Colosseum to Dublin: USC Football’s 2024 Schedule as Global Satire
The Colosseum Has Wi-Fi: USC Football’s 2024 Schedule as a Mirror to Our Dying Empire
by Jorge “El Cynico” Mendieta, International Affairs Desk
LOS ANGELES—While the rest of the planet debates whether the Arctic will finish melting before or after the next U.S. election, the University of Southern California has released its 2024 football schedule: twelve carefully curated collisions of padded gladiators that, if you squint, look remarkably like a three-month metaphor for late-stage capitalism.
The season opens Aug. 31 against LSU in Las Vegas, a city that exists only because the desert decided to monetize despair. Allegiant Stadium—capacity 65,000, or roughly the number of Lebanese citizens displaced last week—will host two teams whose combined athletic budget rivals the GDP of Fiji. Tickets start at $199, not including resort fees or the existential one. The game will be broadcast in 47 countries, most of which will politely pretend to understand the rules while actually waiting for Taylor Swift cutaways.
Week 3 brings Michigan State to the LA Coliseum, a crumbling relic older than nine current U.N. member states. The Coliseum’s renovation was bankrolled by a $270 million naming-rights deal with United Airlines, whose carbon footprint is now etched into the very stone where O.J. once ran. The symbolism is delicious: a bankrupt state subsidizing a college sport that subsidizes airlines that melt glaciers that drown island nations who can’t even field a decent linebacker.
By Week 5, USC ventures to Maryland—its first-ever trip to College Park—proving that Manifest Destiny now includes frequent-flyer miles. The Terrapins’ home stadium sits 30 minutes from Capitol Hill, where lawmakers recently allocated $886 billion for weapons but couldn’t scrape together lunch money for schoolchildren. Somewhere in Kyiv, a trench-bound conscript will stream the game on a cracked iPhone 6, wondering if the concussion protocol applies to artillery shells.
The international crescendo arrives Nov. 2: a neutral-site “home” game in Dublin, Ireland. Aviva Stadium will be rebranded “Tommy Trojan’s Emerald Isle Experience,” complete with leprechaun-themed tailgates and a commemorative potato famine bobblehead. The Irish government, ever hungry for American tax dollars, has agreed to waive alcohol limits and most labor laws. Dubliners, still rationing heat, will gaze at the imported palm trees and ponder whether climate change is just another American export.
Back home, USC closes against Notre Dame in what pundits bill as “The Battle for the Soul of Catholicism,” as if the Pope weren’t busy live-tweeting synods. The rivalry dates to 1926, when both schools were still in the business of educating white men for empire. Today the contest is streamed on Peacock, NBC’s answer to the question, “What if colonialism had a subscription tier?”
Global Implications, or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Spread Option
The schedule’s true product isn’t touchdowns but data: biometric trackers harvest heart rates from 18-year-olds so that Nike can sell sneakers to 14-year-olds in Jakarta. Every snap is a geopolitical act—microchips mined in Congo, stitched into helmets in Vietnam, worn by athletes majoring in “Leisure Studies” on visas that expire the moment eligibility does.
Meanwhile, FIFA quietly seethes. The world’s real football is played barefoot on dirt in Rosario and Lagos, yet here we are, exporting shoulder pads to Dublin like missionaries of obesity. If you listen closely, you can hear Sepp Blatter cackling from his Qatari retirement villa.
Conclusion: Bread, Circuses, and Extra Cheese
Come December, USC will finish somewhere between 8-4 and a playoff berth, depending on the mercy of algorithms and boosters. The rest of the planet will keep spinning—ice shelves calving, currencies imploding, democracies ghosting their citizens. But for twelve autumn Saturdays, a few million humans will agree to pretend that a red-and-gold horse named Traveler galloping across a jumbotron is the most important thing happening anywhere.
And honestly? Given the alternatives, that might be the sanest decision we make all year.
