The ongoing 2026 FIFA World Cup is the biggest sporting event in the world right now. While we don’t have the overall numbers yet since the tournament is ongoing, it’s already breaking viewership records in multiple countries, and if the last World Cup is any indication, it’ll end up reaching more than half of the world’s population.
From the perspective of someone in sports media, it’s all-encompassing. There are thousands upon thousands of words spoken about the tournament on TV, written across newspapers and online publications, or argued about on sports talk radio. The World Cup gets people talking, and along with them, sportswriters.
But when sports media across the globe is in conversation about one event, should The Ubyssey’s Sports section join that chorus?
It’s a question that only I, as the publication’s sports editor, can answer — and making that determination is one of the most important parts of my job.
Being the head of a section at The Ubyssey, as I am, entails quite a few responsibilities. As the name implies, we edit the work of our staff reporters. We work with our writers to improve their writing, both through feedback on articles and through training in meetings. We do reporting. We coordinate photo, graphic and video material for our articles with our Visuals departments. But above all of those responsibilities, in my mind, is our work in editorial curation.
At the end of the day, as an editor, I, alongside our deputy editors in Sports, Ian Cooper and Sofia Campanholo, decide what stories the section runs. While our reporters pitch stories, it’s up to us three to work with those writers to refocus and reorient those pitches, while cutting down on ideas that don’t fit the section’s identity and promoting those that do. It’s thinking about the section in totality. Where do we want it to go?
While our editor-in-chief and managing editor take the reins in setting the direction for our publication as a whole, section editors and deputy editors are entirely responsible for the content within a section. It’s up to us to present an organized report for our area of coverage — and for something as broad as “sports,” that isn’t easy.
Within just our section at The Ubyssey, during last few years, we’ve covered varsity sport, recreation, sport clubs, kinesiology research, alumni activity, general athletic phenomena, sightseeing and more. Each of those sub-sections could easily fill hundreds of stories, if not more. But those groupings don’t encompass all sports news. How do we narrow it all down? How do we decide what is worth writing about and what isn’t?
One of our most prominent delimiters in previous years was our adherence to our hyperlocal mandate. In essence, because we are an on-campus newspaper, our coverage should be limited to what’s on-campus. While we can occasionally stray past Point Grey and into coverage of professional sports like the PWHL or NSL, this would only come if there was a direct link to campus, such as a Thunderbird alumni in the league. When we covered the Grey Cup in 2024, it was less because the game was in Vancouver, and more because UBC had two alumni playing in the game.
That required “UBC connection” defined our borders, and from there, section editors operated as they saw fit. Then, last year, we started to move those limits.
In our strategic report, published in October 2025, one of our 29 goals for the upcoming year was to have our report “expand beyond the hyperlocal, somehow.” Instead of drawing a strict line by having stories require some link back to UBC, we shifted to “creating a report that brings stories back to campus from the wider world.” That barrier had been removed. So, as sports editor, how did I heed that call?
With much trepidation.
I’ve always been hesitant to push beyond campus for stories in the Sports section, and much of my reasoning comes from my understanding of what journalism is for. I think the best terminology to describe my issue comes from New York University associate professor of journalism, Jay Rosen. In a 2013 article written for the Columbia Journalism Review, Rosen addresses journalism’s purpose by coining a term: awayness.
Essentially, to Rosen, journalism is useful when it can communicate information about the goings-on in a certain area of interest to an intended audience who wasn’t there. It becomes important “when human settlement, daily economy, and political organization grow beyond the scale of the self-informing populace,” to say to others: “‘I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it.’”
This justification works well for most of our on-campus coverage. While any student on campus could theoretically go to a Thunderbirds game at any point, the likelihood that they’ll attend every single game they want to is very low. That is where we can come in, to address the “awayness” problem. We went to the game and spoke to the players and coaches while you were studying, and here’s what happened. On its face, that approach works. By keeping to our hyper-local coverage, we would be bringing news to our readers.
Yet, if we were to decide to cover something much larger in scope, such as the Super Bowl, or, say, the World Cup, then that same value isn’t there. While obviously not everyone is going to every single World Cup match, anyone who is interested in a game will be watching it on TV — to the tune of millions upon millions of people. If one of our readers is interested in following Canada throughout the tournament, they can just turn on TSN and watch the game. Even if they don’t watch the game, however, we still aren’t addressing an awayness problem — specifically because of how many other outlets are covering the same event.
For something as big as the World Cup, every sports media publication that even tangentially covers soccer will likely be writing an article for every single game. If more established organizations like The Athletic, TSN, Sportsnet, Sports Illustrated and so, so many more all have coverage out for games — likely before we do — then why would anyone have reason to read our writing at The Ubyssey?
The answer to that question lies in a move we made to reformat the Sports section last year.
