An event like the World Cup is a reminder of the enormous influence a sporting event can have over a city. Sports reroute traffic patterns and displace residents. They provide the stage for political protest or fevered jingoism. Bars and restaurants become overrun, office towers empty out, and students fall asleep at their desks. A big game can make an entire city miserable or spark a metropolis-wide celebration that lasts for weeks.

Those effects can be wide-ranging and indirect. Last year, the Blue Jays came inches away from winning the World Series. This year, my kid’s baseball league had record levels of sign-ups, the second-hand sporting goods stores across the city were picked clean, and a whole new cohort of parents who would otherwise have continued to enjoy simple, baseball-free lives now spend their summer evenings in Christie Pits, watching nine-year-olds throw wild pitch after wild pitch. Who could have seen it coming?

The Local’s latest issue, launching today and rolling out over the coming weeks, is our very Local-ish foray into sports writing. While the collected sports media of the world cover the massive international tournament that has arrived in Toronto, we’ll be looking at athletic events closer to the ground—because the story of how sports act upon a city is, of course, also a story about policy and politics, culture and business. If sports are transformative, then questions of how we support sporting events, who gets to play, and how they’re funded and function are matters of civic importance.

Over the next few weeks we’ll visit Brampton cricket pitches, minor-league ballparks, and the training facility of national wheelchair rugby players. We’ll write about the uphill battle for more female coaches, dig into the big business of youth sports, and conduct a deep anthropological study of the tragi-comic figure that is the aspiring professional soccer referee.

The issue kicks off with a data illustration by the artist Michael DeForge and The Local’s Wency Leung. As the World Cup arrives, we wanted to visualize exactly what Toronto has spent, and what we stand to gain. The biggest sporting event in the world is here, after all. Let’s see what that actually means for our city.