Bundesliga: Germany’s Weekly Reminder That Even Football Can’t Fix Late-Stage Capitalism By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, currently sober enough to file copy The Bundesliga kicked off again last weekend, and—much like the planet’s remaining glaciers—showed up right on time, slightly smaller, and with a multinational corporate logo where its soul used to be. From São Paulo…
It began, as most modern miracles do, with a viral clip: a cherubic 16-year-old from Warrington, England, flattening men twice his age on the oche like a cosmic steamroller powered by Monster Energy and GCSE stress. Luke Littler’s run to the PDC World Darts Championship final wasn’t just a sporting anomaly; it was a Rorschach…
The World Watches Two Second-Tier Londoners Argue Over a Ball: Fulham vs Leeds United as a Parable for Late-Stage Capitalism By the time the floodlights flickered on at Craven Cottage, satellites were already relaying the scene to betting dens in Manila, expat pubs in Dubai, and that one basement in Montevideo where a Leeds-supporting orthodontist…
Everton vs Aston Villa: A Tale of Two Cities, Three Continents, and One Very Expensive Mid-Table Grudge Match By our man in the global cheap seats, still wondering why airlines charge extra for legroom but not for existential dread. On the face of it, Saturday evening at Goodison Park is merely another Premier League fixture…
MADISON, Wisconsin—While the rest of the planet was busy debating whether A.I. will replace us before climate change finishes the job, roughly 80,000 bipeds clad in dairy-scented scarlet fleece poured into a concrete horseshoe on a Saturday night to scream at 19-year-olds in tights. Welcome, dear cosmopolitan reader, to Wisconsin football: the Midwestern passion play…
NEWCASTLE, England — Somewhere between the Tyne and the Wear, 52,000 locals are presently being reminded that hope is just disappointment wearing a fluorescent bib. Newcastle United, that perennial exercise in self-inflicted agony, welcomes Wolverhampton Wanderers to St James’ Park in a fixture that—on paper—looks like a mid-table shrug but, viewed from a safe distance,…
The Name That Launched a Thousand Takes: Ødegaard’s Global Echo Chamber By the time Martin Ødegaard limped off against Aston Villa last weekend, every pub from Tromsø to Tierra del Fuego had already diagnosed him with everything from “Scandinavian burnout” to “existential dread.” Such is the planetary reach of a 25-year-old Norwegian whose surname has…
Bananas in the Anthropocene: A Fruit That Thinks It’s a Baseball Team For a planet currently busy stockpiling canned beans and iodine tablets, it is oddly reassuring to watch 7,000 Georgians—actual Georgians, not the Eurasian variety—lose their collective minds over a yellow-clad circus that calls itself the Savannah Bananas. From the outside, the spectacle resembles…
Ethan Nwaneri, the 17-year-old Arsenal prodigy who already looks like he’s collecting passports for sport, has become the Rorschach test of late-capitalist football: each continent sees in him whatever it needs to feel better about itself. To the Premier League’s marketing wizards—those caffeinated alchemists who could monetize a sneeze if it trended on TikTok—he is…
Real Sociedad 0 – Real Madrid 2 Anoeta, Sunday night, and the rain that drifts in from the Cantabrian Sea is the sort that makes diplomats cancel flights and poets cancel themselves. Inside the stadium, 33,000 mortals huddle beneath sponsored ponchos while 22 millionaires in wet laundry jog about, pretending the result matters more than…
From the Basque Hills to the Boardrooms of Beijing: A Brief, Cynical History of Real Sociedad vs Real Madrid By Our Man in Madrid, who has seen smaller clubs swallowed whole and richer ones vomit up managers like bad paella. 1909 – Birth of a David Real Sociedad pops into existence in San Sebastián, a…
Sitting in a café that claims to be “Parisian” but smells exclusively of burnt sugar and desperation, I watch the replay of Newcastle United versus Wolverhampton Wanderers on a screen whose pixels long ago surrendered. Around me, Japanese tourists photograph croissants, a Russian oligarch haggles over the price of bottled water, and an American podcaster…
