Raphael Stevens

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    PSG Says Kylian Mbappé Must Sign New Deal or Leave

    Nasser al-Khelaifi, the president of Paris St.-Germain, was introducing the team’s new coach when he turned to tough talk on the future of his team’s biggest star.It was at the unveiling of yet another new coach that Paris St.-Germain’s president made his first public statement on the future of his team’s best player. He did not equivocate and left little room for compromise.Kylian Mbappé, the marquee player for P.S.G. and France, must sign a new contract this summer or leave, Nasser al-Khelaifi told reporters, who were ostensibly gathered to hear the first pronouncements from the new coach, the Spaniard Luis Enrique, but eager to hear what the club planned to do about the uncertainty created by Mbappé after his public declaration last month that he wished to move on after next season.Such a scenario would leave the club in the unenviable situation of losing, without compensation, a player in whom it has invested more than $500 million in transfer fees, bonuses and wages. That is something al-Khelaifi said would not be allowed to happen.“We do not want him to leave for free in 2024,” al-Khelaifi said.“Our position is clear,” he continued. “If Kylian wants to stay, we want him to stay. But he needs to sign a new contract.“We don’t want to lose the best player in the world for free. It’s impossible.”And that was that. Al-Khelaifi, as he stood to leave the raised platform he had shared with Enrique, told the assembled members of the news media that he expected they had gotten what they came for. The new coach, for his part, declined to say whether he expected Mbappé to be in Paris when the new season gets underway this summer.What is clear is that for a second straight summer, the fate of where Mbappé plays is going to overshadow P.S.G.’s efforts to prove that it is now a serious contender for soccer’s biggest prize rather than once again the central stage for the sport’s biggest intrigues.A news conference on Wednesday was intended to introduce Luis Enrique, left, as P.S.G.’s new coach, but that was overshadowed when Nasser al-Khelaifi, right, addressed Mbappé’s future.Aurelien Morissard/Associated PressEnrique, who most recently coached Spain’s national team, arrived on Wednesday and is charged with bringing order to a club that has been characterized by disorder in recent seasons. Just this week, his predecessor, Christophe Galtier, who arrived just last summer, became the latest P.S.G. coach to be shown the door before completing his contract.No club in soccer has spent more money on talent since Qatar Sports Investments acquired P.S.G. about a decade ago. Few top clubs have cycled through as many coaches, and fewer still have wasted as much time and money trying to find an identity and a style underpinning all that largess.Last summer, P.S.G. persuaded Mbappé to sign a new contract rather than sign with Real Madrid, the Spanish super club he has long dreamed of playing for. P.S.G. had wanted to build a new model, with Mbappé as the central star in a constellation of mostly young, mostly French talent. Without him, that master plan would once again require reimagining.Later on, al-Khelaifi was even more strident. Sitting down with members of the domestic news media, he said Mbappé had a “maximum” of two weeks to decide whether to sign a new contract. The club, he said, would not allow such a valuable asset to leave for nothing in 12 months. Mbappé could, it was pointed out to al-Khelaifi, just decide to stay, making it impossible for the club to dictate his fate.Al-Khelaifi said that would be unthinkable — that Mbappé would be breaking an unwritten convention of some sort, by doing something that the world’s best players simply do not do. He did not mention that P.S.G. had done that very thing two summers ago, signing the Argentine great Lionel Messi as a free agent when Barcelona, the team Messi had played on for his entire career, could no longer afford to keep him.“If he doesn’t want to sign,” al-Khelaifi said, “the door is open.”Privately, the club has been exchanging letters with Mbappé’s management team, which is led by his mother, Fayza Lamari. This week, the latest missive, running to three pages, expressed disappointment with the position Mbappé had taken and reminded the player and his family how much P.S.G. had invested in the forward since his teenage years.In signing his contract, Mbappé was allowed a rare level of influence over the club’s activities, including a say over recruitment of the players who would line up alongside him. The club’s letter, which expressed a demand for an urgent meeting, said as much, acknowledging that while the club had not been able to fulfill all his requirements for reinforcements, it had done as much as it could given the constraints placed upon it by European soccer rules on spending.P.S.G. resumes practice on July 10, but Mbappé, along with others who played for their national teams in June, will return on July 17. By then, the club hopes to have clarity on whether he will accede to its demand to sign a new contract. It hopes he will, even though his doing so would not reduce the possibility that he would leave next summer. A new contract dated beyond the end of next season would allow P.S.G. to recoup a fee. Shortly after signing his current deal last summer, Mbappé told The New York Times in an interview that it would not have felt correct to leave the club via free agency.In the rarefied world Mbappé inhabits, for both his talent and his earning potential, the pool of clubs he could sign with is a shallow one and may actually be limited to one: Real Madrid.That club is searching for a marquee forward, having lost the veteran striker Karim Benzema to Saudi Arabia’s soccer land grab, and Mbappé has spoken of playing there one day. For the stars to align, the club would have to be convinced to make P.S.G. an offer for a player it knows it could bring in without a fee next year. So far, it has remained tight-lipped about its plans.In her time representing her son, Lamari has become an experienced hand in securing the best possible deal. Last summer, with a deal with Real Madrid in hand, and the suggestion that the Premier League club Liverpool, an unlikely suitor, also had a firm interest, she managed to secure a huge new contract. It guaranteed a bonus of more than $100 million just as a re-signing fee even before his stratospheric new salary was included.P.S.G. announced that the deal would run through 2025, and it even had Mbappé wear a jersey emblazoned with the year on his back. Only later did it transpire that the third year was an option that only the player could exercise.Lamari will once again take center stage as face-to-face talks with club executives take place over the next few days. Only then will it become clear whether, as al-Khelaifi told reporters, “No one player is bigger than the club.”​​ More

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    P.S.G. Attack, Still a Mystery, Ended Two Women’s World Cup Dreams

