Raphael Stevens

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    Don’t Reject the Champions League’s Changes Out of Hand

    The latest proposals to reallocate European soccer’s riches show that there may be sense even in dumb ideas.Say what you like about Andrea Agnelli, but at least he is not afraid of a bad idea. Even by the standards of Agnelli, the Juventus chairman, this has been a fairly spectacular week, a seemingly never-ending stream of free-form thoughts about the future of soccer, each one somehow worse than the last.There was, first, a stout defense of the coming reform of the Champions League, the so-called Swiss Model, which would see 36 teams qualify for the tournament and then play 10 group games, rather than six, all of them against different opponents.That was just Agnelli getting started, though. It is perhaps easiest to think of him as soccer’s equivalent to Stewart Pearson, the policy strategist/vapid marketing guru skewered so perfectly in “The Thick of It,” the British political satire. Legacy places in the Champions League? Banning elite clubs from buying each other’s players? Selling a subscription to the last 15 minutes of games? Yes, and ho (Parental Guidance: R).The reaction to all of these suggestions, of course, was what even Agnelli, presumably, has come to expect: a panoply of derision and disdain, the sort that in a strange sort of way unites soccer’s various warring tribes in hostility to the machinations of a smart, urbane businessman who seems determined to play the role of cartoonish supervillain.That so many of his ideas emerged in a week in which Agnelli’s Juventus was unexpectedly and dramatically eliminated from the Champions League by F.C. Porto simply served to underline his hubris. This, after all, was the sort of drama he wants to negate, inflicted by the sort of team he wants to disenfranchise. He got, in short, what he deserved.But while that reaction is both understandable and largely justified, it is not desperately constructive. Just as with Project Big Picture — the set of ideas tossed around by the owners of Manchester United and Liverpool for reform of the Premier League and leaked late last year — the immediate rush to outrage means that the islands of common sense in Agnelli’s thought torrent are swept away before they can be properly explored.Take, for example, the last of his suggestions. Why would it be bad, precisely, to sell the rights to watch the last 15 minutes of games? Of course the clubs would benefit from the tapping of another revenue stream, but who suffers?Those who wanted to watch the full match could still do so, through whatever subscription package they currently enjoy. But maybe others — those not able to afford it, those without the time to benefit from it, those who do not wish to watch an entire game — could use a cheaper, shorter, more ad hoc alternative.There will have been plenty, for example, who might have wanted to watch the denouement to Juventus’s game with Porto, once it became clear that it might prove more compelling than anticipated. So why not let them?Porto isn’t in a Big Five league, but it deserves nights to celebrate, too.Valerio Pennicino/Getty ImagesThat the idea could be dismissed out of hand is, in part, down to the fact that it was Agnelli who proposed it. He is, after all, not only the chairman of Juventus, but the president of the European Club Association, too, a body that is designed to represent the interests of all of its members but — in the popular imagination — is largely deployed to lobby for the game’s established elite.As such, it is assumed that everything that is in Agnelli’s interests is automatically tinged with not just self-interest, but also greed. The expansion of the Champions League, according to that argument, is designed to enable a handful of clubs to make more money, at the expense of everyone else, furthering the financial chasm that yawns between teams in the major leagues, and between the major leagues and the minor ones.The idea of legacy places — allowing teams with more European pedigree to leapfrog those with less, ensuring that the traditional powers always have access to the Champions League, regardless of where they finish in their domestic leagues — is seen as offering them a backstop, inuring them from the consequences of failure, breaking the contract that sport should be in some way meritocratic, ensuring their money keeps flowing.This is, doubtless, true. Agnelli is not advocating anything that would damage his, his club’s or his collaborators’ interests. But it does not follow that those who stand in his way are acting out of some sort of higher purpose. This week, several clubs — most notably Crystal Palace and Aston Villa — led the resistance to the reform of the Champions League, insisting that it would irrevocably damage domestic competitions.That Andrea Agnelli is largely looking out for the interests of Juventus does not mean every one of his ideas must be rejected out of hand.Denis Balibouse/ReutersAnd they are right, but their motivations are no purer than Agnelli’s. Crystal Palace and Aston Villa benefit very nicely, thank you very much, from the status quo. They have been made immeasurably rich by their mere presence in the Premier League; they will reject any move that endangers their place on that particular gravy train.It is here that the problem becomes broader, more pernicious. There is a reason Agnelli — and John W. Henry, the owner of Liverpool, and Joel Glazer, his counterpart at Manchester United, and the powers-that-be at Bayern Munich and Juventus and all the rest — keeps having bad ideas, and it is one that cannot be put entirely (though that is relevant) to the big clubs’ greed for trophies and for profit.It is that on some fundamental level, the economics of soccer as they stand do not work, and they did not work even before the coronavirus hit, creating a colossal hole in the accounts of (almost) every club across Europe, rich and poor alike.Ideally, at this juncture, it would be possible to pinpoint just one problem — the spending of Paris St.-Germain and Manchester City, the wealth of the Premier League or the growing gap between haves and have-nots — and then to identify a panacea that would make it all better But that is not how it works. Fairness in top-flight European soccer is a vast and unwieldy and complicated issue, and one without an obvious solution.For the grand houses of continental Europe, the issue is the relentless march of the Premier League. For the big clubs of the Premier League, it is being expected to win an arms race against teams backed by nation states. For those teams, it is trying to crack a cartel that is arranged against them.For all its financial might, P.S.G. is still chasing its first Champions League title with Kylian Mbappé. For all its struggles, Barcelona has won four with Lionel Messi.Gonzalo Fuentes/ReutersFor the teams that fill out the five major leagues of Western Europe, it is finding a way to overcome the enormous financial advantages of their opponents. For those leagues that are not considered the major powers, it is identifying a way to compete with the Big Five, and to deal with the deleterious effect on competitive balance of the Champions League itself.And that is before we get further down the pyramid, to the teams struggling to breathe away from the continent’s top divisions. It is this that makes it too hard to sympathize with the plight of Crystal Palace, which currently makes more money than A.C. Milan and Feyenoord and Legia Warsaw and Panathinaikos and all but a couple of dozen other teams in the world. It is this that means it is dangerous to assume that what is good for Crystal Palace is good for soccer as a whole.There are, unfortunately, no easy answers. But that should not dictate that all suggestions for change are shot down, or that the underlying assumption should be that they are all rooted in bad faith, or even that self-interest itself precludes an idea’s having merit.The people who own clubs are within their rights to want steadier, more predictable incomes, or more restricted spending. It is not feasible to demand, as we currently do, that they just throw as much money against the wall as possible in pursuit of short-term success. Fans, above all, should know by now that such an approach rarely ends well.Will an expanded Champions League still have room for past winners like Ajax and Feyenoord?Maurice Van Steen/EPA, via ShutterstockThat is not to say that Agnelli has yet hit upon the answer. Legacy places for historic teams defeat the purpose of sport, though they are not exactly unprecedented: In South America, there have been various experiments — rarely for good reasons — to make relegation a punishment for years of underperformance, not just a single bad season.Expanding the Champions League — though not something that is personally appealing — has more positives, should the extra places go to national champions from lesser leagues, expanding the horizons of the competition, though even that might then have a distorting effect on those domestic tournaments. (Banning transfers between elite clubs makes no sense: How else would Agnelli, for one, have unloaded Miralem Pjanic’s contract?)But none of this should disguise the need both to talk about and institute change. The status quo might work for a handful of teams — the ones, largely, that finish in the top 15 of the Premier League pretty regularly, and possibly Bayern Munich — but it locks out the vast majority; according to a report this week from Football Supporters Europe, fans* are finding it increasingly off-putting.