The day after forty-nine-year-old soccer journalist Grant Wahl collapsed in the press tribune at a World Cup quarterfinal in Qatar and died of an aortic aneurysm, a Los Angeles Times headline compared Wahl’s life to that of the late travel host Anthony Bourdain. The two men took dissimilar paths through life, but the comparison felt apt in one particularly important way: Bourdain used food as a lens through which to connect with people and understand the world. Wahl’s lens was soccer.

The game was a perfect choice. More than any other sport, soccer is a microcosm of the world — reflective of its extraordinary diversity and universal joys but also of its inequalities, injustices, corruption. Seldom has that been clearer than over the last month as the world has trained its eyes on a World Cup in Qatar, marred by the deaths of migrant workers and myriad human rights abuses and illuminated by the passion of millions of supporters across the globe.

Wahl was a hugely successful sportswriter and a trailblazer in American soccer journalism, but what set him apart in his field was his unyielding commitment to using his voice to stand up for people of all kinds, in all places. Wahl was a champion of the women’s game in the United States, one of a handful of prominent soccer journalists who covered women’s soccer without any caveat and with the same respect and rigor he afforded the men’s game.