    An assault case that rattled one of France’s best soccer teams remains unresolved despite a series of arrests. Its main characters have paid a heavy price.Aminata Diallo was being escorted from her foul-smelling holding cell to an interview room inside the Hôtel de Police in Versailles the first time she heard the name Tonya Harding.Harding’s name is infamous in sports, of course. A decorated American figure skater, she was a central figure in the notorious case involving the assault of her biggest rival only weeks before the 1994 Winter Olympics. The scandal — a sudden and violent attack by a mystery man; accusations and denials; tabloid headlines — led to worldwide attention and, years later, a feature-length movie about Harding. But to Diallo, a 28-year-old French soccer player being led up a police station stairwell, the mention of her name — “Have you heard of Tonya Harding?” — produced only a blank stare.Diallo would quickly learn, however, that the police had reason to ask.Harding’s rival, Nancy Kerrigan, had been attacked by a man who beat her on the legs in an attempt to keep her from competing. Now, in France, a generation later, the police suspected a similar motive in an attack on Kheira Hamraoui, Diallo’s teammate at the French club Paris St.-Germain. Hamraoui had been dragged out of Diallo’s car on a cold November night in 2021 and, like Kerrigan, beaten on her legs in a clear attempt to injure her.It would take almost a year, and another spell in detention for Diallo, before the police officer’s offhand question became a formal accusation. Prosecutors last September charged Diallo with aggravated assault in the attack on Hamraoui. Documents in the case and leaks to the French news media have accused Diallo of masterminding a premeditated attack. The goal, that theory goes, was to eliminate a rival of Diallo’s for a spot in the lineup at P.S.G., one of the best teams in women’s soccer, and on the roster of the French national team, which will be among the favorites at the Women’s World Cup, which begins July 20.“Lots of people would like it to be me, but that’s not the reality,” Diallo said in an interview in Spain, where she had been trying to resurrect her career. “Tonya Harding, she did it. I didn’t.”Doubts, and QuestionsWith its parallels to a decades-old scandal; its themes of race and professional rivalry; and its unlikely cast of elite women’s athletes and shadowy characters, it is no surprise that the case continues to draw interest, or that it has spawned competing documentary projects.Diallo’s guilt or innocence is no clearer today than it was that morning in the police station in Versailles. A trial date is yet to be announced. But the consequences continue to ripple outward.The central police station in Versailles, where Diallo was brought for questioning.James Hill for The New York TimesFriendships have ended, as has at least one marriage. Two locker rooms were divided. Diallo was exiled from Paris. Hamraoui, too, became an exile in her own way, ostracized by some of her teammates and eventually forced out of her club.The police’s case apparently rests on text messages sent by Diallo, some suspicious web searches and a claim by at least one of the men charged in the assault that he had been acting on behalf of Diallo, even though he admitted the order had not come directly from her.Diallo and her legal team insist the charges are the actions of a desperate police force looking to secure convictions in a high-profile case, of a case built on flimsy connections and untrustworthy sources.Diallo said she views the documentary offers as a sort of compensation for everything that she has lost, like the privacy and anonymity she once enjoyed as a stalwart, if unspectacular, soccer professional, but, more materially, for the new contract with P.S.G. that she insists was all but certain before the attack changed the direction of her career and life.“I think for them it’s interesting whether I am guilty or not,” Diallo said of the filmmakers who have approached her.The charges she faces — three counts of aggravated assault and criminal assault — came after her second stay in custody and were accompanied by an order not to enter Paris or engage with her former teammates on P.S.G. That was how she found herself in Spain this spring, nibbling patatas bravas and garlic shrimp at a beachside restaurant in Valencia, her career saved only by a short-term deal to play for Levante, which has now ended.Hamraoui has left P.S.G., too; she was released at the end of the season after not being offered a new deal. Her departure was not a quiet one: On her way out, she accused the club of ostracizing her by treating her differently from her teammates, of victimizing her again.“In addition to the trauma I suffered that night, I would face this indifference, this cruelty, not to say a form of abuse toward me,” Hamraoui wrote in a book published recently that has been serialized in the French sports newspaper L’Equipe.“The squad no longer speaks to me, and P.S.G. has only one objective: that I leave as quickly as possible,” Hamraoui said. “They treat me like a plague victim.”Kheira Hamraoui training with the Paris St.-Germain women’s team in September 2022.Christophe Petit Tesson/EPA, via ShutterstockIn Spain, Diallo’s life became a stripped-down version of what went before. Apart from training sessions, she spent most of her time alone at a rented apartment. (Qatar-owned P.S.G. had provided a home and a car, the one involved in the attack.) She was not a standout for her new team, and was often deployed as a substitute, a role she was grateful for, and accepted.“I’ve found it difficult to find the top, top level,” she said as the now finished season meandered toward its conclusion. “I’ve lost the pleasure to play. I’m playing with injustice.”Diallo contends that she has been wronged, that she is also a victim in the Hamraoui affair. Investigators in France contend she is at the heart of the conspiracy.Details of their case, leaked to the French news media, paint Diallo as the driving force of the attack on Hamraoui. The men who have been charged with the assault itself are said to have told the police that they believed they were acting on behalf of Diallo, who was driving the car when it was stopped and when Hamraoui was yanked out and beaten on her legs with an iron bar. Text messages from Diallo disparaging Hamraoui were discovered after the police seized her cellphone and computer, as were online searches for phrases like “breaking a kneecap” and “deadly cocktail of drugs.”In an interview last November at the offices of her lawyers in Paris, shortly after she was formally charged, Diallo offered explanations. The police had ignored all the positive comments about Hamraoui she had made to friends and associates, she said. The online searches were not unusual, she contended, for an athlete concerned with injuries and health.But she also contends that her race and background — she is a Black woman from a working-class neighborhood in Grenoble — had not only led the police to jump to conclusions about her, but others as well.“In France, when there’s a case like that, the media are quick to assume that you’re guilty,” she said. “They are going to bring up where you’re from right away, which is an argument to show that you are capable of doing that.”Now, in Valencia, Diallo produced her phone and brandished a screenshot of a diagram published by the French daily Le Parisien that used arrows and boxes to purportedly show links between the men involved in the attack, Diallo and unknown intermediaries. The fact that after all the investigations, the phone taps and the listening devices placed in Diallo’s home, the police still had not found any direct link between her and the arrested men highlighted the weakness of the case against her, Diallo said. She has, she added, “more hate” toward the investigators than Hamraoui, who fell out with Diallo and other teammates after they suggested she, and others at P.S.G., could have been involved in the attack.“It’s not her trying to find a case against me,” Diallo said of Hamraoui. “I don’t give a damn about her.”Choosing SidesAmong her protestations of innocence, Diallo pointed to messages sent by her former agent, Sonia Souid, who also represents Hamraoui. Diallo argued that those messages undermine the police’s belief that she orchestrated the attack out of professional jealousy.In one, a voice note sent about two weeks before the attack and played for a New York Times reporter, Souid told Diallo that she had met with P.S.G.’s sporting director. The club was pleased with Diallo’s performances, Souid reported, and was eager to make an offer to extend her contract, which was about to expire, for two seasons.Souid, who is one of the most influential agents in women’s soccer in France, said in an interview that while negotiations had not started, the club had made its intentions clear.Diallo playing for P.S.G. in 2021. She is now barred from contacting her former teammates.Aurelien Meunier/PSG, via Getty ImagesBut weeks after the November 2021 attack, Souid’s relationship with Diallo ended in a tearful meeting. The player informed the agent that she could no longer be represented by her because of her ties to Hamraoui. In March 2022, Souid said she met with police investigators. She declined to reveal what she was asked, but said the meeting had left her shaken.“The questions they asked me made me think something very wrong has happened,” Souid said.She suggested the police had covertly listened not only to Diallo’s conversations but also hers and those of others in the course of their investigation. “They knew everything,” Souid said. “They knew the exact moment calls were made and what was being said, and not just by me.”Souid said she had always found Diallo to be polite, respectful and serious in their interactions. But as details of the case filtered out, and as she processed the questions she had been asked by the police, she said she began to wonder whether Diallo had “another side.”Left OutAs the investigation continues, and as Diallo and Hamraoui — now both out of contract — await the next developments, the soccer world rumbles on toward what will be the biggest event in women’s soccer this year, the Women’s World Cup.Diallo will not be there; she had been a fringe player on France’s national team at the time of the attack, and the notoriety of her case and her long layoff — not to mention the court orders to stay away from her former P.S.G. teammates — effectively ended her international career.Hamraoui, who appeared for France as recently as February, had held out hope of playing her way onto the French team headed to Australia and New Zealand, even though her presence on the squad would not be universally welcomed by some, including a group of P.S.G. players close to Diallo and still furious at Hamraoui’s early insinuations that other players from the club might have been involved in her assault.Souid, Hamraoui’s agent, had harbored similar optimism. “The Americans are several times World Cup champions and all the players don’t like each other,” she said this spring.Hamraoui challenging Denmark’s Kathrine Moller Kuhl in February. She was left off France’s roster for the Women’s World Cup.Jean-Francois Monier/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut when France’s new coach, Hervé Renard, announced his preliminary roster for the tournament, Hamraoui’s name was not on it. The decision prompted one French newspaper to run a poll asking whether the decision to omit her was “really a sporting choice.” Hamraoui suggested in a radio interview with France Inter soon after the announcement that it was not: She called her omission “an injustice.”The story, though, is not over. That is why, Souid said, filmmakers were interested in telling Hamraoui’s side of it. “It’s not easy to understand what happened to her,” she said.Diallo, adrift and impatient, might say the same.For now, both players wait for clarity on who bears the ultimate responsibility for what happened on that dark night in the narrow street, for the end of their association with the case, and with Tonya Harding. Until then, Hamraoui will continue to pursue her soccer career. And Diallo will continue to defend her name.“I’m not hiding,” Diallo said before departing for another evening in her silent apartment, alone with her thoughts, and her furies.Tom Nouvian contributed reporting in Paris. More

