Milan vs Bologna: A Derby of Desperation in the Age of Global Collateral Damage By Our Man in the Mezzogiorno, still coughing up neoliberal dust MILAN—At first glance, tonight’s Serie A fixture between Milan and Bologna is merely the 156th official meeting of two clubs whose combined trophy cabinets could house a modest oligarch’s ego….
Eddy Piñeiro: The Cuban-Born Foot Who Reminds the World That Nations Still Argue Over 100 Yards of Grass By the time the American football season mercifully ends and the rest of the planet returns to grown-up sports, Eddy Piñeiro’s right boot will have ping-ponged between glory and infamy more often than a diplomat at a…
Stefon Diggs and the 21st-Century Gladiator Exchange Program By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere over Greenland Somewhere between the sushi bar at Narita and the duty-free Marlboros in Dubai, Stefon Diggs—wide-receiver, occasional philosopher, and full-time mood ring—was traded from Buffalo to Houston like a collectible NFT nobody asked for. The transaction pinged across…
Rome, Italy – At 3 a.m. local time, while the Eternal City’s pigeons slept off another day of aggressive carb-loading, a small band of insomniac Europeans huddled around laptops tuned to a grainy stream of the Arizona Cardinals versus the Seattle Seahawks. The broadcast was in English, the commercials were for pickup trucks unavailable on…
CLEVELAND, OHIO—Somewhere between the rust-belt skyline that looks like Berlin after an especially bitter winter and the Cuyahoga River, famous for once being flammable, the Cleveland Browns continue their noble quest to teach the planet that hope is a renewable resource—mainly because it keeps getting crushed and recycled. From the vantage point of a globe…
Seen from the rooftop bars of São Paulo, the NFL Network looks less like a television channel and more like a geopolitical hallucination: 24-hour coverage of men in Kevlar costumes hurling themselves at one another, punctuated by graphics so aggressive they could be NATO briefings. Yet the signal—beamed by satellite, pirated in Lagos internet cafés,…
Ravens Game: When a Football Match in Baltimore Becomes a Global Metaphor for Everything Going Wrong By the time the final whistle blew at M&T Bank Stadium last Sunday, half the planet had already turned the Ravens game into whatever political Rorschach test it needed most. In Delhi, the match was proof that American decadence…
Charissa Thompson and the Global Collapse of Authenticity: A Dispatch from the Sports-Industrial Complex By the time the sun rose in Mumbai, Charissa Thompson had already trended in Lagos, trended in São Paulo, and been retweeted by a Turkish crypto-bro who thinks “NFL RedZone” is a Marxist plot. The reason? The American sideline reporter admitted—on…
Browns Game Today: The Rust Belt Circus Streams Live to a Planet on Fire By Matteo “Gravedigger” Gallo, foreign desk, somewhere over the Atlantic The Cleveland Browns are playing today, and—mirabile dictu—someone in Ulaanbaatar is refreshing the NFL app to see if Nick Chubb’s reconstructed knee still bends the right way. This is not a…
Saints Game: A Global Ritual Where Hope and Despair Share a Bowl of Gumbo By Pascal “Pax” Moreau | International Desk, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between the Tigris and the Thames, between the favelas of Rio and the K-pop karaoke bars of Seoul, the world pauses for the Saints Game. In New Orleans the cathedral bells…
The Premier League Table as Geopolitical Barometer By Our Man in the Departure Lounge LONDON—Somewhere between the 37th minute and the existential dread that is Monday, the Premier League table has become the world’s most widely consulted oracle. From Lagos hawkers to Tokyo hedge-fund pods, the spreadsheet of 20 English postal codes is parsed with…
Ashton Gate: The World Shrinks Around a Patch of Grass in South Bristol By our correspondent, still pretending the local is global The first thing you notice when you land at Heathrow—after the queue that makes purgatory look like priority boarding—is that the planet’s problems are now classified as either “over there” or “somebody else’s…
