Celtic Score: How a Football Tally in Glasgow Became the World’s New Favorite Rorschach Test In the grand, perpetually malfunctioning casino we call planet Earth, nothing travels faster than a scoreline—except, perhaps, the hot takes that follow. When Celtic Football Club rattled in five unanswered goals against Slovan Bratislava on a damp Wednesday in Glasgow,…
KENYON SADIQ AND THE AGE OF THE BORDERLESS SCANDAL Dave’s Locker International | 600 words There are only two kinds of global citizens left: those who have never heard of Kenyon Sadiq, and those who pretend they haven’t. From the glass towers of Singapore to the crumbling cafés of Algiers, the name now circulates like…
The Red Card That Rules the World by A. Corvus, roving correspondent, somewhere between the locker room and the Hague On a damp Thursday in Dortmund, the referee reached into his breast pocket and produced what looked like a laminated square of doom. One crimson rectangle later, Jude Bellingham was trudging off the pitch, 80,000…
Kansas Football and the Art of Cosmic Insignificance by Special Correspondent Luka Petrovic, filing from a hotel bar that still thinks Prohibition is negotiable Somewhere on the vast, wheat-swept oblong Americans call “the Heartland,” 53 scholarship athletes in crimson and blue keep losing football games with the dependable rhythm of a Swiss cuckoo clock that’s…
Somewhere between the tarmac of Dulles and the potholed fantasies of every commuter on Earth sits the U.S. Secretary of Transportation—a title that sounds thrillingly omnipotent until you remember it mostly involves begging Congress for money to replace bolts installed during the Ford administration. Still, for the rest of the planet, the office is less…
The Criminal Lawyer: Global Baggage Handler for Humanity’s Carry-On of Sin By a correspondent who has spent too many nights in fluorescent airports and even more in dimly lit courtrooms From the marble-paneled war crimes chambers in The Hague to a tin-roofed magistrate’s shed outside Freetown, the criminal lawyer is the one indispensable travel adaptor…
Leeds United vs Bournemouth: A Microscopic Clash in the Colosseum of Meaningless Significance by D. Lockhart, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between the Brexit hangover and the TikTok apocalypse, 22 men in fluorescent socks will chase a sphere across a rectangle of chemically enhanced grass in West Yorkshire. The planet, meanwhile, will keep spinning at…
The last time a single American linebacker caused this much trans-Atlantic chatter, the Berlin Wall was still standing and fax machines were considered cutting-edge espionage tech. Yet here we are in 2024, and Lavar Arrington—retired gridiron demigod, part-time philosopher, full-time podcast provocateur—has somehow become the unofficial yardstick by which the rest of the planet measures…
Mainz 05 vs Borussia Dortmund: A Provincial Dust-Up in the Global Coliseum By Our Correspondent, somewhere east of the Rhine and west of existential despair When tiny 1. FSV Mainz 05 host the corporate fever dream known as Borussia Dortmund, the planet keeps turning, missiles keep flying elsewhere, and your crypto portfolio keeps hemorrhaging. Yet…
Rugby World Cup: When 15 Men and a Ball Become the UN Security Council’s Only Functional Sub-Committee By Our Correspondent, currently elbow-deep in lukewarm stadium lager somewhere between the Tropics and Lat. 34°S The Rugby World Cup kicked off again this autumn—because apparently we needed another quadrennial reminder that human beings will happily volunteer to…
MADRID—Somewhere between a flamenco bar and a NATO summit, Atlético Madrid and Real Madrid will again collide tonight in a fixture that doubles as a municipal civil war and a quarterly earnings call. The match is nominally about three points in La Liga, but—like most things in 2024—it is really about soft power, trans-continental brand…
Chelsea vs Brighton: A Timeline of Tactical Nihilism and Global Collateral Damage The first time these two south-coast neighbors locked horns in the top flight—April Fool’s Day, 1933—Europe was busy rehearsing its next world war and the Dow was still hung-over from 1929. Brighton lost 3-2 at Stamford Bridge, proving that even in the Great…