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    Soccer’s Next Big Thing Is Buying in Bulk

    Networks of clubs help top teams streamline their scouting, methods and player acquisition. But who do they really serve?On Wednesday evening, the Colombian club Atlético Huila decided to treat its players and its coaching staff to what could be best thought of as an office night out. Huila has had a rough season. It finished at the bottom of the Apertura, the first half of the Colombian campaign. It won only five of its 20 games. A field trip was more a restorative than a reward.It was a good night, too. Huila’s squad has spent the last week in Sangolqui, a suburb of Ecuador’s capital, Quito, finishing off its preparations for the second half of the season as guests of Independiente del Valle. The host duly offered Huila an invitation to watch its Copa Libertadores game against Argentinos Juniors at its compact, modern stadium.What Huila’s players saw was, first and foremost, rousing entertainment. Thanks to a last-ditch goal from Kevin Rodríguez, Independiente won, 3-2, securing the top spot in its group in the process. More important, as they posed for a group photograph against the empty stands of the Estadio Banco Guayaquil after the final whistle, Huila’s players will have known they had seen a glimpse of their — or at least their club’s — future.Back in March, speaking at the Financial Times Business of Football summit, the Newcastle United minority owner Amanda Staveley confirmed that the English club was exploring the idea of establishing a worldwide network of teams.That, in itself, was no great surprise. Over the last few years, the concept of building a stable of clubs has become de rigueur in soccer. Red Bull pioneered the model, in Salzburg and Leipzig, New York and São Paulo. Manchester City, through City Football Group, industrialized it; its portfolio now encompasses more than a dozen clubs, spread as far afield as Uruguay and India.Since then, anyone who is anyone has followed suit. Indeed, that is what was most striking about Staveley’s announcement: not what she said, but how she said it. Newcastle, she told the conference, was pursuing “multiclub.” Not “a multiclub model.” Just “multiclub.” Owning multiple teams across disparate leagues has become so commonplace that it is now a noun.Dozens of teams have now been subsumed into these models. Genoa, Standard Liège, Hertha Berlin and Sevilla are all part of the same group. Botafogo, RWD Molenbeek and Lyon are linked through another. Brighton has a connection to Union Saint-Gilloise (everyone has a club in Belgium). This week, Chelsea’s ever-disruptive owners bought a majority share in the French team Strasbourg.Manchester City has built an extensive network of clubs around the world.Shaun Botterill/Getty ImagesCity’s teams, which include New York City F.C., have had varying degrees of success.Vincent Carchietta/Usa Today Sports, via Reuters ConThe rationale, on paper, is this: Owning a network of teams should allow owners to share best practices more easily while reducing risk and increasing efficiency in the transfer market. A network should, if constructed correctly, function as a two-way talent pipeline: The best players rise to the top of the pyramid, while those who fall by the wayside have landing spots farther down, meaning there is far less waste.That is the theory. The practice is a little different. Leipzig and Salzburg apart, it is not clear if anyone has managed to make the idea work, at least at scale. Players do not move from Montevideo City Torque to Girona to Manchester City. The portfolio approach to soccer, for now, remains very much in beta.There is a reason people keep trying it, though. For the clubs that form the networks — especially for those teams outside the wealthy enclaves of England’s Premier League and Europe’s elite — collective safety offers a degree of economic stability. It may even, at some point, give them access to a higher caliber of player than they’d otherwise get.And yet, in another light, the trend represents something significantly more troubling: not so much an inevitable conclusion to the sport’s flirtation with high finance but something far closer to an existential threat.Often, that is framed as an issue of competitive integrity: What will happen, for example, if two teams from the same group encounter each other in European competition? But perhaps more pressing is whether being part of a larger group fundamentally changes the purpose of a club. Does it alter the meaning of a team when it is no longer an entity trying to succeed on its own terms but is instead either a proving ground for talent or a parking lot for castoffs?These are questions UEFA, at least, does not seem in a hurry to answer. The organization’s president, Aleksander Ceferin, has performed a significant about face on the subject, going from immediate, reflexive objection to hinting that the body will change its rules to accommodate the new reality. The conclusion, as always, is that soccer is happy to grant forgiveness, even if you do not ask permission.Still, there is sufficient organic skepticism that — as a rule — these deals are announced as gently as possible. Freshly minted member clubs are offered soothing reassurances about their autonomy. The connections are, to some extent, downplayed. The precise purpose is always oblique. There are, it is fair to say, not many cases where one team poses happily for a photo in the stadium of its new stablemate.Last month, Atlético Huila was acquired by Grupo Independiente, an investment consortium headed by Michel Deller, an Ecuadorean real estate magnate. His wealth, though, was not the main source of the group’s appeal.Rodrigo Buendia/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt was instead the success he and his partners have had with Independiente del Valle, the club they bought 15 years ago and turned, at blistering speed, into what may be the most forward-thinking team in Latin America.As Juan Carlos Patarroyo, the outgoing president of Huila, said, Independiente now stands as the “guru” of South American soccer, a “pioneer in training, creating, producing and marketing professional players.”The sophistication of its youth system is the envy of the continent: the regional training bases placed deliberately in the most fertile areas of the country, the in-house tournaments that attract scouts from across the world. Independiente has produced not just Ecuador’s current golden boy, Moisés Caicedo, but also Kendry Paéz, his heir apparent. It is not bad going, given that Paéz, at 16, is older than the current iteration of the club.No less impressive have been the results. Independiente is not just a finishing school. Deller, thanks to considerable investment and a sharp eye for coaching talent, has turned his project into a genuine continental force. Independiente was a Libertadores finalist in 2016, and it won the Copa Sudamericana in 2019 and 2022.Most significant, though, has been its broader impact on soccer in Ecuador. At the World Cup last year, 10 of the 26 players on Ecuador’s squad bore Independiente’s imprimatur: They had spent some, or all, of their careers in Sangolqui. Led by Paéz, Ecuador finished as runners-up in this year’s South American under-17 championship, ahead of Argentina, to earn a place in the under-17 World Cup.And now, through Huila, Deller has set himself the target of doing exactly the same in Colombia. The conditions, he believes, are similar: an abundance of young talent, much of it currently lost through carelessness, to be harnessed; a club more than willing to adopt his methods and apply his knowledge.