Getafe vs Alavés: Two Suburbs of Madrid and Vitoria Walk Into a Global Bar and Nobody Notices—Except the Algorithms By the time the referee’s whistle echoes around the Coliseum Alfonso Pérez this weekend, three continents will have already yawned, scrolled past, and queued up cat videos instead. Yet in the grand, increasingly pixelated circus of…
Monchi: The Data Whisperer Who Turned Sevilla into a Global Talent Laundromat By “Lucky” Lucía Ortega, International Desk, Dave’s Locker If you’ve never heard of Ramón Rodríguez Verdejo—known to the footballing underworld simply as “Monchi”—congratulations on your blissful ignorance. The rest of us mortals, scattered from Dakar to Dortmund, now live in the economy he…
Opta Stats: The Global Spreadsheet That Knows You’re Overrated Before You Do By Our Man in Cyberspace, Still Nursing a Hangover from the Last World Cup If the planet ever decides to hold a beauty contest for raw data, Opta’s spreadsheets would arrive dripping in sponsored moisturizer, each cell flexing like an influencer on a…
From the vantage of a rainy rooftop bar in Brussels—where the EU’s finest bureaucrats are currently arguing about the curvature of bananas—one might not expect the tremors of a baseball scandal in Houston to register on the Rich Bullshit Detector™. Yet Zach Cole, a name that sounds like a failed boy-band member turned tax attorney,…
Bryson DeChambeau, the human launch monitor who looks like he bench-presses physics textbooks, has become golf’s most reliable export of controlled chaos. While the rest of the planet argues over tariffs, carbon credits, and whose submarine is parked in whose harbor, DeChambeau is busy re-engineering the supposedly pastoral game into something resembling a NASA stress…
