More stories

  • in

    N.F.L. Officially Adds 17th Regular Season Game

    The measure passed by team owners Tuesday is the first expansion of the N.F.L.’s regular season schedule since 1978 and will force the league to push the Super Bowl back one week.The N.F.L. formally agreed to add a 17th regular season game on Tuesday, the first expansion of the league’s schedule since 1978.To make room for the extra game, the league’s owners removed one preseason game, leaving three for each team. The upcoming regular season will begin on Thursday, Sept. 9 and end one week later than usual, on Sunday, Jan. 9, 2022. Super Bowl LVI, which will be played in Inglewood, Calif., will also move back one week, to Sunday, Feb. 13, 2022.Teams will continue to have only one bye week during the season.Team owners approved the expansion at an annual meeting held virtually, but the new calendar structure had been all but guaranteed to move forward after the league announced on March 18 that it had reached a series of long-term distribution deals with CBS, Fox and other media companies. The current collective bargaining agreement, reached in March 2020, gave team owners the option to add an extra regular season game if the league signed at least one new media deal.With the addition of a 17th regular season game on top of the two extra playoff games the league added last season, the N.F.L. negotiated substantially higher rates for its media rights. The new deals, which total more than $100 billion, nearly double the amount of the expiring contracts.“One of the benefits of each team playing 17 regular-season games is the ability for us to continue to grow our game around the world,” N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement.During negotiations on the labor contract last year, many prominent players, including Richard Sherman and Aaron Rodgers, opposed adding a 17th regular season game. The owners ultimately won over reluctant union members, who approved the agreement by just 60 votes, with players getting a bump in their share of the N.F.L.’s revenue, up to 48.5 percent from 47 under the old deal.Some players remain opposed to a longer season. Denver Broncos safety Kareem Jackson called the additional game “complete BS” in a post on Twitter. New Orleans Saints running back Alvin Kamara used spicier language to convey his displeasure, before tempering his reaction by writing, “17 games still dumb,” on the app.Goodell said in a conference call with reporters that players would still play a total of 20 preseason and regular season games. Injury rates, he said, are higher during preseason games, so eliminating one could lead to fewer injuries. Most established players, though, play only sparingly during the preseason, when coaches prefer to evaluate free agents and rookies as they vie for roster spots.On Tuesday, the owners also approved a rule that would require all 32 teams to play an overseas game at least once every eight years. This will allow the league to schedule up to four neutral-site games each year outside the United States starting in 2022. Teams like the Green Bay Packers have been reluctant to play internationally because they did not want to give up the revenue from a home game and because of the stress of additional travel. In recent years, some franchises have been willing to play games in London and in Mexico City in exchange for the right to host a Super Bowl. The new rule would end that trade-off.As the league looks to grow the game’s international footprint, N.F.L. executives said it may also return to playing games in Canada, as well as in South America and elsewhere in Europe, including Germany. Chris Halpin, the N.F.L.’s chief strategy and growth officer, said finding a Canadian stadium that meets the league’s specifications for hosting a game remains an issue.The 17-game regular season will give half of the N.F.L.’s teams an extra home game each season. For simplicity’s sake, the 17th game will be hosted by all teams from one conference on a rotating basis. In 2021, every A.F.C. team will host nine regular season games, while N.F.C. teams will host eight. In 2022, N.F.C. teams will get the ninth home game.As usual, teams will play home and away against their three divisional rivals for a total of six games. Interdivisional games within the same conference will continue on a rotating, three-year cycle, interconference games, on a four-year cycle. Remaining games will be determined based on the prior year’s standings.The newly added 17th game will be between interconference teams based on the prior year’s standings. A first-place team from one division will face a first-place team from a division in the opposing conference that it had not been scheduled to play based on the usual scheduling rotations.That will lead to some intriguing interconference games in 2021. The Green Bay Packers, for instance, winners of the NF.C. North last season, will travel to Kansas City to play the Chiefs, who won the A.F.C. West. The Seattle Seahawks, winners of the N.F.C. West, will play the Steelers in Pittsburgh, while the Super Bowl champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers will play the Colts in Indianapolis.The N.F.L. will announce the dates and times of all these games in the coming weeks. More

  • in

    The Champions League Is Changing. Here’s How It Will Work.

    European soccer’s premier club competition, the Champions League, is remaking itself. After more than a generation in its current form, the Champions League is about to become an actual league for the first time. Organizers say the changes will produce better matchups, fewer meaningless games, and more drama. Critics say it’s about what these kinds […] More

