Newsletters, live coverage, a one-time magazine: The World Cup is becoming a testbed for journalism experiments
The FIFA World Cup, which begins on June 11, is by many measures the biggest World Cup in history: 48 teams will compete in 104 matches across the United States, Canada, and Mexico; ticket and transit prices are through the roof; and taxpayers have shelled out hundreds of millions of dollars to keep up with FIFA’s demands. But every World Cup, massive as it may be, is also deeply personal, a cauldron of hopes and dreams that are determined in moments by human skill and a little bit of luck.
“It’s one of those huge, gigantic things that sort of go beyond sports,” said Alexander Abnos, senior sports editor at The Guardian U.S. “It’s like a life-measurement mechanism.”
It’s also an opportunity for journalism to look a little different. I spoke to the people at three publications — including a one-time, single-issue magazine — to get an idea of what their journalism might look like this June.
A 156-year old operation gets a brand-new newsletter
The Guardian has been covering soccer (or football, as its U.K.-based staff would call it) since at least 1870, when it published a match report for the first-ever international soccer match, between England and Scotland. But while The Guardian U.K. has since grown into a robust soccer-coverage operation, with match reports and the Football Weekly podcast, its American operation until recently had just one person — Abnos — covering the sport. That changed in the lead-up to the World Cup, with the hiring of two staff writers, two video producers, and an assistant editor.
For the World Cup, Abnos told me, the Guardian’s U.K.-based soccer team will be doing what they do best: covering matches, writing up analyses, and giving plugged-in fans a look at team dynamics behind the scenes. But Abnos thinks the World Cup is also an opportunity to reach fans, particularly Americans, who are only just beginning to get into the sport.
“I think part of the reason a lot of people, especially in the U.S., gravitate toward soccer is that it is connected to the rest of the world in a way that our other sports aren’t,” Abnos said. Abnos and his team are giving them an entryway into the sport with The World Behind the Cup, a newsletter dedicated to World Cup history that will run for eight issues before the tournament begins.
The newsletter will be helmed by Jonathan Wilson, a U.K.-based soccer writer with an encyclopedic knowledge of the sport’s history who has been watching World Cups since the 1982 tournament, when he was six.
“I didn’t know what was happening at the time, but in retrospect, I clearly recognized the World Cup is this incredible gateway to the world,” Wilson told me. With the newsletter, he plans to dive into the sociopolitical realities of that gateway, starting with a story about how countries use the tournament as a way to project a national identity. It’s a particularly potent time to be covering those issues, given the political realities of the United States in 2026, and Abnos has been talking to his colleagues in the Guardian’s D.C. bureau about how their coverage might overlap with his team’s usual fare.
Once the tournament begins, Abnos told me, subscribers to The World Behind the Cup will start receiving Wilson’s regular newsletter, which features match recaps and other updates from the world of soccer. Abnos and his team are also planning to experiment with shortform video throughout the tournament, and the Guardian Football Weekly will be live-taping from the United States throughout the tournament — the podcast team will spend the group stages taping from L.A. and then move to New York, where among other things they will do a sold-out live show at the Bowery Ballroom.
All of that, Abnos said, should help build up the Guardian U.S.’s soccer audience. “We’re not here just for the World Cup,” Abnos told me.
Abnos, who grew up in Kansas City, has a personal hope for the World Cup: That he’ll get to go to that city’s Arrowhead Stadium to cover the Argentina-Algeria match on June 16.
“Schedule-wise it’s not a great fit, and I’d have to take a kind of crazy flight to get there, and I’ll only be able to be there for 24 hours and basically wave hi to my family,” he said. “I don’t care at all. I cannot wait to go there.”
“Live coverage is going to be absolutely key to what we do.”
In 2022, the year it was acquired by The New York Times, The Athletic sent 21 reporters to Qatar to cover the World Cup. This year, it’s sending over 100.
“Our live coverage is going to be absolutely key to what we do,” said David Jordan, The Athletic’s head of global soccer. “It’s always a huge driver of audience, but also a big surface that people come to for the first time when they see our coverage. The demand, increasingly, is on instantaneous coverage.”
Much like Abnos, Jordan thinks the people coming to the Athletic will be equal parts diehard soccer fans and people who are experiencing soccer for the first time and want to learn more about it. So The Athletic is launching three daily newsletters — one for “every level of soccer fandom” — as well as podcasts and explainers in text and video. They’re also launching a dedicated World Cup home page and a predictions game for the tournament, similar to one they ran for this year’s March Madness, so that audiences have even more reason to come back each day.
“We’re aware that there’ll be lots of people who will come to this World Cup on the day it starts and be like, ‘What is this?’” Jordan said. “We want to meet that challenge of speaking to the largest possible audience we can, from newcomers to diehard fans, but we also want to use this moment to grow our soccer audience [even after the World Cup].”
But it’s not all match reports and rule explainers: this year, The Athletic is speaking to fans from all 48 World Cup nations for a project about the language of soccer and what their national team means to them. The hope, Jordan told me, is that the project will give readers of The Athletic a deep understanding of teams and countries they previously would never have given much thought to.
