range, so he ended up watching at a mall nearby with thousands of others.

Everyone’s back home now.

Like lots of people, I visited Japan recently.

I’m a prideful traveller, drawn to adventures into the unfamiliar in pursuit of wonder, a dwindling resource. Japan had been at the top my travel wish list for a decade, but by the time I got around to booking the trip last year, I was reading news stories about crowded shrines, long restaurant wait times, rising hotel prices, a glut of foreigners so disruptive that the government increased the visitor tax for 2026. My Instagram feed, once dominated by Mexico City and Lisbon, was now absolutely saturated with Japan spoilers. It felt like watching a movie trailer that reveals too much. Hoping to preserve whatever mystery I could salvage, I frantically scrolled past clips of Mount Fuji vistas and tatami-matted AirBnbs.

It was hard to look away, for fear of missing an essential recommendation. I made reservations at restaurants featured on magazine lists, vetted museums on TripAdvisor, scoped out the trendy neighborhoods and must-see sites. Maybe I was doomed to cycle through well-trodden paths crammed with fellow seekers, wandering in futile search of even the smallest whiff of discovery, desperate for surprise but seeing only what others have shown me.

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On my first night in Tokyo, in early December, I wandered through rainy blocks glowing neon and slipped into what looked like a hole-in-the-wall ramen joint in a gritty-looking alley, where I sat at a counter between other Americans, all of us snapping the same aesthetic photo of the steaming bowl before a background of cooks making noodles in the open kitchen. Afterward, I pulled up my phone to find a bar, somewhere low-key, authentic, with dim lights and few Google reviews. Somewhere frequented, of course, by locals. Where might my Japanese doppelgänger go for an after-work whisky? Maybe a book-themed cocktail bar on a quiet-looking street in the neighborhood’s residential outskirts. I found myself alone for blocks, turning into a dark alley of slim, three-story houses. A sign pointed to a door, which led to a narrow carpeted staircase lined with books and a globe. At the top, a man in a white bartender uniform met me at the threshold. He smiled warmly and greeted me in Japanese.

The place was small, six stools around the L-shaped bar, dark green walls with mahogany fixtures. Japanese whisky bottles glimmered amber in the orange light. Shelves squeezed across every possible surface, filled end to end with leather hardcovers, pocket novellas, manga collections, literary magazines, travel guides, and illustrated histories. I took it all in. You only get to experience something for the first time once, and I wanted to memorize every detail of the feeling. Jazz piano twinkled over the soft rumble of jovial conversation, a familiar patter of barely restrained voices bouncing around the space like ping pong balls. It took me a few beats to recognize – ah, yes, I knew that sound, the very last thing I wanted to hear here: that was the unmistakable trumpet of American English. The bartender guided me to a stool beside the three other customers. Their eyes all turned to me. “Hey, how’s it going?” one of them said. “Are you American, too?”

A couple from Chicago said they had visited Japan more than a few times, travelled all over the country, and had plenty of recommendations.

“Most people just go to Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka,” one of them said. “But there’s so much more.”

“Where are you going?” the other asked.

“Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto,” I replied. “You know, for my first visit, I just figured –”

“No, yeah, that’s great for a first visit.”

No shame in being a tourist. I embrace the label. I love a hop-on-hop-off bus tour. I snap selfies in front of all the iconic sights. I’ll wait in line for a meal I read about online. I’ll come home telling all my friends about the public transportation infrastructure, the bento box lunch on the bullet train, the 7-11 egg-salad sandwiches and fish-market sushi, the samurai artifacts at Osaka Castle and vintage sex art at the Museum of Roadside Art, the zen gardens, ancient shrines, and mesmerizing bamboo forests, no shortage of novelties for my American senses.

In Osaka, I signed up for a walking tour claiming to show the “dark side” of Japan, though the guide, it turned out, didn’t endorse the website’s description, which he called “click-bait.” “I prefer to think of this as a tour about the complicated social history of Japan,” tour guide Jay said. “But that wouldn’t get as much attention.”

Jay was a historian in his late 30s. Born in China, he had lived for a time in Brooklyn before settling in Osaka, his wife’s hometown. He wore an Adidas tracksuit and a knit beanie, dressed down to lead us to the neighborhoods on the other side of the railroad tracks. Here, hotels offered rooms for the equivalent of $5 a night. Barbed wire twisted above walls and along cement ledges to keep people from sitting. A massive residence for elderly people featured a spiral metal slide on its exterior – a fire escape that accounted for residents’ disabilities. A noodle shop founded by a former Yakuza member offered free meals to people who couldn’t afford to pay. An abandoned public housing project loomed in the dark sky, long awaiting transformation. Property owners painted red Shinto shrine gates on their walls to try to guilt people out of pissing in alleys. The most impressive structure in the neighborhood was the police station, gleaming in white tiles.

The neighborhood struck pangs of familiarity. The obstacles to keep people from loitering in public spaces, the obvious signs of unwellness in folks sipping from bottles in brown paper bags, the visible evidence of neglect. Every land has its impoverished pockets, shoved behind rivers and swept beneath highways. Once home mostly to butchers, the neighborhood now housed migrant workers, day laborers, and families with the lowest incomes. On more than one occasion over the decades, the communities here led protests against police brutality that ignited into riots.

When Jay took us to a pachinko parlor, a middle-age Australian white man on the tour asked what it was about the “Asian condition” that led to gambling addictions, because even in Australia, he said, he mostly saw older Asian people in the casinos and at his college parties he remembered Asian students being the only ones gambling.

