Raphael Stevens

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    Former Fox Employee Convicted of Bribery for Soccer Broadcast Deals

    The employee, Hernán López, and an Argentine marketing firm were accused of helping make illegal payments for rights to tournaments in South America.After hearing seven weeks of often-impenetrable testimony about television contracts, codes of ethics and the interpretation of Spanish phrases in emails sent more than a dozen years ago, a federal jury in Brooklyn on Thursday convicted a former Fox employee and an Argentine sports marketing firm of paying bribes in exchange for lucrative soccer broadcasting contracts.Prosecutors said that Hernán López, who until 2016 worked for a unit of what was then known as 21st Century Fox, had taken part in a complex scheme to make millions of dollars in secret annual payments to the presidents of national soccer federations in order to secure the rights to the Copa Libertadores and the Copa Sudamericana, widely viewed South American soccer tournaments. Full Play Group, the marketing firm, stood accused of similar but far more extensive corruption. Prosecutors said it paid bribes for the rights to World Cup qualifiers, exhibition matches, the Copa América tournament and the Copa Libertadores.The government also argued that López had taken advantage of “loyalty secured through the payment of bribes” to secure inside information that helped Fox beat out ESPN in its bid for the United States broadcasting rights for the 2018 and 2022 men’s World Cups — a theory Fox has vigorously denied. Fox was never accused of any wrongdoing.López, who holds dual American and Argentine citizenship, was convicted on one count of money laundering conspiracy and one count of wire fraud conspiracy and faces up to 40 years in prison. Full Play was convicted on six fraud and money laundering counts and, as a corporation, could face financial penalties.A third defendant, Carlos Martínez, who worked under López at Fox, was acquitted on counts of wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy.The convictions represent what Breon S. Peace, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, called “a resounding victory” in the Justice Department’s sweeping investigation of corruption in international soccer.After a secret inquiry began in 2010, the case broke into public view in May 2015 when sensational predawn arrests were made in Zurich, the city that FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, calls home. Since then, more than two dozen individuals and entities have voluntarily pleaded guilty to a wide variety of charges, including racketeering and wire fraud. And in 2017, a different federal jury convicted two soccer officials, from Paraguay and Brazil, on wire fraud conspiracy and other charges.Prosecutors indicted López, Martínez and Full Play in March 2020, signaling that the long-running case — which shook FIFA to the core and resulted in a shakeout of several generations of leadership in its ranks — still had legs.“The defendants cheated by bribing soccer officials to act in their own greedy interests rather than in the best interests of the sport,” Peace said in a statement following the verdict. Judge Pamela K. Chen rejected a request from prosecutors that López be taken immediately into custody, instead releasing him with tightened bond restrictions. A sentencing date has not been set.John Gleeson, a lawyer for López, said in a statement that “we are obviously disappointed with the jury’s verdict.”He continued, “The proceedings have involved both legal and factual errors, and we look forward to vindicating our client on appeal.” Lopez, who left Fox in early 2016, went on to found the podcasting company Wondery, which was sold to Amazon in 2020 in a deal that valued the company at a reported $300 million.Carlos Ortiz, a lawyer for Full Play, declined to comment. The company was founded by an Argentine father and son, Hugo and Mariano Jinkis, who were charged in 2015 but were not extradited. A lawyer for Hugo Jinkis said he could not immediately comment on the news.“We are very grateful for the jury’s service,” Steven McCool, Martínez’s lead lawyer, said in a brief call after the verdict. “Carlos received justice today and it was a long time coming.”A watch party in Los Angeles for the 2022 World Cup. Fox had the U.S. English-language rights for last year’s tournament in Qatar and the 2018 tournament in Russia.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesThursday’s verdict came on the fourth day of deliberations after a complex and slow-moving trial. Jurors were presented with reams of contracts, financial spreadsheets and bank transfer statements, as well as expert witnesses who debated whether a particular phrase meant “pay him less” or “pay it less.”At one point, early in the trial, Judge Chen admonished the lead prosecutor, Kaitlin T. Farrell, for reading entire emails about corporate issues into the official record, warning that she risked losing the jury’s attention.And as in the first trial in the case, the government relied particularly heavily on a single star witness: Alejandro Burzaco, the former chief executive of the Argentine sports marketing and TV production firm Torneos, who pleaded guilty in the case in 2015 and has been cooperating with the U.S. government since.Over 11 days of testimony, he described in painstaking and sometimes stultifying detail the esoteric series of shell companies and phony contracts that had been used to pay bribes to soccer officials through a joint venture owned by Torneos and 21st Century Fox. Although he personally arranged the payments, Burzaco said he had informed both López and Martínez about their existence and said that neither executive had done anything to halt them.Burzaco also detailed using a relationship cultivated through bribes paid to Julio Grondona — a FIFA vice president and a longtime president of Argentina’s soccer association who died in 2014 — to gain inside information that helped Fox win the U.S. English-language rights to the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. ESPN had long held that coveted property.Although bidding was supposed to have been blind, Burzaco said he had asked Grondona in late 2011 for help at López’s request. Burzaco testified that Grondona had “told me if Fox puts $400 million, they are going to award it to Fox — tell your friends.” Fox ultimately paid $425 million, and several years later obtained rights to the 2026 World Cup, to be held in the United States, Canada and Mexico.Over howls of protest from defense lawyers, prosecutors called the former ESPN president John Skipper to testify about the incident. “I was disappointed,” he said. “In fact, I was angry.”In a statement after the verdict, a Fox spokesman said, “This case does not involve Fox Corporation, and it was made clear that there was no connection to Fox’s successful World Cup bids.” The company has in the past noted that the unit where López and Martínez worked, Fox International Channels, was spun off in 2019 and that it was a different division, Fox Sports, that was charged with negotiating for those rights.Although both López and Martínez maintained their innocence, claiming they were never aware any bribes had been paid, Full Play took a decidedly different tack. Its lawyers readily admitted that the company had made regular payments to Latin American soccer officials but claimed that those payments had not been bribes but simply the standard way of doing business when it came to South American soccer.Ortiz, the lawyer for Full Play, said in his closing arguments late last week: “You can look at it and, say, hey, do I like this morally? Do I think this is appropriate?” But, he added, “all of these executives and officers acted in a manner and behaved and carried themselves in a manner that sent a clear, strong message that their receipts of payments were totally fine.” More

