Andrew Kerth 
Every Wimbledon, it happens: a match builds toward its crescendo deep in the London evening, and then, at 11 p.m., it simply stops. Players walk off mid-drama, the crowd groans, and casual viewers around the world ask the same question, why does the most prestigious tournament in tennis have a bedtime? The answer isn’t tradition … Read more
Every summer, the world’s most famous tennis tournament doubles as the world’s largest strawberry stand. Over the Wimbledon fortnight, spectators eat their way through nearly two million strawberries, tens of thousands of punnets a day, drowned in thousands of liters of fresh cream, a tradition that has run continuously since the very first Championships in … Read more
This weekend, one champion will lift a golden cup crowned with a pineapple nobody can explain, and another will hold aloft a silver dish named after the wrong goddess. Wimbledon’s trophies are the strangest in major sports, and the strangeness is entirely genuine: the Gentlemen’s Singles Trophy (1887) is topped by a small pineapple whose … Read more
The 2026 World Cup final kicks off Sunday, July 19 at 3 p.m. ET at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, 82,500 seats, five miles from Manhattan, the climax of the biggest World Cup ever played. And this final will do something no World Cup final has done in 96 years of trying: stop … Read more
Has anyone ever won back-to-back World Cups? Yes, twice, and then never again. Italy repeated in 1934 and 1938, Brazil repeated in 1958 and 1962, and in the 64 years and fifteen tournaments since, no defending champion has managed it. Not Pele’s later Brazils, not Maradona’s Argentina, not the Spain and Germany dynasties. The World … Read more
Which World Cup team has the most expensive roster? By the measure the soccer industry actually uses, it’s France, whose 2026 squad carries a combined market value of about 1.52 billion euros, more than the bottom two dozen squads at this tournament put together. At the other end sits Qatar, whose entire roster is valued … Read more
The most goals ever scored in a single FIFA World Cup tournament is 13, by Just Fontaine of France at the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, a record that has stood for 68 years. But for the first time in a generation, the record book is under live assault: Lionel Messi’s 83rd-minute goal in Argentina’s … Read more
The top of the USMNT’s all-time scoring chart is a dead heat: Clint Dempsey and Landon Donovan, teammates for a decade and the two faces of American soccer’s rise, are tied forever at 57 goals apiece. Officially, Dempsey is listed first on a superior goals-per-game rate; unofficially, the argument is a national pastime. Behind them, … Read more
The winner of the 2026 Tour de France will collect 500,000 euros for three weeks and roughly 3,320 kilometers of racing, the largest single check in cycling, drawn from a total purse of about 2.3 million euros that pays everyone from the yellow jersey down to the last-placed finisher, who gets exactly 1,000 euros for … Read more
The 2026 World Cup contains the most lopsided population matchup in the tournament’s history: the United States, 340 million people, sharing a field with Curacao, population roughly 156,000, the smallest nation ever to qualify for a World Cup. That’s a gap of more than 2,000 to one. Entire American suburbs outnumber the island whose team … Read more