Raphael Stevens

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    ACL Injuries Are Hurting Women’s Soccer

    The World Cup is missing some of the sport’s biggest stars because of a knee injury epidemic. No one can say for sure why it’s happening, or how to fix it.The third time around, Megan Rapinoe’s reaction to a potentially career-ending knee injury went no further than an eye roll. She had torn her anterior cruciate ligament. She could reel off the recovery schedule from the top of her head. She could see, crystal clear, the next nine to 12 months spooling out in front of her.The surgery, the painstaking rehab, the grueling weeks in the gym, the anxious first steps on the turf, the slow journey back to what she had once been. As she considered it in 2015, she felt something closer to exasperation than to despair. “I was like, ‘I don’t have time for this,’” she said.The first time had been different. She had torn the anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee at age 21, when she was a breakout star in her sophomore year at the University of Portland. At that time, she felt what she called “the fear” — the worry that it might all be over before it had begun.A year later, she had done it again: same ligament, same knee, same arduous road back. It did not stop her from doing all that she had dreamed of doing. She turned pro. She was named to an all-star team. She represented her country. She won a gold medal at the Olympics. She moved to France. She played in two World Cups. She won one of them.And then, during a training session in Hawaii in December 2015, months after her 30th birthday, it happened again. This time, it was the right knee, and this time, her reaction was different. “It changed for me as I got older,” she said. “That one was like an eye roll. ‘This is annoying. I know what it is going to take to come back’. But generally, I think there’s this fear. Is this going to be the end? Am I going to come back from this? Am I going to have pain forever?”Over the last year or so, that fear — and the searching questions it prompts — has coursed through women’s soccer. The sport has at times seemed to be in the grip of an epidemic of A.C.L. injuries, one so widespread that at one point it had sidelined a quarter of the nominees for last year’s Ballon d’Or.Alexia Putellas, the Spain midfielder who won that award and the consensus pick as the best player of her generation, has recovered in time to grace the World Cup, the sport’s showpiece event. But countless other stars have not. They will, instead, spend their summer at home, nursing their injuries, cursing their luck.Alexia Putellas of Spain missed last year’s European Championship after tearing a knee ligament. She hopes to play a key role in her country’s World Cup campaign.Damien Meyer/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe list is a long one. Catarina Macario, the U.S. forward, tore the A.C.L. in her left knee last year and could not regain her fitness in time. She will not be present in Australia and New Zealand. Nor will two of the stars of the England team that is hoping to dethrone the United States: The team’s captain, Leah Williamson, and its most productive goal-scorer, Beth Mead, both fell victim to A.C.L. injuries this season.The Olympic champion, Canada, has lost Janine Beckie. France has not been able to call upon Marie-Antoinette Katoto or Delphine Cascarino. The Netherlands, a finalist in 2019, is without striker Vivianne Miedema.But these are just the famous names, the familiar faces, the notable absentees. The problem has become so acute that, at times, it has strained tensions between national teams and the clubs that employ the players from which their rosters are drawn, with at least one high profile European coach suggesting that too much was being asked of the athletes.Miedema herself pointed out that, this season alone, almost 60 players in Europe’s five major leagues had torn their A.C.L.s. “It is ridiculous,” she said earlier this year. “Something needs to be done.”Working out precisely what that might be, though, is more complicated than anyone would like.Lack of KnowledgeThere is fear, of course, for players who are enduring those long weeks of recovery, but it is not the only type of fear. In Europe particularly, over the last 12 months, the sheer scale of the issue — the numbers of players being struck down by torn A.C.L.s — set off a psychological contagion.A number of national associations, as well as local offices of FIFPro, the global players’ union, reported inquiries from active players — those who had seen teammates or opponents or friends condemned to months on the sideline — seeking reassurance, solace or even just basic information.“The players are asking for research,” said Alex Culvin, FIFPro’s head of strategy and research in women’s soccer. “We’ve had a lot of feedback from players saying they feel unsafe. You saw it last season — at times, players were not going in for tackles as they normally would because they were worried about injury.”The problem, Culvin said, is there is not enough research available for anyone to give the players clear answers. European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, has been running an injury surveillance study on men’s soccer, for example, for more than two decades. The women’s equivalent has been operating for only five years. “That lack of knowledge creates fear,” Culvin said.It is established fact that women are more at risk of suffering an A.C.L. injury than men. Quite how much more at risk is a little murkier. Martin Hagglund, a professor of physiotherapy at the University of Linkoping in Sweden, puts the risk at “two to three times greater, based on a systematic review of studies.” Culvin goes a little higher: Some studies, she said, suggest the risk for women could be “six or seven” times as great as that for men. “There is a real range,” she said.The France striker Marie-Antoinette Katoto, on crutches, was left off France’s World Cup roster after she was unable to complete her recovery in time.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe issue of why that might be is more contested still. Traditionally, much of the research has focused on biology. “There are obvious anatomical differences” between men’s and women’s knees, Hagglund said. Not just the knees, in fact — the whole leg. Some studies have suggested that women’s A.C.L.s are smaller. There are differences in the hips, the pelvis, the engineering of the foot.Increasingly, too, there is a body of evidence to suggest there is a link between hormonal fluctuations and susceptibility to injuries in general, and A.C.L. injuries in particular. Chelsea, one of the leading clubs in England’s Women’s Super League, now tailors players’ training loads at specific phases of the menstrual cycle in a bid to mitigate the impact.As a paper published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in September 2021 pointed out, though, the instinct to focus purely on physiological explanations is both rooted in and serves to reinforce the misogynistic stereotype that “women’s sport participation is dangerous predominantly due to female biology.”It also runs the risk, in Hagglund’s mind, of turning a blind eye to the host of other issues that may have played a part in depriving the World Cup of so many of its brightest lights this month. “The focus on anatomical differences means we have left out the other parts, the extrinsic factors,” he said. It just so happens that those are the ones that might, feasibly, be addressed.Injury as a Measure of ValueIt is perhaps natural that for the players themselves, the cause of the run of A.C.L. tears is obvious. “We keep adding