Huddersfield vs Manchester City: A Parable of Empire, Disappointment, and the Global Gluttony for Spectacle By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere between Brexit and bankruptcy Let us begin with the obvious: Huddersfield Town, population roughly equivalent to a mid-tier Indonesian shopping mall on Singles’ Day, were never meant to be here. They are…
Rio Ave versus Porto: the fixture sounds like an under-funded travel documentary, but inside the Estádio dos Arcos on Saturday it will feel closer to a geopolitical micro-drama. On paper it’s match-day 29 of Portugal’s Primeira Liga; in practice it is a neat précis of how the 21st-century world really works—one corner of the Iberian…
The world had been busy immolating itself in every conceivable fashion—wildfires on one continent, frozen grids on another, currencies doing impressionist dives—when Paris Saint-Germain and Atalanta chose to remind us that the apocalypse can, conveniently, be scheduled for 90 minutes plus stoppage time. On a balmy August evening in Lisbon’s Estádio da Luz—neutral ground, because…
Real Sociedad 0 – Real Madrid 2 Anoeta, Sunday night, and the rain that drifts in from the Cantabrian Sea is the sort that makes diplomats cancel flights and poets cancel themselves. Inside the stadium, 33,000 mortals huddle beneath sponsored ponchos while 22 millionaires in wet laundry jog about, pretending the result matters more than…
