Raphael Stevens

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The Superteam That May Be Selling Itself Short

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Vfl Wolfsburg casts itself as an underdog in Germany and in the Champions League. That doesn’t reflect reality.The grounds for VfL Wolfsburg’s inferiority complex are thin, at best. This is a club that has been crowned champion of Germany in five of the last six seasons. It has reached at least the quarterfinals of the Women’s Champions League in every year of the competition’s existence. It has made five finals, and won two of them.Its squad drips with experience and talent: Alexandra Popp, the German talisman, and her international teammates Svenja Huth, Merle Frohms and Marina Hegering; Lena Oberdorf, arguably Europe’s most exciting young player; the seasoned Dutch international Jill Roord, restored to Germany after a couple of years away in England.By any measure, Wolfsburg is a bona fide superpower, a dominant force domestically and a longstanding contender internationally. And yet even its players seem to have internalized the idea that they are underdogs. A few weeks ago, Popp herself suggested that Bayern Munich — Wolfsburg’s only serious rival for the German title — had started the season as “strong favorites, and that has been the case for the last couple of years.”Svenja Huth is one of the handful of Germany stars on Wolfsburg’s roster.Gonzalo Fuentes/ReutersIt is not quite clear why anyone — let alone Popp, fully aware of the quality of player lining up alongside her on the field — should believe that to be the case. The most obvious rationale is that the Bayern’s reputation, particularly in Germany, is such that it exerts a kind of reflexive gravity: It has sufficient weight that it is capable of bending light, and logic, around it.As soon as Bayern started to invest heavily in its women’s side, as it did around a decade ago, the natural assumption was that it would win. That is what Bayern does, after all: It wins. It is the club’s calling card, an inevitability threaded into its DNA. And to an extent, that is true. Bayern has picked up three Bundesliga titles since 2015. It has been as good as its word. It has won. It has just not won as much as Wolfsburg.And yet, somehow, the success of Popp and her teammates has still been overshadowed by the rise of Bayern. In truth, it is hard to shake the sense that Wolfsburg’s location — and what might best be described as its nature — has not worked in the team’s favor.Wolfsburg is a factory town, its identity bound up with Volkswagen, the city’s major employer and greatest claim to fame. Both the men’s and women’s divisions of VfL Wolfsburg are even now regarded, on some subconscious level, as factory teams.When the women’s side lifted its last Bundesliga title, Ralf Brandstätter, the chief executive of the car manufacturer, described the players as “personable and successful ambassadors for the club, for Wolfsburg and of course for Volkswagen.” There is not, it does not need to be said, anything especially glamorous about being seen as ambassadors for Volkswagen.And European women’s soccer is undeniably drawn — at this stage — to glamour (a charge that can just as easily be laid at the men’s game). The Champions League has, for some time, been the private fief of Lyon, a team whose recruitment strategy has long copied that of the Harlem Globetrotters: Its approach has been no more sophisticated than identifying the best players on the planet and working out how much it would take to persuade them to move to the banks of the Rhone.Bayern Munich and Barcelona collided in this season’s Champions League group stage.Andreas Gebert/ReutersThat model has bled down, not just to Lyon’s great domestic rival, Paris St.-Germain, but to the moneyed plains of England’s Women’s Super League, where Manchester City, Chelsea and, more recently, Manchester United have used their uncontested financial advantages to attract enviable collections of the best players in the world. Bayern has followed much the same blueprint.Even Barcelona, which prided itself on its homespun approach to success, its idiosyncratic, characteristic style and its inviolable principles, has been unable to resist the pull of women’s soccer’s increasingly frenzied transfer market. Last summer, it made the English midfielder Kiera Walsh the most expensive player on the planet.In that context, a team like Wolfsburg — largely German, devoid of genuine star names (Popp and potentially Oberdorf apart) and based not in one of Europe’s grand metropoles but in a city frequently caricatured as little more than a production line surrounded by houses — is always likely to struggle for the spotlight.Increasingly, though, Wolfsburg is becoming difficult to ignore. Tommy Stroot’s side is on course for another Bundesliga title. If it can avoid defeat at Bayern this weekend and it would enter the home straight with a two-point lead at the top of the table. A second straight European semifinal is on the cards, too, after a 1-0 win at P.S.G. this week.A quiet confidence is taking root among Stroot’s squad that they have nothing to fear, even in the Champions League. “The only thing that can stop Wolfsburg winning it is ourselves,” Popp told FIFA.com earlier this month.Its victory in Paris, in front of a fervid, boisterous crowd, settled a few of the ghosts of last season, when Stroot’s team froze in front of more than 91,000 fans at Camp Nou, losing to Barcelona, 5-1, in the first leg of their semifinal.“We experienced the same noise from the crowd at Barcelona last season,” said Dominique Janssen, the Dutch midfielder. “You try to take that experience away with you, and know that it gets easier the more it happens.”The club might not have lifted the Champions League trophy since 2014, but neither Lyon nor Barcelona looks quite as imposing this time around as they have in seasons past. Like Bayern, Chelsea and Arsenal, there is a sense at Wolfsburg that the field is leveling just a little. It might think of itself as an underdog, but the superteam that everyone has forgotten, in the place that nobody bothers to look, has no reason to feel inferior.Doing Business in PublicThe general rule of thumb, when it comes to prospective takeovers of major soccer teams, is that there is an inverse correlation between heat and light. The more public a suitor, the less likely they are to succeed. Among executives regularly involved in these transactions, the dictum runs that the serious bidders are also the quietest.All of which, of course, has been upended by the ongoing process to find a new owner for Manchester United. As should have been expected, any interested party was made to sign a “strict” and “binding” nondisclosure agreement before being offered access to the club’s detailed financial accounts. (There is a tautology here, obviously: Nondisclosure agreements are rarely described as “loose” or “really more of a guideline.”)Still, it might be worth checking the wording. It is not just that the identities of the two leading contenders tussling for the club — Jim Ratcliffe, a petrochemical billionaire, and Sheikh Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani, the son of a former Qatari prime minister and ABSOLUTELY NOT linked to the Qatari state — have become public. It is that everything else has, too.It has been possible, in fact, to follow this multibillion dollar transaction in surprisingly forensic detail. There were statements to accompany the submission of their bids, as well as ballpark figures of their valuations of the club. There have been details about when and where they have held further talks with United’s current hierarchy ahead of a very public — and completely artificial — deadline for offers. Ratcliffe was even photographed at Old Trafford along with his negotiating team.“Oh, what a surprise to see photographers here for my secret talks. Maybe I can hide in front of this crest.”Phil Noble/ReutersNews organizations tend not to rail against transparency. The more people want to talk, the better, particularly when it pertains to a club that commands as much interest as United. In this case, though, it might be worth pausing to ask who benefits, exactly, from what would ordinarily be a faintly clandestine process playing out in the open.For the contenders, it presents a chance to win hearts and minds, and perhaps that is no bad thing. For the Glazer family, the current owners, it is a way to smoke out as much interest as possible, and that is entirely their prerogative. For Raine, the bank that has been tasked with overseeing the deal, it is a chance to drive up the price, and by coincidence its commission.Everyone involved, in other words, is using United — a club that regards itself, not without cause, as the biggest sporting institution in the world — for their own ends. United is reduced to a mere asset, a trinket to be haggled over and horse-traded, a passive participant in the proxy wars of billionaires. And that, when it comes down to it, is about as good a definition of modern soccer as you will find.“Failure”Julian Nagelsmann, now out of the hot seat at Bayern Munich.Michaela Rehle/ReutersJulian Nagelsmann always wanted to be Bayern Munich manager. It was the job he coveted more than any other during his meteoric rise, back when he was European soccer’s coming force, its baby-faced managerial prodigy, an outsider who was overturning conventional wisdom of what a coach should look like, what steps they needed to take, how old they really ought to be.When he left his first job, at the equally neophyte Hoffenheim, for RB Leipzig, it was with the express purpose of positioning himself to take charge at Bayern. Leipzig was his designated intermediate step, the place where he would go to get from here to there, to where he always wanted to be.And though the move worked, he never felt quite like a natural fit with Bayern Munich. The images, early on in his tenure, of him scooting around Bayern’s training facility at Sabenerstrasse on a hoverboard felt somehow jarring, a Silicon Valley tech bro on vacation at Neuschwanstein. There always seemed to be just a hint of unease in the air: a hunt for a mole here, an unwarranted, unedifying outburst there.If the timing of his demise is curious — he was set to be fired on Friday, with his team in second place in the Bundesliga, a point behind its next opponent, and with a Champions League quarterfinal on the horizon — then the fact of it was not. Bayern places great stock in having a coach whose face fits. It is a shifting, vague criterion, but one that condemned him in the end. Nagelsmann never felt right, not quite.His solace, of course, is not simply the Bundesliga title he picked up in his first and only full season in Munich — proof that nobody fails at Bayern, not in any meaningful sense of the word — but the fact that he will be able to parlay that experience into something else soon enough.Bayern, it turns out, will not be his final destination. Nagelsmann will now be a contender for any of the handful of elite jobs that becomes available. Once a manager has broken through that ceiling, after all, it quickly transforms into a floor. The best evidence for that is the man who is reportedly replacing him: Thomas Tuchel, fired by Paris St.-Germain and fired by Chelsea, but hired in an instant by Bayern. For Nagelsmann, Munich will be just another step along the way.CorrespondenceWe are moving away from the many and varied failings of penalties and onto socks this week, courtesy of Shawn Donnelly. “What’s the deal with these Premier League players’ socks?” he asked, in the tone (I am assuming) of Jerry Seinfeld. “Half of them seemed to be ripped up in the back. Is this a new style, or can the sportswear brands not produce a sock strong enough for the rigors of the Premier League?”This is a good question, and in a rare stroke of good fortune, it is one I can actually answer. It is to do with reducing pressure on the calf muscles. Kyle Walker, the Manchester City defender, seems to have been the pioneer in this particular realm of what we may as well, for want of a better word, call science, and now it is almost de rigueur.Free the calf.Phil Noble/ReutersMoshe Arenstein, meanwhile, makes a perfectly coherent point of logic. “As we enjoy this great part of the year with amazing Champions and Europa League games, why on earth would the final game be just one game? Isn’t the best part of this tournament the home and away? Do we not deserve a final that has two games as well?”That, of course, was exactly how one European tournament functioned until relatively recently: the UEFA Cup, the forerunner of the Europa League, only switched to a single, showpiece final in 1998. (The Intercontinental Cup, the predecessor of the Club World Cup, ran as a home-and-away affair until 1980.)This newsletter is not above a dash of misty-eyed nostalgia, of course, but on this one I err on the side of modernity: there is an appeal to a two-legged final, but there is no drama greater than a one-and-done, surely?And Tom Gantz, rightly, takes issue with my description of dead-rubber group stage games in the expanded men’s World Cup as being “pointless soccer.”“Pointless to whom, exactly?” Tom asks. “The chance to watch the best soccer players once every four years is something I won’t pass up even if the outcome of every game doesn’t actually affect progression in the tournament.”I will cede that point as graciously as possible: No soccer match is truly pointless, is it? And I say that as a man who once attended a group stage game in a minor cup competition in which both teams had already been eliminated, and yet it ended in a penalty shootout anyway. More

