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    Lionel Messi, Barcelona and the Crippling Cost of Success

    Credit…Associated PressThe Great ReadBarcelona and the Crippling Cost of SuccessThe world’s richest soccer club is facing a financial crisis. Executives blame the pandemic, but many of its biggest problems, including its enormous debt to Lionel Messi, are its own fault.Credit…Associated PressSupported byContinue reading the main storyTariq Panja and Feb. 12, 2021Updated 9:53 a.m. ETThe careful plan hatched by Barcelona, the richest soccer club in the world, fell apart almost as soon as its negotiators entered the room.On a sweltering late summer afternoon, Barcelona’s executives had come to one of Monte Carlo’s most exclusive hotels to strike a deal with the German club Borussia Dortmund for one of the most exciting young prospects in Europe: the French forward Ousmane Dembélé.Barcelona had decided on its strategy, and its price: Dembélé, in Barcelona’s eyes, was worth $96 million, and not a cent more. No matter how hard Dortmund pressed for a higher fee, the men from Barcelona would hold firm. The two executives steeled themselves as they headed to the suite the Germans had booked. They embraced before knocking on the door. And then they stepped inside, only to find that Dortmund’s executives had decided on a strategy, too.The Germans told their guests that they had a plane to catch. They had no time to exchange small talk, and they were not here to negotiate. If Barcelona wanted Dembélé, it would have to pay roughly double the Spaniards’ valuation: $193 million. The price would make the 20-year-old Frenchman the second-most expensive soccer player in history.Barcelona’s president, Josep Maria Bartomeu, was stunned. But he did not walk away. He quickly agreed to pay almost the entire amount, settling at a fee of $127 million up front, with a further $50 million in easily-achieved performance bonuses. For all his intentions of playing hardball, he felt he did not have a choice.Only a few weeks earlier, Barcelona had seen one of its own crown jewels, Neymar, plucked by Paris St.-Germain. Bartomeu could not risk disappointing a fan base still reeling from that blow by returning home empty-handed. He needed a marquee signing, a trophy, a trinket. He had to pay the price.The Billion Dollar ClubFans at Camp Nou in 2019, the year Barcelona surpassed $1 billion in revenue. The club’s structure gives members a strong say in team affairs but also makes executives eager to please them.Credit…Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesF.C. Barcelona has, for much of the last decade, had the look of a sporting and commercial colossus. This century, its on-field success and its off-field wealth have made it the envy of even its most bitter rivals.It is the first (and only) team to surpass $1 billion in annual revenue. It employs arguably the finest player in history, Lionel Messi. On matchdays, the cavernous, iconic stadium it calls home fills with almost 100,000 card-carrying, dues-paying club members.But Barcelona has been living on the edge for much of its recent history, a consequence of years of impulsive management, rash decisions and imprudent contracts. For years, soaring revenues helped paper over its worst mistakes, but the coronavirus has now changed the math.One former board member believes the pandemic will eventually cost the team more than half a billion dollars in revenue. Its salary bill is the highest in Europe. It has already broken debt covenants it agreed to with its creditors, which will almost certainly mean higher interest costs in the future.The result is that the club that brings in more money than any other in world soccer now faces a crisis: not only a crushing financial squeeze, but a contentious presidential election and potentially even the loss of its crown jewel, Messi. Its hurried pursuit of Dembélé, among others, is only one part of how it got here.Even as Bartomeu finalized that deal, in August 2017, Barcelona knew it had been stung. The club had banked $222 million from the sale of Neymar weeks earlier and now needed a flashy signing to change the conversation. Every seller in Europe, though, knew Barcelona was cash-rich and time-poor. “You have a weaker negotiating position,” said Jordi Moix, Bartomeu’s former vice president for economic affairs. “They’re waiting for you.”If any club could afford to overpay, though, it was Barcelona. Over the previous decade, it had been transformed into not only the best team in the world — the winner of three Champions League titles in seven years — but also its greatest moneymaking machine.Its revenues were then inching ever closer to the target of one billion euros set by Bartomeu in 2015. It hit the mark — in dollars, at least — in 2019, two years ahead of schedule. Plans for a sleek entertainment and leisure district around the team’s stadium and the launch of the Barcelona Innovation Hub would keep the river of money flowing.At the same time, though, the club was walking an increasingly delicate financial tightrope. There is another billion-dollar watermark it has passed: its total debt, including the amount owed to banks, tax authorities, rival teams and its own players, has ballooned to more than 1.1 billion euros.More than 60 percent of that is considered short-term debt — more than any team in Europe — but that did not stop the lavish spending in the transfer market: not only the price paid for Dembélé but, a few months later, the $145 million committed for the capture of Philippe Coutinho from Liverpool — another negotiation in which Barcelona folded, and agreed to a price it could not afford to pay.The burden of paying the players already on the club’s books, too, has continued to grow. According to Carles Tusquets, its interim president since Bartomeu was deposed last year, Barcelona’s annual salary bill of $771 million now eats up 74 percent of the club’s annual income, a much larger slice than its contemporaries, many of whom aim to keep that percentage no higher than 60. “It is an awful lot,” Tusquets said.The pandemic slashed Barcelona’s revenue, but not its expenses.Credit…F.C. BarcelonaIn some ways, Barcelona was a victim of its own success. The more its players won, the greater the figures they could command in salary negotiations. The fact that so much of its squad — the likes of Messi but also Gerard Piqué, Sergio Busquets and Jordi Alba — were seen as the spiritual soul of the club, visible proof of the road from the club’s La Masia academy to the first team, gave the players, not the club, leverage.