games left, right and center,” said Miedema, one of four players at Arsenal alone who have sustained the injury this season. “Instead of 30 games a season, we now play 60. But we don’t have the time and investment that is needed to keep players fit.”Kristie Mewis, a U.S. midfielder, contended that the “intensity” with which women’s soccer is now played had compounded that effect. It is not just that there are more games, she said. It is that they are exponentially faster, more physical and more demanding than ever before. “As the game is growing, it’s getting more competitive,” she said. “Maybe stress has something to do with it.”Rapinoe would endorse both ideas — “the load and intensity are different,” she said — and would add that while women’s soccer has professionalized on the field at breakneck speed, it has not always matched that pace off it.Megan Rapinoe has endured three A.C.L. tears, injuries that left her unable to play in the 2007 World Cup and the 2008 Olympics.Rob Kinnan/USA Today Sports, via Reuters“We don’t generally charter; we don’t fly private,” she said. “We don’t have the resources. So with recovery, you’re being asked to produce a bigger load than you ever have but with less resources than you really need to do that.”To Hagglund, that is only the start of a long list of possible structural, cultural factors that might be at play. “Women’s soccer does not have the same organizational support as men’s,” he said. That applies not just to travel, but to the number and the quality of medical staff members, physiotherapists, nutritionists.Likewise, young female players, until relatively recently, did not have the benefits of the same sort of specialized strength and conditioning training that is commonplace in boys’ academies. Women’s teams have what he called smaller “competitive” squads — they rely heavily on a handful of high-profile players, ones who cannot afford to be rested. “That means they are more exposed to fixture congestion, there is less rotation, they are more likely to play with an injury,” he said.And then there are the environmental problems. Women’s teams do not play on the same perfectly manicured lawns that top men’s teams do. “In Scandinavia, certainly, it is still quite common for teams to play on artificial turf,” he said. The players must do so, often, while wearing shoes designed with men’s feet, rather than women’s, in mind.As diffuse as all of those problems are, they come down to much the same thing in Culvin’s mind. “It is a question of value,” she said. “What value do we place on an athlete? The players might be professional, but the conditions around them are not always suitable for professional athletes. There is not equity in the workplace until we value them properly in all components — the fields, the stadiums, the support staff around them.”The Right FitLaura Youngson is always surprised, even now, by the number of players she encounters who have convinced themselves that soccer cleats are designed to be uncomfortable. “That’s the perception,” she said. “That they’re supposed to feel like that, and that women, in particular, are just supposed to put up with it. They’re really not meant to be like that.”Still, the belief is widespread. Earlier this year, an in-depth study conducted by the European Club Association and St. Mary’s University, London, found that 82 percent of elite female players experienced “pain or discomfort” from the footwear they wore while playing.The reason for that is simple. In contrast to running, say, where major footwear brands realized long ago that women and men required — and would buy — different types of shoes, the soccer versions sold to women are, largely, not actually designed for them. The abiding market principle has effectively been, as Youngson put it, “that women are just small men.”Laura Youngson started a company that produces custom-made soccer cleats for women, using research that found they tended to have narrower heels, wider toe boxes and higher arches than men.Hannah Peters/FIFA, via Getty ImagesFor a long time, like everyone else, Youngson just accepted that her soccer shoes never seemed to fit quite right. Then, after organizing a charity game on Mount Kilimanjaro in 2017, she realized that she was not alone. Even the professional players on the trip had the same complaint. She saw an opportunity — both a business one and a moral one — to put it right.Since then, the company she founded, Ida Sports, has conducted extensive research to produce the first custom-made women’s soccer cleats. They found that women tended to have narrower heels, wider toe areas and higher arches. (They are also more likely to change than men’s are, particularly during and after pregnancy.) That means they “interact differently with the ground,” something that Ida Sports has tried to remedy by redesigning the sole of the shoes she makes.There is also enough evidence to suggest that the shape and structure of women’s feet may make them more susceptible to injuries, both chronic and acute, including A.C.L. tears. Youngson does not claim to have a silver bullet for the knee injury epidemic, nor does she believe that wearing better-fitting shoes will end the problem on its own.“But there is definitely an opportunity for further research,” she said. “People are doing great work studying hormones and behavior and other things. We know boots and surfaces. There are definitely recommendations that we would make. The issue is, how do we keep more players on the pitch? Even if it is for a 1 percent gain, it is worth it.”Like Rapinoe, the former England international Claire Rafferty endured three A.C.L. injuries in her career. As with Rapinoe, her reaction changed over time. After her first, in her left knee, she felt “invincible,” as if she had gotten her bad luck out of the way early. She was only 16. It would, she assumed, be smooth sailing from there.She did not know then that the single greatest risk factor for sustaining an A.C.L. injury is having experienced one. Research suggests that 40 percent of players who have torn a cruciate ligament will do so again — in either knee — within five years. It is closer, in other words, to the flip of a coin than a roll of the dice.Rafferty learned that the hard way. In 2011, she tore the A.C.L. in her right knee. That time, she recalls being “in shock.” She did what she could to mitigate the risk. Despite her entreaties, her coach at Chelsea, Emma Hayes, regularly refused to allow her to play on artificial surfaces. Two years later, Rafferty tore the A.C.L. in her right knee again.“Nobody thought you could come back from three A.C.L.s then,” she said. Rafferty did. Physically, at least. Mentally, the scars did not heal. “I wasn’t calm,” she said. “I thought every game could be my last. I was playing with a lot of fear. I had quite a lot of anxiety. I couldn’t play like I did before.The former England player Claire Rafferty retired from soccer after three A.C.L. injuries left her unable to play without the fear that another was only a step away.Ker Robertson/Getty Images“I remember hearing people ask, ‘What’s happened to Claire Rafferty?’ I wanted to tell them that I couldn’t run properly because I was so afraid. I didn’t enjoy playing football. I started to resent it.”That fear, the one felt by the players missing this year’s World Cup, the one shared by all those who now feel unsafe on the field, had overwhelmed and inhibited her. She knew what she had to do. Long before her career should have ended, she walked away. She was 30. For women’s soccer, the real risk of its A.C.L. epidemic, the one rooted in lack of knowledge and a historical lack of care, is that she will not be the last.Jeré Longman More

