How To Celebrate Sport
What one leader is doing this month should be the baseline, not the exception.
I want to talk about something that isn’t exactly sneakers. Except it is, because sneakers wouldn’t exist without sport, and sport wouldn’t exist without the people playing it in the streets.
This month, New York City has given us a masterclass in how to treat sport the way it deserves to be treated. Not as a luxury. Not as a product. As a thing that belongs to everyone who loves it.
I’ve been watching what Mayor Zohran Mamdani has put together around the 2026 World Cup and the Knicks’ NBA Finals run, and I keep coming back to a simple question: when was the last time you saw this level of intentionality directed at regular people, not just the ones who can afford a ticket?
We covered the brands on the pitch and the footwear stories worth following in yesterday’s issue, A Sneakerhead’s Guide to Watching the World Cup. This is a different kind of piece. This one is about the fans. The ones who never make it into the stadium but never stop showing up anyway.
Think about who that actually is. The kid who grew up playing stickball in the street because that’s what was available. The families running pickup games in side alleys and neighborhood parks until the lights cut out. The millions of people who will never go pro but are diehard supporters, who pass that devotion on to their kids, who give those kids something to belong to before the kids even understand why it matters. That is who sport is actually for. That has always been who sport is for.
The World Cup is here. It is happening across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. It is historic in scale and, by most accounts, historic in expense. Tickets at MetLife Stadium are out of reach for most New Yorkers. Most World Cup kits run well over $100. The whole enterprise can feel exclusionary in a way that sits awkward against the idea of “the people’s game.”
And then you see what NYC is doing.