“We are going to contribute a lot with know-how and experience,” Santiago Morales, Independiente’s general manager, said after the takeover was completed. “We will give new ideas and initiatives, but above all we have a commitment to train players. Soon, we will have Colombia playing in youth tournaments in South America and the world.”That is the plan, anyway. Given all Independiente has accomplished, it is easy to believe they will be able to meet their lofty promises. In doing so, they would not only lift Atlético Huila, but Colombia as a whole. And more than that, they may even prove that there is a way to make soccer’s latest theory work in practice, too.Common Sense RevolutionManchester City and Manchester United are two of the biggest spenders in women’s soccer, too.Molly Darlington/ReutersFrancesca Whitfield is not exactly a household name. As the head of group planning at Manchester United, she probably would not expect to be. Her background is in the corporate sector; United recruited her, initially, as a financial analyst. Still, this week she did two things so rare, and so unexpected, that they deserve to be celebrated.It is impressive enough that, while speaking at the inaugural Women’s Football Summit — the European Clubs’ Association had not thought to organize one before 2023, which is pretty telling, really — Whitfield suggested that women’s soccer should seek to “adopt financial regulation much earlier in the women’s game than we did in the men’s.”This is, of course, so sensible that it almost borders on obvious, but Whitfield’s belief — that women’s soccer should not seek to “emulate or replicate” the men’s game — remains surprisingly revolutionary. Curiously few people in women’s soccer seem to be aware that they do not have to be hidebound by a set of flawed conventions designed for a bygone age.More striking still, though, was the context for Whitfield’s comments. She works for one of the game’s apex predators, and yet she was publicly pushing for financial controls — either an “anchoring system” or “even something akin to a hard salary cap” — that might enable smaller clubs to compete.“The wage inflation we are seeing is contributing to the gap between the larger and the smaller clubs,” she said, pointing out that while teams backed by major men’s clubs can cope, those run on tighter budgets are effectively being railroaded into irrelevance. “They can’t possibly ever be competitive with how things are.” She would like, she said, to see the issue addressed not by the leagues themselves, but “on a European level.”Quite what form that financial control should take — a salary cap, a designated player system or even introducing a draft for out-of-contract players — is open to debate.The sentiment, though, is worth heeding, not solely for women’s soccer, but the game as a whole. Everyone should be thinking about how to make the sport more competitive: between clubs, between leagues, between continents. Everyone, in other words, should be thinking a little more like Francesca Whitfield.AfterthoughtAlex Christian, right, and Haiti stunned Qatar at the Gold Cup, 2-1, on Sunday.Mark Felix/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBy the end, nobody felt the need to remember the start. It seemed too long ago, so much crammed into the month that had elapsed that it felt distant, as if it had happened in another era, or on another planet. Lionel Messi, rather reluctantly wearing a bisht, had lifted the World Cup trophy after a final that will likely go down as the greatest of them all. Qatar had the story it wanted, the tournament it wanted, the stage it wanted all along.In the rush to unpack precisely what that meant — for soccer, for politics, for the Qatar’s human rights record and for the migrant workers who had died so that all of it might happen — it was easy to forget that it had begun with a humiliation.Three minutes into the tournament’s opening game, Qatar’s national team had conceded a goal to Ecuador. It was — very narrowly — ruled out for offside, but it set the tone. Inside 16 minutes, Qatar was behind. The host lost that game. Then it lost to Senegal, ensuring it would not reach the knockout stage. A final defeat, to the Netherlands, marked Qatar as the worst-performing host of all time.Given the cost and the scale and the sheer controversy involved in staging the tournament, it is easy to assume that the Qatari authorities never really cared about the soccer part of it. That is not quite true: The country had spent years trying to hone a team to fly its flag.It built the Aspire Academy, ensuring its young players had the finest facilities in the world, and explored using it to develop talent from across the planet. It invested in Eupen, a minor Belgian team, to expose its hot-housed prodigies to European soccer. It hired expert — and able — coaches to oversee their progress.And it all failed. Qatar was not humiliated during the World Cup, but it is fair to assume that three games, and three defeats, was not quite the return it had anticipated. The results have not improved since then. In its opening game at the Gold Cup, Qatar’s national team — now under the aegis of the grizzled, irascible Carlos Queiroz — lost to Haiti.There is a romance there, of course: Haiti, one of the poorest nations on earth, embattled in so many ways, sticking one in the eye of one of the richest countries. But it is a reminder, too, that while Qatar will look back on the World Cup as a resounding success, there was one aspect of the whole endeavor — the sporting one — that remained entirely beyond its grasp.CorrespondenceThis newsletter likes to regard itself as a safe space. It’s best, perhaps, to think of it as a thought workshop: a place to challenge conventional thinking, to gaze upon the blue sky, to move so far outside the box that you realize the box itself is a circle. No idea is a bad idea: That’s the credo. Except for this one, from Shawn Donnelly.“I just thought of a way to make soccer more exciting,” Shawn wrote, in what I can only assume was the very small hours of the morning. “Take a page out of the N.B.A.’s book and add three-pointers: three points for shots from outside the 18-yard box, two for shots from inside, and one for penalties.”You’ll have spotted the problem here: What Shawn has done is not so much as take a page from the N.B.A.’s book as copy-and-paste it, verbatim.Let’s think this through, though. Is the idea that teams who score more goals than others not something that should be incentivized? Could there not be a bonus point, as there is in rugby, for sides that score — say — four or more? Or would that simply give the elite teams even more of a structural advantage? Probably, but it is worth considering. This is why we should always workshop every idea, even if the raw material is, um, lacking. All goals should count equally. That is not a part of soccer we need to adjust.U.S. striker Jesus Ferreira scored three goals in a 6-0 win over St. Kitts and Nevis in the Concacaf Gold Cup on Wednesday. The Americans close the group stage against Trinidad and Tobago on Monday.Jeff Curry/Usa Today Sports, via Reuters ConWalid Neaz, on the other hand, has an idea that needs very little tweaking. “Why are the continental champions not awarded a spot in the World Cup?” he asked. “If it’s the showcase tournament, then it would stand to reason the champions for each continent have earned a spot?”Yes, absolutely. This makes perfect sense. The reigning champions of each confederation should, of course, earn a bye straight into the World Cup. It would, as Walid points out, help to alleviate fixture congestion, just a little. It would reward long-term planning. And it may even increase the prestige of a couple of the continental tournaments.Sadly, Walid already knows why it won’t happen. “More games means more eyeballs and more revenue to be sold for FIFA,” he pointed out in the coda to his email. (I’d add that it would mean the individual confederations’ accepting that their tournaments are upstream of the World Cup, which is not something their pride would allow.) More