“Not in America,” I interjected with defensive righteousness. “Lots of white people I know gamble there.”

Jay nodded in recognition: “Ah, yes, DraftKings.”

Certain collective battles bonded us. Here, too, old money closed ranks, corporate empires squeezed what they could from underpaid employees, and migrants from formerly colonized countries worked construction sites. In late-night cubicles around the country, where office workers toil long hours under bosses who reward seniority over merit, the relentless maw of modern capitalism tests the silent endurance of inherited wisdom. Amid the loneliness epidemic sweeping the digital age, old notions of patriarchy linger, in households and across the job market. Japan’s gender pay gap, around 24%, is one of the highest among developed nations.

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My Japanese doppelgängers weren’t hard to find once I knew where to look. One night in Kyoto, a Californian I met at a bar tipped me off to a spot by the river where a group of people were freestyle rapping. Swept up in the ancient grandeur of Kyoto’s shrines and gardens, I’d drifted away from any understanding of it as a real place where real people lived, much less rapped. But lo and behold, on the dirt promenade down by the river, six young guys in their late teens or early twenties stood in a circle around a boombox, beer bottles at their feet, spitting bars off the top of their heads like my friends and me at house parties years ago. I approached with the cautious fascination of a wildlife guide. Fully attentive to the performances, they didn’t acknowledge my presence except to wordlessly widen the circle to let me in. They ciphered in eight-bar rotations, staccato flows, punchlines drawing cackles, seamless transitions with each pass of the invisible mic. They wore puffy jackets and baggy jeans. One guy had cornrows.

I couldn’t help but notice that my pursuit of distinctive Japanese experiences often landed me alongside fellow tourists, while the authentic local immersions I stumbled into sometimes echoed my own country’s culture back at me. As a visitor from the superpower, my language was ubiquitous, my currency went a long way, and reminders of home often made me cringe. My Filipino ancestors suffered colonial oppressions at the hands of Japanese occupiers but I was born into the empire, a direct beneficiary of American hegemony. I wanted to apologize for the McDonald’s, the late-stage capitalism, the nuclear bombs. I confess that I physically recoiled, as if from a slur, upon seeing that there was a neighborhood in Osaka called “American Village.” I imagined cowboy steakhouses with John Wayne movie posters, so imagine my astonishment when I instead found Japanese shopkeepers my age in streetwear selling vintage basketball jerseys while bumping ‘90s hip-hop, imports that reflected things I did like about my country, a cultural exchange I could appreciate.

One afternoon in Tokyo, I was taking a meandering walk in the general direction of a museum I planned to visit, when I came across a big banner promoting a basketball game between the Shibuya Sun Rockers and the Chiba Jets. The game was that evening, two hours away, and people in Shibuya yellow and Chiba red were already starting to line up outside the arena. Never one to miss a clear sign from the sports gods, I beelined to the box office, contemplating how much I’d be willing to pay for courtside seats, only to learn that tickets were sold out. It took some pleading and persistence, but I managed to get a standing room spot next to the TV camera guys at the top of the packed stands, behind the hometown Shibuya fans, who chanted and sang and complained about the referees.

The sports gods blessed me that day. Of all the games to wander into, this one featured Japan’s best player, Yuta Watanabe, a star forward on the Jets and the national team that qualified for the 2024 Olympics, and he decided to put on a show for us. He’d played in the NBA for several years, and his world-class skills tore up the Sun Rockers defense. Cross-over step-back threes, hesi mid-range pull-ups, freight-train dashes to the rim, whipping the Chiba side into a frenzy, deflating Shibuya supporters into awe-struck resignation. I knew the feeling, had seen my own teams cut down by the wizardry of Lebron James and Patrick Mahomes, an experience as magical as a nightmare. Sitting on Shibuya’s side, I maintained proper decorum, hiding my glee as Watanabe soared for another spectacular dunk.

**

Around the world, across cultures and classes, a similar set of rituals plays out, ceremonies celebrating beloved games. I wrote about the universal language of sports for Condé Nast Traveler’s series on countries in this year’s World Cup, which kicked off this week. My contribution is a snapshot of beach football in Cape Verde.

**

Back in the States this spring, I’ve been covering the Knicks’ magical playoff run. In recent weeks, I’ve written about Spike Lee’s local sports bar and Victor Wembanyama’s arrival as New York City’s latest sports villain. This week, I wrote about Knicks fans booing Donald Trump when he attended Game 3 at Madison Square Garden and the raucous celebrations out in the streets after the team’s miraculous Game 4 comeback.

When I was 12, my mom signed me up for a summer basketball program that played against teams from other countries at a tournament in Italy. It was my first time flying alone, but that was nowhere near as intimidating as the prospect of spending two weeks with a group of boys I’d never met. Gathering for the first time at the airport in Milan, we sized one another up, dozens of adolescent strangers, age 12 to 17, conditioned for competition, stepping into a mad scramble for social positioning.

It was a treacherous environment. Some older boys exerted their dominance by punishing anyone who fell asleep on our long bus rides, flicking ears, plugging noses, slapping cheeks, pouring water into open mouths. One boy who tried to stand up to them got his backpack dumped out into the aisle, cascading a waterfall of papers, coins, playing cards, and CDs that tumbled to the carpet with distressing thuds.

