Raphael Stevens

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    Can This Man Make Soccer Smarter?

    Ian Graham helped transform Liverpool from a faded giant into soccer’s most cutting-edge club. Now he wants to do the same for everyone else.Ian Graham does not make for an especially likely revolutionary. He has a distinctly academic air: genial, whip-smart, just a touch crumpled. He is not a natural salesman. He does not particularly enjoy giving interviews. Roughly once every 10 minutes, he allows a mischievous, outré sense of humor to get the better of him. He feels this makes appearing on any broadcast medium something of a risk.It is hard to deny, though, that he is a resoundingly successful insurgent. Twenty years ago, he was among the first to explore the idea that soccer might be able to understand itself better by examining the vast reams of data produced by every single player in every single game. He did not so much pioneer the field of soccer analytics as help to conjure it into existence.Then, over the course of a decade at Liverpool, he acted as proof of concept. From scratch, he built a data department that came to be regarded as one of the most sophisticated in the sport. His systems, his methods and his insights turned a club that had long been a drifting, fading giant into a beacon of innovation.There are two ways to gauge his influence. The simplest is soccer’s default: the weighing of silver and gold. In his time at Liverpool, the club was crowned champion of England — for the first time in 30 years — Europe and the world. It made the Champions League final, the sport’s biggest game, three times in five seasons.But a better measure, perhaps, is the wake he left rather than the trail he blazed. When he joined Liverpool in 2012, the fact that an elite team might employ an actual scientist — he holds a doctorate in polymer physics, but deploys his honorific only as a joke — was seen as either outlandish or absurd.Soccer had long been resistant to outsiders, those who had not established their bona fides within the sport as players or coaches. Insiders regarded academics with particular contempt. The sport still viewed itself as too dynamic, too fluid, too poetic to be reduced to the mundanity of numbers. The idea of a data department was still something of a novelty in itself.Liverpool’s victory parade after it won the Champions League in 2019. Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBy the time Graham left Liverpool earlier this year, however, it was closer to a necessity. It is widely accepted that any club serious about competing in the continent’s major leagues should consult data when signing new players and assessing performances.Almost every major team in Europe has a data department, increasingly including someone with a scientific background. Graham would be forgiven, perhaps, for thinking that the revolution he helped to instigate was complete. As far as he is concerned, though, it has barely begun.GravityThere are, in Graham’s mind, two reasons that soccer is more complex than theoretical physics. The first is that “hard science” — his term — has the benefit of being bound by a set of unassailable rules. The laws of physics are nonnegotiable. Particles behave in predictable ways. That is not the case in soccer. “In physics, you do not have to take into account that gravity works slightly differently in Germany,” he said.The second is that elite sports do not provide the “huge luxury” of controlled experimentation. European soccer does not operate in sterile laboratory conditions. There is no opportunity to formulate, test and modify a hypothesis. “It’s very emotional, very reactive,” Graham said. Fans and executives alike demand instant gratification.The long-term future extends, at most, six weeks or so. To Christmas at the latest. The one thing nobody in soccer has, as a rule, is time.He attributes much of his success at Liverpool to the fact that he did. This was, he said, the key ingredient in the “special sauce” the club developed. “The first thing I said to the owners was that they shouldn’t expect to hear from me for six months,” he said. “That’s how long it would take to build all the structures we needed. Every time there was something more pressing, we were able to hire someone else to do it.”That few — if any — other teams have that privilege limits soccer’s ability to make the most of the great advances made in analytics in recent years. Even Brighton and Brentford, the two English clubs that now function as Liverpool’s heirs at the cutting edge, with their fairy-tale ascensions to the Premier League powered by data, must keep pace with a field evolving at breakneck speed.Brighton and Brentford have used their own data-driven improvements to punch above their weight in the Premier League.Justin Setterfield/Getty Images“If you look at what people are doing outside the sport, people who have the time to try things out, it’s often a lot more advanced,” Graham said. “The tools available, the technology, the data are all a lot better now. If you were to start building a system today, you’d have a much higher baseline. Inside a club, you have to stop developing at a certain level. There’s so much day-to-day work that there’s no time for research.”That is not the only limiting factor. Clubs operate in distinct silos: The work they do on data is largely proprietary. That teams should not share knowledge or disseminate best practices makes perfect sense on a sporting level. But not only is it antithetical on a scientific one, it serves to diminish the scale of data’s potential impact.Teams that did not have the foresight to be early adopters are, Graham estimates, “10 years behind” the likes of Liverpool, Brighton and Brentford today. Those who had the appetite but not the resources are locked out, too. “The teams who could benefit the most from it often can’t afford to do it, or at least do it properly,” he said.It has been almost a year, now, since the 45-year-old informed Liverpool that his role there had reached “a natural end.” Working for the club he had supported as a child was his “dream job,” he said, but he felt as if he had achieved all that he could. He knew that, at least in a professional environment, he would not be able to start from scratch again.When the news of his impending departure got out, he quickly received a flurry of offers from other teams, all hoping he could do for them what he had done for Liverpool. Graham did not find the prospect appealing. The systems he had designed for Liverpool were now the club’s intellectual property; he did not particularly want to build something for someone else. “I felt like I’d done it,” he said. “It would have been crazy to work for just one club again.”Instead, he set his sights on helping soccer as a whole to become just a little bit smarter.Known UnknownsOver the past couple of months, Graham has met with a succession of owners, and prospective owners, of soccer teams. They are — largely, though not exclusively — extremely wealthy Americans, often executives from private equity and venture capital firms, all of them keen to acquire the services of Ludonautics, the firm he established after leaving Liverpool, for the clubs they have bought or the clubs they hope to buy.The appeal is obvious. In a sport chronically lacking in time, Ludonautics has the feel of a shortcut. Graham’s résumé is compelling. So, too, is that of Michael Edwards, the feted, publicity-averse sporting director who worked with him at Liverpool and who is now engaged by the company as a “sporting consultant.”A year after it won the Champions League, Liverpool claimed its first English championship in 30 years.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe pitch, though, is not that they can repeat the success they had at Liverpool; it is that they can expand upon it. Graham no longer has to work according to the strictures and demands of an individual team. He can, instead, use the full gamut of modern technology at his disposal to build something new, something better, and to drive the sport’s next great leap forward.In time, he said, that may even allow him to attain what he regards as the “holy grail” of analytics: assessing the actual significance of a manager. “That’s very complicated,” he said. “It tends to be conflated with who has the best players, the best team. There are a lot of second-order effects. It’s very hard to know exactly how good any manager is, and what sort of impact they have on results.”What has struck him most in his recent meetings is how little soccer still knows about itself. It is not just that complex things — how much of a team’s performance can be attributed to luck, how much it is spending for each point it has acquired — remain a mystery. The simplest building blocks often do, too.Most pressing is that, in many cases, teams do not know what should be regarded as success. Ludonautics has seen sale prospectuses for teams in which the values of the squads are little more than finger-in-the-air estimates. That, Graham said, represents more than just a little sales sleight of hand; it has a tangible and detrimental effect.“In terms of performance, they often do not have a systematic way of knowing who they are and where they are,” he said. “They do not have a sense of the underlying strength of the team. Without that, how do you know where you should be finishing? How do you know if coming fifth is good or bad? And how do you hold people accountable?”As far as he is concerned, that is in the sport’s interest as a whole: The more teams that know the simple things as well as the complex ones, the better the sport becomes. “There’s a quote from John Keats about Isaac Newton using the prism to explain the colors of a rainbow,” Graham said. “But knowing why it happens doesn’t make a rainbow any less beautiful.” More