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    Women’s World Cup: FIFA Will Allow Rainbow Armbands

    Captains will be offered choices reflecting several anti-discrimination efforts. The rainbow-colored design is similar to one banned at the men’s World Cup in Qatar.UPDATE, Friday, June 30: FIFA on Friday confirmed the rules for the armbands team captains can wear at the Women’s World Cup described in this article. One design includes a rainbow-colored design, but FIFA took pains to differentiate its from a familiar pride design some teams have worn for years. This article has been updated to note the approved slogans and designs.FIFA will allow teams to wear rainbow-colored armbands that promote inclusivity at this year’s Women’s World Cup, reversing a policy that specifically outlawed a similar armband featuring the same colors at the men’s World Cup in Qatar last year.In November, FIFA threatened teams and their captains with serious punishments in its effort to silence a long-planned anti-discrimination statement only hours before the start of the World Cup, leading to a breakdown in relations between soccer’s governing body and several competing nations.But this week, after months of discussions between soccer’s leaders and national federations that are intent on allowing their players to highlight causes that are important to them on women’s soccer’s biggest stage, FIFA sent a letter outlining its armband rules for the 32 teams that will participate in the tournament.The participating national soccer federations received the letter on Friday, around the time FIFA announced its plans on social media.The agreement that appears to have been reached will allow captains of teams that want to participate in efforts to promote inclusivity — a FIFA-approved message scheduled to be the theme for the first round of games — to wear armbands featuring rainbow colors during matches at the monthlong event in Australia and New Zealand.The single multi-colored design, similar to the so-called One Love version banned in Qatar, would be reminiscent in its colors to the well-known flag that serves as a symbol of L.G.B.T.Q. pride, but purposely not identical to it.FIFA will allow individual nations to decide whether or not to wear the rainbow armband, and it will offer captains and teams who opt out choices highlighting other social justice words and phrases on a solid blue armband, or a neutral FIFA armband bearing the message “Football Unites the World.”In the tournament’s later rounds, FIFA and the national teams will promote themes beyond inclusivity like gender equality, peace, education and violence against women, among others. The co-host Australia had pushed for an armband that highlights the rights of Indigenous citizens; that was also approved. (In a related decision, FIFA plans to hang Indigenous flags at World Cup stadiums in Australia and New Zealand in a show of support for an issue of particular interest to both host nations.)Getting to a consensus on armbands has not been easy. At one stage of the months of sometimes contentious talks between FIFA and the teams, there was a growing sense that the rainbow-colored armbands sought by supporters of the inclusivity campaign would not be permitted. As recently as March, a top German official said her team had been told directly by FIFA that the rainbow armbands its players have worn for years would not be allowed at the Women’s World Cup.Players on several Women’s World Cup teams have spoken about their intention to highlight support for the L.G.B.T.Q. community at the monthlong tournament, which will feature dozens of players who are gay. A handful of teams already wear rainbow armbands in many of their matches, and other players and teams have used armbands and wristbands in the past to highlight issues such as sexual abuse, gender equality and gun control.FIFA may be just as eager to take the issue off the table after the pushback, public protests and online scorn it received over its ban on rainbow armbands in Qatar, a country where homosexuality is outlawed.“We all went through a learning process,” FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, said of the armband battle during a visit to London in March. “What we will try to do better this time is to search for a dialogue with everyone involved — the captains, the federations, the players, FIFA — to capture the different sensitivities and see what can be done in order to express a position, a value or a feeling that somebody has in a positive way, without hurting anyone else.“We are looking for dialogue and we will have a solution in place well before the Women’s World Cup,” he predicted at the time. The tournament opens on July 20. More

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    U.S. Will Host Club World Cup in 2025

    A year before the World Cup comes to North America, an expanded soccer competition for the top global club teams will be contested in the United States.A year before 48 of the best men’s national soccer teams come to North America for the World Cup, 32 of the best club teams will arrive in the United States for the first edition of an expanded Club World Cup in 2025.The entrants will include the 12 top European teams based on their performances in the Champions League, including Chelsea, Real Madrid and Manchester City. Clubs from the rest of the world will qualify from their various continental club championships.The Seattle Sounders of Major League Soccer earned a berth by winning the 2022 Concacaf Champions League, and teams from Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Brazil and elsewhere have already qualified, with more than half the field still to be determined.FIFA announced Friday that the United States would host the event. The cities where games will be held and the exact format of the tournament have not yet been disclosed. The event is expected to be held in June and July.FIFA has long dreamed of a world championship for club teams that might someday rival the big international team events it holds. At one point, a 24-team version of the event was announced for China but was scrapped, in part because of the pandemic.Under the current format, started in 2005, the Club World Cup has been held annually in the winter months, with seven teams — one per continent and one from the host country. The expanded event, proposed long ago but delayed several times, is expected to be held every four years.Despite the global field, European teams nearly always win the event, and with 12 of 32 entrants in the new format, they seem likely to continue to do so. This means that the Club World Cup could become essentially a spruced-up version of Europe’s Champions League. It would also add to the nearly year-round schedule of games for top players.In part for these reasons, the European governing body, UEFA, some top club teams and representatives for players have been at times less than enthusiastic about the expanded event.J.T. Batson, the chief executive of U.S. Soccer, said he was excited about the coming event.Besides the 12 European entrants, the 2025 event will include six teams from South America; four each from Asia, Africa and the North and Central America and Caribbean region; one from Oceania; and one from the host country, in this case the United States.The expanded Club World Cup will come one year before the 2026 World Cup, which will hold the bulk of its games, including the final, in the United States, with some games in Canada and Mexico. In 2024, the United States will host the Copa América, the championship for South American national teams. More

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    Secrets and Systems, Lost in the Video Age