You had to stay sharp to avoid embarrassment. You had to make cool friends who looked out for you. Everyone got got sooner or later. Even I had my slip ups. In Venice, I took a hit in a gelato fight, spoonfuls catapulted across the piazza, a chocolatey blob nailing me below the shoulder blade, smearing my gray Nike tank top. Another afternoon, in Rimini, I napped for too long and showed up late to our bus, where everyone was waiting, their glares converging on me like arrows, and as I slunk down the aisle in search of an open seat, an older boy flicked the bucket hat off my head.

But those were mild wounds, easily survivable, and my social status felt safe once I made friends with a crew of star players in my age group. But one boy on our team, Colin, seemed to never have much of a chance, stamped with misfortune from the moment he landed.

The airline had lost his suitcase. While the rest of us gathered impatiently by the arrival hall doors, eager to begin our grand adventure, there was Colin standing off with a coach and an airline official, sorting out a horror I didn’t want to think about. While the rest of us spent our first evening eating pizza and watching Italian television at the hotel, he was out buying a new set of clothes.

If only he turned out to be a standout talent on the court, then maybe his game would come to define him, but he rode the bench, a decent but unmemorable contributor. Halfway through our trip, his bag still hadn’t shown up. When we went to a waterpark, he didn’t have anything to swim in, so he could only watch.

I had the opposite problem: I didn’t know where to put my abundance of clothes. Other boys stashed their sneakers and shorts in lockers, but paying a fee just to store your clothes somewhere seemed like a ripoff when I could just carry my stuff. Of course, I realized within seconds that this was a mistake, but by then it was too late – the crew of cool new friends I rolled with was on the move, bounding to the slides while I tried to keep pace with my precarious load. I felt my face flush, the dilemma dawning on me: turn around and risk losing track of the group, or waddle behind the pack with my sneakers tucked into my arms like footballs.

Then a voice cut through my storm of concerns: It was Colin, offering to hold my stuff. As I tried to string together an expression of gratitude worthy of his sacrifice, this incorruptible saint of a boy said to me – and I swear he said this, I wrote it down in my journal that night – “If I can’t have fun, I can at least help someone else have more fun.”

Three days before the end of our trip, Colin’s bag finally arrived, an occasion I memorialized in my journal with all-caps in giant font: “COLIN GOT HIS LUGGAGE!”

Maybe it was an omen. The next day was our biggest game of the tournament, a rematch against Venezuela. After opening the competition with blowout wins over Italy and Greece, we had crashed into these boys from Venezuela who whooped us by 27 points, and worse, punked us, throwing elbows, bumping bodies, fouling hard. We bounced back to earn a spot in the 3rd place game, determined to salvage our dignity by finishing on the medal podium. It felt only natural that we had to go through Venezuela, the chance for redemption promised in every inspirational sports story.

We played with intensity, leaning into the physicality, pounding the ball down low to Keith, our hard-nosed team captain, who came through with tough buckets every time the game threatened to slip away. They double teamed him, slapped his arms, drove their shoulders into his back, but with a pump fake and a pivot he kept eluding their grasp. You could see Keith’s frustration rising as he made pleading glances at the referee.

With a minute left in the game, we were down by one point. We had the ball. There was no question who was getting it. As Keith rounded a screen, his defender grabbed his shorts so forcefully that they dropped to his thighs.

The referee blew the whistle for a foul but that wasn’t sufficient justice for Keith. In one swift motion, he pulled up his shorts, turned to his counterpart, and squared up with fists raised like a trained boxer. The boys traded swings, none connecting before coaches and teammates broke it up. Both boys were ejected, which felt unfair because Keith was a much better player than the boy who provoked him.

Somebody else on our side would have to shoot the free throws from the initial foul – shots that would determine the game’s outcome. My heart drumrolled. Our coach perused our bench in contemplation. I avoided eye contact, praying not to be the one. His gaze settled on the boy next to me, Colin. Not Colin! Poor Colin had already been through enough. Pure, sweet Colin, doomed to the trials of a callous God like Job of the Old Testament, now suddenly thrust into the fire of high-stakes competition without warning.

Thinking quickly, I asked our coach if I could go to the bathroom. His face flashed a hint of confusion, but he had the fate of our tournament to worry about so what else could he do but tell me to go ahead without taking his eyes off the court? I scurried through the locker room to the stalls in the back. A dusty ray of sunshine poured through a window above one of the toilets, drawing me toward it. I didn’t bother to close the door. I didn’t actually have to use the bathroom.

Standing over the toilet, with the golden light washing over my face, I bowed my head, closed my eyes, and asked God to guide Colin’s shots through the net please. I could hear the faint bounce of the ball, then endless seconds of heart-wrenching silence. I was still religious then, in the summer of 2001. I saw a universe where prayers are answered, goodness rewarded, and everything happens for a reason. Colin made the free throws, and all was right.

**

I know better now. There are a million reasons why a team wins or loses, and some of them have nothing to do with justice. Lately, I’ve been curious about one particular team: Italy’s men’s national soccer team, which has failed to qualify for three straight World Cups, the first former champion to suffer that fate. How did Italy’s storied soccer program fall so far behind the rest of Europe’s? Some Italian soccer agents, officials, and fans I spoke with believe that racist immigration laws are to blame. I reported on that possibility for a story in The New Yorker this week.