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    Lionel Messi Gives M.L.S. First Taste of the Weight of His Star

    One day after Messi’s contract with Inter Miami became official, the club presented him to fans in a rain-soaked stadium and on the league’s streaming platform.Just before 9 p.m. on Sunday, the greatest soccer player of his era, and maybe the greatest of all time, walked across a makeshift stage in his new home stadium. He hugged the owners of his new team, including the former star David Beckham. As he held his new jersey — a pink No. 10 — Lionel Messi grinned and looked up at the crowd and the fireworks.If it has felt like a dream that Messi, who won the World Cup in December as Argentina’s captain and who has claimed seven Ballons d’Or as the world’s best player, chose Inter Miami of M.L.S. as his team for the twilight of his career, his unveiling event was proof that, yes, this has actually happened.“Before anything, I want to give thanks to Miami for this reception and the kindness since I arrived to the city,” Messi said in Spanish in his first public comments since his monumental deal, which runs through the 2025 M.L.S. season, was announced on Saturday. “To be honest, I’m very emotional and very happy to be here in Miami and to be with you.”For two minutes, Messi, 36, spoke directly to the Inter Miami fans who chanted his surname throughout the night at DRV PNK Stadium, about 30 miles north of downtown Miami. Messi’s introduction was called La PresentaSíon, or the Presentation in Spanish, but with “Sí” (“Yes”) emphasized. And in typical South Florida fashion, it took place in the rain.In choosing Miami, where he owns property, Messi turned down a chance to play in Saudi Arabia, where a team had offered him significantly more money. He also declined the possibility of returning to Barcelona, where he signed at 13, won every major trophy and wanted to remain before moving to Paris-St. Germain in 2021.Long before Messi’s time in France came to an unceremonious end this summer, the owners of Inter Miami had dreamed of bringing him to South Florida. The event on Sunday and the weeks leading up to it have shown how much of a jolt Messi has already provided to the franchise, the region and soccer in the United States.“There will always be a before and after Lionel Messi,” said Jorge Mas, the Cuban American billionaire and managing owner of Inter Miami, which played its inaugural season in 2020.David Beckham, part of Inter Miami’s ownership, once made a similar move to M.L.S., joining the L.A. Galaxy as a player in 2007.Saul Martinez for The New York Times“We are recipients of the legacy of the greatest player in the world that started at Newell’s Old Boys, went to Barcelona, ended at P.S.G.,” Mas continued, listing Messi’s previous teams, including his youth team in Argentina. “But today it sits in the hands of Inter Miami and its fans. This is our moment. Our moment to change the football landscape in this country.”The rain subsided by the time Messi spoke, but a torrential downpour hindered the early festivities and flooded parts of this interim stadium. (Inter Miami hopes to move to a proposed new stadium near Miami International Airport in 2025.) On Sunday, the 19,000-seat stadium certainly didn’t have the size or energy of Camp Nou in Barcelona or Parc des Princes in Paris, but most fans donned team or Messi gear. One shirtless fan waved a huge flag featuring Messi in an Argentina jersey. Argentina jerseys were the second most popular clothing choice, with a few fans wearing Messi’s Barcelona shirt.The celebration, broadcast globally in English and Spanish on Apple TV+, M.L.S.’s first-year streaming partner, with a few glitches, purposefully coincided with halftime of the Concacaf Gold Cup final, which Mexico won by 1-0 over Panama.Before Messi addressed the crowd, Mas and Beckham spoke. Beckham, an Englishman who famously signed with the Los Angeles Galaxy of M.L.S. in 2007, read his prepared comments from his cellphone, sprinkling in some Spanish. Mas used both languages for the entirety of his address. Miami, after all, is the unofficial capital of Latin America, and Florida has the largest Argentine community in the United States.“I know that the people of South Florida will take you all into their hearts,” Beckham said. “We are building a special club here at Inter Miami, a club that represents this special place and its people.”Inter Miami pink and Argentina blue dominated the stands in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesBefore Messi appeared, Beckham introduced the team’s second marquee signing of the summer, Sergio Busquets, Messi’s former teammate at Barcelona. Busquets spoke, too, but briefly. The night, imperfect and all, belonged to Messi.Not known for being loquacious, Messi was concise on Sunday. Wearing a white Inter Miami T-shirt and jeans, he thanked the team’s ownership group for making him and his family feel welcome. He said he hoped fans would keep watching and growing with the team.“I have a lot of desire to start training and to compete,” said Messi, who joins a team in last place in M.L.S.’s Eastern Conference. “I came with a desire to always compete and want to win.”Messi also thanked his teammates, several of whom were on the field.“I’m very happy to have chosen to come to this city with my family and to have chosen this project,” he said. “I don’t have a doubt that we’ll enjoy it and we’ll have a good time and beautiful things will happen.”After Messi handed over the microphone, a video played on the big screen featuring many celebrities, such as the retired Argentine basketball star Manu Ginóbili and the Miami residents Gloria and Emilio Estefan, welcoming Messi to town and wishing him luck. Then the families of Messi and the owners joined them onstage for photos. Musical acts followed.Afterward, Messi signed autographs for fans in the stands. Tuesday is his first official training session with his teammates, and Friday will be his first game. This is his new home. More

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    Women’s World Cup Contenders

