PARIS—Somewhere between the Champs-Élysées and the existential void, Hugo Ekitiké, 21, is learning that the road from Reims to superstardom is paved with more paperwork than poetry. The French striker, currently on loan at Eintracht Frankfurt after Paris Saint-Germain decided he was surplus to requirements (read: not a Brazilian with a TikTok account), embodies the…
Gravenberch, or How One Midfielder Became a Global Mirror ZURICH—Somewhere between a Champions League quarter-final and a TikTok clip of him nutmegging a camera operator, Ryan Gravenberch stopped being merely Dutch and became a planetary weather vane. One week he’s the latest proof that Ajax’s academy could still squeeze genius from a clogged drain; the…
Michael Olise and the Beautiful Game’s Ugly Price Tag By Our Man in Every Airport Lounge Between Paris and Penang It takes a village to raise a child, they say, but it apparently takes the GDP of a mid-sized Pacific island to buy one who can bend a football like Michael Olise. The 22-year-old Franco-Nigerian-English…
Dominique Malonga: The Name That Launched a Thousand Transfer-Rumour Bots A sardonic dispatch from the crossroads of football, finance, and our collective gullibility By the time you finish this sentence, Dominique Malonga’s Wikipedia page will have been edited in at least three alphabets you don’t speak. That, dear reader, is the modern miracle of global…
Rasmus Højlund to Napoli: A Nordic Tragedy in Three Acts, Starring the Global Transfer Market as Itself The rumour, like a cheap espresso in Naples’ back alleys, is short, bitter, and impossible to ignore: Manchester United’s Viking-in-residence, Rasmus Højlund, is being courted by Napoli. On paper it’s a mere line in the sports pages; in…
Fábio Carvalho: The €7 Million Footballer Who Reminds Us the World Is Still For Sale, Just at a Discount If you squint hard enough at Fábio Carvalho’s career trajectory, you can see the entire global economy refracted in miniature: a Portuguese kid born in Torres Vedras, polished in England, loan-dumped in Germany, and now hawked…
Zubimendi: A Basque Anchor in the Age of Football Mercenaries By Our Man in the Transfer Minefield It’s 3 a.m. in Singapore, prime time for European football gossip addicts. Across the hemisphere, phones ping with the same headline: “Zubimendi Turns Down Liverpool.” Somewhere in Texas, a hedge-fund bro who’s never seen San Sebastián except on…
The Rise and Mildly Inconvenient Fall of Chuba Akpom, or How a Striker’s Goal Glut Became Collateral Damage in Football’s Endless Transfer Carousel By Our Man in the Departure Lounge ISTANBUL—Somewhere between the kebab smoke and the Bosphorus haze, Chuba Akpom has discovered that fame, like Turkish tea, cools quickly once the cup is empty….
Jota Silva: The Portuguese Winger Who Proves the World Still Runs on Speed, Debt, and Hope By the time you finish reading this sentence, Jota Silva will have already been scouted by three mid-table Premier League clubs, two petro-state sporting directors with Excel sheets full of blood money, and one MLS franchise that still thinks…
Wigan Athletic’s Norwegian teenager, Thelo Aasgaard, has spent the past fortnight doing something no Scandinavian export has managed since flat-pack furniture: forcing the world to read the assembly instructions. One dazzling League One hat-trick later and the 20-year-old’s name is being Googled from Lagos to Lima by people who previously thought “Aasgaard” was either an…
Moise Kean and the Global Transfer Carousel: How a Striker’s Career Became a Metaphor for Everything Wrong (and Right) with International Football By the time Moise Kean turned 24, the Italian striker had collected more passport stamps than most foreign correspondents. Born near Turin to Ivorian parents, fast-tracked by Juventus, dispatched to Everton, loaned to…