[*This is a subject for another column, but the issue with these sorts of surveys is that they represent a specific cohort of fans, not a broad spectrum.]It is incumbent on everyone, then, to have the courage to have ideas: not objections rooted in tradition, not utopian daydreams, but concrete, considered suggestions. Would cross-border leagues help teams from smaller nations compete? Should elite teams be allowed to sign strategic deals with partner clubs? Is there a way to make the Champions League more compelling? How do you address competitive balance within and between domestic tournaments? (Answers below.)All of them will have drawbacks. All of them will elicit criticism. But it is a conversation we must be prepared to have, not one that should be shut down just because someone, somewhere, finds it does not align with his interests. Partly because that is the only way anything will change. And partly because if we do not, one of Agnelli’s ideas might just stick.a) Yes, it’s obvious; b) yes, so is that; c) you’d start by changing the seeding; and d) squad and spending limits, and a combination of a) and b).A Year OnA packed house and one mask at Anfield in March 11, 2020, hours before sports called time.Phil Noble/ReutersThe news seeped through as Jürgen Klopp was licking his wounds and Diego Simeone was basking in glory. It had been one of those electric Champions League nights: Atlético Madrid had eliminated Liverpool, the reigning champion, last March, storming what was supposed to be fortress Anfield with that distinctively Cholísta mix of strategy and steel.And then, as the managers were picking over the bones of what had happened, as 56,000 people were drifting into the night, the news flickered through from Italy. Daniele Rugani, the Juventus defender, had tested positive for the coronavirus. The club was sending its squad into isolation for 14 days. Its opponent the previous weekend, Inter Milan, quickly did the same.That was March 11, 2020, a year and a day ago. Even in the slightly frantic, vaguely frazzled surroundings of a press box, it was apparent that what had played out in front of us was not the story. It seemed obvious, even then, that the night’s theme was not just Liverpool’s facing up to an immediate future with no European competition.The World Health Organization had declared a pandemic. Across the Atlantic, Rudy Gobert had tested positive, bringing the virus into the N.B.A. Sports in the United States was shutting down. Over the next 36 hours, Europe reached the same conclusion. The patchwork solutions that had tried to hold back the tide — games in empty stadiums, games being postponed — gave way.In England, at least, the tipping point was Mikel Arteta, the Arsenal manager, and the Chelsea forward Callum Hudson-Odoi testing positive. The Premier League, until then content to stick its fingers in its ears and blunder through, called an emergency meeting. A few hours after insisting the show, that weekend, would go on, the league confirmed it would be mothballed. Nobody could be quite sure that it would come back.Two things now stand out about those few days. One is specific to Britain. It is important to remember that, at the time of Arteta’s positive test, the British government was dallying. The country was still almost two weeks from being locked down. Officials were encouraging people to go to work. Some 56,000 people had been allowed to go to Anfield, including some who flew in from Madrid for the privilege. A quarter of a million had been admitted to horse racing’s Cheltenham Festival.Looking back, it may not be too much of a stretch to suggest that it was the abandonment of the Premier League that concentrated a few minds and forced a few hands. Its elite soccer league is, deep down, one of England’s most high-profile institutions. Its sudden absence denoted, in the most incontrovertible tone, that the pandemic had arrived.The other, broader thing is that for all the criticism, for all the missteps and the arguments and the questionable motives, soccer deserves credit for finding its way back: its players for enduring the schedule; its executives for conjuring solutions; the countless, unheralded staff members at clubs and leagues and broadcasters for making it work. Soccer is not perfect. Sometimes, it is not even good. But in what has been an inordinately difficult year for so many, it has, in some small way, helped.CorrespondenceManchester City and ballet, you say? Set this photo to music.Pool photo by Clive BrunskillLast week’s column on Manchester City — a team that inspires an intellectual response, more than an emotional one, at least in my eyes — prompted many of you to get in touch to set me straight. Matt Noel highlighted not only that Pep Guardiola has been able to “make some tweaks and reunite” his squad, but also the “style in which City plays … is nothing short of miraculous, delicate and ephemeral.”I have no arguments there and, of course, it is not for me to dictate your responses to any team. I was, as the vernacular goes, simply offering you my truth. “I love watching City,” Charlotte Mehrtens wrote. “The skill is such a joy. You claim this football lacks soul? That’s like saying a choreographed ballet lacks soul.”This is a great parallel, because there is something inherently balletic about City, and also I find that ballet leaves me a bit cold, too. I appreciate the art and the skill, but I could do with a bit of talking. The issue here, then, may be that I am a philistine.David Ittah took exception with the idea that Guardiola has invented a new position for João Cancelo. “Marcelo has been playing exactly that role for many years at Real Madrid,” he wrote. He has indeed: Nobody loves Marcelo, pound for pound the greatest signing of all time, more than me. But Cancelo’s role is much more structured, much more part of the tactical blueprint, than the freestyle approach that makes Marcelo a joy.And a wonderful idea from Ian Greig. “Why not try to make a virtue out of the loss by holding games on out-of-the-way unknown pitches in remote places. Pitches without stands, or fans in beautiful places, rural Scotland, Georgia. Years ago I watched a game near Syanky in Poland, a lovely site surrounded by pines. I hold the memory dear.”Consider me on board. Let’s play the Champions League final in Lofoten. Or Qeqertarsuaq. More

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    Fenerbahce vs. beIN Is Turkey's High-Stakes Rivalry

    A feud between a top Turkish soccer team and the league’s broadcaster is rooted in taped chants, time stamps and club rivalry. But the fight’s cost could be enormous.The offending chant had been broadcast during Turkish league matches for months before anyone noticed it. The refrain, a variation of which is often heard in stadiums around Turkey, ends with a profanity directed at Fenerbahce, one of the country’s biggest and richest clubs.For months, it had been included in the prerecorded crowd noise that has become the soundtrack to live sports in empty stadiums in the coronavirus era. And for months, no one in Turkey said a thing — until January, when a keen-eared observer noticed the chant in the background of games involving one of the league’s smallest teams.Now, it is the latest flash point in an increasingly bitter dispute pitting Fenerbahce — a Turkish soccer team which has millions of passionate fans and is led by one of Turkey’s richest men — against beIN Media Group, one of the world’s largest buyers of sports rights.Fenerbahce has seized on the revelation about the chants as proof of its long-held belief that the Qatar-based broadcaster, through its beIN Sports Turkey subsidiary, had an agenda against the club. The fight has sabotaged interviews and played out in on-field protests, perceived injustices and, most recently, a lawsuit in a Turkish court. It could have serious financial consequences for the entire league, and the club is showing no sign it will relent.Until a court ruling ordered Fenerbahce to stop, the club sent its players onto the field in shirts critical of beIN Sports.Gokhan Kilincer/Reuters“It would be too naïve to consider all these consecutive incidents as honest human mistakes,” Fenerbahce said in comments it attributed to its secretary general, Burak Caglan Kizilhan. “We believe our arguments are extremely valid and concerning.”The tension between one of Turkey’s biggest clubs and the league’s official broadcaster has come at a sensitive time for Turkish soccer. BeIN Sports, through its local subsidiary, pays about $360 million for the television rights to the league’s matches.Now, with most of Turkey’s biggest teams, including Fenerbahce, heavily in debt, the league is planning a new television rights sale. And beIN is wondering if staying involved in Turkish soccer is worth the trouble.