    The Women’s World Cup, which opens this week, is the biggest in its 32-year history, but it may also be the most open field the tournament has seen.While plenty of the 32 teams descending on Australia and New Zealand probably have modest ambitions for the next month, it is not a stretch to say that almost half of the field might regard themselves as serious title contenders. (Some more accurately than others.) These 10 countries are the most likely to stick around all the way until the end.United StatesForward Trinity Rodman is one of 14 U.S. players headed to their first World Cup.Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated PressTwo things can be true at once. By common consensus, Vlatko Andonovski’s team arrived in New Zealand as the favorite to win the tournament. It has the aura of experience, the dazzling jolt of youth and the deep bedrock of talent to lift a third straight World Cup. It has a psychological edge, too: It has been the game’s superpower for so long that respect can manifest as awe.At the same time, the undisputed primacy the United States has enjoyed for more than a decade has never been more fragile. There is a risk that this squad will fail the Goldilocks test: Some players are too old, some are too young, and so perhaps none are just right. Europe’s major nations have closed the gap. In the space of a month last year, the Americans lost to England, Spain and Germany. The United States has the squad to emerge as champion. But for the first time in some time, it is not alone in that.EnglandRachel Daly started at left back in the Euros last summer. Now she is England’s most potent striker.David Rogers/Getty ImagesExpectation hangs heavy on Sarina Wiegman’s England. The Lionesses won the European Championship on home soil last summer, the team’s first major honor, and followed that with a victory in the Finalissima — a game between the European and South American champions — earlier this year. Winning the World Cup would be the natural conclusion to a trajectory that has been on a steep upward curve for 10 years.Fate, though, has intervened. Wiegman has lost her captain, Leah Williamson; her most creative player, Fran Kirby; and her most potent attacking threat, Beth Mead, to injury. Millie Bright made the squad but is still, strictly speaking, recovering from knee surgery. Wiegman is an astute enough coach — and she has enough talent at her disposal — to disguise those losses. But she will be doing so on the fly.AustraliaSam Kerr will shoulder the hopes of one of the host nations.William West/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is difficult not to see the co-host less as “Australia” and more as “Sam Kerr and Guests.” At 30, Kerr, the Chelsea striker, may well be the finest player in the world. She is a totem for her country. She is the face of the tournament, the person expected to deliver what she has referred to as a “Cathy Freeman moment.” She is the star on which Australia’s hopes hang.That assessment is not quite true. Tony Gustavsson’s squad is drawn largely from the major leagues of Europe and the N.W.S.L. In Caitlin Foord, Hayley Raso and Alanna Kennedy, the supporting cast is a strong one. Its momentum, too, is considerable: Australia has won eight of its last nine games, including a milestone victory against England. Kerr will have to deliver, of course, but she is far from alone.The NetherlandsThe Netherlands lost to the United States in the World Cup final in 2019. Its path runs through the Americans again.Rob Engelaar/EPA, via ShutterstockIn 2019, the Dutch emerged as the standard-bearer for Europe’s coming force, an advertisement for the game’s shifting power base. They fell agonizingly short, losing to the United States in the final. Progress since then has been patchy, as they have lost Wiegman, who left to coach England, before falling in the quarterfinals of the European Championship last summer.The core of the team that made the final four years ago — Danielle van de Donk, Jackie Groenen, Jill Roord, Lieke Martens — remains, and the Dutch have the talent to make a deep run once more. Two things stand in their way: the absence of striker Vivianne Miedema through injury and an unfortunate draw for the group stage. The Dutch face the Americans early; defeat in that game will most likely mean a tougher route for the remainder of their stay.CanadaChristine Sinclair has played 323 games for Canada.LM Otero/Associated PressThe Canadians have made precious little impact on the latter rounds of the World Cup in the last two decades, extending their stay beyond the first knockout round only once. Yet even that, on home soil in 2015, lasted only until the quarterfinals.In many ways, it is hard to see that changing this time around. Christine Sinclair is 40; Janine Beckie is out, another victim of women’s soccer’s A.C.L. epidemic; Canada has won only one of its last five games and has been drawn in the same group as Australia. But there is a resilience to this team that should not be underappreciated: It is only two years, after all, since Canada — completely overlooked then as now — won gold at the Tokyo Olympics.BrazilMarta is headed to her sixth World Cup with Brazil.Ueslei Marcelino/ReutersOn some level, Brazil’s stay in this World Cup will be seen as Marta’s valedictory tour: a sixth and (presumably) final tournament turned into a lap of honor for a 37-year-old player regarded by some as the best of all time.It is hard, certainly, to believe that it will end with Marta’s repeating Lionel Messi’s trick and finally winning the honor that would mean more to her than any other. Brazil’s squad is not as strong as previous editions, and none of them were strong enough to overcome the superpowers of North America and Europe, either. Still, in Pia Sundhage, Brazil has a canny, adroit coach, and the likes of Debinha, Kerolin and Geyse mean Marta may not have to bear the load alone.SpainAlexia Putellas of Spain is the reigning world player of the year.Steve Luciano/Associated PressMore than anyone — even England — Spain should be the biggest threat to the United States’ crown this summer. Its national team is, after all, based largely on the Barcelona team that has become the dominant force in European club soccer. Alexia Putellas, while most likely not fully recovered from the knee injury that kept her out of the Euros last year, is the reigning world player of the year. Spain has lost just once in a year.The problem is that Spain has been engulfed by civil war between the players and the country’s soccer federation since last summer. Though an uneasy truce has been called — allowing some of the 15 players who had demanded the dismissal of the coach, Jorge Vilda, to return — the effects are still being felt. A dozen players are still missing, and Vilda must find a way to instill a team spirit in a squad consisting of both rebels and their replacements.FranceWendie Renard, center, and Kadidiatou Diani had threatened not to play for France under its former coach.William West/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Spanish might have had the least ideal preparation for a major tournament, but kudos to the French for giving them a run for their money. Corinne Diacre, the longstanding coach who had lost the faith of a considerable number of her players, was finally ousted in March. She was replaced by Hervé Renard, a globe-trotting coach of some renown but absolutely no experience in the women’s game.He has, at least, restored some familiar faces to the squad: Wendie Renard and Kadidiatou Diani, both of whom had refused to play under Diacre, are back. Amandine Henry, the vastly experienced midfielder, had been recalled, too, only to suffer a calf injury that will keep her out of the tournament. France’s hopes, now, rest on the new coach’s being able to get the best out of a team he has only just encountered.GermanyLena Oberdorf and Germany will enter the World Cup off a run of puzzling results.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIf anything at all is certain about this tournament, it is that the Germans will reach the quarterfinals. In eight attempts, they have never failed to do so, and given a kindly group draw — Morocco, Colombia and South Korea — there is little reason to believe they will not make the last eight again.Whether Coach Martina Voss-Tecklenburg can steer her team any further, though, is open to question. Germany has a well-balanced squad — two outstanding goalkeepers, the emerging star power of Lena Oberdorf, the creativity of Lina Magull, the goals of Svenja Huth and Alexandra Popp — and finished as runner-up in last summer’s European Championship. But its form is sputtering: It has lost to Brazil and Zambia in the last couple of months and just squeezed past Vietnam in a warm-up match last month.SwedenKosovare Asllani and Sweden finished third at the 2019 World Cup and second at the Tokyo Olympics.Kimmo Brandt/EPA, via ShutterstockNobody ever thinks about Sweden. Sweden might have one silver and three bronze medals to show for its eight previous World Cups, and it might be a reliable force in the European Championship, but the operating assumption is always that Sweden is not a genuine contender.It is worth pointing out, then, that Sweden not only has the likes of Fridolina Rolfo, Stina Blackstenius and Hanna Bennison to call on, but that it made the semifinals of the Euros last year, and it swatted aside the United States on the way to the Olympic final two years ago. Sweden is a threat. But nobody ever thinks about Sweden. More

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    Why Does Every Women’s World Cup City Have Two Names?

