Raphael Stevens

There will always be critics of a soccer super league, those who say the hurdles are too high, that it could never work. Except, of course, that one time when it did. More

Major League Soccer’s reworked regular season is, at last, racing to a conclusion. Many of the league’s teams have only two games left to play of this year’s truncated, 23-game schedule. Several others must squeeze in three matches in the next 11 days.The Colorado Rapids, who missed a month because of a coronavirus outbreak that affected more than a dozen players and staff members, are eight games short.And that is changing the playoff calculus.Traditionally, total points determine the standings in soccer. Every team plays the same number of games, and teams are ranked by the points they accumulate. But with the mismatch in games played in M.L.S. this year — Colorado has played only 15 games, while rivals like San Jose and Vancouver are already at 21 — the league will decide its playoff field by a different metric: points per game.“In the event that all 26 teams do not end the season with the same number of matches played,” the league’s competition rules state, qualification for the 2020 M.L.S. Cup playoffs will be determined “by points earned on a per match basis, or points per game.” (In the case of ties on that metric, goal difference — also determined on a per-game basis — will be the tiebreaker.)The difference is not merely a hypothetical one. Since it is clear that Colorado will not be able to make up all of its games before the regular season ends on Nov. 8, its playoff hopes are alive solely because points per game will be used to set the playoff field.The Rapids currently have 19 points, good for only 11th place in the West, which gets eight playoff berths this year. Under a points-per-game calculation, however, the Rapids stand eighth, at 1.27, good enough (at the moment) for a playoff spot.The Vancouver Whitecaps, who currently would be in the postseason field on points but just outside it on points per game, may have the most to lose. Vancouver has faced the additional handicap of playing its “home” games down the stretch in Portland, Ore., because of strict Canadian quarantine rules.“Don’t ask somebody from a Canadian team about if everything is balanced and fair!” Vancouver’s chief executive, Axel Schuster, told ESPN this month. “I haven’t seen my family in a month. So let us not speak if everything is balanced and everything is equal at the end.“Was everybody able to perform on the same level as everybody else? No, of course not. But I have never seen a pandemic before. I think that the only thing we can do is to go on and play and find the best solution. And to accept that the world is crazy.”There are a few other teams that will end the regular season without a full complement of results, although their deficits are much smaller than Colorado’s. The defending champion Seattle Sounders, for example, are scheduled to complete 22 of their 23 games. They stand second in the West in points, but first in points per game, and their seeding — like every other team’s — could mean the difference between a favorable matchup and a more difficult path to the league’s championship game on Dec. 12.It has been a strange season for M.L.S., which played two games to start the season, spent four months on the sideline, then played a tournament at Disney World before resuming with a shortened season.To account for the impact of an abbreviated season, M.L.S. expanded its postseason to include 10 teams from the 14-team Eastern Conference and eight from the 12-team West. More than half of those spots have been claimed to date: the Red Bulls, New York City F.C. and Los Angeles F.C. were among the half-dozen clubs that punched their tickets this week.The imbalance in the schedule could repeat itself on a much grander scale if the N.F.L. has to postpone more games because of coronavirus positives. Many N.F.L. teams have little flexibility after using their bye weeks, and teams playing 14 or 15 games instead of 16 has become a possibility. The league has considered adding an 18th week to its schedule to account for makeup games, but for now that remains only an option.This year’s Women’s Super League in England faced a similar problem in the spring when its season was abruptly halted by the coronavirus. The league opted to decide its champion by points per game, meaning Chelsea won the title, despite having fewer total points than Manchester City, an outcome that City accepted far more readily than its fans did. More

