I had treated Manchester City’s 115 financial breaches as an academic exercise. As in math, the equation must be balanced, and City’s punishments must be commensurate with their crimes, which, according to the Premier League’s statement last month, amounts to ten years of corporate fraud. The word ‘sham’ appears five times in the statement. But I dispensed with all rationality at the 62nd minute of the Liverpool-Man City match last weekend.

In a competitive 0-0 game, Liverpool midfielder Ryan Gravenberch received a second yellow and was ejected from the game. City went on to win 3-0. Make that the sixth sham, as everything about the match was farcical.

Liverpool fans harangued City all afternoon. City supporters waved inflatable bananas in some ironic protest, as if they are the aggrieved party. Man City of today, a veritable super team, is built on its fraudulent success of yesterday. Punishment looms, pending appeal, and the narrative of the game was couched entirely in the context of City’s cheating. And after the game, there was Man City, atop the Premier League table again. Man City won four league titles, as well as many cup trophies, in an era in which they had inflated their revenues, exceeded spending limits, and covered it up. They then refused to cooperate with the ensuing investigation.

“City is disgusting. Shouldn’t even be allowed to compete.”

“Everything about that club is fraudulent.”

“Hope you’re happy cheering for the biggest frauds in sports history.”

“You love state-backed terrorism.”

These are some texts I sent to the City fans in my life as City built its lead against Liverpool. I thought conceptually and now believe fervently that Man City deserve nothing short of the proverbial death penalty. It’s a position brilliantly staked out by pundit Alfie Potts Harmer. But that sort of speculation is for the sports radio caller.

The real consideration is from where the Man City affair came and what in life it reflects. In this regard, Man City’s is, inarguably, the most impactful case of cheating in sports history. Arguably, it belongs on the list of most infamous cases of corporate fraud. Four reasons below articulate why.

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Resistance to justice reflects the illiberal political moment

It was reported that, early in the Premier League’s investigation, Man City was negotiating a settlement, which is surprising considering how publicly intransigent the club has been. They are innocent, they insist, and believe they will be exonerated, and they have all but accused the Premier League of leading a conspiracy against them.

“Manchester City FC will now pursue the appeal avenues open to it, on the basis that the opinion contains clear material errors, of law, principle and fact, and is unsafe,” the club’s said in its response to the guilty verdict. “The Club has diligently respected due process for eight years on the basis that the Premier League Board and Executive would behave as an independent, impartial and fair-minded regulator, free from partisan influence.”

Translation: We are going to go scorched earth on your ass.

This resistance to justice reflects the creeping illiberalism around the world, best typified by MAGA. Donald Trump has warded off civil lawsuits and criminal charges all his life, and as president of the United States he has imbued that ethos into a political movement. He regularly pardons wealthy, white-collar criminals, openly defies laws he is charged with executing, and wields that law arbitrarily. The people who pound their chest about law and order are those most disdainful of it.

These traits are embedded in the UK’s Reform party and France’s far-right movement, for example, as well as in the world’s monarchal, theocratic, and dictatorial countries. Sheikh Mansour, Man City’s owner, is an heir to the United Arab Emirates’ ruling family. UAE, of course, treats human rights and liberties as one does a mosquito—swatted away, at best, and violently eliminated, at worst. It’s almost too on-the-nose that a UAE official recently bought a major stake in a Trump-backed crypto company.

If Man City were a country, then it is operates with the same sense of entitlement, the same aura of impunity. The club isn’t shocked that it had broken rules. It isn’t shocked that it had been caught. Man City is shocked that they are being held accountable for their actions. That is not how it works in the world of strongmen. They close ranks around each other and use their power to maintain that power.

Once Mansour bought the club in 2008 and operationalized the fraud, Manchester City stopped being purely a football club. It became a vehicle for the illiberal aims of UAE’s ruling family, just as the Republican Party stateside became a vehicle for Trump’s personal interests. Justice is merely a speed bump for those vehicles.

State ownership in sports is a metastatic cancer

Man City are not alone in being owned effectively by a sovereign nation. Newcastle, backed by the Saudis, are the wealthiest club on earth, and the Qataris have turned Paris Saint-Germain into not only one of the best football teams in the world but also into a luxury lifestyle brand. Not being exceptional does not make Man City innocent.