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    The Superteam That May Be Selling Itself Short

    Vfl Wolfsburg casts itself as an underdog in Germany and in the Champions League. That doesn’t reflect reality.The grounds for VfL Wolfsburg’s inferiority complex are thin, at best. This is a club that has been crowned champion of Germany in five of the last six seasons. It has reached at least the quarterfinals of the Women’s Champions League in every year of the competition’s existence. It has made five finals, and won two of them.Its squad drips with experience and talent: Alexandra Popp, the German talisman, and her international teammates Svenja Huth, Merle Frohms and Marina Hegering; Lena Oberdorf, arguably Europe’s most exciting young player; the seasoned Dutch international Jill Roord, restored to Germany after a couple of years away in England.By any measure, Wolfsburg is a bona fide superpower, a dominant force domestically and a longstanding contender internationally. And yet even its players seem to have internalized the idea that they are underdogs. A few weeks ago, Popp herself suggested that Bayern Munich — Wolfsburg’s only serious rival for the German title — had started the season as “strong favorites, and that has been the case for the last couple of years.”Svenja Huth is one of the handful of Germany stars on Wolfsburg’s roster.Gonzalo Fuentes/ReutersIt is not quite clear why anyone — let alone Popp, fully aware of the quality of player lining up alongside her on the field — should believe that to be the case. The most obvious rationale is that the Bayern’s reputation, particularly in Germany, is such that it exerts a kind of reflexive gravity: It has sufficient weight that it is capable of bending light, and logic, around it.As soon as Bayern started to invest heavily in its women’s side, as it did around a decade ago, the natural assumption was that it would win. That is what Bayern does, after all: It wins. It is the club’s calling card, an inevitability threaded into its DNA. And to an extent, that is true. Bayern has picked up three Bundesliga titles since 2015. It has been as good as its word. It has won. It has just not won as much as Wolfsburg.And yet, somehow, the success of Popp and her teammates has still been overshadowed by the rise of Bayern. In truth, it is hard to shake the sense that Wolfsburg’s location — and what might best be described as its nature — has not worked in the team’s favor.Wolfsburg is a factory town, its identity bound up with Volkswagen, the city’s major employer and greatest claim to fame. Both the men’s and women’s divisions of VfL Wolfsburg are even now regarded, on some subconscious level, as factory teams.When the women’s side lifted its last Bundesliga title, Ralf Brandstätter, the chief executive of the car manufacturer, described the players as “personable and successful ambassadors for the club, for Wolfsburg and of course for Volkswagen.” There is not, it does not need to be said, anything especially glamorous about being seen as ambassadors for Volkswagen.And European women’s soccer is undeniably drawn — at this stage — to glamour (a charge that can just as easily be laid at the men’s game). The Champions League has, for some time, been the private fief of Lyon, a team whose recruitment strategy has long copied that of the Harlem Globetrotters: Its approach has been no more sophisticated than identifying the best players on the planet and working out how much it would take to persuade them to move to the banks of the Rhone.Bayern Munich and Barcelona collided in this season’s Champions League group stage.Andreas Gebert/ReutersThat model has bled down, not just to Lyon’s great domestic rival, Paris St.-Germain, but to the moneyed plains of England’s Women’s Super League, where Manchester City, Chelsea and, more recently, Manchester United have used their uncontested financial advantages to attract enviable collections of the best players in the world. Bayern has followed much the same blueprint.Even Barcelona, which prided itself on its homespun approach to success, its idiosyncratic, characteristic style and its inviolable principles, has been unable to resist the pull of women’s soccer’s increasingly frenzied transfer market. Last summer, it made the English midfielder Kiera Walsh the most expensive player on the planet.In that context, a team like Wolfsburg — largely German, devoid of genuine star names (Popp and potentially Oberdorf apart) and based not in one of Europe’s grand metropoles but in a city frequently caricatured as little more than a production line surrounded by houses — is always likely to struggle for the spotlight.Increasingly, though, Wolfsburg is becoming difficult to ignore. Tommy Stroot’s side is on course for another Bundesliga title. If it can avoid defeat at Bayern this weekend and it would enter the home straight with a two-point lead at the top of the table. A second straight European semifinal is on the cards, too, after a 1-0 win at P.S.G. this week.A quiet confidence is taking root among Stroot’s squad that they have nothing to fear, even in the Champions League. “The only thing that can stop Wolfsburg winning it is ourselves,” Popp told FIFA.com earlier this month.Its victory in Paris, in front of a fervid, boisterous crowd, settled a few of the ghosts of last season, when Stroot’s team froze in front of more than 91,000 fans at Camp Nou, losing to Barcelona, 5-1, in the first leg of their semifinal.“We experienced the same noise from the crowd at Barcelona last season,” said Dominique Janssen, the Dutch midfielder. “You try to take that experience away with you, and know that it gets easier the more it happens.”The club might not have lifted the Champions League trophy since 2014, but neither Lyon nor Barcelona looks quite as imposing this time around as they have in seasons past. Like Bayern, Chelsea and Arsenal, there is a sense at Wolfsburg that the field is leveling just a little. It might think of itself as an underdog, but the superteam that everyone has forgotten, in the place that nobody bothers to look, has no reason to feel inferior.Doing Business in PublicThe general rule of thumb, when it comes to prospective takeovers of major soccer teams, is that there is an inverse correlation between heat and light. The more public a suitor, the less likely they are to succeed. Among executives regularly involved in these transactions, the dictum runs that the serious bidders are also the quietest.All of which, of course, has been upended by the ongoing process to find a new owner for Manchester United. As should have been expected, any interested party was made to sign a “strict” and “binding” nondisclosure agreement before being offered access to the club’s detailed financial accounts. (There is a tautology here, obviously: Nondisclosure agreements are rarely described as “loose” or “really more of a guideline.”)Still, it might be worth checking the wording. It is not just that the identities of the two leading contenders tussling for the club — Jim Ratcliffe, a petrochemical billionaire, and Sheikh Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani, the son of a former Qatari prime minister and ABSOLUTELY NOT linked to the Qatari state — have become public. It is that everything else has, too.It has been possible, in fact, to follow this multibillion dollar transaction in surprisingly forensic detail. There were statements to accompany the submission of their bids, as well as ballpark figures of their valuations of the club. There have been details about when and where they have held further talks with United’s current hierarchy ahead of a very public — and completely artificial — deadline for offers. Ratcliffe was even photographed at Old Trafford along with his negotiating team.“Oh, what a surprise to see photographers here for my secret talks. Maybe I can hide in front of this crest.”Phil Noble/ReutersNews organizations tend not to rail against transparency. The more people want to talk, the better, particularly when it pertains to a club that commands as much interest as United. In this case, though, it might be worth pausing to ask who benefits, exactly, from what would ordinarily be a faintly clandestine process playing out in the open.For the contenders, it presents a chance to win hearts and minds, and perhaps that is no bad thing. For the Glazer family, the current owners, it is a way to smoke out as much interest as possible, and that is entirely their prerogative. For Raine, the bank that has been tasked with overseeing the deal, it is a chance to drive up the price, and by coincidence its commission.Everyone involved, in other words, is using United — a club that regards itself, not without cause, as the biggest sporting institution in the world — for their own ends. United is reduced to a mere asset, a trinket to be haggled over and horse-traded, a passive participant in the proxy wars of billionaires. And that, when it comes down to it, is about as good a definition of modern soccer as you will find.“Failure”Julian Nagelsmann, now out of the hot seat at Bayern Munich.Michaela Rehle/ReutersJulian Nagelsmann always wanted to be Bayern Munich manager. It was the job he coveted more than any other during his meteoric rise, back when he was European soccer’s coming force, its baby-faced managerial prodigy, an outsider who was overturning conventional wisdom of what a coach should look like, what steps they needed to take, how old they really ought to be.When he left his first job, at the equally neophyte Hoffenheim, for RB Leipzig, it was with the express purpose of positioning himself to take charge at Bayern. Leipzig was his designated intermediate step, the place where he would go to get from here to there, to where he always wanted to be.And though the move worked, he never felt quite like a natural fit with Bayern Munich. The images, early on in his tenure, of him scooting around Bayern’s training facility at Sabenerstrasse on a hoverboard felt somehow jarring, a Silicon Valley tech bro on vacation at Neuschwanstein. There always seemed to be just a hint of unease in the air: a hunt for a mole here, an unwarranted, unedifying outburst there.If the timing of his demise is curious — he was set to be fired on Friday, with his team in second place in the Bundesliga, a point behind its next opponent, and with a Champions League quarterfinal on the horizon — then the fact of it was not. Bayern places great stock in having a coach whose face fits. It is a shifting, vague criterion, but one that condemned him in the end. Nagelsmann never felt right, not quite.His solace, of course, is not simply the Bundesliga title he picked up in his first and only full season in Munich — proof that nobody fails at Bayern, not in any meaningful sense of the word — but the fact that he will be able to parlay that experience into something else soon enough.Bayern, it turns out, will not be his final destination. Nagelsmann will now be a contender for any of the handful of elite jobs that becomes available. Once a manager has broken through that ceiling, after all, it quickly transforms into a floor. The best evidence for that is the man who is reportedly replacing him: Thomas Tuchel, fired by Paris St.-Germain and fired by Chelsea, but hired in an instant by Bayern. For Nagelsmann, Munich will be just another step along the way.CorrespondenceWe are moving away from the many and varied failings of penalties and onto socks this week, courtesy of Shawn Donnelly. “What’s the deal with these Premier League players’ socks?” he asked, in the tone (I am assuming) of Jerry Seinfeld. “Half of them seemed to be ripped up in the back. Is this a new style, or can the sportswear brands not produce a sock strong enough for the rigors of the Premier League?”This is a good question, and in a rare stroke of good fortune, it is one I can actually answer. It is to do with reducing pressure on the calf muscles. Kyle Walker, the Manchester City defender, seems to have been the pioneer in this particular realm of what we may as well, for want of a better word, call science, and now it is almost de rigueur.Free the calf.Phil Noble/ReutersMoshe Arenstein, meanwhile, makes a perfectly coherent point of logic. “As we enjoy this great part of the year with amazing Champions and Europa League games, why on earth would the final game be just one game? Isn’t the best part of this tournament the home and away? Do we not deserve a final that has two games as well?”That, of course, was exactly how one European tournament functioned until relatively recently: the UEFA Cup, the forerunner of the Europa League, only switched to a single, showpiece final in 1998. (The Intercontinental Cup, the predecessor of the Club World Cup, ran as a home-and-away affair until 1980.)This newsletter is not above a dash of misty-eyed nostalgia, of course, but on this one I err on the side of modernity: there is an appeal to a two-legged final, but there is no drama greater than a one-and-done, surely?And Tom Gantz, rightly, takes issue with my description of dead-rubber group stage games in the expanded men’s World Cup as being “pointless soccer.”“Pointless to whom, exactly?” Tom asks. “The chance to watch the best soccer players once every four years is something I won’t pass up even if the outcome of every game doesn’t actually affect progression in the tournament.”I will cede that point as graciously as possible: No soccer match is truly pointless, is it? And I say that as a man who once attended a group stage game in a minor cup competition in which both teams had already been eliminated, and yet it ended in a penalty shootout anyway. More

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    Ali Krieger Is Calling It a Career. She Wants Wins on Her Way Out.