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    Chelsea Saves the Day; Saving the Season Can Come Later

    Beating Dortmund in the Champions League will ease the pressure on Graham Potter and his team, but it won’t end the questions about where they are headed.LONDON — Just when Graham Potter needed it most, something may have stirred at Chelsea. All of those disparate, finely tuned parts, the expensively but randomly acquired fruits of the club’s lavish transfer-market abandon, slotted together enough to keep his team’s season alive. And they did so just in the nick of time.Potter, for the last few weeks, has had the air of a manager desperately trying to keep his head above water. Chelsea had won only twice all year. His team had not scored more than one goal in a game since December. First, it had lost ground in the race for a top-four finish in the Premier League, and then it had lost sight of it completely.As a rule, all of that ends only one way for a coach: not just at Chelsea but especially at Chelsea. The club’s fans had not quite turned on Potter, not en masse, but there has been for some time a definite sense that they are thinking about it. The club’s owners, meanwhile, have been assiduous in reiterating their ongoing faith in the 47-year-old Potter, but there comes a point where the frequency of those reassurances is itself reflective of a problem.Potter will know, of course, that edging past a somewhat depleted Borussia Dortmund, 2-0, on Tuesday to qualify for the quarterfinals of the Champions League is not a panacea. It will not make him immune to dark talk of crisis should Chelsea stutter in the Premier League. But it is preferable to the alternative: Winning this game was not conclusive, but losing it might have been.Raheem Sterling’s first-half goal had Chelsea ahead on the night and even over two legs.Hannah Mckay/ReutersIt was fitting, really, that the game, and the round-of-16 tie, hinged on a five-minute period in which nobody actually played any soccer. Chelsea had gone into halftime with the lead on the night and parity restored on aggregate, Raheem Sterling canceling out the advantage Dortmund had established three weeks ago in Germany.The circumstances in which Potter’s team went ahead, though, were not soul-stirring and blood-pumping; they were, instead, strange and disembodied and somehow remote, as if the whole event had been settled by decree elsewhere.It started with a handball from Marius Wolf, the Dortmund right back, one confirmed only after the intervention of the video assistant referee and a long gaze at the pitch-side monitor by the on-field official, Danny Makkelie. The players idled around as they waited to find out their fate.It would get stranger. Once the penalty had been awarded, Kai Havertz missed it, his effort clipping the post with his teammates already celebrating. A moment later, he had a reprieve. Three Dortmund players had encroached into the penalty area as he prepared to take the kick. After another V.A.R. check, Havertz was given another go. He got it right this time.Dortmund players surrounded the referee, Danny Makkelie, after he awarded Chelsea a second try at a missed penalty kick.Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesStill, it was apt, because even in victory it is not immediately possible to discern a clear, distinct pattern in this Chelsea team. There is nothing, as yet, that marks it out as characteristically Potter’s, no glowing signpost toward the future of this team as he has envisioned it, no particularly idiosyncratic stamp.Perhaps that is inevitable. After all, there has been continual upheaval at Stamford Bridge over the last year, a flood of new players arriving first in the summer and then, more eye-catching still, in January. Potter, it has to be assumed, has approved most of those signings, but fostering and nurturing a coherent team takes time and patience.And it is only natural, given the sheer number of players at his disposal, that Potter has been unable to resist the temptation to cycle through all of his options. As results and performances have waned, rather than waxed, he has tweaked his personnel and his formation and then his personnel again. He has not, yet, hit upon a formula that works reliably, or that he feels confident may work reliably.That can, of course, be a signifier of a creditable versatility, a chameleonic streak that he displayed in his previous job at Brighton and that will stand the club in good stead in the long term. But more immediately it can also betray an uncertainty, a restlessness and a lack of clarity, all of which have a habit of making the long term irrelevant.Nico Schlotterbeck and Dortmund pressed again and again for a goal that might have extended the two-legged tie.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse, via Ikimages/AFP, via Getty ImagesPotter may, in time, come to look back on this game as an educational experience. Maybe the front line of Sterling, Havertz and João Félix does offer the best balance of all the combinations available to him. Certainly, finding a way to empower Chelsea’s two raiding fullbacks, Ben Chilwell and Reece James, should be as much a priority for him as it was for Frank Lampard and Thomas Tuchel.Those notes of cautious optimism, though, will be offset by the fact that Dortmund had Chelsea on the ropes for periods of the first half; with a little more precision and composure, the German team might easily have punished Chelsea for its failure to take control of the game. This was not sweeping, serene progress into the land of Europe’s giants. It was nip and tuck, taut and tense, almost until the end.Still, for Chelsea, that will have to do. For now, at least. Far more important than how the team qualified was that it did so, that for a few more weeks, at least, the impending sense of doom can be lifted just a little, that there remains a purpose in a season that might otherwise have started to drift, that all is not yet lost. For Potter, in particular, that is what matters. It is better, of course, to win in the way you want to win. Until that can happen, though, any type of win will do.Kepa Arrizabalaga and his teammates will learn their quarterfinal opponent next week.Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images More

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    Liverpool Fans Will Get Refunds for Champions League Final Tickets

