Back to the Soccer Newsfeed

football without fans is nothing

UEFA, via Associated Press

Enjoying this newsletter every Friday? Send it to a friend, or six, and have them sign up at nytimes.com/rory.

There is something unsettling about watching a soccer match played behind closed doors, in a stadium filled with echoes and air, rather than noise and life. The faces of the players, the jerseys they wear and the movements they make are all the same, of course, but the setting is so alien, so different, that a sense of dislocation sets in. It is sports in the uncanny valley.