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Welcome new readers! The SportsThink Weekly Review highlights my favorite sport-related reading of the week. Most articles are recently published, but some are not; the only rule is that I’ve read them within the past week. Some are relevant to my day job as a professor teaching courses on the business, history, and philosophy of sports. Others are just plain interesting, relevant to my life-long obsession with the games we play. I also occasionally share articles and assorted musings on Twitter. The newsletter is free, but comes with two requests. 1. I’m always open to suggestions, so send me the good stuff that you read! 2. If you enjoy the newsletter, please share it with other folks who might enjoy it as well. Finally, I try to focus on non-paywalled writing, but if you find yourself unable to access anything, just hit reply to the email and I’ll do my best to get you a copy. Thanks for reading!
Happy Friday, everyone, hope that all is well in your world. It’s been an eventful week in Sports World, with a World Series no-hitter and another unexpected fringe sport cheating scandal. First it was chess, then bass fishing, and now, cornhole. Is nothing sacred? Just a couple reads and a short newsletter this week, hope you enjoy.
This is fantastic. Another installment in what is shaping up to be an excellent series, where Phillips works through the histories of 22 significant World Cup goals ( I shared the Maradona Hand of God story a little while back). This is effectively a cleaned up podcast transcript, so the writing style is a little funny at parts, but that’s a minuscule complaint (and you can always listen to the story if you prefer). In this edition, we get the story of the first ever goal scored at the World Cup, but also an efficient history of early international soccer tournaments, Ceylon’s transition from a coffee based economy to a tea based economy, and a whole lot more. Really well done. Worthwhile even if you’re not a soccer person.
What if the NBA Developed Its Player Pipeline? (Tom Farrey, Aspen Institute)
Not the most entertaining read, but a nice speculative piece on reshaping approaches to athlete development. Farrey remains the best mainstream voice on the necessary changes in youth sports. A good one for folks interested in sport policy, athlete development, and youth sports in general.
As always, thanks for reading. Please send along interesting articles and please share the newsletter.
See you next week,
Tolga