    Technology democratized scouting and made hidden gems a thing of the past. But innovation is a moving target.Udinese knew about Alexis Sánchez long before he had been called up to play for the Chilean national team. It knew about him before he had played in the Copa Libertadores, before the rest of South America discovered him and before he had caught the acquisitive eyes of Europe’s biggest, richest teams.Quite how much time elapsed between Sánchez’s making his debut — a substitute appearance for Cobreloa, a team based in the mining town of Calama in Chile’s parched, dusty north — and word of his talent spreading all the way from the edge of the Atacama Desert to Italy’s cold, foggy northeast is difficult to establish precisely.A couple of months, possibly. Maybe less. There is a chance that Udinese knew about Sánchez even before, on April 23, 2005, Jawed Karim stood outside the elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo, filming himself for a website he had helped to launch.It was not especially compelling content. “The cool thing about these guys,” Karim said, correctly, “is that they have really, really, really long trunks.” It may not have been David Attenborough, but it was the first video uploaded to YouTube. And it would, ultimately, be possibly the most significant event in Udinese’s modern history.A middleweight sort of a club in Serie A, Udinese did not have the luxury of employing a scout on the ground in Chile, one who could attend mid-table Primera División games in the hopes of unearthing a generational talent. Instead, it found out about Sánchez the way it found out about almost all of the dozens of nascent stars it had discovered.Udinese, whose vast scouting network once allowed it to compete for European places, has been a reliably mid-table team for the past decade.Andrea Bressanutti/LaPresse, via Associated PressUnder the auspices of Gino Pozzo, the son of the club’s owner, Udinese had spent years establishing a formidable, informal network of contacts across the globe: coaches, fixers, scouts, agents, journalists.The emphasis was not on countries that were well established as sources of players — Brazil, Argentina, Portugal, the Netherlands — but on those places that were a little more off the beaten track: the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Colombia, Chile. “We look in countries where there is a good balance between the technical level and the financial,” Pozzo told The Times of London in 2015.Under the Pozzos’ setup, if any of Udinese’s informants spotted a player who might be of interest, they would send footage — in the form of videotape, initially, and then DVDs — to the club. In Italy, it would be parsed and analyzed by Udinese’s technical staff. If the recommendation passed muster, the club would dispatch scouts to watch the player in person.For more than a decade, the system worked, and it worked spectacularly. Udinese earned a reputation as masters of the transfer market, the most reliable talent merchants in Italy. Márcio Amoroso, Marek Jankulovski, Sulley Muntari and Oliver Bierhoff all passed through Udine on their way to grander, brighter horizons.So did Sánchez, whose career after Italy took him to Barcelona, Arsenal, Manchester United and — after a brief loan spell with Inter Milan — to Marseille. He was a totem in what may well be the finest national team Chile has known. There is an argument, a convincing one, that he is his country’s greatest player.He was also, though neither he nor the club knew it at the time, the last hurrah of Udinese’s golden era.Alexis Sánchez, the Chile striker found and, more recently, lost.Martin Bernetti/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe way Udinese worked, of course, never wavered. Pozzo’s attempts to expand his empire — he invested in the Spanish team Granada and the English club Watford in an attempt to industrialize Udinese’s recruitment strategy — failed, but he still had his network of contacts around the world. Thousands upon thousands of hours of tape still poured into the club’s viewing center. Udinese did not lose its expertise, its judgment, its way.And yet it rapidly found its edge dulled nonetheless. While Udinese had not changed, the rest of the world had. Both the technology that YouTube pioneered and the principle it represented — that footage of anything could be uploaded and quickly disseminated online — had not taken long to infiltrate soccer.Clubs no longer needed to have a dedicated scout covering a league to find players. Instead, they could track a competition on one of any number of video-sharing platforms that offered game footage for a reasonable monthly fee. The most prominent, Wyscout, became a compulsory subscription for every club. Soon, data providers added video to their packages, too. Now, if it knew what it was looking for, any team could be Udinese.Soccer has a habit of undervaluing these sorts of cultural shifts, and as a result misunderstanding the currents that eddy and swirl around it, invisibly and inexorably shaping its reality. There is a tendency, for example, to berate the sport for its apparent reluctance to embrace data as quickly as baseball and, to some extent, basketball.The charge is that soccer’s inherent conservatism, its aversion to new thinking, conditioned it to resist the benefits of analytics. That is, doubtless, true. But in researching “Expected Goals,” my book on the history of the relationship between soccer and data, it became clear that before 1998, and the invention of the DVD, even attempting any form of analytics was too unwieldy to be practical. One of the pioneers of the field, ProZone, initially used a system that required eight — eight — interconnected VCRs in order to annotate tape.That blindness to the indirect, external factors that explain success is significant. This month, Aston Villa appointed Ramón Rodriguez Verdejo — better known as Monchi — as its president of football operations. It is, doubtless, a coup. Monchi has, in almost two decades at Sevilla, established himself as one of the most admired talent spotters in world soccer.Monchi’s track record is unparalleled. He has discovered so many players — Ivan Rakitic, Carlos Bacca, Jules Koundé, countless others — that the profits from their sales helped transform Sevilla from a financially stricken, second-division team into one that can win the Europa League even when it expressly does not want to win the Europa League.The only note of caution, when Monchi’s appointment by Villa was announced, was that it is not yet clear if his skills are transferable. He left Sevilla once before, for the Italian side Roma, and lasted less than a year. (The reasons behind that premature departure are intensely debated and fervently held.)Perhaps, though, there should be another warning. Monchi’s calling card, his pièce de résistance, was his signing of Dani Alves, two decades ago. The Brazilian fullback, currently awaiting trial in Spain on charges of sexual assault, went on to play for Barcelona, Juventus and Paris St.-Germain. No player has won more honors. He made 126 appearances for Brazil. His signing was the beginning of Monchi’s legend.The story of how Monchi found him, though, is significant. Sevilla spotted Alves at the South American under-20 championship, when he stood out so much that Sevilla’s scout called Monchi immediately, praising this young right back to the skies. The haste was, perhaps, unnecessary. Sevilla was the only European club to have sent a representative to the tournament.That is not to say that Monchi is outdated. He thrived in Seville for two decades. He is no starchy traditionalist. He has been more than willing to innovate and experiment and update his methods. He is impeccably connected, fiercely intelligent, a consummate deal maker: precisely the sort of executive, in other words, that an ambitious team like Villa needs.But it is true that, since returning to Sevilla from Roma in 2019, Monchi’s success rate has been just a little lower. Koundé, now with Barcelona, is the only relatively recent addition to his greatest hits. The others, from Alves to Rakitic to the forwards Luís Fabiano and Júlio Baptista, all now belong to a previous era of the game.Like Udinese, it is not that Monchi has changed. It is not even that he has suffered the fate of so many pioneers, and found his advantage eroded by imitation. It is simply that everyone can now send a scout to the South American under-20 championship. And even if they do not, they can always watch the games on Wyscout or Scout7, or read the data on StatsBomb or Opta Pro or InStat.The world has changed, in other words. It was altered irrevocably by “Me at the zoo,” even if it did not know it at the time. The executives in charge of world soccer know that now, of course. But knowing it, and figuring out how that should influence the decisions you make and the things you believe: Those are two quite different things.Caesar’s WifeAt best, the evidence is circumstantial. It may be nothing more than coincidence.To recap the bare facts of the case, because it is all quite dry and convoluted and also requires an inelegant number of the uses of the word “fund”: Clearlake, the private equity firm that owns Chelsea — alongside the transfer market master strategist Todd Boehly — has received some (it’s not clear how much) investment from the Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.The PIF, as previously discussed in this newsletter, recently took control of four teams in the Saudi Pro League, and has set about hiring a glut of aging, slightly faded stars to populate them. Many of its targets, as it turns out, play for Chelsea: N’Golo Kanté, Hakim Ziyech, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and so on.N’Golo Kanté, safely shuffled off Chelsea’s books with the help of Al-Ittihad’s checkbook.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAs it happens, Chelsea has spent colossal sums on players since Clearlake and Boehly took over last year. It now finds itself desperately trying to pare down its bloated, expensive squad, both for practical reasons — the players do not all fit in one changing room — and more pressing economic ones: Chelsea needs its books to balance a little more by the end of the month so the club doesn’t run afoul of various financial regulations put in place by the Premier League and European soccer.On the surface, then, it is not hard to understand why people might think this Saudi buying of Chelsea players is all just a little too convenient. Somewhere along the line, the people doing the buying and the people doing the selling have interests that are, let’s say, mutually aligned.There is, of course, an alternative explanation: that Chelsea has a stock of high-profile players it no longer requires, and that the Saudi authorities — working out how to spend the PIF’s money — have spotted an opportunity, in essence, to buy in bulk. Coincidence, in other words. Nothing untoward to see here at all, just the usual mechanics of the market.And that may well be true. Certainly, those involved with Chelsea and the Saudi clubs insist that it is. But that does not mean the perception is not a problem. Saudi Arabia’s bailing Chelsea out of a mess of the club’s own making would compromise soccer’s integrity. Saudi Arabia merely looking as if it is bailing out Chelsea, though, is not a whole lot better.In his trilogy on the Roman orator and politician Cicero, the author Robert Harris depicts the story of Publius Clodius Pulcher, a sociopathic, rabble-rousing politician who slips into Julius Caesar’s home to witness the rites of the Good Goddess, a ceremony only women were permitted to attend.Clodius is caught. A scandal, and a trial, ensue. Caesar insists he did not allow Clodius to enter, and nor did his wife, Pompeia. He maintains her innocence absolutely, in fact. But he is the chief of the official Roman state religion, the pontifex maximus. And so he divorces Pompeia. What matters most of all, he realizes, is not just that his wife — and his family — “are free from guilt, but even from the suspicion of it.”CorrespondenceA great sin was committed in last week’s newsletter, and thankfully — with the unerring precision of a Luis Suárez free kick, or a pod of orcas attacking a boat — Tom Karsay spotted it immediately. In the story of Luciano Spalletti, I did not so much as bury the lede as omit it altogether. “His car,” Tom wrote. “Did he ever get it back?”The answer is, pleasingly, that he got some of it back: Once Spalletti announced that he was leaving Napoli, a delegation of the club’s ultras presented him with the car’s steering wheel, as a goodbye gift. Personally, I am in favor of this becoming a tradition: Departing managers should in perpetuity be presented at Napoli with a steering wheel in gratitude for their service.Mary Irene Katsibas spotted another absence. “Writing about managers walking away before they are fired I wish you had mentioned Zidane,” she pointed out, entirely reasonably. Zinedine Zidane knew when to call it a day at Real Madrid. The first time round, at least. He did kind of spoil it by going back and having to leave again, though.And Eduardo Frias has a response to the question, posed last week, about who will benefit most from Lionel Messi’s arrival in Major League Soccer, outside his new teammates at Inter Miami. “Argentina’s national team,” Eduardo wrote, definitively. “Messi happy, staying in shape, playing in a league where they will not try to break his ankles in every challenge is a huge plus.”That, without question, was part of the motivation behind Messi’s choice: Though he recently hinted otherwise, I think we can probably assume that Messi is intending to defend the World Cup — on what by then will be home soil — in 2026. Now what was that thing about legacy being defined by knowing when to walk away … More