    European soccer’s governing body will return millions of dollars to fans affected by dangerous overcrowding that its own investigation said could have turned deadly.European soccer’s governing body said Tuesday that it would refund the tickets of thousands of Liverpool fans who attended last season’s Champions League final outside Paris, the latest effort by the organization to make amends for policing and security failures that nearly saw its showcase game take a deadly turn.The governing body, UEFA, said it would offer refunds to the fans “most affected” by scenes of dangerous overcrowding outside the gates of the Stade de France last May 28. The affected tickets include the entire ticket allocation provided to Liverpool for sale to its fans — a block of nearly 20,000 tickets — as well as any fans with tickets to specific gates where the worst of the crushes took place.Last year’s final, the showpiece game of the European soccer season, matched two of the most popular and best-supported teams in the game, Liverpool and Real Madrid. But planning failures led to dangerous scenes in which large crowds of Liverpool fans were herded into narrow areas where, with kickoff approaching and fears in the crowds rising, some were sprayed with tear gas by the French riot police.The tickets eligible for refunds, UEFA said, included Liverpool’s entire allotment of 19,618, but potentially hundreds, or even thousands, of others held by fans affected by the problems at the match.A French Senate investigation last year faulted the authorities for the chaos, calling it a “fiasco” and raising concerns about French policing before this year’s Rugby World Cup and next summer’s Paris Olympic Games. An investigation by UEFA, released last month, was even more direct: Its harshly critical report concluded it was only “a matter of chance” that no fans had died. That report laid the principal blame on UEFA.UEFA officials, and French sports officials, have offered previous apologies to Liverpool and its fans for the overcrowding after initially shifting blame for the problems on “late-arriving” fans. (It also first said people who arrived with fake tickets were to blame, though those claims were later debunked by a check of computer ticketing records.) Liverpool and its fans have taken great offense to those comments; at a recent Champions League game against Real Madrid, the teams’ first meeting on the field since last year’s final, Liverpool fans raised banners that were critical of UEFA and denounced France’s sports minister and interior minister as liars.The UEFA statement announcing the ticket refunds, a tangible and multimillion-dollar effort perhaps aimed at defusing some of those hard feelings, was notable in that it included neither a new apology nor any comment from the organization’s president, Aleksander Ceferin. Instead, one of Ceferin’s top deputies thanked Liverpool fans for their input and said the refund plan was an effort “to recognize the negative experiences of those supporters on the day.”It is unclear how many Liverpool fans will accept UEFA’s offer. Hundreds had threatened to sue for compensation last month, and one of the law firms representing a large group of supporters wrote on Twitter that the offer “is welcome but does not go far enough.”UEFA said refunds would be made available to all fans with tickets for six specific gates of the Stade de France, but also to all fans who ticketing controls showed did not enter the stadium before the scheduled 9 p.m. kickoff, and to any others who were not able to — or chose not to — enter the stadium at all. Liverpool has agreed to handle refunds for fans who bought tickets through the club, an accommodation UEFA said was done for privacy reasons. More

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    Liverpool, Napoli and the Problem With Systems