“Why would we deliberately try to disenfranchise one of the biggest clubs in Turkey?” a beIN Media Group spokesman said of Fenerbahce’s accusations. “It doesn’t make any sense, commercially or otherwise.” Like multiple people interviewed for this article, the spokesman asked that his name not be used, to avoid drawing the wrath of Fenerbahce and its fans.Even before the latest skirmish, the situation had driven beIN executives to distraction. Fenerbahce, through its president, Ali Koc, had been making claims about beIN for months. For example, the team has repeatedly accused beIN of selecting television angles and replays on its broadcasts that cast Fenerbahce or decision for and against the club in a negative light or, alternately, to accentuate the positives of its opponents.In response, Fenerbahce has mounted hashtag campaigns — amplified by its millions of followers — on social media, dressed its players in anti-beIN gear and even had them wear shirts with a logo doctored to read “beFAIR” to interviews conducted by the network. When the club signed the former Arsenal star Mesut Özil in January, journalists from beIN Sports Turkey — the official league broadcaster — were barred from his first news conference.The network has tried in vain to lower the temperature. After the chants in the television soundtrack were revealed, beIN officials immediately issued an apology. But rather than dampen the flames, its statement stoked more fury.The apology, according to Fenerbahce, had intentionally been issued at 7:05 p.m. — 19:05, according to the 24-hour clock. The timing was no accident, according to Fenerbahce; 1905 was the founding year of its greatest rival, Galatasaray. To the club, even the apology served as confirmation of the network’s agenda.“Conspiracy and paranoia is part of the culture in Turkey,” said Emre Sarigul, a co-founder of Turkish Football, the largest English website solely devoted to Turkish soccer.Barred from Turkey’s stadiums by the pandemic, many Fenerbahce fans have backed the club’s hashtag campaign on social media. Chris Mcgrath/Getty ImagesSarigul described machinations in the top division as more akin to W.W.E., the popular American wrestling franchise, where actions are frequently choreographed to elicit maximum reaction. “It’s entertainment,” Sarigul said. “You’re often going there for the drama and not for the football on show.”“When something goes wrong,” he added, “you blame ‘them.’ But no one knows who ‘them’ are.”For beIN, a network that has faced challenging situations in its other markets, the experience in Turkey has been bewildering. It conducted an investigation into how the anti-Fenerbache chants had made it onto broadcasts and concluded that human error was to blame.In what appeared to be a conciliatory gesture toward Fenerbahce, it then fired the two staff members directly responsible. But the two employees turned out to be Fenerbahce fans, prompting the club to revive its claims of mistreatment.As a result, beIN is considering walking away from the fight, and the league. The network, bankrolled by the Qatari state, has always absorbed losses from its right deals, but in recent years it has withdrawn from several of them and cut its staff amid a long-running, and costly, piracy dispute. It has allowed deals with the top leagues in Germany and Italy to lapse, and recently withdrew from one with Formula 1.The Turkish dispute has taken a toll on beIN executives. Some of the network’s non-Turkish staff members have been rotated out of the country, and at least one new one, Rashed al-Marri, was brought in from Doha to take charge of operations in Turkey and in particular to handle the relationship with Fenerbahce. But nothing seems to be bringing down the temperature.In late February, the company went to court to prevent Fenerbahce from continuing a weekslong campaign that had targeted the broadcaster at its stadium and on its social media channels by using the colors of the beIN logo but replacing the words with the slogan “beFAIR.”A result was that Turkish subscribers to beIN’s matches were presented with a panoply of protest banners, sideline electronic advertising boards and even the Fenerbahce players themselves covered in beFAIR-branded slogans.The logos forced beIN to change how it broadcast the matches and conducted interviews with Fenerbahce players. Directors were instructed not to display shots of the players in the beFAIR gear during warm-ups or interviews. Keeping the messages out of live-action shots proved more difficult.Asked by The New York Times to explain the essence of its campaign, Fenerbahce took several weeks to reply before providing a multiple-page treatise that went into great detail about how it had been slighted by beIN’s coverage this season.Fenerbahce’s response was laced with the language of conspiracy theory. “If our arguments are considered individually, they would not make much sense,” said Kizilhan, the general secretary, “but seeing them as the parts of a puzzle, it shows the big picture clearly.”Kizilhan acknowledged that some of the nuances of the fight would be difficult to understand for anyone “without having clear understanding and knowledge of local intricacies and ingredients of Turkish football.”One of those intricacies involves Fenerbahce’s rivalry with Galatasaray. The club continues to argue that beIN’s Turkish operation is stocked with individuals sympathetic to its rival, which it accuses of working deliberately to sabotage its season. (Some of the audience for that charge may be internal: Fenerbahce has not won a league title since 2014, and Koc, one of Turkey’s richest men, will stand for another term as club president next year.)Fenerbahce’s president, Ali Koc, has threatened to start a boycott of beIN Sports over his club’s complaints.Associated PressSome beIN executives have been targeted directly, including Hande Sumertas, a former Galatasaray official who is now responsible for media rights at the network. Sumertas has become a lightning rod for fan criticism to such an extent that her name is regularly a trending topic on Twitter in Turkey.Things reached a head earlier this year when a referee turned commentator went on television to insult Sumertas as “brainless.” BeIN issued a strongly worded statement at the time, vowing to use all means at its disposal to defend Sumertas and emphasizing that her role gives her no control over the content of the channel’s broadcasts.But Fenerbahce doubled down, with Kizilhan charging that Sumertas could not work objectively because of her previous work at Galatasaray.“Our concerns and allegations are not over specific individuals but over a systematic approach toward our club,” Kizilhan said, before adding, “BeIN Sports would be wise to re-evaluate their hiring processes and human resources.”Fenerbahce and Galatasaray players before a match in February. Their clubs’ bitter rivalry is another thread in the Fenerbahce-beIN feud.Kenan Asyali/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Turkish soccer federation, which treads a fine line in order not to inflame the huge fan bases of any of its top teams, has been eager to avoid the issue. But in late January, its chairman, Nihat Ozdemir, was asked about the feud. Ozdemir said he did not believe the anti-Fenerbahce chants had been broadcast deliberately, and said the relationship between Turkish soccer and beIN Sports was mutually beneficial. “I don’t think they would want to get out of here,” he said.But while beIN’s new emissary, al-Marri, has spoken with Fenerbahce’s management, the relationship shows no signs of improving.When a court last week ordered Fenerbahce to stop using the beFAIR logo, the team simply changed the language of its protests. On Thursday, in its first home game since the injunction, Fenerbahce’s stadium was festooned with new protest slogans. One message covering the seats at its Sukru Saracoglu stadium implored Fenerbahce fans to “break their games.”Another, darker one was a warning: “Fenerbahce cannot be challenged!” More