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    Everton, 777 and the Business of Premier League Soccer

    777 Partners had been scooping up big-name soccer teams for two years when it bid for Everton. Doubts about its finances could kill the deal.The acquisitions came so quickly that it was hard to keep up. An agreement to buy the oldest soccer team in Italy. An investment in one of the most popular teams in Brazil. Stakes in well-known clubs in Belgium and France, Germany and Australia.Each new deal was trumpeted by the Miami-based investment company, 777 Partners, that was hurriedly snapping them up.Then, in September, the investment group revealed its biggest deal yet: an agreement to acquire a controlling stake in Everton F.C., a founding member of the Premier League and one of the oldest soccer clubs in England.Suddenly, everyone in soccer had heard of 777 Partners. Beyond its name, though, little was known about the company. It said it had $10 billion in assets, but was so closely held that verifying that claim was difficult. Lawsuits against the firm raised concerns for potential partners. A string of unpaid bills, some as recent as this month, raised more.Now, in bidding for a place in the Premier League, 777 Partners faces something it had previously avoided: a forensic review of its holdings, its finances and its brash American co-owner, Josh Wander, who in one recent interview said he was “more serious about investing” in soccer than anyone in history.His company’s bid for control of Everton, an acquisition that would eventually require hundreds of millions of dollars in assumed debt and other obligations, is by no means a sure thing. The Premier League, England’s Football Association and an independent British government regulator, the Financial Control Authority, all must approve the proposed deal, a process that is likely to take months.What they discover could have implications not only for the future of Everton, a fallen, money-losing giant, but also for rest of the financially troubled teams in the 777 network.James Garner of Everton, left, and two teammates celebrate a goal. Nigel French/Press Association, via Associated PressThe stakes are just as high for the Premier League, which is trying to prove it can oversee its clubs’ finances amid talk of government regulation, and for an interconnected global soccer economy reliant on the simple premise that teams can and will pay their bills.None of the soccer or public agencies currently assessing 777 Partners would discuss their review or a timetable for its conclusion.Mr. Wander, the co-founder and public face of the company, declined multiple requests to be interviewed for this article, though he published a long letter to fans on Everton’s website on Saturday in which he acknowledged fans had been discomfited by media reports about the company’s businesses. But those reports, he said, were “misleading.”“The truth is far more boring than the fiction,” he wrote.“We are not asset strippers nor speculative investors. We build and hold businesses, and intend to hold the football clubs in our portfolio for a long term,” a spokesman for 777 wrote in an emailed statement. In the letter to fans, Mr. Wander wrote that he would share “player recruitment, data analytics and commercial development resources,” with the other teams in the group.More than a dozen current or former employees, club officials and others who have done business with 777, however, revealed new details and questions about the sources of its financing. The people asked not to be named because of relationships with the company.In interviews, they also shared details about unmet obligations and unpaid bills, and wondered if the company has the resources to manage a global network of clubs carrying hundreds of millions of dollars in debts and obligations.A successful takeover of Everton would bring the number of clubs in 777’s portfolio to eight. The teams in its existing stable are well known: Genoa in Italy, Hertha Berlin in Germany, Vasco da Gama in Brazil. All are different in size and ambition but shared a common theme before attracting the interest of 777: They were all in financial crisis.Mr. Wander, 42, and his co-founder Steve Pasko, a Wall Street veteran two decades his senior, would not have been seen as a typical sports team investors when they started 777 Partners in 2015. At the time, the company’s core investments were related to the world of structured settlements, an opaque industry in which recipients of long-term annuities, typically the result of compensation claims, cash them out for lump sums of immediate cash.In one recent interview, Wander, on the left, said he was “more serious about investing in soccer than anyone in history.”Luca Zennaro/EPA, via ShutterstockThe firm quickly branched out into other sectors, including low-cost airlines and litigation financing, according to Gary Chodes, who served as a board member of a 777 subsidiary until 2017. He said he parted on good terms, but that the firm he left had few profitable businesses. So he noticed when 777 started collecting soccer teams and committing to assume their sizable debts through loans and other upfront payments.“If I was to ask, ‘Is there a little bit of mystery as to how Josh would generate three quarters of a billion dollars to buy a sports team from the businesses he owns in 777?’ — I would say that’s somewhat of a mystery,” he said.In past interviews, Mr. Wander has painted a picture of a sprawling and successful business, one that manages $10 billion in assets, counts 60 subsidiaries across a range of industries: sports, insurance, aviation, media. Many of the company’s financial details are difficult to verify since the business is private and its financial structure, current and former staff members said, is closely controlled by Mr. Wander and Mr. Pasko. Last weekend, for example, it announced the sale of one of its insurance businesses without identifying the buyers or the price.The company relies on loans to operate many of its businesses, according to the current and former employees. One of the biggest lenders to 777 is A-Cap, a private company operating in the insurance and investment business, three people said. A-Cap did not respond to a request for comment. “Not all of our 60 businesses will be profitable at any one time, but the fundamental underlying business performance of the 777 Group is strong,” Mr. Wander wrote in Saturday’s letter to fans, adding the company was not a “typical private equity firm.”Yet as 777 executives have spoken of their ambition and the scale of their operations, some of the businesses they run, including their sports teams, have reported missed payments related to agreed-upon funding schedules and even routine operating expenses.In England, for example, the chairman of the British Basketball League, in which 777 owns a 45 percent share, wrote to its founders on Sept. 6 warning that the league was at risk of bankruptcy unless the firm delivered a late payment of about $1 million. Those funds eventually arrived.In Belgium, according to reporting by the soccer magazine Josimar, the lack of clarity around 777’s finances spooked Belgian soccer’s licensing officials enough that they considered refusing to allow the company to continue operating the 125-year-old club it owns, Standard Liège. Eventually a compromise was found, and the team was granted a license.A successful takeover of Everton would bring the number of clubs in 777’s portfolio to eight, including Vasco da Gama in Brazil. Buda Mendes/Getty ImagesIn Brazil, Vasco da Gama had been anxiously awaiting a scheduled payment of about $23 million due the same week as the basketball league was expecting its funds. Without the money, Vasco has been unable to make outstanding payments to its suppliers and to rival teams owed in past deals for players. When it missed some of the payments, soccer’s governing body prohibited the club from signing new players until its debts were paid.Through its spokesman, 777 said it had already delivered much of the money required in its payment schedule with Vasco. It also said it was ahead of “ahead of schedule” and “beyond our original commitment” to the British Basketball League. But to some outsiders, the repeated issues involving money suggested an exercise in financial plate-spinning rather than the kind of healthy, well-capitalized owner a Premier League team requires.Away from the soccer field, its co-founder, Mr. Wander, built an image of a risk taker with a knack for making money.One former associate, Rhonda Bentzen, recalled how Mr. Wander would request loans from colleagues at a structured settlements business he had set up with the promise of profits in a matter of days. “I did it with him a few times and he absolutely doubled the money every single time,” Ms. Bentzen said. But once, she said, she watched Mr. Wander drop about $5,000 in a Las Vegas slot machine, lose it all in less than a minute and “not bat an eye.”In the early years of his business career, Mr. Wander was shadowed by a cocaine-trafficking charge from his college days at the University of Miami. After he pleaded no contest in 2003, he spent more than a decade on probation. A spokesman for the company said his plea, and the successful completion of his probation, meant he “was not convicted of anything.”Court records reveal other details about Mr. Wander, his company and money. In 2012, the Bellagio casino sued Mr. Wander for failing to pay back a $54,500 cash advance. In March, American Express went to court seeking $324,000.89 that had been charged to a 777 Partners credit card. The spokesman for 777 said both matters were resolved. Court documents show the Bellagio repayment remained outstanding for at least six years.Just last week, a former business partner in 777’s airline business made an allegation of fraud against the company in the Court of Chancery in Delaware. The filing said the firm and a subsidiary, Phoenicia L.L.C., “are part of a web of companies 777 uses to move around money and assets to operate and conceal a sprawling fraudulent enterprise.” A 777 spokesman declined to respond to the accusation, citing a company policy not to comment on litigation.The pattern of late and delayed payments, rather than any lawsuits, raises the biggest doubts about 777’s suitability to run Everton, said Keiron Maguire, a lecturer in the management school at the University of Liverpool and a specialist in soccer finance. “It’s a red flag to a potentially more significant cash-flow issue, or incompetent management,” he said.Everton’s Goodison Park Stadium in Liverpool, England.Jon Super/Associated PressMoney is of paramount concern at Everton at the moment. The club’s current owner, Farhad Moshiri, has spent close to $1 billion on Everton since purchasing the team in 2016, and the club’s immediate financial needs are so acute that 777 has already lent the team more than 20 million pounds, or almost $25 million, just so it can continue to operate.By agreeing to take on its ballooning debts, as well as a Premier League wage bill and a half-finished stadium on the Liverpool waterfront, 777 Partners has essentially committed to injecting hundreds of millions of dollars into the club. Last weekend, they saw the job ahead first hand, taking in an Everton match from seats in the front row of the director’s box.Executives at Vasco da Gama in Brazil were watching. It had not escaped their attention that the $25 million loan that 777 Partners gave Everton last month was similar to an amount that was, at that moment, still owed to Vasco.On Thursday, a month after it was due, part of the payment arrived, with a promise that the balance would be paid on Friday morning. But it was not paid. The holdup, 777 Partners said, was a bank holiday in the United States.The missing $7 million, the company assured Vasco, would be there this week. More