    As system clubs start to falter, the future seems to belong to the teams and coaches who are willing to be a little more flexible.There is no such thing as a 4-3-3. The same goes for all those pithy threads of numbers that are hard-wired into soccer’s vernacular, the communal, universal drop-down list of legitimate patterns in which a team might be arrayed: 3-5-2 and 4-2-3-1 and even the fabled, fading 4-4-2. They are familiar, reflexive. But none of them exist. Not really.The way a team lines up to start a game, for example, most likely will bear very little relation to what it looks like during it as players whirl around the field, engaged in what anyone who has not watched a lot of mid-table Premier League soccer might describe as a complex, instinctive ballet.Most teams will adopt one shape when blessed with the ball, and another without it. Increasingly, many will shift their approaches in the course of the game, responding to the lunges, the parries and the ripostes of their opponents.A team presented in a 4-3-3 on a graphic before kickoff might be playing a 3-5-2 while that image is still fresh in the memory. A coach might choose to drop a midfielder between the central defenders to control possession, or push the fullbacks daringly high, or draw a forward a little deeper. The nominal 4-3-3 might, if it all comes off, be more accurately denoted as a 3-1-4-1-1. Sort of. Maybe.And besides, every manager will have a different sense of what each of those formations means. As Thiago Motta, the Bologna coach, has said: a 3-5-2 can be a front-foot, adventurous sort of a system, and a 4-3-3 a cautious, defensive one. How the players are arranged does not, in his view, say very much at all about their intentions.Luciano Spalleti’s aversion to a system is working just fine at Napoli.Armando Babani/EPA, via ShutterstockNone of that is to say that formations are completely meaningless. As a rule, managers tend to scoff at the very mention of them. They assume that hearing any value ascribed to the idea of “formation” is a surefire sign that they are in the helpless company of a slow-witted civilian, or perhaps a child.They are, though, useful shorthands: broad-brush, big-picture guidelines that fans and opponents can use to try to find a pattern in what can look — at first — like unfettered chaos. They are a way of establishing what you think a team might look like once it takes the field, what it might be trying to do, how it might be attempting to win.Or, at least, that is what formations have always been. It may not last. There is a chance, now, that soccer’s great leap forward will render all of those old, comfortable ideas almost entirely moribund.The three decades on either side of the Millennium — the period, in soccer terms, that starts with Arrigo Sacchi’s A.C. Milan and ends with Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City — will, in time, be remembered as the sport’s age of the system, the first time its most coveted talents, its defining figures, have been not players but coaches.On the surface, there may be scant similarity between the tiki-taka that turned Barcelona into the finest club in history and the sturm-und-drang of the energy-drink infused, heavy-metal inflected German pressing game.Underneath, though, they share two crucial characteristics. They are both precisely, almost militaristically choreographed, players moving by rote and by edict in preordained patterns learned and honed in training. And they both rely, essentially, on a conception of soccer as a game defined less by the position of the ball and more by the occupation and creation of space.Fernando Diniz, the coach of the Brazilian side Fluminense, rejects the idea of rigid positions.Sergio Moraes/ReutersSoccer’s history, though, is a process of call and response, of action and reaction. One innovation holds sway for a while — the process happens increasingly quickly — before the competition decodes it and either counteracts or adopts it. Both have the same, blunting effect.And there are, now, the first glimmers of what might follow on the horizon. Across Europe, the system teams are starting to falter. The most obvious case is Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool, struggling not just with a physical and mental fatigue but a philosophical one, too. Its rivals and peers are now inoculated to its dangers.But there are others: Jesse Marsch’s travails as the manager at Leeds United can be traced in some way to his refusal to bend from what might broadly, and only moderately pompously, be called the “Red Bull School.” Barcelona, its characteristic style now widely copied across the continent, is scratching around with limited success for some new edge. Even Manchester City, where suffering is always relative, seems less imperious than once it did.The future, instead, seems to belong to the teams and coaches who are willing to be a little more flexible and see their role as providing a platform on which their players might extemporize.Real Madrid, of course, has always had that approach, choosing to control specific moments in games rather than the game itself, but it has done so with the rather significant advantage of possessing many of the finest players on earth.Pep Guardiola has some thoughts.Filip Singer/EPA, via ShutterstockThat others, in less rarefied climes, have started to follow that model is much more instructive. Luciano Spalletti’s Napoli, the most captivating team in Europe, is barreling toward the Serie A title thanks to a free-form, virtuosic style that does not deploy the likes of Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and Victor Osimhen as puppets but encourages them to think, to interpret, for themselves.Fernando Diniz, the coach of the Brazilian side Fluminense, has even given it a name: the “apositional style,” placing it in direct (but perhaps not intentional) conflict with the “positional play” that Guardiola and his teams have perfected.Diniz, like Spalletti, does not believe in assigning his players specific positions or roles, but in allowing them to interchange at will, to respond to the exigencies of the game. He is not concerned with the control of specific areas of the field. The only zone that matters to him, and to his team, is the one near the ball.In his eyes, soccer is not a game defined by the occupation of space. It is centered, instead, on the ball: As long as his players are close to it, what theoretical position they play does not matter in the slightest. They do not need to cleave to a specific formation, to a string of numbers coded into their heads.Instead, they are free to go where they wish, where their judgment tells them. If it makes it all but impossible to present a shorthand of how the team plays, then so much the better. After all, systems are designed by coaches with the express purpose of stripping the game of as much spontaneity as possible. Managers want, understandably, to control what a player does in any given circumstance. They crave predictability. They yearn for it.In that environment, it is only natural that unpredictability becomes an edge.Split VoteAlexia Putellas, world player of (some of) the year.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAlexia Putellas’s year effectively ended last July 5, the day she felt a click in one of her knees during a small-sided training game. A few hours later, she was in the King Edward VII hospital in London, attempting to absorb the news that she had ruptured an anterior cruciate ligament with the European Championship only days away. She would miss the tournament, and at that stage her participation in this summer’s Women’s World Cup was in doubt, too.Putellas is, thankfully, making excellent progress. Her recuperation has gone sufficiently well that she is not only running again, but engaging in what everyone in soccer refers to as “ball work”: the delicate process of ensuring that the repaired connections in her knee can handle the sudden, jarring twists and turns that games will likely demand. Barring any major setbacks, Putellas will feature for Spain at the World Cup that opens in July, and the tournament will be all the better for it.It was hard, though, not to be struck by her election as the best female player on the planet at FIFA’s flashy awards show Monday night in Paris. It would be unfair to suggest that Putellas was an undeserving winner. She is an outstanding player, after all. But at the same time, she had played only half the year. She did not feature in the Euros, the year’s pre-eminent women’s tournament. Her club team, Barcelona, lost the final of the Champions League.The immediate suspicion, where any FIFA award is concerned, is that her victory is a testament to the power of reputation. Both the men’s and the women’s prizes, after all, have had a habit of reverting to the default: The national team coaches and captains, and the international media representatives, generally favor whoever is the most famous, the most high-profile, the safest choice.In the case of Putellas, though, it is likely to be something else. The European champions, England, did not have a single standout player, though a case could be made for Beth Mead, the leading scorer, or Leah Williamson, the captain. Keira Walsh of England was the tournament’s best player, but she is a defensive midfielder, and defensive midfielders do not win awards.Likewise, Lyon’s run to the Champions League title was not inspired by a single individual, as it had been when the goals of Ada Hegerberg powered it to glory in 2019.This year’s field, in other words, was both broad and deep. In that context, both what Putellas achieved — Spanish champion, leading scorer in the Champions League — and what she could not played in her favor: The perception that Spain’s bid for the European Championship fell apart in her absence was supporting evidence for her legitimacy.More Like David AlibiThere comes a point, really, where everyone involved should take a look at their behavior and feel their cheeks flush with shame. There is a level of pettiness that is unavoidable in a rivalry as virulent and intractable as the one shared by Real Madrid and Barcelona. But then there is the controversy that engulfed David Alaba this week, which makes all concerned look like children.Alaba, the Real Madrid defender, is also the captain of the Austrian men’s national team. As such, he was eligible to cast a vote for The Best Men’s Player at FIFA’s sparkling celebration of self-importance. He picked, not unreasonably, Lionel Messi, as did an overwhelming majority of the appointed electorate. (A note, here, for the captain of Gabon and the coach of Botswana, who watched Messi inspire Argentina to the World Cup title and both declared Julián Álvarez the real star of the show.)Only Alaba, though, subsequently had to explain his decision. A Real Madrid player not selecting Karim Benzema, you see, was considered unacceptable not only by Madrid fans on social media but by several Madrid-based news outlets. That he would instead throw his weight behind Messi, so indelibly linked with Barcelona, was beyond the pale.Alaba, to his credit, indulged the nonsense, explaining that the Austrian team voted as a collective and that the majority of the players’ council had favored Messi. He wanted to make it plain that he considered Benzema the “best forward in the world.” Most impressively, he did this all without once mentioning how stupid the whole debate was, or noting that encouraging players to vote politically renders the concept of the award itself completely meaningless.Alaba was perfectly entitled to vote for Messi, whether in consultation with his teammates or not. Benzema would have understood that instantly. He would have been no more offended by Alaba’s selection than he would have been at the sight of France’s captain, Hugo Lloris, and coach, Didier Deschamps, not voting for him either. He is, after all, a grown-up. It is a shame that so many of those commenting appear not to be. 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    Just Fontaine, Record-Setting French Soccer Star, Dies at 89

