Brennan Johnson and the Astonishing Global Reverberations of a Welshman Kicking a Ball When the transfer window finally slammed shut on deadline day, the fax machines stopped wheezing, and the spreadsheet jockeys in beige offices across Europe declared the summer silly season over, one modest footnote kept echoing from Cardiff to Calcutta: Brennan Johnson had…
Salomón Rondón: The Striker Who Outlasted Three Presidents, Two Sanctions, and One Currency CARACAS—When Salomón Rondón bundled home a rebound against Bournemouth in March, the modest cheer at Goodison Park was drowned out by a louder rovation in living rooms from Maracaibo to Madrid. Not because Everton fans are ungrateful—though they are—but because, for many…
John McGinn: The Ginger Midfielder Quietly Holding Together a Fractured Planet When the world’s supply chains are snapping like cheap guitar strings and entire governments can’t keep their own lights on, it’s comforting—if slightly deranged—to know that a 29-year-old Scotsman with a haircut last seen on 1970s wallpaper is still doing his job with suspiciously…
Saliba: The Word That Launched a Thousand Tweets and Terrified a Continent by Lysandra Voss, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker PARIS—Somewhere between the foie-gras counter and the manifesto aisle, Europe discovered that “saliba” is not, in fact, a trendy new hummus flavor. The syllable—Arabic for “cross,” Latin for “panic in Group F,” and Twitter for “please…
Tottenham vs Aston Villa: A North London Derby That Somehow Matters to Your Pension Fund in Singapore By our man in the cheap seats, still waiting for VAR to overturn 2020 The world’s attention this weekend swivelled, briefly, from mushroom clouds over the Pacific and bond yields in Frankfurt to a rectangle of grass in…
Arsenal 3–0 Port Vale: A Friendly Reminder That the World Order Is Still Intact By Our Man in the Upper Tier, Nursing a £6.50 Pint There is something almost soothing in watching Arsenal, a club whose annual wage bill rivals the GDP of a medium-sized island nation, swat aside Port Vale, a team whose yearly…
Simon Jordan: The Mouth That Roared Across Borders By our man in the cheap seats, still recovering from the Premier League’s latest morality play LONDON—Somewhere between a Brexit argument and a heatwave-induced blackout, Simon Jordan is holding court again. The former Crystal Palace owner-turned-broadcaster has become Britain’s loudest export since the vuvuzela: impossible to ignore,…
**The Potter Paradox: Why West Ham’s Managerial Musical Chairs Resonate from Buenos Aires to Beijing** In the grand theater of global capitalism, where hedge fund managers bet on wheat futures while children starve and tech billionaires rocket to space for Instagram content, the appointment of Graham Potter at West Ham United might seem like small…
Oslo, Norway – Somewhere in the bowels of the Etihad, a Viking‐sized striker is nursing a foot that apparently decided to mutiny mid-season. Erling Haaland’s “bone stress reaction” has been upgraded from the usual managerial euphemism (“slight knock”) to the more ominous “indefinite,” which in football-speak translates roughly to “buy your fantasy wildcard now.” The…
Wolves vs Everton: A Modest Proxy War for the End of Days By Our Jaded Correspondent, filing from an airport lounge that smells faintly of disinfectant and regret Molineux, Wolverhampton—In a week when the United Nations warned that the planet has roughly six years left before irreversible climate collapse, 31,500 people filed into a stadium…
Liverpool vs Southampton: A Micro-Drama for a Macro-Mess By our man in the cheap seats, wondering if the apocalypse has VAR The planet is busy imploding—ice shelves calving like bored royals, shipping lanes turning into jacuzzis, and democracy being auctioned off between smartphone notifications—yet for ninety-odd minutes on a damp English Saturday, a reasonable slice…
Gabriel Jesus and the Portable Messiah Complex By Our Man in São Paulo, still waiting for the Second Coming (or at least a decent corner kick) RIO DE JANEIRO — On a continent where the word “jesus” is more often seen on cathedral façades than football shirts, Gabriel Jesus has spent the better part of…