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    Liverpool, V.A.R. and the Problem With Process

    If process and hubris trump getting calls right, the system has broken down.There are very few coherent sentences in what will, in time, doubtless come to be known as the Luis Díaz Tape, a sort of Premier League equivalent to the Zapruder film. The various protagonists communicate in clipped and meaningless phrases, any clarity sacrificed on the altar of self-important brevity.The tape lasts only two minutes, and while it is not a particularly thrilling video — a group of faceless voices discussing procedure while staring at screens, advancing resolutely toward a presaged outcome — it is, by turns, tense and frustrating and never less than compelling.It is best considered, really, as a character drama. The setting is this: Díaz, the Liverpool forward, has just scored to put his team ahead against Tottenham Hotspur. The goal is ruled out, on the field, for offside. A few miles away, in a building at Stockley Park west of London, the Premier League’s Video Assistant Referee studio whirs into action.Darren England, the game’s designated V.A.R., wants to check if the goal should be allowed to stand. He commands that the footage be rewound and paused and decorated with a line. He determines that, no, Díaz had timed his run perfectly. “That’s fine, perfect,” he says to his colleagues in the video room and to Simon Hooper, the on-field official. “Check complete.”It is here that everything unravels. The goal should count, but England seems to have declared that the original call — no goal — is “perfect.” “Well done, boys; good process,” Hooper mutters. Tottenham restarts the game with a free kick. A couple of pregnant seconds pass by. Nobody seems to have noticed the non sequitur. The audience, though, knows.Luis Díaz, hero denied.Peter Cziborra/Action Images, via ReutersAt this point, the hero enters. Mo Abby is not a qualified referee; he is the technological specialist, present to operate the video equipment while the officials issue their expert judgments. “Are you happy with this?” he asks, a hint of nervousness in his voice, as if he knows he is stepping outside his role.Now, it all goes to pieces. The precise nature, the exact scale, of the error is suddenly clear to England and Dan Cook, his assistant. Another outsider, Oli Kohout — the hub operations manager, which is not a title that can be pithily explained — suggests pausing the game and allowing Hooper to correct the mistake.England is the one with the power to make that call. In the inevitable dramatization, it is at this point that the camera will focus intently on his face. His eyes will betray his panic, his fear, his dawning realization of his powerlessness. His voice, though, does not. The game has resumed. “Nothing I can do,” he says, again and again, with surprising conviction, his hubris sealing his fate.It is this that is, in truth, most troubling about the incident at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. The last week has been rife with false equivalences. When the Liverpool manager, Jürgen Klopp, suggested that the most sporting consequence of the mistake would be for the game itself to be replayed, the response was predictable. Should we replay the 1966 World Cup final? Argentina’s defeat of England in 1986? The 2019 Champions League final? That game last year where my team was on the end of a disputed, subjective call?The difference should not need to be spelled out, but since we are here: Plenty of teams have been the victims of errors no less consequential than the one that cost Liverpool last Saturday. In almost all of those cases, though, those decisions were made in good faith. The officials believed they were right. They did not press ahead in the clear, undisputed knowledge that they were wrong.There are plenty of reasons to be object to the existence, or at least the application, of V.A.R. It interrupts the rhythm of games. It diminishes the experience of watching soccer in a stadium, allowing the nature of the action to be determined remotely, by some apparently unaccountable external force. It creates and enforces an expectation of perfection that is impossible to attain and will, therefore, be a source of eternal disappointment.Liverpool’s Jürgen Klopp, offering some thoughts.Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockThe Díaz tape, though, is a perfect distillation of what may be the most significant objection to V.A.R. Darren England’s response, both plaintive and brash — “nothing I can do” — is rooted in a belief that what matters, above all, is the correct implementation of protocol. The rules, the sainted Laws, decree that once a game has restarted, it cannot be stopped. Errors are material reality. The referee’s decision is final, even when it is known to be wrong.This is indicative of what V.A.R. has done to soccer. Recently retired officials have a cloying tendency to lionize the days when they could apply what is known, euphemistically, as “game management.” Generally, this means referring to players by their nicknames, indulging in a false and unreciprocated chumminess, and allowing the more famous participants in a game rather more leeway than their lesser colleagues.Such an approach is, of course, flawed, but it is perhaps preferable to the technologically induced alternative, which is a world in which any form of discretion has been almost entirely removed. Quite how much soccer has shifted to allow itself to be adjudicated from afar is overlooked worryingly frequently.The most obvious example of this is handball, the definition of which seems to change with the seasons. The motivation behind this is not an attempt to hew closer to the spirit of the game, but to make it possible for a decision to be made on a screen.There are others, though. The shifting thresholds for red and yellow cards and the shrinking border between reckless and malicious are both inspired by the need to make an objective decision, one that does not rely on any human allowance for context or intent.This is the atmosphere in which referees now function, one in which they are not there to apply the rules as they see fit, but in which the rules are unyielding and inflexible and do not brook any interpretation. It is a world in which what matters is not whether anything makes any sense, but in which protocol — officious and unapologetic and blind — is king.This search for absolutism has led, ironically, to a sense of greater arbitrariness. That, in the aftermath of the Díaz incident, almost every club could pick out a litany of its own injustices in the recent past was designed to illustrate that Liverpool’s response was somehow excessive or self-pitying. Instead, it highlighted more than anything how fractured fans’ belief in the fair implementation of the Laws of the Game — always portentously capitalized — has become.Nobody is quite sure what the rules are anymore, because they have a tendency to change so often. This week, this is a handball and the referees are clamping down on time-wasting or players who demand yellow cards, and next week they are not.Decisions are imposed without adequate explanation by an officiating body that has issued 14 formal apologies since the start of last season but seems still, for some reason, convinced of its infallibility. The letter of the law is applied rigorously, but the spirit of it has been lost almost entirely. And the feeling that follows is the same as that which can be detected in the Luis Díaz tape: a sense of unmitigated frustration, of wild confusion, of total powerlessness. There is nothing Darren England can do, and in that he is no different from the rest of us.The 2030 World Cup Will Be Held … EverywhereTomas Cuesta/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is to Gianni Infantino’s credit, really, that he resisted the temptation to announce the location of the 2030 World Cup in the style of Oprah Winfrey giving out cars. Spain: You get a World Cup. Portugal: You get a World Cup. Morocco, Uruguay, Argentina and, for reasons that will have to be explained later, Paraguay: You can all have a World Cup, too.The FIFA president will insist that this plan is perfectly sensible. Admirable, even. Hosting the tournament across three continents, Infantino explained on Wednesday, sends a message of “peace, tolerance and inclusion.” It means spreading the financial burden of a 48-team tournament, and by consequence sharing the joy.There is even just a hint of romance. South America has long believed it would be fitting if the World Cup’s centenary edition took place back where it all began: in Uruguay, the host of the 1930 tournament, and Argentina, the losing finalist.It had looked for some time, though, as if that might be impossible. Even with their resources pooled, the South American bidders did not possess the infrastructure — specifically the stadiums — to meet FIFA’s exacting requirements.Infantino’s solution — handing the tournament’s opening three fixtures to Montevideo, Buenos Aires and Asunción and then shifting the rest of the tournament to the Pillars of Hercules — will doubtless be sold as an ingenious compromise. That this plan effectively clears the path for the 2034 tournament to go to Asia, and to Saudi Arabia, is obviously just a coincidence.At this stage, all of this is still just an idea. The plan still has to be ratified by a vote of all 211 FIFA members next year. That it has been suggested at all, though, makes the organization’s ecological attitude abundantly clear. The 2022 World Cup might have been the single most environmentally damaging event ever staged. The 2026 edition is being held across a whole continent. The likelihood is that 2030 will take place across three.That may be the most consequential objection, but there is something less tangible to be mourned here, too. Elite sports may now be a televisual event, dislocated and remote, but it is the connection to a place that lifts a World Cup into something beyond mere content to be consumed.It is a chance for a country to go on hiatus, to revel in itself, to spend a month being swept away. That was true of Russia in 2018 and of Australia and New Zealand this year. It was that sense of proximity, the feel of a global carnival, that illuminated Qatar, far more than the stadiums. Spreading the World Cup around does not diffuse that. It dilutes it. Sure, everyone gets a little piece of it, but that does not have the same effect. Not at all. More

