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,…
ZUBIMENDI: THE MIDFIELDER WHO SAID “NO” TO ARSENAL, YES TO THE APOCALYPSE by Our Man in the Bunker San Sebastián – While half the planet was busy arguing about whether the Doomsday Clock should be moved to 89.5 seconds to midnight or simply replaced by a live feed of Elon Musk’s Twitter drafts, Martín Zubimendi…
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…
The Slow, Glorious Death of Hope: A Global Timeline of Crystal Palace vs Sunderland By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, somewhere above the Atlantic 1905 – Birth of a Rivalry, Birth of the Modern Age Crystal Palace and Sunderland first meet when Britannia still ruled waves and the planet’s thermostat was mostly intact. The…
Fulham vs Leeds: A Timeline of Mutual Self-Destruction, Now Broadcasting Worldwide By Our Man in the Departure Lounge London, 14:03 GMT – Somewhere above the Atlantic, a Singaporean hedge-fund analyst toggles between two tabs: one tracking the Nikkei’s latest swan dive, the other a grainy stream of Fulham vs Leeds from 2003. He isn’t nostalgic;…
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…
Declan Rice, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Transfer Fee by our man in the cheap seats, somewhere over the Atlantic The planet keeps spinning, glaciers sulk, and somewhere a hedge-fund algorithm is quietly buying up the Colorado River. Yet in the summer of 2023, a 24-year-old from Kingston-upon-Thames became the…
Arsenal F.C. vs Nottingham Forest: A Timeline of Hope, Hubris, and the Slow Unraveling of Civilization By Our Man on the Touchline, Watching the World Burn One VAR Decision at a Time Arsenal versus Nottingham Forest sounds, to the uninitiated, like a quaint English domestic—two sets of fans politely disagreeing over whose turn it is…
In a week when the Arctic Circle was busy melting faster than a popsicle in Riyadh and several sovereign nations quietly renegotiated their debt with the structural elegance of a pyramid scheme, the planet still found collective bandwidth to watch 22 millionaires chase a sphere across manicured grass. Arsenal versus Nottingham Forest, a fixture that…
West Ham vs Arsenal: A London Derby as Global Farce By our man in the departure lounge, still waiting for the post-Brexit apology LONDON—On Sunday, two quarrelling postcodes will once again pretend the planet is watching. West Ham United, a club whose fans still sing about 1966 as if it were last week, host Arsenal,…
The Curious Case of David Coote: How One Referee’s Zoom Lens Became a Global Rorschach Test By the time the clip reached a bar in Lagos, David Coote had already been sacked, re-hired in effigy, and turned into a cautionary emoji in Jakarta group chats. One slo-mo replay of a Liverpool midfielders’ kneecap—captured on an…
Marc Guéhi and the Quiet Art of Empire Maintenance By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere above the M4 Marc Guéhi is the sort of name that makes global powerbrokers yawn and then, three seconds later, frantically open a new tab. To the average punter from São Paulo to Singapore, he sounds like a…
