Vitality Stadium: The World’s Smallest Top-Flight Coliseum and Other Cosmic Jokes Bournemouth, England – The first thing you notice about Vitality Stadium is that it’s smaller than most Texas high-school football bleachers. The second thing you notice is that it still somehow hosts Premier League football, a league whose global television rights are worth more…
Fulham vs Brentford: How a West London Derby Quietly Became the UN General Assembly of Football By Our Man in the Departure Lounge For those of you reading this in Singapore, São Paulo, or Saskatoon, permit a brief geography lesson: the distance between Fulham’s Craven Cottage and Brentford’s Gtech Community Stadium is roughly the same…
Bruno Fernandes: The Last Romantic in a World of Spreadsheet Football Somewhere between the ruins of Old Trafford’s fading empire and the fluorescent glow of Premier League accounting departments, Bruno Fernandes has become the last man alive who still believes football is meant to be played with a bleeding heart rather than a balance sheet….
Cole Palmer: The Quiet English Kid Quietly Reshaping Global Football’s Hierarchy By Dave’s Foreign Desk, somewhere between a damp Tuesday in Manchester and a sun-baked Champions League night LONDON — The world’s supply chains are sputtering, glaciers are auditioning for puddles, and democracy is locked in a never-ending group chat with itself, yet the planet’s…
Old Trafford’s Schedule: The World’s Favorite Soap Opera, Now in 38 Terrifying Episodes By Our Correspondent in a Café Where Even the Wi-Fi Has Stockholm Syndrome The moment the Premier League fixture computer spat out Manchester United’s 2024-25 calendar, three time zones flinched, two hedge funds recalibrated their Asian advertising budgets, and a bar in…
West Ham vs Crystal Palace: A Parochial Derby the World Pretends to Care About By our man in the cheap seats, still waiting for geopolitical relevance to kick in LONDON—While diplomats in Brussels argue over artillery shells and grain corridors, 62,000 otherwise sane adults converged on a former marsh in Stratford on Saturday to scream…
Chelsea vs Manchester United: A Timeline of Collateral Damage from the Theater of Dreams and the Loan Shark Aquarium By Our Man in the Away End, nursing a lukewarm £6 lager and a mild existential crisis. 1905–1950: Imperial Warm-up Acts In the era when Britannia still pretended to rule the waves and ration books doubled…
James Tarkowski: The Last Honest Centre-Half in a World That Prefers Glitter to Grit By the time the final whistle blew at Craven Cottage last Saturday, James Tarkowski had already flown 4,800 kilometres—give or take the odd holding-foul-induced delay—around the pitch. GPS trackers insist it was only 10.3 km, but the man moves like a…
On a planet where glaciers recede faster than Chelsea’s back line under sustained pressure, Manchester United versus Chelsea is still treated as a clash of civilizations—two privately owned super-yachts bumping hulls in the same oligarchic marina while the rest of us watch from a rapidly warming shoreline. From the neon canyons of Shanghai to the…
Jack Grealish, the £100 million hair-band, has spent the season oscillating between the Manchester City bench and the global meme economy like a geopolitical ping-pong ball. In any other era, a footballer known primarily for his calves and calamity would be a parochial curiosity. But ours is the age when a misplaced shinpad in the…
Ryan Gravenberch: The Dutch Midfielder Who Became a Global Metaphor for Everything Wrong With Modern Football By the time Ryan Gravenberch finally escaped Bayern Munich’s substitute bench last autumn—fleeing south like a budget-conscious retiree discovering Portugal—the planet had already digested three new iPhone iterations, one attempted coup in Brasília, and the quiet death of the…
The Black-and-Gold vs. the Peacocks: A Timeline of Midlands Pride and Yorkshire Grit in the Age of Global Spectacle Somewhere in a dimly lit studio in Doha, a rights-holder executive is already calculating how many extra streaming subscriptions Wolves-Leeds can coax out of Jakarta. Meanwhile, in a pub just off Wolverhampton’s Ring Road, an aging…
