Mixed Zone blog

The Valley of the Sun isn’t exactly known for snow, but that hasn’t stopped the Great Game Lab from getting excited about the Winter Olympics. With Milano Cortina 2026 around the corner, we took a walk around campus to check the temperature on Olympic excitement.

 

If you are looking forward to the Australian Open as much as I am, chances are you will enjoy the first full season of The Players Box podcast as much as I will.

Running is a shapeshifter. It serves us in different and overlapping ways as we move through our lives and choose to move by running. Running is forever profound in this way. At the same time, as Nicholas Thompson points out in the new memoir, The Running Ground, running is “the simplest of sports.”

The Great Game Lab is primed for FIFA's World Cup draw to be held in Washington on December 5. We walked about our Arizona State campus to gauge how primed the rest of our community is.

Our latest Scrimmage explores baseball diplomacy between the U.S. and Japan after an exceptional performance by the L.A. Dodgers in the World Series. Jason Coskrey of The Japan Times, Kerry Yo Nakagawa, founder of the Nisei Baseball Research Project, and Professor Derek Moscato of Western Washington University, weigh in on what this means for the 150-year-long relationship between the two nations.

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.