**

The struggles of Italy’s soccer team have amounted to a national scandal. But the country’s sporting decline has also extended to Europe’s next most popular team game, basketball. Italy won silver at the 2004 Olympics, and in 2006 Italian Andrea Bargnani became the first European-born player to get selected with the number-one pick in the NBA Draft, one of three first round draft picks from Italy that decade. Since then, Italy’s men’s basketball team has missed the Olympics four times and never finished higher than fifth. No player born in Italy has been selected in the first round of the NBA Draft in 18 years. As in soccer, France has surpassed Italy to become the preeminent European hoops power. France’s basketball program won back-to-back silvers at the last two Olympics, and produced six first-round NBA draft picks in 2025, as well as the number-one picks in 2023 and 2024, including Victor Wembanyama, a 22-year-old all-star descended from Congolese immigrants.

Wembanyama entered the league with rarified expectations and has already exceeded them, ascending faster than his peers and predecessors, performing never-before-seen highlights, instilling wonder with every soaring block and step-back three. In just his third season, Wembanyama has reached the NBA Finals, which tipped off this week. He faces off against the New York Knicks, a franchise that hasn’t won a title since 1973. For The Washington Post this week, I wrote about how notoriously surly Knicks fans, usually eager to channel their ire at villainous adversaries, can’t help but love Wemby.

I confess that I was late to soccer.

In childhood, I was not even a casual fan. I could name more golfers and hockey players than soccer stars, and I didn’t even care about golf or hockey. I had heard of Pelé, of course, an athlete I understood to be on the same mythical pedestal as Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan. I was vaguely familiar with Diego Maradona’s most famous goal but ignorant of his accomplishments. I recognized the faces of Team USA stars who entered my orbit when the World Cup rolled around. I knew of Ronaldinho’s mesmerizing brilliance from the Nike commercials that showed him dancing around defenders in street games that echoed AND1 basketball mixtapes.

The first World Cup match I can remember watching was the 2006 Final, where I developed an appreciation for Thierry Henry and felt outraged when Zinedine Zidane got disqualified for headbutting an opponent who seemed to deserve vigilante justice. The summer of the 2010 World Cup, I moved to New York City and got swept into the day-drinking nationalism that seemed to spill out of every sports bar. By the time the 2014 World Cup rolled around, my older cousin Jed, who’d nourished my formative interest in basketball and football, had started getting heavy into soccer, schooling me up on the key players, basic strategies, and betting lines. The summer of the 2018 World Cup, my friend Alex invited me to his bachelor party in Paris, where we went native: painting our faces, rocking shirts supporting the French team, embedding in crowds that erupted with every Kylian Mbappé scorcher en route to the title. When I found out Mbappé played for a club in Paris, I purchased his jersey, my first soccer shirt.

Now I was properly a soccer fan, announcing my status anytime I stepped foot outside in that jersey, inviting camaraderie, taunts, conversation. I didn’t want to front. I studied up – keeping pace with news articles, catching up on YouTube clips, turning on the biggest games. I felt ready to take the next step. I wanted a team in the world’s biggest soccer league. I had put off that decision. I had developed a fondness for various clubs in various countries, but didn’t touch the English Premier League.

I held no delusions about what it means to pledge allegiance to a sports team. I’ve learned that you get what you put in – a spiritual investment that risks agony in pursuit of ecstasy. Gamblers can run out of money or shift their stakes, but a serious fan has infinite reserves of emotion and nowhere to go. The teams I care about most, I inherited from my elders, who gathered to watch the Bay Area’s 49ers, Giants, and Warriors, passing down lore and loyalty. My childhood was completely devoid of any championships, riddled with close calls and deflated hopes, and thank the sports gods for that because when the good times did eventually come, I savored the moments like they might never return.

I scanned the EPL table like a dating app, my future flashing before my eyes with each name and logo. I tried out different teams, watching match highlights and following players on Instagram. The soccer lovers in my life advised me against the cursed clubs with racist fans or fascist backgrounds or a reputation for delivering heartbreak. My friend Ryan lobbied hard for Arsenal. No club presented a stronger argument: Arsenal had been Henry’s team, fielding a lineup of mostly Black players back when every other top European club was nearly all white. Arsenal hadn’t won a title since 2004, and had gone six straight years without finishing higher than fifth place, which appealed to me because I’m too savvy to jump on a championship contender. You don’t get much time at the top before the cycle moves on, and I wanted to build a nice base of yearning and sports trauma before my championship window opened.

By the summer of 2022, Ryan was ready to close the deal. He got us tickets to watch Arsenal in London, where I’d be unable to resist the siren song of the chanting Gooners. Minutes after we checked into our AirBnb, sprawled out on the couch, still sweaty from our walk from the train station, we got the notification: the Queen was apparently about to die. We were devastated by this terrible news. We rooted for her to hold on a bit longer. Ideally at least two more days, after our Saturday game. But nope. That night, her death was officially announced. The next day, the soccer games were canceled, our carefully drawn plans ruined so the nation could mourn. Though there were no soccer matches, the pubs were open as usual, so we spent our time there getting sloshed with the locals. Across the city, every ad was taken down, from billboards and bus stops and metro tunnels, every single one replaced with a portrait of the queen, rows and rows of that same ominous image everywhere we looked.

It was a sign. The sports gods couldn’t be more clear. They had gifted me with a formative memory of disappointment to forge a foundation of fandom. They had thrown before me an antagonist perfectly curated to awaken my tribalism. I was missing out on a chance to see my beloved Gunners so that a colonizing empire could honor a monarch whose wealth traced to theft? I had to resist those oppressive forces.