    Krieger, 38, will retire after one final season with Gotham F.C. in the N.W.S.L. She is confident it will go better than the last one.Since it began almost two decades ago, Ali Krieger’s soccer career has taken her more places than she can remember: dozens of countries, three World Cups and at least two operating rooms.But this year her career will come to an end, but not before a final challenge that will be a far cry from the glory of lifting league and World Cup trophies. Before she calls it quits, Krieger, 38, wants to turn around her club team, Gotham F.C. of the National Women’s Soccer League, after a season she would prefer to forget.“It was terrible,” Krieger said of last season, her first with the club. “I don’t think I’d ever been on a team in last place.”Last season’s champion, the Portland Thorns, and the regular-season winner, OL Reign, are the more likely candidates for success in the new N.W.S.L. season, which opens this weekend. But Krieger, a defender, said she was determined to help turn around Gotham after a year in which the team started 4-8, fired its coach and then didn’t win again. Ten games. Nine losses. No fun.“We were so unhappy because we didn’t understand our roles and responsibilities,” Krieger said. “No one really knew what we were supposed to be doing out on the field.”Krieger said her penultimate N.W.S.L. season was “terrible.” Her final one starts this weekend.Ashley Landis/Associated PressIn an interview last week, she said that she was optimistic that this year would be better and that a revival could be accomplished under the team’s new Spanish coach, Juan Carlos Amorós.“I don’t say this lightly,” Krieger said. “I have played for some of the best coaches in the world. He is the ultimate package. I’ve never seen so many players this happy, whether they are playing every minute or not.“Everyone has an understanding of the ‘why.’ Why you do every little thing in training or in your specific position on the field.”Gotham scored a league-low 16 goals in its 22 games last season, and no individual player had more than three — not a recipe for success. To address that glaring weakness, the team added Lynn Williams, who has scored 15 times for the women’s national team, up front. But Krieger said scoring responsibility does not rest solely on the strikers, and the team also added defender Kelley O’Hara and midfielder Allie Long, two more players with deep national team experience. They, and Krieger, should give the team a little more organization and a little more connection up the field.That said, Krieger admitted, “Adding Lynn Williams to any squad, you are 100 percent better.”No matter how her final season turns out, Krieger said she was confident the N.W.S.L., which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, was on the right path after a season marred by a sprawling abuse scandal that affected multiple clubs.“It’s definitely better,” she said. “Now we have sponsorships and ownerships and club officials who actually care. We’re not considered a charity anymore. This is a business.”While acknowledging the pinnacle of her career had been being a part of World Cup-winning teams in 2015 and 2019, Krieger said, “I’m a club over country girl.” One of her most memorable moments, she said, came in her first season in Europe, winning the Champions League and the treble with a German team then known as F.F.C. Frankfurt.“I didn’t realize that it was that important at the time,” Krieger said of her early club successes. “I had never really watched a lot of European women’s teams play. I could not just pop online and watch the Bundesliga.”There is plenty from the European model, she said, that could be valuable for the N.W.S.L., including an emphasis on developing the next generation of talent.Krieger during her Bundesliga years, when she helped Frankfurt win the league, cup and Champions League treble.Joern Pollex/Bongarts/Getty Images“I played with 15- and 16-year-olds,” she said. “I can remember Svenja Huth” — now a mainstay of the German national team — “she was 16 playing in her first Champions League game in front of me.“That model is something we could hopefully get to in the future. I don’t know if we have the infrastructure at every single club to do that just yet, but we’re getting there.”The on-field style of European play is different as well, she said. American teams often rely on an advantage of athleticism, and pace and pressure, rather than on a technical approach.“In Europe, players are very technical and skillful,” Krieger said. “They tend to play smarter, not harder. We’re trying to bring that kind of mentality here. Just kicking it long and running, high-pressing constantly, is not always going to be the best style.“Our younger players have the technical ability and the skill set to really do both. It’s exciting to see the future coming and mixing the two styles.”For Krieger, retirement will mean more time with her growing family — she married her former national teammate Ashlyn Harris in 2019, and the couple have two children, ages 2 and 8 months — and possibly a place on the board of trustees for her alma mater, Penn State.Krieger and Ashlyn Harris with their daughter, Sloane, last season. They also have a son. Ira L. Black/Corbis, via Getty ImagesBut that will come after one last season. After that, she said, she will be happy to leave the next steps — and the battles for more wins, safer workplaces and equal pay — to players coming up behind her.“We had to fight tooth and nail,” she said of the struggles of players of her era and earlier ones. “To even have a voice, we had to win. That sparked a different mentality in our generation. We were a bunch of psychos out there. I don’t know if I’ve seen that type of urgency yet from the younger players because they were brought up in a different time.“It’s not better or worse. But that mentality piece is the next step to create the winning way that we have paved for them. In order for them to continue to win, that mentality, that urgency, determination and grit will have to be instilled. Daily.” More

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    Quinten and Jurrien Timber Share Title Dreams and a Bedroom

