FAYETTEVILLE, USA — Somewhere between the Ozarks and the Ozempic, the Arkansas Razorbacks are playing football again. That may sound like local color to most of the planet, but in an era when American college sports have become the last reliable export that doesn’t explode on the launchpad, the Razorbacks are—believe it or not—global news….
Notts County: The 160-Year-Old Football Club Teaching the World How to Survive Its Own Stupidity By Our Man in the East Midlands, nursing a lukewarm pint and déjà vu Meadow Lane, Nottingham – In a week when Silicon Valley titans were congratulating themselves for inventing the “metaverse pub” (basically a chat room with beer NFTs),…
Yerevan—The Armenian capital smells of apricots, diesel, and the faint, metallic whiff of existential dread that hovers over any nation whose neighbor keeps tanks on the lawn. On Thursday night, that bouquet was joined by grilled sardines and Cristiano Ronaldo’s cologne as Portugal rolled into town for a Euro qualifier. The final score—Portugal 3, Armenia…
Tyrese Haliburton and the Quiet Americanization of the World’s Living Room By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk When a 23-year-old from Oshkosh, Wisconsin—yes, the place that still manufactures overalls—drops 43 points on the NBA’s most marketable franchise while wearing sneakers named after a Japanese manga demon, you begin to understand why geopolitics now comes with a…
Arsenal Women’s meteoric rise isn’t merely a feel-good subplot for North-London nostalgists eating lukewarm pies at the Emirates; it’s a geopolitical mood ring that turns pink whenever global power shifts. While diplomats in Geneva argue over commas in climate accords, Jonas Eidevall’s side has quietly weaponised possession statistics and pressed the patriarchy into its own…
Scorpion in a Suitcase: How René Higuita Accidentally Became the World’s Most Dangerous Tourist By the time the Berlin Wall had been reduced to souvenir fragments, René Higuita was busy turning the penalty area into a geopolitical playground. The Colombian goalkeeper—part acrobat, part liability insurer’s nightmare—never bothered to wait for history’s permission slip. Instead, he…
BBC Sport Tennis: A Global Court Where Geopolitics Serves and Human Frailty Volleys Back By Our Man in the Press Box Who Still Owes Wimbledon a Security Deposit There is, apparently, no corner of the planet so remote that a local 12-year-old hasn’t already perfected a topspin forehand and is now being data-mined by a…
To the rest of the planet, the All Blacks versus the Springboks is less a rugby match and more a geopolitical stress test disguised as sport. While the rest of us were doom-scrolling through inflation graphs and negotiating with our microwaves for edible leftovers, New Zealand and South Africa quietly scheduled their annual reminder that…
The BBC’s rugby coverage usually opens with a brassy fanfare and a slow-motion montage of glistening foreheads, but zoom out a few thousand miles and the same footage looks less like sport and more like a ritual re-enactment of Empire—performed, naturally, in four languages and beamed to 180 territories where nobody has ever knowingly scrummed….
Geraint Thomas and the Existential Circus of Modern Sport By our man in the peloton of despair Paris, July — While diplomats in Brussels argue over fish quotas and the planet quietly smolders, a 37-year-old Welshman with the knees of a medieval cathedral has been pedaling through France in a neon jersey, carrying the faint…
Ken Dryden: The Goalie Who Blocked Pucks, Then Blocked Political Apathy By Our Correspondent, still recovering from the last time a Canadian politely explained morality to the rest of us MONTREAL—While the planet busies itself weaponizing trade routes and monetizing cat videos, it’s worth remembering that somewhere north of the 49th parallel lives a six-foot-four…
In Houston, under a roof that cost more than the GDP of several Pacific island nations, the Astros played baseball last night. That sentence already contains enough contradictions—indoor baseball, billion-dollar air-conditioning, a sport once exported as a metaphor for American innocence now wrapped in retractable steel—to make any foreign correspondent reach for the antacid and…
