Steven Sandor

Steven Sandor is a features editor and sports writer at the Edmonton Journal, responsible for long-form coverage that links games to the business, civic and cultural forces around them. He comes to the sports beat with years of magazine editing, book writing and soccer broadcasting, so his reporting carries a big-picture perspective on how sport fits into wider public life. His work spans hockey, soccer and city issues, and consistently foregrounds the numbers, policies and community impacts that sit behind the scoreboard.

Sports business around the Oilers and beyond

Sandor often treats major hockey stories as business assignments, drilling into ticket availability, pricing and attendance rather than game summaries.

In his reporting on the Oilers' home opener, he details that more than 1,500 seats remain unsold, breaks down how those seats are split between the upper and lower bowls at Rogers Place, and shows how that pattern continues through most of the October home schedule. He puts ticket packages and price ranges for season plans on the page, framing season tickets as a major household purchase rather than a routine fan expense.

A piece on Oilers fans weighing travel to a Stanley Cup Final in Florida uses travel-agency bookings and fan voices to show how U.S. politics and practical costs shape decisions about following the team on the road. Across these stories, the distinguishing feature is his insistence on the economics of fandom - rooms booked, seats sold, packages offered - as the real engine behind high-profile games.

Gambling, regulation and athlete image rights

He extends that business lens into the fast-evolving gambling space, reporting on an AI-generated Instagram ad that falsely depicts Alphonso Davies's father being arrested by Edmonton police to promote “legal gambling” in Alberta.

Sandor traces the click-through path from the ad to an offshore gambling site based in Comoros, explains why it operates as a “black market” platform, and makes clear that it is not regulated in the province. The story walks through Alberta’s rules on gambling promotion, noting that celebrity athletes are forbidden from endorsing casinos or sportsbooks except in campaigns that emphasize responsible gambling or gaming controls.

By foregrounding the agent’s response, the minister’s warnings and the role of AI fakery, he treats gambling and digital manipulation as a regulatory and consumer-protection issue as much as a sports story. That focus on law, advertising standards and athlete image rights sets his gambling coverage apart from game-driven reporting on odds or outcomes.

Civic development and neighbourhood change

Sandor’s beat regularly touches on how sports infrastructure and broader civic development reshape neighbourhoods and local politics. In one Edmonton Journal piece, he covers a councilor pushing for a referendum on a proposed all-weather event park next to the NHL arena, laying out the project’s total cost, the breakdown of provincial and team contributions, and the linked plan to demolish the old Northlands Coliseum and service nearby lands.

He follows the councilor’s argument that key projects such as Coliseum demolition and land servicing should not be tied to event-park funding, showing how arena-related deals are contested at city hall rather than treated as inevitable.

Another story on Glenora and Crestwood residents describes their move to place restrictive covenants on land titles as a legal strategy to counter a new zoning bylaw, while council looks at limiting the size of new developments in mature neighbourhoods. A feature on a downtown restaurant closing after prolonged construction disruption uses that single business to illustrate how infrastructure work and planning decisions can grind away at street-level operators.

Together, these pieces show him treating sport venues, zoning fights and downtown construction as parts of the same urban narrative, with clear attention to who pays, who benefits and who bears the strain.

Hockey culture and long-form storytelling

Beyond daily coverage, Sandor brings a long-form sensibility rooted in his work as a features editor and author.

His book-length reporting on racism in hockey draws on interviews with NHL players of colour and examines how exclusion and class barriers are embedded in the sport’s culture. That concern with inclusion and access feeds back into his journalism, where stories about ticket prices, gambling ads or event-park funding are framed in terms of who is welcomed into the game and who is left out. His background in soccer broadcasting and magazine editing gives him fluency across formats - print features, columns and on-air analysis - which he applies to issues ranging from national soccer competitions to symbolic gestures that touch on national unity and separation debates.

The through-line is a reporter who treats sport as culture and public policy, using detailed reporting and narrative structure to connect plays on the ice or pitch to deeper questions of fairness, regulation and community life.