Rio de Janeiro, 11:47 p.m. local time – In the grand coliseum of football, where fortunes pivot on a single toe-poke and entire economies hold their breath, Palmeiras and River Plate have just delivered another installment of the world’s most reliable telenovela: South American club football. Somewhere between the confetti cannons and the VAR-induced existential…
Oxford, Mississippi – In the grand, tawdry amphitheater of American college football, Lane Kiffin is the ringmaster who never quite drops his smirk. Yet even smirks have curfews, and the man who once trolled the Southeastern Conference with burner-phone bravado is now reliably escorted home by the same person who quietly keeps the circus receipts:…
White Sox vs. Yankees: The World’s Most Over-Subscribed Proxy War By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent Somewhere between the Caspian Sea and the South China Sea, a bleary-eyed grain trader in Singapore yawns at his Bloomberg terminal and sees the White Sox are up 4-2 in the Bronx. He doesn’t cheer—he hedges. In the same instant,…
Max Scherzer, the man with two different colored eyes and a fastball that could perforate a UN resolution, has—through no fault of his own—become a walking metaphor for the twenty-first century: dazzling, expensive, and held together by a patchwork of insurance clauses. While the average citizen of planet Earth worries about the price of diesel,…
Global leaders usually exit the stage to polite golf-clap applause; Margaret Thatcher, however, left the theatre on a pyre of burning effigies and champagne corks. From Buenos Aires to Beijing, her shadow still looms like an overly strict governess who confiscated the world’s allowance and then lectured it on compound interest. Thirty-five years after she…
New York City vs Inter Miami: A Proxy War for the End of Empire Somewhere over the North Atlantic, the pilot of a Brussels-bound Airbus noses his jet south just enough that the passengers can glimpse a flicker of red and green below—two football clubs playing on a patch of grass that used to be…
Inter Miami vs NYCFC: The Derby the Rest of the World Pretends Not to Watch By Santiago “Santi” Valdez, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between the Strait of Malacca and the Suez Canal, a Greek tanker captain named Stavros is idling off Djibouti, waiting for insurance rates to drop. He has never heard of Inter…
Vasco da Gama vs Bahia: When Two Brazilian Clubs Try to Solve the World’s Problems with a Football Rio de Janeiro – On paper, it’s just another Campeonato Brasileiro fixture: Vasco da Gama, the Rio side whose glory days echo like a tango in an abandoned ballroom, versus Bahia, the northeastern outfit whose last national…
Battlefield 6: The World’s Most Expensive Geopolitical Mood Ring By Dave’s Locker International Desk It’s 3:14 a.m. in Reykjavík when the servers finally breathe, and somewhere in Lagos a teenager wearing noise-canceling headphones learns the Swedish word for “cover me.” That’s the moment you realize Battlefield 6 isn’t really a videogame—it’s the planet’s least supervised…
Somewhere between the turquoise shallows of Cancún and the fluorescent purgatory of duty-free, a 72-year-old Mexican engineer named Fernando Chico Pardo keeps cashing in on humanity’s inability to sit still. While the rest of us queue for overpriced sunscreen that promises to ward off both UV rays and existential dread, Chico Pardo’s holding companies quietly…
Friday evening in Milwaukee, and the only thing colder than the lake-effect wind is the existential dread creeping in past the seventh-inning stretch. The Brewers—an outfit whose name still sounds like a failed microbrewery IPO—are hosting the Padres, a team whose branding evokes Catholic guilt and surfer slang in equal measure. To the uninitiated, it’s…
Carabao Cup Draw: When the World Pauses for a Milk Carton’s Glittering Roulette By Dave’s Locker’s Special Correspondent in Exile London – Tuesday night, 7:05 p.m. GMT. Somewhere in the bowels of the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, a former Premier League striker in a suit that costs more than the average annual salary in 132 countries…