    His stellar career was cut short by injury, but he made his mark by scoring 13 goals at the 1958 World Cup.Just Fontaine, the French soccer star who scored a record 13 goals at the 1958 World Cup, died on Wednesday. He was 89.Fontaine’s former club Reims and the French soccer federation announced his death, but did not say where he died or cite a cause.Fontaine took six games to achieve his feat at the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, when he was a last-minute inclusion on the French squad.Entering the tournament, Fontaine, a forward, was little known outside the French league. Yet he tormented opponents with his speed and finishing touch, even though had to borrow a pair of cleats after damaging his own boots in practice.Fontaine scored four goals in the third-place game against West Germany, and he could have had five if he had taken the penalty kick.In addition to his feats with the national team, Fontaine won the French league title four times, won the French Cup and reached the final of the 1959 European Cup during his career with Casablanca, Nice and Reims.The French soccer federation said there would be tributes to Fontaine across France this weekend, with a “minute of homage” that will also be observed on Wednesday before French Cup games at Toulouse, Marseille and Nantes.The highest scorer at a World Cup tournament is now acknowledged with the Golden Boot award. FIFA did not begin presenting that award until after Fontaine set the record.“Beating my record? I don’t think it can ever be done,” Fontaine told The Associated Press in a 2006 interview. “The person who wants to beat me has a massive task, doesn’t he? He has to score two goals per game over seven games.”Playing in the days when no substitutions were allowed, France lost in the semifinals, 5-2, to a Brazil team featuring the 17-year-old Pelé.The men’s record for most goals scored in a World Cup career is 16, by the Germany striker Miroslav Klose, who played in four tournaments. Fontaine, who broke the record of 11 goals scored by the Hungary striker Sandor Kocsis at the 1954 tournament, played in only one World Cup.The Brazil striker Marta has scored 17 goals in five Women’s World Cup tournaments.Fontaine scored 200 goals in 213 games, including 30 goals in 21 games for France. But his career was cut short when he was only 28.Renowned for his lightning pace and ruthless finishing, Fontaine suffered a serious leg fracture after a mistimed tackle in March 1960. He retired as a player just after his 29th birthday. He briefly coached France’s national team before going on to coach Luchon, Paris Saint-Germain, Toulouse and the Moroccan national team.Just Fontaine was born in Marrakesh, Morocco, on Aug. 18, 1933. Information on survivors was not immediately available. More

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    France’s Le Graët Steps Down but Lands on His Feet With FIFA

    Noël Le Graët quit after an investigation found federation staff members had endured sexual and mental abuse, but he will stay in soccer: FIFA has hired him to run its Paris office.PARIS — Noël Le Graët, the embattled president of France’s soccer federation, stepped down on Tuesday, bringing an end to the long tenure of an executive whose grip on power — aided by powerful friendships — endured through on-field triumphs and off-field scandals.Battered by accusations of misconduct and mismanagement, Le Graët finally yielded to mounting calls for his removal at a special meeting of the board of the French federation, widely known by its three letter acronym, F.F.F. His announcement came two weeks after the completion of an audit into the organization revealed years of improper behavior even as France produced some of its best national teams, sending its men’s team to consecutive World Cup finals and hosting the Women’s World Cup on home soil in 2019.The audit had been commissioned by France’s sports minister amid growing reports of personal misconduct by Le Graët, including his sending inappropriate late-night text messages to female staff members. The sports minister, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, had publicly called for Le Graët’s resignation in January. On Tuesday, she hailed what she called “the right decision for the F.F.F. and for himself.”But even as he quit the federation under pressure, his place in soccer seemed secure: FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, appointed Le Graët last year to oversee its new office in Paris, and on Tuesday several of his federation colleagues offered him congratulations on that role.Misgivings about Le Graët’s continued presence in the presidency he had held since 2011 only increased as he created a string of controversies while the investigation was ongoing. Late last year, he infuriated French government officials before the World Cup by playing down the treatment of migrant workers in Qatar. After the tournament, he made derogatory statements about Zinedine Zidane, a World Cup winner considered to be one of the best players France has ever produced. Le Graët later took back his remarks and apologized to Zidane.Still, the 81-year-old Le Graët retained numerous allies despite the turmoil, including Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, who had reportedly lobbied on his behalf as his ouster neared. Infantino last year named Le Graët as his presidential delegate to oversee FIFA’s new office in Paris, an outpost that has taken on increasingly important roles that had once been the exclusive preserve of staff members at FIFA’s headquarters in Switzerland.Éric Borghini, a member of the French federation board present at Tuesday’s meeting, suggested Le Graët would continue in that role. It is unclear, though, if Le Graët will continue with his efforts to retain his seat on the soccer body’s governing board, the FIFA Council, in an election in April.Philippe Diallo, the vice president of the federation, will act as interim president of the F.F.F. until June 10, the date of its next general assembly.Far from excoriating Le Graët, his former colleagues rallied around the now ex-president. “Everywhere he has gone, the institutions and clubs he has led have been successful,” Diallo said.The official federation statement announcing his exit sought to celebrate French soccer’s successes under Le Graët, noting that under his direction France’s men’s and women’s teams had secured 11 titles and played in six international finals. The statement also pointed to infrastructure developments and the economic health of the federation.It did not make reference to the turmoil that has enveloped the federation since the men’s team’s success at the 2018 World Cup in France, including allegations of sexual harassment and sexual abuse. Some of those problems grew so toxic that several senior staff members complained about the workplace environment, a crisis that in 2020 forced Le Graët to call in an outside expert specializing in repairing damaged workplaces.Those efforts failed to yield results beyond preserving the positions of Le Graët and his second in command, Florence Hardouin. Hardouin is negotiating her departure from the federation after the government-sponsored investigation accused her of employing “brutal methods and erratic behavior.” Her legal team has since suggested she acted as a whistle-blower in the claims against Le Graët.The federation sought to protect itself in the aftermath of his resignation, claiming the investigation failed to reveal any systemic failure or any failure to fulfill its core mission. “The F.F.F. nevertheless notes that this report is based less on objective facts than on assessments which have sometimes led to a disproportionate denigration of the body,” it said.Current and former officials, meanwhile, continued to insist that removing Le Graët would not be enough to fix the federation’s problems.“The important point is not Le Graët and Hardouin,” said Pierre Samsonoff, the former head of the federation’s amateur soccer division. “What is important is the way the institution is ruled.” More

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    Ahead of Paris Olympics, France’s Sports Minister Faces Trials by Fire