  • in

    Howard Schnellenberger, College Coach Who Built Winners, Dies at 87

    After assembling the formidable offense for the unbeaten 1972 Miami Dolphins, he breathed new life into football programs at two universities.Howard Schnellenberger, who built the offense for the 1972 Miami Dolphins’ unbeaten Super Bowl champions, then revived downtrodden football programs as head coach at the Universities of Miami and Louisville, died on Saturday. He was 87.His death was announced by Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, whose football program he had created. The university did not say where he died or give the cause.Brash and supremely confident and a distinctive figure on the sidelines, usually wearing a sports jacket and tie and sporting a bushy mustache, Schnellenberger was eager to defy the odds.And he was very much the taskmaster.“Football is the last place, outside of the military, where we have an opportunity to develop the proposition that the team is more important than the individual,” he told Sports Illustrated after putting his 1995 Oklahoma Sooners — the third of four college teams he coached — through a grueling spring workout.Schnellenberger was the offensive coordinator under Coach Don Shula for the 17-0 Dolphins of 1972, assembling a unit featuring Bob Griese and Earl Morrall at quarterback, Larry Csonka at fullback, Mercury Morris at running back and Paul Warfield at wide receiver.He embarked on his collegiate head-coaching career in January 1979, when the Miami Hurricanes hired him to take over a football program that was in disarray. Two weeks earlier, Lou Saban, the latest of several head coaches Miami had gone through in the 1970s, had suddenly departed for Army.Schnellenberger watching his Florida Atlantic University team run drills in 2008. He coached Florida Atlantic to a bowl game in his fourth season there.J. Pat Carter/Associated PressIn his five seasons with the Hurricanes, Schnellenberger focused on recruiting players from Florida high schools, proclaiming that “the State of Miami,” delineated by an imaginary line that ran from Tampa eastward, would be the northern boundary of his prime recruiting territory. And he installed professional-type offensive and defensive schemes.The rebuilding program reached its pinnacle when quarterback Bernie Kosar (who was from Ohio) led the Hurricanes to an 11-1 record and a No. 1 ranking for the 1983 season, capped by a 31-30 victory over the previously undefeated Nebraska in the Orange Bowl.After posting a 41-16 record at Miami, Schnellenberger left in 1984 for a prospective head-coaching post in the short-lived United States Football League. But that deal collapsed, and in 1985 he returned to Louisville, where he had grown up, to coach the Cardinals.He said he was unfazed by the challenge of reviving a football program that had long been in the shadow of the school’s basketball squads.“We’re on a collision course with the national championship,” he said at his introductory news conference. “The only variable is time.”He coached Louisville to a pair of bowl victories, most notably a 34-7 rout of Alabama in the 1991 New Year’s Day Fiesta Bowl, the climax of a 10-1-1 season.Schnellenberger became the head coach at Oklahoma in 1995. But the Sooners went only 5-5-1, and he resigned.He retired after that, but Florida Atlantic University hired him in 1998 to raise funds for the creation of a football program. He began recruiting players as the head coach a year later, and his first team took the field in 2001, in Division 1-AA. Florida Atlantic transitioned to the higher Division 1-A in 2004 and won the 2007 New Orleans Bowl and the 2008 Motor City Bowl at that level.Howard Leslie Schnellenberger was born on March 16, 1934, in Saint Meinrad, Ind. He was of German-American descent. His father was a truck driver, and his mother worked in a munitions plant during World War II. He played for Kentucky under Bear Bryant and Blanton Collier, as an end, and was named a first-team All-American by The Associated Press in 1955. He was an assistant coach under Collier at Kentucky in 1959 and 1960 and under Bryant at Alabama from 1961 through 1965. Schnellenberger’s wife, Beverlee, bronzed a pair of shoes that she said he had worn during every game he coached from 1959 to 1972.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesSchnellenberger recruited Joe Namath and Ken Stabler for the Crimson Tide. When he went to Beaver Falls, Pa., to induce Namath to play for Bryant, he once told The Sun Sentinel of South Florida, “a three-day recruiting trip turned into 10 days,” since Namath and his family took some persuading.“I was out of money and had to buy him a plane ticket to return with me,” he recalled. “I wrote a bad check to Eastern Airlines to get both of us to Alabama.”When Stabler asked Schnellenberger to bring a small gift for his mother when he was wooing Stabler for Bryant, Schnellenberger recalled, “I took his mom a fifth of bourbon.”Schnellenberger was an offensive coach on Bryant’s national championship Alabama teams of 1961, ’64 and ’65. He became the receivers coach for George Allen’s Los Angeles Rams in 1966, then was hired by Shula as the Dolphins’ offensive coordinator in 1970.Coming off the Dolphins’ unbeaten season, he was named the Baltimore Colts’ head coach in 1973. But after the Colts went 4-10 and then got off to an 0-3 start the next season, he was fired. He was the Dolphins’ offensive coordinator again from 1975 to 1978.Schnellenberger with the Peach Bowl trophy after Miami beat Virginia Tech in 1981.Joe Sebo/Associated PressSchnellenberger had a career record of 158-151-3 as a collegiate head coach. He was 6-0 in bowl games, coaching Miami, Louisville and Florida Atlantic to two bowl triumphs apiece. He retired a second and final time after Florida Atlantic’s 2011 season.He is survived by his wife, Beverlee; his sons Stuart and Timothy; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. His son Stephen died in 2008.Miami and Florida Atlantic met for the first time in August 2013. The Hurricanes won, 34-6, with Schnellenberger and players from his 1983 Miami team on hand to mark the 30th anniversary of their national championship season. Schnellenberger was both a winner and a loser at that 2013 matchup: He was the honorary captain for both teams. More