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    FIFA Will Host 2030 World Cup on Three Continents

    Soccer’s biggest event will celebrate its centenary by placing games in South America, Europe and Africa. The decision could pave the way for Saudi Arabia to host in 2034.Soccer’s World Cup will be staged in six countries on three continents in its centenary edition in 2030, an unexpected and complex alteration to its traditional format that was approved on Wednesday in a meeting of FIFA’s governing council.In the unusual arrangement, three South American countries — Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay — each will host a single opening match on home soil and then join the rest of the field for the remainder of the tournament, which will take place in Spain, Portugal and Morocco.The six countries had initially joined forces regionally in separate bids for the hosting rights to the 100th anniversary World Cup, a globe-stopping, monthlong soccer festival that produces billions of dollars in revenue for FIFA every four years.The offer from the South American nations had long been considered an outsider, however, to the three-nation bid from Spain, Portugal and Morocco, which was officially declared the sole bidder for 2030 on Wednesday. But under the new arrangement to recognize the tournament’s centenary, each nation will get to take a turn as a host.“In 2030, the FIFA World Cup will unite three continents and six countries, inviting the entire world to join in the celebration of the beautiful game, the centenary and the FIFA World Cup itself,” FIFA said in a statement after the meeting.“The FIFA Council unanimously agreed that the sole candidacy will be the combined bid of Morocco, Portugal, and Spain, which will host the event in 2030 and qualify automatically.”In sharing the 2030 tournament among three continents, FIFA also significantly narrowed the field of nations eligible to bid for the 2034 event. That opened the door for Saudi Arabia, a nation that has made no secret of wanting to host, to win the rights when that host is selected next year.The first World Cup was held in 1930 in Uruguay, when the championship was a compact, 13-team affair held over two-and-a-half weeks in a single city, the Uruguayan capital, Montevideo. It has since grown to be one of the most valuable and most watched sporting events in the world, a financial juggernaut that FIFA projects will produce record revenues of at least $11 billion for its current four-year cycle, almost double what it earned in the last one.The complexity and size of the World Cup has grown steadily in recent decades, with the next edition — in 2026 — expanded by 12 teams to 48 in total, making it the largest in history. That size, and FIFA’s exacting requirements for bidding countries and stadiums, mean that few nations are now capable of staging the event alone.The 2026 tournament will take place mostly in the United States, but games also will be staged in Mexico and Canada — the first time the tournament will be played in three countries. The complexities of holding that event have yet to be worked out, and officials are still grappling with a wide range of complications, ranging from visa-free travel for spectators to taxation.Speculation that FIFA was preparing to make a surprise announcement was tipped by the South American soccer head Alejandro Dominguez, a FIFA vice president, who took to social media as the meeting was taking place to post a video of himself dancing, suggesting in Spanish “something global is coming for all football fans.”Dominguez then broke the news in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, before FIFA had a chance to make its announcement.“We believed in big,” Dominguez wrote in Spanish. “The 2030 Centennial World Cup begins where it all began.”Taking the tournament to all six countries allows FIFA and its president, Gianni Infantino, to avert some difficult political choices, and could allow Infantino to deliver the next tournament to a reliable ally. In FIFA’s statement announcing the plans for 2030, it said that only teams from Asia and Oceania could bid in 2034 — creating an opportunity for one of his closest backers, Saudi Arabia, to secure a tournament, and a global stage, that it covets.Within an hour of FIFA’s announcement, the Saudi press agency had published a statement from the kingdom’s powerful crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, expressing his country’s interest in hosting in 2034, and the president of the Asian soccer confederation had thrown his support behind the effort, declaring “the entire Asian football family will stand united in support of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s momentous initiative.”FIFA said that bidding for the 2034 World Cup would conclude with a vote at a meeting of its 211 member nations next year, short-circuiting a process that had been expected to conclude in 2027 or 2028. The shorter timeline reduces the time for other nations considering bidding for the tournament to put together coherent plans.Infantino, elected to FIFA’s top position in 2016, will now have the chance to leave his imprint on least two more World Cups, include the 2034 event, which will take place after his final term in office is supposed to have ended.His legacy already includes major changes to the World Cup, with 48 teams, resulting in a change in the competition’s format, as well as clearing the way for more than two countries to co-host. Infantino had wanted to stage the World Cup biennially, but that effort ended amid bitter opposition from European soccer officials as well as top clubs and fans.Fans groups were quick to oppose the plans for the multicontinent 2030 World Cup on Wednesday.“FIFA continues its cycle of destruction against the greatest tournament on earth,” one umbrella group called Football Supporters Europe posted on X. “Horrendous for supporters, disregards the environment and rolls the red carpet out to a host for 2034 with an appalling human rights record. It’s the end of the World Cup as we know it.”The 2030 championship will now start with an opening ceremony at the Estadio Centenario in Uruguay, the site of the 1930 final, and stadiums in Buenos Aires and Asunción, Paraguay.The three nations and their opponents would have to travel to Spain, Portugal or Morocco to continue with the rest of the tournament. More

