Ethan Nwaneri, the 17-year-old Arsenal prodigy who already looks like he’s collecting passports for sport, has become the Rorschach test of late-capitalist football: each continent sees in him whatever it needs to feel better about itself. To the Premier League’s marketing wizards—those caffeinated alchemists who could monetize a sneeze if it trended on TikTok—he is…
The Curious Case of Brilyn Hollyhand: How a 17-Year-Old Alabama Kid Accidentally Became the World’s Most Reluctant Soft-Power Asset By D. Locke, International Correspondent PARIS—Somewhere between the seventh arrondissement and a nondescript brasserie where the espresso tastes like regret, I found myself staring at a phone screen displaying Brilyn Hollyhand’s Instagram grid. The kid—yes, kid,…
When Aaron Ramsey announced his latest move to Nice in the summer of 2023, the planet paused for roughly the length of a TikTok clip. In Syria, cease-fires flickered; in São Paulo, commuters glanced up from their phones just long enough to mutter “Nice, huh?” and return to doom-scrolling. Somewhere in the sprawl of global…
Everton vs Aston Villa: A Timeline of Two Cities, Three Continents, and One Very British Neurosis ≈600 words It began, as so many of the modern world’s ills do, with a telegram. On 22 September 1888, a flustered clerk in the Liverpool Post Office tapped out the score—Everton 2–2 Aston Villa—to a bemused colonial administrator…
The Slow, Glorious Death of Hope: A Global Timeline of Crystal Palace vs Sunderland By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, somewhere above the Atlantic 1905 – Birth of a Rivalry, Birth of the Modern Age Crystal Palace and Sunderland first meet when Britannia still ruled waves and the planet’s thermostat was mostly intact. The…
Real Sociedad 0 – Real Madrid 2 Anoeta, Sunday night, and the rain that drifts in from the Cantabrian Sea is the sort that makes diplomats cancel flights and poets cancel themselves. Inside the stadium, 33,000 mortals huddle beneath sponsored ponchos while 22 millionaires in wet laundry jog about, pretending the result matters more than…
From the Basque Hills to the Boardrooms of Beijing: A Brief, Cynical History of Real Sociedad vs Real Madrid By Our Man in Madrid, who has seen smaller clubs swallowed whole and richer ones vomit up managers like bad paella. 1909 – Birth of a David Real Sociedad pops into existence in San Sebastián, a…
Cameron Crowe’s Existential Crisis—and Ours A dispatch from the planet-wide screening room where the house lights never quite come up By the time the news pinged across continents—Cameron Crowe, 66, was “stepping back to reassess narrative priorities,” a phrase that sounded suspiciously like Hollywood code for “my last film financed a small nation and still…
Getafe 0 – Real Oviedo 0 A Scoreline That Managed to Mean Everything and Nothing in the Same Breath By the time the final whistle blew on an overcast Tuesday night in the southern Madrid dormitory town, the global news cycle had already sprinted three laps around the planet. Somewhere in the Pacific, a nuclear…
Fulham vs Leeds: A Timeline of Mutual Self-Destruction, Now Broadcasting Worldwide By Our Man in the Departure Lounge London, 14:03 GMT – Somewhere above the Atlantic, a Singaporean hedge-fund analyst toggles between two tabs: one tracking the Nikkei’s latest swan dive, the other a grainy stream of Fulham vs Leeds from 2003. He isn’t nostalgic;…
Sitting in a café that claims to be “Parisian” but smells exclusively of burnt sugar and desperation, I watch the replay of Newcastle United versus Wolverhampton Wanderers on a screen whose pixels long ago surrendered. Around me, Japanese tourists photograph croissants, a Russian oligarch haggles over the price of bottled water, and an American podcaster…
Declan Rice, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Transfer Fee by our man in the cheap seats, somewhere over the Atlantic The planet keeps spinning, glaciers sulk, and somewhere a hedge-fund algorithm is quietly buying up the Colorado River. Yet in the summer of 2023, a 24-year-old from Kingston-upon-Thames became the…
