Kansas City, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles—four cities whose names conjure very different flavors of late-stage capitalism, now welded together by a division whose acronym sounds suspiciously like a Swiss bank routing code. Welcome to the AFC West, a quarterly demonstration that even in the age of global supply-chain anxiety, Americans still find time to…
Jerry Jones: The Last American Monarch in a League of His Own By Our Man in Row Z, International Affairs Desk The name “Jerry Jones” doesn’t translate into Mandarin or Swahili, yet from Lagos sports bars to Seoul betting apps, everyone knows the silhouette: the silver pompadour rising from a luxury box like a weather…
Cooper Kupp, American Football’s Quiet Apocalypse in Cleats By Dave’s Locker International Desk Stockholm, Sweden – On the edge of the Baltic, where winter daylight is rationed like contraband, a local sports bar called “End Zone” has taken to projecting grainy NFL highlights between re-runs of curling championships. The crowd—half of them remote-work refugees from…
The Earth tilts on its axis, oceans rise and fall, currencies collapse and re-inflate like cheap balloons, and yet somewhere a 34-year-old man-child from upstate New York is still spiking a synthetic leather football into the turf as though it personally insulted his mother. To the rest of the planet—where fútbol is a religion, rugby…
From the Shard to the Sahara—everywhere the Wi-Fi reaches—strangers ask the same question: “Who’s No. 1 in college football?” It is, on the surface, a charmingly parochial query, like asking a Mongolian yak herder about the pecking order of East Anglian lawn-bowls clubs. Yet the answer is parsed in trading rooms from Frankfurt to Singapore,…
In the grand, slow-motion car crash we politely call “civilization,” few things travel farther, faster, and with less apparent logic than an aging American quarterback looking for one last spin of the roulette wheel. So when Joseph Vincent Flacco—age 38, Super Bowl MVP from the era when Facebook was still considered cool—was air-freighted from his…
The PLL Championship—those three letters that, to the uninitiated, sound like either a new cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme or a European privacy regulation—has once again crowned a lacrosse sovereign. For the uninitiated, Premier Lacrosse League is America’s attempt to make a sport invented by the Iroquois look like a Vegas pool party. The Denver finale saw…
Terry Bradshaw: America’s Gridiron Prophet, Now Exporting Folksy Doom to a Planet Already on Fire By the time the rest of the world first noticed Terry Bradshaw, he had already collected four Super Bowl rings, a steel-mill handshake, and a smile that looked suspiciously like the American Dream on steroids. To non-Americans, the name once…
When the NFL’s Washington Commanders dispatched Brian Robinson Jr. to the field last autumn, the event registered somewhere between a blip and a shrug on most global seismographs. After all, the planet was busy: the yen was in freefall, Shanghai’s lockdown drones were serenading citizens with “Stay Inside” in three-part harmony, and a British prime…
In a world where supply-chain disruptions can sink currencies faster than a TikTok trend, the Cincinnati Bengals have quietly published a schedule that, on the surface, is merely 17 dates and a few bye-week tears. Yet from an international vantage point—say, a damp café in Istanbul where the espresso tastes like geopolitical regret—the Bengals’ calendar…
NFL Week 2: A Global Audit of the American Gladiator Circus by Matteo “The Passport” De Luca, International Affairs Desk KIGALI—While the Central Bank of Rwanda debates whether to de-dollarize before or after lunch, 73 million Americans are busy screaming at a flat-screen because a man in Cincinnati failed to throw an inflated bladder in…
The Vatican has popes, Brussels has bureaucrats, and South Bend, Indiana—population 103,000, soy-to-human ratio still disputed—has a football coach. When Notre Dame promoted defensive coordinator Marcus Freeman to the throne formerly warmed by Brian Kelly’s hyperactive headset, the global reaction was swift, breathless, and completely disproportionate to any measurable impact on, say, grain futures in…