    A concerted effort to say Indigenous names correctly, and tell the stories behind them, will show up in stadiums in New Zealand and Australia.When soccer fans land in New Zealand this month ahead of the Women’s World Cup, they may find themselves welcomed not to Auckland or Wellington, but to “Tāmaki Makaurau” (“Tah-mah-key Ma-kow-row”) or “Te Whanganui-a-Tara” (“Tay Fung-a-noo-ee a Tah-rah”).Those names — what the cities are called in the country’s Indigenous language, te reo Māori — are reflected in the official documents for this year’s Women’s World Cup, which has placed Indigenous languages and imagery unapologetically at the forefront.Every city that will host a match is listed with its English and Indigenous names, and FIFA announced this month that it would fly First Nations and Māori flags in every stadium. The effort came after soccer and government officials in the host nations pushed for a more inclusive approach, and it “will mean so much to so many,” the head of Australia’s soccer federation said.In New Zealand, the decision reflects an ongoing conversation about the nation’s identity. For decades, many New Zealanders routinely mangled and mispronounced the Māori names of the country’s cities and towns. Taupō (“Toe-paw”) was pronounced “Towel-po.” Ōtāhuhu (Oh-tah-hu-hu) was “Oter-hu.” And Paraparaumu (“para-para-oo-moo”) was sometimes simply referred to as “Pram.”More recently lawmakers, broadcasters and much of the general public have cast out those mispronunciations as part of a concerted national effort to say the names correctly. At the same time, many are choosing to use their cities’ original Māori names over their English alternatives. Last year, a formal petition to rename the country altogether and restore all Māori names was signed by more than 70,000 people.“Before, it felt like a choice to say the names right,” said Julia de Bres, a linguist at Massey University in New Zealand. “And now it feels like a choice not to.”Visitors should absolutely use those names, as well as the common greeting “kia ora” (“key ow-rah”), said Hemi Dale, the director of Māori medium education at the University of Auckland.“Once you grasp the vowels, you can get your tongue around most of the words — long sounds, short sounds, the macron,” the horizontal line above a vowel that indicates a stressed syllable, he said.The Māori flag outside Te Papa museum of New Zealand.Marty Melville/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images(A note: New Zealanders overseas — of any descent — will often permit themselves an internal wince at how foreigners say the word “Māori.” The correct pronunciation is closest to “Mao-ree,” and never “May-or-i.” The plural is simply “Māori,” without an “s,” which does not appear in the language.)The championing of Māori place names is visible throughout New Zealand life: Increasingly, New Zealanders call their homeland Aotearoa, the Māori name that is often translated as “land of the long white cloud” and that has been used by Māori to refer to the country for decades, if not centuries. Māori and English names are used by the country’s weather forecasting service, on newly released official maps and on signs on the nation’s roads.The changes are an effect of a decades-long movement to revitalize a language that risked being extinguished by colonialism, said Rawinia Higgins, the country’s Māori language commissioner.As English-speaking settlers became the dominant population, Māori and their language were sidelined and suppressed. As late as the 1980s, Māori children were beaten at school for speaking the language, and many adults chose not to pass it on to their families.Starting in the 1970s, the Māori language revival movement has led to te reo’s being adopted as one of the country’s two official languages, alongside sign language, and the establishment of nearly 500 early childhood schools in which Māori is spoken exclusively.Many non-Māori New Zealanders have embraced the change, and there are long wait lists for Māori language courses. The government aims to have one million New Zealanders — roughly one-fifth of the population — speaking basic Māori by 2040.But for a small but vocal minority, a bicultural society is viewed as divisive rather than inclusive.Last year, after the chocolatier Whittakers temporarily changed the packaging on its milk chocolate bars to read Miraka Kirīmi (Creamy Milk), some in New Zealand called for a boycott of the brand. The question of bilingual road signs has taken on outsize importance ahead of this year’s general election, where questions of racial politics have become a feature of the center-right’s rhetoric.Place names, as some of the more visible examples of the shift, have become caught in the fray. Lost in that debate is the reality that the country’s colonial names often had little to do with the places they related to.Christchurch, for instance, was named to recall a college at the University of Oxford, while the name Auckland was bestowed as a thank you to George Eden, the Earl of Auckland. Eden was the boss of a former governor of New Zealand, William Hobson, who chose the name. Eden never set foot in the city.By contrast, Māori place names reflect location-specific information, including important stories or where food might be found, said Hana Skerett-White, a Māori teacher, advocate and translator who has worked with artists such as the singer Lorde.“The Māori names tell us stories,” she said. “They speak of our history, of important events, and they actually act as pockets of knowledge, which is how we transmit information from generation to generation.“When those names are taken away, so too are our knowledge systems disrupted in the process.”A view of Tāmaki Makaurau, or Auckland in English.Catherine Ivill/Getty ImagesEnglish translations for Tāmaki Makaurau, as Auckland is known in Māori, vary. One version indicates that the city, with its palm-fringed harbors and volcanoes, is a place desired by many. Another tells the story of Tāmaki, a beautiful princess, and her many admirers.From a Māori perspective, each understanding is equally valid, and individual tribes, or iwi, may approach it differently, said Pāora Puru, a Māori language advocate and a co-founder of the Māori social enterprise Te Manu Taupua.“People have their own interpretations, their own meaning,” he said. “I liken it to an invisible umbilical cord that connects you to that place, and to your ancestors’ traditional connection, association, occupation or use of that particular area.” More

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    How Julie Ertz, a New Mother, Hustled Back to the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team

    Even before Julie Ertz gave birth to her son, Madden, last August, she knew it would be a challenge to return to the fitness and form that would be required of her if she wanted to play in a third Women’s World Cup.Pregnancy and childbirth, unlike sports injuries, offer no reliable timeline for return, no proven handbook to guide a player back from what is a life-changing event. More important, Ertz, who was 30 when Madden was born, wanted to gauge her progress discreetly before she made any promises to the national team. To pull that off without attracting attention, Ertz was going to need help.A group of teenage boys answered the call.Ertz was in Phoenix, which is her hometown and where her husband, Zach, plays tight end for the Arizona Cardinals. She reached out to two of the coaches who knew her best: Paul Taylor and Matt Midkiff, who had helped guide her development from preteen prodigy to college all-American. Taylor and Midkiff connected Ertz with Phoenix Rising, a United Soccer League club with a Major League Soccer Academy program. Ertz arranged to begin training with the club’s under-19 team in February.When Taylor informed the boys on the team that Julie Ertz would be coming to practice, many of the players greeted the news with blank stares.But not Luke Burns.Luke Burns, right, was pleasantly surprised when he found out Julie Ertz would be training with his team. He was a fan.Courtesy Luke Burns“At first, I was star-struck,” said Burns, 17. “I don’t think many of my teammates really knew who she was. But I was one of the only ones who was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is crazy.’”Burns, who has committed to play at the University of Virginia, said his older sister, who also plays college soccer, got him into watching women’s soccer at a young age. He knew the players. He knew their histories and their highlights. Still, he said, it took him 15 minutes to work up the courage to introduce himself to Ertz at her first training session. It took even less time to sense that she was a cut above.“Even on the first day of training that we had with her, she was in the best shape out of all of us,” Burns said. “She would do extra sprints after practice. She would do these little things to become a bit better. And it showed me that if I wanted to go to the professional level, I have to do those extra things as well.”Taylor said Ertz set a high standard for herself in their first conversation. If she was going to come back, she told him, she did not want to simply come back as the player she was before. She wanted to be better than anyone remembered, better than even she could remember.“I know the expectation and standards that this team has,” Ertz said. “And I didn’t want to go into any camp if I wasn’t feeling like I could actually compete.”An Ertz fan at the U.S. team’s send-off game in California.Marlena Sloss for The New York TimesFor Ertz, that motivation came from an intimate knowledge of the national team and the role she would need to play to contribute at this World Cup. At the time she returned to training, the national team’s captain and defensive linchpin, Becky Sauerbrunn, was struggling with a foot injury. (Sauerbrunn was eventually left off the World Cup roster.) Sam Mewis, a midfielder who had played a pivotal role in the team’s 2019 World Cup championship, was enduring repeated setbacks with her injured knee. (Mewis may never play elite soccer again.)Without them, Ertz knew, the U.S. team was in need of experience and leadership at the back. It needed her to be the glue that held the spine of the team together.But by February, the clock was ticking. When U.S. Coach Vlatko Andonovski released a training camp roster for the SheBelieves Cup, Ertz’s absence was not a surprise. Still, Andonovski warned, “time is running out for her.”As the pressure mounted, Ertz remained committed to taking things slow. She knew she needed to reach peak performance quickly, but she also knew she couldn’t rush it.By March, national team staff members had seen Ertz play with Phoenix Rising in scrimmages and had come away impressed. Talk of her returning for the World Cup began to circulate inside the team. Defender Kelley O’Hara, who has played with Ertz for 10 years, said she tried to manage her excitement when it began to sound possible that Ertz would make it back in time.“I started texting her,” O’Hara said, excitedly miming a typing motion with her fingers. “Not trying to put too much pressure, and not trying to, you know, sway her decision. But she’s awesome and she’s an incredible teammate to have, especially in tournaments like this.”Ertz returned to club soccer in April with Angel City of the National Women’s Soccer League.Troy Wayrynen/USA Today Sports, via ReutersIn late March, Andonovski called Ertz into her first training camp since the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. In April, Ertz returned to club soccer by signing with Angel City of the National Women’s Soccer League. Slowly increasing her workload and fitness, Ertz showed Andonovski enough that he named her to his 23-player roster for the World Cup. Days later, in her final game before she left the club to join the national team for training, she played 97 minutes. Her comeback was complete.“It’s been competitive, which is what you need,” Ertz said of her two months with Angel City. “It’s been an environment to be able to thrive.”Now a bigger task awaits. She and her U.S. teammates will open the World Cup on Friday night (Eastern time) in Auckland, New Zealand. Madden Ertz and his father will be in the stands cheering. Julie Ertz will probably be right in the middle of the field. Right where she wanted to be. Right where her team needs her. More

