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…
Javier Hernández—known to stadium PA announcers in five languages and to immigration officers as “please step aside, sir”—is the last living argument that globalization sometimes works exactly the way the brochure promised. Born in Guadalajara, polished in Manchester, monetized in Madrid, and lately spotted gamboling about Los Angeles like an endangered species that learned to…
Carlos Vela: The Reluctant Global Icon Who Showed Us Talent Can Be a Terrible Thing to Waste—Responsibly By the time Carlos Vela chipped in that languid, borderline-insulting Panenka to seal Mexico’s 2010 World Cup victory over France, the international press corps had already filed two drafts: one hailing the rise of a new Mesut Özil,…
Seattle Sounders vs Austin: When Cascadia Rain Meets Texas Swagger in a Match Nobody’s Embassy Will Be Watching If you were hoping for geopolitical fireworks, look elsewhere. The Seattle Sounders versus Austin FC will not redraw any borders, re-price oil futures, or trigger a UN Security Council session. And yet, on a balmy Saturday night…
When Galactic Ambition Meets Midwestern Grit: A Cosmic Ballet in Cleats The universe, as any cosmologist will tell you, is mostly empty space punctuated by occasional collisions of matter that briefly create something interesting before succumbing to entropy. So too, one might observe, is Major League Soccer—though Thursday night’s LA Galaxy versus FC Cincinnati fixture…
CINCINNATI, Ohio — Somewhere between the Ohio River and the smog-soaked hills of Los Angeles, two professional football clubs met on a humid Midwestern night to remind the rest of the planet that the United States still insists on calling the game “soccer.” The occasion—FC Cincinnati versus the LA Galaxy—was billed locally as a “crucial…
Washington, D.C.—a city that once prided itself on exporting democracy and importing lobbyists—took a brief respite from its usual grift on Saturday night to host the Great Transatlantic Transfusion known as DC United v. Inter Miami. On paper, it was Major League Soccer fixture #17. In practice, it was a geopolitical séance where a club…
San Diego FC vs. Atlanta United: A Tale of Two Franchises, One Decaying Empire, and the Beautiful Game’s Global Midlife Crisis by Our Man on the Left Coast, filing from the Hotel Minibar Somewhere between the Pacific surf that still smells faintly of venture-capital sunscreen and the humidity of Georgia that feels like a banker’s…
Real Salt Lake vs LAFC: A Riot in the Rockies, a Ballet in Beverly Hills—And Why a Kazakhstani Goat Herder Should Care SALT LAKE CITY—High above the Great Basin, where the air is thin and the liquor laws Byzantine, two Major League Soccer franchises prepared to do battle last night with the solemn urgency of…
Seattle Sounders vs Inter Miami: A Cold War in Short Pants By Our Man in the Departure Lounge The chartered Gulfstreams began stacking above Sea-Tac early Thursday—Brazilian pilots, Qatari catering, and enough carbon credits to make a small Nordic country blush. Below, two soccer teams prepared to re-enact the great ideological battles of the 20th…
Seattle Sounders vs. Inter Miami: A Glittering Mid-Table Skirmish Disguised as World History By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you squint hard enough from the International Space Station, the emerald smear of Seattle and the neon smudge of Miami look like two bruises on America’s coastal underbelly. Between them, last Saturday night, a football match…