  • in

    The Gambling Company That Had the Best Pandemic Ever

    LONDON — At no point during the soccer game between Stoke City and visiting Watford did anyone say, “Tonight’s match is brought to you by bet365,” one of the world’s largest online gambling companies. No one needed to. It was pretty obvious.The game took place at bet365 Stadium, where “bet365” was stenciled across a huge swath of red seats, which were empty because of the pandemic. LED banner ads with the green-and-yellow bet365 logo blinked and rolled around the perimeter of the field throughout play. And every Stoke player had bet365’s insignia emblazoned on the front of his shirt. The company doesn’t just sponsor the team. The company owns it.“We’ve been stuttering a bit,” Peter Coates, who is chairman of both bet365 and Stoke City, said in a phone interview a few hours before the January game. “We need a win tonight.”He didn’t get one. Watford prevailed, 2-1, after more than 90 minutes of sporadically exciting play.Bet365 undoubtedly had a much better night.Bet365, in Stoke-on-Trent, England, thrives in a nation that loosely regulates online gambling.Nathan Stirk/Getty ImagesThe company is private and doesn’t report quarterly earnings. But publicly traded rivals have announced results, and they strongly suggest that gambling operators are one of the big winners in the pandemic economy. The gaming giant Flutter Entertainment announced in November that sports betting revenue rose more than 30 percent last summer from the previous summer. The average daily number of gamblers at all of the company’s chains rose 40 percent.In soccer-crazed England, gambling is one of the few legally available thrills for a nation that is bored, isolated and stuck at home. It’s the British answer to day trading in the U.S. stock market, which has boomed throughout the pandemic and is expected to rise again as a new round of stimulus checks arrives. With an efficiency that seems both grim and arbitrary, Covid-19 has struck down millions but left others unscathed and, in some cases, richer than ever.The latter group includes executives at a select group of companies in a variety of fields including e-commerce, like Amazon, and entertainment, like Netflix. Gambling has a singular distinction in this rarefied class. Much of its gains come directly from people in financial duress — and much of that duress has been caused by gambling.The Gordon Moody Association, a British charity offering residential treatment for gambling addicts, said over the summer that the number of calls from gamblers who said they felt suicidal had recently quadrupled. A House of Lords report found last year that 60 percent of the industry’s profits came from 5 percent of its customers — namely problem gamblers, or gamblers at risk of developing a problem.People like Lewis, a 25-year-old from Hampshire who requested anonymity because few people know about a compulsion he is still struggling to control. He won about $77,000 at age 16 with an online betting account and chased the high of that original hit for years. Since 2016, he said, he has toggled between total abstinence and flat-out mania.To him, bet365 is the most insidious of the many online gambling sites, because it outpaces the rest at catering to the always-on impulse of people who want to wager, day and night, on games happening anywhere in the world.“A gambler is desperate to distract himself, and during lockdown there was nothing to distract me,” he said. “Can’t meet your mates at a pub, can’t go out for a meal. You’re at home every waking second. You end up in a vicious cycle.”A character out of John le CarréDenise Coates, who runs bet365, earned more than $420 million in 2019, the company reported.Felix Clay/EyevineThe online gambling industry has long operated under exceptionally lenient rules in Britain, many of them codified in 2005, with a set of regulations that was largely designed for retail betting shops. It has been described as an analog law for a digital age, and it’s overseen by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, also known as “the Ministry of Fun.”By all accounts, no company has profited more under this light-handed regime than bet365. Which is why it is spectacularly profitable.In 2019, the company stated in an annual filing that Mr. Coates’s daughter, Denise Coates, the co-chief executive, had earned more than $420 million, making her the highest-paid executive in the country and the “highest-paid woman in the world,” according to The Guardian. That was many times more than the chief executives of publicly traded competitors and more than 12,000 times the average salary in Stoke-on-Trent, the struggling city, 140 miles north of London, where bet365 is based.The company floundered last year during the months when soccer games were suspended in Britain, Mr. Coates said. Bet365 leaned on its casino offerings and found some soccer games in Belarus and Australia. Revenue snapped back quickly when play resumed.Ms. Coates, 53, rarely gives interviews and did not respond to messages for this article. She has been described as intensely private, and even to some longtime rivals — the sort of people she might run into at conventions or associations — she remains elusive.“She’s like a character out of a John le Carré novel, a person you know exists but whom you never meet,” said Ralph Topping, a former chief executive of William Hill, one of the country’s largest betting companies. “When I was at William Hill, we would have liked to have had her input on matters important to the industry. I’ve never had a conversation with her.”Ms. Coates’s journey to the pinnacle of online gambling started after she graduated with an honors degree in econometrics from the University of Sheffield and joined her father’s catering business as an accountant. Mr. Coates then owned a few dozen retail gambling shops, essentially a side business at the time.“She said, ‘Dad, that’s the most boring thing I’ve ever done,’” Mr. Coates recalled. “She said, ‘I want to run those shops for you,’ and she was brilliant at it.”She spruced up the stores and added 15 more. In 2000, she bought the domain name bet365 from eBay.“She’s very driven, always likes to be better than anyone else,” Mr. Coates said. “Very organized, good with people. She turned out to be a bit of a star.”Offering wagers all game longA Stoke City match against Leicester at bet365 Stadium. “In-play betting” lets bettors place wagers throughout a game.Getty ImagesThe world that her father credits Ms. Coates with creating is reflected in a television ad for bet365 that ran before the Stoke-Watford game. It featured the actor turned pitchman Ray Winstone, who sat in the back of a luxury sedan, dressed in a dark suit, idling in traffic and exuding ease and control.“At bet365 we’re always innovating and creating,” he said in a Cockney accent, staring at the camera. Cellphone in hand, apparently ready to place some wagers, he ticked through a list of those innovations, including something called “in-play betting.”In-play betting allows customers to wager throughout a sporting event, on minutiae that has little bearing on the outcome. How many corner kicks will there be in the first half of a soccer game? How many players will be ejected? What will happen first during a 10-minute increment — a throw-in, a free kick, a goal kick, something else? When those minutes expire, the site takes wagers on the next 10.