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    ‘Everyone Expects Us to Win’: England Tries to Live in the Now

    Injuries weakened the Lionesses, and recent results have raised eyebrows. But the players and their coach say it takes a lot to shake a champion.Sarina Wiegman likes to look on the bright side of things. In April, England’s 30-match unbeaten run was ended with a 2-0 loss to Australia. But Wiegman, the team’s Dutch coach, deliberately focused on the positives.“It sounds really strange, and you always want to win, but I think this defeat also brought us so many learning lessons,” she explained a few weeks later during an interview at England’s training facility in St. George’s Park. “It has, most of all, showed us the urgency to do some things better.”It is an interesting time for the England women’s team, which arrives at the Women’s World Cup as one of the tournament favorites but also in perhaps its most uncertain state after two years of largely smooth sailing under Wiegman.The Lionesses are the champions of Europe, a triumph claimed on home soil last year that has precipitated a sea change for women’s soccer in England. Never-seen-before viewing figures. Record attendances and a vibrant domestic league. Victories in the past year over the reigning World Cup champion (the United States) as well as World Cup contenders like Germany, Sweden and Spain. And ever-rising expectations that this is just the start.England’s celebrations after their Euros win.Tolga Akmen/EPA, via Shutterstock“With this England team,” Wiegman said, “everyone expects us to win.”But the England that enters this World Cup is, arguably, a weakened champion. In the months since claiming its European title, what began as the loss of one key starter to injury, striker Beth Mead, has become three. Midfielder Fran Kirby will miss the World Cup, too, after having surgery on her knee. Leah Williamson, who captained England as it conquered, has, like Mead, torn a knee ligament. Her replacement captain, defender Millie Bright, has only recently recovered from a knee injury of her own, and was a question mark when the team boarded its flight to Australia.Recent results have proved similarly worrisome: The loss to Australia was followed by a lackluster 0-0 draw against Portugal, a game in which a frustrated England unable to convert any of its 23 attempts on goal. A goalless draw in a behind-closed-doors friendly against Canada, England’s last game before the World Cup, was the team’s third straight scoreless performance.Yet Wiegman remains pragmatic and steadfast. Again and again in her recent interview, she returned to the same questions that have become touchstones for her and her team: “What do we want to do? How do we want to play? What are the roles and the tasks in the team?”She has insisted on a game-by-game approach, and communicated to her players that tactics and, perhaps more important, minutes will be decided on a day-to-day basis. That fluidity, Wiegman said, has its own motivating value, offering “opportunities for other players to play, to take responsibility, and to show who they are.”“That’s why we then come back to: ‘OK, this is our next game’,” she said. “And then we’re in the now.”England Coach Sarina Wiegman led the Netherlands to the 2019 final. Now she hopes to do the same with England.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPlayers, of course, have their own ambitions.“We’ve all got dreams, and we all want to win,” forward Lauren Hemp said. “We’ll see how the tournament goes. But it’s something that we’re striving toward obviously, coming off the back of the championships and winning the Euros. It makes you hungry to want to win more.”The 22-year-old Manchester City defender Esme Morgan is among the new faces vying for game time. “That’s really been emphasized, to be honest, that there’s no set places in the squad,” she said after going 90 minutes in the draw against Portugal. “There’s so much competition in every position across the pitch. Really in training you can see that: The standard is so, so high.”Lucy Bronze, one of the team’s most senior players, saw her own history as a guide. “I went into 2015 as a young player not expecting to play much and I ended up playing in every single game, scoring goals, and I forced myself into the spotlight and broke out a little bit,” she said. “Anything can happen in a World Cup.”Wiegman harbors her own hopes for the squad. “We have high expectations, too,” she said. But true to her instructions, she is staying in the now. She is not interested in discussing a potential rematch against Australia in the round of 16, or a possible collision with the United States, or Germany, or anyone else if England can navigate deep into the knockout stages.“Let’s first see, ‘OK, we want to get out of the group stage,’” she said. “Then you come to the next stage and we see who is in front of us. It’s going to be very tough. And if we would get to the final, hopefully we do.“It really doesn’t matter who’s in front of us. You just want to win every game.” More

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    Lionel Messi Signs With Inter Miami and M.L.S.