Man City are able to and have reached their tentacles into public institutions and choked off sources of justice. Their defiant statement tattles on themselves. Only someone who will use every political lever to advance their aims will call on their opponent to forgo partisanship.

It’s especially rich coming from a club whose chairman, Mansour proxy Khaldoon Al Mubarek, serves on Donald Trump’s Board of Peace. The board was convened last year, and the membership fee is $1 billion annually. The board has accomplished nothing. On the other end of the political spectrum, newly minted UK prime minister Andy Burnham defended Man City’s investments in the community—Burnham had led Manchester as mayor—and his ties to the club have since been a source of controversy.

These muddied political waters have prompted the chairman of England’s football regulatory body to threaten to resign should he come under undue political pressure over the Man City investigation. There is also speculation that UAE could economically and diplomatically retaliate against the UK should Man City’s punishment be too severe. It is insane that such considerations are associated with a sports team breaking rules.

To be clear, state ownership should be considered much differently than other forms of public ownership, be it members-owned or municipally-owned teams. Those models better align the club’s interests with those of its supporters. Additionally, any nefarious political machinations would have a more limited impact and could theoretically be quelled by higher levels of government. This is to say that there are more forms of accountability, something literally and proverbially foreign to state ownership.

A pillar of culture is being undermined

“We will take necessary action to protect the club and seek competition from any party, now and in the future.”

So said Ferran Soriano, Manchester City’s CEO, in a statement. Aside from making me want to tell him to blink twice if he needs help, the recording makes clear City cares not at all about the collateral damage of its ruthless defense.

In a worst case scenario, some or all of the following would happen:

• Man City’s appeal is heard sometime before Christmas.

• Assuming the appeal is rejected, the Premier League announces the club’s punishment.

• Manchester City sues the Premier League (and/or any other entity trying to hold it to account), stringing the case into at least next season.

• Clubs who financially suffered because of Manchester City’s fraudulent success sue Man City for damages. (Tottenham, for example, are estimated to have lost a cool $159 million.)

• With the case in limbo, this season’s title and relegation battles become chaotic, lucrative qualification into European tournaments becomes unclear, and fan bases for other clubs become increasingly distrustful of Man City’s involvement in the Premier League.

• The institutions responsible for upholding fair competition—the Premier League, the FA, etc.—lose public trust from their inability to reconcile the Man City affair.

Professional, unscripted sports is predicated on the shared belief that the competition is not fixed. Sports are where justice still reigns, which is what makes sports in the 21st century something pure and rare. A great song can renew something positive and essential in us, even if that song is distributed commercially. The same goes for sports. It’s a significant part of the social fabric, and Man City is unapologetically thrashing at it.

Values mean nothing

I believe in justice and fairness. Sue me.

Actually, Manchester City just might, per its CEO. My transgression, City’s executives would argue, is that I believe in something besides power. Values are for the non-rich and for the suckers who use them as an excuse to treat people with kindness. Values are for the people who buy tickets to attend football games and streaming subscriptions to watch them.

As imperfect as they are, we had built institutions imbued with values to maintain order, protect the vulnerable, and provide for basic necessities. But in an illiberal world order, the only institution is money. Needs, safety, status—they’re all to be bought and sold.

For Manchester City’s owner, status meant buying football trophies. That winning made a lot of people happy, City supporters especially, but in that craven act was a lack of respect. City fans were not customers to be rewarded with a better product. They were unwitting pawns in a geopolitical game of power. It seems, should City get its way, they will remain as such.

“What we have right now is chaos,” Texas senator Ted Cruz said last week. “There are no rules.”

Cruz was not talking about the artificial intelligence industry nor the wanton tariffs imposed by the Trump administration. He was talking about college sports. He was talking about his Protect College Sports Act, which passed the Senate this week. It’s a groundbreaking piece of legislation, one that regulates and reorganizes college athletics, but also one that is as misguided as it is representational.

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To the former, I had little ideological faith in a bill whose lead sponsor was a senator who slipped off to a Mexican vacation during an energy catastrophe in his state. Conferences, universities, and many college football coaches, including Colorado’s Deion Sanders, also advocated for the bill. If the law is misguided it is because it serves the most powerful. T’was ever thus. I am more interested in the latter.

When in some far-off century alien archaeologists descend to Earth they can wipe the debris from the Congressional Record and reconstruct the 2026 version of the United States from the Protect College Sports Act. All of our society and culture is in it. At the top of the list is the Act’s labor provisions.