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    Washington Spirit’s Michele Kang Wants to Take Women’s Soccer Clubs Global

    “Transforming Spaces” is a series about women driving change in sometimes unexpected places.Y. Michele Kang did not expect to be here.As the founder and chief executive of Cognosante, a health care technology company, she had made a name for herself as a “reasonably successful businesswoman,” she said.At this point in her career, she explained, she thought she might start spending more time on her philanthropic work. Instead, she has become an influential figure in the world of professional women’s soccer.“I don’t think I’ve been as passionate about anything as I am now about women’s soccer,” Ms. Kang said.In March 2022, she purchased the Washington Spirit, becoming the first woman of color to own a controlling stake in a National Women’s Soccer League team. The sale came after a long and contentious battle in which players and fans called for Steve Baldwin, the chief executive at the time, to sell the team to Ms. Kang in the wake of allegations of abuse brought against the team’s former coach.Just a year later, she is now set to become the first woman to own and lead a multiteam soccer organization, which will encompass both the Spirit and the French club Olympique Lyonnais. The all-stock deal, which is expected to close in late June, will create a new independent entity under Ms. Kang as majority owner. She is already talking of adding more teams from around the world.As Ms. Kang’s profile has risen, questions remain about how much she can do in a league and a sport where abuse has been rampant and leaders have failed to protect players. Trust in longtime N.W.S.L. coaches and staff members can be on shaky ground. Who knew of abuse and turned the other way? How do you build a new culture from the ground up?Her response lies in equal parts investment and trust. Players and staff had endured a “horrific situation,” she said of abuse allegations, including accusations that the coach of the team she owned had fostered a toxic workplace culture for female employees.“I don’t want to overplay that I’m a woman, or a person of color, therefore I’m the only one who can understand our players,” she said, speaking of members of the Washington Spirit, “but there is a little bit of a sense of trust and comfort and familiarity that I am very glad to provide so that they feel comfortable coming up to me and talking to me about any issues.” She wishes she could say any of this — her purchase of a N.W.S.L. team, her creation of a multiteam organization, her hopes to help transform the culture around women’s soccer — were all part of a grand vision. But that is not the case.A few years ago, she didn’t know much about the sport. So little, in fact, that friends accused her of not knowing Lionel Messi, one of the world’s most famous players.Her retort? “Well, I did know who Pelé was.”Ms. Kang in 2021, as the Spirit’s co-owner, celebrating after the team won the National Women’s Soccer League championship on Nov. 20 in Louisville, Ky.Tim Nwachukwu/Getty ImagesMs. Kang grew up in Seoul in a home where education was prized. Her mother demanded excellence and her father always told her “there is nothing I couldn’t do that the boy next door could,” a sentiment that was more of a rarity growing up in South Korea in the 1960s.As she began to study business and economics in Seoul, she realized her dreams extended beyond her home country. The center of the business world was in America, she said, so with the eventual blessing of her parents, that’s where she decided to go. It was quite a bold move for a young single Korean woman at the time. She earned a degree in economics from the University of Chicago and went on to earn a master’s degree from the Yale School of Management.And so began not a five-year plan but a 30-year plan. The goal was to build enough experience to become the chief executive of a large company. Her work kept her in motion. Ms. Kang estimates she moved between 20 and 30 times.In the midst of the recession of 2008, around the time she expected to join a major company, she started her own. Like many entrepreneurial stories, what would become Cognosante, a multimillion-dollar company, began in a room above her garage in the Washington, D.C., area.“I had a reasonably successful company,” she said of Cognosante, “I thought that was my business career.”That was until 2019, when Ms. Kang, whose business accomplishments were well-known, was invited to join the Spirit’s ownership group after the U.S. women’s national team won the World Cup that year. Ms. Kang didn’t know much about soccer, and she still had her own company to run, she recalled. But she was curious enough to spend six months getting to know the owners and players. She thought about the mentorship she was already doing. Why not this too?She joined the ownership group in late 2020, walking into a league and a team that would face a public reckoning and an extraordinary upheaval.In the spring of 2021, she was made aware of ongoing accusations of verbal and emotional abuse at the hands of Richie Burke, the Spirit’s former head coach. Ms. Kang said multiple people came to her with their concerns. Mr. Burke was fired from the team in September 2021. The accusations were recounted in a series of published reports, and many employees had quit the team amid reports of a toxic workplace culture.Ms. Kang was working to take majority control of the team as players and fans called for Mr. Baldwin, then the chief executive, to sell the Spirit. The transfer of power did not come easily. Spirit players demanded that Ms. Kang be the new owner, but it would be months before Mr. Baldwin stepped down and Ms. Kang was able to acquire the necessary shares.“Let us be clear,” a letter to Mr. Baldwin from the team’s players stated. “The person we trust is Michele. She continuously puts players’ needs and interests first. She listens. She believes that this can be a profitable business and you have always said you intended to hand the team over to female ownership. That moment is now.”The Spirit deal closed on March 30, 2022.Ms. Kang hugs Spirit goalkeeper Aubrey Kingsbury after a May match against San Diego Wave F.C. at Audi Field.Geoff Burke/USA Today Sports, via ReutersMs. Kang’s influence grew quickly in the midst of a wave of new investment, and interest in, the women’s game.In the summer of 2020, an eclectic group of owners including the actors Natalie Portman and Eva Longoria, the soccer legend Mia Hamm and the tennis great Serena Williams announced the creation of a team in Los Angeles, Angel City F.C., which made its debut in 2022, along with another expansion club, the San Diego Wave. An additional club, Racing Louisville F.C., joined the league in 2021, and the Utah Royals were sold and their assets moved to a new franchise in Kansas City, the Current. The Utah Royals will be added back to the N.W.S.L. in the 2024 season, along with another expansion club, Bay F.C. The league, now in its 11th season, is already looking at further expansion.None of this is a surprise to Ms. Kang, who seems dumbfounded if not frustrated by how anyone could undervalue a women’s professional soccer league, or why there has been a lag in investments.“I give full credit to people who carried the teams,” she continued, speaking of past N.W.S.L. owners. “But it was being viewed as a charity or a nonprofit, and business disciplines were not applied from where I stand.”That attitude signals legitimacy in a unique way, said Natalie L. Smith, an associate professor of sports management at East Tennessee State University who studies women’s soccer.If Angel City signaled legitimacy through celebrity, she said, Ms. Kang signals worth through business investment, which sends a message to other potential investors as well.These moves come in the midst of two transitions in the world of soccer, said Stefan Szymanski, an economist at the University of Michigan and the co-author of “Soccernomics.” “One obviously is the rise of women’s soccer, which is long overdue and which seems to be going places quite rapidly in the moment. The second is the transformation of soccer ownership and the management of clubs generally worldwide.”“We don’t feel that women are small men,” said Ms. Kang, at Audi Field. She added that female athletes should be trained with a specific understanding of their physiology and biology.Lexey Swall for The New York TimesMs. Kang, who turns 64 this month, now speaks like a student of the game. She is eager to listen and to learn, and to navigate the complexities of team ownership, ones that in her current purview are not so complex at all. It’s a trait that has made her popular and trusted among the players and staff on her team.“We don’t feel that women are small men,” she said, echoing a sentiment reflected in the lack of studies done specifically on women’s athletics. “We are not going to borrow a manual from the men’s soccer team. We want to understand women’s physiology and biology and train our athletes according to that.”To that effect, Ms. Kang has hired experts to develop programs for how training may, or should, differ during menstrual cycles. It’s a worthwhile place to put funding, she said, and the experience has helped her realize what her footprint could be in the greater soccer world.“There’s no reason I should only do that for the Spirit,” she said, adding: “And frankly, to do that for one team is a real significant investment.”It’s part of what pushed her to think more globally. Ms. Kang looked to Lyon, a dominant European team that has historically recruited top American players including Aly Wagner, Hope Solo, Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan. She spoke excitedly of scouting players internationally, of designing training centers and bigger stadiums, of next steps for expansion.“There is always this push-pull of the greater good when it comes to the women’s football community, which is something that benefits these clubs,” said Ms. Smith, the sports management professor, of Ms. Kang’s expansion. “She does want the game to grow, but she also wants her teams to win.”It will surely not be a straightforward road. There are questions around what could be conflicts of interest in an already dubious labor market. But her biggest test may be with fans outside of the United States.“Americans are little bit docile when it comes to sports and who runs them,” said Mr. Szymanski, the co-author of “Soccernomics.” He added, “In Europe, people just don’t see it like that. They say, ‘This is our sport, not your sport. You may temporarily be here and we’ll give you your due if you put money in, but this is not all about you. This is about the sport.’”Ms. Kang remains undeterred.“It’s not rocket science,” she said with a smile. More