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    In N.F.L. Free Agency, Your Team Either Goes Broke or Stinks

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn FootballIn N.F.L. Free Agency, Your Team Either Goes Broke or StinksG.M.s will have to work extra hard to add talent in a salary cap-crunched 2021. It’s still a bad way for most teams to improve.The Dallas Cowboys appeared to have a salary cap surplus until the moment quarterback Dak Prescott’s new $160 million contract was announced Monday. Credit…Ron Jenkins/Associated PressMarch 10, 2021, 5:28 p.m. ETWelcome to the start of N.F.L. free agency, one of the most exciting events of the league’s off-season.Many teams are either flat broke (read: no cap space) or so far from contention that splurging on big-name talent is more likely to hurt than help them. Several of the most coveted free agents were pulled from the market at the last minute. The reports of massive dollar figures doled out in new contracts over the next few weeks will mostly be accounting metafiction, not real money. And the best transactions will inevitably be the ones teams avoid making.Are you excited yet?Free agency officially begins on March 17, but thanks to a “legal tampering period” that begins two days before then, many of the splashiest transactions are announced several days early, making free agency an event that essentially ends before it begins. The N.F.L. instituted the window back in 2016, permitting teams to open talks with other teams’ soon-to-be-free agents a few days early. General managers and agents no longer wink and pretend that they negotiated eight-figure, multiyear contracts seconds after the start of the new league year. Now, they wink and pretend that they negotiated those contracts seconds after the start of the tampering period.This year’s overspending binge promises to be more chaotic than usual due to a rare dip in the N.F.L.’s 2021 salary cap. Each year’s cap is directly tied to the previous year’s league revenues, which partially include gate receipts that of course declined precipitously in 2020 because of pandemic restrictions. The salary cap dipped from $198.2 million in 2020 to anticipated $182.5 million this year. It would have fallen further if the league and the N.F.L. Players Association had not negotiated a sort of relief bill to spread 2020’s losses over multiple years; otherwise, some teams would have been forced to field teams consisting of guaranteed-salary quarterbacks surrounded by groundskeepers and equipment managers.This year’s cap crunch arrived just as the balloon payments came due for many teams that overspent in pursuit of past Super Bowls, forcing those teams to both cut veterans and resort to imaginative bookkeeping to achieve cap compliance. For example, the New Orleans Saints restructured Drew Brees’s contract in early February, even though Brees is expected to retire. The Pittsburgh Steelers restructured Ben Roethlisberger’s contract last week to make ends meet, even though Roethlisberger probably should retire. The Philadelphia Eagles incurred a $33 million cap hit when they traded quarterback Carson Wentz to the Indianapolis Colts in February. To get back under the cap, the team is attempting to perform the budget equivalent of ripping the copper wiring out the walls to sell for gas money.All the accounting sorcery in the multiverse won’t free enough cap space to make the Eagles, Steelers or Saints serious participants in free agency. Meanwhile, the ever-woeful Jacksonville Jaguars (an estimated $72 million under the cap, as of this writing) and the Jets ($67 million) have the most money to spend this year, as they do every few years, which neatly illustrates the folly of trying to build a quality football team via free agency.Some legitimate contenders appear to have money to spend, but again: it’s inadvisable to believe any of the numbers associated with N.F.L. free agency. The defending Super Bowl champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers entered the week with about $12 million in cap space, and are reportedly planning to clear more by extending Tom Brady’s contract until he’s nearly eligible to join the AARP. The Buccaneers then re-signed linebacker Lavonte David and applied the franchise tag to receiver Chris Godwin, temporarily placing them back in the red before they could address other in-house free agents like the pass rusher Shaquil Barrett or tight end Rob Gronkowski.Tampa Bay’s Shaquil Barrett, right, headlines a deep pool of pass rushing free agents. The Buccaneers entered the week with about $12 million in cap space on their ledger, and are reportedly planning to clear more by extending Tom Brady’s contract Credit…Jason Behnken/Associated PressThe Dallas Cowboys also appeared to have a cap surplus until the moment quarterback Dak Prescott’s new contract was announced Monday. Often, a team’s full bank account is just a sign that the bills haven’t been paid yet.Godwin and Chicago Bears receiver Allen Robinson were among the best players available before each received the dreaded franchise tag, a speed bump on the free market that allows teams to retain the rights to some would-be free agents for one year at a high-but-tightly-regulated salary. For Godwin, the franchise tag at least guarantees him a chance to catch passes from Brady and could perhaps mean a return to the Super Bowl. Robinson will be stuck celebrating the Bears’ 71st consecutive season of trying to replace Sid Luckman at quarterback.Even without Robinson and Godwin, there’s a free-agent talent glut at receiver, including up-and-comers Kenny Golladay, Curtis Samuel and JuJu Smith-Schuster; veterans like Larry Fitzgerald, T.Y. Hilton and A.J. Green, and many others. Barrett headlines a deep pool of pass rushers along with Melvin Ingram, Bud Dupree, and Justin Houston. There are more quality players at these positions than solvent potential employers, and the free-agent ranks are growing because teams are still shedding salaries. For example, the Seattle Seahawks released pass rusher Carlos Dunlap on Monday, adding another job applicant to an already crowded field.Supply and demand dictates that shrewd organizations will be able to sign quality players at deep discounts once the initial spending spree for big names like Barrett subsides. That is how the New England Patriots successfully operated from the dawn of the 21st century through last year’s signing of quarterback Cam Newton. The Jets are bound to figure out the secret one of these decades.The dollar values of the contracts that will be announced next week are widely known to be the most imaginary numbers in all of free agency. N.F.L. contracts are typically bloated with non-guaranteed back-end money that provides bragging rights for players and agents and proration lodestones for cap alchemists. Linebacker Kyle Van Noy signed a reported four-year, $51 million contract with the Miami Dolphins last March. The team released him last week after one year, paying him about $15.5 million. Van Noy is now yet another veteran pass rusher seeking work.As Brady and the Buccaneers illustrated last season, a judicious big-name signing or two can truly help a team that’s already stacked. Still, the best approach to free agency is typically to avoid it. In addition to bargain hunting for leftovers, successful franchises sign core players to extensions before they reach the market, then let veterans who have peaked sign elsewhere in exchange for the compensatory draft picks the N.F.L. doles out in its quest for perfect competitive balance.Organizations that overspend during this time of year end up trapped in a binge-and-purge cycle of cutting past losses to make room for their next round of mistakes. For fans of teams like the Jets and Jaguars, who have endured years of misplaced spring hope, a quiet free agency period would be a truly exciting free agency period.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    N.F.L. Sets Salary Cap at $182.5 Million in 2021

