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THE WARMUP
Happy Sunday. The Back Page is open.
This week, the World Cup roster leaks before the party, North London has its best and worst season in years, a developer builds a newsletter overnight and gets 5,000 subscribers in six days, and Kyle Busch is gone too soon.
Grab a cuppa and settle in.
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THE LEAD
🌍 The rosters are real now
The World Cup is less than three weeks away.
On Tuesday, the U.S. men’s national team is having a party to announce arguably the most talented roster the Yanks have ever assembled for the world’s biggest sporting event.
Of course, the roster was leaked to The Guardian on Saturday—the Sunday Back Page thinks this was calculated after most countries announced their rosters late last week—so Tuesday will be more of a love-in at South Street Seaport in New York City. I’ll be there as a card-carrying U.S. Soccer Insider.
South Street Seaport is 12.5 miles from MetLife Stadium, the site of the World Cup final. Barring a near-miracle, American fans know Tuesday will be as close as the USMNT will get to MetLife this summer. If you’ve seen the prices for the final, then you know I won’t be there either. Get-in prices are roughly $11,000 per seat.
The USMNT’s World Cup path is West Coast- and Central U.S.-based. According to Kalshi, the U.S. is the slight favorite (41%) to win Group D and has 82% odds to advance from the group.
Pulisic at AC Milan, Balogun at Monaco, McKennie at Juventus, Antonee Robinson returning to full fitness at Fulham after a knee injury that cost him a large chunk of the season, Chris Richards at Crystal Palace, Weah at Marseille and Tyler Adams at Bournemouth. This is a roster of players at top-flight clubs doing real things in Europe every week. For several of them, this is the moment they’ve spent their careers building toward.
The biggest omissions — Tanner Tessmann and Diego Luna — were due to injury. The Gio Reyna stans are psyched he made the roster under Mauricio Pochettino. This isn’t Jurgen Klinsmann leaving Landon Donovan at home in 2014 with an agenda behind it. This is a coach making hard calls on players who weren’t fully healthy.
England announced on Friday and owned the weekend conversation. The U.S. leak dropped Saturday. Make of that timing what you will.
June 12. SoFi. Paraguay. It’s here.
— Ian Powers
THE QUESTION
❓ Sunday trivia
Which player holds the all-time World Cup scoring record?
A) Eusébio
B) Miroslav Klose
C) Gerd Müller
D) Lionel Messi
See answer below 👇
THE READS
📖 The best things we read this week
Each week, we curate 4-6 of our favorite reads from this week. The selections came from our own curation and from dozens of submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.
If you build it, they will come
Yahoo Sports! newsletter guru Kendall Baker posted on X, wondering what it would look like if someone delivered every MLB box score to your inbox every morning. Dense. Complete. No editorial. Just the data, the way the agate used to run in the back of the sports section.
Jeff Blankenburg read it, started building that night, and had 5,000 subscribers six days later. The list is growing by roughly 1,000 a day. It’s free. It arrives at 5 a.m.
Subscribe to get your baseball agate page delivered to your inbox: boxscore.email
Lane Kiffin finally noticed something
Carron J. Phillips doesn’t let Lane Kiffin take a bow for leaving Ole Miss. When Kiffin told Vanity Fair that top Black recruits were being steered away from Oxford by their families because of the school’s racial history, Phillips pointed out the obvious: Kiffin spent years there as the state’s highest-paid employee and never used that platform to change anything. Now he’s at LSU, whose nickname traces back to a Confederate military unit, accepting credit for leaving a place he helped sustain.
The timing matters. The Louisiana legislature is currently considering a redistricting bill that would likely eliminate a majority Black congressional district. That would be in Baton Rouge—the same city where Kiffin is now coaching, recruiting Black athletes, and telling the world how much better it feels there.
The weight of 22 years
Hunter Machon’s piece on Arsenal winning the Premier League title is the kind of writing that earns its length. He opens with a shirt at the back of a wardrobe — a Bergkamp, maybe a Henry (the answer should be Tony Adams) — and what it means to finally pull it out again after 22 years.
As a Liverpool fan, I’ll admit this made me feel meh. But one of the reasons this newsletter exists is to push past the echo chamber. Read things that challenge you. Machon did the work here, and Arsenal fans deserve this one.
From Madrid to the brink
While Arsenal fans dust off their Henry shirts, their neighbors at Spurs are staring down the final day of the season, hoping to avoid relegation.
Sportsclusive and Asher Lewis trace exactly how a club that reached the Champions League final in 2019 got here: the managerial carousel, the Kane departure, the stadium debt, the loss of identity.
The “Dare is to Do” motto has never felt more hollow. I mean, even Daniel Levy is no longer there to blame. Sunday’s final day could determine whether this is a temporary decline or something more permanent.
Claire B. Lang on losing Kyle Busch
The Sunday Back Page submission cutoff is Thursday at midnight. This piece was published Friday. I’m running it anyway.