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    Ajax and the Fragile Business of Champions League Soccer

    The stumbles of a famed Dutch club are a lesson in fallibility of even the best methods, and a reminder of how fast it can all go wrong at the top of the sport.All of the little things had been considered. The design was so painstaking that even the fine details seemed to possess explanatory power. The list of virtues on the wall, the way the light poured into the canteen, the communal spaces laid out according to Montessori principles. Everywhere inside the home of the Dutch soccer club Ajax, the human touches stood out.And yet, in essence, the youth academy known as De Toekomst was, and is, a factory, an industrialized production line geared for maximum efficiency. Its facilities might have been upgraded over the years, but in one guise or another it has been feeding players into Ajax’s team for decades. From there, its graduates have gone on to play for the Netherlands, to represent clubs across Europe. The clue, really, is in the name. De Toekomst means The Future.It is hard to define, accurately, quite what the academy means to Ajax. It is more than just its educational arm and its supply chain. It is not its secret weapon, because — along with its conceptual nephew in Barcelona — it may well be the most celebrated, most fabled youth system in soccer. To label it the club’s heart and soul is more poetic, but less exact, less meaningful. De Toekomst is where players receive the Ajax imprimatur. It is the club’s core, but it is also its edge.Ajax is not the only club to have a celebrated academy, of course. It is not even unique in inculcating its prospects in the tenets of a tightly defined, nonnegotiable philosophy.Ajax is different, now, not so much in how it runs its hothouse of talent but in what happens afterward, where De Toekomst sits in the club’s organizational structure, the role it plays in the business model. For most elite teams, youth systems exist somewhere on the spectrum between optional extra and unexpected bonus.At Ajax, the pipeline of young talent never stops pumping out new stars.Olaf Kraak/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe idea, of course, is that at some point they produce a player or two for the senior side. Quite when that point might come, though, is deemed to be in the lap of the gods. It is a relatively new phenomenon that teams might take into consideration the talent emerging from its academy when planning its transfer strategy.The prospects who do make it through, on the whole, tend to offer a talent that is both ready-made and irresistible. Two or three or more fallow years may pass, and millions of dollars can be invested, waiting for a Phil Foden or a Trent Alexander-Arnold or a Gavi.At Ajax, the paradigm has always been the opposite. The whole club is geared toward the obvious but revolutionary idea that there are always more soccer players. De Toekomst is expected to produce excellent ones: Some years will be more fruitful than others, of course, but whether a trickle or a flood, the flow should always be constant.In return, the club ensures that there is space for them to fill. Ajax does not just graciously stand aside to allow older players to leave for brighter lights or greener pastures or a disappointing spell at Manchester United. It all but pushes them out of the door. Donny Van de Beek must leave so that Ryan Gravenberch can flourish. Gravenberch must go in order to allow Kenneth Taylor his opportunity.In the last five years or so, Ajax seemed to have perfected the formula. No team outside Europe’s self-appointed, self-selecting aristocrats — Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, plus those backed either by a nation state or by the television bonanza on offer in the Premier League — had accommodated itself quite so well to the game’s new economic reality.Ajax produced and replaced, produced and replaced, as if De Toekomst itself was mining a bottomless seam. Every summer, ever greater profits swelled Ajax’s coffers, allowing it to invest further in those areas of its squad that the academy could not replenish.It ran the most expensive salary roll in the Netherlands. It added a string of championships. It started to compete, for the first time in two decades, with Europe’s superpowers. The club began to conceive of itself as a Dutch version of Bayern Munich, its primacy bleeding remorselessly into lasting dominance.And then, all of a sudden, it went wrong. Ajax finished third in the Eredivisie last year, missing out on a place in the Champions League. Its start to this season was even worse: After five games, it had amassed only five points, its worst opening to a campaign in 60 years.Ajax is off to a forgettable start this season.Olaf Kraak/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesLast weekend, Ajax found its nadir: With less than an hour played, the club found itself losing by 3-0 to Feyenoord, its archrival, on home turf. The team’s most demonstrative ultra group, the F Side, began to hurl flares onto the field in protest. The game was abandoned, the stadium cleared.Afterward, some fans tried to force their way back inside. Others were charged by mounted police officers. The final 40 minutes or so of the game were eventually completed on Wednesday. The Johan Cruyff Arena was empty. Ajax conceded a fourth goal almost immediately.Quite where the blame lies for the rapid unspooling of all that Ajax had built is open to conjecture. It may be related to the departures of two of the architects of the modern iteration of the club: Marc Overmars, the former sporting director, who left in disgrace, and Edwin van der Sar, the longstanding chief executive, who did not.Or perhaps the descent started in summer 2022, when the club sanctioned just a little too much change, watching as its coach, Erik Ten Hag, left for Manchester United. He took two of the team’s best players with him, at the end of a transfer window in which a half-dozen others had gone, too.Or maybe even that is one beat too far: It might simply be the case that Ajax erred by replacing Ten Hag with Alfred Schreuder, who did not see out even a season in Amsterdam. A more judicious succession plan may have allowed the club to ride out the transition and at least make it to this season’s Champions League, rather than being forced to sell another tranche of players simply to balance the accounts.The fans, though, made it plain that they had a different villain in mind. Sven Mislintat, the German sporting director brought in to retool the club’s squad — and to modernize its approach to recruitment — became a lightning rod for criticism with remarkable speed. The club, needing a sacrificial lamb after the chaos against Feyenoord, decided he was as good a candidate as any, and fired him.It seems unlikely the problem will be solved in one fell move, of course, but Mislintat always seemed a strange appointment, given just what it is that makes Ajax tick. His approach was focused on signing unheralded young players from overlooked markets — the German second division, Eastern Europe — and giving them a chance to shine.Ajax fired its German sporting director, Sven Mislintat, this week.Phil Nijhuis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn most contexts, that would be admirable. Ajax had enjoyed no little success in attracting players from Brazil (albeit not a market anyone could describe as overlooked) and Mexico in recent years. Mislintat’s mistake was forgetting that the first place Ajax should look for players is closer to home. The club’s future, after all, is always supposed to be on hand. His recruits were seen as barring the way for the next generation of graduates from De Toekomst. At that point, Ajax no longer really felt like Ajax.There are two warnings in all of this, both of them bleak, both of them with resonance far beyond Ajax. The first is that there is no such thing as a formula; no matter how certain a club’s place seems to be, no matter how assured its methods or lionized its approach, nothing is eternal.The second is that soccer is a fragile, perilous business. Building what made the club special, what made it successful, took years. Generations, really. It required not just a grand, overarching vision, but careful stewardship, delicate handling, nurture both loving and cautious. There were times when the journey was anything but smooth. There were undeniable miscalculations along the way. But Ajax had made it through, and built itself a place in a game that many felt had moved out of its reach.And then, in the space of a year — give or take — it has watched it all crumble to the ground. A couple of misjudged appointments, a handful of bad decisions, and all of a sudden it was gone. Ajax lost sight, perhaps, of what it was trying to do, of what made the whole thing work, and that was enough.Now it has to do it all again. It should not take quite so long for the club to chart its course this time, but how long that process will take is anyone’s guess. Inside Ajax, though, they will surely know that everything will begin wherever everything always begins. The priority will be to make sure the production line keeps firing. That is where Ajax will find its tomorrow. The clue really is in the name.CorrespondenceIt is important, I think, for news organizations to listen to their audience, particularly at a time when misinformation — the slightly unnecessary euphemism for “lying” — has such a dissembling effect on public discourse. And the message we have received from our audience, this week, has been loud and clear: You feel this newsletter should be about ice cream.“I am a loyal reader of the newsletter,” an email from John begins, fairly ominously. It sounds as if there is a “but” coming. Oh yes: “But your comments on ice cream have provided me with an impulse to write some correspondence. Having not yet seen your full list, I am struck by your choice of La Carraia in Florence as a top spot: for me, the best gelateria in that neighborhood is Sbrino.”(Kindly, John has also directed me to Cesare, in Reggio Calabria, a place that he in no way controversially has christened “the best” gelateria in Italy.)Ray Judoaitis, on the other hand, is a purist: Ice cream does not need to be ranked, he believes, because ice cream is good in its very essence. “Ranking ice cream shops may be futile, as I have rarely had a bad one. Therefore access and amount become significant. To that end, I recommend Café Maioli in Florence.”And over on whatever Twitter is called now, Georg Baumann wanted to alert me to the existence of Duo — Sicilian Ice Cream in Berlin; he believes it might prove to be worthy of inclusion. This, of course, is the point of the Ice Cream List: It is not, and can never be, definitive. You have to keep eating ice cream in order to make it as comprehensive, and as current, as possible. It is probably best thought of as a quest, except with more salted caramel than normal. More