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyN.F.L. Sets Salary Cap at $182.5 Million in 2021The figure is down 8 percent from 2020, an anticipated decline based on revenue lost because of the coronavirus pandemic.N.F.L. franchises will have nearly $16 million less than they did last year to pay players, which is sure to distort how general managers allocate their more limited funds.Credit…Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesMarch 10, 2021Updated 4:28 p.m. ETThe N.F.L. has determined the salary cap for the 2021 season, saying each team will have $182.5 million to spend on player payroll, nearly 8 percent less than in 2020, when revenues were cleaved by the coronavirus pandemic. In 2020, the salary cap was $198.2 million, a league record.A decline in the cap, the maximum amount available for teams to spend on player salaries and bonuses, was expected, but it was less severe than anticipated. Still, N.F.L. franchises will have nearly $16 million less than they had last year to pay players, which is sure to distort how general managers allocate their more limited funds.Sports Business Journal was first to report the final salary cap figure, which fell for only the second time since the spending limit was introduced in 1994.With the free-agent market loaded with big-name quarterbacks and other star players looking to relocate, teams seeking to sign those players will have less money left to fill out their rosters. That could lead general managers to sign more rookies and free agents who are willing to play for league-minimum salaries or to sign the biggest names to one-year deals, rather than look to veterans seeking lucrative long-term contracts.Of the 500 or so players looking for new deals, many of them are young players at the end of their rookie contracts who are seeking second deals that reflect their value (think JuJu Smith-Schuster of the Pittsburgh Steelers) or established players seeking to cash in on longer résumés. Trent Williams, an eight-time Pro Bowl offensive tackle, and Jadeveon Clowney, a three-time Pro Bowl defensive end, are expected to garner significant interest, as are midcareer players like defensive end Shaquil Barrett, whose stock has risen because of his role in helping the Tampa Bay Buccaneers win the Super Bowl in February.As a practical matter, each team’s salary cap is subject to adjustments based on rollover amounts from players under contract that they cut or traded. Some teams, like the Cleveland Browns and the New England Patriots, will have more than $200 million in payroll to spend in 2021.Still, the salary cap is a barometer of the health of the league, and the lower cap reflects some grim math: The N.F.L. lost about $4 billion in revenue last season by limiting attendance at games. About 1.2 million fans watched N.F.L. games in person, down from about 17 million in a typical season. Teams lost tens of millions of dollars because of a decline in sales of tickets, suites, food, beverages, parking and sponsorships.The league initially set a salary cap of $175 million to make up for the lost revenue, then raised it to $180 million before settling on $182.5 million.The only other time the salary cap declined was in the 2011 season, in somewhat of a fluke. In 2010, the N.F.L. played without a cap because team owners, unhappy with the labor agreement, exercised their option in 2008 to end the deal ahead of schedule as a way of prompting both sides to return to bargaining. The union and league failed to reach a new deal, however, triggering a capless year. When the two sides ultimately agreed, the salary cap for 2011 was set at $120 million, less than the $123 million salary cap in 2009.The final increase does not reflect revenue that will be generated in newly negotiated broadcast agreements, which are expected to be completed in the coming weeks. The money from those deals is expected to grow by 50 percent to 100 percent over the next decade or so, a windfall that is likely to grow the salary cap significantly in the coming years.ESPN’s deal to broadcast games on Monday nights expires at the end of the 2021 season, as does Fox’s agreement to carry Thursday night games. The league’s other contracts, with CBS, NBC and other carriers, expire after the 2022 season.The N.F.L. and the N.F.L. Players Association could have faced a far worse situation had they not agreed to a 10-year labor agreement last year on March 15 as the coronavirus pandemic was causing shutdowns in the United States. That agreement ensured the two sides would have terms in place to avoid a work stoppage and gave the league enough certainty to begin negotiations with its broadcast partners.A person familiar with the league’s finances said the salary cap could have fallen to about $160 million if the labor agreement had not been signed last March and had negotiations spilled into what was already a chaotic 2020 season. The new labor deal gave the owners the right to add a 17th regular-season game, which they are likely to do in 2021, adding another source of revenue to offset the impact of the pandemic.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    NFL's Concussion Settlement Will Look at Racial Bias in Payouts

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyN.F.L. Asked to Address Race-Based Evaluations in Concussion SettlementMediation in the case could force a reopening of hundreds of denied dementia claims from Black players if race-based evaluation benchmarks are thrown out.Najeh Davenport is one of two retired N.F.L. players who brought suits alleging that the race-based benchmarks for evaluating dementia claims in the league’s concussions settlement were discriminatory.Credit…Jeffery Salter for The New York TimesMarch 9, 2021Updated 8:08 p.m. ETThe judge overseeing the landmark N.F.L. concussion settlement ordered a mediator to look into concerns about the league’s use of separate scoring curves — one for Black athletes, another for white players — used by doctors to evaluate dementia-related claims that retired players say “explicitly and deliberately” discriminated against hundreds if not thousands of Black players.The mediation between the N.F.L. and the lawyers representing the 20,000 or so retired players covered in the settlement comes after two retired Black players, Kevin Henry and Najeh Davenport, filed a civil rights suit and a suit against the settlement in August that called for an end to the practice of race-normed benchmarks to assess their claims of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Both cases were dismissed but lawyers for the two players are planning to appeal.Their allegation of systematic discrimination shined a harsh light on the settlement reached in 2015. The payouts from the settlement have since been plagued by delays, predatory lenders, accusations of fraud and a lack of transparency. Criticisms of the race-based evaluation policies come at a critical time for the N.F.L., as it seeks to address racial inequity and social concerns raised by Black players, who make up about 70 percent of active players on the league’s rosters.After the suits were filed, four members of Congress requested data from the N.F.L. to determine if Black players were being discriminated against. (The N.F.L. declined to share.) Last month, an ABC News report included correspondence between doctors hired to evaluate retired players in which the neuropsychologists raised concerns that race-norming discriminated against Black players. This month, more than a dozen wives of Black retired N.F.L. players sent the judge a petition with nearly 50,000 signatures calling for an end to race-norming.For now, the mediation keeps their complaints alive.The judge overseeing the settlement, Anita B. Brody of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, dismissed the lawsuits because they were an “improper collateral attack” on the settlement. Brody expressed concern about the race-based benchmarks the league’s doctors use, but provided no specifics to guide the mediator, who must “address the concerns relating to the race-norming issue.”A magistrate judge will serve as mediator between the N.F.L. and Christopher Seeger, the lead lawyer for the plaintiffs who represents the entire class of 20,000 or so retired players. There is no timeline for the sides to reach any agreement.Lawyers for Henry and Davenport, as well as the wives of former players, expressed doubt that Seeger will fairly represent Black players’ interests in the mediation. The N.F.L. and Seeger, they said, introduced the use of race-norming into the settlement agreement in 2017 and have no incentive to admit now that it is flawed.“We are deeply concerned that the Court’s proposed solution is to order the very parties who created this discriminatory system to negotiate a fix,” said Cyril Smith, a lawyer for Henry and Davenport. “The class of Black former players whom we represent must have a seat at the table and a transparent process, so that we are not back in the same place four years from now dealing with another fatally flawed settlement.”Christopher Seeger, left, is the lead attorney for about 20,000 former N.F.L. players who reached a settlement with the league over concussions. Some players are now questioning whether he can advocate on behalf of Black players.Credit…Matt Rourke/Associated PressAmy Lewis, whose husband, Ken Jenkins, played in the N.F.L., was equally skeptical. Leaving the N.F.L. and Seeger to work out an agreement is “giving the fox another chance to guard the hen house,” she said in a letter to Judge Brody sent on behalf of more than a dozen other wives of N.F.L. players. “How can any of us have any faith that the violating parties are not going to, once again, bury this and deny civil rights to our husbands?”Lewis said the group would ask the Department of Justice and Congress to launch an investigation into “civil rights violations and possible collusion” between the N.F.L. and Seeger.In a statement, Seeger said he has “not seen any evidence of racial bias in the settlement program,” but “continues to review claims to determine if any claim was inappropriately denied as a result of application of these adjustments.”But he said that race-based demographic adjustments should be scrapped and players who had their claims denied because of race-norming should have their tests scored again without the race-based adjustments if there was evidence of discrimination.