“Clearly a lack of leadership, the leadership of the board being afraid to say no, is one of the key things that needs to be avoided going forward,” said Víctor Font, one of the candidates to become the club’s next president when elections are held in March. “Wages had gone too high.”But when the club could rely on revenues tipping $1 billion every year, paying out almost $700 million in salaries was “a stress, but affordable,” Moix said, adding: “It did not give us much room for savings, but they were the backbone of the team. If we did not make the agreements, they would have gone.”Moix admitted that Bartomeu and his board made mistakes, but he is convinced that it was an event outside of their control that finally tipped the club off its high-wire. “As time goes by things will be put in perspective,” he said. “How much is due to management, how much to Covid? It’s a subjective discussion.”Barcelona’s 99,000-seat stadium, Camp Nou, has been shuttered for nearly a year. A club official expects the pandemic to cost the team about $600 million in lost revenue.Credit…Joan Monfort/Associated PressEither way, the scale of the damage is vast. In its most recent financial reports, Barcelona announced a loss for the year of $117 million. It estimates that it already has lost $246 million as a result of the pandemic. Moix suggested the total hit eventually will top $600 million.At the same time, its debt to financial institutions and other clubs has risen by $327 million. Barcelona executives believe that figure — despite drastic efforts to cut costs — will climb further in 2021. Both its stadium and museum, two of Spain’s most popular tourist destinations, are likely to remain shut to visitors for at least the rest of this season.With its forecast revenues for the next year revised down by $250 million, its players’ salaries may soon account for as much as eighty cents of every dollar brought into the club. The same squad that brought Barcelona such glory in the recent past seems, now, to foreshadow toil in the immediate future.And there is no clearer example of that than the player who — above all — has come to symbolize this Barcelona, the player on whose shoulders its rise to global pre-eminence rested and whose salary, now, represents its single greatest financial commitment: Lionel Messi.PharaohBarcelona’s former president, Josep Maria Bartomeu, and Messi on the day the star signed his current contract. The four-year deal will pay him almost $675 million.Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe contract Messi signed with Barcelona — in the fall of 2017, in the aftermath of Neymar’s departure — runs to 30 pages, according to a Spanish newspaper that was leaked a copy of the document. It contains a screed of eye-watering figures: a signing bonus of $139 million. A “loyalty” bonus of $93 million. A total value, if Messi meets every clause and every condition, of almost $675 million.Last month, the newspaper that revealed its contents, El Mundo, described it as “Pharaonic,” a deal that was “ruining Barcelona.” That Messi was the world’s best-paid player was not a surprise: It had been reported at the time the contract was agreed that he would earn an annual salary of around $132 million.To those outside Barcelona, it was seeing the sheer scale of the deal in black and white that was most striking. To those inside the club, though, the problem was not the figures but that they had been revealed to the public. Ronald Koeman, Barcelona’s coach, called for anyone found responsible for leaking the contract to be excommunicated. The club threatened to take legal action. Messi, too, was furious at what he perceived as an attempt to sabotage his standing at the club.Messi’s relationship with Barcelona has been strained for some time. But last summer, after a third consecutive season of disappointment and a historic 8-2 humbling in the Champions League, his frustration boiled over and he gave the club formal notice that he intended to end his contract and leave.Bartomeu refused even to countenance the idea. If any suitor wanted to sign Messi, he declared, it would have to pay a fee. Though Messi saw that as the breaking of not just a promise but a contractual obligation, he eventually backed down, unwilling to take the club he has represented since he was 13 to court in order to force his exit.Six months later, his future is no more certain. His deal expires in June. Since Jan. 1, he has been free to agree to a move this summer to any club outside Spain. In a television interview last month, he said he would “wait until the season ends” before making any decision. “If I do leave,” he said, “I want to leave in the best way possible.”Letting Messi walk away this summer would ease Barcelona’s cash crisis, but it is a solution both fans and executives consider unthinkable.Credit…Marcelo Del Pozo/ReutersThough it is taboo for it to be said in public — and though nobody would welcome it — there are those inside Barcelona who believe Messi’s departure may be a necessary evil. Last summer, a few whispered that it made sense to cash in on Messi while the club still could, and not just because the transfer fee and the savings on his nine-figure salary could add more $250 million to the team’s bottom line.Given his status, and his impact, few believe Messi himself is overpaid, but some members of the previous board wondered if he had an inflationary effect on the squad as a whole. Barcelona was paying out salaries worth hundreds of thousands of euros a week to fringe players. Messi’s earnings had raised the wage ceiling so high that the salaries of his teammates — especially the senior, home-reared ones — were rising quickly alongside it.Moix, for his part, did not share that logic. “We can’t negotiate with an asset like this,” he said. Nor could Barcelona, really, negotiate at all; there are only a few clubs in the world capable of meeting Messi’s salary and his ambition, and none were eager to pay a premium for a player they might be able to get for free this summer.Regardless, according to Moix, fixing a price for Messi proved irrelevant. “It is a theoretical question whether we would have sold him for 100 million euros,” he said. “Nobody made an offer.”Fire SaleThe former Barcelona president Joan Laporta is running to regain his old post. Credit…Oscar Del Pozo/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAs the club’s presidential election draws closer, each candidate is trying to position himself as the only man — and they are all men — with a solution to the financial crisis.But Barcelona’s charm, in a sense, is also its curse: Every move the club makes has to be made not only with the support of whoever wins the election on March 7, but with the backing of its 140,000-strong membership.