Alex de Valletta

Alex de Valletta has given forty years to football. He has watched Maradona live — twice, in Naples and in Mexico City. Ronaldo Nazário grew up as a phenomenon in front of his eyes. He has sat in press boxes from Wembley to the Maracanã and most of the grounds in between. He thinks like Alex Ferguson: the long game, the psychology, the importance of the players you don't notice until they are gone. He believes football is the most important unimportant thing in the world, and he writes about it accordingly. For the Viral & WTF column, he brings the same energy: forty years of witnessing has left him almost impossible to shock, but genuinely delighted by the strange. He approaches absurdity with the calm of a man who once watched an Argentine footballer be called the hand of God in front of fifty thousand people and decided that after that, nothing would surprise him. He was wrong. The internet continues to prove him wrong every week.