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    UEFA Opens a Door to Russia’s Return in Soccer, and Faces a Backlash

    The angry reactions to a vote by European soccer’s governing body to partly lift its ban on Russian teams could be a preview of fights in other sports.European soccer’s governing body is facing angry criticism and open defiance from some of its member nations after a vote by its executive committee earlier this week partially lifted a blanket ban on Russian teams that was imposed after last year’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.The proposal to allow Russia’s teams to participate in qualifying for the European men’s and women’s under-17 championships that will be held next year, and for which qualifying has already begun, came as a surprise to many members of the governing body, UEFA. Its approval has reopened what many believed was a bitter but settled debate about solidarity with Ukraine.Ukraine’s national soccer federation quickly objected to the vote, arguing that allowing even Russian youth teams to return to tournaments “tolerates Russia’s aggressive policy.” Several federations, including Sweden, Norway and a group of Baltic nations, noted that the conditions that had led to the initial ban remained unchanged, and they invited punishment by saying that they would refuse to play Russian opponents under any circumstances.The tensions in soccer could be a preview of difficult discussions playing out in dozens of sports over the reintegration of Russia and its athletes into global sports ahead of next year’s Paris Olympics. And the angry reaction to the decision highlighted of the difficulty of balancing official solidarity with Ukraine — and opposition to Russian aggression in Ukraine — against the rights of athletes, even youth players, with little say in the actions of their governments.The differences at times appear irreconcilable. A bloc of Western nations, for example, continues to lobby against efforts by the International Olympic Committee to create conditions in which Russian athletes will be allowed to participate in the Paris Games as neutrals. And sports as diverse as tennis and fencing have already seen the effects of the war provoke confrontations and snubs at their competitions.On Friday, Russian athletes received more positive news when the International Paralympic Committee cleared them to compete at the Games that will take place in Paris after next year’s Summer Olympics. The committee voted to allow them to take part as neutrals, without their national emblems or flag.European soccer officials, for their part, were struggling to understand why their organization’s powerful president, Aleksander Ceferin of Slovenia, had chosen to drag their sport back into the dispute. Mr. Ceferin had repeatedly said that the blanket ban on Russian teams would remain in place “until the war ends,” they were quick to note, and the competitive concerns behind the original ban — that the refusal of teams to play Russia made tournament draws unworkable and potentially unfair — had not changed.The stage for the fight was unusual as well. Youth tournaments usually merit little attention at the leadership meetings of European soccer’s governing body, often consigned to cursory updates at the bottom of a long agenda. But this week was different.The closed-door gathering at a hotel in Cyprus was about 90 minutes old when Mr. Ceferin spoke up and put forward a motion. He asked the committee to partially lift a ban on Russian soccer teams that had been imposed after the invasion of Ukraine so that Russia’s junior teams could return to European competition.The president of European soccer’s governing body, Aleksander Ceferin, defended the vote to allow Russian teams to return to continental competitions.Daniel Cole/Associated PressMr. Ceferin left little doubt about his preference. Arguing that it was not right to punish children, he cited his own experience growing up in Slovenia during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia and referenced a United Nations charter on the rights of children before allowing others in the room to speak. While most of the officials remained silent — typical in such gatherings, where decisions are usually agreed before a formal vote — Poland’s representative, the former star player Zbigniew Boniek, offered passionate opposition.Mr. Boniek took the floor for about five minutes, pointing out that children in Ukraine, too, continued to suffer because of the war. He said that nothing had changed since the decision to bar Russia was made only days after the start of the war in February 2022.A Romanian official in the room, who did not have a vote, also spoke. He reminded the board that Russia’s war was also affecting children in other European countries. The war, he said, was forcing budget cuts on services in Romania to account for increases in military spending.The representatives from England and Wales joined Boniek in abstaining when the vote was taken, but the motion passed anyway. The repercussions began almost immediately.A handful of European soccer federations immediately said they would not play against Russian teams should they be paired against them in qualification tournaments. Sweden, whose representative at UEFA, Karl-Erik Nilsson, voted for the plan to allow Russian teams to return, went further: It said it would bar Russian players from traveling to next year’s women’s under-17 finals in Sweden should the team qualify.It is unclear what motivated UEFA’s decision to open the door to Russia’s return. Mr. Ceferin’s initiative was not widely shared with officials within the organization before the vote, something that typically happens so the organization can game out the implications of a decision, and the practical consequences are significant: The qualifying draws for both the men’s and women’s under-17 championships were made without Russia, and men’s teams have already begun playing matches. Women’s qualifying begins next week.If the decision is not reversed, UEFA now faces the specter of having to take disciplinary action against countries who refuse to play against Russian opponents. Still, its president was unmoved.Ukrainian boys at a damaged stadium in Irpin. Poland’s representative at the UEFA meeting pointed out that children in Ukraine continued to suffer because of the war.Nicole Tung for The New York Times“By banning children from our competitions, we not only fail to recognize and uphold a fundamental right for their holistic development but we directly discriminate against them,” Mr. Ceferin said in comments published by UEFA after the vote. “By providing opportunities to play and compete with their peers from all over Europe, we are investing in what we hope will be a brighter and more capable future generation and a better tomorrow.”Ukraine’s soccer federation said the return of Russian teams to competitions “in the midst of hostilities conducted by the Russian Federation against Ukraine is groundless and such that it tolerates Russia’s aggressive policy.”Its unequivocal refusal to play Russian opposition was matched by a group of European federations that included the Baltic nations, England, Wales, Norway and Denmark, whose president, like his Swedish counterpart, is a close ally of Mr. Ceferin and did not speak out to oppose Russia’s return during the vote in Cyprus.The ban against Russia’s senior teams will continue until the end of the war, Mr. Ceferin said, reiterating a position he made clear following a charity soccer game in Slovenia earlier this month. At the time, Serbian media quoted the UEFA president as saying “Ask Putin” when he was asked when the ban would be lifted.For now, that question is the least of UEFA’s problems. First it has to hurriedly devise a calendar that will allow Russian teams to enter events that have already begun, keep them away from opponents who are refusing to play them, and do it all even as the list of potential opponents could diminish as more national federations consider whether to heed Ukraine’s call to refuse to play. More

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    Artists Play a ‘Drunk vs. Stoned’ Soccer Game