    Messi is expected to join the team this week on a contract that runs through the 2025 Major League Soccer season.The greatest soccer player of his era, and maybe the greatest of all time, is coming to the United States for the twilight of his career. Lionel Messi, 36, officially joined Inter Miami of Major League Soccer, the club announced in a release on Saturday.His contract commits him to the team through the 2025 M.L.S. season.“I’m very excited to start this next step in my career with Inter Miami and in the United States,” Messi said in a statement. “This is a fantastic opportunity and together we will continue to build this beautiful project.”Messi had revealed his plans to play for Miami last month and was spotted shopping with his family at a Miami-area grocery this week.He is expected to join the team in the next week, which would put him on track to make his debut for Inter Miami in a Concacaf Leagues Cup game against Cruz Azul of Mexico on July 21.A soccer prodigy as a child in Argentina, Messi moved to Spain to sign with Barcelona at age 13 and soon became a talked about young player. He made his debut with the first team at 16 and went on to a spectacular career, winning every major trophy and six Ballons d’Or as the world’s best player. He moved on to Paris-St. Germain in 2021, where he won another Ballon d’Or, and his team dominated the French league, although it failed to win the Champions League.He has been the leader of the Argentine national team almost since his 2005 debut, and added the final trophy missing from his collection when he won the World Cup with them last summer.The consensus of fans and historians has been that his greatness as a player is rivaled perhaps only by Cristiano Ronaldo in his own era and by Pelé and Diego Maradona from any era.Messi’s signing completes what could be described as the quiet Barcelona-fication of Inter Miami that preceded his formal arrival. The team’s chief business officer and its top operations and facilities executive are both former Barcelona employees. Last month, Inter Miami announced that Messi’s former midfield teammate at Barcelona, Sergio Busquets, would be its second marquee signing of the summer.Then, two weeks ago, Gerardo Martino, the Argentine known as Tata who had coached Messi at Barcelona, was hired as Inter Miami’s coach. At his introductory news conference, he spoke openly of working with Messi and Busquets, and left little doubt that he saw his new challenge as more than a reunion.“Sometimes we associate the United States, Miami, are linked with the idea of a vacation,” Martino said. “This isn’t that. We want to compete.“They are not players who are going to come here to not compete.”The signing is reminiscent of 2007, when Los Angeles Galaxy of M.L.S. signed the world’s most famous player, if not the best, David Beckham, at age 32. Beckham played in L.A. for six years, winning two championships, and brought the league unprecedented exposure.M.L.S. has long spoken of eventually matching the quality and visibility of the world’s top leagues. It will hope that Lionel Messi’s golden years help push it in that direction. More

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    When You Can’t Believe What You’re Seeing

