Athletic Club 2 – 0 Alavés: A Basque Derby in the Twilight of the World San Mamés, Thursday night—while half the planet doom-scrolled its way through another 24-hour news cycle of melting ice caps and crypto scams, 46,000 souls wedged themselves into a cathedral of cracked concrete and throbbing larynxes to watch 22 millionaires boot…
South Alabama vs. Auburn: A Microscopic Proxy War in a World That’s Already Over By the time the final whistle blows on Saturday night, roughly 87,000 Alabamians will have screamed themselves hoarse inside Jordan–Hare Stadium while another 25,000 will have discovered the existential terror of a half-empty Hancock Whitney Stadium in Mobile. To the rest…
**Saturday’s Gladiator Pageant: Why the Planet Still Watches College Football Games Today, Live and in Real Time** If you tune in to any college football games today live, you will witness roughly four million BTUs of adolescent kinetic energy being converted, in real time, into advertising inventory. From Jakarta to Johannesburg, satellites obediently relay the…
Samford vs Baylor: A Microscopic Gladiator Match in the Coliseum of American Overreach By L. Marchetti, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Global Desk Somewhere on the rolling, chemically-enhanced grass of Waco, Texas—an otherwise forgettable dot on the map notable mainly for its enthusiastic relationship with firearms and Dr Pepper—Samford University will attempt to mug Baylor University…
Juventus vs Inter: The Derby That Could Start a Small Trade War By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent Somewhere Between Milan and Turin, Nursing an Overpriced Espresso The Derby d’Italia is back, and for once the Italian government isn’t the most dysfunctional thing on display. Juventus—fresh from accounting classes and a 15-point deduction that vanished like a…
Juventus vs. Inter: When Football’s Cold War Finally Spills Out of Europe’s Deep Freezer By Our Man in Turin (who still hasn’t thawed out) TURIN—If you squint hard enough through the Alpine smog, the Derby d’Italia looks less like a football match and more like a summit of two failing superpowers trying to convince the…
Alex Goleš: The Balkan Midfielder Who Became a Metaphor for Europe’s Existential Midfield Crisis From the terraces of Partizan Belgrade to the fluorescent-lit spreadsheets of UEFA licensing officers, the career arc of Aleksandar “Alex” Goleš is less a bedtime story for football romantics and more a cautionary fable for anyone who still believes the beautiful…
The quaintly named “HCU vs Nebraska” is, on first glance, only a scrap of American collegiate sport, a dust-up between Houston Christian University—population: one modest Texas campus—and the University of Nebraska, whose football program alone could probably float a small sovereign debt issue. Yet, like a well-traveled diplomat who pretends to sip tea while negotiating…
The World Watches Central Michigan vs. Michigan, or: How We All Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mid-Major By L. Marlowe, International Desk, somewhere between despair and a Marriott minibar. From the banks of the Tigris to the glass towers of Singapore, humanity awoke last Saturday to discover the globe’s most pressing geopolitical fault…
The Curious Case of Joey Aguilar: How One Man’s Local Scam Became a Global Masterclass in Collective Gullibility by Dave’s Locker, International Desk PARIS – Every few years the planet coughs up a folk-hero fraudster who reminds us that borders are just suggestions and gullibility is the last truly universal currency. Enter Joey Aguilar, 31,…
Oklahoma vs Temple: A Dispatch from the Imperial Margins By Sergei “Sarge” Volkov, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker The alert pinged in from a bar in Tbilisi, a city that knows something about being a buffer zone between empires. A college football game—Oklahoma versus Temple—was trending worldwide. Not because the Sooners might drop 50 points on…
Nick Saban, American Caesar of the Gridiron, Retires—And the World Somehow Keeps Spinning By Helena Draxler, Senior International Correspondent | Dave’s Locker PARIS—While glaciers melt, supply chains choke, and half the planet queues for a passport that still means something, the United States paused yesterday to rend its garments over the retirement of a 72-year-old…