    Quinten and Jurrien Timber are on opposite sides of the Dutch championship race. At home, they may be closer, literally, than any two players in European soccer.Perhaps the following exchange provides the best example of the precise dynamic of the Timber household. One brother, Quinten, is reflecting on the various virtues that have helped his Feyenoord side soar, just a touch unexpectedly, to the top of the Eredivisie — Dutch soccer’s top division — this season.“Maybe we do not have the best individuals,” he says. “But we are a good team. We fight to the end.” He pauses for breath. Sitting next to him, his twin brother, Jurrien, takes the break as an invitation to interject.“You’ve been a bit lucky sometimes, too,” he tells his brother. His voice trails off as he does so, making it sound as if no team has ever been more fortunate than Feyenoord this season.Graciously, Quinten concedes the point. Yes, he says, but then, that’s sports. Any successful team needs the ball to bounce its way at times. He says it with the sort of tone that suggests he has clocked his brother’s attempts to be provocative, and that he does not intend to rise to them.The Timbers met when their teams played a 1-1 draw in January. Sunday’s rematch will help decide the Dutch championship.Sipa, via Associated Press“It changed after the World Cup,” Quinten says, picking up his train of thought. Suddenly, Feyenoord and its fans realized a first Dutch title since 2017 might be feasible. “The pressure was very high after that,” he says. “But we have stayed first since then.”“Yeah,” Jurrien says, turning back to take another swing, “but you want to be No. 1 in May. Let’s see how long they can handle the pressure.”This sparring works both ways: A little while later, Quinten will need no second invitation to remind Jurrien that Feyenoord is still in contention for three trophies, and that Jurrien’s team, Ajax, is, well, not. It contains not a hint of malice. This is just how it has to be, when you share not just a house but a bedroom with someone who plays for your fiercest rival, and your direct opponent in a title race.For most of their lives, Jurrien and Quinten Timber were on the same team. They played together for their school and for their local grass-roots team. At age 7, they joined Feyenoord together, and then early in their teens both made the leap to Ajax. The only exception was in pickup games. “Then we had to be apart,” Jurrien said. “Otherwise it wasn’t fair.”Quinten and Jurrien began their careers as teammates at Ajax.Sipa, via Associated PressNow, though, they are 21, and they find themselves on either side of Dutch soccer’s most intractable divide. An energetic, inventive midfielder, Quinten left Ajax a couple of years ago, determining that a move to Utrecht, his hometown club, would offer a quicker route to elite soccer. He did enough in a season there to win an immediate move to Feyenoord.“It was one step back to take two forward,” he said. “I had to make that choice to play more at the highest level. It was a good choice.”Jurrien supported him in that decision, even as he remained at Ajax. He is now in his fourth season as an intelligent, assured mainstay of the club’s defense. He has already picked up a number of Dutch titles. (“Is it two?” asked Quinten. “Three,” Jurrien countered. “But the first one was the season canceled by coronavirus.”)That, of course, would be schism enough for any family: The rivalry between Ajax and Feyenoord is as deep-rooted as any in Europe. “I don’t want to use the word hate,” said Quinten. No alternative, though, leaps immediately to mind. “Yeah, Feyenoord fans really hate Ajax.”Rivals and roommates, but not for long: Both say they plan to move out of their family home this summer.Melissa Schriek for The New York TimesThis season, though, the enmity has become more immediate. Last summer, Ajax lost not only its coach, Erik Ten Hag, but a swath of players: the defender Lisandro Martínez and the winger Antony both joined their mentor at Manchester United; Ryan Gravenberch and Noussair Mazraoui left for Bayern Munich; Perr Schuurs, Nicolás Tagliafico and Sébastien Haller all departed, too.Early in the season, the club — Dutch champions in three of the past four seasons — searched for its usual form. “We lost a lot of stupid points,” Jurrien said. “We were not playing at our level. It was the first time that had happened to me, the first bad patch I’d known. A lot of things had changed, and it takes time. It is difficult when you lose that many players. But now we are getting back.”(“Yes,” says Quinten, with just a hint of joyful condescendence. “Maybe now you are ready to compete.”)For Feyenoord, Ajax’s struggles represented an opportunity. The club won 10 of its first 14 games to move to the top of the Eredivisie before the World Cup. It has not lost since league play resumed after the tournament, even if a run of four draws in six games in January and February slowed its momentum a little. Still, though, it has a three-point lead over Ajax as the two clubs prepare to meet in Amsterdam on Sunday.The brothers’ only chance to play on the same side these days is with the Netherlands.Eric Verhoeven/Soccrates, via Getty ImagesThat should, of course, have the potential to be intensely awkward for the Timber family. The brothers said they were confident that there was no risk of split loyalties for their mother and their three older brothers, at least, given that Quinten has been ruled out of the game with a knee injury. “Normally our Mum supports the underdog,” Jurrien said. “But because Quin’s injured, I think she’ll be for Ajax.”In the bedroom they have shared since childhood, there is no sign of tension. Both plan to move out in the coming months but even in the thick of a title race, both seem ambivalent about the prospect. “We’ve lived together our whole lives,” Quinten said. “It will be weird.”He probably ranks as a little more enthused at independence than his brother, which may or may not be related to the fact that, when asked which of the two was messier, Jurrien looked immediately sheepish and Quinten looked immediately at Jurrien.They have not felt the need to institute a rule banning soccer talk when they get home; the only taboo is that they will not divulge potentially sensitive information to each other. “Giving details would be dangerous,” Jurrien said. “But it’s interesting how it goes at the different clubs, how they think, how we think.”“Normally our Mum supports the underdog,” Jurrien said of Sunday. “But because Quin’s injured, I think she’ll be for Ajax.”Melissa Schriek for The New York Times“They asked me today whether Ajax was confident,” Quinten said. “I told them that Ajax is always confident. Even if they are playing badly and not winning games, they are confident. That’s always how it is at Ajax.”The Timbers are, though, making provisions for what happens after the game. Before the season, and after Quinten had completed his move to Feyenoord, they agreed on a silver lining: At least this way one of them would be champion. “We said it would be me or him,” Jurrien said. “Not PSV Eindhoven or AZ Alkmaar or anyone like that.”That brotherly affection only extends so far, though.“You don’t want to hear after the game that they won,” said Quinten. “Well, a little bit, maybe. That’s the fun part. You can talk about the game, how it went. But not too much.”Jurrien is not so sure. Asked what he might do if Feyenoord were to win in Amsterdam, and take another giant step toward the championship at his and Ajax’s expense, he said, “I think I might go and sleep at my girlfriend’s.”More, More, MoreGianni Infantino, probably after seeing the accounting projections for a 2026 World Cup.Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere could not, really, be a more perfect encapsulation of the problem with FIFA than the one that played out in Rwanda this week. No, not the part in which Gianni Infantino was elected for another term as president by acclamation, as though he were some sort of Roman emperor, but the part in which the organization’s congress casually decided to add 104 games to the 2026 World Cup.In one sense, of course, this is the correct decision. FIFA had long been toying with the idea of dividing the field in the first-ever 48-team World Cup into 16 groups of three, with 32 nations progressing to an extended knockout round. It was an unwieldy, inelegant sort of a plan, one that seemed to guarantee an awful lot of pointless soccer early in the tournament.The drama of the group stage in Qatar — remember the part in which Poland needed to avoid yellow cards in order to qualify? — persuaded FIFA to change course. Groups of four, it noticed, worked quite nicely. And so, this week, it resolved that 2026 would follow the same format: The tournament will start with 12 groups of four.It is a typical FIFA solution, a technocrat’s fix, one that betrays quite how little it understands the appeal of its own competition. Four-team groups are not inherently better than three-team pools; what made the group stage in Qatar (and in every World Cup since 1998) dramatic is that it served to halve the field.That will still not be the case in 2026: The top two teams in each of the 12 groups will progress, and so will eight teams who finish in third place. The stakes, in many of the games, will be infinitely lower. There will be more second chances. There will still be an awful lot of largely pointless soccer.That, ultimately, is the price FIFA has to pay for expanding its money-spinning, showpiece occasion. There is, after all, a balance in all things. FIFA can have more teams in the World Cup finals. It may well be richer for it, both metaphorically and literally. But it comes at a cost, somewhere along the line. Changing the scale of the tournament alters the nature of it. And there is no way to square that particular circle, no technical solution to an emotional problem.Might Makes RightRB Leipzig and Red Bull Salzburg met in the Europa League in 2018. The company won either way.Andreas Schaad/EPA, via ShutterstockIt has not been all that long since European soccer’s ultimate power broker, UEFA, published a report that identified the rising trend of multiclub ownership as a clear and present threat to the game. Indeed, the model is now so popular, and so prominent, that it has generated a neologism: Executives now happily talk about pursuing “multiclub” setups as part of their strategy.The downside to one group of investors owning multiple teams, though, is twofold. Most obvious is that it might damage the integrity of a competition that brings any two teams from the same stable into direct competition.Much more serious — though a little less tangible, and therefore more easily ignored — is that it raises uncomfortable questions about what the point of some of those teams might be. Do the lesser sides in a network exist to compete for trophies, as they really should, or are they reduced to acting as warehouses for storing what investors might refer to as assets but have, habitually, been calling “players?”For years, the primary bulwark against the popularization of that approach has been a single rule in UEFA’s statutes, one that outright forbids the same group having “control or influence” over two teams in the same European competition.It has been teetering for years — in 2018, UEFA found a workaround to allow RB Leipzig and Red Bull Salzburg not only to compete in the same tournament but to play one another in it — but now, as more and more investors gobble up more and more teams, its very existence seems to hang in the balance.“We have to speak about this regulation,” UEFA’s president, Aleksander Ceferin, said in an interview with The Overlap this week. “There is more and more interest in this particular ownership. We shouldn’t just say no to multiclub ownership, but we have to see what rules we set because the rules have to be strict.”He is right, to some extent: Multiclub ownership should not be dismissed out of hand as an emerging evil. In some circumstances, at least, it is possible to make a case for its benefits. It should be the subject of a mature and intelligent discussion, rather than a reflex rejection.At the same time, though, it is very hard to avoid the suspicion that UEFA’s about-face on the subject illustrates how powerless the organization is to protect and nurture the game in the face of an unrelenting tide of money. It rather gives the impression that UEFA will bend the rules to incorporate anything that the rich and the powerful want. It makes it abundantly clear, in fact, who is in charge, and it is not the people who exist to look after the best interests of the game. More

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    Gianni Infantino Is Re-elected, Unopposed, as FIFA President

