Scotch Tape for the Soul: How Chivas Became the World’s Favorite Liquid Alibi By Our Man in the Departure Lounge Somewhere between the 5 a.m. call to prayer in Dubai and the 5 p.m. closing bell in São Paulo, the word “Chivas” stopped being a surname and became a passport stamp. Or, more accurately, a…
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…
In a nondescript conference room somewhere between Brussels and Boredom, the world’s defense ministers recently wrapped up another round of what they insist on calling the “Guardians Game.” The term sounds like a Saturday-morning cartoon spin-off, but it’s actually the polite label for a global wargame that runs on classified servers, diplomatic double-speak, and an…
The Nine-Lives of Lisa Aguilar: A Global Parable for the Post-Truth Age Dateline: Somewhere over the international date line, where yesterday’s conspiracy is tomorrow’s Netflix docu-series. If you missed the latest Twitter cyclone, allow me to catch you up: Lisa Aguilar, a 29-year-old municipal clerk from a mid-sized city whose greatest previous claim to fame…
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…
Whit Weeks: When the Northern Hemisphere Takes a Collective Smoke Break While the Rest of the World Pretends Not to Notice By the time the lilacs in Oslo have bloomed and Stockholm’s office towers start emptying at 3 p.m., the annual rite known locally as “whit weeks” is under way. To outsiders it sounds vaguely…
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…