“It’s very much like being in a casino,” said Jake Thomas, a former gambling industry executive who chaperoned a reporter, over the phone, through the website during the Stoke-Watford game. “Why wait 90 minutes to find out if your team is going to win? Why not get a little buzz betting on the next corner kick?”As Mr. Thomas spoke, and the minutes ticked by, the odds of dozens of wagers were constantly repriced. A bet that Stoke would score in the first 30 minutes paid 9 to 1 at just over 25 minutes into the game. A moment later, as that outcome appeared fractionally less likely, the same bet paid 19 to 2.The company has said it takes action on 100,000 events throughout the year, on sports and races around the world — greyhounds in New Zealand, women’s table tennis in Ukraine, golf in Dubai. There’s even a section on politics. (George Clooney is currently 100 to 1 to win the American presidency in 2024.)If no live events appeal, virtual events beckon. These are video-generated simulations of tennis matches; games of football, soccer, basketball and cricket; and on and on. One afternoon, bicycle races in a virtual velodrome were running every three minutes, each lasting about a minute.James Grimes, the founder of an antigambling group, and an ad for the gambling app Paddy Power in Manchester.Andy Haslam for The New York TimesOther gambling operators now offer just about everything found on bet365’s site. But rivals say Ms. Coates and her team led the way.“We were always looking at them to see what they were doing and how they were doing it,” said Peter Nolan, a former group director at William Hill. “And to the extent we could, we competed with them.”Because of that competition, fans 40 and younger grew up inundated with gambling ads. The subtext, and sometimes the text, was that soccer and betting don’t merely go together — they enhance each other.“I trusted the messages that football sent me,” said James Grimes, who lost $140,000, two jobs and all of his friends before he quit gambling and founded the Big Step, an antigambling group. “A slogan that I heard a lot as a kid” — from Sky Bet, an online gambling company — “was ‘It matters more when there’s money on it.’ And I believed that.”A tight-lipped companyPeter Coates, left, the chairman of bet365, at a soccer match in Stoke-on-Trent, where the company is the largest single employer.Nick Potts/PA Images, via Getty ImagesStoke-on-Trent is well known for ceramics — it’s where the reality fare “The Great Pottery Showdown” is filmed — but today, with a payroll of more than 4,000, it’s bet365 and not Wedgewood that is the city’s largest single employer. Few employees, even those who have been around for years, have met Ms. Coates. Her reticence is embodied in the company’s approach to the news media. It doesn’t have a press office, and no one responded to messages left with customer service representatives, even to say, “No comment.”Instead, after giving an impromptu phone interview, Peter Coates called to say he would forward any questions to relevant people at bet365. He added, good-naturedly, that speaking to this reporter had landed him in “some trouble.”The origins of bet365 start with Mr. Coates, a Stoke-on-Trent native and son of a coal miner. With money he had earned through a business selling food at stadiums across the country, he bought three local betting shops, essentially as a favor to the brother of an employee. The chain would eventually expand to 35 shops, stretching from the West Midlands to Liverpool.Two decades ago, after getting online at Ms. Coates’s urging, the company operated out of a portable cabin near one of the betting shops. It was a more complicated and expensive proposition than the family had initially realized.“We had to find about 20 million pounds,” Mr. Coates said. “In the early days, we lost a lot of money. They were worrying times, but I felt we were accumulating a customer base, and we eventually passed the critical mass you need.”The last time the company filed a financial report, in December 2019, it stated that operating profit had jumped 15 percent from the previous year, to roughly $1 billion. This capped an immensely lucrative period for Ms. Coates. Forbes recently estimated her net worth at $6.4 billion. For the second year in a row, the Coates family is the United Kingdom’s biggest taxpayer, according to the annual Sunday Times Tax List, published in late January. The family paid the equivalent of $785 million into state coffers last year. Ms. Coates has also set up the Denise Coates Foundation, which focuses on health care and research and charity and in its most recent filing reported $14 million in giving.More quietly, she has been buying hundreds of acres in nearby Cheshire and building what The Daily Mail called a $125 million “glass palace,” along with stables, a tennis court and a 75,000-square-foot artificial lake.In Stoke, Ms. Coates is both acclaimed and largely invisible. She can be counted on to chip in money for civic projects, as she did when the town needed additional funds to erect a statue for Arnold Bennett, a local author who died 90 years ago. Just don’t expect her to show up at the unveiling.“A lot of people who have made money in Stoke leave,” said Fred Hughes, 80, a retired police officer who attended the Bennett statue ceremony. “This is quite an impoverished area, and it’s always looking for outside investment. The Coates family is the exception.”Winners not always welcomeMark Palios, owner of the Tranmere Rovers in Birkenhead, has spoken out against gambling operators as a malign force in the game.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesThe success of bet365 stems in large part from the way it pampers bettors. It offers, for instance, refunds to anyone who bets on a soccer team to win in a game that ends without any goals. (Nil-nil ties enrage bettors.) And in certain circumstances, the company will pay out winners before a game is over.This is not exactly altruism.“The logic from their point of view is that if you’ve got your winnings before the game is over, you can use that money to bet again,” said Warwick Bartlett of Global Betting & Gaming Consultants.The company is far less hospitable to another type of customer: consistent winners. Brian Chappell said he had a falling out with bet365 a few years ago after earning about $4,800 over a summer of gambling on horses. A retired health care researcher, Mr. Chappell said he simply studied the sport and understood the complexities of hedging well enough to come out ahead on weekly races.“Then one Saturday I went to place a bet and the most I could wager was £1.60,” or about $2.20, he said. “They don’t tell you it’s going to happen — there’s no interaction at all. Just one day, your bet is restricted.”After learning that others had encountered similar obstacles, at bet365 and other operators, Mr. Chappell founded Justice for Punters — “punter” is slang for bettor — to fight back.“I call it the ‘ban or bankrupt’ strategy,” he said, describing what he calls an “amazing” business model: “If you’re any good, you get banned. If you’re useless, you get a V.I.P. manager who will keep you gambling.”Antigambling activists contend that such stratagems are just part of the problem, especially during the pandemic.“The lockdowns have accelerated the growth of online gambling and increased the use of more addictive gambling products,” said Matt Zarb-Cousin, who runs Clean Up Gambling, a nonprofit. “This means an entire generation is now far more vulnerable to gambling addiction.”Without new regulations, separating soccer and gambling will never happen, Mr. Zarb-Cousin and others say, because the two are now essentially fused. About 70 percent of teams in the top two English leagues earn millions by wearing betting company logos on their uniforms. Even the few soccer team owners who refuse gambling money, on principle, end up taking it just by competing.Mark Palios, owner of the Tranmere Rovers in Birkenhead has spoken out against gambling operators as a malign force in the game. He was appalled two seasons ago when bet365 wound up with broadcasting rights to some games. The Football Association, which markets those rights, shares revenue with teams in the league.“And bet365 decided that if you wanted to watch games you needed to go to the company’s website and sign up for an account,” Mr. Palios said. “The company was nakedly leveraging its market power to compel people to gamble. I thought that was obscene.” More