“This means eliminated and gone from the settlement,” Seeger said in a statement. Some lawyers remain skeptical that Seeger, who previously denied the existence of any discrimination, will push the N.F.L. hard enough to re-evaluate the scores of the thousands of Black players who have been tested and may not even know why they were excluded, a process that could lead to hundreds of players eventually qualifying for payments each potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.“It’s not hard to do, but it could be expensive for the N.F.L.,” said Justin Wyatt, who represents more than 100 retired players in the settlement. “We need to search for where people have been discriminated against, and that means rescoring every African-American player. It’s incumbent on us to make sure this process is discrimination-free.”Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, who with Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and two members of the House asked the N.F.L. for data on race-norming, said, “The league has failed to produce a shred of scientific evidence supporting the absurd claim that using this race-based formula somehow helps Black former players, instead of unfairly preventing them from getting benefits.”He added: “The N.F.L. is out of excuses — it needs to drop this racist formula immediately.”Thus far, the N.F.L. has paid more than $765 million to 1,189 players with dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and other cognitive and neurological diseases. However, far more players have had their claims denied, audited or withdrawn, including about 70 percent of the claims for dementia.In a statement, the N.F.L. said it was pleased with the judge’s decision to dismiss the cases and looked forward to working with the mediator, Magistrate Judge David R. Strawbridge, “to address the Court’s concerns.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Weston McKennie Is Right Where He Belongs at Juventus

    Credit…Marco Canoniero/LightRocket, via Getty ImagesWeston McKennie Is Right Where He BelongsWhat is most surprising about the American’s path to Juventus is not how far he has come, but how effortless he has made the journey look.Credit…Marco Canoniero/LightRocket, via Getty ImagesSupported byContinue reading the main storyMarch 8, 2021, 10:30 a.m. ETAs he sat down for lunch, Weston McKennie slipped his cellphone out of his pocket and onto the chair in front of him, hiding it beneath his legs. He was breaking the rules — he and his Schalke teammates were strictly forbidden from taking their phones into the cafeteria — but he was prepared to take the risk. There are some calls you do not want to miss.McKennie found himself glancing down every few seconds, checking his screen as surreptitiously as he could. Midway through his meal, it arrived. His screen lit up and his chair buzzed. McKennie grabbed his phone, stood and walked out of the room. “I was just like: ‘Sorry, I’ve got to take this,’” he said. You do not, after all, keep Andrea Pirlo waiting.The last few months have been full of moments like that for McKennie, instances in which the surreal somehow feels quotidian. His career, and his prospects, have undergone the sort of whirlwind transformation that can be difficult to process: the rise is so dizzyingly rapid and the curve so precipitously steep that after a while, the scale and speed of the journey as a whole is difficult to gauge.Signed to help Juventus in midfield, McKennie has instead become a ball-winning, goal-scoring fixture alongside stars like Cristiano Ronaldo.Credit…Miguel Medina/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is only in fleeting vignettes — little scenes from his last six months — that McKennie can catch a reflection of his new reality. Last summer, he was a 22-year-old midfielder from Little Elm, Texas, who had been a rare ray of sunlight in the otherwise stormy sky looming over Schalke, the troubled Bundesliga team where he had spent all of his professional career.His most recent season had been conflicted. Personally, McKennie had found it satisfying: He had made 28 Bundesliga appearances in a campaign interrupted by the pandemic, and had established himself as a mainstay of the United States national team. Collectively, it had been difficult. Schalke had collapsed in the second half of the season. It did not win a single league game between January and the summer.Even in that context, his performances had been good enough to catch the attention of the likes of Southampton and Newcastle, steady performers from the middle reaches of the Premier League. He was one of the few assets Schalke possessed that it could sell. He most likely knew the club needed money. He most definitely knew that cash was scarce in a pandemic-afflicted market.But then his agent mentioned that another team had inquired about his services. “It didn’t seem super-realistic,” McKennie said. “So I kind of brushed it off.” A couple of weeks later, though, the same suitor returned, the interest more concrete this time. “We have to make it happen,” McKennie instructed his agent, as he prepared to join Schalke’s preseason training camp. He was told to expect a call from Juventus, the grand old lady of Italian soccer, coached by Pirlo and home of Cristiano Ronaldo. Precisely, in other words, the sort of call you do not want to miss.McKennie made a name for himself in Europe at Schalke in the Bundesliga. But when the club fell on hard times financially, it cashed in on McKennie by loaning him to Juventus.Credit…Patrik Stollarz/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe conversation went well. Pirlo outlined why he wanted McKennie: There would be lots of games this season, plenty of chances for an energetic, dynamic, ball-hungry player to shine. McKennie did not need a hard sell. “It was more a case of me selling myself to him,” he said. “If that’s what he wanted, then that’s what I’d do.”And so McKennie finds himself where he is now: still a 22-year-old from Little Elm, Texas, but one that has made such an impression in the midfield of the biggest club in Italy — one not battling relegation but competing to win Serie A and the Champions League — that last week it exercised its option to turn his initial one-season loan into a permanent deal, paying $21.5 million for the privilege.It is the final seal of “approval” of his coach, Pirlo, who just so happens to be one of the finest exponents of the midfield art in recent history. “A legend,” McKennie calls him.Sometimes, he said, he overhears one of his teammates expressing disbelief at finding themselves playing in such rarefied air, competing with the heroes of their childhood. “They can’t believe how far they’ve come, that they’re playing in the Champions League,” he said. “And I think that, when I was a kid, I had never even heard of the Champions League.” McKennie is not fulfilling his dreams: Somehow, it is bigger than that, as if he is stretching the bounds of reality.McKennie has appeared in 22 of Juventus’s 25 games in Serie A, and six of seven in the Champions League.Credit…Massimo Pinca/ReutersIt is in those little moments that he can glimpse it. Sometimes, it is something grand that triggers it. When he was younger, he and his family, then living in Germany, where his father’s Air Force career had taken them, went to Camp Nou while on vacation. They explored a lot, he said, during the years they lived near Kaiserslautern, where they moved when McKennie was 6.