Russia, Soccer and a Line Drawn Too Late

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The troops were already over the border, the fighter jets screaming low through the skies, smoke billowing from the airfields when Schalke decided to act. The sound of the air raid sirens wailing, the sight of families huddled in subway stations, the images of thousands desperately fleeing Kyiv, a full-scale invasion: That was where it drew the line.

Everything else, Schalke had been prepared to swallow. It did not bat an eyelid during the brief, brutal war with Georgia in 2008, or at Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, or at the downing of a passenger jet the same year, or at the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in 2018, or at Vladimir V. Putin’s longstanding support for and arming of Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime in Syria.

Throughout all of that, Schalke’s royal blue jerseys were proudly adorned with the logo of Gazprom, the energy giant that is majority-owned by the Russian state and has, variously, been described as a “geopolitical tool” and a “politicized weapon” wielded by Putin and a handpicked cadre of his cronies.

That has been the case for 15 years — making it one of the longest-running sponsorship arrangements in European soccer — ever since Gerhard Schröder, the former German premier who now works with Gazprom, suggested the firm might like to invest in Schalke.

That many of the club’s fans have long been uneasy with the relationship — warning more than once about the team being seen as the “lap dogs of an autocrat” — made no difference. The $17 million or so the company paid the club every year for its prime advertising space, even as it slipped from Champions League contention to relegation from the Bundesliga, was enough to override any such qualms. The old line, trotted out yet again this week by Sergey Semak, the coach of another Gazprom-backed team, Zenit St. Petersburg, that sport and politics should not be allowed to mix was the only justification anyone needed.

Until, Thursday afternoon, that is, when Schalke suddenly discovered its moral compass. Gazprom’s logo was being removed from its jerseys, a statement on the club’s website read, because of the euphemistically-titled “recent developments” in Ukraine. Instead, when its players take to the field against Karlsruhe this weekend — and for the foreseeable future — their jerseys will simply read: Schalke 04.

It is, though, somewhat churlish to focus exclusively on Schalke. Better late than never, after all: The club has done what it can, in some small way, to highlight its objection to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. There are plenty of others who have yet to meet even that bar.

Everton and Chelsea, for example, have significant financial ties to Russian oligarchs who were named by a British lawmaker this week as suitable targets for sanctions; or Manchester United, studiously quiet on its sponsorship deal with Aeroflot, the state-backed Russian airline, until suddenly dropping it Friday.

Still, what do you expect, when the very bodies who are supposed to represent the game have been so acquiescent? UEFA has, at least, stripped St. Petersburg of this year’s Champions League final, something it has found easier than annulling its own, lucrative sponsorship agreement with Gazprom.

And then, of course, there is FIFA. Oh, FIFA, whose president once accepted a friendship medal from Putin and claimed that the 2018 World Cup had highlighted how wrong the Western perception of the ruthless kleptocracy he presided over had been. On Thursday, that president, Gianni Infantino, did condemn Russia’s “use of force in Ukraine,” though there were times when outright criticism did not seem to come easily.

Even placing those teams, those bodies under scrutiny, though, may still be a touch unfair. The idea that any of these institutions should be expected to have a cogent, considered reaction to a major, unfolding global crisis is, at heart, faintly absurd.

The issues that have driven the world to this point, their underlying causes, their long-term ramifications, are way beyond not only the scope of their expertise — let’s go live, now, to Frank Lampard, for his take on the Minsk accords of 2014 — but the limits of their world.

If the British or American governments cannot muster a convincing, unified policy in response to Putin’s aggression, why should we expect Everton, a middling Premier League team whose main concern is not being relegated, to do so? Why should UEFA, an organization which seems to find it hard to stop people being actively racist at public events, be expected to take decisive action before the European Union and the United Nations? What core competencies does FIFA, stocked as it is by the self-interested and the chronically mediocre, have to understand the tectonic shifts in geopolitics?

At what point did we decide that any of this was within soccer’s wheelhouse? At what point did soccer become a lightning rod for international diplomacy? Why would an issue this serious be refracted through the lens of something as inherently trivial as sport?

The answer, of course, is because soccer wanted it this way. Or, rather, because this is a price that soccer long ago decided was worth paying, when it elected to pursue money and glamour and influence at all costs, when it chose to open its doors to anyone who wanted a part of it, regardless of their morals or their motives, as long as they were good for the money, when it allowed itself to be hijacked by those who saw it not as an end but a means, not as a sport but as a vehicle.

Soccer has not just welcomed them all in — the politicians and the oligarchs and the tycoons and the nation states — but actively courted and feted and celebrated their contributions. It has transformed them from parasites, hoping to attach themselves to the world’s great, unyielding passion to serve their own interests, into saviors and heroes and idols, conferring upon them not just legitimacy but adoration.

And it has done so because they have helped to turn the game into what the historian David Goldblatt has referred to as the greatest cultural phenomenon in history, a world of untold riches and unlimited promise, one that knows no borders and recognizes neither its horizons nor its hubris.

That is not the worst of it, though. The worst of it is that it has sold not only its morals and its right to innocence, to simplicity, but a part of its soul to anyone who could afford it not for any grand vision of what it might be, of what it might do, but simply to bankroll the endlessly spiraling inflation of transfer fees and wages, to support an economy that is bloated beyond all recognition, one so engorged and distorted that it calls into question the very integrity of the sport itself.