“It makes it a bit more difficult to manage,” Moix said. “But that fact is also one of the differences we use to try to attract sponsors and business. The members are the real owners.”In the past, that has contributed to the club’s largess: Bartomeu might not have been so desperate to land Dembélé, whatever the cost, had he not feared a fan revolt if he failed. Font, one of his potential successors, is convinced the lack of professional experience among previous boards has led to some of the poor decision-making.Joan Laporta, a former president now running for his old post, last year labeled Barcelona “the club of three billion: one billion in income, one billion in expenses and one billion in debt.” He, like his rivals, has vowed to repair the team’s financial fortunes.“It’s not your money but you can’t just do what you want,” Font said. “It has nothing to do with ownership structure, it has to do with poor governance, people who are not equipped to make decisions. For them it’s fun. It’s like a fun toy, I play with it, and I make decisions I believe make sense. That’s why you need people that understand playing with a toy in the wrong way can be dangerous.”Now, though, it leaves the three remaining candidates for president with the toughest of electoral sells: promising cutbacks while continuing to meet the fans’ expectations. Most accept that the club’s salary commitments will have to be reduced, though that is rather easier said than done.Just as Borussia Dortmund realized that Barcelona, in 2017, was in no position to haggle, European soccer — ravaged by the pandemic — is well aware that it is now, in effect, a distressed seller. Its players are unlikely to command premium prices, if buyers in a position to pay distorted salaries for aging stars can be found in the first place.That has forced executives to examine other measures to try to alleviate the financial strain. Some of the costs — like an annual payment of five million euros to Atlético Madrid, a putative rival, for first refusal on any of its players — make little sense. Others, like seven-figure payments for past signings, are already baked in.Víctor Font, a business executive, and Toni Freixa, a lawyer, will face Laporta in next month’s election. To win, each must balance hard truths and fan expectations.Credit…Enric Fontcuberta/EPA, via ShutterstockFor now, the club has been scrambling to renegotiate some of what it owes with its creditors, but it is likely that any attempt will mean doing so on worse terms.It is exploring whether it can be granted an advance on future television income — worth around $190 million per season — or strike an innovative deal, designed by Goldman Sachs, to raise $240 million by selling a stake in a basket of Barcelona’s nonsporting assets — including its content creation business and its merchandising operation. The response, according to people familiar with the offer, has been positive.Font said officials had pitched details of the money-raising plans to him, but he remains unconvinced. “We have a saying in Spanish: bread for today, hunger for tomorrow,” he said.Goldman Sachs also has agreed on a proposal with the club to arrange financing for a $988 million refit of the Camp Nou, a stadium that does not have a single sky box and is mostly uncovered. The project — which requires member approval — also includes for the creation of other properties, including a smaller, secondary stadium.There is, of course, one other option. Allowing Messi to leave might solve many of the problems on the balance sheet in one fell swoop, and buy the club some breathing space. But while all of the candidates talk of the need to restore financial sanity, that is a road nobody is willing to take.“The best player in the history of such a sport generates a lot of commercial value,” Font said. He is so determined to ensure that Messi stays that he would offer him a lifetime contract, one that would bond the player to the club even after he has retired. It would be fitting reward, after all, for the player who — more than any other — brought Barcelona here.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Super Bowl Ratings Hit a 15-Year Low. It Still Outperformed Everything Else.

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storySuper Bowl Ratings Hit a 15-Year Low. It Still Outperformed Everything Else.The game between two marquee quarterbacks was not competitive. Still, the Super Bowl is expected to be the most watched television program this year.Television viewership for the Super Bowl was down 9 percent compared with last year.Credit…Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesFeb. 9, 2021Updated 4:20 p.m. ETSunday’s Super Bowl was watched by just 91.6 million people on CBS, the lowest number of viewers for the game on traditional broadcast television since 2006. A total of 96.4 million people watched when other platforms — like the CBS All Access streaming service and mobile phone apps — were counted, the lowest number of total viewers since 2007.Still, the Super Bowl will surely be the most watched television program of 2021, and the N.F.L. is expected to see a huge increase in television rights fees when it signs several new television distribution agreements over the next year.After peaking at 114 million television viewers in 2015, television ratings for the Super Bowl have declined in five of the past six years. The 9 percent decline in television viewership from last year’s Super Bowl is roughly in line with season-long trends. N.F.L. games this season were watched by 7 percent fewer people than the season before.Many of the necessary ingredients for a bonanza Super Bowl were present. The game featured an intriguing matchup between the two most popular quarterbacks in football, Tom Brady of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs. The weather Sunday was freezing across much of the country, which traditionally drives people inside to be entertained by their televisions. But the game itself failed to deliver, all but ending by the third quarter when the Buccaneers led, 31-9, with no