“The stadium was closed that day,” he remembered. “But we persuaded the security guard to let us in. The team was training: all of those players, Xavi and Andrés Iniesta and Lionel Messi and Ronaldinho.” They stood and watched for a while. When a loose ball flew into the stands, McKennie scurried down to retrieve it and throw it back. That was their cue to leave.He had not been back to Barcelona until December. “It was strange that it was empty, just the players on the field, when I first went, and it was empty again now,” he said. This time, McKennie did not have to plead with security to let him in. He belonged not only in the stadium, but on the field. He scored that night.Sometimes, though, the realizations come in more intimate, more private settings. Those are the ones that catch McKennie by surprise. “I was sitting with Alvaro Morata after training the other day,” he said. “We were just watching Cristiano practicing his free kicks. And we turned to each other and said what a privilege it is, just to be able to do that: to watch him take free kick after free kick.”But while McKennie feels fortunate to find himself where he is, that should not be mistaken for luck. He is no mere tourist at Juventus, passing through, savoring these snapshots of life in the elite, an American on some sort of year abroad in Serie A.The perception, when he joined, was that he was destined to be an option of first reserve: that he would spend much of his time riding the bench, and when he was not, he would be a “hard six,” there to win the ball back and give it to someone with, well, more talent.Juventus made its acquisition of McKennie permanent last week. He may be there a while.Credit…Marco Alpozzi/LaPresse, via Associated PressIn reality, even McKennie is a little “surprised” at how important he has become. He has appeared in 22 of Juventus’s 25 games in Serie A, and six of its seven — so far — in the Champions League. He has emerged, too, as a creative, offensive force: He has scored at Camp Nou, in that rout of Barcelona, and at San Siro, in a win against A.C. Milan. He is comfortable enough in his surroundings to joke that Ronaldo, Aaron Ramsey and Dejan Kulusevski take turns acting as his translator (though his Italian is now good enough, he said, to understand most of what is going on.)At first, he said, he worried about living up to expectations, wondering “why they chose me.” It has taken only a few months for those anxieties to dissipate entirely, quietly shed as his rise gathered speed and height, as McKennie has proved that he belongs.That is what makes his transformation difficult to parse: that it has felt so smooth, so natural, that the line between remarkable and quotidian has blurred quite so readily, that it seems so obvious now not only why McKennie picked up, but why Pirlo called in the first place.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    F.C. Barcelona Elects Joan Laporta as President

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBarcelona Elects a President, and Hands Him a CrisisJoan Laporta won easily in a vote of Barcelona’s membership. But the new president will face thorny issues on and off the field almost immediately.Joan Laporta’s previous term as Barcelona’s president set the stage for a dominant era on the field for the club.Credit…Alejandro Garcia/EPA, via ShutterstockMarch 7, 2021Updated 6:10 p.m. ETSix days after a police raid on its offices led to the seizure of files and the arrests of four club officials, F.C. Barcelona elected Joan Laporta as its new president on Sunday.Laporta, a lawyer who previously served as Barcelona’s president more than a decade ago, defeated two rivals in what he labeled “the most important elections in the history” of Barcelona, one of Europe’s most decorated soccer clubs.He received more than 50 percent of the vote, defeating his closest rival, 54.2 percent to 29.9 percent. In video broadcast on the club’s television network, the two challengers, the runner-up Victor Font and Toni Freixa, congratulated Laporta in a show of unity, and Laporta enjoyed a champagne toast with his supporters. But Laporta’s reward — a billion-dollar organization facing tough decisions about some of its most popular players and a looming financial crisis made worse by the coronavirus pandemic — hardly seems like a prize.The most immediate challenges he faces are navigating the biggest debt crisis in European soccer, currently more than $1.3 billion; lowering the team’s salary bill, at the moment the highest in Europe; and avoiding the loss — perhaps as soon as this summer — of Lionel Messi, the club’s greatest player.Perhaps an even more important task, however, will be uniting a club once revered for elevating modern soccer into high art out of an era of infighting, dirty tricks and red ink. The series of unfolding crises have turned Barcelona from a model of commercial and sporting success into, at times, the punchline of a bad joke.Laporta’s predecessor, Josep Maria Bartomeu, resigned in October, just ahead of a vote to remove him. By then, more than 20,000 of Barcelona’s 140,000 members had turned in hand-signed forms seeking his ouster, and last week he was detained by the police as part of its investigation of the team’s internal affairs.But on Sunday, Bartomeu still lined up — along with everyday fans, team executives, former players and coaches, and even a handful of members of the current first team, including Messi — to cast his presidential vote. Even amid the team’s turmoil, the turnout represented the kind of quaint, one-fan-one-vote ethos on which Barcelona prides itself.The Barcelona star Lionel Messi was among the tens of thousands of club members who voted in Sunday’s election.Credit…Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe election had been delayed by the ongoing repercussions of the pandemic. Restrictions on mass gatherings required Barcelona to change its voting process by spreading polling stations across Catalonia, and by allowing mail-in ballots for the first time in its history. But thousands of the club’s members still turned up in person to cast their votes during the 12 hours allotted for the balloting on Sunday.The club said more than 55,000 votes were cast by members who chose not only a new president but also board members who will serve until 2026. Even before the final ballots were counted, Font and Freixa conceded.“I want to congratulate Laporta for this victory, which does not allow for any discussion,” Freixa said. “We must now support our president.”Toni Freixa said the vote totals “legitimized” Laporta’s victory.Credit…Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesVictor Font with a fan after he arrived to cast his vote at Camp Nou.Credit…Andreu Dalmau/EPA, via ShutterstockIn picking Laporta, Barcelona members appeared to have opted for a candidate who many remember fondly from his previous term. As Barcelona’s president from 2003 to 2010, he ushered in the start of a golden decade of success for the century-old club.His signature decision, elevating the untested Pep Guardiola from his role as coach of Barcelona’s B team to take charge of the first-team squad in 2008, proved to be a masterstroke. Guardiola rebuilt Barcelona around homegrown talents, including Messi, and combined them with established stars to produce a brand of soccer that captivated audiences around the world. The club collected more than a dozen trophies under Guardiola, including three Spanish titles and two victories in the Champions League, European’s soccer richest and most prized club competition.With the current team viewed as aging and below the club’s standard, Laporta will be expected to guide a similar revival. But this time, the outlook is bleaker than ever.More recently, Barcelona has become synonymous with negativity, with the bad news arriving in waves. Since June, the team has had to contend with the outsized impact the coronavirus has had on its finances; a scandal involving a club-financed social-media campaign that targeted Bartomeu’s rivals, including several popular players; a humiliating Champions League exit; a public falling out between Messi and Bartomeu that almost led to Messi’s departure before the season; and then, most recently, last week’s raid on Barcelona’s offices that resulted in the arrests of four team officials.Barcelona had to adapt its voting procedures because of the coronavirus, but many members still turned up at the club’s Camp Nou stadium to cast their ballots in person.Credit…Albert Gea/ReutersWith Barcelona facing the most urgent short-term debt crisis in European soccer, the new president immediately faces the twin challenges of keeping the club afloat while also following through on promises to keep it competitive with not only domestic rivals like Real Madrid and Atlético Madrid but also deep-pocketed foreign challengers like Manchester City, Paris St.-Germain, Liverpool, Chelsea and Manchester United, many of them bankrolled by Gulf nation states, Russian oligarchs or American billionaires.As a member-supported club, Barcelona does not have that luxury. Laporta will have to decide whether or not to forge ahead with a plan put together by the club’s executive team and Goldman Sachs to raise 250 million euros (almost $300 million) by selling a basket of club-owned assets to external investors. The move would be unusual and likely contentious — and it would require the backing of a membership fractured by the recent crisis.The new board also will need to recalibrate supporter expectations, and reverse course from a management style — including by Laporta during his previous tenure — that has drawn criticism for prioritizing short-term rewards, in the form of lavish spending and popular (and expensive) signings, over long-term financial stability.He will also have to restore the club’s battered reputation. At a sports business conference hosted by the Financial Times last month, Christian Seifert, the chief executive of Germany’s Bundesliga, took aim at Barcelona and its rival Real Madrid for their spending habits. “These so-called superclubs are in fact poorly managed, cash-burning machines that were not able, in a decade of incredible growth, to come close to a somehow sustainable business model,” Seifert said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Manchester United Stops Manchester City but Not Its Destiny