I entered my baptismal season as an Arsenal supporter filled with excitement, but then something terrible happened: Arsenal immediately surged to the top of the standings, holding a big lead late into the spring, a championship in sight. Could it be this easy? I panicked. I didn’t feel ready to celebrate. I told Ryan I couldn’t in good faith jump on a rocketship the moment it hit the stratosphere. So what happened next is probably all my fault: Arsenal collapsed, finished in second place. Then second place again the next year, and again the year after that. I watched more than a few games at an Arsenal bar in Brooklyn, riding the waves with diehards ever faithful but inevitably doomed. How much suffering did I need to witness before I felt I had paid sufficient dues? I prayed to the sports gods for mercy.

This season, Arsenal once again started strong, and again it looked like the same old story, with late season stumbles threatening another disappointment. This time Arsenal held on. I was at the Arsenal bar when the team won the championship. All around me, people were jumping, hugging, screaming, splashing their beers. I released myself into the sea of arms, became one with the spirit of revelry. I felt happy, fulfilled by a sense of sporting justice, grateful to be in the room, but I wasn’t floating anywhere near as high as the diehards around me. They had earned their dividends, and I had earned mine.

**

I wrote about that Arsenal bar, which is also a New York Knicks bar, for a story in the Washington Post this week about those two fan bases converging when their seasons climax in the spring. My dispatch chronicles a memorable May Tuesday when Arsenal’s championship celebration coincided with a historic Knicks playoff victory.

You can tell a lot about a person by who they cheer for in the World Cup. I have a soft spot for underdogs. Any population recently colonized, any diaspora facing oppression, any nation welcoming to underprivileged outsiders wins a key to my heart.

That’s not as simple as it used to be. France and Spain, two of history’s most aggressive colonizers, reap the benefits of their sprawling former conquests. Kylian Mbappé’s father migrated to France from Cameroon and his mother’s parents arrived from Algeria; Lamine Yamal’s parents came to Spain from Morocco and Equatorial Guinea. How do I reconcile my rooting principles when the descendants of the colonized grow up to represent the same nations that pillaged their ancestors? It’s a dissonance I’m familiar with as the American-born child of a mother from the Philippines. The legacy of colonialism breeds that uncomfortable tension, and the World Cup brings all that messiness into the spotlight, for everybody to think about.

This year’s tournament brings plenty of geopolitical chaos. For the past several weeks, I’ve been reporting a story for The New Yorker about the indignities of the United States hosting the event while blocking visitors from dozens of countries – mostly in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. I spoke to players, coaches, agents, and fans from Haiti, Iran, Senegal, Ghana, Cabo Verde, Brazil, Ecuador, Uruguay, and France, among other places. While the US is co-hosting with Mexico and Canada, three-quarters of the games will take place on American soil. Some of the countries banned from tourist visas have teams participating in the World Cup, which has left their players wondering if their loved ones will be able to attend the biggest games of their careers.

It’s a brutal irony for Haiti in particular, which has qualified for the World Cup for the first time since 1974. Of all the years to make it, it had to be when the event takes place in a country that has barred Haitians from visiting?

Haiti enters the tournament as a darling underdog taking on wealthier nations with more storied soccer pedigrees, and the team’s against-all-odds journey presents an inescapable reminder of the country’s long road from colonial oppression. After Haitian revolutionaries won independence from France, which had turned much of the land into slave plantations, the French empire demanded payment for the enslaved people who were freed.

That debt hampered Haiti’s development like an anchor. Players I spoke with said they felt motivated to represent that history for a global audience. “A lot of people don’t know Haiti was the first Black country to have independence” from European colonizers, Louicius Deedson, a 25-year-old forward who lived in Port-au-Prince before his parents sent him to a host family in the US at 13, told me. “We want to show people in the world that Haiti exists. We also have good things going on.”

Now, thanks to these players’ athletic abilities, millions around the world will see Haiti’s flags, hear Haiti’s anthem, and witness Haitian people perform on the brightest stage. They’ll do it in a country with a president who has demonized their homeland with racist insults and policies. Their presence broadcasts not just what Haiti has to offer but what America has sought to diminish.

You can read more about this in my story for The New Yorker.

For all of my two and a half years at the Washington Post, the threat of layoffs hung over us. Whenever job loss seemed imminent for at least some of us, we parsed vague management statements for clues into who might be included in whatever plan lay ahead. Gallows humor spread far and wide.

Nothing new for me. I’m a battle-hardened veteran of our industry’s collapse, after all. I was months into my first job at an alt-weekly in St. Louis in 2011 when budget shortfalls trimmed our unit of staff writers from five to four. At an alt-weekly in San Francisco in 2012, I watched an investment group buy the paper, then cut the staff and merge us with two other local papers. The Village Voice hired me in 2013 after most of its staff quit in protest of forthcoming layoffs; I was there when the owners moved the big historic newsroom out of Greenwich Village and into a small glass office on Wall Street. At my first BuzzFeed Christmas party in 2014, I remember seeing fire dancers on stage in this lavish hall filled with young journalists rescued from print, and thinking: Either we’re saved or we’re doomed. It turned out to be the latter a few years later, though we made the most of the money in the time that we had it, doing work that matched our ambitions, running up expense accounts, building our careers in the digital media spotlight, enjoying a ride we weren’t completely delusional about, until the ship sank and we soothed our disappointment with the understanding that it had always felt like a dream anyway. I remember using the term “scar tissue” a lot in those days.