In previous iterations of The Ubyssey, to report for Sports, or any other section, all you had to do was respond to a pitch email: a message that came out in a massive list, sent to anyone on campus who clicked a link to sign up. Essentially, anybody could write for us, even without experience or expertise. As our strategic report detailed, the quality of our journalism suffered immensely because of it.
This was especially potent in Sports. Because new writers could jump on covering a sport whenever they wanted — typically with little to no prior knowledge — most game coverage ended up looking the same: bland, 250-500 word ‘recaps’ that provided little information or insight beyond what could be drawn from the box score. While we were technically addressing the awayness problem for our readers, we weren’t doing it in a very interesting way. We were giving them the bare minimum, something they could still theoretically find elsewhere — like on the Thunderbirds official team website — before we had even published our article.
So to address these issues, we did two things. First, we established beats. No longer could inexperienced, untrained writers come in to cover sports for our section. Instead, each varsity team on campus had their own dedicated, experienced reporter who would stick with the same group throughout the year. Second, in a move enabled by the establishment of beats, we moved away from verbatim ‘what happened’ recapitulations of game action and towards reporting that instead prioritized why something happened, and more importantly, why it mattered.
That kind of reporting can only be done from a place of expertise. You can’t begin to analyze anything if you don’t know what you’re looking at. That’s where beats came in. By sticking with a team all season, that expertise developed over time in each of our reporters, through watching every single game of a team’s season, speaking to team personnel after and between every match, and researching and writing about the team all year. Through more analytical reporting and persistence on a beat, our reporters became voices worth listening to.
We were still addressing the awayness problem — but now, it wasn’t the only thing bringing value to our reporting. It now also included the experience and knowledge of the people writing it. It provided a voice that readers could trust, and hopefully, a perspective they wanted to hear.
This is the approach we’re bringing to the World Cup.
As a university newspaper, we cannot cover global sports events — especially one of this scale — without any thought. I think there’s often an instinct to cover an event just because it’s large and popular. Of course we’ll cover the World Cup, everyone’s talking about it. Of course we’ll cover the Super Bowl, everyone’s watching it. But that’s not the point. For something like the World Cup, the question isn’t a broad ‘is this newsworthy enough to talk about’ — because the answer is obviously yes. The question is instead: why us?
Why would a reader come to us for World Cup coverage, as opposed to any other publication? If we regurgitate 500-word recaps of game proceedings that everyone already knows, we’re not adding any value to the media landscape for readers. There’s nothing novel. There’s nothing insightful. There’s no purpose. Why us? Who knows.
However, if we come into this World Cup anchoring the expertise of our reporters, then we have an answer.
Why us? Because you’ve been reading our varsity soccer coverage and want to hear from the same voices that have been providing analysis for the T-Birds all year. Because you want to hear our writers’ unique perspective on the game, through their voice as a storyteller. Because you’re interested in their insights. Because you want to hear from a voice you trust.
That’s what we’re centring here. That’s why our coverage — in a sea of it — is worth reading.
To accomplish this, we’ve established two ‘break-away beats’ to cover the tournament. In essence, two members of our team will ‘break away’ from their typical coverage for a month to take on World Cup responsibilities in a specific area. These beats are inherently temporary because of the limited duration of the event, but they still ensure the voices you’re hearing are consistent and come from a place of knowledge on the subject they’re reporting on.
Our two beats for this tournament are our Canada Soccer Reporter, Maia Cesario, and our Vancouver Soccer Reporter, Sofia Campanholo. In Maia’s coverage, she’ll be following Canada’s Men’s National Team throughout the tournament, providing analysis and insight into the team’s performance for all three group stage games, and any additional knockout round games. Sofia’s coverage, on the other hand, will be focused on all the games played in Vancouver — grounding the beat in the games played on our city’s home turf, with a particular focus on match and fan culture.
Both Maia and Sofia have extensive experience writing about soccer for The Ubyssey. Maia was our Women's Soccer Reporter last year, and will retain that role heading into next year. She was there throughout all of UBC’s historic undefeated regular season, giving readers a view into how the team developed over the year. While Sofia is our Women’s Volleyball Reporter, she’s been writing about soccer with The Ubyssey for nearly two years, mostly covering the men’s team, including last year, where she covered multiple games on their run to nationals.
When you see analyses of World Cup games on our website, they’re not impulsively done because a reporter was interested in the game and parachuted into the topic — they’ve been planned months in advance and are written by knowledgeable voices with analytical insights that add to the reader experience.
Expanding beyond campus is something we’ll continue to push the boundaries of, testing out what works and what doesn’t. But it’s not something to be done just because we feel like it.
It’ll be something that’s been vetted, thought through and curated. If we cover something, we’ll have a consistent reason to do so. Because, if readers can’t trust us to make good decisions on what to cover, then why would they trust the reporting itself? Sometimes, a story fails in its mere existence before it’s failed by the writing.
It’s my job to ensure that never happens in The Ubyssey’s Sports section. That starts with a question, the same one that sparked our conversations around the World Cup.
Why us?