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    U.S. Women’s World Cup Roster Reflects a Team in Transition

    Form and injuries affected the players available to Coach Vlatko Andonovski as he picked a soccer team facing perhaps the toughest challenge in its history.Here’s a sentence you see every four years: The United States is a favorite to win the Women’s World Cup.Why shouldn’t the public believe the hype this time?The United States’ résumé is top of its class: It is the No. 1-ranked women’s soccer team in the world and the two-time defending world champion. And unlike any other women’s team, it has four tiny golden stars sewn above its jersey crest to show the program’s pedigree of four World Cup titles.The team’s World Cup roster was announced on Wednesday, and the Americans are set to arrive in July at the tournament in Australia and New Zealand with a meticulously curated mix of players with and without experience on soccer’s biggest stage.Nine players on the team have lifted the championship trophy before. For three of those players — forwards Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe and defender Kelley O’Hara — this will be their fourth World Cup. For two other players — goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher and midfielder Julie Ertz — this will be their third. Morgan said she is “just as excited and anxious” for this World Cup as she was for her first one.But knowing what it takes to win and doing it with one of the most inexperienced teams the United States has ever taken to a World Cup are very different things. Of the 23 players named to the team, 14 will be World Cup rookies, including a pair of young forwards, 18-year-old Alyssa Thompson and 21-year-old Trinity Rodman.One of those rookies, midfielder Savannah DeMelo, has never even played for the senior national team before. The last time an uncapped player like DeMelo was on the U.S. Women’s World Cup roster was 20 years ago.Yet Coach Vlatko Andonovski said he was confident that this team had the talent to win a record third straight Women’s World Cup title, saying in a statement that the United States has “a roster with depth and versatility, and that will help us take on all the challenges that will be coming our way.”In a video call with reporters, he added: “We want to do something that has never been done before, and we believe in the quality of the team.”Andonovski, who coached the team to a bronze medal at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, spent the past few years trying to rebuild his squad as this tournament loomed, easing out veterans and introducing new talent in an effort to construct a roster that he thinks can win this year and succeed into the future.He was faced with a few surprises as he tweaked the roster, which made a hard process even harder. Just last week, he lost his captain, defender Becky Sauerbrunn, who was ruled out with a lingering foot injury. Injuries also cost him the services of Sam Mewis, a midfield fixture of the 2019 World Cup champions, and more recently the presence of two valuable attacking options, Mallory Swanson, who appeared to be peaking at the perfect time, and the Brazilian-born Catarina Macario.Still, Andonovski had a core of stalwarts he could count on, including stars like Morgan and Rapinoe, who bring years of international experience as well as their gravitas as two of the most famous and most outspoken female athletes in the world. He also had midfielder Rose Lavelle, the breakout star of the 2019 tournament after she made scoring look all too easy. Lavelle and Lindsey Horan will offer a familiar combination of grit and flash in midfield.There will be many new stars, including Sophia Smith, 22, who was last year’s most valuable player of the National Women’s Soccer League, and Rodman, the 2021 N.W.S.L. rookie of the year and daughter of Dennis Rodman, the former N.B.A. All-Star.Sophia Smith was the 2022 M.V.P. of the N.W.S.L. for her play with the Portland Thorns.Jeff Curry/USA Today SportsThe Americans’ first game will be July 22 against Vietnam in Auckland, New Zealand — 9 p.m. Eastern time on July 21. That will be followed by the team’s biggest game since the last World Cup: a rematch with the other 2019 finalist, the Netherlands, that will probably leave the winner with a much easier path in the knockout stage.Andonovski might have surprised himself with some of the names he had penciled in. But as with several other top teams, injuries forced him to alter his plans.Sauerbrunn, 38, announced last week that she would miss the World Cup with a foot injury. She was not only a dogged central defender for years, but also a revered role model for her teammates: the team’s Zen master of confidence and calm, not to mention the anchor of its back line as it won the past two World Cups.Her announcement came only weeks after Swanson, who had been Andonovski’s most dangerous forward this year, tore the patellar tendon in her left knee. Other players with World Cup experience, including Mewis, Abby Dahlkemper, Christen Press and Tobin Heath, have been out with injuries or are still coming back from surgeries. Macario, whose international career is on a steep upswing, simply ran out of time to get back up to speed after tearing the anterior cruciate ligament in her knee last year while playing in France.There will be, however, many familiar and experienced players when Andonovski and his team gather for a training camp next week in California. Ertz, 10 months after having a baby, has stepped directly back into the team’s midfield. Crystal Dunn, who gave birth to a son 13 months ago, will continue to be a rock on defense, as will Emily Sonnett. A versatile player, Dunn can be moved to other positions, including midfielder. Both Dunn and Sonnett played in the last World Cup.Julie Ertz returned to competition with the national team in April, 10 months after the birth of her son.Dustin Safranek/USA Today SportsCasual fans will have to learn some new names. In her World Cup debut, Naomi Girma, a 23-year-old defender for the San Diego Wave, former Stanford team captain and daughter of Ethiopian immigrants, will be in line to replace Sauerbrunn. DeMelo is having a strong year for her N.W.S.L. team, which is partly why she was given this chance. And three young forwards — Smith, Rodman and Thompson — have what it takes to push Morgan, Rapinoe and Lynn Williams up front.Thompson was called up after Swanson’s injury; she is only the fourth teenager to be named to the United States’ World Cup team and will become the youngest U.S. women’s soccer player at the tournament since 1995. The first draft pick in this year’s N.W.S.L. draft, Thompson has the energy, skill and phenomenal speed to be a generational player. But she is also just out of high school.“We just have such a great group,” Smith said. “I think no matter who you put out there, we’re going to get the job done.”About Thompson, Smith said: “I’m so excited for Alyssa. I think she’s so deserving of this and she’s proven herself. She’s ready for this, and I just can’t wait to kind of go through this with her.”With all the new players mingled with the old, it remains to be seen if the team that shows up in New Zealand will have the swagger of previous ones. The team’s pre-eminence in the women’s game has been under threat from the growing investments, and the growing power, of rivals in Europe. Last fall, the United States lost three games in a row for the first time since 1993.That the defeats came against three European opponents — Germany, England and Spain — was an unmistakable message to outsiders: The United States still ranks among the favorites. But its margin may be finer than ever. More