Michigan’s Schedule Is the New Geopolitical Crystal Ball By Dave’s Locker International Desk In a world where central banks blink and markets convulse, the one document that now moves global capital faster than a Russian troll farm is the humble Michigan Wolverines football schedule. Yes, the same scrap of paper your cousin in Kalamazoo tapes…
Casemiro: The Last Samurai of Global Football’s Endless Aisle By the time the ink dried on Casemiro’s 2022 transfer from the Bernabéu to Old Trafford—roughly the moment a Saudi prince sneezed and funded three other midfielders—planet Earth had already rotated 1,463 kilometres eastward. Somewhere in Lagos a generator coughed itself awake, in São Paulo a…
Gravenberch, or How One Midfielder Became a Global Mirror ZURICH—Somewhere between a Champions League quarter-final and a TikTok clip of him nutmegging a camera operator, Ryan Gravenberch stopped being merely Dutch and became a planetary weather vane. One week he’s the latest proof that Ajax’s academy could still squeeze genius from a clogged drain; the…
**The Curious Case of Walker Buehler: America’s Baseball Casualty as the World Burns** While the planet grapples with climate negotiations that move at glacial speeds (ironically, the only things not melting), nuclear proliferation disguised as energy solutions, and economic systems that somehow make billionaires richer during pandemics, America has found its latest tragedy: a 30-year-old…
# Mohamed Sanu: The Accidental Prophet of Our Disposable Age **DAVE’S LOCKER** — While the world’s attention remains fixated on newer, shinier objects, Mohamed Sanu continues his quiet pilgrimage across America’s gridiron cathedrals—a journeyman wide receiver whose career arc mirrors our collective existential drift through the twenty-first century. The international significance of Sanu’s peripatetic existence…
Gridiron Diplomacy: Why the NFLPA’s Latest Tantrum Matters to a Planet That Doesn’t Watch Football By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Geneva Bureau GENEVA—While most of the civilised world was busy bribing traffic cops or binge-watching Korean zombies, the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) quietly filed the sort of labour grievance that makes…
Dalton Kincaid: The Accidental Geopolitical Football Nobody Asked For By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Mid-Atlantic Let us begin with the obvious: most of the planet had never heard of Dalton Kincaid until the Buffalo Bills decided he was worth a first-round draft pick and, more importantly, a 12-hour Twitter argument…
Jaylen Waddle and the Glorious Commodification of Human Explosiveness by Dave’s International Desk of Controlled Chaos Miami, USA — Somewhere in a climate-controlled war room that smells faintly of sunscreen and venture capital, Jaylen Waddle is being discussed not as a wide receiver but as a unit of export-grade velocity. The Dolphins’ No. 17 is…
As the sun sets on another humid Caracas evening, a taxi driver toggles between the national news—where the bolívar’s latest cliff-dive is politely described as “volatility”—and a pixelated feed of the Yankees-Red Sox running on a cracked Samsung tablet. The stream stutters, buffers, then delivers Aaron Judge in 720p glory. The driver grins, because for…
Paul Pogba: The 100-Million-Euro Metaphor for Everything Wrong—And Beautifully Absurd—About Global Football Manchester, Shanghai, Riyadh, Turin—pick a continent at random and you’ll still find someone arguing about Paul Pogba. The French midfielder has become less a footballer and more a planetary Rorschach test: to the Premier League’s marketing department he’s a shampoo-commercial deity, to Serie…
Jesus Luzardo and the Global Theater of Overpaid Arms By Our Man in the Dugout, somewhere between the mound and the International Date Line If you blinked somewhere between Caracas and Seoul last week, you probably missed Jesus Luzardo’s 96-mph fastball—an object that traveled faster than most passports and carried roughly the same economic weight…
**The Curious Case of Veronica Burton: How One Woman’s Basketball Career Became a Global Metaphor for Everything Wrong (and Right) with Modern Sport** If you’ve been anywhere near a sports bar in Ulaanbaatar lately—and honestly, who hasn’t—you’ve probably overheard heated debates about Veronica Burton’s defensive rating. The WNBA guard’s journey from Northwestern University standout to…