    In Montauk, an end-of-summer art show and sporting event served as a kind of referendum on two altered states.A bunch of artists, along with some friends and family members, said goodbye to summer by playing soccer in Montauk, N.Y., on Sept. 17.It wasn’t the usual game. The participants split into two teams, Drunk and Stoned, and conducted themselves accordingly.The madcap sporting event went along with an exhibition, “Drunk vs. Stoned 3,” in which the works of 70 artists were displayed at a Montauk gallery and the Ranch, a 26-acre horse farm and venue owned by the art dealer Max Levai.The first “Drunk vs. Stoned” was held in 2004 at a gallery in Greenwich Village. The critic Jerry Saltz called it “one of the most diverting group shows of the year,” adding that it was “also one of the daffiest.” There was a sequel the next year, along with a soccer game at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan. Legend has it that the Stoned team lost that contest because it didn’t notice that Drunk had added three players after halftime.Cannabis and hashish were available at a table near the field. A tall water pipe was an attraction for many participants.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesIt’s no secret that painters and poets have long sought inspiration in altered states, and the show notes for the third “Drunk vs. Stoned” event compared and contrasted works seemingly informed by alcohol and cannabis. Viewers were encouraged to ponder just how, as the organizers wrote, “the lowered inhibitions and impulsive decisions of drunk stand in stark contrast to the heightened sensitivity and methodical meandering of stoned.”Artists who took part in the exhibition included: Rachel Harrison and Laura Owens, who have been the subjects of full-scale surveys at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Katherine Bradford, who has works in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum; Jamian Juliano-Villani, whose paintings were featured in last year’s Venice Bienniale; and Nate Lowman, whose works have appeared at the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.On the morning of the game, which was scheduled to start at 2 p.m., Mr. Levai, 35, was not pleased to see a black Hyundai parked in the gravel area near one of the goals. The car spoiled the tableau he had hoped to establish on the property and detracted from the five grand sculptures by Matt Johnson, each strategically placed near the undulating expanse where the game would take place.“A lot of the sculptures here are pink and white, and the barns are white,” Mr. Levai said. “The black Hyundai is a big interruption in this aesthetics trajectory.”A “Drunk vs. Stoned” cozy commemorated the event.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesPlayers pick up their game shirts.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesThe car also didn’t fit in with the recreational zone that would include a massage table and two makeshift bars. Mr. Levai said he would have moved the vehicle himself, but it was locked, and he couldn’t track down the person who had parked it. He repaired to his hilltop residence, where he hit upon a solution: toilet paper.It seemed that Mr. Levai — who struck out on his own after he was ousted from the presidency of the Marlborough Gallery in 2020 — had ordered far too many rolls of industrial-grade Scott, which he was keeping in his pantry. Now he had a use for them.He enlisted two children, the sons of people involved in the exhibition, and together they covered the eyesore, using shaving cream as a binding agent. When the job was done, the Hyundai could almost pass for an art installation.Mr. Levai, the son of the former Marlborough Gallery director Pierre Levai, has not always had a smooth time on Long Island’s East End since becoming the owner of the Ranch in 2020, according to reports in local news outlets and art publications. In July, there was an altercation with a neighbor, the gallerist Adam Lindemann, who owns the adjacent estate, Eothen. Last month, a supervisor for East Hampton, which contains Montauk, said the town could seek an injunction against Mr. Levai over how he is using land that has been set aside as an agricultural preserve. (Mr. Levai had no comment on his dealings with the town or his plans for the Ranch.)The artist Scott Reeder, a curator of earlier “Drunk vs. Stoned” exhibitions in Manhattan, was at the event in Montauk.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesAs game time approached, the artist Scott Reeder, a curator of the first “Drunk vs. Stoned” shows, said that Mr. Levai had mentioned the idea of reviving the concept about a year ago. “I said, ‘If you were going to restage it, do it here,’” Mr. Reeder recalled.As the Stoned players began warming up on the field, several Drunk team members downed shots and beer. Both teams had uniforms made for the occasion, with “Stoned” or “Drunk” printed across the back. The referee, Jose Martos, an art dealer, suggested he was open to bribes, telling players, “One hundred dollars, if you want to win.”In the game’s opening minutes, Stoned was lively and focused. It had youth on its side: The two boys who had helped TP the Hyundai, ages 11 and 12, were in the lineup. (They did not partake of anything on offer at the makeshift bars.)Spectators cheered for Drunk as it scored one of its five goals.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesDrunk was sloppy, but it had a secret weapon in its goalkeeper, Paololuca Barbieri Marchi, a filmmaker and a founder of the art collective Alterazioni Video. Without his shot-blocking prowess, the game might have been a blowout.The 12-year-old player scored the first goal. The artist Borna Sammak, a member of the Drunk team, collapsed to the field, though he was not injured. He spent 10 minutes lounging in the grass, sipping a tequila drink.Esteban Chacon, a surf coach in Costa Rica and Montauk, had the second goal for Stoned. “This is vengeance,” said Mr. Reeder, who had played for the losing Stoned squad in 2005 and was on the same side again.A Drunk player took part in the action, drink in hand.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesThe Drunk team gave a cheer after its victory.Johnny Milano for The New York Times“Come on, Drunk, you got this!” said the Drunk coach, Ellie Rines, who runs 56 Henry, a gallery in New York’s Chinatown. Seconds later, Alex Hubbard, a mixed-media artist, kicked in the team’s first goal.In the first half’s final minutes — with Stoned leading, 4-3 — the players could hear the sounds of Big Karma, a Grateful Dead cover band that had set up about 100 yards from the field. As the musicians went into an extended jam, the Stoned team seemed to fall under a spell.Large sculptures by Matt Johnson were positioned close to the playing field at the Ranch in Montauk.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesAt halftime, a tow truck was rolling in reverse toward the Hyundai. Devin Troy Strother, a painter, confessed that he had left it in the gravel lot. The keys had ended up locked inside after a series of mix-ups, he said.Nearby, Stoned players were making use of a hookah-like bong. The Drunk team was huddling with Coach Rines, who was in pep talk mode. “We’ve got grit!” she said. “I think we can take this!”In the second half, many Stoned players were moving with a kind of contented aimlessness. They seemed to wither when Billy Grant, an artist playing for Drunk, engaged in some aggressive trash-talking. “I thought, ‘Just start screaming, to scare them,’” he said. Drunk won, 5-4.Massages were on offer for participants and spectators.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesThe next day, in a phone interview, Mr. Levai offered the opinion that the Grateful Dead cover band was a factor in the outcome. “Some people thought it would be an advantage for the Stoned team,” he said, “but my feeling was that it might have ended up being a distraction.” More

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    The Stolen Glory of Spain’s World Cup Champions