On this point, the bill does a lot, including:

• Imposes a hard “salary” cap

• Limits players to one “free” transfer (with exceptions)

• Limits compensation of player agents

• Limits player eligibility to no more than five years

A series of court rulings in recent years ushered in an era of player free agency. Student-athletes could transfer as much as they wanted, they could earn money through endorsements, the schools were ordered to directly compensate their players, and some players even went pro, realized they were swimming in deep waters, and returned to the familiar (and lucrative) shores of campus.

After decades of uncompensated labor in the name of amateurism, players were finally earning a buck, and it cleared the smoke around an uncomfortable, existential question: What is the point of amateur college athletics? This is the so-called chaos that institutions, conferences, and coaches wanted to tame. College athletics were literally all fun and games until schools, suddenly needing to buy talent on the market, were thrown into a recruiting arms race of their own making.

Knowing they could not invalidate court orders, and obviously unwilling to risk a revolt among players, the powers-that-be turned to Congress to impose regulations. Under the Act, players can continue to get paid, though with stringent limits. (Indicatively, there are no compensation limits for coaches or school administrators.)

It’s not just what is in the bill, either. The Act is silent on the employment status of student-athletes, which is a crucial legal distinction. As employees, players would be expressly able to organize and file for union recognition and collectively bargain. There have been many such unionization efforts through the years in the college ranks, but legal technicalities and institutional resistance, including from the players’ universities and the National Labor Relations Board, have strangled any widespread movements.

That ambiguity pervades the Act. Everyone refers to it as college sports’ new “salary cap,” but the text makes clear—in the way that legal text does—that payments from universities are not compensation and therefore not salaries. Payments to athletes are a benefit from revenue share stemming from a previously agreed settlement for the purpose of retaining student-athletes.

This view of labor, that it’s a costly nuisance to be subjugated, is endemic right now. MLB team owners are about to shut baseball down, which is more popular and lucrative than ever, because they want a salary cap. The NBA’s infamous second apron, implemented a couple of years ago, functions as a salary cap and is distorting team building. Outside of sports, the federal minimum wage hasn’t been touched since 2009, despite an inflationary economy and union approval ratings being the highest in decades.

It’s not a coincidence that a resurgent post-Covid class consciousness is met with a fanatical anti-labor politics. High costs are impacting everyone, and to protect profits businesses are desperate to deflate the one cost driver they have direct control over. Just don’t call an institution of higher learning a business. I am sure that any excess funds generated by, say, the Trojan football team are invested in the University of Southern California’s educational programming.

I’ll highlight one more irony. In the same week that his bill passed, Cruz took a hatchet to proposed AI regulation, blocking their consideration in the Senate. About one proposal, he said, “That concerns me, because it is difficult to imagine what an ambitious bureaucrat couldn’t shoehorn under this broad authority.” The Protect College Sports Act grants broad authority to the NCAA to enforce the provisions of the Act and establishes a Commission on the Future of College Sports. It also prohibits the mergers of conferences into “super leagues” and permits the pooling of media rights. These latter provisions require exemptions to antitrust law, which famously never result in increased costs for consumers (see: MLB).

To their voting bases, legislators paint themselves as faithful partisans and trustworthy ideologues, but in legislative politics party and values don’t mean shit, or at least their downhill of power. The Protect College Sports Act is about protecting the powerbrokers of college sports. That is neither the players, whose labor makes the games possible, nor the fans, who in one way or the other pay for that entertainment. Cruz’s comments in other contexts about small government and free markets were not going to stop his efforts serving the interests of those powerbrokers.

(Okay, one more (tangential) irony. MLB’s antitrust exemption was granted by the Supreme Court in 1922. In subsequent challenges to that ruling, the Court said that, while the original ruling is probably faulty, it is Congress’s job to determine antitrust policy and therefore it is only Congress who can repeal MLB’s antitrust exemption. Congress has not done so, given MLB team owners’ collective power, but here we have the Senate granting new antitrust exemptions to the NCAA and its television partners. The Court today will not bat an eye. I hope our alien archaeologists can parse out our brand of rule of law.)