    The Swiss administrator, a contentious figure in the soccer world, had no rivals for the position and was crowned for another four years by acclamation.Gianni Infantino, a contentious figure in the soccer world, secured a new term on Thursday as the president of FIFA, the sport’s global governing body, after an election in which he was the only candidate.Infantino, 52, was crowned for another four years by acclamation, with representatives from all but a small number of FIFA’s 211 national federations rising to applaud at FIFA’s annual meeting, held this year in Kigali, the Rwandan capital.After rising from relative obscurity, Infantino became soccer’s top leader in 2016 after a huge corruption scandal that mired FIFA in probably the biggest crisis in its history. FIFA rules drawn up by a group that included Mr. Infantino limit presidents to three terms of four years, but on the eve of last year’s World Cup final, he said that a review had “clarified” that his first three years in office did not count, allowing him potentially to run FIFA through 2031. Infantino took office after his longtime predecessor Sepp Blatter was forced out after just one year of his latest four year term. After confirmation of his re-election, Infantino appeared to recognize that he was not universally popular. “Those who love me, I know there are so many, and those who hate me, I know there are a few,” he said. “I love you all.” While Infantino’s time in office has stabilized the governing body, his tenure has also been marked by curious public statements and bruising battles with some of soccer’s biggest stakeholders, including clubs, leagues and unions. He has also been at the center of a power struggle with European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, where he had been the top administrator before his elevation to FIFA president.FIFA has been in an almost constant conflict with UEFA since 2018, when Infantino tried to push through a $25 billion sale of new events, including an expanded World Cup for clubs that was considered a rival to UEFA’s hugely popular Champions League.Since then, there have been other skirmishes, too, particularly when Infantino tried to push a proposal to switch the quadrennial World Cup to a biennial event. Infantino and UEFA’s president, Aleksander Ceferin, now rarely speak.Infantino congratulated Lionel Messi after Argentina won the men’s World Cup last year in Qatar. The decision, backed by Infantino, to play the World Cup in the Gulf nation was not without its critics.Julian Finney/Getty ImagesBut this week, among the delegates at the FIFA gathering in Kigali, Infantino has appeared in his element. Many of the governing body’s member nations are relatively small or midsize countries that are heavily reliant on FIFA’s largess for much of their income. Infantino also has a reputation for showcasing his relationships with politicians — including the likes of Donald J. Trump and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. In Kigali, he was joined at the congress by President Paul Kagame of Rwanda.In his opening remarks on Thursday, Infantino recalled how he had traveled to Rwanda to lobby African officials during his first campaign to become FIFA president eight years ago. After being told that he could not count on their support, he said that he had been on the verge of pulling out. But, he said, a visit to a memorial to the victims of the 1994 Rwandan genocide had “inspired” him to stay in the race. Infantino courted controversy on the eve of the World Cup in Qatar last year with an extraordinary speech in which he lashed out at Western critics of the decision to stage the tournament in the Middle East for the first time. In Kigali, he found an ally in Kagame, who used his speech to back Infantino, making similar references to “constant hypocritical criticism.”“Instead of asking why is it being held there, first ask, ‘Why not?’” Kagame said. “Unless we are talking about a kind of entitlement that only some of us from this bloc deserve to enjoy, it’s about keeping some people in their place, but that kind of attitude should have been left far behind in history by now.”Critics of the Qatar World Cup had highlighted the deaths and mistreatment of workers hired for the grand construction projects that were built for the tournament, including several stadiums. Others drew attention to the country’s broader human rights record. Infantino was unmoved, describing the tournament as the “best ever.”The FIFA conference in Kigali has offered a microcosm of Infantino’s presidency. He was feted by local politicians and national soccer executives, but drew criticism once more from farther afield. An announcement this week that the 2026 World Cup in North America, the first 48-team tournament and the first expansion of the event since 1998, would be extended further by adding 24 games more than planned was met by fury from groups representing leagues around the world. They offered what has become a familiar rebuke of Infantino’s FIFA: that the governing body announces major changes without consulting the groups involved.Before delegates were asked to show their support for Infantino, the FIFA president made another speech outlining the organization’s achievements and the ways in which it had successfully staged the World Cup and planned for new ones. He also reminded officials that FIFA had budgeted for record revenues of $11 billion over a four-year cycle to 2026, a figure that he said “will increase further by a few billion.”At voting time, Infantino was backed by most of the room, including by delegates from his fiercest critics, such as the federations of the Netherlands and of England.The Norwegian delegation, however, followed through on a promise not to rise to acclaim him, with its president, Lise Klaveness, saying on the eve of the election that Infantino had “failed to walk the talk” on his promised reforms. More

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    Portrait of an Artist, Still Just a Young Man

    Khvicha Kvaratskhelia has become a star in nine months at Napoli. With his transcendent talent, things may only get better.NAPLES, Italy — European soccer’s breakout star looks briefly uneasy. It is not the setting. That is just about perfect: He is leaning on a wrought-iron railing on the terrace of the Grand Hotel Parker’s, all cut-glass, belle epoque elegance, the city of Naples spilling out to the sea beneath him. At his back lurks Mount Vesuvius, wreathed in clouds.No, it is the pose that has perplexed Khvicha Kvaratskhelia. He cannot decide what to do with his arms. If he pulls them too close, he looks stiff, tense. If he allows them to slide too far away, he is drawn into a slouch. He cannot find a compromise that makes him happy. For a moment, he is flummoxed. And in that moment, he is just a little outside his comfort zone.In a way, that is quite reassuring. For the better part of the last nine months, after all, it has not been immediately clear that there exists anything at all that can throw Kvaratskhelia off balance. Everything has gone so blissfully, so impossibly smoothly for him that even he has been taken aback at times.