In the grand carnival of American football—where helmets are shinier than most national GDPs and the stakes are measured in torn ligaments and television contracts—Christian Darrisaw plays left tackle for the Minnesota Vikings. A position, for the uninitiated, that exists primarily so 320-pound men don’t accidentally sit on quarterbacks who make more per Instagram post…
MILWAUKEE—In a world where the Arctic is on fire and central bankers play Jenga with interest rates, the planet paused last night to watch two American ball clubs named after beer and law enforcement chase a small white sphere across a manicured lawn. The Brewers versus the Rangers, a mid-May interleague tilt that, on paper,…
Mac Jones and the Export of American Quarterbacking: A Tragicomedy in Three Acts By Our Man in Exile, Somewhere Over Greenland Act I – The Transatlantic Pipeline When the New England Patriots drafted Mac Jones 15th overall in 2021, the moment did not, strictly speaking, make the front page of Le Monde or spark a…
Nuno Espírito Santo: The Accidental Globalist Who Keeps Getting Hired to Fire Himself By Our Man on the Touchline, Nursing a Flat White and Existential Dread Somewhere over the Atlantic—between the duty-free Toblerone and the recycled air—Nuno Espírito Santo is probably updating his LinkedIn again. The Portuguese manager has become football’s most polite pandemic: he…
Nottingham Forest: A Parable of Hope, Hubris, and the Global Football Funnel By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere between the Trent and the Tigris On a damp Tuesday in January, while the World Economic Forum was busy recycling last year’s buzzwords in Davos and Elon Musk was still deciding which government to troll…
From the vantage point of a hotel bar in Phnom Penh—where the barman insists on playing 1990s American sitcom theme songs at funeral-parlor volume—the Cubs versus Braves tussle feels less like a ballgame and more like an allegory for late-stage capitalism’s greatest hits. Two franchises, each clutching century-old grievances like passports to self-pity, meet in…
The Washington Nationals and the Miami Marlins, two baseball franchises whose combined payrolls could bail out a modestly failing European bank, faced off last night in a contest that the global community greeted with the same polite indifference normally reserved for a UN subcommittee on agricultural tariffs. From the Maracanã to the Marina Bay Sands,…
Mets vs Phillies: Two Rust-Belt City-States Fight Over a Pastime While the Planet Melts By Ignacio “Nacho” Valdez, International Correspondent, currently hiding from his bar tab in Athens If you squint at the right moment—say, during a 3-2 changeup that dies in the humid Philadelphia night—the Mets-Phillies rivalry starts to look like a low-stakes reenactment…
PARIS—Somewhere between the baguette crumbs and the hushed reverence of Court 2 at Roland-Garros, Alycia Parks is busy reminding the planet that power tennis is no longer the monopoly of Eastern European finishing schools or Floridian academies staffed by ex-Soviet taskmasters with a vitamin-B12 drip. Instead, the 6-foot-1 product of suburban Atlanta—pop. 500K, humidity 200%—has…
From the balmy banks of the Clyde to the fluorescent glare of Turf Moor, Greg Taylor has evolved from a boyhood Celtic fan into a walking referendum on the state of modern football—complete with all the contradictions, neuroses, and transfer-mark-to-market arbitrage that entails. While most of the planet sorts out inflation, war, and whether to…
Steven Lenhart: The Man Who Turned MLS Fouls Into Performance Art and Accidentally Forecasted the End of the American Century By A Correspondent Who Once Watched a Friendly in Pyongyang and Still Has the Whistle Marks PARIS—Somewhere between the croissants and the existential dread, the name Steven Lenhart still surfaces in bars along the Boulevard…
Moise Kean and the Global Transfer Carousel: How a Striker’s Career Became a Metaphor for Everything Wrong (and Right) with International Football By the time Moise Kean turned 24, the Italian striker had collected more passport stamps than most foreign correspondents. Born near Turin to Ivorian parents, fast-tracked by Juventus, dispatched to Everton, loaned to…