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Finally, the passage of the Act reflects political realities of our time. It was one of the Senate’s last orders of business before the November midterm elections in era in which inflation is eating away at the economy, the country is bungling another war in the Middle East, Trumpian economic policy is isolating the US, and climate change—just kidding. Nobody cares about the environment.

In any event, college sports governance not only being at the top of the docket, but also receiving a comfortable 77 votes reflects what our government deems important. And what is important in America in 2026 is capping workers’ pay and entrenching the power of institutions, both public and private, whose sole purpose, whether explicit or not, is to make money. Fight On, amirite?

Baseball has disgusted me in recent weeks. Arte Moreno sold the Anaheim Angels for $4 billion, marking a $3.8 billion profit despite being, for two decades, one of MLB’s worst owners. The alleged self-dealing of Los Angeles Dodgers owner Mark Walter ignited a debate about the dark money sloshing around sports. And MLB team…

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Last year, I wrote about ICE’s initial foray into San Diego, and I connected it to the billionaire class that owns our sports teams. Below is that essay, lightly updated and edited.

A years-old tip alleged fake papers, so agents of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement dressed for the Battle of Fallujah and came to my city, to a pizza joint. They found middle class people eating pizza and the staff that served it. ICE arrested four people, dishwashers and servers.

No one served pizza or washed dishes that night. The restaurant had closed after the raid. No one served pizza or washed dishes the following Monday or Tuesday. The restaurant had closed to regroup. A community reeled. Democratic lawmakers demanded answers. Republican lawmakers gloated, or they said nothing. The Otay Mesa Detention Center processed four new detainees.

A few days later and a thousand miles north, Seattle Sounders players protested the revenue split for the Club World Cup, so team owner Adrian Hanauer dressed down his employees. The Club World Cup is a tournament organized by the nation-state of FIFA. It stands to make millions, millions that trickles down to continental governing bodies and club owners.

MLS players will not make millions. The collective bargaining agreement between the league and its players is silent on the Club World Cup, it being a recent invention. Hanauer wants to hoard the Sounders’ take. In a week or so, the workers he cursed out will play in the competition on spec.

If the illusion of freedom was a coin, then these events would be its two sides.

Hanauer embodies how liberty in the US has become synonymous with wealth. If taxes are communism, then neoliberalism is freedom. Freedom, then, is earned and wielded, like capital. Rich people have the most of it and so they are most uninhibited.

Hanauer scolded his employees not because he signs their checks and not because they wanted fair pay. He lashed out so forcefully because the players attacked the scaffolding of his existence. If capital is freedom, then who is Hanauer with less wealth? He must defend his soul—his bottom line—and he’s free to. No one will hold him to account for acting like a child.

Hanauer is a man not happy enough to be cut into a monopoly. He is not happy enough to control one of the best soccer teams in North America. He is not happy enough with all the freedom money can buy. I’m sad for him.

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The immigration enforcement in San Diego and elsewhere reflects a belief that freedom and liberty, like wealth, are limited. If someone is free, or wanting to be, then that must come at the expense of someone else. Oppression is the tool to allot the freedom. 

There is no policy basis to ICE’s actions. There is only the need to be dominant, for a worldview premised on scarcity requires someone to lose. Those losers are always the most vulnerable. To justify the oppression, the losers must be villainized. They must be hated, and the more they are hated the more free the oppressors are.

It is exhausting to hate people. It is costly to hate people. I think of Stephen Miller, the architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policy. He is a man not happy enough to ascend to the highest office in the country, twice. He is not happy enough to be the president’s right hand man. He is not happy enough with all the freedom that his status as a white native-born American affords. I’m sad for him. 

“When you stomp on the part of yourself that is repulsed by this kind of cruelty, something important dies.”

It’s a line Ezra Klein has used a lot. One thing that dies is freedom. 

We have rights and laws and rules and regulations, but liberty doesn’t derive from paper. It comes from within and is expressed socially. It’s the ultimate act of faith. My freedom relies on people believing I’m free, that I’m worthy of being free, even when I am not good. And my freedom relies on my believing that people, wherever they’re from and whatever their status, deserve the same. Encouragingly, it’s apparent that the people in power targeting workers and families will not and cannot extinguish that faith.

The Sounders players held fast to their position after Hanauer admonished them. San Diegans ran armed and masked ICE agents out of their neighborhood with nothing but their voices and phones, proving how pathetic and insecure the MAGA movement is. Donald Trump and his ilk persecute us today, but their fear is beyond mine. 