“Ever since I arrived,” he said, “it has felt like being in a dream.”Often, it has felt like watching one, too. Trajectories like Kvaratskhelia’s do not happen anymore. There are no overnight sensations in modern soccer. The game’s next big things, its greats-in-waiting, are picked up and pored over before they are in their teens.They have agents at 10, shoe deals at 12 and millions of YouTube views before they hit 14. They are summoned by the sport’s great clubs long before they turn 16, legends paraded in front of them by teams squabbling desperately over their affection and signature. The sort of talent that can illuminate one of Europe’s major leagues is identified and cultivated while it is still germinating.It is not — repeat: not — found showing quiet promise at age 21 while playing for Rubin Kazan, a middling Russian team in what traditionally ranks as one of Europe’s second-tier competitions. Those are not circumstances in which it is possible to procure a player who will immediately turn out to be among the most devastating attacking forces in the world.Except that is precisely what happened.Kvaratskhelia’s first season at Napoli could end with the club’s first Italian title in more than three decades. Jennifer Lorenzini/ReutersKvaratskhelia arrived at Napoli for a little more than $10 million last summer (from Dinamo Batumi, in his homeland, Georgia, after having canceled his contract in Kazan). The Italian side had, by all accounts, been tracking him for two years.Within a couple of months, his new club’s fans had taken to calling him either Kvaradona or, more erudite, Kvaravaggio. One company in Georgia began arranging charter flights to Naples to coincide with Napoli’s home games, ensuring that every time he takes the field at the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona, one small corner of the stadium is marked by Georgian flags and contains a couple hundred countrymen there specifically to see him.By Christmas, his agent was having to dampen talk on a reasonably regular basis that Manchester City was busy riffling through its bottomless wallet to find the $100 million or so that might persuade Napoli to cash in on its budding phenom.None of it appears to have fazed him in the slightest. “The start was so smooth that it did feel like a dream,” he said. “But at some point, early on, I had to collect myself, remind myself that it was not a dream, that it was reality, and I had to find the strength in myself to live through it.”Nine months later, Kvaratskhelia still does not possess the glossy veneer of the ascendant superstar. His hair is tousled: not artfully or deliberately, but absent-mindedly. His beard is thick but patchy enough that another nickname, Che Kvara, has caught on, too. He looks like a tortured love poet or an eager politics student.He speaks perfectly passable English — good enough to expound, in reasonable detail, on the health-giving qualities of Georgian wine — but preferred his first major interview since moving to Italy to run through an interpreter back in Tbilisi. A friend of his girlfriend’s mother works in the country’s parliament, he explained. “She normally works with important people,” he said, without a hint of irony.Napoli’s coach sold Kvaratskhelia not with an offer of freedom, but a demand to fit in with his team.Roberto Salomone for The New York TimesIt is typical of how lightly he has worn his new status, of how easily he has carried the weight of expectation that has rapidly coalesced around him. “I tend to default to gratitude,” he said. “I am grateful for every piece of love and affection people show me. I know it is praise, but it is also motivation and inspiration. It is a huge responsibility. I have to prove every game that I can do as I have promised.”At no point has it looked as if that might be a problem. In 21 games in his debut season in Serie A, Kvaratskhelia has scored 10 goals and created 11 more. The last of them came on Saturday, a storybook goal that involved slaloming between three defenders and then cannoning a fierce, rising shot past three more, as well as the goalkeeper.It set his team on a course to a victory that extended its lead over second-place Inter Milan at the top of Serie A to 18 points. Napoli is on its way to its first Italian title in 33 years, and common consensus has identified Kvaratskhelia as the reason.The Champions League has proved no more daunting. His first contribution in that competition was to instill an identity crisis — as yet unresolved — in Trent Alexander-Arnold, the Liverpool and England right back. His most recent was a moderately unrealistic back-heeled assist in Napoli’s win against Eintracht Frankfurt in the first leg of its last 16 tie.That virtuosic streak — the sense that his greatest asset is an untamed imagination — has become Kvaratskhelia’s calling card. “That freedom is my signature,” he said. “It is something I recognize in myself. It is because I love what I do. When I am playing, it kind of carries me away.”A Georgian company arranges flights for every Napoli home game so fans can watch their favorite son. Ciro De Luca/ReutersIt is not, though, what he would attribute as the root of his sudden success. Before he joined Napoli, he had a long phone call with Luciano Spalletti, the club’s wily, experienced coach. Spalletti, as is normal in these situations, was simultaneously trying to sell him on the club and warn him as to the nature of his duties.“It was a good talk,” Kvaratskhelia said. The coach did not promise him carte blanche to express himself. “He told me what I would be expected to do for the team. We talked a lot about focusing on defensive work, about being part of team play and the importance of team spirit. That is what is really important to him: the spirit.”That is not necessarily, of course, what a player of Kvaratskhelia’s gifts — spontaneous, off-the-cuff, proudly improvisational — might be expected to want to hear, that he was being introduced not as a soloist but as part of an ensemble. And yet it made perfect sense to him. Partly, he recognized that Spalletti’s approach might round out his skill set. “Italian coaches are famous,” he said. “They know how to make players perform.”Mainly, though, it fit with the way he saw his talent. “You play with your heart, with passion, but you also play with your conscious brain,” he said. “It is more a conscious thing than anything else, based on what you have learned in training, on the mistakes you have made previously, on the options that are there.”What looks like the work of impromptu genius is, to Kvaratskhelia, actually nothing more than a constructed pattern of lived experience. “The way I play is both heart and conscious thought,” he said, chewing it over a little more. “But if you don’t use your brain, you would never improve.”“Freedom is my signature,” he said. “It is something I recognize in myself. It is because I love what I do.”Ciro Fusco/EPA, via ShutterstockHe knows that is his next challenge.He has, he acknowledged, detected that teams — particularly in Italy — have started to defend him a little differently. He may not act like a star, and he may not feel like a star, but he is starting to be treated like one. “I feel like my factor has been built in to the way teams set up against us,” he said.He is not troubled by that. If anything, he sees it as a compliment. Nine months since his arrival, every team that faces Napoli knows that if it is to stand any chance at all, it has to succeed where so many others have failed. It has to find a way of taking Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, the overnight sensation with Naples, the star with Italy and Europe in the palm of his hands, out of his comfort zone. More

