Mixed Zone blog

The Great Game Lab celebrates Andrea Kimi Antonelli, who just became the youngest ever F1 World Champion, because he embodies everything we love about Gen Z's approach to sports.

The Great Game Lab fired up the WhatsApp to chat with some recent notable collegiate athletes from Australia about the state of Aussie-American sporting relations, which seem to be having a moment.

Now what? That is the big question hovering like a menacing cloud over the world’s most followed sports league after Manchester City, the English Premier League’s most successful club over the past two decades, has been found guilty by an independent commission of 114 out of 115 charges that it breached league financial rules to gain an improper advantage on the field. Andrés Martinez weighs in.

October feels like peak sports month, with so many leagues in so many sports getting down to business. With that in mind, the Great Game Lab walked about campus to check out the diversity of teams being repped by students.

North Carolina's fabled collegiate football program went to Ireland for a weekend of sport diplomacy and pints. The Tar Heel women brought along Bill Belichick’s team too.

Season 4 of "Ted Lasso" follows former AFC Richmond men's head coach back across the pond to lead the recently launched women's team. The new season proves to keep it real and showcase the realities -- the brilliance and the challenges -- of professional women's football.

In exploring how sport connects US to the world, we normally focus on tectonic shifts transforming global media, the sports industry, and international diplomacy — things happening far beyond our campus. But in a telling sign of the times, our own ASU Sun Devils are heading off to play an American football game at London’s Wembley stadium, the other football’s ultimate cathedral.

World Cups used to feature rare encounters between separate footballing civilizations, each with their own distinct style and players not known to the rest of the world. Globalization has changed all that, with World Cup rosters increasingly resembling a fusion of teammates and rivals from the top European leagues.

The great economic thinker who championed free trade and open markets was Scottish, but he’d still appreciate how England’s national team is proving him right. England has embraced a radical globalization of its domestic league, and its domestic product (the national team in international competition) has improved considerably as a result, notwithstanding that inexplicable collapse to Argentina in the semifinals.

While we are sad that the 2026 FIFA men’s World Cup is now over, we are also excited to look ahead to the 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup in Brazil. This 2026-27 academic year, ASU’s Great Game Lab will be researching and highlighting Women’s World Cup stories that showcase our major inquiry: how the US connects to the world through sport. Only 339 days to go!

Sanctions sidelined Russia from participating in international soccer, but the Russian public can still watch North America's World Cup.

The World Cup in Philadelphia is over — 6 games, 410,000 fans, 290,000 beers, 26,500 cheesesteaks, and one of the most-attended FIFA Fan Festivals. Great Game Lab documentarian Yana Pashaeva was there for the Croatia vs Ghana game on June 27.