Bruno Fernandes: The Last Romantic in a World of Spreadsheet Football Somewhere between the ruins of Old Trafford’s fading empire and the fluorescent glow of Premier League accounting departments, Bruno Fernandes has become the last man alive who still believes football is meant to be played with a bleeding heart rather than a balance sheet….
Syracuse vs Clemson: The Colosseum Goes Global, Sponsored by Late-Stage Capitalism By Our Man at the Thermonuclear Buffet When two American college football programs—one from a lake-effect snowbelt, the other from the buckle of the Bible Belt—clash on a late-October Saturday, the world is, of course, watching. Or at least that’s what ESPN International keeps…
The Rangers game today is, on paper, a provincial footnote in the grand ledger of human folly: two dozen millionaires in polyester chasing vulcanized rubber across a refrigerated rectangle in Manhattan. Yet from Manila to Montevideo, algorithmic trading desks twitch in sympathy, diplomatic cables bristle with soft-power implications, and at least three sovereign wealth funds…
The 2024 Clausura final between Mazatlán and Atlas began, in true Mexican fashion, five minutes late—just enough time for the global audience to remember that time is a negotiable concept south of the Río Grande and absolutely nowhere else. In Zurich, FIFA executives checked their Swiss watches and sighed; in Beijing, streaming rights holders wondered…
Lafayette Football: The Tiny, Militantly American Sport That Somehow Still Matters to the Rest of Us Bylines from Parisian cafés, Lagos traffic jams, and the sort of Tokyo izakaya that smells like soy sauce and regret. The words “Lafayette football” conjure, to most citizens of Earth, a baffled shrug followed by the inevitable follow-up: “Is…
Barry Hearn: How a Cockney Accountant Turned Darts Players into Gladiators and the World into a Pay-Per-View Colosseum By “Lucky” Laurent Dupré, usually stationed in places where the sport involves live ammunition LONDON—Somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of TikTok, Barry Hearn, a bespectacled former accountant from Dagenham, quietly rewired…
The Tragicomic Global Odyssey of Trent Grisham, Baseball’s Wandering Metaphor By Dave’s International Desk of Disenchantment In the grand bazaar of global sport, where Premier League oligarchs flip super-clubs like condos and Chinese streaming giants bankroll esports teenagers who’ve never seen daylight, Trent Grisham stands as a quaint anachronism: a 27-year-old center-fielder from Fort Worth…
PARIS—While delegates at UNESCO politely clapped for yet another PowerPoint on “sport as soft power,” Skylar Diggins-Smith was 7,500 kilometers away in Dallas, draining a contested three over two defenders and reminding the planet that soft power sometimes wears size-10 Nikes and has a mean crossover. The box score will tell you she logged 25…
Somewhere between the Arctic shipping lanes and the latest crypto-crisis, the planet’s attention briefly flickered to a man named Darnell Savage. Yes, the same Darnell Savage who lines up in the Green Bay backfield wearing a number so forgettable that even the stadium Wi-Fi refuses to store it. While glaciers calve and central banks wobble,…
Barcelona—The city that once exported anarchism and now exports paella-flavored NFTs—hosted another episode in the long-running Iberian passion play known as La Liga. RCD Espanyol versus RCD Mallorca: two clubs whose initials sound like failed boy bands but who, for ninety minutes plus whatever VAR decides to tack on, carried the psychic baggage of two…
They say the sun never sets on the British Empire; these days it merely glints off a thousand smartphone screens across four continents as grown men in Jakarta traffic jams, Lagos cybercafés, and Munich beer halls all hit refresh on ProFootballTalk. A modest blog started in 2001 by a former lawyer with a dial-up modem…
Astros vs. Braves: A Cosmic Farce Played Out in Left Field By Diego Valdés, International Sports Desk Somewhere between the asteroid belt and the Beltway, the Houston Astros and the Atlanta Braves have managed to turn a provincial baseball quarrel into a planetary Rorschach test—one that reveals less about curveballs than it does about humanity’s…
