A World Cup Story
How I Spent the Better Part of My Summer
Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on.
In addition to my posts here, I co-host a podcast titled “Your Leadership Podcast,” which is available on Spotify and wherever fine podcasts are available. I write about law and legal education at TaxProf Blog and for several years co-hosted a podcast about technology and law titled “Your Future Law Podcast.“ My older blog about Pittsburgh and renewing cities, Pittsblog, is still available online, as is my original blog about law, technology, and governance.
Not only did I spend weeks of the Summer of 2026 glued to my TV screen, watching World Cup soccer, but I also wrote near-daily essays on Facebook about my reactions. My audience? My dozens of what Facebook calls “friends.”
Many of those people are my friends beyond Facebook. Their responses to my essays being pretty positive on the whole, via Facebook comments and private messages, I’ve combined the essays in a single document.
The exercise was revealing: I wrote nearly 23,000 words in total! For a lot of college and university professors, that’s a Summer’s worth of effort.
Call it, then, “how I spent the better part of my Summer,” or one fan’s journey through soccer’s looking glass. Add my narration to your own, or enjoy my version of the tournament vicariously, as a partial substitute for your own experience.
Here it is, with the title, “A Summer of Soccer: The World Cup 2026.”
My Dean will never care about my effort or yours, and none of what I wrote is publishable as an scholarly journal article or book chapter. But I had a lot of fun along the way, and I got to put my 1970s “old school” journalistic training to use. I once learned to compose at a typewriter keyboard, in a newsroom. That explains the header image! Maybe someone will find it interesting, amusing, or even useful.
Next time, I’ll find a way back to topics other than soccer. The Fall semester looms; my courses begin in only three weeks. And I have a lot of additional writing to do!
Thanks for sticking with me.