    Amélie Oudéa-Castéra’s first year in office brought chaos at the Champions League final and scandals in multiple sports. With the Paris Olympics looming, her toughest days may be ahead.PARIS — It was the middle of September and Amélie Oudéa-Castéra needed to know if there was any truth in the lurid headlines she was reading.As France’s sports minister, Oudéa-Castéra had the power to summon Noël Le Graët, the octogenarian who has run French soccer for more than a decade, and confront him about the allegations about his behavior: serious accusations of inappropriate comments and text messages to female staff members; whispers about heavy lunchtime drinking sessions; news reports that the federation had ignored sexual harassment and sexual abuse.“Before those revelations from the press I personally did not know Noël Le Graët,” Oudéa-Castéra said in an interview last week. “I had never met him.”So Oudéa-Castéra, not yet four months into her post, reached out arranged a meeting. On the appointed day, the two executives sat down at a circular glass table in Oudéa-Castéra’s cavernous sixth-floor office, and she began to ask questions. Unable to reconcile the two conflicting narratives, the news coverage and the denials being offered by Le Graët, Oudéa-Castéra commissioned an independent investigation.By the time it was underway, the stack of problems on her desk had already grown.Dark CloudsThese should be heady days for French sports. The country’s men’s soccer team played in its second straight World Cup final in December, and its women’s squad will be among the favorites in its own championship this summer. France will host the Rugby World Cup later this year, and then step onto the biggest stage in sports in 2024, when it will welcome the world to the Summer Olympics in Paris.All of those events had been expected to bring an outsize focus on French sports and by extension on Oudéa-Castéra, an old friend and college contemporary of President Emmanuel Macron who took the job of sports minister last May. Few could have predicted how hot that spotlight would become.A former junior tennis champion and professional player, Oudéa-Castéra had arrived at the sports ministry from a short stint leading the French tennis federation. She came armed with folders filled with big ideas and grand plans, excited to use her office to promote youth affairs, health and job creation.Instead, she has been fighting fires almost nonstop.Noël Le Graët faces a board vote this week that could see him removed as president of the French soccer federation.Alain Jocard/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOne of her major headaches may be addressed this week: A decision on the status of Le Graët is expected during a meeting of the soccer federation’s board on Tuesday.But there are more ahead, as leadership scandals, ugly public disputes and mounting security concerns have cast a cloud over French sports that never seems to lift. The soccer federation’s leadership problems, for example, extend far beyond one man. The same is true for rugby. And, most disconcertingly for Oudéa-Castéra, she is still facing withering criticism for her role in the response to security problems at last year’s Champions League final.That game took place only eight days after Oudéa-Castéra took office. But her comments in the aftermath of the match, which descended into chaos after organizational and policing failures saw thousands of Liverpool fans trapped in dangerously small areas, cast her as a central figure in a near disaster, and continue to shadow her to this day. That no one died in the crushes outside the stadium gates, investigators later concluded, was “a matter of chance.”Much of the criticism of Oudéa-Castéra is linked to a specific claim that she and France’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, made publicly: that 30,000 to 40,000 fans with fake tickets, or without tickets at all, were partly to blame for the crowd problems.Oudéa-Castéra said she had merely relied on numbers supplied to government officials at the time, and in an interview said that she still believes the figures, in the context they were provided to her, remain true. But the anger, particularly among Liverpool fans, shows no sign of abating. Hours after she sat for an interview in her office last week, a banner was raised in the stands at a Champions League game in Liverpool — a rematch of the final with Real Madrid — that featured cartoon images of Oudéa-Castéra and Darmanin with long noses, captioned with the French word for liars.“Can I ask you a question?” Oudéa-Castéra said, stopping the interview at one point. “It always feels a little bit like we have not apologized.” She has done so repeatedly, she said, writing letters to Liverpool’s chairman and maintaining a regular dialogue with him about the final. She says that she recognizes her initial comments were particularly sensitive for Liverpool fans since some in Paris that day had survived the 1989 Hillsborough disaster.That is why, she said, she has sought to make amends in the nine months since the game. It is also why the ongoing criticism stings. “For me it’s very sensitive because I cannot admit people say that we have lied,” Oudéa-Castéra said. “It’s not true.”Liverpool fans delivered their scathing verdict on Oudéa-Castéra and Gérald Darmanin, France’s interior minister, during a Champions League match last week, calling them liars. Michael Regan/Getty ImagesAn independent report commissioned by European soccer’s governing body came to a different conclusion. It argued that the figures for fans without tickets or with fake tickets had been incorrectly inflated and then stated as fact by top officials “to deflect responsibility for the planning and operational failures of stakeholders.”Oudéa-Castéra acknowledged mistakes were made in real time and in the immediate aftermath as officials scrambled to parse fact from fiction. She said her office eventually concluded ticketing was only one of “seven or eight things” that combined to create a potentially deadly crush. But she also conceded that the veracity of official remarks was not the only issue.“The one thing we should have clearly done much better was right from Minute 1 to say how sorry we were to Liverpool fans,” she said. “Clearly the time lag in showing that sorrow and that empathy lacked.”Weeks after the chaotic scenes at the Stade de France, Oudéa-Castéra and others were summoned by a French Senate committee to explain the failures. Almost as soon as the senate delivered its verdict in July, though, she was facing a whole new set of crises.New ProblemsWeeks after the Senate hearing, chaos engulfed the organizers of the Rugby World Cup, which will be the biggest sporting event in France before next year’s Olympics.In August, the tournament’s chief executive was suspended and Oudéa-Castéra ordered an investigation amid reports of a “climate of terror” within the organizing committee. In October, the chief executive, Claude Atcher, was fired.The plans for the tournament were further undermined when the powerful head of French rugby, Bernard Laporte, was convicted in December on charges of corruption and influence peddling. Laporte resigned in January, reportedly minutes before he arrived for a meeting in which Oudéa-Castéra was to be present.(Days later, the head of France’s national handball league, Bruno Martini, was out, too; he quit after pleading guilty in a child pornography case.)Oudéa-Castéra with Alexandre Martinez, right, the interim president of the embattled French rugby federation, at France’s Six Nations game against Scotland on Sunday.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPersuading Le Graët, the French soccer federation’s president, to leave has proved a far sterner task. Oudéa-Castéra has said publicly that he should resign but has to date declined to fire Le Graët herself, wary that ignoring the autonomy of French sports bodies — and soccer’s rules about government interference — might only make the situation worse.She has done little, though, to hide her opinions. Even before the investigation into Le Graët’s conduct had been completed, Oudéa-Castéra said she worried that he had begun to exhibit what she labeled “weird” behavior. First, he infuriated the French government by downplaying concerns over the treatment of migrant laborers in Qatar ahead of the World Cup. Then, after the tournament ended, he enraged fans and others by making derogatory statements about the French soccer legend Zinedine Zidane.“It was so inappropriate, so disrespectful, that you can only feel that is someone who is not 100 percent with his mind there,” Oudéa-Castéra said.The investigation has only strengthened Oudéa-Castéra’s belief that Le Graët should step down or be removed. “He cannot continue,” she said. “That is clear.”Asked why well-established problems inside the soccer federation, including accusations of bullying, harassment and sexism by top administrators reported by The New York Times in 2020, were only now being examined, Oudéa-Castéra said the true scale of the crisis had only recently emerged.Virgile Caillet, a former senior official at France’s athletics federation, said it was more likely something else that had stalled a reckoning: “a lack of courage” by sports administrators unwilling to take on powerful officials.Fabien Archambault, a sports historian, argued that Oudéa-Castéra’s presence in the post underlined its importance to Macron, especially as the Olympics approach. Previous sports ministers wielded far less power than Oudéa-Castéra, Archambault said, and would not have taken on entrenched leaders the way she has without the French president’s full support.“We have to do it,” Oudéa-Castéra said, “because there is also the need for the image of France to be a clean and positive one before we welcome the world.”The Current StormFor now, the focus in France remains on Le Graët, a man with powerful allies.After Oudéa-Castéra publicly called on him to resign in January following his comments about Zidane, FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, wrote to the French federation to remind it of the organization’s firm rules on government interference.“I think they wanted to say, ‘OK, the state is something, but we should be managing our own destiny,’” Oudéa-Castéra said. “In France it doesn’t work this way.”That will mean new oversight for soccer and other sports. It will mean a new focus on security ahead of the Olympics, and on fan safety during the Games. It will mean navigating a treacherous path between the International Olympic Committee, which is studying ways to return Russian athletes to competition, and a group of more than 30 nations — including France — that wants to see Russians banned while the war in Ukraine continues.It also suggests that the pile of problems on the desk in Oudéa-Castéra’s office will only continue to grow.“The responsibility is very heavy so I try to leverage every minute to be up to the challenge,” she said. “It’s clearly the challenge of my life.”The Stade de France, the site of serious crowd control failures at last May’s Champions League final, and the venue for track and field events and the closing ceremony at the Paris Olympics.James Hill for The New York Times More

