Atlas—Santos: A Tale of Two Cities, One Stadium, and the Global Gladiator Complex By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between the smog of Torreón and the salt-breeze of Santos, two Mexican football clubs met last night in a fixture that, on paper, was merely the latest chapter in Liga MX’s interminable telenovela. Yet the Atlas–Santos…
UK Football: The Empire Strikes Back—With VAR and Petrodollars By Our Man in the Global Sports Saloon Somewhere over the North Atlantic, a chartered Gulfstream carrying a Qatari banker, a Silicon Valley data guru, and three North London season-ticket holders collides with the jet stream of history. The topic in the cabin: whether Manchester City’s…
**The Ghost of Bo Jackson Haunts Columbus, and the World Watches with Popcorn** COLUMBUS, Ohio — In a universe where college football recruiting scandals erupt with the predictability of a Swiss cuckoo clock, the latest twist involving Bo Jackson’s spectral presence at Ohio State has achieved the rare feat of making the entire planet pause…
Tigres—León: The Derby That Explains Why the World Can’t Have Nice Things By Our Correspondent, Still Recovering from Airport Tequila MONTERREY, NUEVO LEÓN—If you watched the Tigres–León clash last weekend strictly for the football, congratulations on your adorable naïveté. The rest of us—jaded foreign hacks, commodity traders glued to Bloomberg, and European scouts praying Mexico…
There’s a new name rattling around the UFC’s octagon like a loose screw in a Boeing cockpit, and it belongs to David Martínez, the 27-year-old Spaniard who apparently decided flamenco wasn’t lethal enough. Born in Valencia—where paella and existential dread are served in equal portions—Martínez has leapt from the regional European scene to the big…
In the grand theater of global sport, where the Champions League final can still be interrupted by a pitch invader in a tutu and a World Cup can be bought for the price of a few luxury hotels in Doha, this weekend’s Major League Soccer sideshow between LA Galaxy and Seattle Sounders carries the geopolitical…
The Black-and-Gold vs. the Quakes: A California Derby That Could Seismically Shift Global Football Economics LOS ANGELES—Somewhere between the tacos of Exposition Park and the garlic fries of PayPal Park, two Major League Soccer franchises will kick a ball tonight and pretend the planet is watching. The Los Angeles Football Club and the San Jose…
From the banks of the Mekong to the banks of the… well, the Cedar River, the planet tilts slightly every August as 80,000 corn-fed pilgrims in black-and-gold descend on a town that smells of hog confinement and hope. The Iowa Hawkeyes’ 2024 schedule has just been released, and—believe it or not—this scrap of Midwestern Americana…
Cruz Azul and the Beautiful, Brutal Theater of Mexican Football By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large, currently hiding in a Tijuana mezcalería Football clubs are, at their core, elaborate metaphors for national neuroses. Barcelona is Catalan pride wrapped in tiki-taka; Manchester United is the British Empire refusing to admit it’s broke. Cruz Azul, meanwhile, is Mexico’s long-running…
The Olympic flame sputtered its way through Paris last week, and somewhere between the Seine’s bacterial bloom and the €1.4-billion security cordon that cordoned off even the pigeons, a familiar thought flickered: humanity still believes the fastest person over 100 metres can redeem a planet that is literally on fire. From the air-conditioned stadiums of…
Fluminense vs Corinthians: A Glorious Waste of Human Potential on the Global Stage By D. Locke, International Correspondent RIO DE JANEIRO—Somewhere between the Atlantic’s salt haze and the Christ statue’s permanent shrug, two football clubs will tonight try to convince 65,000 sun-basted souls that the result actually matters. Fluminense, the Rio aristocrats who still iron…
Charlotte vs Inter Miami: When a Southern Suburb and a Retirement Home Try to Play Football for the Future of Earth There are moments when one sport, played in a stadium built on reclaimed swamp land, seems to contain the entire geopolitical temperature of the planet. Saturday night’s Charlotte-Inter Miami clash was one of them—an…
