In 1957, three months after Ghanaian independence, the world’s most celebrated footballer came to Accra to teach. What Stanley Matthews left behind changed Ghanaian football forever.
Latest
How Morocco’s diaspora is remaking the nation
When Ayyoub Bouaddi chose Morocco over France, he wasn’t just making a football decision, he was enacting a theory of citizenship that has been in the making since 1880.
The World Cup
Our coverage of the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup in North America.
Culture
My mother’s buried story
AI tools are built on Eurocentric datasets. For Brazil’s Afro-descendants — whose histories were already marginalised from literature, academia, and media — it poses the threat of industrial-scale erasure.
SPORTS
The World Cup was born from imperial rivalry and nationalist aspiration. Almost a century later, it still oscillates between mass hope and elite spectacle.
Politics
The right to belong imperfectly
In South Africa, one of xenophobia’s quieter moral mechanisms is the way foreign wrongdoing is made to carry more meaning than citizen wrongdoing.
World Cup Archive
Matchday 2: The Battle of Omdurman
A new season of the African Five-a-side podcast asks, “what is the greatest match in the history of men's African football?”
The worst thing to happen to football
Gianni Infantino isn’t just another corrupt FIFA president — his greed, self-importance, and political alliances are actively ruining football.
The value of holding on as we imagine an escape
As Iran withstands one of its greatest existential challenges, its men's national team would be forced to carry the weight of a nation’s despair on the field.
Belonging is not a sport
The reality of any society, any nation, and of our world, is much messier than picking a soccer team.