The best matchdays at a World Cup are the ones that quietly stack drama on top of each other until…
For three weeks the World Cup has been a sprawling, generous thing — twelve groups, forty-eight teams, a fixture list…
Some matchdays you watch for the drama of who survives. June 26 was the other kind — the day the…
There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over a living room at the end of a long matchday,…
The last night of a World Cup group stage has a texture all its own. Six matches, three groups still…
Every World Cup runs two tournaments at once. There is the one you see on the bracket — the grind…
The last time Spain lost a football match, Lamine Yamal was sixteen years old. It has been so long that…
Spain have lifted the trophy at MetLife Stadium, the individual awards have been handed out, and every market that mattered…
Two summers ago, in Munich, Spain beat France in a semi-final. Last summer, in Stuttgart, they did it again —…
I’ve watched Lionel Messi play World Cup football across two decades, from a teenage substitute in Germany 2006 to a…
I have been waiting most of my adult life to write a sentence like this one: on June 24, Canada…
There is a number that sums up Spain’s tournament, and it is not in their attack. It is in their…
I still remember the moment the final whistle blew at MetLife Stadium. Thirty-nine seconds into the second period of extra…
There is a phrase Canadian soccer fans have spent a lifetime never getting to say, and on June 28 we…
There is a version of this tournament that nobody predicted, and it is the one we got. Not a bracket…
Two games. That is all that stands between four teams and a World Cup final, and both of them are…
Somewhere in a Toronto pub this week, a group of us worked out that we had never, not once, discussed…
A World Cup quarter-final has a different feel from every round that comes before it. The crowds thin out a…
The bracket has shrunk to eight, the scorers have shrunk to seven, and the number of teams with a legitimate…
There is a number that has quietly hung over this entire World Cup, and it is nineteen. Nineteen is the…
There is a number that has sat untouched at the top of the World Cup record books for sixteen years,…
There is a small, quiet moment that happens before every France game at this World Cup — the camera finds…
The record did not change hands in a final. It changed hands in a bronze match — a 6-4 defeat,…
The moment in a knockout match that defines a career is rarely the moment the player sees coming. Kylian Mbappé…
Every good tournament has a night that closes a chapter, and this is ours. When Colombia and Ghana finish under…
The clock at BMO Field had already turned red — 90+4 — when Rafael Leão swung in a cross and…
I’ve covered enough award ceremonies to recognize genuine shock when I see it. When Rodri’s name was announced as the…
The romance of a World Cup usually lives in its outsiders. The Cameroon of 1990, the South Korea of 2002,…
There are fixtures that carry more than three points, and this is the heaviest of them all. England and Argentina…
Some matches are about survival; this one is about pride and position. Colombia and Portugal are both already through to…
