Chengdu Open: A Tennis Tournament, a Power Cable, and the World’s Slow-Motion Nervous Breakdown By Dave’s Far-East Correspondent, Nursing a Hangzhou Hangover The Chengdu Open—an ATP 250 event played 1,600 kilometres from the nearest ocean and zero kilometres from the next Sichuan hotpot—kicked off this week in a city best known for pandas who refuse…
A Ticket to the Old Firm: How a Sliver of Green-and-White Cardstock Became the Hottest Geopolitical Currency You’ve Never Heard Of By the time the WhatsApp pings land in Jakarta, Bogotá, and a particularly disgruntled Toronto pub owner’s group chat, the digital queue for Celtic tickets has already been bleeding servers for six hours. Somewhere…
House of Guinness: When the World’s Favourite Stout Becomes a Geopolitical Football Dublin’s St. James’s Gate has always been a cathedral of foam and folklore, but lately the altar boys are wearing bespoke suits and speaking in the clipped dialects of Singapore, New York, and—because irony never sleeps—London. The “House of Guinness” is no longer…
PARIS—While the Seine lurches through another heatwave and the Olympic rings rust politely on the skyline, a 23-year-old from California has convinced 17.4 million strangers that watching him screech into his phone is the new appointment viewing. Alex Warren—TikTok’s answer to a skateboard with anxiety—has officially cracked the global attention economy, proving that international diplomacy…
Every April, while the rest of the planet toggles between existential dread and the next dopamine hit from a dancing-cat reel, the ancient Suffolk county town of Ipswich stages its Half Marathon—a thirteen-point-one-mile exercise in collective denial that is quietly redefining what it means to be “globalised.” To the untrained eye it’s just 2,000 Brits…
Pachuca vs. Querétaro: the fixture that sounds like a regional bus route but somehow matters to the algorithmic overlords who decide what 3 a.m. insomniacs from Jakarta to Johannesburg are allowed to scream at on their phones. Welcome, dear reader, to the globalised circus known as Liga MX, where two mid-table Mexican sides can still…
Valencia vs Athletic Club: A Mediterranean Morality Tale Beamed to a Planet That’s Already Bored By our Special Correspondent in Existential Section J-7 Mestalla Stadium, Valencia—Thursday, 02:15 GMT+1. Somewhere between the paella pans and the palm-lined promenades, 22 millionaires in polyester are about to chase an inflatable sphere while the rest of humanity doom-scrolls its…
When Arouca—population 22,000, best known for producing granite and existential dread—hosts Benfica in the Taça de Portugal, the planet does not exactly tilt off its axis. Yet the fixture, charmingly abbreviated across betting apps as “AVS vs Benfica,” is a tidy parable for the times we live in: a micro-club whose annual budget couldn’t cover…
Verona vs Juventus: A Microscopic Opera of Global Delusion By Dave’s Locker International Desk There is, at first glance, nothing cosmic about a mid-table scuffle in Serie A. Verona—city of star-crossed teenagers, overpriced opera tickets, and the faint smell of mildewed romance—hosts Juventus, that Turin-based global hedge fund that occasionally fields a football team. And…
West Ham vs Crystal Palace: A Parochial Derby the World Pretends to Care About By our man in the cheap seats, still waiting for geopolitical relevance to kick in LONDON—While diplomats in Brussels argue over artillery shells and grain corridors, 62,000 otherwise sane adults converged on a former marsh in Stratford on Saturday to scream…
Mikel Arteta, the accidental geopolitician, is currently conducting a real-time experiment in soft power from a bench in North London. While the rest of us doom-scroll through tariff wars, coups, and that inexplicable new TikTok dance, Arteta has quietly turned Arsenal Football Club into a multilateral alliance that would make the UN Security Council blush…
The Planet Wagers On: How a Quiet Maltese Brand Became the House Bank for a Restless Earth By the time the final whistle blew in last month’s Copa Libertadores final, Betway’s odds ticker had already refreshed for the Bangladesh Premier League, a lower-division Belarusian reserve match, and a competitive thumb-wrestling semi-final in an undisclosed Siberian…