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn SoccerManchester United Slows City’s March, but Only for a DayA rivalry victory may only prove a speed bump in the Premier League title. But European rivals will see hope in a blow to City’s rhythm.Manchester United’s celebrations started early on Sunday. City’s, presumably, are still to come.Credit…Pool photo by Peter PowellMarch 7, 2021Updated 3:28 p.m. ETMANCHESTER, England — Manchester United will recognize this feeling, the evanescent satisfaction of a battle won far too late in the day to have any hope of turning the tide of the war, the curious and complex pride that comes from celebrating a victory that highlights only how far you have fallen.It is only three years, after all, since United experienced pretty much the same thing, in pretty much the same place, if not quite in the same circumstances. Manchester City was supposed to claim the Premier League title that afternoon — the first of Pep Guardiola’s reign — at home against its rival, neighbor and longtime persecutor in the spring of 2018.The Etihad Stadium was packed and boisterous, relishing the prospect of the perfect scenario for clinching the championship, with United invited to play the part first of sacrificial victim, and then unwilling observer. What better way, after all, could there be to illustrate the power shift in Manchester, in England, and in Europe, than for City to win the league as United was forced to watch?United, that day, proved recalcitrant guests. Guardiola’s team raced into a two-goal lead, and then hesitated, a brief flash of the old City, the one practiced in the art of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, bubbling up to infect the new. United took advantage, surged back and won.It was clear and obvious at the time that this was a mere postponement of City’s celebrations — even José Mourinho, the United manager, congratulated Guardiola on his looming title win after the game — rather than a threatened cancellation. All concerned knew that City would be proclaimed champion, with ease, sooner rather than later. But for United, victory was a tonic, a solace, a shot across the bow, something to hold on to in the long night of the blue moon.Sunday was not quite a carbon copy. The details were a little different, for a start. It is much earlier in the season, for one, and City remains some way from having the championship mathematically sealed. The Etihad did not need to be silenced: Like every other stadium across Europe, it has been quiet for a year now, the noise and emotion of the fans an increasingly distant and sorrowful memory.United grabbed an early lead and then its best to keep Kevin de Bruyne and his teammates off balance.Credit…Pool photo by Laurence GriffithsThe effect, though, was much the same. United won a penalty inside 38 seconds, Bruno Fernandes converted it within two minutes, and then Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s team set about holding City at arm’s length. Early in the second half, Luke Shaw doubled United’s lead. Anthony Martial might have made it three, but the damage was done. For the day, at least.The extent of the damage will not, in all likelihood, extend beyond that. The 21-game winning run that preceded this result, City’s first defeat since November, makes the Premier League title a foregone conclusion. Guardiola’s team still holds an 11-point lead at the top of the table, with 10 games to play.This loss would need to presage a collapse that is all but unimaginable to prevent Guardiola’s claiming a third championship in four years. United can, once again, claim parochial primacy, but it is not enough to change the map of English soccer’s broader landscape.A few days earlier, United had been flat and uninspired — and a little fortunate — to take a goalless draw at Crystal Palace. Solskjaer’s players had won only twice in the Premier League since January, their stuttering form masked by the stuttering form of, well, everyone else, and in particular the apparently bottomless incompetence of Liverpool. This is not likely to be a corner turned. For United, victory in the derby was a welcome outcome, but nothing more, not really.Bruno Fernandes staked United to its lead with a second-minute penalty kick, but his team still trails City by 11 points with 10 games to go.Credit…Pool photo by Laurence GriffithsBut that does not mean this was a game devoid of significance. For City, certainly, it would be worth pausing to reflect not only on the fact of defeat, but the nature of it. Its loss in this fixture in 2018 was sandwiched by two losses to Liverpool in the Champions League, one comprehensive, one narrow and unfortunate, but both enough to end the club’s hopes of winning its first European crown.With the league title all but in hand now, that is where Guardiola’s focus will shift in the coming weeks. There are two domestic cups to be won, too, but it is that Champions League trophy that Guardiola — and much of City’s hierarchy — craves more than any other, that trophy which they believe will complete the club’s transformation into true European aristocracy.It has been hard, over the last couple of months, to see who might realistically stop City. Real Madrid and Barcelona are shadows of what they once were. Atlético Madrid is tiring, fast. The reigning champion, Bayern Munich, has developed a curious habit of giving almost all of its opponents a two-goal head start. Paris St.-Germain is undermined by inconsistency. No club has been quite so imperious this season as City; it is hardly bold to claim that this is, currently, and defeat notwithstanding, the best team in Europe.All of those teams, then, will have welcomed United’s victory as proof that City is not invincible. They will have seen glimpses that, for all the resources that Guardiola has access to and for all that he has managed them expertly through this compact, condensed campaign, City’s players are not immune to fatigue. Kevin de Bruyne, in particular, seemed unable to influence this game as he would have wished.Raheem Sterling and City will try their rhythm back on Wednesday against Southampton.Credit…Pool photo by Peter PowellRivals will have taken heart from the first 20 minutes or so, when City repeatedly played its way into trouble, unable to find its rhythm, or to piece together United’s plan. And, most of all, they will have noted how Solskjaer — an underrated tactician in games of this ilk — neutralized João Cancelo, the fullback who becomes a midfield playmaker and, in doing so, makes this iteration of City tick.Solskjaer’s antidote was a simple but nerveless one. He instructed Marcus Rashford to play high and wide on United’s left, forcing Cancelo into a choice: either come into midfield and leave space to exploit, or stay in his lane, and defang his own team’s attack. He chose both, and neither: It was no surprise that both of United’s goals originated on his side.Cancelo has been one of City’s great strengths this season. His role has been the innovation that has re-energized Guardiola’s system. On Sunday at the Etihad, Solskjaer turned him into what City has seemed to lack for weeks and for months: a weakness. It will make not the slightest difference to the destiny of the Premier League title race, of course. Most teams will lack the personnel or the inclination to be able to repeat the trick.But for those sides across Europe who stand in the way of Manchester City and a clean sweep of all four trophies, it will be something more than a solace, more than a tonic. For Guardiola, and for City, it is a reminder and a warning, that so high are their sights that one battle lost can cost the entire war.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More