  • in

    Jesse Lingard and Tricks of the Light

    Be patient, West Ham’s David Moyes said when he signed the out-of-favor forward from Manchester United in January. Both are already reaping the rewards.For possibly the first and only time this season, David Moyes was wrong. As the January transfer window drew to a close, his West Ham side had agreed on a deal to sign Jesse Lingard on loan from Manchester United, and Moyes was keen to stave off the Premier League’s proclivity for rushing to judgment.As far as Moyes was concerned, Lingard was a smart option. He was well aware that what his team needed more than anything was a striker: Sebastian Haller had left for Ajax, leaving the redoubtable Michail Antonio as the club’s only specialist forward. And even he, strictly speaking, was a late-in-life sort of a striker.The problem, as Moyes put it, was a scarcity of plug-and-play replacements on the market. Lingard, he said, might offer a way to think around the problem. He could play as a forward if necessary, but he could also play wide right, wide left, or in a deeper role through the middle. With West Ham chasing a place in Europe for next season, that versatility made him a great value.Not everyone saw it that way. The reaction to Lingard’s arrival at West Ham was mixed. In English soccer’s ever-voluble punditocracy, its content-industrial complex, some saw him as a “diamond.” Others questioned whether a player who had been an outcast at Manchester United would be “good enough” to earn a place at West Ham.As he fell out of favor at Manchester United, Lingard became the butt of jokes.Carl Recine/ReutersA former teammate, Rio Ferdinand — long before he produced what may be the most extraordinary take of the season, on any subject, in any sport — had always been a staunch supporter of Lingard, but even he could see the player was a polarizing figure. He had, he said, “argued with pundit after pundit, on air and off air,” over the 28-year-old Lingard’s merits.Moyes knew all of that, and so he asked for patience. “It will take him a little bit of time to settle, so let’s give him a chance,” he said a couple of days after Lingard arrived. And that is where he was wrong, because 24 hours later, Lingard was busy scoring twice on his West Ham debut, inspiring a rout of Aston Villa, and looking for all the world like the best player on the field.Since then, Lingard has hardly stopped. He did not, it turns out, need any time to settle at all. He has five goals in seven appearances for West Ham, the sort of form that has not only persuaded Moyes to attempt to sign him on a permanent deal but that has attracted the attentions of Leicester City and Aston Villa, too. This week, he returned to the England squad for the first time in two years.Lingard’s form drew the attention of the England coaching staff, which called him up for this week’s World Cup qualifiers.Pool photo by Carl RecineReputations rise and fall precipitously in soccer, but even by those standards, Lingard’s transformation, what he has described as his “new lease of life,” is eye-catching. He had not just become a bit-part player in Manchester United’s eyes; he had, to the wider world, become something close to a figure of fun.Every month, a meme borrowed from the influential, worryingly prescient British comedy series “The Day Today” made its way round Twitter, asking if Lingard had scored or assisted on a league goal over the last four weeks. It had been started innocently enough, but, as is the way of things on social media, had been co-opted by cruelty.The joke, of course, was that he never did. Lingard had enjoyed one golden month in December 2018, scoring four goals and creating two others, but had done nothing before or since. His reputation had been built on the exception, rather than the rule.That the impression stuck was, at least in part, because Lingard was seen as fair game for mockery. Partly, that was through no fault of his own. Pundits assailed him for his extracurricular business interests. The news media, meanwhile, bizarrely insisted on identifying him as a young prospect, long after he had outgrown that particular label. Fans, at least some, objected to his performed, public persona, particularly online.And partly, he did not help himself. It is deeply unfair and moderately pompous to judge a young man for expressing his personality, but at the same time it seems likely that the elaborate goal celebrations, the social media antics and the use of the nickname J-Lingz did not help others take him seriously. Lingard, to some extent, was complicit in his Peter Panning.By January this year, the combination of all those factors seemed to have brought Lingard’s career to a standstill. He had barely played for Manchester United, despite, in his view, the fact that he had returned from lockdown in good form and fine fettle. The only clubs interested in handing him a second chance were West Bromwich Albion and Newcastle United — the transfer market’s last refuge of the damned — and, thanks to the fact that Moyes had worked with him at Old Trafford eight years ago, West Ham.The evidence of the last three months is that he chose correctly. Some credit for Lingard’s renaissance, of course, must go to Moyes, who has filled him with trust and confidence, and provided a space in which he can thrive. Much of it, too, must go to Lingard. He has a whiteboard on the wall at his home filled with a set of targets for him to achieve, including the number of shots he takes, the number of players he beats. In private, he is clearly very serious about his career.But there is a lesson in Lingard’s story, too. More than one, in fact. The first is an old one: that, in soccer, the stage matters as much as the ability of the actor. Players thrive and talent shines in a conducive environment; being in the right place, at the right time, with the right people is as important as an individual’s baseline of talent.Trust me, David Moyes told critics of his decision to acquire Lingard. He knew the player from his brief tenure at Manchester United.Pool photo by Justin SetterfieldThe second lesson is that perception can be skewed by circumstance, that it is too easily forgotten that the higher up soccer’s pyramid one goes, the thinner the air. It is easy to forget that only players of the very highest quality are good enough to be surplus to requirements at Manchester United and the rest of Europe’s rarefied elite.Too often, there is an assumption that those who fail to make the grade at Old Trafford or the Bernabéu or the Allianz Arena have been exposed as talentless hacks, a curling of the nose at the idea of signing another team’s rejects.The reality is not only different, it is the precise opposite: A player who has survived for as long as Lingard did at Manchester United will stand out, in fertile soil, almost anywhere else. Perhaps Lingard was not good enough, not any more, for the club where he started his career. That he was, at one time, should have been reason enough to take him more seriously than we did.Postponing ProblemsBurak Yilmaz and Turkey opened World Cup qualifying with a win over the Netherlands in Istanbul. South America’s players had the week off.Pool photo by Murad SezerThe managers of Europe’s elite clubs would hardly have been alone at breathing a sigh of relief, a couple