Welcome to The Soccer Series
Stories crafted from real data, moments built to last
Hello, soccer fans. (And respect to American football — but on this blog, we're calling it soccer. We're in the United States. The 2026 World Cup is in the United States. Let's meet readers where they are.)
There will be a Spanish-language version of every post you read here. If you'd rather read in Spanish, look for the link at the top of each piece — Léelo en español → — and a parallel post will be waiting for you.
Here's what I'm trying to do with this blog.
I want to bring the biggest moments in soccer to everyone — and I mean everyone, from the friend who only watches the World Cup every four years to the lifelong fan who can recite every Golden Boot winner since 1930 — in a way that respects both kinds of reader. The route there, for me, runs through real data, carefully curated, and the stories the numbers tell when you let them breathe.
This is going to run in seasons. Right now, the season is the 2026 FIFA World Cup, and we're 27 days from kickoff. Between now and June 11, when Mexico opens the tournament at Estadio Azteca, I'll be writing a post every day. Some posts will look backward — Brazil's perfect 1970, Argentina's redemption in 2022, the night Cameroon shocked Maradona's defending champions in 1990. Some will look at the data — what 22 World Cups can tell us about how the game changes, which tournaments delivered the most drama, which records still stand. Some will look at where we're going — the 16 cities that will host this World Cup, the players writing the next chapter, the storylines worth following.
A little about me, because you should know who's writing this.
I'm a software engineer by trade and a soccer fan by every other measure. I grew up watching European football — the leagues, the rivalries, the tactical histories that make the game feel like literature. I've also spent enough time in American sports culture to know the rhythms here: how a country that didn't grow up with this game has been quietly building its own soccer identity for the last thirty years, through MLS, through the World Cup '94 generation, through the dual-citizenship kids who choose Mexico or the U.S., through the Latin American diaspora that has carried the flame in this country since long before it was fashionable. I want this blog to live where those two worlds meet.
Which brings me to the editorial promise — and the one rule I'm not breaking.
No negative-clickbait titles. Ever.
You know the kind: "Ronaldo is finished." "Messi is so…" "The end of an era for X." They show up in your feed every day. Most of them are technically accurate in some narrow sense, and most of them are engineered to land like a punch. When I read them, my heart aches a little — not because the news is wrong, but because the framing reduces a career, a moment, a player to whatever conflict gets the click.
I'd rather take the same set of facts and write the opposite kind of piece: what the player gave us, what the moment meant, what the data says about why we'll still be talking about it in twenty years.
That's what I'm chasing. Not the take. The moment.
A few things you can expect to keep showing up in these posts:
- Momentum — the feeling of a team or a player arriving at the right time.
- History — the long memory of the game, because nothing about 2026 will make full sense without 1970, 1986, 1994, and 2022 in the picture.
- Data — present-tense, verifiable, and never invented. If a stat is in a post, I can show you where it came from.
The metric I care about is simple. If I write 100 posts and one of them keeps getting visited — year after year, a post somebody comes back to, links to a friend, references in an argument — that post matters more to me than 99 posts that spike for a week and disappear. A legendary post. The kind of writing the internet used to make and increasingly doesn't. That's the goal. One in a hundred. Maybe two.
And once one of those exists, the question gets interesting: can it become something more? An app, a tool, a small site of its own? Soccer fans love data, and the data we have access to — 93 years of World Cup history, 22 tournaments, every team that's ever qualified, every goal verified across multiple independent sources — is rich enough to support things I haven't built yet. I want to find out what readers come back for, and then build for that.
Above all of this: I want to grow with you. Wherever you are — Brooklyn or Mexico City, Buenos Aires or Manchester, Casablanca or Tokyo, watching at a bar with friends or at home with your kids — I want this blog to feel like it was written for you. Beginners welcome. Lifers welcome. MLS heads welcome. Bring your friends. Send me what you'd like to read next.
A new post tomorrow. We're going to talk about what's actually happening on June 11th, in 16 cities across three countries, and why this is going to be the biggest World Cup ever held — for the casual fan and the obsessive alike.
See you then.