I am back in Paris, where there are at least five Statues of Liberty. I have seen a few of them while living here for graduate school. The “real” Statue of Liberty, the one standing sentinel in New York Harbor, was donated by the French to the United States, which was founded in Philadelphia, which is where I lived …

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I started drafting Out in Left’s weekly post last Sunday, something about the psychology of FIFA president Gianni Infantino and his scheme to sell shares in the World Cup, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. I’m soccer-ed out. I’m Infantino’d out.

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I thank my ancestors for not bequeathing me an addictive personality, but I do believe I am withdrawing from the World Cup.

For almost a month, tides of football fans from France and Ecuador and Côte d’Ivoire and everywhere else descended on and retreated from Philadel…

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In my last post, I reveled in being right about the World Cup. Now, I must admit that FIFA president Gianni Infantino was right. The 2026 FIFA World Cup is “the greatest event that humanity, that mankind, has ever seen and will ever see.”

Infantino said those words in December, at FIFA’s shambolic Wo…

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If you called me a FIFA alarmist, then I wouldn’t protest. Two of the best read pieces in these hallowed pages are “Everything insane at the FIFA 2026 World Cup Draw, ranked” and “New Jersey may have a ‘chilling effect’ on the World Cup. Does FIFA have a point?”

But I knew something others didn’t. I knew the 2026 FIFA World Cup would no…

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Major League Baseball’s players union, as expected, offered tweaks to the sport’s existing economic model. Team owners, as expected, countered with a hard salary cap. Then the first grenade of MLB’s epic labor showdown rolled into the room. This week, President Donald Trump endorsed a hard salary cap. Good.

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MLB is the only ma…

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The attorneys general from New York and the great state of New Jersey launched an investigation this week into FIFA’s 2026 World Cup ticketing practices. “Being honest about ticket sales is not complicated,” New Jersey Attorney General Jen Davenport, said in a stat…

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It has rained in Philadelphia this holiday weekend for four straight days, and I’ve scrolled Instagram for just as long. This mean I’ve consumed a lot of soccer content, and chatter in my group chats is picking up about the World Cup, too. With the tournament less than three weeks away, my overall impression is this: I have no idea how it will go. No on…

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A friend in France recently asked me about New Jersey, indicating my native state’s long-awaited ascension into international renown and respect. Yes, yes, we are, in fact, hosting the World Cup, behind only the Olympics, which Paris recently hosted, as one of the big…

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Hungover from a wedding in Ireland and with time to kill before my flight back to Paris, I committed myself to the most literary of transportation methods: I walked the 6.8 miles (or 11 kilometers)…

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I knelt before my editor at Padres Mission, and with a sword he tapped on one of my shoulders, and he tapped the other, then I rose to my feet and solemnly nodded, my mission understood: For the love of God, write something different about José E. Feliciano.

The Wa…

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“The year is 2020. Olivia Rodrigo is working on a new album. The Trump administration is trying to figure out what to do with Iran. And San Diego Padres catcher Luis Campusano is primed for a breakout.

It seems the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

So begins my first piece for Padres …

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I felt like a bozo, sitting there at the pub and looking up at the TV. Expecting Tottenham Hotspur to offer anything besides a desultory performance turned into a fool’s errand, and for that errand I wore a vintage Spurs shirt. By the 87th minute, Spurs were losing 3-0 at home. I was reminded of the opening verse of Springsteen’s “Reason to Believe”:

See…

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Update: I first published this essay a year ago, almost to the day, and I was reminded of it for three reasons. First, Europeans really don’t care about American college basketball. I cannot find this year’s NCAA tournament anywhere in France—if you like televised snooker, then I know just the continent for you—and my lack of familiarity with college basketball this season is reflected in my standing in last place in my bracket competition, a competition I won handily last year.

Second, just one of San Diego’s Division I basketball teams made the tournament this year, and the UCSD women’s team was trounced in its only game. This puts last year’s achievement, when the city sent four teams to the Dance, in greater perspective.

Third, a friend and former colleague from San Diego visited Paris this week. We reminisced about our city, and I complained, yet again, why the absence of an inanimate object (clouds) is the source of civic pride. As San Diego poet Ernie McCray wrote recently for , “I’d go so far as to say / that the city and the UT / owe these remarkable athletes / an apology.