When Claire B. Lang of the Dialed In Journal wrote about Kyle Busch’s death, she didn’t write a career retrospective. She wrote about date nights. After races, Busch would come into the studio and hang out with Lang while the crew chief picked out a sappy song. NASCAR would come looking for him and be told: he’s in with Claire doing “Date Night.” That detail tells you more about who Kyle Busch actually was than any win total could.
We do what NASCAR does in tragedy. We lean on each other. We hold on to the good memories. We do not fall apart but fall together. It’s hard - and it is going to be sad.
He died of sepsis caused by acute pneumonia. Not a crash. Not something the sport had prepared us for. That’s what made Thursday so disorienting — NASCAR fans carry the knowledge that any weekend could bring the worst. This wasn’t that. This was something else entirely.
THE LISTENS
🎧 The best podcasts we heard this week
Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite podcasts. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.
The PWHL has a champion
The IX Sports Podcast is one of the better women’s sports outlets working right now. Host Maya Smith brings in Montréal Victoire beat writer Dylan Nazareth to break down how the Victoire swept the Ottawa Charge in four games to win the first Walter Cup in franchise history, and how Marie-Philip Poulin, because of course it was Poulin, walked away with playoff MVP.
They also get into the PWHL’s expansion to San Jose and what that means for Montréal’s roster heading into next season. Thirty-five minutes, well spent.
A guilty pleasure, fully justified
Knicks Film School sits in an interesting place: t’s fan-first, but Jonathan Macri has built something that serious journalists show up for. Dexter Henry of the New York Post is in this episode. That’s not an accident.
When the Knicks came back from 22 down to beat the Cavs in overtime in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals at MSG, Macri did what he does best: relived every moment of it with the energy of someone who couldn’t sleep after. GMAC (Andrew Claudio) joins later, too. An hour and 19 minutes of people who care deeply about this team making sense of something that probably shouldn’t have happened.
THE WATCH
📺 The best videos we viewed this week
Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite videos. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.
Why lefties are weird in baseball
Former MLB pitcher Trevor May has been putting out smart, watchable baseball content on YouTube, and this one is worth your time.
He goes into why left-handed players are excluded from certain positions and skills: no lefty catchers, no lefty shortstops, and the reason southpaws essentially can’t throw a splitter.
May has the credibility to explain the mechanical and structural reasons behind it all, and he does so without making you feel like you’re watching a clinic. Good baseball nerd content for a World Cup buildup week when you still want your baseball fix.
And please don’t hate me for featuring another former Met in The Watch this week.
THE PRESSROOM
🗞️ Who’s making moves in the newsletter space
Mike Tanier is moving Too Deep Zone to Ghost
Mike Tanier is moving Too Deep Zone from Substack to Ghost. The reason is familiar by now: Substack’s platforming policies (Andrew Tate chief among the concerns) don’t align with his values or the environment he wants for his readers.
Tanier notes that Matt Lombardo made a similar move, taking Between the Hashmarks to Beehiiv around the same time, though they landed on different platforms because of different needs.
The podcast with Matt continues. Worth watching as more sports writers make the same calculation. The two even have a discount subscription package together.
THE ROSTER
📋 Some follows to note
We want to celebrate as many independent creators on The Sunday Back Page as possible. Here are all the people who either submitted their work for consideration or were considered independently this week. Many of these creators deserved a place in this newsletter, and we hope they continue to submit their work. Please keep them on your radar.
Michael Pallett | Jeshal | Degrees of Competition | Tevin Morris | Kwame Twumasi-Ankrah | Baseball Scoops | Sando’s FC Barcelona | David Tratner | Doug Glanville | The Secret Tour Caddy | Eric Katz | Rohan Ajit | Steven S. Neff | The Full Scope | Jack Carnefix | Dustin Gouker | Stard54 |
Here are some soccer follows as we ramp up for the World Cup. This is just a small portion of the list I will be sharing each week leading up to the World Cup:
USMNT Team Sheet | Elizabeth Villa | Charlotte Beach | Scotland's Coefficient | Unexpected Goals | Graham Ruthven | Swiss Ramble | Paul Grech | Michael Caley | Jack Holmes | Get German Football News | Jon Arnold | Clare McEwen | Megan Swanick | Jose Nunez | DeadBallTV | Albert Kim | Joe Patrick | Football Ramble | Jon Lane | Fox in the Box | Sam on Sport | Jamie Cartmill | Carla Bilche | Nutmeg Soccer | Soccer Briefs | Filippo Silva (Tactical Manager) | The Tap-Inn
Want to see your independent publication featured here? Let us know. There are hundreds more baseball Substacks out there. Give me a shout!
THE ANSWER
❓ Sunday trivia answer
B) Miroslav Klose. The German striker scored 16 goals across four World Cups (2002, 2006, 2010, 2014).
THE SCORECARD