of weeks ago, when South America’s soccer authorities confirmed the round of World Cup qualifiers scheduled to be held this week would be postponed.It is precisely the outcome Pep Guardiola, Jürgen Klopp and several of their peers had wanted, of course, and it was the correct course of action from a public health perspective. But they were not the only beneficiaries.A two-week break in this most frantic of seasons will be of considerable benefit to those players who would, otherwise, have been traveling thousands of miles to play two matches inside five days. It is an unexpected blessing in a campaign that has pushed those whose job it is to play the game to their limits. Weary bodies will have had time to rest and repair. Tired minds will have had chance to reset.There is, though, a drawback. Obviously there is a drawback. And it is that those games now have to be slotted in somewhere else, and the calendar is no less forgiving once this season is finished.There is little space to play the postponed fixtures this summer. South America’s teams already have two delayed qualifiers to play in early June, squeezed in before yet another Copa América. (There is, as we have seen previously, always a Copa América. But don’t worry, they’ve changed this one, altering the format to make it worse.) And there is little room to breathe next season, with the schedule compressed anyway by the looming logistical problems of a mid-season World Cup at the end of 2022.We have learned this lesson before, of course, but it bears repeating: There is too little slack in soccer’s calendar. What is dressed up as compromise is, in reality, often nothing more than greed, every interested party happy to sign up to anything as long as they get what they want. And, at the end of it all, the people who suffer are the ones who have to fulfill these ludicrous schedules: the players.In Case You Missed It: U.S. 4, Jamaica 1Christian Pulisic newsletter klaxon: The United States, playing regulars like Pulisic and Sergino Dest, left, but also the newcomer Yunus Musah, right, thumped Jamaica, 4-1, in a friendly on Thursday in Vienna.Jakub Sukup/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Reward and the RiskTo many in women’s soccer in England, Monday was a day of vindication. After months of negotiation, the Women’s Super League — regarded by many, now, as the finest domestic competition on the planet — confirmed that it had agreed to a three-year television deal with Sky and the BBC, one that will earn its clubs almost $11 million per season.The triumphalism is, in large part, warranted. Nobody will pay more to broadcast women’s soccer anywhere in the world. Sky has promised to give the W.S.L.’s games the same treatment — hope you like bombast and slow-motion montages, W.S.L. fans! — that it affords the Premier League. It is a level of exposure and, bluntly, revenue that those who have worked tirelessly to advance the women’s game deserve.The hope, of course, is that the new deal will kick-start a virtuous circle: more investment means better facilities; better facilities attract (and produce, the thinking goes, though whether that part is correct or not is debatable) better players; better players lead to better games; better games attract more viewers; and more viewers lead to more investment.There are, though, two notes of caution worth considering. The first is that the W.S.L. is, increasingly, dominated by two clubs: Manchester City and Chelsea, two teams that have packed their rosters with international players. Indeed, lack of competitive balance is as much an issue for the women’s game as it is the men’s.A new television deal will expose more fans to Women’s Super League stars like Chelsea’s Sam Kerr. But it’s important that the money trickles down, too.Mike Egerton/Press Association, via Associated PressWill this television deal give their rivals the resources to compete, or will it simply entrench their dominance? In the longer term, too, will the money not incentivize clubs simply to buy in talent, rather than develop homegrown players, a problem that men’s soccer has had to wrestle with for years?And second, and more pressing: Though the free-to-air BBC will be showing a handful of games (and matches will be streamed by the Football Association itself), the vast majority will be on cable, effectively paywalled off from consumers.Sports that have a far larger popular following than women’s soccer currently enjoys — including cricket and Formula 1 — have found that can be an obstacle to building, or even retaining, an audience. This W.S.L. deal is rich reward for all those involved in the undoubted success of women’s soccer in recent years. But lack of access is not, necessarily, a price worth paying.CorrespondenceRodrygo, right, and Vinicius Júnior were two significant investments in Real Madrid’s future.Juanjo Martin/EPA, via ShutterstockLast week’s column on the folly of signing Eden Hazard prompted an impassioned and, if we are all completely honest, quite accurate defense of Real Madrid’s transfer dealings from Sebastian Royo.“If you look at the players they have hired in the last few years — Vinicius, Rodrygo, Luka Jovic, Martin Odegaard, Ferland Mendy — they are all in their teens or early 20s,” Sebastian wrote. “If anything, Real can be accused of getting players who are too young and not ready to start, and not giving them enough opportunity to play and grow.”This is a valid rebuttal. Real Madrid has spent a lot of money on young talent; so, for that matter, has Barcelona. But perhaps the problem is that, at the same time, both teams have been unable to resist signing ready-made superstars, which has to some extent limited the young players’ chances.A great point, too, from David Hamlyn on the surprisingly enervating issue of quick free kicks’ being discouraged. “In this era of scripted play, the offensive side will still want to do their setup, thereby slowing play down,” he noted. This is right, I think: Teams work doggedly on set plays. I’m not sure they would automatically take them quickly, even if they could do so more easily.Lynton Smith was in touch on the evergreen subject of video assistant referees and offside, which I’ll be returning to again in the near future — put a note in your diaries for that one — but one (throwaway) comment caught my eye. “We want as many goals in the game as we can,” Lynton wrote, “and the new precision disallows goals which in the past would have stood.” I don’t know if I agree with that assertion. Do we want as many goals as we can? Would that not make them less special? Is the gratification not in the delay?And finally, Atticus Proctor asks a very good question. “Why is soccer so obsessed with always restructuring its tournaments and leagues? I’m only 25, but just in recent memory, Concacaf has restructured World Cup qualification, teams were added to the European Championships and the World Cup, the Nations League was created, and the Champions League has changed format four times since 1999.”The glib answers, obviously, would be a) to make more money and b) to reflect the ever-shifting currents of the sport’s politics. But the endless flux is, in itself, interesting, because I wonder to what extent a prior willingness to be flexible leads to an assumption that everything is permanently up for grabs. More

