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…
When the world’s financial class starts speaking in three-letter acronyms, the rest of us brace for impact. FBS I—short for “Financial Balance Sheet Initiative, version 1”—sounds like an obscure software patch your bank’s IT department quietly installs at 3 a.m. while you dream of compound interest. In reality, it is the newest attempt by the…
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…
Utah vs Wyoming: Two Rectangles and a Global Existential Crisis By R. M. Delgado, Senior Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Atlantic It began, as most planetary fiascos do, with a college-football scoreboard: Utah 34, Wyoming 17. Yet the tremor from Rice-Eccles Stadium did not stop at the Wasatch Fault; it ricocheted through algorithmic trading floors in…
The International Trade War Nobody Talked About: How Juan Soto Became a Geopolitical Asset in Pinstripes By Our Man in the Dugout, filing from everywhere the Wi-Fi still works It began, as most modern tragedies do, with a push notification. Somewhere between a cease-fire in Gaza and another crypto magnate’s fraud indictment, Juan Soto—age 25,…
ORLANDO, Florida—On Saturday night, Exploria Stadium will stage another installment of Major League Soccer’s most charmingly lopsided rivalry: Orlando City versus D.C. United, the tale of two capitals—one built on fairy dust and foreclosure, the other on marble and moral compromise. From the outside, it’s only 90 minutes of 22 men chasing a ball while…