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    How Should Fans Feel About Newcastle United?

    Saudi money has revived a Premier League soccer team and sent it to a cup final on Sunday. Those cheering say they shouldn’t have to answer for the source of its recent success.NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE, England — As he walked out of the tunnel and onto the field at St. James’ Park, Eddie Howe paused for a beat. Much of the time, Newcastle United’s manager makes a conscious effort to maintain the distance between himself and the effects of his work. It is a natural instinct, a self-defense mechanism.But for once, Howe could not stop himself from taking in the tableau. All around him, the steep banks of seats were filled with striped black-and-white flags. In the Gallowgate, the grandstand that serves as the stadium’s heart and lungs, there were banners for heroes current and past.“A lot of the time, you do separate yourself from some of the feeling around the city,” Howe reflected a couple of hours later. “But it’s good to get an idea of what it means. The view of the stadium, all of the scarves and the flags: It is an incredible place to play.”In recent years, that has not always been the case. For more than a decade, as it bristled under the unpopular and at times deliberately provocative ownership of the British sportswear tycoon Mike Ashley, St. James’ Park stewed in melancholy and resentment and despair.The contrast, these days, is stark. Newcastle has the distinct air of a club going places: possibly to Europe, and the Champions League, by the end of the season; and, more immediately, to Wembley, to face Manchester United in Sunday’s league cup final.On the bitingly cold night in January when Howe’s team confirmed its place in that showpiece, the club unveiled to the crowd Anthony Gordon, a winger acquired from Everton for more than $45 million a couple of days earlier. Clutching a Newcastle scarf and blinking under the floodlights, he seemed just a little taken aback by the fervor of his greeting.“All we saw was relegation,” Manager Eddie Howe said of the club he took over in November 2021. It now sits in fifth place.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesGordon is just the latest in a string of a dozen or so new signings added to the squad at considerable expense in the past year, but that recruitment drive is not the only explanation for Newcastle’s rise.Howe has also reinvented or repurposed many of the players he found when he first arrived: Joelinton, a misfiring forward turned into an all-action midfielder; Sean Longstaff, an academy product given a second chance; and, most spectacularly, Miguel Almirón, an eager but mercurial winger who suddenly, on either side of the World Cup, decided to be the Premier League’s deadliest finisher.That all have flourished, unexpectedly, under Howe has burnished Newcastle’s underdog sheen, one that fits neatly with the club’s and the city’s sense of itself. There is something inherently romantic about the restoration of Newcastle. In one light, it is a rare and precious feel-good story for English soccer. The problem is that, in another, it really isn’t.RevitalizedEvery couple of minutes, Bill Corcoran has to put the brakes on his train of thought to engage another fan wanting to throw a some coins or a folded bank note into his collection bucket. A volunteer for Newcastle’s West End Foodbank, Corcoran greets them all like old friends.He chews the fat with each of them about the evening’s game. Only lowly Southampton, bottom of the Premier League and on the verge of firing its coach for the second time this season, stood in between Newcastle and Wembley. Most of the fans, though, seem suspicious of this state of affairs. A twist, they assume, is coming. Loving a team and trusting it are very different things.In between, without missing a beat, Corcoran returns to the subject at hand. Or, rather, subjects: At various points, he sweeps in the Tasmanian genocide of the 1820s, the relative merits of freeing Julian Assange, the Irish famine and the history of the Mikasa, a 20th-century Japanese battleship. This is not traditional pregame chatter.It is, though, indicative of the strange intellectual territory Newcastle’s fans have found themselves occupying over the last 18 months, ever since their club was purchased by a consortium fronted by the British financier Amanda Staveley and her husband, Mehrdad Ghodoussi, but backed largely by the Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s enormous sovereign wealth fund.Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of the Public Investment Fund, has been a regular guest in the owners’ box at Newcastle.Fayez Nureldine/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe deal itself was wreathed in controversy. The Premier League blocked the sale, at first, on the grounds of suspected Saudi involvement in the piracy of its broadcast rights. It only allowed it to go through after it had received “binding assurances” that the P.I.F. was a distinct entity from the Saudi state. (Last week, in a legal dispute over the P.I.F.-backed LIV Golf series, the fund claimed “sovereign immunity” in front of a federal judge in California.)The deal’s eventual approval drew thousands of fans to St. James’ Park in celebration. A smattering waved Saudi flags. A handful wore traditional Saudi dress. The effect was jarring and disorienting: a brutal, repressive autocracy being greeted as liberators from the hated regime of Sports Direct.Since then, the club’s owners have delivered everything the fans could have asked. Howe was appointed as manager. Newcastle has twice broken its transfer record to acquire a new star. It spent more money in last year’s January transfer window than any other club on earth. A team that had been languishing at the foot of the Premier League table has, in the blink of an eye, become a contender.The effect has reverberated beyond the confines of the stadium. “There is a real buzz in the air,” said Stephen Patterson, the chief executive of NE1, which represents the interests of 1,400 businesses across Newcastle’s downtown. “The success has spilled out of the club and into the city itself.”In part, that is to do with a slate of major infrastructure projects getting underway in a city — and a region — that has long felt both underappreciated and underfunded by England’s political and financial power center in London. “The skyline is evidence of investor confidence,” Patterson said. “I’ve never known so much public and private investment in the city.”The soccer team, though, has acted as an accelerant. “It has de-risked a lot of projects,” said Rachel Anderson, the assistant director of policy at the North East England Chamber of Commerce. “Developments that have sat on ice for a long time have come online. The takeover has acted as a catalyst. It makes it easier to raise financing or to greenlight a project.”