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    Investigators Clear Former U.S. Soccer Coach in 1992 Incident

    An inquiry found no reason U.S. Soccer could not rehire Gregg Berhalter as coach of the men’s national team. But investigators criticized the parents of a player for their part in the controversy.Gregg Berhalter, the men’s national soccer team coach at last year’s World Cup, is eligible to return for the next World Cup cycle after investigators looking into his personal conduct cleared him to remain a candidate for the job, the U.S. Soccer Federation said on Monday.“There is no basis to conclude that employing Mr. Berhalter would create legal risks for an organization,” investigators said in a report made public on Monday.The federation three months ago hired investigators at the Atlanta-based law firm Alston & Bird to look into an incident involving Berhalter kicking his wife, Rosalind, in front of a bar when they were dating as students at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1992. No police report was filed for that incident.The investigators said they were “impressed with Mr. Berhalter’s candor and demeanor” during the inquiry and found no discrepancies between Gregg and Rosalind Berhalter’s description of the incident, with Gregg Berhalter saying he reported it to his college coach and also sought counseling for the way he acted. The two had been drunk when they left the bar arguing, and Rosalind hit Gregg in the face. Gregg then pushed her down and kicked her twice in the upper leg, the report said.Both Berhalters, in a statement made public in January, acknowledged what happened and said they have been happily married for 25 years.The report also said, based on interviews and research, that there was no reason to believe that Berhalter — whose contract with U.S. Soccer expired at the end of 2022 — ever acted aggressively toward his wife in the past 31 years.“The investigation revealed no evidence to suggest that he had engaged in violence against another person at any time prior or thereafter,” the report said, calling the 1992 incident “an isolated event.”In a statement Monday, Gregg Berhalter said: “Rosalind and I respect the process that U.S. Soccer went through. We are grateful that it is concluded and look forward to what’s next.”The report concludes a bizarre turn of events surrounding the World Cup involving Claudio and Danielle Reyna, the parents of U.S. forward Gio Reyna. The Reynas complained to U.S. Soccer about Gio’s playing time in the tournament and suggested “they knew damaging information about Mr. Berhalter that U.S. Soccer officials did not know.”The Berhalters and Reynas had been close friends for decades, and Rosalind and Danielle had been college soccer teammates. But the Reynas became upset after hearing Berhalter’s public comments about an unnamed player at the World Cup who “was clearly not meeting expectations on and off the field” and who the staff considered sending home. The player was Gio Reyna, and the Reynas vented to U.S. Soccer about what Berhalter had said, with Danielle Reyna telling the federation about the 1992 incident.Berhalter coaching Gio Reyna during a match against the Netherlands in December.Danielle Parhizkaran/USA Today Sports, via ReutersThe Reynas told U.S. Soccer about the incident, the report said, because they didn’t want the federation to renew Berhalter’s contract. “The information was disclosed at a time when it would be expected to discourage or otherwise influence the organization from offering a contract extension to Mr. Berhalter,” the report said.The report said Danielle Reyna first denied to investigators that she told the U.S. Soccer sporting director Earnie Stewart about the kicking incident, but then called back to say she indeed had. Compared to how open and willing the Berhalters had been in the inquiry, the report said, the Reynas were much less cooperative.The Reynas could not immediately be reached for comment.The investigative report details some of the Reynas’ complaints to U.S. Soccer over the years, specifically calling out Claudio Reyna’s yearslong outreach to the federation on behalf of his children, especially Gio.Claudio Reyna expressed his dissatisfaction with refereeing at the youth club level of the U.S. Soccer Development Academy, travel arrangements at the U-17 World Cup (he wanted business class) and Gio’s playing time on the national team, according to the report. One person interviewed by investigators referred to Reyna’s interactions with U.S. Soccer about his sons as “inappropriate,” “bullying” and “mean spirited.” Another, whose name was also redacted, said, “Mr. Reyna expected Gio Reyna to be treated better than other players.”The report also said that the communications between the Reynas and U.S. Soccer didn’t violate any federation laws or policy, but it did not say whether the Reynas violated FIFA’s code of ethics.In a statement, U.S. Soccer noted that the report said that there is “a need to revisit U.S. Soccer’s policies concerning appropriate parental conduct and communications with the staff at the National Team level.”The federation went on to say: “We will be updating those policies as we continue to work to ensure safe environments for all participants in our game.”Whether Berhalter will be in charge of the men’s national team when those policies are put in place is still unknown.Stewart, the sporting director, resigned in January amid the Reyna-Berhalter situation and took a job with a Dutch club team, and U.S. Soccer is looking for his replacement. The new sporting director will likely will be in charge of hiring the new men’s national team coach. More

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    Gary Lineker to Return to BBC Soccer Show ‘Match of the Day’

