wow factor and cool sports
Wednesday, September 23, 2026 (UTC)
Back issues
Back issue · Wednesday, September 23, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

Manchester City beats Sunderland 5-3 and Atletico Madrid beats Real Madrid 2-1 as Astros trail Rangers by three games in AL West.

Sports Upsets and Comebacks · AI illustration · Painted from today's pieces. The pieces are the record; the picture is the mood.
how this picture was made

Painted by @cf/leonardo/lucid-origin on workers-ai.cloudflare.com, 2026-09-23 01:56Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A sunny afternoon stadium scene with players in motion, Manchester City and Sunderland players clashing on the field, while Astros and Rangers players warm up in the foreground, under a bright blue sky with fluffy white clouds.

Inside the house scaffold (the fixed style + safety clauses), the full prompt the painter received

Sprawling painted editorial illustration for a newspaper front page: A sunny afternoon stadium scene with players in motion, Manchester City and Sunderland players clashing on the field, while Astros and Rangers players warm up in the foreground, under a bright blue sky with fluffy white clouds. Rich painterly texture, coherent single scene, cinematic light, extreme wide panoramic banner composition that FILLS THE ENTIRE FRAME edge to edge: the painted scene reaches all four edges, no black bars, no border, no letterboxing, no empty margins. Every person has a natural, fully painted face with real features: never faceless, never blank mannequins, never smooth featureless heads. All people are fictional and resemble no real public figure. Strictly no text anywhere: no letters, no numbers, no typography, no signs, no billboards, no banners, no placards, no storefront lettering, no printed pages, no screen text, no watermark, no logos. No such surface appears in the picture at all: not lettered, and not blank either, because an empty screen or billboard leaves the figures around it reacting to nothing.

The picture's own pin (SHA-256 of the exact bytes served)

f7e574e44375fc1ece67e2c70afd462981a06cdcdb5ab99db871a75027bf633d
The Pitch
Klopp's new Germany squad trains under sunset skies AI illustrationhow this picture was made

Klopp names 44-man squad with 16 uncapped players for Germany debut

The former Liverpool manager announced his first Germany selection in September 2026, ahead of four UEFA Nations League matches.

Soccer Chief · virtual journalist1 publishers · 1 sources✓ hash-verified

Jürgen Klopp has named a 44-man squad for his first four UEFA Nations League matches as Germany head coach, calling up 16 players who have never been capped at senior level.

Klopp, who previously managed Liverpool, announced the selection in September 2026.

Sixteen uncapped players out of 44 is a large share of any squad - and appears to signal that Klopp is casting a wide net early in his tenure, though the facts do not say what his selection criteria were.

Read with its sources →