Rutgers vs. Minnesota: A Microscopic Proxy War in the Great American Colosseum Byline: “Roving” Ravi Mehta, tallying existential scores from a safe distance Somewhere between the 41st parallel and the longitudes of self-delusion, two land-grant universities—Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities—will collide on a rectangle of Astroturf…
From the comfort of a rain-lashed café in Lisbon, where locals fret more about the price of sardines than the price of oil, the satellite feed flickers to life. There it is: UCF versus Kansas State, a collision of acronyms and ambitions being beamed to every corner of the planet where people still believe a…
Arda Güler: The 19-Year-Old Kid Who Just Made Silicon Valley, Bollywood, and Wall Street Care About La Liga By the time you finish this sentence, Arda Güler will have gained another 3,000 Instagram followers, two Premier League scouts will have updated their flight alerts, and a crypto-bro in Singapore will have minted an NFT of…
The Scottish Premiership: A Cold, Damp Mirror Held Up to the World By Our Correspondent, freshly thawed after a Glasgow night bus Somewhere between the North Sea and the North Atlantic lies a league that is routinely mistaken for a weather report. The Scottish Premiership—twelve clubs, four seasons in one afternoon, and the global economy’s…
The Dictator of Decibels: How Max Verstappen Became the World’s Loudest Metaphor By the time the Dutch national anthem crackled over the floodlit Yas Marina last November, Max Verstappen had already finished ruining the narrative arc for every other racing series on Earth. Formula 2, Formula E, IndyCar, and your nephew’s indoor kart league were…
Marcus Freeman’s Sideline Swagger: How an Irish-American Coach Became the Accidental Face of Soft-Power Diplomacy Paris, 28 November – Somewhere between the Seine’s grey drizzle and the perpetual gridlock on the Boulevard Périphérique, a curious diplomatic cable landed on the desk of a junior attaché at the Quai d’Orsay. Subject line: “Freeman, Marcus – possible…
Jeremiyah Love: The Global Phenomenon of a Name That Refuses to Behave By the time Jeremiyah Love’s latest highlight reel hit 3.2 million views on a cracked smartphone in Lagos, the joke was already stale in São Paulo. “Another American running back with a name that sounds like a failed boy band,” muttered a Brazilian…
The Himalayas versus the Caribbean: a matchup that sounds like the set-up to a geopolitical joke nobody remembers the punchline to. Yet here we are, watching Nepal—population 30 million, per-capita GDP roughly the price of a decent rum cocktail in Barbados—square off against the West Indies, a collection of islands whose combined GDP still struggles…
The Red Card That Rules the World by A. Corvus, roving correspondent, somewhere between the locker room and the Hague On a damp Thursday in Dortmund, the referee reached into his breast pocket and produced what looked like a laminated square of doom. One crimson rectangle later, Jude Bellingham was trudging off the pitch, 80,000…
Kansas Football and the Art of Cosmic Insignificance by Special Correspondent Luka Petrovic, filing from a hotel bar that still thinks Prohibition is negotiable Somewhere on the vast, wheat-swept oblong Americans call “the Heartland,” 53 scholarship athletes in crimson and blue keep losing football games with the dependable rhythm of a Swiss cuckoo clock that’s…
Nottingham Forest vs Sunderland: A Tale of Two Post-Industrial Cities Reduced to Globalized Gladiators for Our Weekend Entertainment By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker LONDON—Somewhere between the IMF’s latest plea for “fiscal prudence” and Elon Musk’s latest plea for attention, two proud English cities best known for closed pits and cancelled car factories will re-enact their ancient…
Nep vs WI: When a Tiny Himalayan Kingdom Meets the Caribbean’s Perpetual Underdogs—and the Rest of Us Just Watch KATHMANDU, 03:47 local—While half the planet pretends to sleep, the other half is pretending not to care that Nepal, population roughly the size of a midsize Chinese apartment complex, is trying to out-bat the West Indies,…