  • in

    Daniel Snyder to Buy Out Other Owners of Washington NFL Team

    The league is expected to approve a measure that will allow Daniel Snyder to buy total control of the team.Seeking to move past a year of tumult over the team’s former name and a sexual harassment investigation of its front office, the owner of the Washington Football Team is close to a deal with fellow league owners that will give him greater control over the organization while he pays a fine for executives’ misconduct.The arrangement effectively resolves two pressing issues: a protracted boardroom fight over ownership that spilled out into the open and an investigation by the N.F.L. into allegations that women who worked for the team were sexually harassed by staff members, a number of whom have already been dismissed.The league owners next week are expected to approve a special waiver that would allow the owner, Daniel Snyder, to take on an additional $450 million in debt in order to buy out minority partners he has been battling, according to a copy of the resolution reviewed by The New York Times. The N.F.L.’s finance committee last week unanimously recommended that the full cohort of owners waive the limit of debt a buyer can take on to buy into a team. Snyder will have to repay the money by March 2028.Support for Snyder’s purchase comes as the N.F.L.’s investigation into sexual harassment claims made against former Washington Football Team executives concludes. In the coming days, Commissioner Roger Goodell may address the findings collected by Beth Wilkinson, a Washington-based lawyer whom Snyder hired last summer to investigate after several Washington Post articles reported widespread sexual harassment of women who worked for the team over a 15-year span. The N.F.L. took over her investigation from Snyder.Snyder’s pending purchase of his partners’ shares and the end of Wilkinson’s investigation into the team’s internal culture come after a chaotic year for the franchise. The team decided to drop its nickname and logo last July after years of criticism from some Native American activists who considered it a racist slur and threats from major corporations that they would end sponsorships if the name stayed. The Washington Football Team is still reviewing possible new names and logos.Since then, Washington sought to rectify its 3-13 record from the 2019 season by firing numerous front office executives and hiring a new coach, Ron Rivera, at the beginning of 2020. In August, Rivera learned he had cancer and began treatments for it, but he coached the full season, leading the team back to the playoffs for the first time in five years.To try to revive the club’s tattered image, Snyder has hired several new executives, including Jason Wright, the N.F.L.’s first Black team president. A coed dance team will perform on game days, replacing the cheerleading program, which had been overseen by one of the since-fired executives who had been accused of sexual harassment.Snyder will pay $875 million for the 40.5 percent of the team owned by Dwight Schar, Robert Rothman and Frederick Smith, ensuring his total control of the franchise he bought a majority stake of in 1999.When the purchase is completed, which is expected shortly, Snyder and his family will hold 100 percent of the club and end a very public fight with Rothman, Schar and Smith, who bought into the team in 2003. Last spring, the three men banded together to try to sell their stakes after Snyder declined to pay them annual dividends as a way to conserve the team’s cash with the 2020 N.F.L. season still in doubt because of the coronavirus pandemic.In August, the private disagreement over distributed dividends turned into corporate warfare that spilled into public view. Snyder all but accused Schar of orchestrating a smear campaign against him by contending in court documents that Schar facilitated the spread of negative information about him to the media with the hope that bad press would ultimately force Snyder to sell his majority stake. In that situation, the trio’s shares would have garnered a higher price if the team was sold as a whole.The three minority owners — Schar, a real estate developer; Rothman, an asset manager; and Smith, the chairman of FedEx — turned against Snyder, accusing him in federal court of bad-faith dealing and malfeasance.Even as Wilkinson was brought in last July to conduct an investigation into team executives’ conduct toward female employees, the N.F.L. had hired in late June former Attorney General Loretta Lynch to untangle the squabble among the Washington Football Team’s owners.The Washington Post reported that two women had accused Snyder, 56, in separate episodes of harassment dating to 2004 — which he denied — and that he reached a financial settlement in 2009 with a female former executive who had accused him of sexual misconduct during a trip on a private jet.Now, with the investigation into his and other team employees’ conduct wrapping up and the conclusion of his boardroom battle in sight, Snyder can focus on another major task: deciding how to rebrand the football team whose future is entirely under his control. More

  • in

    Bayern's Alphonso Davies Wants to Share His Story

    The Bayern Munich star didn’t learn his own refugee story until his parents talked about it in a team video. He has come to embrace its power, and its effect on others.For a long time, Alphonso Davies knew only the outline of the story. His parents had given him the bare facts, but little more: that they had fled the bloody civil war engulfing their native Liberia; that he had been born in the refugee camp in Ghana where they sought shelter; that they had moved to Canada when he was 5.He had been too young not only to understand where he was and what his family was enduring, but also for those years to leave any imprint on him at all. His memory kicks in, he said, at age 6 or so: He remembers starting school in Windsor, Ontario, but nothing before that. His parents, Debeah and Victoria, never volunteered to fill in the gaps.“They didn’t really explain it,” Davies said. “It’s not something they talked about a lot. They didn’t really want to. It was a dark time in their history. They just wanted us to enjoy our lives in Canada, to be really happy in a safe place, where we could be whatever we wanted to be.”Davies discovered much of the detail of his own story at the same time as almost everyone else. On the day in 2017 when he was officially granted Canadian citizenship, the Vancouver Whitecaps — the club where he made his name as a 16-year-old — produced a short film, part celebration and part commemoration of his journey.It was the first time Davies had heard his parents’ firsthand account of the part of their life — and his — that he had never known. They described the decision to flee the violence stalking Liberia. They spoke about the hand-to-mouth realities of existence in Buduburam, the camp on the edge of the Ghanaian capital, Accra, where they found themselves. They talked about the hunger, the poverty, the uncertainty, the fear.“They said it was like being in a container that you can’t leave, because you don’t know what would happen to you,” he said. “It was hard to find food and water. You don’t know what’s coming the next day. My mum didn’t know how she would feed me, take care of me. She cried. They were struggling, for themselves and for me. I didn’t know any of it until they did that interview.”Davies with his parents and family members in 2018, before his final game with the Vancouver Whitecaps. A few months later, just after he turned 18, he made his debut for Bayern Munich.Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press, via Associated PressDavies was not alone in being touched by his parents’ account. He had always known he was Liberian: The gospel music that Victoria played at 7 a.m. every Sunday at their new home in Edmonton, Alberta, gave that away. He had known, too, that he had been a refugee. “It is part of my identity,” he said. “It is part of me.”But it was only after his parents’ interview that he started to realize the significance of his story. “A lot of people reach out to me on social media to say what it means to them,” he said. “I started doing interviews about it, and I got a lot of feedback. It opens your eyes. It was amazing that people were inspired by it.”Over the last couple of years, Davies has done all he can to share it. He has given interviews to Gary Lineker and the BBC about his background. Bayern Munich — the club that signed him from the Whitecaps as a 17-year-old and made him a German and European champion before he turned 20 — produced a report from Buduburam on the early years of his life.Most important, though, in the first few months of his coronavirus-imposed lockdown last year, Davies started to use his fame and his platform to become an advocate for those suffering as his family once had.For many of the 80 million or so displaced people around the planet, he said, “food and water can be hard to come by.” He continued: “It is not always possible in those conditions to social distance. Access to the vaccine is difficult. People are passing away. I wanted to tell people that they are not alone, that there are people out there who were in their shoes.”He started to lend his support to the work being done by the U.N.H.C.R., the United Nations refugee agency, the body that helped organize his family’s resettlement in Canada. This week, the organization will appoint Davies as a good-will ambassador. He hopes to use the position to raise money to renovate soccer facilities in refugee camps. He is not only the first Canadian, but also the first soccer player, to be afforded the honor.It is fitting in more ways than one. It is not just the first act of Davies’s story that makes him suitable, but the second, too. In his first few years in Canada, he struggled a little academically, partly because of a language barrier and partly, he will admit, through a lack of inclination.As a gifted athlete, though, he never found any trouble fitting in. Edmonton is Gretzky country, but he did not take to ice hockey. (His skating has improved in recent years, he said.) Instead, he played a little basketball, and emerged as a talented track runner. But soccer was his first love, his clear gift, the sport he had grown up watching with his father, a keen fan of both Chelsea and, in particular, Didier Drogba.Alphonso Davies when he was younger in Canada.Courtesy Davies Family, via UNHCRHe was — this is no surprise — the standout player on every team he joined. As such, friends came relatively easily. “Other kids saw I was good at sports, so they wanted to be my friends,” he said. Being picked first on every team is a reasonably sure shortcut to preteen popularity. “Also,” Davies said, with the air of a man keen to underline the point, “I was a cool guy.”Though Davies’s soccer talent was unusual — not everyone, after all, is gifted enough to play for Bayern Munich as a teenager — this element of his story, according to those who work with refugees and asylum seekers around the world, is much more universal. “It is hard to think of an equivalent that has the same reach or impact,” said Naomi Westland, the founder of Amnesty International’s Football Welcomes program.Though it is natural, perhaps, to cite those from a refugee or migrant background who go on to professional careers as examples and inspirations — not only Davies, but the likes of Bournemouth goalkeeper Asmir Begovic and Bologna striker Musa Juwara, too — the most valuable work, in truth, is not concerned with unearthing talent.Instead, it is helping refugees and asylum seekers to build a new life, to integrate and combat racism and prejudice, through soccer. Europe is dotted with teams dedicated to doing just that: Some of them, like the five English clubs that are part of Amnesty’s program, use the resources of the professional game to help. Others, like Liberi Nantes and Afro Napoli in Italy, are grass-roots organizations.Davies’s trophy case already includes two Bundesliga titles, two German Cups and a Champions League winners medal.Pool photo by Adam Pretty“You don’t need to be able to speak the language,” Westland said. “But playing in a team gives you a chance to forget about the stresses of being in the asylum system, a way to make friends, a chance to make connections. For people who have had to leave their homes, their countries and their lives behind, it can give you a sense of belonging, and a sense of purpose. That’s incredibly important.”Davies would not disagree. In those earliest memories of his, what mattered was not just his nascent brilliance on the field, the preternatural talent that would eventually take him far from home, to Vancouver and on to Munich, but the fact that he could use soccer as a common language and a shared interest. It was his way of “settling in,” he said. “It wasn’t a big soccer school, but there were enough kids who followed and understood.”He can still recall the endless, cyclical conversations about whether Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo was the superior player; when he first met Arjen Robben, in the changing room in Munich, he remembers being “star struck” by the sight of the man Davies was ardently convinced should have been anointed world player of the year in 2013.He still, he said, has to remind himself at times that he is actually talking to Robert Lewandowski, the guy who used to score goals for him on the FIFA video games. He did not know that is how his story would turn out at the time, of course. He did not know he would go on to be an inspiration. All he knew was that he wanted to talk about, and play, soccer. “Talking about it, being surrounded by it, that’s how you make friends,” he said. More