Originally published March 23, 2025

San Diego is the best college basketball city in the country.

There are more accomplished regions, of course. North Carolina’s “Research Triangle” boasts 13 men’s national championships among Duke, University of North Carolina, and North Carolina State University.

There are more accomplished states. What would be the point of Indiana or Kentucky if not for college basketball?

And there are cities that have produced more NBA players, including Los Angeles, which, to many San Diegans, is like Voldemort. It’s the city that shall not be named yet we are fixated on it.

But there is only one city—not a metro region, not a state, but a single city—that sent four teams to the men’s and women’s NCAA tournament this year, and that is San Diego. That accomplishment has been years in the making, and it improbably starts with the nerds.

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Until last weekend, UCSD had 27 more Nobel Prize winners than NCAA tournament berths, which is to say the university has 27 Nobel Prize winners. For years, the men’s and women’s basketball teams dominated the Division II ranks, and in a move compelled by student-athletes UCSD athletics rose to Division I in 2020. 

“The students were the ones that created the impetus for Division I, because as they looked at UC San Diego, and they looked at other high profile schools, [Division I] was a missing denominator,” UCSD director of athletics Earl W. Edwards told me in October. “So the students came to us and said, ‘We'd like to move to Division I.’”

Because the NCAA makes no sense, that move initiated a four-year “reclassification period,” in which the university would compete in Division I athletics but not be eligible for postseason play. A lot of locals probably didn’t know that the school could make March Madness this year, and to most non-San Diegans UCSD is irrelevant. (Just don’t say that to an aspiring engineer or scientist.)

Perhaps surprisingly, the men’s team won the regular season Big West Conference title in a wire-to-wire romp, then won the conference tournament to earn an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. They entered March Madness on a 15-game winning streak and with 30 wins overall. Only five other teams in Division I eclipsed that mark heading into the tournament. Three contributors stand out.

Senior guard/forward Aniwaniwa Tait-Jones was named the Big West Player of the Year and also took home the Out in Left Best Name Award. Head coach Eric Olin was honored as the Big West Coach of the Year for the second consecutive season. Senior guard Hayden Gray was named the conference’s best defensive player and is one of ten finalists for the Naismith Defensive Player of the Year Award. The three sat shoulder-to-shoulder at the podium after the team’s victory in the Big West final over UC Irvine. 

“They’re the ones that changed our program. They’re the ones that people come out to watch,” Olin said of his players. “The way that they play, the way that they share the ball, how selfless they are, how much fun they have—it resonates with people. That’s what people come out to see. Our campus and the San Diego community will absolutely support great basketball, and these guys played great basketball all year. The sellouts at home, the fans we had at Irvine, the fans in line to get in at our home games—all of that is a byproduct of the way they play basketball.”

The UCSD women’s team had a less successful regular season, entering the Big West Conference tournament at 17-15, but behind star sophomore guard and San Diego native Sumayah Sugapong the Tritons beat three teams in the conference tournament to punch their ticket to the Big Dance.

It’s a similar story across town for the San Diego State women’s team. (UCSD is a few stops down the Blue Line and a transfer at Old Town away from SDSU. Please let me know what the rail connection is between USC and UCLA.) A solid regular season preceded a remarkable conference tournament—the Aztecs won in an epic triple-overtime final against Wyoming, giving the program its first NCAA tournament bid since 2012.

For the SDSU men’s team, it’s business as usual, and that business is being pound-for-pound the best college basketball program in the country. Their at-large bid marked the fifth-consecutive appearance in the NCAA tournament. It would have been the sixth, had Covid not cancelled the 2020 NCAA tournament. At 30-2, the Aztecs were then having their greatest season ever.

This year’s tournament bid is their 14th since 2002, when legendary coach Steve Fisher turned the program around. Sprinkled in that span are four Sweet Sixteen appearances and, under current coach Brian Dutcher, a run to the 2023 championship game. Dutcher is San Diego’s Coach K, if Coach K had been underpaid, under-resourced, and underappreciated.

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Discussing San Diego sports requires qualifiers. It’s the largest media market without an NFL team. Until Peter Seidler’s ownership, the Padres had long been dismissed as a small-market minnow (and the team is devolving into that again after Seidler’s passing in 2023). The city’s college programs are considered mid-majors. There have been no major sports championships since 1963.