fourth-quarter scoring or hint of a competitive game. Viewership is measured as the average of the audience watching at each minute of the game; the longer a game is competitive and viewers stay tuned in, the better.The hype and marketing machine surrounding the game was also changed by the coronavirus pandemic. The N.F.L. credentialed about 4,000 fewer media members for the Super Bowl compared with last year, meaning fans saw less media live from the Super Bowl ahead of the game. Fans were discouraged from gathering for parties, and instead of staying home and watching alone, it seems many just did something else. Just 38 percent of all households with a television were tuned to the game, the lowest percentage since 1969, according to Nielsen.The N.F.L. joins almost every other sport in seeing viewership declines over the past year. The pandemic shut down the sporting world for months in the spring, and when games resumed they frequently lacked energy with few or no fans in the stands. Games were often played on unusual days or at unusual times, disrupting the traditional sports viewership calendar.Viewership for the N.B.A. finals was down 49 percent and for the Stanley Cup finals was down 61 percent. It is not just sports. Compared to this time last year, viewership of all broadcast television — CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox — is down 20 percent during prime time. In that context, a 7 percent season drop and a 9 percent Super Bowl drop is a comparatively decent showing for the N.F.L.Importantly, it also won’t slow down the N.F.L.’s march toward lucrative new television contracts. All indications — including deals made by other leagues and the competitive demand among networks and streaming services — suggest that the league will sign new agreements over the next year with a significant increase in average annual value.Even in a world of fractured viewership that is quickly moving toward streaming, the N.F.L. remains king. Of the 100 most viewed television programs in 2020, 76 were N.F.L. games, according to Mike Mulvihill, an executive at Fox Sports. And while the 38 percent of households tuned to the game was a modern day low for the Super Bowl, the last time that number was beat by anything other than an N.F.L. game was the 1994 Winter Olympics, according to the website Sports Media Watch, when the figure skaters Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding competed amid the scandal of Harding’s involvement in an attack on Kerrigan.The N.F.L. could become the king of streaming, too. According to CBS the Super Bowl averaged 5.7 million viewers streaming the game, 68 percent more than last year.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Marty Schottenheimer, 77, Winning N.F.L. Coach With Four Teams, Dies

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyMarty Schottenheimer, 77, Winning N.F.L. Coach With Four Teams, DiesWith a running attack known as Martyball, his teams won 200 regular season games and reached the playoffs 13 times but never made it to the Super Bowl.Marty Schottenheimer coaching the  Cleveland Browns during the 1980s. He gained acclaim for turning around floundering teams. Credit…The Sporting News/Sporting News, via Getty ImagesFeb. 9, 2021Updated 3:01 p.m. ETMarty Schottenheimer, who won 200 regular-season games as an N.F.L. head coach, the eighth-highest total in league history, and took teams to the playoffs in 13 of his 21 seasons but never made it to the Super Bowl, died on Monday in Charlotte, N.C. He was 77. The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, said Bob Moore, a spokesman for the family. Schottenheimer died at a hospice facility near his home in Charlotte after being in its care since Jan. 30. He was first given a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s in 2014.Coaching four franchises with an often headstrong manner, Schottenheimer gained acclaim for turning around floundering teams, often emphasizing a power-running offense known as Martyball.At first, the tag was emblematic of his winning ways, at least in the regular season. But as the years passed, and Schottenheimer’s teams reached a conference final only three times and then lost all three games on that final rung toward the Super Bowl, Martyball became a term of derision, branding his offense as too conservative.Schottenheimer coached the original Cleveland Browns from midway through the 1984 season to 1988, the Kansas City Chiefs from 1989 to 1998, the Washington Redskins in 2001 (the team dropped that name last July) and the San Diego Chargers from 2002 to 2006.His teams went 200-126-1 over all, and he was named the 2004 N.F.L. coach of the year by The Associated Press when his Chargers went 12-4 after finishing the previous season at 4-12. But they were upset by the Jets in the first round of the playoffs.Schottenheimer’s squads had a 5-13 record in playoff games.In the run-up to the Chargers-Jets playoff game, Lee Jenkins of The New York Times, reflecting on Schottenheimer’s intensity, wrote how “anyone who watches Schottenheimer standing on the sideline Saturday night against the Jets, arms crossed and feet shoulder-width apart, will recognize him as that angry professor from Kansas City and Cleveland.”“He still wears his gold spectacles,” Jenkins wrote, “and sets his square jaw and roars his favorite football platitudes in a hoarse baritone that makes him sound as if he has been screaming for three and a half quarters.”Schottenheimer as head coach of the San Diego Chargers during a divisional playoff game in 2007. After the Chargers lost, he was fired.  Credit…Mike Blake/ReutersHue Jackson, an assistant to Schottenheimer with the Redskins and a future head coach of the Oakland Raiders and the second Cleveland Browns franchise, was struck by Schottenheimer’s football smarts coupled with an insistence on control.“My time with him, I watched one of the most passionate football coaches I had ever been around,” Jackson told ESPN in 2016. “I know everybody has the stories about Marty crying.”