Michael Olise and the Beautiful Game’s Ugly Price Tag By Our Man in Every Airport Lounge Between Paris and Penang It takes a village to raise a child, they say, but it apparently takes the GDP of a mid-sized Pacific island to buy one who can bend a football like Michael Olise. The 22-year-old Franco-Nigerian-English…
Flashscore: The Global Addiction Nobody Talked About At Davos By Dimitri Valenzuela, Senior Correspondent-at-Large There’s a quiet pandemic spreading faster than the last one (and arguably with fewer masks). It isn’t carried by bats, lab leaks, or rogue influencers. It’s called Flashscore, a pocket-sized dopamine IV drip that has turned every human with a smartphone…
The Glorious Global Panic of Livescore: Humanity’s Last Collective Reflex by Marco “Doomscrolling” Valenti, International Correspondent-at-Large The alert pings while you’re pretending to work in a Berlin co-working space. In Lagos, it buzzes in the pocket of a boda-boda rider dodging traffic like Frogger on payday. Somewhere in São Paulo, a trader watches the same…
Liverpool’s Match Today: A Global Séance in Red and the Quiet Collapse of Time Zones By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, Thursday Somewhere between the Indian Ocean and the Irish Sea, a Sri Lankan call-center worker named Ranjith is watching Mohamed Salah ghost past a defender on a cracked Samsung J5. The feed lags,…
Ajax vs Inter: the Champions League quarterfinal nobody asked for but everybody will watch anyway, because the modern attention economy demands we rubber-neck at every head-on collision between legacy brands that peaked when fax machines were cutting-edge. On paper it’s a clash of continental aristocracy: Amsterdam’s once-revolutionary nursery against Milan’s faded La Scala of calcio….
From Pittsburgh to Pyongyang: The Curiously Global Echo of Dale Lolley’s Steelers Sermons By Our Man in the End-Zone, filing from a barstool with Wi-Fi and existential dread. Dale Lolley is, on paper, a regional beat writer for the Pittsburgh Steelers—an occupation that ranks somewhere between “mayonnaise sommelier” and “professional cat meme curator” on the…
The Philadelphia Phillies, for those who still believe baseball is more than a taxpayer-funded real-estate hustle, have quietly become a small but telling barometer of late-stage global capitalism. While the world’s attention toggles between the next missile test and the latest crypto-meltdown, the Phillies—those red-pinstriped avatars of American pastoral nostalgia—are busy exporting existential dread disguised…
Lincoln Middle School, Berwyn, Illinois—population 57,250 if you’re counting, 57,249 if you discount the mayor’s ego—would appear, at first glance, to be the very antithesis of global consequence. A squat brick rectangle squatting on the prairie like a stubborn toad, its playground still scarred by the 1987 tornado that politely skipped the liquor store but…
The Curious Case of Robbie Savage: How One Peroxide Welshman Became a Global Metaphor for Our Times Somewhere between the fall of Kabul and the rise of TikTok, humanity quietly agreed that Robbie Savage—yes, that Robbie Savage—would serve as the international barometer for how far we’ve collectively fallen. From the steppes of Mongolia to the…
Fenerbahçe vs Alanyaspor: A Mediterranean Punch-Up That Explains Everything Wrong with the 21st Century By the time the referee’s whistle shrank into the Aegean dusk last night, 41,000 yellow-and-navy pilgrims inside Şükrü Saracoğlu Stadium were busy pretending their hearts hadn’t just been drop-kicked into low orbit. Fenerbahçe had squeaked past Alanyaspor 2-1, a scoreline that…
Bayern vs Chelsea: A Continental Cage Match for the Age of Existential Dread Bylines from Munich to Manila, August 2025 In an era when geopolitics feels like a toddler’s finger-painting and the global thermometer resembles a fever dream, the Champions League knockout tie between Bayern Munich and Chelsea arrived like a beautifully pointless opera: expensive,…
Pafos FC and the Great Cypriot Hedge-Fund Holiday By our correspondent who still hasn’t found the exit from Larnaca Airport Pafos, Cyprus—If you squint through the Mediterranean haze, the town’s newest football cathedral, the Alphamega Stadium, looks like a Bond villain’s panic room that accidentally landed beside a vineyard. Inside, Pafos FC—once a humble regional…