    The story, more than the sport, is what matters.Nobody is quite sure where the term “kayfabe” originated. It may be a bastardized form of pig Latin, something to do with the actual word “fake.” It may have its roots in the culture of wandering 19th-century carnivals, the world inhabited by P.T. Barnum and the confidence men and the salesmen who sold actual snake oil.Its modern usage, though, is sufficiently specific that only a relatively small proportion of people would even have a sense of what it means. Kayfabe is, essentially, the illusory cloak that is doggedly draped over professional wrestling: the maintenance of the pretense that what you see in the ring is unscripted, competitive, what we would consider real.For decades, wrestlers were expected to keep kayfabe even when they were off the clock. The on-screen heroes and villains were not supposed to drive to events together, or to socialize together after them, in case they were seen and the illusion was broken. The omertà had to be upheld at all costs. Breaching it was not just a transgression. It was a betrayal.As Abraham Josephine Riesman delineates in “Ringmaster,” her magisterial biography of Vince McMahon — close personal friend of Donald Trump and longstanding, all-purpose tyrant behind World Wrestling Entertainment — there came a point, sometime around the 1990s, when that all felt just a little anachronistic.For anyone other than perhaps the very young, she posits, by that stage most wrestling fans had long understood the nature of what they were watching. More than that, they had delighted in it. Riesman’s theory is that the fun was not so much in seeing who won, but in trying to decode the why. What did this star’s propulsion mean for behind-the-scenes politics? What did this defeat indicate about the next twist in the never-ending tale?McMahon’s genius — again, in Riesman’s telling — was that he accepted the new reality. Rather than try to cling on to the tradition, to insist on the fantasy, he leaned into the wink and the nudge.Nobody ever said, of course, that the whole thing was a soap opera, a piece of brutal theater. But the sense that the real story could be found in what was happening backstage, that there was a political process behind who rose and who fell — all of that moved front and center. McMahon invented what Riesman calls neokayfabe.In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as McMahon was pioneering this new approach, soccer was changing, too. Delegations of executives from Europe’s major teams looked on jealously at the sporting landscape of the United States, where money flowed freely from television, through glamorous, lucrative leagues, and straight into their counterparts’ pockets.It was the N.F.L., with its cheerleaders and its fireworks and its sense of event, that caught their eyes particularly, and they returned home with whatever ideas they could mimic. Dance troupes appeared at midtable Premier League games. Flashy graphics and portentous music splashed across television screens. Stadiums modernized, attracting more families. That allowed ticket prices to increase and corporate sections to flourish.There is absolutely no evidence that anyone within soccer thought to learn anything from professional wrestling. Nobody, most likely, would have even contemplated it. Soccer, after all, belongs to the world of sports. Even McMahon long ago gave up on the idea that wrestling fit neatly under that umbrella. Instead, with typical euphemism, he refers to it as sports entertainment.And yet, behind differences so glaring they are almost existential, it is possible to make the case that modern soccer — the soccer of the Premier League and the Champions League era, the soccer of social media and saturation coverage, of rolling news channels and cultural hegemony — owes more to professional wrestling than it does to any other industry.As in wrestling, it is increasingly difficult to escape the sense that the action itself is secondary to all of the noise that surrounds it — the transfer rumors, the coaching feuds, the undeniable theater that now attends the weekly news conferences, and the declarations of pride and fury and rage that follow every utterance, no matter how banal.Games exist in a pitch of frenzy, but rather than being seen as the purpose of the whole exercise, they serve simply to feed the sport’s insatiable hunger for a story. The overall sweep of each set of 90 minutes is, frequently, lost in a miasma of exaggerated controversy.Tactics and strategy and individual excellence are acknowledged, of course, but drowned out by an unrelenting focus on the failures — both technical and moral — of the referee, or the defeated manager, or whichever of the players is deemed to have let the team down by trying either too hard to win, or not enough.That, in many ways, is the root of the sport’s success, of course. As the cultural commentator Neal Gabler has written, we live in an era of entertainment; in order to survive, in order to thrive, every aspect of life has to turn itself into entertainment. It is just that soccer has done it better than most.Perhaps that is because, more than anything, what soccer has borrowed from wrestling is Riesman’s concept of neokayfabe. Soccer’s global cultural cachet, its status as the most popular pastime that the world has ever known, is both its strength and its weakness.Its stars are subject to the same sort of intense scrutiny that attends Hollywood’s most famous faces. It is squabbled over by the scions of global capitalism, by nation states, by private equity and public investment funds. It has its heroes, and its villains, and both inspire fierce loyalty and deep-seated loathing. It is an analog product trying to adapt to a modern age. It is among the most valuable forms of content that exist, a saffron for the AppleTV+ age.The trick, though, is that the sport has managed to subsume all of that — all of these things that happen to it, these currents beyond its control — into part of the story. Just as in wrestling, soccer has been able to take its inner workings, its politicking and its power struggles and even its scandal, and fold it into the entertainment.That approach applies even when it brings with it the danger that the sport’s integrity — the thing that competitive sports require in the same way as wrestling needs a willing suspension of disbelief, the thing that makes it real — might be compromised.The principle applies no matter the issue. The suspicion that Manchester City has cheated the sport’s financial rules becomes a chance for Pep Guardiola and his team to hit back at their critics; the arrival of the Saudi state at Newcastle is both a new beginning for a proud, beloved team and a test for the strength of the established order. Even the criticism can be leveraged. Newcastle can be the hero or the villain. Either sells, so either is fine.The engulfing of Juventus’s hierarchy in allegations that it has committed actual financial crimes is presented as a challenge for a fallen giant. Barcelona has mortgaged its future because of colossal mismanagement, but what does that mean for Pedri? A small cabal of clubs greedily claiming every trophy and every glimmer of talent for themselves is presented not as a dangerous economic trend but as testament to their innate greatness.The impression — wrong, perhaps, but as previously stated, damaging nonetheless — that the business links between Chelsea’s owners and Saudi Arabia allowed the club to clear the chaff from its squad with surprising ease becomes a controversy, of course, but not one about the sport’s complex relationship with, and its growing vulnerability to, money and power.Instead, the peril of the accusation is lost in claim and counterclaim over the motivation behind the criticism, lost in soccer’s absolute refusal to understand the world as anything less than unremittingly tribal, the belief that serves as the sport’s underlying assumption, its equivalent of wrestling’s illusion.Everything, eventually, becomes part of the story. And the story, more than the sport, is what matters. That is what is sold by the broadcasters and the news outlets and everyone else who does so much to sustain a mutually beneficial ecosystem. It is the magic trick that lies behind modern soccer.It shows you exactly what it is, pulls you behind the curtain, harnesses your outrage and concern and disgust and fear when you see what lurks there, and sells it straight back to you. It is pure, uncut McMahon, a monument of neokayfabe, straight from the sports entertainment playbook, with the emphasis on the entertainment.Living Your ValuesSteven Gerrard, right, on his first day as Al-Ettifaq soccer minister. Er, coach.Ettifaq Media Office/via ReutersJordan Henderson is, of course, quite entitled to do whatever he wants. Should he decide to accept an eye-wateringly lucrative offer from Al-Ettifaq, the Saudi club now managed by his friend and former teammate Steven Gerrard, the Liverpool captain will stand accused of sacrificing his professional ambitions, and his dignity, for little more than naked greed.The reality is more complex than that. Yes, Henderson has spent more than a decade earning several million dollars a year. (At a rough estimate, his pay, after tax, currently stands at around $6 million.) He is a very rich man. It is true that a soccer player’s career is a short one. But a player of Henderson’s profile does not exactly need to worry about how he will cope.Still, the money reportedly on offer in Saudi Arabia — somewhere north of $30 million a year — can still rightly be described as transformational. Henderson’s primary concern will be his family. If this is his opportunity to provide for them for generations, then it is hardly a sin that he, like several others this summer, might consider it.What makes it unpalatable that Henderson, in particular, might be coaxed to the relentlessly expansionist Saudi Pro League is that he is not just a soccer player. He has, in recent years, emerged as an eloquent advocate for not only his club but for professional players as a whole. More important, he has been a staunch and sincere ally for L.G.B.T.Q. rights.“When you see something that is clearly wrong and makes another human being feel excluded you should stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them,” he wrote in 2021. “That’s where my own position on homophobia in football is rooted.“Before I’m a footballer, I’m a parent, a husband, a son, a brother and a friend to the people in my life who matter so much to me. The idea that any of them would feel excluded from playing or attending a football match, simply for being and identifying as who they are, blows my mind.”There is no reason to claim these are not Henderson’s values. He has every right to move to Saudi Arabia, just as Saudi Arabia has every right to want to improve the quality of its domestic league. He has every right to ignore the criticism that he is moving solely for money.There comes a point, though, where if you do not live your values, then it is very difficult to assume they are your values at all. If Henderson decides to effectively endorse the geopolitical power-play of a country where homosexuality remains illegal, then not only will it damage the credibility of soccer players who speak out on social issues, it will make it look a lot as if what he says, and what he does, are very different things.CorrespondenceIt has always been a source of considerable pride that this section of the newsletter can be considered a collaborative learning space. Not in the sense that you, the reader, benefit from my great and beneficent wisdom, but that I get to take all of your ideas and, several months down the line, pass them off as my own.So thanks to all of you who wrote in to explain the origins of the Apertura-Clausura system that prevails in so much of Latin America. “I’d be willing to bet it is an Argentine invention,” Fernando Gama wrote. “The first one in Argentina was 1991-92, whereas Colombia and Mexico were 2002.”His theory on why Argentina adopted the approach is that its teams hoped to “reap a profit if they were available for international friendlies during the European summer.” The benefit, though, may have been different. “It makes sense for each of them to count as a full championship if you take into account how quickly teams get dismantled by the European market. It is very hard to maintain the same base team for an entire year.”Juan Botella, too, believes that Argentina provided the genesis, certainly for Mexico. In the 1990s, “Mexican fútbol’s ruling elite realized they could make more money following Argentina’s approach,” he wrote. “There was much complaint from traditionalists, who prefer a yearlong tournament with no playoffs.”Juan and Gustavo Ortiz are on the same side there. “It delivers short-term satisfaction for team directors who want more national championships in detriment to the climax of one champion at the end of the season,” he wrote. “I prefer the Uruguayan system. They play two championships, Apertura and Clausura. Each has a winner that plays the team with the most points won during both tournaments.”In exchange for educating me, I will endeavor to answer a question from Ken Andrejko. “Do players receive a percentage of the transfer fee when they change clubs?” he asked. No, is the answer, but that’s a bit glib. They do, however, receive a signing-on fee, although that can be both directly and inversely proportional to the size of the transfer fee.And some wonderful — if belatedly published — pedantry from Iain Dunlop. “You referred to the concept of Newcastle pursuing ‘multiclub’ as a noun,” he wrote. “I would argue that Newcastle and others are in fact attempting to multiclub (I multiclub, you multiclub, he/she multiclubs, etc.), and thus it should be classified as a verb.In many ways, Iain, that would be preferable to what is actually happening. The precise quote on Newcastle was that the club is looking into “doing multiclub.” (I do multiclub, you do multiclub, he/she/the Saudi state does multiclub.) Does that make it part of the verb? I’m not enough of a grammarian to know.That’s all for this week. Please keep all of your thoughts coming to askrory@nytimes.com, but do bear in mind that, after next week’s edition, this newsletter will be stepping aside to make room for our World Cup briefing (which you all should sign up for immediately.)Beyond that, unfortunately, there is only shadow and doubt. We’ve had plenty of emails over the last week inquiring about what happens to this newsletter — or the people involved in its production — in light of The Times’s decision to reconsider how it covers sports. Your messages of support and well wishes were much appreciated. I’ll tell you what’s happening to the newsletter as soon as anyone tells me. More