“He taught me a ton about the running game, being tough, just what it meant to be a part of a team,” Jackson recalled, adding, “Marty does not back down from anybody.”Martin Edward Schottenheimer was born on Sept. 23, 1943, in Canonsburg, Pa., near Pittsburgh, and grew up in nearby McDonald, a coal town, where his grandfather Frank, a German immigrant, had worked in the mines. His father, Edward, worked for a grocery chain, and his mother, Catherine (Dunbar) Schottenheimer, was a homemaker.Schottenheimer was considered one of the best high school defensive linemen in western Pennsylvania. He went on to the University of Pittsburgh, playing at linebacker from 1962 to 1964, and was named a second-team All-American by The Associated Press for his senior season.He was selected in the fourth round of the N.F.L.’s 1965 draft by the Baltimore Colts and in the seventh round of the American Football League draft by the Buffalo Bills.Schottenheimer, 6 feet 3 inches and 225 pounds, spent four seasons with the Bills and another two with the Boston Patriots.After working in real estate following his retirement as a player, he turned to coaching in the N.F.L. He spent two years as the Giants’ linebacker coach and then was their defensive coordinator in 1977. He coached the Detroit Lions’ linebackers for two seasons after that before becoming the Browns’ defensive coordinator. He succeeded Sam Rutigliano as the Browns’ head coach midway through the 1984 season, when they were 1-7.Relying on a power ground game featuring Earnest Byner and Kevin Mack and the passing of Bernie Kosar, Schottenheimer took the Browns to the American Football Conference final following the 1986 and 1987 seasons, but they lost to the Denver Broncos each time in their bid to reach the Super Bowl.The first time, the quarterback John Elway led the Broncos to a tying touchdown after they took over on their 2-yard line late in the fourth quarter, the sequence that became known as “the drive.” The Browns were then beaten on a field goal in overtime.The next year, in a play that became known as “the fumble,” Byner was stripped of the football just as he was about to cross the goal line for a potential game-tying touchdown with about a minute left. The Broncos took a safety and ran out the clock for a 38-33 victory.Schottenheimer’s 1988 Browns team went 10-6 and lost in the first round of the playoffs. At the time, his brother, Kurt, was the team’s defensive coordinator, and when the owner, Art Modell, insisted that he reassign his brother, Schottenheimer quit. He had also resisted Modell’s demand that he hire a new offensive coordinator, having filled that role himself when it become vacant that year.Schottenheimer was the first to admit that he was strong-willed.“Maybe I thought there was a pot of gold somewhere else to be found,” he said in his memoir, “Martyball!” (2012), written with Jeff Flanagan. “But I was stubborn, very stubborn back then. I’ve always been stubborn but much more so when I decided to leave Cleveland.”He then began a 10-season run as coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, taking them to the playoffs seven times.Before the 1993 season, the Chiefs obtained two of the N.F.L.’s marquee names, quarterback Joe Montana, in a trade, and running back Marcus Allen as a free agent. The team then went 11-5 and reached the A.F.C. final against the Bills. But Schottenheimer once again missed out on the Super Bowl. Montana left the game early in the second half with an injury, and the Bills rolled to a 30-13 victory.Schottenheimer as head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs in 1997. The team went to 13-3 in the regular season that year but lost to the Denver Broncos in the first round of the playoffs. Credit…Jed Jacobsohn/AllsportThe Chiefs were 13-3 in the 1997 regular season, only to lose to the Broncos in the playoffs’ first round. Schottenheimer was fired after the Chiefs went 7-9 in 1998, the only time one of his Kansas City teams finished below .500.After two years as an analyst for ESPN, Schottenheimer was hired as the Washington coach in 2001. He took the Redskins to an 8-8 record, then was fired once more.His last N.F.L. stop came in San Diego, where he twice lost in the playoffs’ first round, the second time following the Chargers’ 14-2 season in 2006 behind their brilliant running back LaDainian Tomlinson. In firing Schottenheimer after that season, the Chargers cited his feuding with the general manager, A.J. Smith, over control of roster decisions.Schottenheimer was coach and general manager of the Virginia Destroyers of the United Football League in 2011, taking them to the league title.He is survived by his wife, Pat (Hoeltgen) Schottenheimer; a son, Brian, who was a quarterback coach under him; a daughter, Kristen; his brothers Bill and Kurt; a sister, Lisa; and four grandchildren.Schottenheimer refused to second-guess decisions he had made in the playoffs or at any other time.“I’ve made calls that, by all reason, were perfect, and got nothing,” he once told The Boston Globe. “And I’ve made calls that were inappropriate to the situation and they’ve worked. So go figure. Pro football is a strange game.”Alex Traub contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Why Patrick Mahomes Lost Last Night

    Why Patrick Mahomes Lost Last NightDoug Mills/The New York TimesPatrick Mahomes didn’t look anything like himself during the Super Bowl, largely because Tampa Bay’s pass rush had him on the run all game — setting a fairly incredible record in the process.Here’s how the Buccaneers disrupted the Chiefs’ unflappable quarterback → More

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    Britt Reid, Son of Chiefs Coach, Drank Alcohol Ahead of Car Crash

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Super Bowl 2021N.F.L.’s Most Challenging YearGame HighlightsThe CommercialsHalftime ShowWhat We LearnedAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBritt Reid, Son of Chiefs Coach, Drank Alcohol Ahead of Car CrashReid told the police he had “two or three drinks” before slamming into a car that carried two small children last week. One is hospitalized with life-threatening injuries.Britt Reid did not travel with the Kansas City Chiefs to Tampa, Fla., for the Super Bowl on Sunday.Credit…Mark Brown/Getty ImagesKevin Draper and Feb. 8, 2021Updated 3:41 p.m. ETBritt Reid, the outside linebackers coach for the Kansas City Chiefs and a son of the head coach, Andy Reid, told police officers he had “two or three drinks” before he was involved in an automobile crash Thursday night that left a child with life-threatening injuries, according to a search warrant filed in Jackson County, Mo., circuit court.The crash occurred just days before the Super Bowl in Tampa, Fla., on Sunday, when the Chiefs, the reigning N.F.L. champions, played the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The Chiefs flew to Tampa on