Sibling Rivalry

Two Bitter Rivalries Take Flight, Right Before Our Eyes

Hal Phillips — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 21:49:51 +0000

In the pages of Sibling Rivalry, I examine not just U.S. vs. Mexico, but also rivalry itself as a sporting phenomenon. Because we humans tend to tribalize so enthusiastically, rivalry is a consistent, almost inevitable outgrowth of these identity politics. Rivalries don’t typically evolve in symmetric fashion, however. It took the U.S. nearly 50 years [...]

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Excerpt: Mexican admiration for Argentinian Futbol Culture runs Deep

Hal Phillips — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:06:01 +0000

Walking through the tailgate scene outside Estadio Akron, I stopped a few times to chat up the locals—hoping to find English speakers to discuss the match and our multigenerational family feud. This search proved largely fruitless. Google Translate can only do so much. But those limited conversations, taken together, did accentuate one thing: Mexican [...]

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He’s Not Wrong: U.S. Tends to Hog Regional Branding

Hal Phillips — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 22:50:24 +0000

Neil Young first introduced me to appellative “American” chauvinism. Someone (probably a Lynyrd Skynyrd fan) had accused the Canadian guitar god of not being American — as part of the flack Young took for writing and recording the song, “Southern Man”. Neil’s response was quick, pointed and apt: “I’m plenty American: North American.” It’s been [...]

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Bloomsbury issues Sibling Rivalry: The ESSENTIAL Soccer Book for 2026

Hal Phillips — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 19:21:00 +0000

NEW YORK, N.Y. (5 March 2026) — Bloomsbury has published the latest release from best-selling author Hal Phillips. Sibling Rivalry: How Mexico and the US Built the Most Contentious, Co-Dependent Feud in World Soccer arrives 89 years after their first meeting, 35 years after Bora Milutinovic recast the North American Derby as a battle of [...]

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Excerpt: The Continuing Education of Rafa Marquez

Hal Phillips — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:28:00 +0000

Rafa Marquez is a thoroughly modern figure. In the twenty-first century, no one has wielded more influence on the fortunes and reputations of Mexican soccer. The modern game is a global game, so it follows that Rafa made much of his mark, for himself and his countrymen, abroad. In 1999, he left the security [...]

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Politics of Blood & Soil Should Inform Club Allegiance, not Actual Politics

Hal Phillips — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 14:50:03 +0000

I was chatting with a business associate the other day who happens to be a Liverpool fan. When he politely asked about my own club allegiance, I told him the truth: Tottenham Hotspur. I’m well familiar with how this makes me feel: the odd-but-familiar combination of forlorn hope and idiosyncratic pride (I typically don’t get [...]

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FIFA Introduces New ‘Dynamism’ to World Cup Ticketing Grift

Hal Phillips — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 21:41:15 +0000

The bleak, hyper-lux reality of World Cup ticket pricing is beginning to sink into the global futbol consciousness, and with FIFA itself. How do we know the latter? Because FIFA president Gianni Infantino sounds in increasingly defensive, claiming that without extortionate 2026 tournament revenues, “There would be no football in 150 countries in the [...]

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Why Mexican futbol does “identity” better than American Soccer

Hal Phillips — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 23:14:26 +0000

Without national identity, international sport doesn’t really work. As a compelling spectacle, it’s the tribe vs. tribe component that makes such a confrontation so tasty, so distinct from a domestic club match. Ahead of and during international matches, Mexican futbol culture has exhibited a real genius for branding that national identity, via its national team, [...]

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Depth of Talent is a USMNT Game-changer

Hal Phillips — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 23:19:34 +0000

In assessing the inherent, overall quality of a golf course — not in comparison to another but on its own, in a vacuum — it’s helpful to start at the bottom: What’s the worst hole out there? Out of 18, how many objectively bad or fair-to-middling holes are there really? In other words, what's the [...]

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Envy & Scorn Furnish this Rivalry with Curiously Intimate form of Codependence

Hal Phillips — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 13:42:08 +0000

See below a brief excerpt from Chapter 1 of Sibling Rivalry, 400-odd words that help explain what 200 years of envy and scorn can do to a sporting rivalry. But first, a shout-out to photographer Tony Quinn, whose work is featured throughout the book. This image above captures the unalloyed bliss produced by yet another [...]

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