“Sport and politics are going to overlap in this tournament in particular,” Jordan said. “Trying to understand these teams and what they’re really about, through the voices of the people who follow them and care about them, would be really cool. There’s a lot of fun to be had at the World Cup. If we can be a place that brings people joy and that they go to enjoy themselves, then, then I think we are doing something right.”
A one-time Golden Goal
Miguel Salazar and Alex Shephard are not, on paper, sports journalists; Salazar works for the New York Times Book Review and Shephard is a senior editor at The New Republic, where he and Salazar met. Nor are they magazine publishers. Yet they are, for this World Cup, launching a limited-time newsletter and single-issue magazine called Golden Goal, named for a type of tiebreaker that is no longer used in professional soccer.
“We have a group chat with a bunch of people who watch soccer, and one of our longest-running bits was that the glossy soccer magazine of our dreams would cover these more evergreen stories, or stories that are more out of left field, or aren’t in the news,” Shephard told me. “The idea of soccer explaining the world is a little hackneyed; there are plenty of places you can go if you want to understand what’s happening in soccer right now and what that says about the world. What we’ve kind of lost are things that take a step back and are more reflective or quiet or just try to figure out the meaning of things. Not their significance or their impact, but what they mean.”
After years of kicking the idea around, Salazar and Shephard decided to finally turn the bit into reality for this year’s World Cup. They started by reaching out to writers and designers whose work they admired to see if they would be interested. All of them said yes — even though, as Salazar and Shephard pointed out, they would likely be paid little, if anything; some writers asked for payment in the form of a Golden Goal-themed jersey instead of money.
“I think the fact that this is a decidedly non-professional, non-profit seeking thing is part of its appeal,” Shephard told me, “as is the fact that it’s something that we’re just doing once and throwing it out there for the fun of it.”
Designers Alejandro Torres Viera and Eduardo Palma came up with the magazine’s visual language of bold colors and big text, and Salazar and Shephard, and Versa in Illinois is printing the magazine, which will have a single run of somewhere between 500 and 1000 copies.
“We love print, but also we want to create something that feels like it exists, as opposed to just being on the internet,” Salazar said. “Part of the approach is to create something that’s also literary, that feels artful, and I don’t think we can do that and be responsive or reactionary to the day to day news cycle.”
Golden Goal is decidedly international, with writers from around the world contributing to create a picture of what the World Cup looks like from places that otherwise might go overlooked in soccer coverage, like Uzbekistan and Haiti. The newsletter will allow Golden Goal to be slightly more in the mix as the World Cup plays out, but even that will only publish once a week and not necessarily respond to the news. A piece by Bolivian novelist Rodrigo Hasbún about his country’s national team, which ran just before they played against Iraq for a spot in the World Cup, is entirely about the 1994 World Cup — the last time Bolivia qualified for the tournament — and makes no mention of the fact that Bolivia eventually lost to Iraq, which means it won’t be in this year’s World Cup either.
“So much soccer media is driven by digital demands,” Shephard said. “I think one of the weaknesses is a loss or an erosion of perspective, and what we’re trying to do is find a way to regain some of that. In some ways that’s a challenge, because you have to think about what is worthy of lasting that long.”
Salazar and Shephard launched Golden Goal on Kickstarter in late February with a goal of $10,000, which they hit in less than two weeks, though they recently added a stretch goal of $15,000 after realizing they will have higher costs than they previously estimated. They’ve been spending the time since then building up their Instagram presence — a collaboration with Copa90, the soccer-focused YouTube channel, brought in many Bolivian followers after Hasbún’s piece went live — and putting the magazine together, which Salazar said has taken up “about 80%” of his time outside his day job. Once the magazine is printed, it will be sent to Salazar and Shephard’s homes in New York, after which they’ll have to spend even more time sending them out to Kickstarter backers.
They’ll also be hosting events in New York during the World Cup. They started with a trivia night at a bar in Brooklyn, which they plan to repeat, and are also planning a screening of the film Offside, by Iranian director Jafar Panahi, followed by a panel discussion with Iranian writers, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). There will be a launch party, because every magazine — even if it exists only once — needs a launch party.
“The community that we’re building is obviously ephemeral, because it’s just rooted to this magazine that is going to come out once and probably never again, but I think it does answer a kind of calling for a space that you can occupy as someone who might be ambivalent about the tournament in a lot of ways,” Shephard said. “One of the things that I’m most proud of is how little of it is about Donald Trump and [FIFA head] Gianni Infantino..”
Instead, said Salazar, who is Colombian and remembers his father waking up at unreasonable hours to watch the 2002 World Cup, which was hosted by Japan and South Korea, the idea is instead to focus on how this tournament — run by a famously corrupt institution and used to whitewash the reputations of countries at the expense of taxpayers and host cities — can be deeply personal.
“A lot of the players [on the Colombian team] are sort of like me, in the sense that some of them left Colombia very young, and they’re part of this diaspora, but are still representing the country, and that helps me feel joy and a sort of kinship with my country in ways that I don’t feel day to day,” Salazar said. “We’re reclaiming the tournament, almost, for us and for our readers.”