    Players extracted important changes in a bitter battle with their country’s soccer federation. But doing so robbed them of a moment they can’t get back.Wordlessly, their eyes fixed straight ahead, Spain’s players filed in to the Alameda Hotel not far from Madrid’s airport. It had been a month, almost to the day, since they won the World Cup. It should have been a joyful reunion, a welcome and gleeful chance for the women to revel in the greatest glory of their careers. Instead, they looked as if they were heading into battle.In a way, of course, they were. Many of Spain’s players have been locked in open conflict with the country’s soccer federation — its employer, in effect — for more than a year. The disagreement expanded to envelop almost all of them pretty much from the moment the whistle blew to end the World Cup final.Over the last week or so, all of their efforts have — finally — borne fruit. The players have secured something that looks a lot like victory; in the war, at least, even if the peace still has to be won. Concessions have been made, commitments assured, and heads are starting to roll. Three major figures have fallen. More will follow in time.This is what the players have wanted all along. The original protest, the one last year that led 15 members of the squad to temporarily refuse to play for the national team, was rooted in a desire to force the federation to change. The team wanted better facilities, a proper support staff, a professionalized environment, a coach who did not track their every move.Alexia Putellas, center, and her teammates face Sweden on Friday in their first game since the World Cup final.Biel Alino/EPA, via ShutterstockTo persuade some of the rebels to return for the World Cup, the federation had made some accommodations. The team traveled to Australia and New Zealand with a nutritionist and a psychologist. The players were consulted on where they would stay and where they would train. Each squad member was given an allowance that permitted family and friends to join them. An uneasy truce held long enough for Spain to conquer the world.Quite how little had changed, though, became clear even before the players had lifted the trophy. Luis Rubiales, the federation’s president, kissed the forward Jenni Hermoso forcefully on the lips as they celebrated on the podium. It had been consensual, he insisted afterward. When Hermoso made perfectly clear that had not been the case, Rubiales doubled down rather than apologize.The federation did not so much as back him as follow him down the rabbit hole. At one point it adopted the posture that it was prepared to pull out of European competition — its women’s teams, its men’s teams, its club sides — entirely if anyone dared to try to remove Rubiales from his post. His mother locked herself in a church. Hermoso’s reputation was impugned; she was accused of lying. This was not a federation that appeared dedicated to change.It was more than the players could tolerate. Dozens of them released a statement declaring that they would not represent their country while Rubiales remained in place. It became increasingly clear that the coach, Jorge Vilda, was in an untenable position, too. This time, there would be no half-measures, no awkward cease-fire.Eventually, both did go — Rubiales, in particular, through gritted teeth — but still the federation found a way to undermine the prospect of any good will.Spain’s new coach, Montse Tomé, was an assistant to her fired predecessor, Jorge Vilda.Alberto Saiz/Associated PressVilda was replaced by one of his assistants, Montse Tomé, hardly a break with the old regime. When 39 players announced that there had still not been enough meaningful, structural change to persuade them to return to the fold, she called them to camp anyway. If they ignored the summons, they players were threatened, they could be fined and banned even from club competition. That was how they arrived, jaws clenched and against their wishes, at the Alameda Hotel.What happened next is testament not only to their perseverance but to the validity of their cause. In a meeting brokered by the Spanish government, the players finally forced the federation to bend to their will. They requested the departure of three more senior staff members, petitioned for stronger safeguarding measures, demanded changes that should prevent a repeat of all they have been through.They won. It was not an easy victory — the meeting, at a hotel a little south of Valencia, reportedly lasted seven hours, and drew to a close only at 5 a.m. — but it was a victory nonetheless.And yet this is not a triumph for the underdog forces of all that is right and virtuous over their uncaring oppressors. Or, more accurately, that is not how it feels. What Spain’s players have been through over the last year, and particularly in the last month, is too outrageous to be erased by the silhouette of an uplifting outcome. The aftertaste is too strong, and too bitter.Perhaps, in time, they will come to regard the past few weeks as a sacrifice worth making. If the federation follows through on the promises it has made to ensure subsequent generations do not have to fight the same battles, to endure the same indignities, then perhaps the Spanish women who stood for what they believed in will have a legacy cast in both concrete and gold.“We hope that this can be a turning point,” defender Irene Paredes said this week, “where women can raise their voice and say if something has happened.”Björn Larsson Rosvall/TT News Agency, via Associated PressMore potent even than outrage, though, is sadness. Spain’s players had worked for years to win the World Cup. That is true of all athletes, of course, but it is particularly true of women’s soccer players, so consistently overlooked, so reliably underfunded, so frequently deprived of things their men’s counterparts would regard as basic necessities.That Spain’s players achieved their goal — that they reached the apex of any player’s career, delivering to their country the greatest prize imaginable with such verve and panache and dazzling talent — should have been an unyielding source of pride and contentment and joy. The afterglow should have shimmered for years.Thanks to Rubiales and to Vilda and to the rest of the federation power brokers, the ones who refused to listen until the very last moment, the players have been denied all of that. Their World Cup victory is not tarnished — that would be the wrong word — but their memories of it will be, their glory always carrying with it an undercurrent of anguish.That was clear as they trooped into the Hotel Alameda, their faces stern and their shoulders slumped, forced into battle once more. This should have been a moment to relish, the world champions together again. It seemed, instead, one of pure dread. And no matter what happens now, they will never have it back.What’s Entertainment?There is, as there always has been, an existential tension within soccer — in all sports — that it does not especially want to confront. It relates to the purpose of the endeavor. Is it, primarily, a form of entertainment? Or is that more accurately depicted as a byproduct of the activity? Is its actual aim to establish which team is better and which worse, and the fact that people seem to find it compelling just a happy accident?Perhaps it is best framed in less theoretical terms. This season, the all-knowing, all-seeing referees of the Premier League have decided that there is no greater threat to the well-being of the most popular leisure pastime the world has ever known than time-wasting.This is, in part, because they have been instructed to eradicate it: The game’s rule-making body has passed down an edict that time-wasting — dawdling over set pieces, pretending to be injured, strolling off the field after being substituted as if you don’t have a care in the world — is no longer to be tolerated.Are you not entertained?Scott Heppell/ReutersBut it is also the product of the Premier League’s own consultation with “fan groups,” which the league said had revealed the diminishing amount of time taken up with the actual playing of soccer has become something of an issue. “We are seeing a lowering number of effective playing time minutes to a point where people are concerned about that,” Howard Webb, the man in charge of the referees, said earlier this season.And so, this season, referees have shown a blizzard of yellow cards to players deemed guilty of time-wasting. They have even, according to Paul Heckingbottom, the Sheffield United manager, taken to hurrying along goalkeepers they determine to be contemplating the nature of their goal kicks just a little too deeply.This is not a neutral act. The referees have in effect decided that players are entertainers, and therefore have a duty to provide as much entertainment as possible, as if a ticket or a television subscription is a form of covenant with the teams themselves. Not being sufficiently entertaining has now been turned into an offense.The first problem, of course, is that “entertainment” is a subjective judgment. Who gets to decide what is good to watch? Is there not pleasure in the slow burn, in the grind to victory? Is breathlessly, relentlessly fast soccer the only good soccer? Isn’t the whole point that the sport is entertaining because it can take so many forms?And the second problem is where this ends. Are certain styles of play to be outlawed because they are deemed insufficiently aesthetically pleasing? Should we ban players from running the ball into the corner in the dying minutes of a game their team is winning? Such a measure would seem ludicrous, excessive. But the logic, the strict excision of anything that might compromise the show, is exactly the same.CorrespondenceSoccer’s true colors.Maik Dobiey for The New York TimesSeeing as this newsletter, more than anything, is a public service, it seems only right to help out Ilan Kolkowitz. “My partner and I are considering a wide variety of places to go on an upcoming vacation in Europe, and I’d be really interested in catching a soccer match somewhere,” he wrote.“I was wondering if you had recommendations for your favorite places to go? In your recent ‘European Nights’ podcast, you referenced your running ice cream list, and I am certainly open to any factors that may contribute to the overall experience.”If we’re going on the Ice Cream List — capitalization deliberate; it has taken many years of research to construct — then the top choices should be Florence or Lisbon: La Carraia (No. 2) for the former, and Nannarelli (No. 6) for the latter. Both have excellent soccer options, too, whether you see Fiorentina, Benfica or Sporting.Purely on game experience, I would probably have to plump for Napoli, Marseille (try to go when they’re winning) or Rotterdam. If food is the priority, then it’s hard to see past San Sebastián, home to Real Sociedad and as many pintxos as you can eat. Go just up the coast to St. Jean de Luz, in France, and you can get a No. 9-ranked salted caramel, too. More