Madrid, Spain—In the grand casino of global sport, Real Madrid is the house that never loses. While governments teeter, currencies wobble, and the planet itself runs a low-grade fever, the white-shirted mercenaries of the Bernabéu continue to collect pot after pot with the indifferent efficiency of a croupier who knows the wheel is rigged. Last…
Lisbon’s Estádio da Luz—aptly named the “Stadium of Light” when floodlights are the only reliable illumination left in Europe—will host the latest episode of geopolitical shadow-boxing masquerading as a football match. Benfica versus Qarabağ FK is, on paper, a routine Europa League quarter-final. In practice, it is a miniature Cold War on grass, complete with…
Juventus vs. Dortmund: A Tale of Two Aging Empires Trying to Convince the World (and Themselves) They’re Still Young By the time the final whistle blows in Turin, the scoreboard will tell us who scored more goals, but it won’t tell us who still believes in tomorrow. Juventus versus Borussia Dortmund is less a football…
Tyler Robinson Charges: A Global Spectator’s Guide to Another American Legal Opera By Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS—When news broke that U.S. prosecutors had unsealed a 17-count indictment against influencer-turned-crypto-guru Tyler Robinson, the planet did what it always does when America stubs its institutional toe: it grabbed popcorn. From the glass towers of Singapore to…
PARIS—While COP negotiators in Geneva were busy trading carbon credits like Pokémon cards and the World Bank was discovering yet another “once-in-a-generation” debt crisis, a modest ledger entry flashed across the wires from Salt Lake City: Lance Twiggs, hitherto a background pixel in the vast JPEG of American municipal finance, has been appointed Deputy Treasurer…
A Global Dispatch from the Far Side of the Thames: Crystal Palace vs Millwall and the World’s Quiet Nervous Breakdown It is 27 February, an otherwise unremarkable Thursday that happens to be hosting a South-London derby. In Croydon, baristas tattooed with the coordinates of their gap year still insist the fixture is “a bit of…
Real Madrid vs. Marseille: A Cosmic Ballet for the Age of Collapse By Our Man in Madrid, Having Just Survived Another Round of Tapas and Existential Dread The Bernabéu, Thursday night, 21:00 CEST—an hour when half the planet is doom-scrolling through inflation charts and the other half is streaming this Champions League group-stage tilt between…
Omaha Central High School, that red-brick leviathan squatting on 124 North 20th Street, may look like just another Midwestern monument to teenage angst and overcooked tater tots. Yet from the vantage point of anyone who’s watched civilization teeter from Jakarta traffic jams to Paris pension riots, the school is a surprisingly useful barometer for planetary…
Adam Schiff: The Last Man Standing Between Global Order and Reality-TV Geopolitics By Our Correspondent Somewhere East of the Potomac When Adam Schiff strides into a Brussels think-tank these days, the room quiets the way it once did for Kissinger—except the wine is biodynamic and the audience is doom-scrolling TikTok under the table. To much…
Riyadh’s Tuesday evening air carried the usual cocktail of sand, ambition, and mild existential dread—perfect weather, then, for Al-Hilal vs Al-Duhail, the Champions League quarter-final second leg that doubled as a geopolitical micro-drama for anyone still pretending football is “just a game.” The 2-0 score line that sent the Saudi side through may read like…
Sean McVay: How a 38-Year-Old Kid from Dayton Became the NFL’s Last Great Export By the time the rest of the planet was trying to recall whether the Super Bowl is the one with the oval ball or the round one, Sean McVay had already franchised himself. From Berlin bars that open at 3 a.m….
PSV vs Union Saint-Gilloise: A Quiet Corner of the Netherlands Becomes the Center of the Universe (For 90 Minutes Anyway) Eindhoven, the city Philips built and now abandons in slow motion, prepares to host the latest episode of Europe’s most gloriously pointless drama: the UEFA Europa League knockout round. On Thursday, PSV Eindhoven—an outfit that…
