“Neymar arrives home from £322m Saudi calamity still a prisoner of his potential” – Jonathan Wilson (The Guardian)

“His defining move, though, was his 2017 transfer to Paris Saint-Germain for €222m, more than doubling the previous world record, not only delivering for their Qatari owners a talented player but also making a show of their economic might while inflating the market, pushing up prices to a level it was very difficult for clubs without enormously wealthy state-backers to match. The collateral damage for football was vast and cemented Neymar’s position as 21st-century football’s Zelig, somehow always there as the game took another lurch into sordid absurdity”

https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2025/feb/01/neymar-arrives-home-from-322m-saudi-calamity-still-a-prisoner-of-his-potential

“Donald Trump’s Florida project” – Lily Lynch (New Statesman)

“Florida is America’s soft underbelly and its dead end, where all the country’s darkness is illuminated by the omnipresent sun. “Florida from its beginnings has served as a catch basin for the world’s detritus,” the American writer Russell Banks wrote in 2022. “It’s where you go when your prospects elsewhere have ended.” But this reduction of Florida to national punchline is at least partly a product of blue-state cultural elitism, transforming a state with a population of more than 23 million into a receptacle for socially sanctioned classism. The Trump insurgency, organised from Florida and fuelled by the aspirations of immigrants, the interests of the very rich and the resentments of the working class, is the state’s dignity fighting back”

https://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2025/01/donald-trump-florida-project-mar-a-lago