Author: Sam Allcock
During every major tournament, there’s a time when everyone starts to watch someone who no one was before. At the 2026 FIFA World Cup, that person was a goalkeeper from Cape Verde who is 40 years old and goes by the name “Vozinha,” which means “granny” in his native Creole language. The man’s name alone tells you something about him. It also shows how quickly and often things can change in the world of sports finance in just one afternoon. Josimar José Évora Dias, better known as Vozinha to people who have been following the tournament, came into it as…
It looks almost like a scene from a movie. The Argentine national football team, who had just won the Copa América, is on a charter flight at JFK Airport while federal agents question them in a quiet, pointed way on the tarmac outside. There were no handcuffs or dramatic arrests. There are federal agents, a bus that is parked, and thirty minutes of talking about things that no one wants to talk about. Airport witnesses say that FBI agents talked to Claudio Tapia, president of the AFA, and Pablo Toviggino, treasurer of the AFA, on Monday morning as Argentina’s team…
It’s kind of poetic that a woman who grew up in a Welsh coal mining town, dropped out of school when she was sixteen without any qualifications, and discovered her most famous trait—that raw, raspy voice—while yelling in anger—ended up leaving behind a $40 million fortune. Bonnie Tyler was born Gaynor Hopkins in 1951. She died on July 8, 2026, in Portugal, where she had lived for many years. She was 75 years old. In some ways, her career got better over time, as shown by the money she left behind. Bonnie Tyler was thought to have been worth $40…
What’s almost theatrical about the way Wimbledon announces the winners is how it does it. There won’t be a press conference with lights flashing. There was no big reveal. It’s just the All England Club, a formal statement, and a number that makes people gasp and then starts a fight. The total prize pool for the 2026 Championships has been set at £64.2 million, which is a big amount by any measure. Each singles champion will get £3,600,000. This is 20% more than the £3,000,000 that was given out in 2025. For winning a doubles match, each pair gets £760,000,…
It’s almost too honest for comfort when the mayor of New York City jokes at a press conference that people should stream his music to help him make money. “A lot of people say they’re listening,” Zohran Mamdani told reporters not long ago. “They’re not listening.” He was right. Tax records show that Mamdani only made $1,643 in music royalties last year, which is only a small increase from the $1,267 he made the year before. A small number that says a lot. Mamdani made music his whole life, even when he was in his twenties. He rapped under the…
One could almost say that Peter Crouch’s story is poetic. People in football didn’t know what to think of him for years. They said he was too tall. Not nice enough. It’s too simple to ignore. Still, by the time he retired from professional football in 2019 after 20 years, Crouch had quietly built up an estimated net worth of $25 million. This feels like the best possible ending to a joke he always knew was coming. During his playing days, Peter Crouch is thought to have made a total of $35 million, which is about £27 million. That person…
Watching someone win quietly gives you a strange sense of satisfaction. No event to launch the product. No big tweet. There wasn’t a time on the internet that people could point to and say, “Remember that?” Almost right away, Larry Ellison shot to the top of the list of the world’s richest people. One report on earnings. One very interesting afternoon on Wall Street. Suddenly, the 81-year-old co-founder of Oracle’s net worth had grown by more than $100 billion in just one day. This was the biggest gain in wealth that Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index had ever seen in a single…
An aviation career fair tells a version of this story in which a young cadet is shown a slide with the words “£200,000” written on it. The room goes silent. To be exact, it’s true. If you add up allowances, block hour pay, and training supplements for a senior British Airways captain who flies long-haul widebody routes, you can get to that number. However, there is a lot more to the picture than that one number suggests. British Airways, which is based in London Heathrow and has a fleet of about 304 planes and about 4,000 pilots, pays its workers…
When no one shows up in a virtual room, there’s a certain silence. That is, in many respects, the epitome of Meta’s metaverse era: sophisticated press releases, intricate digital architecture, and a nearly empty interior. When word started to spread that Meta was pulling out of its flagship virtual reality platform, Horizon Worlds, the company had already invested more than $80 billion in the project. Furthermore, the general public was still unaware of what a metaverse was. It’s important to consider how forcefully Zuckerberg marketed this idea. He did more than simply make a product announcement in late 2021. One…
A large amount of the most sophisticated microchips in the world are produced at a factory in Hsinchu, Taiwan, a mid-sized city on the northwest coast with nothing particularly noteworthy about it from the outside. Workers in cleanroom suits move silently and cautiously. The machines inside are more precise than most engineers outside the industry have ever worked with. And their fingernail-sized products wind up in the brake sensor in the car you drove this morning, the laptop on your desk, and the iPhone in your pocket. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is unfamiliar to most people. This is one of…