  • in

    Deshaun Watson's Lawyer Issues Denial of Assault Claims

    Since the quarterback’s initial denial on social media, an array of civil suits have been filed that accuse him of a pattern of coercive behavior and, in two cases, sexual assault.Allegations of assault and sexual misconduct against the Houston Texans star quarterback Deshaun Watson have mounted over the past week, as 16 women have filed civil suits against him and their lawyer has publicized the accusations on social media and in a news conference that was streamed online.Aside from an early denial of the first two claims, Watson has remained mostly silent. In the first substantive rebuttal to the accusations, Watson’s lawyer, Rusty Hardin, on Tuesday challenged the veracity of all the claims and described one of the two allegations of sexual assault as an attempt to blackmail his client.In a statement, Hardin blasted Tony Buzbee, the lawyer representing the women, saying he had “orchestrated a circuslike atmosphere by using social media to publicize 14 ‘Jane Doe’ lawsuits” to malign Watson’s reputation. Buzbee filed two additional suits on Tuesday.Watson’s attorney also said that he had “strong evidence” demonstrating that the first lawsuit claiming sexual assault was false, and he said that “calls into question the legitimacy of the other cases as well.”“I believe that any allegation that Deshaun forced a woman to commit a sexual act is completely false,” Hardin said.Since March 16, a total of 16 women have accused Watson of assault in civil lawsuits filed in Harris County, Texas, where he is a resident. According to the complaints, the incidents have taken place from March 2020 to this month. Although most are said to have occurred in Texas, two were said to have happened in Georgia, Watson’s home state, this month, and in California, where he was visiting in July 2020.The civil suits accuse Watson, 25, of engaging in a pattern of lewd behavior with women hired to provide personal services — coercing them to touch him in a sexual manner, exposing himself to women hired to do massages, or moving his body in ways that forced them to touch his penis. The suits that accuse him of sexual assault say that Watson pressured both women to perform oral sex during massages and that he grabbed one woman’s buttocks and vagina.Hardin’s statement referenced the first allegation of sexual assault, which is said to have occurred on Dec. 28, 2020. That day, according to the complaint, he coerced the woman to touch his genitals and perform oral sex. The woman was so upset, the complaint said, that she blacked out for a few minutes.The statement from Watson’s lawyer on Tuesday included a signed affidavit from Bryan Burney, the quarterback’s marketing manager for the past three years. The affidavit states that Burney spoke in January with a woman believed to be the plaintiff in the first claim of sexual assault. Burney said that the woman had asked him to pay her $30,000 on Watson’s behalf for “indefinite silence” about an encounter with Watson that Burney said she characterized to him as consensual.After Burney declined to pay, the statement said, he received a second call from a man who claimed to be the woman’s business manager. That man claimed something embarrassing would be revealed if Watson did not pay to keep it a secret. Watson, Burney said, did not meet the man’s demand.Hardin added in the statement that Watson’s team was “taking the allegations very seriously and we ask only that people not rush to judgment, that people not be unduly influenced by opposing counsel’s antics, and that they let fundamental fairness to both sides rule the day.” More