While the rest of the planet was busy debating whether AI will replace us or merely enslave us, a 23-year-old linebacker from Texas named DeMarvion Overshown quietly reminded the world that flesh-and-blood drama still packs the bigger punch. On a Tuesday that began with European bond yields yawning and Asian markets shrugging, Overshown’s anterior cruciate…
If you want to witness the British Empire’s last functioning colonial outpost, skip the Foreign Office and open the BBC Sport app. From Lagos to Lahore, the familiar Reithian baritone still carries the same faintly patronising promise: “We shall explain the rules of cricket to you, old sport, and incidentally remind you who invented them.”…
From the rickety rooftop bars of Havana to the fluorescent-lit sportsbooks of Macau, the Cubs standings—currently hovering in the polite purgatory of third place in the NL Central—have become a kind of universal Rorschach test for anyone who’s ever tried to explain American optimism to a customs officer abroad. Ask a Berliner why a city…
Michael Olise and the Beautiful Game’s Ugly Price Tag By Our Man in Every Airport Lounge Between Paris and Penang It takes a village to raise a child, they say, but it apparently takes the GDP of a mid-sized Pacific island to buy one who can bend a football like Michael Olise. The 22-year-old Franco-Nigerian-English…
Global Village, Local Whistle: How BBC Football Became the World’s Accidental Diplomat by Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Between Wembley and the End of Civilisation The first thing you learn while jet-lagged in a Dakar airport lounge is that the BBC’s football coverage is more reliable than the departure boards. A grainy stream…
Football Today: A 90-Minute Distraction From the Collapse of Civilisation, Now Streaming Worldwide Somewhere between the Arctic ice shelf and the latest cryptocurrency meltdown, 22 millionaires are kicking a $200 ball across a grass rectangle while the rest of us pretend this is still a rational use of planetary resources. Welcome to football in 2024,…
Andy Robertson: The Last Honest Scotsman Running Full-Tilt at Global Capitalism’s Windshield By Dave’s International Desk, still nursing a diplomatic hangover from COP29 If you stand on Calton Hill at 4 a.m. and listen hard, you can almost hear the collective grinding of teeth in boardrooms from Shenzhen to Silicon Valley. The sound is produced…
The question “What channel is the Champions League on?” sounds innocent enough—like asking where one might find a decent cup of coffee in a new city. Yet behind that query lies the entire architecture of 21st-century soft power, geopolitical sausage-making, and the quiet surrender of human attention to whichever media conglomerate has shoveled the most…
Liverpool’s Match Today: A Global Séance in Red and the Quiet Collapse of Time Zones By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, Thursday Somewhere between the Indian Ocean and the Irish Sea, a Sri Lankan call-center worker named Ranjith is watching Mohamed Salah ghost past a defender on a cracked Samsung J5. The feed lags,…
Ajax vs Inter: the Champions League quarterfinal nobody asked for but everybody will watch anyway, because the modern attention economy demands we rubber-neck at every head-on collision between legacy brands that peaked when fax machines were cutting-edge. On paper it’s a clash of continental aristocracy: Amsterdam’s once-revolutionary nursery against Milan’s faded La Scala of calcio….
Swansea 0–1 Nottingham Forest: A Welsh Tragedy with Global Fallout By Our Man Who’s Seen Enough Relegations to Open a Museum The Liberty Stadium, Friday night, rain that could exfoliate a rhinoceros. Swansea City, once the boutique darling of hipster football blogs from Brooklyn to Busan, slipped quietly into the Championship’s mid-table purgatory courtesy of…
The world had been busy immolating itself in every conceivable fashion—wildfires on one continent, frozen grids on another, currencies doing impressionist dives—when Paris Saint-Germain and Atalanta chose to remind us that the apocalypse can, conveniently, be scheduled for 90 minutes plus stoppage time. On a balmy August evening in Lisbon’s Estádio da Luz—neutral ground, because…
