The Olympic flame sputtered its way through Paris last week, and somewhere between the Seine’s bacterial bloom and the €1.4-billion security cordon that cordoned off even the pigeons, a familiar thought flickered: humanity still believes the fastest person over 100 metres can redeem a planet that is literally on fire. From the air-conditioned stadiums of…
Black Ferns: How a Kiwi Rugby Dynasty Became the World’s Accidental Barometer for Everything WELLINGTON—If you’ve never heard of the Black Ferns, congratulations: you’ve just confessed to the Southern Hemisphere that you still think rugby is a polite mud-wrestle between English villages. New Zealand’s women’s national team has spent three decades turning opponents into highlight-reel…
Championship, noun: the glorious moment when one sweaty tribe convinces the rest of the planet that their arbitrary ritual victory is, in fact, the hinge upon which civilization quietly swings. From the flood-lit cathedrals of Qatar to the jerry-rigged favela courts of Rio, humanity’s appetite for crowning a “best” is the one export that never…
Argentina’s Blue-and-White Circus Rolls On, Trailed by Ghosts, Goalposts, and Global Schadenfreude By “Bitter” Bill McAllister, Senior Correspondent, Buenos Aires Bureau (currently working from a bar that claims Maradona once sneezed on table 9) In most countries, football is a sport. In Argentina it is an ongoing, slightly unhinged national therapy session that the rest…
Every four summers, the planet tilts slightly on its axis—not from any cosmic wobble, but from the collective psychic tremor of 130 million Mexicans holding their breath. El Tri, the itinerant national soap opera disguised as a football team, staggers onto the global stage again, and the rest of us pretend we have better things…
England FC: A Tragicomic Opera Staged for the Planet’s Edification By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere over the Atlantic If you’ve ever wondered what it looks like when an entire nation decides to confuse football with group therapy, tune in to England FC every other summer. The spectacle is broadcast to 195 countries—roughly…
**The Beautiful Game’s Ugly Stepsister: CONCACAF Qualifiers and the Theater of the Absurd** While the world obsesses over UEFA’s glitzy Champions League and South America’s passionate derbies, there’s a corner of global football that operates like a fever dream scripted by a committee of bureaucrats, cartel accountants, and that one uncle who insists he could’ve…
The Glorious Farce of “Um Football” – A Global Tour of Hesitation, Bureaucracy, and the Beautiful Game’s Beautiful Confusion By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you type “um football” into a search engine anywhere outside North America, you will receive 1) a polite correction to “football,” 2) a flurry of American university athletics pages, or…
Scorpion in a Suitcase: How René Higuita Accidentally Became the World’s Most Dangerous Tourist By the time the Berlin Wall had been reduced to souvenir fragments, René Higuita was busy turning the penalty area into a geopolitical playground. The Colombian goalkeeper—part acrobat, part liability insurer’s nightmare—never bothered to wait for history’s permission slip. Instead, he…
Scotland’s Football Team: The World’s Favorite Tragicomedy By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, somewhere between Reykjavík and regret If football is the planet’s shared soap opera, Scotland is the long-running subplot that refuses to be cancelled—equal parts heartbreak, punchline, and existential warning label. While other nations merely play the game, Scotland has spent 26…
The USMNT Conundrum: America Learns That Soccer Is Not a Tax Write-Off By Our Man in the Global Press Box The United States Men’s National Team—abbreviated like a hedge fund that never quite delivered—has once again wandered onto the world stage, blinking like a tourist who forgot to exchange currency. From Berlin to Bogotá, seasoned…