I like to think those experiences forged a grizzled poise. Rescued from the wreckage of digital media, I arrived at the Washington Post grateful and cynical, a willing nomad who never gets too comfortable with a work laptop or email account. Some of my colleagues had been at the paper for decades, the latest in a chain of institutional knowledge spanning a century. At the height of the BuzzFeed News boom, there were moments when I imagined growing old with the place, but the Post had an actual track record. No longer was my job reliant on alt-weekly escort ads or venture capital speculation. Now my paycheck was in the hands of a billionaire who apparently cared enough about journalism to buy one of the world’s great newspapers. As newsroom morale sunk with each round of cuts and each wave of lost subscribers, I kept my head down and on the work, mercifully siloed in New York, quarantined from spiraling vibes.

There’s always a reason to hope, though it looks different for everybody. For me, a reporter in the sports section, it was the simple belief that we had the best sports section in the world, the standard bearer of a vanishing species, a distinctive offering in the newspaper’s bundle. Our section delivered vivid profiles, incisive analysis and blockbuster investigations, along with definitive beat reporting. My own entry point into journalism had been a local sports section, when I was six and my mom unfurled the San Francisco Chronicle every morning. Now some little sports fiend was spilling Pop-Tart crumbs all over my byline, reading about international matchfixing scandals, gender inequalities in NIL payments, violent mismatches in high school football, Steve Ballmer’s sealed testimony about Dennis Robertson, migrants displaced by police sweeps before the Paris Olympics, UFC fans uncomfortable with Trump’s affiliation with the sport, WNBA fans distressed by the toxic culture some new male fans were bringing, a teenager attempting a $1 million kick on national television, a gambling influencer allegedly orchestrating one of the biggest point-shaving schemes in US history. I was rolling.

The question nagging me was: How long until the paper’s top leaders made a decision that would compel me to quit in protest? That was my main concern, more than layoffs, which come and go like a tropical rainstorm. Nothing to do but watch for clouds, look for cover, and prepare for contingencies. You can’t stay dry forever.

In November, I spent a few days in DC, meeting with editors and gossiping with peers. I crashed on the couch of a colleague who had been my reporting partner on a recent pair of big stories that had earned much praise and many readers, pulling in pageview numbers like it was 2015. Over beers in his apartment, we basked in our hot streak, plotting ideas, celebrating the journalistic thrill of hitting a groove. Everything couched with: but who knows what will happen?

We started the new year strong. Our section published high quality stuff on the NFL playoffs, the college football title game, the latest gambling indictment, the epidemic of knee injuries among top women’s athletes, and more. The Winter Olympics were imminent, the World Cup was coming to America, a betting scandal was expanding across basketball. Lots of excitement to keep my mind busy and off the compounding horrors in every direction. What a comfort to immerse in sports, the great unifier, an unguarded lens into a society’s soul.

On the day our section learned that the Post was cancelling plans to send reporters to the Winter Olympics, the most viewed story across the whole website was one of ours, a scoopy follow-up that highlighted the impact of our work: the FBI was investigating the death of Colts owner Jim Irsay after we revealed that a doctor had prescribed him heavy doses of ketamine and opioids in his final months.

The week that followed was a slow blur. I remember looking at my phone a lot, Slack threads, texts, every morsel of news and rumor, bleaker and bleaker yet entirely uncertain. Surely those fools weren’t actually going to kill the world’s best sport section, I kept thinking, though I knew better than to let my guard down. I’d been through this before, of course, not so long ago. The proactive steps were no mystery: the reach outs, file downloads, financial calculations, social media posts, cover letters. I braced myself for the emotional hit, ready to feel and process like a healthy adult, grateful for the scar tissue protecting me.

When BuzzFeed News shut down, I moved with frantic energy, channeling my anxieties into productivity, reeling in my catastrophizing with the certainty that I was giving myself the best possible chance at a decent landing. Comfortably employed there for eight years, I hadn’t navigated the job market under the pressures of an expiring paycheck. I forged an optimism that I protected fiercely, assuring sympathetic friends that I was not only okay, I was thriving. Chaos is a ladder and all that. I was proven right, because within months, I got a new job I loved as much as any I’ve had, and three years later, with that job crumbling, I re-enter the market with a fresh batch of clips and the memory of having figured it out before.

This time, I didn’t feel as energized with the possibilities of what’s next. This time, I went through the motions of essential tasks, the work calls and edits, a night out with friends, all the while resisting ruminations like a broken dam. I’d worked there for only two and a half years, I didn’t expect a consuming period of grief.

The air felt heavier. I chalked it up to the fascism. Everybody was anxious and outraged. And when you’re anxious and outraged, every irritation feels magnified, right? Every oppression, interconnected. Rich losers ruining good things for everybody. It all adds up, even while you hope it never will.

There aren’t many places left that pay good money for good journalism. Fewer and fewer islands to hop to when the seas rise. In those final years at BuzzFeed News, as we toasted from the bow of our slowly sinking ship, we talked circles around every mistake and crossroads. We fumbled the bag on podcasts. We killed the features desk at its height. We launched a cartoonishly bad IPO. But even at the end, we held out hope there was a way to get back afloat. I turned down a buyout when the newsroom shrunk by half and figured I’d ride it out til the end, doing work I love with people I love. When the newsroom shuttered a year later, I felt sad but at peace, comforted by the long goodbye. I believed, right or wrong, that the decisions that doomed us were still largely made in good faith.

This feels nothing like that.

On the highway somewhere east of LA, my mind wandered to a dark place. The road shot through the desert flatlands and twisted up into the mountains. The strip malls faded into cattle ranches, and the road narrowed to a single lane. Pavement became dirt. Cell service faded away. Alone with my thoughts, chewing over the purpose of this reporting trip, I floated into a waking nightmare of my most devastating memories as a sports fan.

