The Red and the Rust: How Liverpool vs Sunderland Became the World’s Favorite Metaphor PARIS—Somewhere between the croissants and the existential dread, I found myself explaining to a French diplomat why a second-tier English football match still matters more than most UN Security Council votes. The subject was Liverpool versus Sunderland, a fixture that sounds…
Midtjylland, Denmark – a name that sounds like a sneeze and looks on the map like the place cartographers forgot to label properly. To the rest of the planet, the region is usually filed under “somewhere between Lego and hygge,” yet this modest slab of Jutland currently exports more geopolitical angst per capita than most…
Tottenham Hotspur versus Doncaster Rovers is, on paper, the sort of fixture the footballing gods schedule after a long lunch and three bottles of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. One club recently renovated its stadium to the tune of a small nation-state’s GDP; the other rents its training cones by the hour. Yet when the FA Cup third-round draw…
Getafe vs Alavés: A Microscopic Civil War in the Shadow of the World Stage By Our Man in Madrid, pretending to care about mid-table squabbles since 2019 MADRID — Somewhere between NATO’s latest communiqué and the G-7’s agonised selfies, two suburbs you’ve never Googled are preparing to punch each other in the shins for the…
Live Cricket Scores: The World’s Most Expensive Way to Watch a Dot-Ball By the time you refresh the app for the fourth time in thirty seconds, a Ukrainian drone has probably changed postal codes, a Japanese pension fund has quietly bought another slice of Sri Lankan sovereign debt, and somewhere in Lagos a teenager just…
Getafe vs Alavés: Two Suburbs of Madrid and Vitoria Walk Into a Global Bar and Nobody Notices—Except the Algorithms By the time the referee’s whistle echoes around the Coliseum Alfonso Pérez this weekend, three continents will have already yawned, scrolled past, and queued up cat videos instead. Yet in the grand, increasingly pixelated circus of…
**Dunking on the Apocalypse: How the World Plans to Celebrate Sports While Everything Burns** The year is 2026, and humanity has collectively decided that what we really need right now—amid the cascading climate disasters, democratic backsliding, and the fact that your smart fridge is probably spying on you—is another international sporting spectacle. Enter “Slam Dunk…
Red Star, Green Money: A Balkan Derby With Global Side-Effects By Dave’s Balkan Bureau (currently operating from a café whose Wi-Fi password is “NATO2000”) Belgrade—When Crvena Zvezda and Celtic jog out onto Rajko Mitić Stadium tonight, the floodlights will illuminate more than just twenty-two footballers in various states of hair-gel. They will spotlight two competing…
**The Parmesan Paradox: How Parma vs Spezia Became Football’s Most Delicious Proxy War** While the world’s superpowers flex their nuclear arsenals and central banks play monetary Jenga with the global economy, humanity finds itself riveted by a far more consequential conflict: Parma versus Spezia, a Serie A fixture that proves civilization hasn’t so much evolved…
The Curious Case of Suryakumar Yadav: How a Middle-Class Mumbaikar Became the UN Secretary-General of T20 Cricket By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Arabian Sea NEW DELHI—Late one humid evening, as Delhi’s air flirted with the toxicity levels of a small chemical spill, Suryakumar Yadav—population 1.4 billion’s newest export—waltzed down the…
Mustafizur Rahman: The Cutter That Cut Through Geopolitics By Our Man in Dhaka, Nursing a Cup of Over-Street Tea To the uninitiated, Mustafizur Rahman is merely a 6’2″ left-arm fast bowler who grips a cricket ball like a barista handles a scalding latte—delicately, yet with lethal intent. To the rest of us, he is a…
Shubman Gill: The Accidental Messiah of a Nation That Can’t Decide Whether It Needs Saving or a Netflix Subscription By Our Correspondent, still recovering from a 3 a.m. doom-scroll in economy class NEW DELHI—In the blue haze of Narendra Modi Stadium—capacity 132,000, or roughly the population of Reykjavik poured into a concrete cereal bowl—Shubman Gill…
