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…
The Ballad of Lamine Yamal: A 17-Year-Old Who Makes the Rest of Us Look Like Underachievers By Dave’s Cynical Foreign Correspondent, somewhere between the Camp Nou and a mid-life crisis The planet’s collective quarter-life crisis took another hit last week when Lamine Yamal—a child who still needs permission slips for school trips—quietly announced himself as…
Ansu Fati Is 21 Going on 31 and the Whole World Is Watching Him Age in Fast-Forward By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, sipping a €17 airport cortado Barcelona—When Ansu Fati was 17, he looked 12 and played like a 27-year-old who had already read the spoiler ending of every defender’s autobiography. Four knee…
Shay Given and the Fine Art of Waiting for Armageddon in a Green Jersey By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere over the Irish Sea In the grand, gaudy theatre of world football, strikers are the demigods who buy Bugattis on whim, managers are the messiahs who last six months and leave clutching golden…
Thursday night in the Europa League’s velvet-rope district, Eintracht Frankfurt and Galatasaray meet in a fixture that sounds like a regional spat but reverberates well beyond the Rhine and the Bosphorus. On paper it’s merely Matchday Whatever—three points, a clean sheet, maybe a souvenir scar for the physio’s scrapbook—but in our end-stage-capitalism era of football,…
Europa League Play-off, Second Leg Old Trafford, Manchester – 22:00 CET, 29 August 2024 If you squint hard enough, Manchester United versus SK Brann begins to resemble one of those late-night infomercials for a miracle kitchen gadget: loudly advertised, vaguely unnecessary, yet somehow compulsory viewing for anyone still awake on a Thursday. On paper it…
Paul Pogba: The 100-Million-Euro Metaphor for Everything Wrong—And Beautifully Absurd—About Global Football Manchester, Shanghai, Riyadh, Turin—pick a continent at random and you’ll still find someone arguing about Paul Pogba. The French midfielder has become less a footballer and more a planetary Rorschach test: to the Premier League’s marketing department he’s a shampoo-commercial deity, to Serie…
MADRID – Walk the worn marble of the Manzanares at dusk and you will find the last dictator Europe still applauds. No, not one of those tin-pot nostalgics hogging the headlines in the world’s sad corners—this one wears a black Armani tracksuit, whistles with the authority of a frontier guard, and has turned a modest…
COPENHAGEN, Denmark — On Thursday night the Parken Stadium will throb with the sort of optimism Scandinavians normally reserve for tax-return season. FC Copenhagen, a club whose annual budget is roughly what Bayer Leverkusen spends on sports-science smoothies, welcomes the newly-crowned “Neverlusen” for the first leg of a Europa League quarter-final. Bookmakers have installed the…
Wycombe Wanderers and the Beautiful Art of Glorious Failure By Dave’s International Desk of Diminishing Returns High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire – population 125,000, elevation 100 meters above sea level, elevation of expectations approximately three pints above sea level on a Tuesday. To the uninitiated, Wycombe Wanderers FC is a modest English club currently marooned in League…
Real Salt Lake vs LAFC: A Riot in the Rockies, a Ballet in Beverly Hills—And Why a Kazakhstani Goat Herder Should Care SALT LAKE CITY—High above the Great Basin, where the air is thin and the liquor laws Byzantine, two Major League Soccer franchises prepared to do battle last night with the solemn urgency of…
River Plate vs. Palmeiras: Two Continents Collide in a Match the World Pretends Not to Care About By the time the Buenos Aires sun sets tonight, 70,000 River Plate devotees will have burned through half their monthly wages on dubious hot-dogs and replica shirts that dissolve in the wash. Across the equator, a near-equal mob…