They each carried different flavors of hurt. My first heartbreak came in the 2002 World Series: the San Francisco Giants were three innings from their first championship of my lifetime before blowing a 5-0 lead in Game 6, and then falling flat in Game 7. It was a formative lesson on the emotional economics of being an obsessive sports fan. Caring about a team brought the potential for euphoria at the risk of real yet irrational pain.

I count my blessings as a San Francisco sports fan who has enjoyed more ups than downs in recent decades. My fandom was a lottery ticket I was born into, an allegiance passed down like a religion, with rituals like Sunday afternoons with the Niners and saints like Jerry Rice, who we recognize as the greatest football player of all time. I remember my uncles grilling burgers in the backyard, rice steaming in the kitchen, the living room lively with cheers and whines and chatter. Curses in Tagalog after playoff losses.

I try to remind myself that seeing my team lose a high-stakes game is actually a privilege. What’s the point of being a sports fan if not for the journey? We’re in it to get swept up in a communal hope, collectively honoring the pursuit of rare glory. It’s a good deal, a fun ride, especially if you can manage to keep your mind off the outcomes. It’s a nirvana I aspire for: Lord, grant me the discipline to savor the simple pleasures. Let me need nothing more than the mouth-watering anticipation before a big game, gazing into a horizon of endless possibilities but never imagining the best or worst, just being present, immersed in the wonder of athletic competition.

It’s a constant battle.

When the Niners reached the 5-year line with two minutes left in the 2013 Super Bowl, and when the Niners took a 10-point lead in the 2020 Super Bowl, and when the Niners took a 10-point lead in the 2023 Super Bowl, my fantasies got loose, whisking me away into a just future where Colin Kaepernick, Trent Williams, and Fred Warner raise Lombardi trophies. The sporting universe rightfully recognizes my team as the best in the league, and I strut down the street in my Niners jacket with championship pride, daring people to ask me about my team. I was already preparing the stories I would tell about our heroes, preemptively reminiscing about an epic journey to the promised land – and then poof. In came that sinking feeling, hopes swirling down a drain. The usual stages of grief follow. I reach acceptance when I can again access the joy from the big wins that led to the crushing loss.

I know a lot of this might sound absurd to people who aren’t obsessive sports fans. Why do I care so much? Part of it is civic pride for the place I’m from. More of it comes from the desire to share the joy of victory with people I love. Much of it is simply tradition, a committed practice of emotional risk, ingrained beyond comprehension. All of it surely stems from growing up as a boy socialized to understand sports as the only acceptable place to express sadness, anxiety or affection – an essential, cathartic outlet.

What builds over time, though, is the parasocial adoration I feel for the players who deliver us excitement. It is far more fulfilling and dignified to cheer on a person than an institution – to launder my loyalties through human connection, feel like I’m part of somebody’s quest for immortality, our fates forever entwined.

When the Warriors reached the NBA Finals in 2016 with the best record in league history, my feelings were almost entirely staked on my beloved Steph Curry. He was launching his legacy to new heights of basketball reverence, achieving something nobody, not even Michael Jordan, had done before. I wanted the world to see him as I saw him. I wanted to say that I was there at the start to witness the ascent of the greatest of all time. I wanted the sports gods to reward him for all the delight he had bestowed on me. Alas, justice can be elusive in sports. The moment the clock hit zero on Game 7, I turned off the TV. I didn’t want to think about sports for a while. I’ve avoided highlights from that series ever since.

Those emotions fuel the business of big league sports. Athletes with the power to bring joy to millions of people earn many millions of dollars. Their talents, habits and decisions can sway economies. They train in grueling conditions, compete under the pressure of a bright public spotlight, and risk their bodies for our entertainment. Pushing for their third-straight championship, Kevin Durant tore his achilles and Klay Thompson tore his ACL in the 2019 NBA Finals. That sucked worse than any scoreboard result. My sympathy for those guys washed out anything else I might have felt after the Warriors lost. I tried not to be a hater. By then, I was a veteran sports fan, grizzled and grateful, far removed from youthful crash outs. No more slamming beer bottles or throwing chairs or punching walls or kicking garbage bags. With the clarity of my hard-earned maturity, I understood that on the other side of my happiest moments as a fan were devastated counterparts, and now it was my turn to grit my teeth. Fair play. Good for Toronto, I forced myself to think. Good for Kawhi Leonard, the soft-spoken superstar who brought bliss to a fan base that had never before reached the basketball mountaintop.

That summer, Leonard entered free agency. Suitors lined up for his superpowers. No matter where he went, he was sure to sign for the maximum contract allowed under NBA salary cap rules. But how much were his services really worth?

It was that question that lured me into the mountains southeast of LA. For a week, I’d criss-crossed southern California, meeting with sources who knew Leonard, for a story about the business manager guiding his career, his uncle Dennis Robertson. Our investigation examined Robertson’s pursuit of unconventional deals, including asking NBA teams for things they aren’t allowed to offer, such as equity, houses, and sponsorships. We got court depositions, text messages, business filings, and property records that offer a glimpse into the shadowy secondary economy that drives player movement in the NBA – and the trail of conflict Robertson has left.

Following the money tied to Kawhi Leonard Inc., I toured some of southern California’s glitziest blocks – high-end hotels, penthouse suites, mansions overlooking the ocean. Exactly the sort of places you might expect to encounter on the trail of a wealthy professional athlete. But one location was more mysterious: a sprawling property across a rugged stretch of mountains in what seemed (on Google Maps) to be the middle of nowhere. So I drove three hours through the desert and up the mountains to see what was there, along the way contemplating the emotional responsibilities I’ve dropped on the shoulders of athletes, unsure how to measure the value of that divine labor.