Finally, with four teams in the NCAA tournaments, the city had something to claim as its own, and it’s a claim that’s hard to argue, at least before this weekend: San Diego is the best college basketball city in America.

That’s without mentioning the University of San Diego, another Division I school, or Point Loma Nazarene, which boasts a top Division II basketball program, or San Diego City College, which is one of the best junior college programs in California. San Diego is known as a laid-back surfing town, when it’s really a big city brimming with and great at basketball.

“I don’t think we have to prove anything to them,” UCSD’s Hayden Gray said, referring to the bigger, more famous Michigan team they faced in the first round of the men’s NCAA tournament. “Teams don’t win 30 games by accident. We’re going to go out there with confidence and see if they can stop us.”

UCSD would ultimately lose to Michigan, which featured two ballyhooed seven-footers, after a would-be game-tying three rattled off the rim at the buzzer. Gray’s words are those that a proud city—a confident city—can live by.

Except no one cared. No one made the argument that San Diego is the best college basketball city in the country, and no one here cared that the city had four teams in the tournaments. National media mostly ignored the San Diego bids, besides patting the UCSD men’s team on the head and saying Aw, look at you trying. The St. John’s program has been irrelevant for all of my life, but this year on ESPN I’ve seen more clips of head coach Rick Pitino’s dyed hair plugs than actual basketball.

Locally, San Diego’s NCAA bids elicited a balkanized and almost indiscernible response. Some news hits on the local TV affiliates here. Some boosterish social media posts there. Local news outlets covered them. In real life, there was no buzz. There were no watch parties or lead-up hype or prideful and knowing nods towards strangers dressed in school colors. It’s standard fare to light up a civic building or skyscraper with the colors of a city’s teams, except, I guess, in San Diego. 

This past week, I asked several San Diegans what they thought about the city’s quad bids, and because no one had thoughts about it I asked why no one cares about San Diego’s quad bids. Almost to a person, the response was some version of “San Diego is too busy surfing.”

This is as lazy as it is ridiculous. La Jolla and Ocean, Mission, and Pacific Beaches, the neighborhoods with most of the city’s surf spots, are home to just 8% of the population. Most San Diegans live in denser and more urban communities east of the 5 and south of the 8 freeways. In 2019, a local nonprofit organized a trip to the beach via public transit for kids from City Heights. The 11-mile trip took an hour-and-a-half. For decades, Barrio Logan had been cut off from San Diego Bay despite sitting next to it. As for youth participation rates, over 2,000 boys and girls play high school basketball across 168 teams in the city of San Diego. Across the city’s 17 surf teams, there aren’t 200 participants.

Saying most San Diegans are too busy surfing is like saying most New Yorkers are too busy hanging out in Times Square. It’s by any metric inaccurate and dismissive. Perhaps I’m taking the insinuation too literally, that the idea of surfing, of laid-back hangs with suntanned friends, is really what people mean, but I can’t think of a worse idea than bobbing in freezing cold water with territorial white people.

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One friend’s response has stuck with me. “No one’s going to think we’re the best if we’re not saying it ourselves,” he said. It’s a higher order thought that makes me sad. 

More than any big city I’ve experienced, San Diego is preoccupied with what others think of it, rather than what it thinks of itself, which leads the city to try to appeal to everyone, which leads to banality and mediocrity. “America’s Finest City” is the nickname invented by former mayor Pete Wilson to obscure the local establishment bungling and ultimately losing the 1972 Republican National Convention to Miami. The “-est” is inherently a comparison, and aspiring to be “fine” reflects the city’s tired adherence to milquetoast suburbanism. 

I’ve written about another example in Snapdragon Stadium. We had a blank canvas for a world-class facility, but instead we built a cheap, multipurpose bowl surrounded by parking lots. It’s exactly what we had there before the Chargers vacated it for Los Angeles. It’s as if building a replica of Qualcomm Stadium would conjure some mid-century magic and wind the clocks back to when rampant greenfield development and Cold War defense spending made San Diego feel important. A friend from LA stabbed us in our inferiority complex and twisted the knife: “You’re obsessed with us, but we never think about you,” she said. Oof. 