“There is a real buzz in the air,” a business executive in Newcastle said. “The success has spilled out of the club and into the city itself.”Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat “buzz in the air,” though, has come at a cost. The P.I.F.-led takeover of Newcastle has been condemned by a host of human rights organizations: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, FairSquare.Democracy for the Arab World Now, a group launched by colleagues and friends of the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, said that allowing the takeover to go through normalized “a dictator who literally goes around butchering journalists.” Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, said before the deal was announced that she was “horrified” at the prospect of Saudi ownership of an English club.In the same time frame that its team and its city have started to soar, Newcastle has been turned into a cipher for the dangers of sportswashing, accused of being nothing but an attempt by the Saudi state to “distract from serious human rights violations,” as Amnesty put it. Inside Newcastle, the club’s new reality still feels a little like a dream. Outside, it has been cast as something far darker.Moral ArbitersThe day the takeover went through, Charlotte Robson was invited onto a prominent national radio show to discuss the meaning and merit of Newcastle’s new ownership. At one point, she remembers, another member of the panel bemoaned that the club’s fans had allowed it to happen. “It really struck me,” said Robson, a board member of the Newcastle United Supporters Trust. “Because I don’t remember us being given much of a say.”It would be wrong to suggest there has been a uniform response among Newcastle’s fans to their new reality, beyond the fact that absolutely nobody misses Mike Ashley. At times, as the initial celebrations suggested, there have been some who are happy to embrace the links to Saudi Arabia, or at least the iconography of that connection.For many, though, it has been a more complex, considered process. Robson herself would ideally like to see the club owned — at least in part — by the fans. She does not equate being a Newcastle fan with being a “supporter of the nation state of Saudi Arabia.”Striker Chris Wood, acquired last January, in Newcastle’s alternate jersey, which critics gleefully noted is in the colors of the Saudi flag.Ed Sykes/Action Images, via ReutersShe has, though, been able to take pleasure in the club’s rise. “The fact that the majority owners are not especially visible is important,” she said. “That’s been helpful for a lot of fans trying to dissociate the club from the ownership.”So, too, has the nature of the team. The club’s spending has been considerable, but hardly wanton by the bloated standards of the Premier League. What she calls the “redemption story” of the more long-serving members of the squad, meanwhile, has made it feel more organic. “Almirón was signed by Rafa Benítez, three managers ago,” Robson notes. “You can point to the coaching staff and say it’s because of them.”Her instinct, though, is largely that many fans resent the idea that it should fall on them to act as “moral arbiters” for the game, when nobody in a position of power — the Premier League, UEFA, the British government — is prepared to do the same.“The league has a policy dating back years of letting potentially unscrupulous actors in,” she said. “The average fan is a bit put out that it’s apparently their job to object, when all they want to do is watch their team.”That, certainly, is where Corcoran falls on the spectrum. Despite his unprompted disquisition on the many and varied failings of British and American foreign policy, 1820-2023, he insisted he has not had to “persuade himself” to accept the ethical legitimacy of Saudi ownership.All he has seen so far, he said, has been encouraging: The owners have pledged to match whatever donations to the food bank he and his fellow volunteers can raise on matchdays. There have been no edicts passed that contravene his sense of what Newcastle United should represent.St. James’ Park, which stewed in resentment under its former owner, now bounces with life again on matchdays.Lee Smith/Action Images Via Reuters“If they asked us to compromise our morals, we would be the first to protest,” he said. “Newcastle is about being inclusive, being welcoming, open to everybody, and those values will not change. It is not worth being a great team if it comes at the cost of being ourselves.”Not everyone has been able to make that sort of accommodation. “There is no glory in success obtained like this,” said John Hird, a member of NUFC Fans Against Sportswashing, a lobbying group set up in the aftermath of the takeover.Though a vast majority of fans have “respected our right to protest,” Hird said, his group has been regularly falsely smeared — particularly online — as some sort of sleeper cell composed of Sunderland fans, seeking to effect the destruction of Newcastle’s impending golden age.In reality, its aims are a little more modest. Hird said he would like to see the city’s lawmakers, as well as larger, more established fan groups, “make good on their promise to be a critical friend to the Saudi owners.” He would encourage those fans won over by the benefits of the takeover “at least to speak up on human rights.”Though its numbers are small — “we accept we are a minority,” Hird said — the group has done what it can to make its voice heard, staging protests outside St. James’ Park and, last week, delivering a letter to Eddie Howe on behalf of the family of a dissident imprisoned in Saudi Arabia.Thus far, though, it has been lost in the clamor generated by Newcastle’s ascent. Every train south is booked this weekend. St. James’ Park is an “incredible” place to play once more. Newcastle has the air of a club going places. Most fans do not see it as their job to stop and think about how it got there.Lee Smith/Action Images, via Reuters More