To Uncle Dennis, it’s worth whatever he can get people to pay. Here’s a gift link to our story in the Washington Post.

My cousin had a friend who had a bookie. This was in the early 2010s, and whenever my cousin and I watched a big game together, he’d call his friend, who’d then call the bookie, to relay our bets. We kept it simple, sticking to point-spreads, usually putting in $50 combined, or sometimes $100 if our confidence bordered on certainty. We were serious sports fans, attuned to the slightest shifts in the competitive winds, every trend, every injury, every variable imaginable in every match-up. We stress tested our theories under the heat of each other’s cross-examinations. And when the games started, we probed for signs of affirmation in the smallest details: the confidence in a star player’s scowl, the energy in a team’s high fives, the optimism stirring in our guts like a bonfire. I wasn’t foolish enough to think we’d be right every time – to be routinely surprised is one of the great joys of being a sports fan. But with everything we collectively knew about the sports we bet on, what I couldn’t understand was how we kept losing nearly every bet we placed.

It felt uncanny, how much we lost. It was almost statistically implausible! There were devastating bad beats, where an unlucky bounce or unjust whistle made the difference. There were simple misreads, where we’d foolishly overlooked some definitive factor. Sometimes, if there was another game we were planning to watch that day, we’d try to recoup. My cousin would again call his friend who would call the bookie to relay the new bet. We’d lose again, typically, inevitably. I’d pay my share to my cousin in cash, and he’d pay his friend the next time he saw him. I soothed my disappointment by telling myself that I’d basically just spent a couple hundred bucks on an exciting shared experience, a reasonable price for a light-hearted memory to recount in perpetuity.

My financial investments in the teams I bet on never came close to matching my emotional stakes in the teams I actually cared about – those were the games that could drive me to euphoria, rage, and sorrow. That was plenty to stress about. If I had won more bets, I probably would have raised my wagers and kept on betting, but instead, each loss left me gunshy. When it came to betting on sports, I accepted that I was cursed. And so by my late 20s, at what should have been the prime of my sports betting career, I’d lost my taste for it, before I ever had a chance to place a wager on a phone screen.

It was a blessing. In another timeline, I’m sure I would have developed an unhealthy relationship with sports betting. I’m impulsive, loose with money, prone to prioritize immediate gratification over lasting benefits — and, when it comes to sports, I’m a bit of a know-it-all. I mean, I won my fantasy football league championship three times in four years! How could I turn down the chance to profit from all the time and energy I’ve poured into understanding these silly little games I love with all my heart??

Laws and technologies have changed since I hung up the betting slips. Now, I can bet on anything anytime anywhere without my cousin having to call anybody. There are live bets promoted on broadcasts, special parlays endorsed on podcasts, sign-up bonuses solicited on highlight shows. I won’t lie to you: I’ve had some fun in the online sports betting boom. Just a few weeks ago, I was at a crowded bar watching a Sunday afternoon football slate that was turning dull until a man sitting near me revealed that he had a long-shot parlay hinging on Jets quarterback Justin Fields scoring two rushing touchdowns – an unlikely outcome that suddenly seemed enticingly within reach after Fields scored one late in the third quarter. The whole bar rallied around this man none of us knew as he paced the hardwood, hands on his head, collar between his teeth. And when Fields crossed the end zone again, we mobbed this man with hugs, handslaps, and let’s fuckin’ go’s.

Sports betting is old as sports, but now it’s legal in more places than ever, and endlessly accessible with the tap of a screen. The two biggest sports betting markets — the US and Brazil — decriminalized it in 2018, and the third biggest — the UK — did so in 2005. Betting companies partner with leagues, broadcasters, and teams, all of them navigating an economy taking shape in real time, reckoning with the consequences as they come. Stories and studies chronicle the rising rates of gambling addiction. Scandals expose match fixers exploiting new opportunities.

For the past two years, I’ve been digging into this frontier, reporting on the betting industry’s impact on games and people: college players in Iowa suspended for online sports betting, the bookie at the center of the Shohei Ohtani gambling investigation, the tactics sportsbook use to keep bettors playing after losses, Jontay Porter’s spiral from fairy tale to cautionary tale.

My latest story came out this week, about a match fixing investigation in international table tennis, and I wanted to use that opportunity to finally start this newsletter I’ve been meaning to start for years. It’s nice to have a space to sort out thoughts that don’t make it into a story, play around with ideas, move with a little more indulgence. I named this newsletter Road Games because my primary indulgences are traveling and sports, which are coincidentally the things I most like to write about. In my reporting on sports betting, the two have especially converged.

The story I’m sharing today was 10 months in the making. It’s about how the expansion of sports betting has impacted niche sports, like table tennis and darts, that are suddenly now available on gambling apps. We found match fixers were offering players in those sports a sweet but tricky deal: by rigging their matches to swing bets, they could earn even more money than they would from salary or prizes. The reporting traces to documents I got through public records requests: “suspicious bet” alerts from sportsbooks that detect unusual wagering patterns, triggering investigations into matchfixing. One alert flagged bettors in New Jersey who won big on a pair of table tennis matches in Lagos. My reporting into that ongoing case examined the question facing leagues trying to crack down on corruption: How do you know if a player rigged a game?

Here’s a gift link to our story in the Washington Post.