Soccer did not have to do any of that. It did not have to allow itself to be the field in which geopolitical rivalries played out, or the stage on which oligarchs sought power and prestige. It did not have to choose a path in which one of Germany’s grandest clubs, owned by its fans, was a pawn in the politicking around the construction of the Nord Stream II gas pipeline.

It could, instead, have looked at its popularity around the globe and wondered how that might be protected from — rather than sold to — the speculators and the opportunists, how the clubs that comprise its fabric might be safeguarded rather than hawked by organizations eager to monetize it, the ones that might have designed rules to prevent a gold rush but chose simply to grab its pickax and start mining.

But it did not, and so this is where it finds itself: stripping sponsors from its jerseys as the air raid sirens wail and the fighter jets scream low over the skies, way out of its depth and way beyond its limits, trying desperately to do what it can to make a stand, knowing full well that it is all far too little, far too late.

A Fight Worth Winning

It is extraordinary, really, that it has taken six years of negotiation and ill-feeling and controversy for U.S. Soccer to formally pledge to fulfill the simplest principle: that its men’s and women’s players should be paid the same amount of money — and given the same access to the same resources — to do the same job.

That does not feel like an especially complicated issue to resolve. It certainly does not seem like the sort of issue on which anyone would willingly take the contrary position.

It is not necessarily something that warrants the most lavish praise, then, that U.S. Soccer has agreed to a settlement that will see several dozen women, both current and former players, share $24 million, largely in back pay, in a belated attempt to right a historical wrong. But as noted elsewhere in this newsletter: better late than never.

Much more important is the effect of the settlement (which is, it should be noted, still dependent on U.S. Soccer’s negotiating new collective bargaining agreements with both its men’s and women’s teams).

The most significant consequence of the fight waged by the players of the United States’ women’s team for the last six years is not, ultimately, that a few dozen elite athletes receive their due, though that is, of course, a significant principle.

It is instead that those that follow will not have to go through the same struggle, and that those in the same position but without many of the same privileges have an example to point to, an inspiration to draw on, and a precedent to cite. That is what matters most of all. That is why these six long years have been worth it.

You Don’t Know What You’ve Got Until It’s Gone

The away goals rule was, without question, a relic. It was a hangover from a previous form of the game, when European competition meant arduous travel to unfamiliar lands to face teams full of unfamiliar faces and unknown qualities, when scouting was basic and lodging rudimentary and replays expensive and unfeasible.

It made sense, then, to find a way to coax visiting teams from their protective shells, to ensure that games were finished over two legs and no more. But it did not make sense now, and had not for some time. If anything, the away goals rule had become counterproductive in recent years, convincing home teams to disavow any risk, making games stale and cautious. Abolishing it was, in a cool and rational analysis, the right thing to do.

The first two weeks of European competition in the post-away goals era has not suffered, in the round, for its absence. The games have not been any better or worse, not really. Teams would not, most likely, have adopted a radically different approach had there been an extra reward for scoring on the road.

And yet it did feel like something was missing: something indistinct, yes, but something nonetheless. Perhaps it was the complication, the endless permutations that the extra prize for an away goal created. Perhaps it was the uniqueness, the fact that a goal away from home meant something different in European games and only in European games. Perhaps it was the tradition.

Those are not necessarily reasons to indulge a relic, of course. But nor are they factors that should be jettisoned at will. Plenty of people have called for the away goals rule to be abandoned in recent years. I’m pretty sure that I’ve been among them. Now that the rule is gone, though, it is hard not to wonder whether away goals were ever really such a problem in the first place.

Correspondence

Thank you so much for keeping the emails flowing over the last few weeks, most of them expressing just how much you enjoyed Astead Herndon’s cameo appearance. We won’t dwell on them too long, except to say that they were greatly appreciated: We don’t need to be giving anyone ideas on the staffing of the soccer department.

I should stress, though, just to clear up any confusion, that it is Astead who is the Tottenham fan (and what a week he’s had as a result). This newsletter remains strictly impartial the other 51 weeks a year.

Among all of the praise for Astead, though, was a smattering of the sort of correspondence that is our plant-based protein and drink, like the one from Wade Burkhart asking why so many high-class goalkeepers exhibit “cross dominance”: They throw with their right hand and kick with their left.

“Is there some sort of advantage to throwing right and kicking left?” he asked. “Does cross dominance offer some sort of neurological advantage? And why does cross dominance among keepers only show up one way and not the other?”

I have no idea to the answer to most of those questions, but they’re very interesting, so I thought I’d share them. I would guess — and no more than that — that most goalkeepers at the elite level can throw with both hands, and will vary depending on which is most effective at the time; could it be that what you are witnessing is simply a manifestation of their teams’ tactical approaches to building play?

And I was grateful to Carson Stanwood, who wrote in asking if the readership of the newsletter could help him pick a team in Liga MX to support. “I’m a long time Manchester United supporter,” he wrote, by way of helping us winnow down the options. He is not, though, “necessarily looking for the United of Liga MX,” which rules out whoever has the highest wage bill but the worst performance.

I feel like we have been through this before, but it definitely bears repeating. The answer to the question “which Mexican team should I support?” is always, without exception, Pumas. The reason that is the answer is because Pumas’ logo is a giant, stylized puma face. This is a much better reason to support someone than Astead’s logic in choosing Spurs.

Audio produced by Parin Behrooz.