The other side of that coin is a lack of vision. Proclaiming greatness, or striving for it, requires a suspension of disbelief. A better world is possible if we accept the possibility of a currently fictional world, and it’s risky to do that. It’s more comfortable to accept the familiar shitty public services and infrastructure and to tolerate the resorts that extract wealth and send it to multinational REITs incorporated in Delaware. 

An exception is Petco Park. The Padres market it as America’s No. 1 ballpark, and not coincidentally it has shown up in recent years at the top of ballpark rankings. It’s a Greatness Feedback Loop. The more the Padres call their home great, the more that outsiders consider it that way, and the more people think Petco Park is great, the more the Padres want to keep it that way. It is astonishing and refreshing to see someone, or something, in San Diego make an unqualified claim to greatness.

I don’t expect everyone to be sports or basketball fans, and that probably isn’t advisable. Sports are at the center of culture in Philadelphia and it is a deranged place. Big 5 partisans think Philly invented basketball and the Palestra is the only arena in the world and that it’s still 1955 when La Salle was the reigning national champion. Remind them that Villanova isn’t actually in the city and they stuff a soft pretzel in your mouth, throw you in the back of a van, and dump your body into the Schuylkill. 

It’s also a generalization for me to say that no one cares about college basketball in San Diego. SDSU’s and UCSD’s local alumni networks are massive, and any casual sports fan—or anyone with a pulse—can buy into a championship run. Whenever I’m in a funk thinking about, say, a president illegalling consolidating power or a major political party ceding the government to an unelected billionaire, I think back to the packed bar at which I watched Lamont Butler drain a buzzer beater in the Final Four. Limbs, as they say across the pond.

But for the first round of this year’s NCAA tournaments the Gaslamp should have been closed to cars for a watch/block party. The County Administration Building should have been lit up in alternating colors of blue and red. Fans should have been bussed to the tarmac at Lindbergh Field so local news cameras could get a clip of the teams being sent off in style. Employers should have relaxed their dress codes and encouraged school colors. The city should have hung basketball hoops on light posts. (I’m for anything that makes NIMBYs lose their minds.) None of that happened because San Diego doesn’t have a civic language or tradition that informs and enlists normies into something important/fun.

It’s a sentiment and history worth exploring more in a different piece, but a major reason is that we mistake climate for culture. Think of any major city or region and the first thought would be about people. London: keep calm and carry on. Midwest: friendly cheese-eaters. New York: assholes. Think of San Diego and you think of the weather. That’s in large part because the modern city1 was founded that way.

We had no water. We had no arable land. We had no oil. We had no precious metals. We had no mountain passes for trains. The bay was mostly unnavigable. So in the early 1900s local robber barons turned to tourism to stabilize San Diego’s economy.

“[John D. Spreckels] owned major tourist assets and appreciated the obvious business logic of moderate public investments in parks, beaches, and pageantry,” Mike Davis writes in Under the Perfect Sun. “At least while waiting for the satanic mills to arrive from the East, it made sense to package the climate for sale to a leisure class of wealthy retirees, consumptives, and cultists—all of whom might stay in Spreckel’s hotels and tent cities or buy lots adjacent to Spreckel’s streetcar lines.”

In essence, San Diego adopted—it was sold—a hollow identity. Weather is inanimate, and everywhere has it. It’s nothing distinctive. Culture, on the other hand, is human. One definition of culture is so beautiful I’m going to get it tattooed across my clavicles: “The arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively.”

Alumni and students hit the bars for the UCSD and SDSU games, of course, but that’s closer to networking than culture. The seeds of culture are Juan in accounting and Julie in marketing, hypothetical colleagues who rarely interact, realizing they can needle each other in good fun (i.e. bond) because, at the office on gameday, one wore a Tritons polo and the other wore an Aztecs shirt, even though neither of them can name a single player. San Diego is big enough for two research institutions with relevant athletics programs, and it should be big enough, and mature enough, to have a civic fabric that strangers can plug into and feel connected with the place and its people.

Last Sunday, San Diego became the only city to send four teams to the NCAA tournaments. In the ensuing three days, San Diego stood alone, and—brace yourself, Chamber of Commerce—it had nothing to do with the sun.

The other day, a friend sent me a video about Olympique de Marseille’s recent failures as a football club. A few hours later, a different friend sent me a video about gondolas, the aerial cable transit systems. My friends hate me. They forced me to think about Frank McCourt, who sucks the soul from two sports I l…

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