Mixed Zone blog

The most globalized sports league on earth deserves a companion podcast with a global audience that is as funny, smart, and kind-hearted as your favorite relative at the Thanksgiving table. The English Premier League is fortunate one such podcast exists: The Guardian’s Football Weekly.

Great Game Lab Co-Director Andrés Martinez spent a week in Poland giving talks at universities and meeting with various sports teams and organizations on a visit organized by the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw. The trip reminded him, as he reflects in this VAR, of how sport is increasingly binding people across borders, even when politics and other forces may not always do so, and how it also binds people across time, generations, and political eras. Martinez was left mightily impressed by Poland, an astonishing success story of the past few decades.

Philadelphia sports fans have long carried a reputation for being intense, passionate — and sometimes aggressive. So when Great Game Lab Documentarian Yana Pashaeva arrived at the Philadelphia Union’s final home game of the MLS regular season, she wasn’t sure what to expect.

Taylor Swift name-drops Real Madrid in her new album, and the Great Game Lab team — Swifties and non-Swifties alike — definitely have thoughts.

An NFL game in Dublin marks a new era for the league. To the delight of football fans in Ireland and beyond, the NFL is looking outwards to the rest of the world and inviting everyone in. But NFL -- especially Pittsburgh Steelers -- roots run deep in Ireland, as Aoife Kane explains, and shares about her childhood experiences playing flag football at U.S. Ambassador Dan Rooney's Dublin residence.

CPKC Stadium holds the distinction of being the first purpose-built stadium for a professional women's sports team in the world. Great Game Lab Co-Director Victoria Jackson went to Kansas City to see it for herself and to cheer on the NWSL's KC Current. She reflects here on why this stadium, this club, and these fans represent a milestone in the advancement of professional women's sports worldwide.

If you’re sad, like we are, that the 2025 Grand Slam season has come to an end, we recommend a big, beautiful biography that will fill you up with all the tennis you are missing. Arthur Ashe: A Life, by historian Raymond Arsenault, chronicles all the on- and off- court experiences of the man whose commitment to human rights and building a better world proved to make for a remarkable and inspiring legacy.

Europe’s football leagues are getting serious about enforcing “financial fair play” and “profit and sustainability rules” designed to ensure that clubs live within their means. All of which sounds good in theory, and as a means of avoiding the type of ruinous speculation that led some clubs in the past to go bust. But increasingly the financial straightjackets on ambitious mid-sized clubs with deep-pocketed owners are looking like an incumbent-protection racket that protects the bigger clubs and their privileged position.

No one did more to make the NFL the huge success it is today, or to drag it into the international limelight. And no one did more to jump-start American interest in the world’s dominant varietal of football, making the US a deserving World Cup host nation. And so no one would have been more delighted by the spectacle of his hugely popular Kansas City Chiefs opening their regular season in a beautiful World Cup stadium in the South American nation that is practically synonymous with soccer. A festival of all the footballs bringing us together.

So much of the history presented by the stories and cultural artifacts of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City is powerful and poignant. From our Great Game Lab lens, perhaps the coolest thread is the little-known role of African American baseball players in globalizing America's pastime.

American college soccer has long represented the best place in the world for many of the world’s best players to develop their game… not to mention that they got to enjoy a world-class education to boot. This will remain the case for countries without strong domestic leagues and robust investment. But for many of the major stars in the Women’s EURO, domestic league development pathways may prove comparable or even superior to the U.S. college route.

Anyone fancy an Uzbekistan vs. Ecuador in Dallas, a Jordan vs. Senegal in New York, or a Norway vs. Iran in Mexico City?