Albert Samaha
Albert Samaha uses sports reporting to show how power, money and culture shape what happens on and around the games people watch. He focuses on investigative and enterprise stories for The Washington Post sports section, treating teams, leagues and fans as an ecosystem where inequality, fandom and business intersect. His work often follows the ripple effects of decisions made far from the field - in boardrooms, betting markets and government offices - on players, workers and communities.
Global tournaments, migration and fan culture
Samaha covers major international tournaments by embedding with fans and tracing how sport reshapes everyday life in host cities. His World Cup features follow traveling supporters through stadium concourses and city streets, documenting how English fans discovered a “soccer lover’s paradise” in Mexico and how visiting supporters navigated local customs and hospitality.
In another World Cup piece, he uses visiting fans’ reactions to American food - from cheesesteaks to basic cheese slices - to explore how global sport collides with domestic culture and consumer habits. His reporting on migrants in Paris ahead of the Olympics tracks how police sweeps and displacement sit alongside the spectacle, placing informal encampments and precarious workers within the broader story of a global event.
He also reports on high-profile games such as the NBA Finals through the behavior of crowds, including a segment on how Knicks fans responded when a sitting president appeared on the arena jumbotron, treating fan reaction itself as a political and cultural signal.
Betting, match-fixing and the business of sport
Samaha devotes significant reporting to the growth of sports betting and the ways gambling money flows through and distorts competitions.
He has chronicled a college basketball betting scandal centered on an Instagram gambling personality, detailing how social media influence, inside information and opaque wagering platforms can converge into alleged match-fixing schemes. His work on suspicious wagers in U.S. markets that triggered investigations in international table tennis shows how relatively small betting patterns can raise alarms across jurisdictions, linking niche sports to global integrity concerns.
In a series on name, image and likeness (NIL) money in college sports, he uses an extensive dataset built from public records requests to highlight gender imbalances in athlete earnings and the structural decisions that produce them. He extends this business focus to ownership and finance, reporting on a Miami-based financier’s attempt to buy an English Premier League club with funds tied to exploitative loans aimed at people receiving disability settlements, connecting elite soccer ambitions to predatory lending practices.
His coverage of the late Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay’s medical treatment before his death, and the subsequent FBI investigation it helped spark, shows his willingness to follow paper trails through medical records, prescribing practices and law enforcement, treating team ownership as a subject for scrutiny rather than spectacle.
Football safety, participation and inequality
Samaha returns frequently to football as a site where risk, opportunity and class dynamics collide. His reporting on youth and high school football charts how tackle football participation declined for a decade and then rebounded after the pandemic, as coaches altered practice structures and hitting drills in response to concern over chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). In that work he contrasts new safety protocols - shorter practices, fewer full-contact drills, changes in tackling technique - with ongoing medical research that raises fresh questions about brain injury and long-term health.
Earlier reporting on who continues to play football despite rising awareness of concussion risks focuses on low-income Black and brown kids, showing how scholarship hopes, private-school access and limited economic alternatives push certain communities to shoulder more of the sport’s danger.
He has also examined “brutal mismatches” between well-funded high school programs and struggling ones, describing lopsided scores and resource gaps as symptoms of a widening participation divide rather than isolated blowouts. Taken together, these pieces frame football not just as a game but as an institution that concentrates risk and reward in unequal ways.
Women’s basketball, fandom and toxic atmospheres
Samaha’s coverage of women’s basketball focuses on how rapid growth in attention and money changes the culture inside arenas and online. In his WNBA feature on shifting fandom, he reports on longtime Liberty supporters who once experienced games as inclusive spaces built by dedicated season-ticket holders, then watched as surging popularity brought more expensive tickets, increased gambling and more aggressive behavior from some newer fans.
He documents how racist and antigay abuse directed at players has risen alongside the league’s prominence, and how “aggressive online tribalism” has spilled into arenas in the form of louder booing and confrontational conduct. His reporting notes operational responses like removing bottle caps at concession stands to reduce the risk of objects being thrown, using small policy changes to illustrate how teams adapt to changing fan dynamics.
Across these stories, he treats WNBA fandom as a proxy for broader debates about whether women’s sports can close financial gaps with men’s leagues without losing the community ethos that early supporters valued.
Across beats - from global tournaments and pro leagues to youth football and college sports - Samaha writes long, deeply reported stories that link on-field drama to off-field systems of economics, regulation and social hierarchy. His work combines narrative scenes with data analysis and document-driven reporting, making his sports coverage useful for understanding how policy decisions and financial structures show up in stadiums, locker rooms and fan sections.
4 more sports journalists.
Adair Reid
Adair Reid is a sports columnist for The Cavalier Daily who covers Virginia men’s programs with a blunt, fan-aware voice that treats them as long-term projects rather than one-off games. He focuses on trajectory, legacy and risk, using opinion columns to question coaching decisions and program strategy while grounding his arguments in recent results, records, tournament performance and roster realities. Men’s lacrosse is a recurring subject, and his work on the program’s coaching change shows how he uses a single decision to examine overall health, standards and competitive standing. He frames games in terms of stakes, identity and institutional expectations, emphasizing postseason implications, recruiting, national perception and alignment with a championship standard. He writes mostly in the first person only when needed, keeps the spotlight on institutional choices and brings analysis-first, evidence-based judgment to Virginia’s flagship men’s teams.
Adam Stern
Adam Stern covers the business of motorsports and combat sports at Sports Business Journal, focusing on how sponsorships, media deals and new events reshape racing and fighting. His beat includes NASCAR, IndyCar, Formula 1, NHRA, rallycross, UFC and boxing. He tracks brands, broadcasters, manufacturers, promoters and streaming platforms, with reporting on sponsorship strategy, rights deals, original content, series growth, team projects and technical regulations. He examines how Cadillac’s Formula 1 entry supports broader marketing aims, how F1 Academy builds commercial momentum and whether new MMA promotions can challenge UFC. His work includes short speed reads on deals and longer features on multi-party investments. He reports on the money and strategy behind the action, treating motorsports and combat sports as connected marketplaces shaped by branding, dealmaking and media innovation.
Albert Burneko
Albert Burneko writes about how systems of power bear down on ordinary people, using sports, politics, technology, food, and domestic life as entry points. He is an assignment editor and writer at Defector and part of its founding ownership group. His politics and capital reporting examines how policy, policing, and public rhetoric turn into harm for specific people, centering victims and vulnerable people. He also covers artificial intelligence, media criticism, and technology’s effects, asking who benefits and who absorbs the costs. His domestic writing focuses on parenting, bodily discomfort, and everyday frustration. His recurring Chefector column turns cooking failures into comic studies of impatience, ego, and routine. He writes sharp reported essays, first-person dispatches, mock explainers, and sports-adjacent guides. His work combines moral seriousness, comic voice, close attention to ordinary life, and a focus on how people live under larger systems.
Alejandro Avila
Alejandro Avila stands out for turning sports flashpoints into stories about pressure, scrutiny, and reputation. He covers sports for Fox News, focusing on the moments when competition, controversy, and culture intersect. He reports on high-visibility incidents, then moves quickly from the play itself to backlash, apologies, discipline, fan reaction, and league rules or unwritten codes. In coverage of Brewers pitcher Abner Uribe’s controversial strikeout celebration, he centered the backlash and the apology, not just the box score. He also tracks suspensions, fines, public statements, and how teams respond when criticism builds. His work appears in a brisk, straight news style, with clear summaries, direct quotes, and a close eye on how athletes, coaches, and leagues handle public judgment.