We’d missed this. That moment when weekends start revolving around matches again, and we check the fixture list before making plans. After the long international break, finally, Calcio is back. First Serie A, then the Champions League. And we’re back photographing Italian stadiums, starting with Como-Roma for the first Residency episode of the season.
There was plenty to look at before a ball was even kicked, too. Take Djed Spence, who made his Serie A debut but had already given us a reason to keep an eye on him before Inter-Parma. Alongside Marcus Thuram, he looks set to form a promising partnership in the style department.
Then, during the week, came Roma-Real Madrid. Mbappé arrived in the Italian capital wearing a fit that paired his signature Oakleys with Louis Vuitton pieces, but once again, it was Roma in DSQUARED2 that won us over. A perfect match, with few rivals among the fashion partnerships in this season’s Champions League.
Once the Champions League anthem ends and the match begins, Lamine Yamal always finds a way to get us talking. This time, it was a new trick, a kind of semirabona that had us replaying the video endlessly. Barcelona keep rolling: ten wins from ten this season. Yamal keeps shining - and, according to Xavier Sala i Martín, Nike still regret letting him go. Meanwhile, in Barcelona El Clásico is already on the horizon. One player who definitely won’t be there is Vinícius, suspended and coming off a difficult spell that has been hard to make sense of - something we’ve already discussed on Tunnel. In the past few hours, another name has taken centre stage: Tyler, The Creator, whose GOLF WANG will take to the pitch on the blaugrana shirt. It’s the latest instalment in the series of artist collaborations created with Spotify. A word of advice: if you’re thinking of adding this one to your wardrobe, check the price first.
Earlier this week, we were in Bergamo to experience a matchday at the New Balance Arena. Before Atalanta-Venezia, we explored the stadium’s interior, visited the dressing rooms and made our way down to pitchside. We saw its newest spaces, but also the historic façades and the roof of the Tribuna Centrale, taking in the way the new structures sit alongside the old. When we reached the skyboxes, the fanzine we had created for the match was waiting for us. Leafing through it with the pitch in front of us felt special. Seeing it later in the hands of supporters heading home felt even better.
adidas has filed trademark applications for a new version of its logo, featuring curved stripes with upturned tips. The German brand had already submitted applications in the EU and the UK - a third has now followed in the US. These are only trademark filings: whether and where the new logo will appear remains to be seen.
We’re into added time, so it’s time to raise the board. In Spain, it might be shaped like a Duracell battery. That development called for a look back at the aesthetic evolution of substitution boards.
Golf club in hand, completely naked and covered in gold: this is how Donald Trump appeared at the European Parliament, in artist Jens Galschiøt’s sculpture The Orange Plague. An image that uses satire to comment on power. On social media, meanwhile, politicians themselves are sharing AI-generated images that bring their most extreme fantasies to life. “Synthetic propaganda” is how Donatella Della Ratta, a communications professor at John Cabot University in Rome, describes it. Speaking to nss magazine, she explored the dangers and “speculative violence” of this content.
Could the America’s Cup become “a better commercial bet than Formula 1”? Christian Horner thinks so. After twenty years as Red Bull Racing’s team principal, he is now an adviser to Oakley Capital, the majority shareholder in sailing team GB1. His move is one of many chapters in a longstanding relationship between the top tiers of motorsport and sailing. Formula 1 and the America’s Cup share engineers, technologies and increasingly similar ideas about how to organise and grow their competitions. With the new America’s Cup Partnership, F1 has also become a reference point for the commercial direction, albeit with some substantial differences. It’s an increasingly complex relationship that we’ve explored here.
F1, meanwhile, keeps redrawing its map and opening up new markets. From the lights of Singapore - and the helmets, which never disappoint here - attention has shifted to Rwanda, where a new regular fixture is set to join the calendar. The choice of Kigali deserves at least as much attention as the return to the continent. To understand where this deal fits into Rwanda’s sporting strategy, and to put the partnership into context beyond the sportswashing narrative, we’ll leave you with the latest The Take.