Saturday, but Britt Reid, 35, did not make the trip.According to the search warrant, an officer could smell “a moderate odor of alcoholic beverages” on Reid after the crash. The search warrant said the police sought to draw Reid’s blood and test it for alcohol and other controlled substances.On Friday, in a statement, the team confirmed that Reid had been involved in a crash, but provided no details. “We are in the process of gathering information, and we will have no further comment at this time,” the statement said.In response to an inquiry about a possible car crash involving Britt Reid, a spokesman for the police department in Kansas City, Mo., said that a crash had occurred on Interstate 435, not far from the Chiefs’ training facility.The spokesman would not provide more details or identify anyone who was involved in the crash, citing a Missouri law that prohibits the police from releasing the names of people who have not been charged with a crime. But the details in the police incident report, such as the make and model of the cars involved and the description of what happened, matched the search warrant, which does name Reid.According to the police, a vehicle ran out of gas on a freeway entrance ramp less than a mile from Arrowhead Stadium. The driver stopped with his flashers on and called his cousins for help. When they arrived, the cousins parked in front of the disabled car and left their lights on, as the battery was dying in the disabled car.Reid entered the on-ramp driving a Ram pickup truck and hit the left front of the stranded car, according to the police incident report. The driver was sitting in the car and was not injured.Reid’s pickup then slammed into the rear of the cousins’ car. The driver and an adult in the front passenger seat were not injured. But a 4-year-old and a 5-year-old sitting in the back were both injured and taken to the hospital, the 5-year-old with life-threatening injuries.The 5-year-old was still in critical condition on Monday morning with a brain injury, according to a police statement.After the Super Bowl, which the Chiefs lost, 31-9, Andy Reid addressed his son’s car crash for the first time.“My heart goes out to all those that were involved in the accident, in particular the family with the little girl who’s fighting for her life,” Andy Reid said, adding that his “heart bleeds.”Britt Reid had non-life-threatening injuries, the police said, but complained of stomach pain and was also taken to a hospital after the crash.“Most serious-injury/fatality crashes take weeks to investigate, as do criminal investigations,” the Kansas City Police Department said in a statement released Monday, explaining why no arrests have been made and the names of those involved in the crash have not been released. “This is no different.”Reid has been a Chiefs coach since his father was hired as head coach eight years ago, and has spent the last two seasons as the outside linebackers coach. Before joining the Chiefs’ coaching staff, he spent three seasons at Temple University as a graduate assistant working with the offense.He was also an intern for his father with the Philadelphia Eagles in 2009.Britt Reid has been in legal trouble previously. In 2007, Reid, then 22, pleaded guilty to gun and drug charges stemming from a road rage dispute. He brandished a handgun at another driver in suburban Philadelphia on the same day his brother Garrett was arrested after a drug-related traffic crash. Andy Reid took a five-week leave of absence from the Eagles after his sons were arrested.Britt Reid also pleaded guilty to simple assault, possession of an instrument of crime and drug possession in the case. While out on bail before the case was decided, he was arrested after driving into a shopping cart in a parking lot and eventually pleaded guilty to driving under the influence.In 2012, Garrett Reid was found dead of an accidental overdose in his dormitory room at the Eagles’ training site in Bethlehem, Pa. He was 29.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    At the Super Bowl, the N.F.L.’s Social Message Is Muddled

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Super Bowl 2021N.F.L.’s Most Challenging YearGame HighlightsThe CommercialsHalftime ShowWhat We LearnedAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn Pro FootballAt the Super Bowl, the N.F.L.’s Social Message Is MuddledThe N.F.L. espoused racial unity and praised health care workers. But its inaction on racial diversity, its stereotypic imagery and its decision to host a potential superspreader event said something different.Masked fans paid tribute to front line workers and displayed messages of racial unity during the second quarter of the Super Bowl.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesFeb. 8, 2021Updated 3:38 p.m. ETThe N.F.L. likes to project power and precision. Sideline catches are scrutinized with zoom lenses, first downs are measured in inches and Air Force jets fly over stadiums just as “The Star-Spangled Banner” reaches its peak.But when it comes to topics like race, health and safety, the league’s certainty dissolves into a series of mixed messages.That was the case on Sunday at the Super Bowl, the N.F.L.’s crowning game, which is typically watched by about 100 million viewers in the United States. The championship game provides the league a massive platform each year to promote itself as America’s corporate do-gooder, with the best interests of its enormous fan base at heart. That was harder to do this year as the country remained roiled by the deadly coronavirus pandemic, which has exacerbated festering political division and racial unrest, issues the N.FL. had to plow past to complete its season.On Sunday, at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Fla., the N.F.L. trumpeted its support for the fight against social injustice. The national anthem was performed by two musicians, one Black and one white. The poet Amanda Gorman, who wowed the country with her recitation at President Biden’s inauguration, read an ode to the three honorary captains — a teacher, a nurse and a soldier — frontline workers in different fields. The TV announcers spoke often of the work that the league and the players have done to battle racial inequities.Yet, moments later, when the Kansas City Chiefs took the field, the N.F.L. played a recording in the reduced capacity stadium of the made-up war cry that is a team custom. The prompt got fans to swing their arms in a “tomahawk chop,” an