Sports Relegation Is Real Competition: Micklethwait and Kennedy

Look around the world and you can find poetry and beauty in sporting rivalry.

Witness what Don DeLillo and Philip Roth wrote about baseball in New York. When Juventus hosts AC Milan, the two Italian teams play with the Alps glistening behind them. The prize at stake when Australia and England compete at the longest form of cricket is a simple urn.

But we are ancestral enemies of a particularly tragic kind.

We support Leicester City and Nottingham Forest, two football teams separated by 30 miles of England’s (distinctly Alp-less) East Midlands. It pits the town that gave the world entertainers Engelbert Humperdinck ...