Rayo Vallecano—Sevilla, the fixture that sounds like a flamenco duel between two rival guitarists who both secretly hate their day jobs. On paper it’s merely another La Liga Saturday in Vallecas, that stubborn pocket of Madrid where gentrification keeps tripping over anarchist graffiti. Yet in the broader, borderless theater we politely call “planet Earth,” this…
Alanyaspor vs Galatasaray: A Turkish League Fixture That Somehow Matters in a World Already on Fire By Dave’s Locker International Desk It is Friday night in Alanya, a Mediterranean resort town whose biggest export used to be mediocre all-inclusive wristbands and whose newest export is a football club punching so far above its weight it…
The Basque Country and the Balearics—two Spanish regions that have spent centuries perfecting the art of polite separatism—met again on the pitch last night, and the world barely blinked. Real Sociedad versus RCD Mallorca: a fixture that sounds like the opening line of a shaggy-dog joke about two autonomous communities walking into a bar. Yet…
Levante 1 – Real Madrid 2: A Quiet Earthquake in the Province of Valencia By our correspondent in the cheap seats, nursing a microwaved cortado and a mild case of existential dread In the grand opera of global sport, some nights are scored for Wagnerian bombast—flares, tear gas, geopolitical metaphors flying like faulty fireworks. Others,…
Sunderland vs Aston Villa: When Two Former Empires Meet in the Colosseum of Relegation Rome had the Colosseum; we have the Stadium of Light on a damp Tuesday night. Same blood sport, slightly better floodlights. Yet when Sunderland host Aston Villa, the global audience is treated to more than a relegation six-pointer—it’s a live autopsy…
Enzo Maresca’s Second Act: How a Former Regista Became the Poster-Boy for Football’s Global Recycling Scheme By Dave’s International Correspondent, still jet-lagged in three time zones Somewhere over the Atlantic, between the last lukewarm airline coffee and the first lukewarm airport beer, a thought occurred to me: Enzo Maresca is proof that the world economy…
Carvajal’s Knee and the End of Empire: A 30-Centimeter Scar for the 21st Century By L. di Sangiovese, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker The sun that never set on Real Madrid’s empire finally flickered last Tuesday, somewhere between a UEFA MRI tube and a Madrid operating table. Dani Carvajal, the indefatigable right-back who has sprinted 40,000…
Lisbon, Portugal – On paper, Benfica is merely a football club—113 years old, 83 major trophies, a seagull-shit-coated stadium squatting on the edge of the Tagus. In practice, it is one of the last functioning imperial machines still headquartered in Europe, a late-capitalist relic that exports talent the way Britain once exported missionaries and smallpox….
Chris Wilder, Sheffield United, and the Global Art of Not Quite Dying By our correspondent in the away end, nursing a £7 pie and an existential crisis The official line is that Sheffield United “parted company” with Chris Wilder on 25 March, which is boardroom code for “we fired him by WhatsApp while the rest…
ZUBIMENDI: THE MIDFIELDER WHO SAID “NO” TO ARSENAL, YES TO THE APOCALYPSE by Our Man in the Bunker San Sebastián – While half the planet was busy arguing about whether the Doomsday Clock should be moved to 89.5 seconds to midnight or simply replaced by a live feed of Elon Musk’s Twitter drafts, Martín Zubimendi…
Declan Rice, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Transfer Fee by our man in the cheap seats, somewhere over the Atlantic The planet keeps spinning, glaciers sulk, and somewhere a hedge-fund algorithm is quietly buying up the Colorado River. Yet in the summer of 2023, a 24-year-old from Kingston-upon-Thames became the…
From the balmy banks of the Clyde to the fluorescent glare of Turf Moor, Greg Taylor has evolved from a boyhood Celtic fan into a walking referendum on the state of modern football—complete with all the contradictions, neuroses, and transfer-mark-to-market arbitrage that entails. While most of the planet sorts out inflation, war, and whether to…