    The move calms a crisis at the publicly funded broadcaster after Gary Lineker, a former soccer star, was removed from a flagship show because of a tweet about immigration policy.The BBC announced on Monday that it had reached an agreement with Gary Lineker, a star sports personality, that will allow him to return to hosting its flagship soccer program, “Match of the Day.”The move defuses a crisis that began with a politically charged post that Mr. Lineker posted on Twitter last week about the British government’s immigration policy and escalated into a staff mutiny that threatened the BBC’s reputation and stability.“Gary is a valued part of the BBC and I know how much the BBC means to Gary, and I look forward to him presenting our coverage this coming weekend,” Tim Davie, the broadcaster’s director general, said in a statement.Mr. Davie said the BBC would launch an independent review into its social media guidelines.In a Twitter post, Mr. Lineker said, “After a surreal few days, I’m delighted that we have navigated a way through this.” He also thanked his colleagues at the network who had supported him.Mr. Lineker’s standoff with the BBC had set off a noisy national debate about free expression, government influence and the role of a revered, if beleaguered, public broadcaster in an era of polarized politics and freewheeling social media.It came after a walkout by Mr. Lineker’s soccer colleagues forced the BBC to radically curtail its coverage of a national obsession, reducing the chatty flagship show he usually anchors, “Match of the Day,” to 20 commentary-free minutes on Saturday.The BBC struggled over the weekend to work out a compromise with Mr. Lineker that would put him back on the air, after days of controversy about his criticism of a government plan to crack down on asylum seekers.But the fallout from the dispute is likely to be wide and long-lasting, casting doubt over the corporation’s management, which has made political impartiality a priority but has faced persistent questions about its own close ties to the Conservative government.“All this has put the BBC’s independence at risk, and its reputation at risk,” said Claire Enders, a London-based media researcher and the founder of Enders Analysis. “That’s unfortunate because this is, at heart, a dispute over whether the BBC can impose its social media guidelines on a contractor.”Mr. Lineker, 62, is no ordinary contractor, of course. He is perhaps the BBC’s biggest name, a beloved sports figure who made a smooth transition from the playing field to the broadcasting booth, where he has been a weekly fixture since 1999, analyzing games and shooting the breeze with other retired sports stars. He is the BBC’s highest-paid on-air personality, earning 1.35 million pounds, about $1.6 million, in 2022.But Mr. Lineker, who grew up in a working-class family in Leicester, has never kept his views on social issues a secret. When the government announced strict new immigration plans to cut down on asylum seekers, he posted on Twitter, “This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s, and I’m out of order?”The British home secretary, Suella Braverman, who is spearheading the policy to stop migrants from crossing the English Channel in small boats, said that Mr. Lineker’s comments diminished the atrocities of the Holocaust. Other Conservative lawmakers said that he had misused his BBC platform — not for the first time — to voice a political opinion.“We need to make sure we maintain that trust in the independence and impartiality of the BBC,” the chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, said on Sunday to a BBC journalist, Laura Kuenssberg.The BBC is not the only media organization to hit turbulence over questions about political expression and social media. Tensions have flared at British newspapers, as well as at The Washington Post and The New York Times, over the Twitter posts of journalists, sometimes critical of their own employers.“This is a period of social change, where public attitudes toward the media and social media are rapidly evolving,” said Mark Thompson, a former director general of the BBC who was later the chief executive of The New York Times Company. “Editorial teams around the world are racing to catch up.”What makes Mr. Lineker’s case especially complicated is both his job status — he is a contractor, not a full-time employee, who works for BBC Sports as opposed to BBC News — and the broadcaster’s enforcement of its social media guidelines, which critics say is haphazard at best and hypocritical at worst.Alan Sugar, a British businessman who hosts the BBC’s version of the American reality TV show “The Apprentice,” has tweeted vociferously against a union leader who has pursued a confrontation with the government, as well as against a former leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, whom Mr. Lineker has also criticized.Mr. Lineker got into no apparent trouble with his bosses about that, or for speaking out on the air about human rights abuses in Qatar during his coverage of the World Cup soccer tournament there last year.Mr. Davie, a former marketing executive who also had links to the Conservative Party, has come under fire for his handling of the dispute with Mr. Lineker. In an interview with the BBC over the weekend, he apologized for the spiraling crisis, which forced the broadcaster to all but scrap two days of sports programming.“This has been a tough time for the BBC,” Mr. Davie said. “Success for me is getting Gary back on air and together we are giving to the audiences that world-class sports coverage which, as I say, I’m sorry we haven’t been able to deliver today.”Mr. Davie, who was appointed during the Johnson government, has made upholding the BBC’s political impartiality one of his major goals as director general. But he denied that the broadcaster was bowing to pressure from the government or Conservative politicians, and said he had no plans to resign. More

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    France Fires Corinne Diacre as Coach Only Months Before World Cup

    Several top players had refused to play for Corinne Diacre, and the divide between the coach and her team “has reached a point of no return,” the federation decided.Corinne Diacre, a veteran coach facing a revolt by several of her best players only months before the Women’s World Cup, was fired Thursday as coach of France’s women’s soccer team. The move upended the preparations of one of the world’s best teams four months before women’s soccer’s showcase championship, but it could open a path for the return of several French stars who had said they would skip the tournament rather than play for Diacre.The French soccer federation announced the change, saying an investigation it had commissioned had revealed “a very significant divide” between Diacre and her team. In recent weeks, at least three French players, including the star defender Wendie Renard, had announced they would skip this year’s World Cup because of concerns about the team’s leadership and atmosphere, an unspoken — but unmistakable — critique of Diacre.The situation inside the team, the federation said Thursday, had deteriorated enough that leaving Diacre in her post was now actively harming France’s chances of success. “This fracture,” the federation said in a statement, “has reached a point of no return.”Diacre’s firing came one day after she had complained that her critics were running a “smear campaign” against her and vowed to remain in charge of the team, and a week after she lost a powerful ally when Noël Le Graët, the powerful president of the French federation who had supported her, resigned after a report that was critical of his own management.Diacre, who in 2014 had become the first woman to coach a professional men’s team in France, had led the women’s team since 2017. She led her team to the quarterfinals of the World Cup on home soil and to the semifinals of the European Championship in England last year. But her tenure also was marked by years of private and public disputes with some of her team’s best players — stars like Eugénie Le Sommer, Amandine Henry and Renard — and repeated complaints about her management style.Known as a taskmaster with no patience for mistakes, dissent or defeat — “What we remember is the final result, and nothing else,” Diacre once said — she was viewed as a cold and ruthless force by some who played for her. She would drop players for not being fit enough, and cut others after they criticized her methods or her tactics. Henry, a star for France’s team for years, said she learned she had been cut from the World Cup roster in 2019 in a phone call from Diacre that lasted “14 or 15 seconds.”Wendie Renard announced last month that she would skip the World Cup; her reasons were widely seen as a rebuke of Diacre’s leadership.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut that driving style also had pushed players away, including several key members of Olympique Lyonnais Féminin, France’s dominant women’s team, and its top domestic rival Paris St.-Germain. The goalkeeper Sarah Bouhaddi, for example, has said she will not play for her country while Diacre is in charge, and last month Renard’s decision to skip the World Cup was quickly echoed by two of her teammates, Marie-Antoinette Katoto and Kadidiatou Diani.“It is a sad day,” Renard wrote on social media when she announced she was out of the World Cup, “but necessary to preserve my mental health.”It is unclear if Diacre’s dismissal might lead Renard, or any of the other players who had said they would not play for Diacre, to make themselves available to the national team again.The decision to drop Diacre as coach so soon before the World Cup could upend — or, in the view of Diacre’s critics, rescue — the preparations of one of the favorites in this summer’s championship. France will open the tournament against Jamaica on July 23, and then will play Brazil and Panama to complete the group stage.The team’s next two games, among its final chances to get together before the World Cup kicks off in July, are a set of friendlies against Colombia and Canada in April.France did not name a replacement for Diacre, but it did seem to issue a veiled warning to the team’s players.“The way used by the players to express their criticisms will no longer be acceptable,” the federation statement said, adding that it planned to propose a change in the governance of the women’s team that would introduce new layer of oversight. More