Real Oviedo vs. Barcelona: When David Books Goliath’s Private Jet Estadio Carlos Tartiere, 21:00 local time—an hour when most of Europe is either asleep or pretending to be. Yet on Spain’s rainy northern coast, 28,000 Asturian souls cram into a stadium whose last major renovation was paid for by the peseta. The occasion? A Copa…
From the Andes to the Alps, the football world woke up this week to the gentle sound of schadenfreude tinkling like wind-chimes in Davos. América de Cali, the scarlet-clad bogotano powerhouse that once trafficked in South American silverware the way Swiss bankers traffic in, well, everything else, has been unceremoniously dumped out of the Copa…
The Café of Broken Dreams, Somewhere Between Mexico City and Zurich Tuesday, 03:17 GMT-6 If you squint just right, the fluorescent glow of Estadio Azteca on Wednesday night looks less like flood-lights and more like the interrogation lamp of a very polite loan shark. Club América—Latin America’s self-appointed Galactic Empire—has rolled up to the semifinal…
Union Saint-Gilloise and the Beautifully Stupid Hope of the Underdog By Our Man in Brussels, nursing his third lambic and counting the ways the world disappoints Brussels, the city that perfected both chocolate and bureaucratic torpor, woke up last Thursday to discover its most successful institution this decade isn’t the European Commission, NATO, or even…
San Sebastián, Sunday night—while the rest of the planet argued over which streaming service best buffered their insomnia, a wind-lashed corner of the Basque Country served up a 90-minute referendum on the modern order. Real Sociedad 0-1 Real Madrid: the scoreline looks minimalist, but the ripple effects are already rattling boardrooms from Beijing to Bogotá,…
Marseille FC, or Olympique de Marseille if you’re trying to impress a customs officer, is less a football club and more a geopolitical Rorschach test smeared across the Mediterranean. From the Vieux-Port to a Singaporean hedge-fund boardroom, OM’s fortunes ricochet like a badly cleared corner kick, reminding the world that even sport is now just…