act that many find disrespectful and a perpetuation of racist stereotypes of the nation’s first people. Last week, the Kansas City Indian Center, a social service agency, put up two billboards in the city that read, “Change the name and stop the chop!”The Kansas City Chiefs took the field as the N.F.L. played the “tomahawk chop” on speakers inside Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Fla.Credit…Chang W. Lee/The New York Times“At the start of the game it was all unify, unify, unify, and then there’s this racist chant,” said Louis Moore, an associate professor of history at Grand Valley State University who studies connections between race and sports. “Eight months after George Floyd, and you’ve done all this stuff, letting players put phrases on the backs of their helmets, giving workers a paid holiday for Juneteenth. They are putting a corporate Band-Aid on a problem instead of dealing with it.”Moore pointed to other inconvenient realities that were either dismissed, ignored or obscured by the relentless messaging.There was scant mention of Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who has not played since the 2016 season, when he began kneeling during the national anthem to shine a light on police brutality.That led to a sharp, viral rebuke on Twitter from the singer Mariah Carey.There was little talk of the league’s abysmal record hiring people of color as head coaches and general managers even as television cameras showed the Chiefs’ successful offensive coordinator, Eric Bieniemy, who is Black and has been unable to land a head coaching position in multiple hiring cycles.Before the game, CBS Sports showed a segment that featured Viola Davis, the Academy Award-winning actress, saluting Kenny Washington, a Black player who in 1946 reintegrated the N.F.L., which had an unofficial color barrier for 13 years.Yet there was no discussion of a lawsuit brought by two former N.F.L. players who accuse the league of rigging the concussion settlement to make it harder for Black players to receive payments.The league spent considerable time lauding nurses and other health care workers on the front lines who have been helping fight the coronavirus. It had invited 7,500 vaccinated workers to the game, a signal to Americans that if you, too, get inoculated, you will be able to safely attend big events like the Super Bowl.Not discussed was that just hosting the Super Bowl could lead to a spike in the number of infections. Sure, the N.F.L. provided fans at the game with face masks and hand sanitizer, but little if any contact tracing was done to monitor exposure. Tracking infected fans will be made all the more difficult as people return to their homes in all corners of the country.Many people flocked to Tampa the week of the Super Bowl, flooding bars and restaurants.Credit…AJ Mast for The New York TimesThe Super Bowl, American sports’ biggest party, is not confined to TV and phone screens. The week of events leading up to the game was a magnet for tens of thousands of fans who attended parties or flocked to Tampa’s bars and restaurants, often unmasked. In the aftermath of the home team’s victory, mask-less revelers took to the streets of Tampa, an utterly predictable scene that has followed other major championships. Many of the people who celebrated without regard to social distancing or other guidelines will expose others to the virus as they travel home.For all the N.F.L.’s feel-good words and gestures to this moment in American history at the Super Bowl, and its attempts to use football to try to bring the nation together, the league’s carefully crafted message risked being muddled by its actions.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Manchester City Routs Liverpool, Confirming the Obvious

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn SoccerCity’s Revival, Liverpool’s Fade and the Flaw in Overthinking ThemManchester City’s rout at Anfield provided some clarity in the Premier League title race. But the factors that led to it have been plain to see for months.Ilkay Gundogan missed a penalty but still scored twice in Manchester City’s 4-1 rout of Liverpool on Sunday.Credit…Pool photo by Jon SuperFeb. 8, 2021, 9:36 a.m. ETSometimes, the easy explanation tells the whole story. Or near enough, anyway. Why Liverpool’s crown as reigning Premier League champion has slipped before the first blooms of spring is no great mystery. There is little need to sift through performances, searching for some failure of character or imagination or ability, to understand how it came to this.Virgil van Dijktore a knee ligament on October 17, in the early minutes of the Merseyside derby. Not quite four weeks later, on November 11, his regular defensive partner Joe Gomez blew out a tendon while away on international duty with England. And that, to a large extent, was that. Liverpool’s aspirations, at that point, had to be downgraded.Soccer has a dispiriting tendency to scorn mitigating circumstances — in the lexicon of sports, explanation is too often seen as a synonym of excuse — as Roy Keane, the hard-boiled former Manchester United captain, rather neatly encapsulated in the aftermath of Liverpool’s humiliation by Manchester City on Sunday. “They’ve been bad champions,” Keane said. To be a “big club,” he said, is to cope with whatever setbacks are thrown your way.There is truth in that, but it carries with it an air of brutal, gleeful oversimplification. Liverpool cannot, of course, escape blame for the collapse of its title defense. The club chose not to add a central defender to its squad last summer, recruiting instead a reserve left back who made his first and only Premier League appearance in the dying minutes on Sunday. That seemed a risk even without the benefit of hindsight.At the same time, Jürgen Klopp, the club’s manager, has cut an increasingly waspish figure as the season has unfurled. He also must shoulder some responsibility, though. He has leaned too heavily on a handful of players, rather than sharing the burden more evenly. Even he has admitted that his squad is as mentally and physically drained as it looks.More important, Klopp has overseen a team that has become grinding and predictable, reliant on the methods that brought a Champions League triumph in 2019 and the Premier League last year, even as Liverpool’s high-energy, high-intensity press has tuned down and his raiding fullbacks have found their edge dulled.Liverpool’s opponents have learned — both Burnley and