Josep Maria Bartomeu, the embattled president of the Spanish soccer giant F.C. Barcelona, announced Tuesday that he had resigned, bringing an abrupt end to a tenure in which he had taken power almost by accident, nearly driven away the best player in the club’s history and provoked a recall effort that many expected to lead to his ouster as soon as next month.Barcelona’s entire board resigned along with Bartomeu, who said he was stepping down to spare the club’s tens of thousands of members from having to vote in a referendum on his leadership during the pandemic.“We cannot and do not want to be in the position of having to choose between the protection of health and the exercise of the right to vote. And that is why we have made the decision not to call the vote and to resign immediately from our duties,” a somber looking Bartomeu said in a late night speech broadcast on the club’s website.As recently as Monday, he had told reporters that he had no plans to resign.While announcing his resignation, Bartomeu also made the bombshell claim that on Monday he had agreed with the leaders of what he described as Europe’s other “big clubs” to participate in a European Super League, a closed competition that has been much discussed in recent years, but one that faces a number of political, sporting and economic hurdles if it is to become reality. A final decision whether or not to participate in such a competition would face a vote of Barcelona’s members, he added.Bartomeu’s departure came only weeks after the fan-owned club’s members had collected the thousands of signatures required to forced a vote on the club’s leadership. Many of them blame Bartomeu for leading the club into the biggest crisis in its modern history, and for nearly driving away Lionel Messi, the team’s best player, who briefly announced his intention to depart only to reverse himself weeks later.Messi had criticized Barcelona’s leadership last season and grumbled about the direction of the club. In announcing his decision to remain at the club in September, though, he blamed Bartomeu personally for breaking his word to him, saying the president had reneged on a promise to let him leave at the end of last season.“The management of the club led by Bartomeu is a disaster,” Messi said.Instead of a no-confidence vote in Bartomeu, Barcelona will now be run by a temporary board who will look to steady the listing club until a new president is elected — a process that must be completed within 40 to 90 days of the temporary board taking control. Whoever takes over will face an inbox overflowing with major issues, including the future of Messi, who can speak to rival suitors in January, as well as plugging major holes in the club’s finances, which have only been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.Bartomeu lashed out at local government officials in Catalonia for not accepting a request to delay the elections for 15 days because of concerns they could not be held safely, before turning to his critics who he said attacked not only himself and his fellow board members but also their families.While, Bartomeu has been unpopular for some time, fan anger peaked in the aftermath of the team’s 8-2 drubbing at the hands of eventual winner Bayern Munich in the quarterfinals of last season’s Champions League. In the wake of that result, the club was rocked further when Messi, who had been with the club since he was 13 and led it to its most-successful period, announced he wanted out.Bartomeu said it would have been easy to leave then, but that would have left the club in worse shape. He said there were several important issues needing to be resolved, including getting Messi to remain with the club, hiring a new coach and dealing with important player contracts.“An early resignation at the end of the season would have led the club to an electoral process and a power vacuum, under the direction of an Interim Board, with limited powers, and during a period where it was necessary to make unavoidable and powerful sporting and economic decisions,” said Bartomeu.The new board will face a number of challenging economic decisions from the get go. They will have to stem losses that rose to more than $100 million last year, while also finding a way to cut the team’s debt, which has also grown rapidly in recent years. At the same time they face the prospect of key sponsorship agreements — including with the team’s principal sponsor Rakuten — expiring. And a $1 billion stadium financing deal with Goldman Sachs to renovate the Camp Nou will need to be revaluated.All the while they will have to appease a fan base that has become increasingly disillusioned by poor results, poor recruitment and a string of scandals and missteps at the top of the club.Bartomeu’s announcement that Barcelona had agreed to form a Super League comes after speculation about talks of a breakaway European league featuring the richest teams started anew in recent weeks. The concept, which has been around in one form or another for two decades or more, has been widely lambasted by European soccer’s governing body UEFA and other key stakeholder. Last week UEFA said such a closed league would be “inevitably boring.” UEFA and the top clubs are currently in negotiations over the format of the Champions League from 2024, with the biggest clubs pushing for reforms that would see more games between the top teams.An early reaction to Bartomeu’s announcement about the plans came from Javier Tebas, who heads Spain’s La Liga. “Unfortunate Bartomeu announcing on his last day participation in a phantom competition which would be the ruin for F.C. Barcelona and confirms their ignorance in the soccer industry,” Tebas said on Twitter. Adding: “Sad end of a president who had successes and lately errors.”Fractious management shake-ups are not new at Barcelona, an intensely political institution, which rival factions have often jostled to rule. Allies of Bartomeu once almost succeeded in ousting a former president, Joan Laporta, in 2008. Laporta narrowly survived, and went on to lay the foundations for much of the team’s current success by naming a largely untested former player, Pep Guardiola, as coach. Under Guardiola, with Messi leading on the field, Barcelona went on to enjoy a decade of unparalleled success.Bartomeu took over in 2014, stepping up from a vice president role after his ally Sandro Rosell was forced to step down amid claims of improper conduct in the signing of the Brazilian forward Neymar.Those early years proved to be relatively stable, with success on the field and record income off it as Barcelona became the first European team to cross the 1 billion euro revenue mark. In recent times, though, the club has lurched from crisis to crisis, as millions of dollars spent to rejuvenate an aging squad only seemed to result in worse performances, and boardroom intrigue spilled into the public domain. More