Brighton have won at Anfield in recent weeks, shutting down the champion using essentially the same playbook — but Klopp’s team has not, the manager apparently insistent on doing the same things over and over again in the desperate, vain hope that the outcome might be different next time.Goalkeeping errors by Alisson Becker led directly to two City goals.Credit…Pool photo by Jon SuperAnd yet all of that is inseparable from the fact that Liverpool has been playing for months without its first-choice central defense, and that its first reserve, Joel Matip, managed to start only nine Premier League games before his season, too, was ended by injury.To cope, Klopp has deconstructed his midfield, drafting first Fabinho and then Jordan Henderson into the back line. The team has lost its rhythm. A swarm of other injuries — Thiago Alcantara and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain missing the first third of the season, Diogo Jota and Naby Keita the middle third, the usual wear-and-tear of a long, hard campaign — has left him with little choice but to play those members of his squad who were left standing.In those circumstances, trying to inculcate a new style of play is hardly realistic. Liverpool does need to evolve; with its resources, it should not be in a position where it is fretting about whether it can fend off West Ham, Everton and, possibly most pertinently, a surging Chelsea to finish in the top four. But in terms of retaining the title, it did not so much meet a setback as run into a roadblock.There is a useful contrast, here, with its most recent conqueror and its heir apparent. So entwined have been the fortunes of Liverpool and Manchester City over the last three years that there is now a temptation to see them as being somehow inextricably linked, the success of one taken as a direct indictment of the other’s failure.This season only seems to reinforce the parallel. Liverpool’s struggles this year do not perfectly match those City faced in the last one: Where City was volatile, scoring great rafts of goals only to freeze completely every few weeks, Liverpool’s fade has been a slow-burn demise, set in motion even before the title was won, the team sputtering through the autumn and only stalling completely at Christmas.But at first glance, the cause and the effect are the same: the lack of defensive cover, the oxygen debt to be paid after two seasons at the most rarefied heights, the sense of a wall being hit, all of it coalescing as Manchester City ran rampant at Anfield on Sunday, the pendulum swinging irrevocably back toward Pep Guardiola’s team.There is an easy explanation for that, too. Last summer, Guardiola and his employers knew their team needed more steel. City had lost nine games the previous season, its efforts to win a third straight title undone not only by Liverpool’s relentlessness but by its own glass jaw.So as much of European soccer fretted about the economic impact of the coronavirus and the subsequent shutdown, Manchester City went and spent $140 million on two defenders: Ruben Días and Nathan Aké. And that, to a large extent, was that. Días has, in the months since, emerged as the cornerstone on which Guardiola has built a new, parsimonious, indomitable version of City, one that is now set to reclaim the championship.In this case, though, the easy explanation only scratches the surface. Guardiola has not simply slotted a new central defender into his team and pressed play. He has, instead, retuned his approach. His team has been a touch less expansive, a touch more controlled, built on a more conservative midfield. He has overseen this shift in the space of a few months, on the back of a summer in which he did not have a preseason, during a campaign in which there is scarcely any time for training.City’s ability, and willingness, to rest its stars has set it up to reclaim the Premier League title.Credit…Pool photo by Jon SuperPartly, Guardiola has hinted, he took that risk — and it was, ultimately, a risk — to suit the realities of this most congested season. But partly, too, it was driven by the same impulse that made him recruit Días and Aké: an awareness that City needed to evolve once more if it was to outwit opponents who knew what to expect.What has enabled him to do that is the one element that has eluded Klopp. City has not been free of injury this season — Sergio Agüero has barely played, and both Gabriel Jesus and Kevin de Bruyne have missed considerable stretches — but its burden has been undeniably lighter than Liverpool’s.Nine of Klopp’s players have started 17 of Liverpool’s 23 Premier League games. Nine have already racked up 1,500 minutes in the league. At City, by contrast, only four players have reached those figures. Or, to put it another way, 13 of Guardiola’s players have started 10 games or more.It is to his credit that he has rotated that heavily. Guardiola has more readily understood the contingencies of this season than almost all of his peers; he spoke, around Christmas, of urging his team to run less, not more, in the early weeks of the campaign.But it does not immediately follow that it is to Klopp’s detriment that he has not had the same realization, that he has not altered Liverpool’s approach sufficiently to enable his players to cope with the test in front of them. It may be tempting to see Liverpool and City as counterweights — the rise of one a comment on the fall of the other — but the circumstances and the contexts are different. Klopp might have followed Guardiola’s lead, had he had the opportunity. Or not. It is impossible to know. Sometimes the easy explanation tells the whole story. And sometimes it does not.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Tom Brady's Super Bowl Win Is a Familiar End to an Odd Season

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Super Bowl 2021N.F.L.’s Most Challenging YearGame HighlightsThe CommercialsHalftime ShowWhat We LearnedAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBuccaneers 31, Chiefs 9Tom Brady’s 7th Super Bowl Win Ends N.F.L.’s Most Challenging YearThe N.F.L. season persisted through challenges wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, political discord and a national reckoning on race to reach a familiar ending.Tom Brady celebrated with his children after winning the Super Bowl on Sunday in Tampa, Fla. “I think we knew this was going to happen now, didn’t we?” Brady said.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesPublished More