Raphael Stevens

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    The Oligarchs’ Derby

    When the top teams in Greece meet, the story lines, and the rivalries, regularly extend far beyond the soccer field.Olympiacos called it the Match for Peace. On April 9 last year, a little more than a month after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Greek club staged a friendly with Shakhtar Donetsk. It was a heartfelt, poignant sort of occasion, the first game Shakhtar had played since it had fled a war in its homeland.Before the game, each of Shakhtar’s players emerged with Ukraine’s flag — cornfield yellow, summer blue — draped over their shoulders. Both teams’ jerseys were adorned with the slogan: “Stop War.” All proceeds from ticket sales for the game, held at Olympiacos’s Karaiskakis stadium in Piraeus, would be used to help support refugees from the fighting. “We use football as a tool for peace,” said Christian Karembeu, the Greek club’s sporting director at the time.Four days earlier, Alkinoos, a crude oil tanker sailing under the flag of Liberia, arrived in Rotterdam from the Russian port of Primorsk, according to data from the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air and analyzed by Investigate Europe and Reporters United, a Greek investigative journalism project.Quite how much Russian oil the vessel was carrying is not known, only that the ship’s capacity is 109,900 deadweight tons, and that it is operated by Capital Ship Management. So, too, is the Aristidis, an oil and chemical tanker that arrived in Teesport, in northern England, a couple of days later. That ship, too, had come from Primorsk.Capital Ship Management is owned by a Greek tycoon named Evangelos Marinakis. Though he has since diversified his holdings into media and retail, Marinakis can trace his fortune to shipping. That is where he made his money. It is in soccer, though, that he found fame. Marinakis is the man who turned Olympiacos into Greece’s serial champion.Olympiacos fans during a Europa League match in September. It hosts its most bitter rival, league-leading Panathinaikos, this weekend.Panagiotis Moschandreou/EPA, via ShutterstockMarinakis — also, much more recently, the owner of Nottingham Forest, now restored to the Premier League — has not broken any laws, or defied any sanctions, by facilitating the flow of Russian oil around the world. The only transgression here, given Olympiacos’s support for Shakhtar, was that his private and public stances did not match.He is not alone in that. Giannis Alafouzos, like Marinakis, has a formidable portfolio of interests. He owns the SKAI television network, as well as Katherimini, Greece’s leading newspaper. Both have been fiercely critical of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Alafouzos has maintained a similar stance in his (relatively few) public statements on the issue.At the root of his fortune, though, is Kyklades Maritime, a shipping company with a fleet of 22 tankers that has continued to transport Russian oil in the year since the war began. Investigate Europe calculated that Kyklades vessels have “carried out 26 shipments of crude oil or oil from Russia internationally” between the start of the invasion and Jan. 5 this year.Alafouzos, it should be pointed out, also owns Panathinaikos, traditionally Olympiacos’s fiercest rival and its closest domestic competitor. In recent years, he has struggled to keep up with the juggernaut that Marinakis has built. Olympiacos, its revenues spiraling thanks to its frequent involvement in the Champions League, has claimed all but four Greek league titles this century. Panathinaikos, by contrast, has not been crowned Greek champion since 2010.This year, though, it seems to have been restored. Under the astute coaching of Ivan Jovanovic, it sits 4 points clear of its nearest rival — AEK Athens — with only three games left in the regular season.Aitor Cantalapiedra and Panathinaikos are closing in on their first Greek league title since 2010.Martin Divisek/EPA, via ShutterstockThis weekend, though, brings its sternest challenge. Olympiacos currently sits third, 5 points back, but with a far deeper, more illustrious squad. It can call on the likes of James Rodríguez on Saturday when the clubs meet in Piraeus, at the Karaiskakis. Nobody will be describing it as a match for peace.It is hard to capture the scale of meetings between Panathinaikos and Olympiacos. Perhaps the best way is to note that the game is known in Greece as the Derby of the Eternal Enemies, and that is probably underselling it. There is a case to be made that this has long been the most heated rivalry in Europe.Between them, though, Marinakis and Alafouzos have managed what really ought to have been impossible: They have stoked it further. Greek soccer has for decades been dominated not by its players and managers but by its owners: proud, bombastic, fabulously wealthy strongmen drawn from the country’s oligarch class, drawn to the sports less for the competition or the glory and more for the power it can bestow.AEK, for example, is owned by Dimitris Melissanidis, another oil and shipping tycoon. PAOK, in the northern city of Thessaloniki, is a plaything of Ivan Savvidis, a Russian-Greek tobacco tycoon. Their clubs bring them a profile, provide them with a constituency, and offer a base from which to promote themselves and the interests of their empires.As owners of the country’s two most prominent and popular clubs, though, Marinakis and Alafouzos occupy the grandest stage. The friction between them has, at times, appeared to go beyond the professional and the commercial and into the deeply, virulently personal.Alafouzos has previously sued Marinakis, among others, in relation to a match-fixing scandal — and attendant wave of violence — in which Marinakis was accused of involvement. He was later acquitted of all charges, and strenuously denies the accusations, painting them as a plot to discredit his success.In return, Alafouzos’s news media outlets have more than once been accused of breaking Greece’s privacy laws in relation to Marinakis. In 2015, a meeting of the country’s Super League teams had to be suspended after a “violent” altercation between the two men, which ended with one of Alafouzos’s bodyguards nursing a split lip.Quite how much any of this has to do with soccer is anyone’s guess. Olympiacos, Panathinaikos and Greek soccer as a whole are, in all likelihood, caught in the crossfire of something far bigger than a mere sport. They are, instead, pieces in a game in which there is no time for morals, where any route to success is considered fair game, where a billionaire rivalry is played out not just on the field but in courts and ports, across the shipping lanes and the airwaves. There, the real prize is not a trophy but pure, uncontested power.The PlayStation PresidentDon’t let Pablo Longoria’s boyish face fool you.Nicolas Tucat/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFor a while, Pablo Longoria had a nickname. As the best nicknames do, it caught on because it worked. Longoria was young, but he looked even younger. And his route into professional soccer’s executive ranks from Asturias, in northern Spain, had been unorthodox. He had honed his scouting acumen as a teenager by hours spent on various computer games. So they called him what he was: Niño De La Play — The PlayStation Kid.At one point, soccer would have held that outsider status against him. Now, though, there is no longer a tightly defined, strictly controlled entry policy to the game’s backstage areas. Regardless of playing experience, any earnest striver, compulsive observer or slick charlatan can barge in the door. All it takes is enough persistence, self-belief and chutzpah.Longoria’s story suggests he has all of those in abundance. By his own account, he set up a website to analyze players when he was 12, which is both unusual and the most 12-year-old thing imaginable. At 16, he wrote to clubs across Europe offering his services. Newcastle United, one of three to respond, showed him the proper form for completing scouting reports.He did not stop there. He got a job as an analyst for Recreativo de Huelva, a venerable, cash-strapped team in Spain’s deep south. He worked for Newcastle, apparently, though it is not clear for how long and for what purpose. He built enough of a network to become a scout for the Italian side Atalanta.By the time Longoria was 34, his résumé was positively glittering. He had been the head of recruitment at Sassuolo. He had been chief scout at Juventus and sporting director of Valencia before taking the latter role at Marseille. A little more than two years later, he earned a promotion: In 2021, he was appointed president of what is — historically — France’s biggest club.Beyond his experience, Longoria did not have any actual qualifications for any of those jobs. A few bad decisions and he might have been dismissed as a self-generated myth, his lack of a playing career held up as conclusive evidence for his failure. The entrance to soccer may be open to anyone, after all, but so is the exit.That Longoria has only risen, then, is testament to the fact that he appears to be good at his work. Very good. At Marseille, he has recruited a mix of reliable Ligue 1 stalwarts, aging castoffs and promising youngsters, and placed them at the service of Igor Tudor, a manager whose appointment was so underwhelming that he was jeered by his own fans simply for taking the job.But it has worked, and worked spectacularly. Marseille sits second in Ligue 1, behind the stuttering traveling circus of Paris St.-Germain. P.S.G. travels to the Stade Velodrome this weekend for France’s great gala derby. Should Marseille win — as it did against P.S.G. in the French Cup a few weeks ago — it would close the gap to only 2 points. Nobody uses Longoria’s nickname any more. Where he came from no longer seems so relevant. Where he is going is much more interesting.State of the UnionUnion Berlin, offering hope to neutrals all season.Robert Michael/DPA, via Associated PressUnion Berlin was supposed to have fallen away by now. Ragtag stories tend, after all, to have a relatively brief shelf life. Unlikely teams rise to the top of the table in the early weeks of the season, as the superpowers are still limbering up. They are flooded with praise for their spirit and their tenacity and their derring-do, and then they slip away with good grace and happy memories of their time in the spotlight.Union, it would appear, has not been handed that particular copy of the script. The Bundesliga is roughly two thirds of the way through its season, and Union — the ultimate underdog, really — is still there, battling with Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich, Union’s opponent this weekend, at the top of the table.The likelihood remains, of course, that in the white heat of the final stretch, Bayern (or possibly Dortmund, which moved on top — temporarily — with a victory Saturday) will have the players, the legs and the resources to leave the others behind, but the longer it goes on, the more of a boon it is for the league as a whole.The Bundesliga has always insisted that Bayern’s dominance is a good thing, not a bad one, no matter how counterintuitive that sounds and how wrong it very clearly is. But the mere possibility of Union’s staying the course has energized the competition.There is no such thing as romance in any major league now, not really. Competition, in the truest sense, is an illusion. There is a hegemony, an unmoving hierarchy, in every corner of Europe. But maintaining that illusion is in itself quite important. It does not matter, in the long run, if Union can stave off gravity. What matters is that, for quite some time, it has looked as if it might.CorrespondenceAs ever, this newsletter seeks to strike a balance between the pragmatic and the philosophical. Joe Light’s question belongs very much to the first category. “I’ve become fan of Wrexham since watching ‘Welcome To Wrexham,’” he wrote, clearly unaware of my close personal friendship with Ryan Reynolds, to whom I recommended a museum in York.“I’m intrigued by the long throw-ins by Ben Tozer, which have the effect of a corner and often lead to scoring chances. Why don’t more clubs utilize this strategy?”The answer to this question, Joe, is common decency. Well, a perception of common decency. Long throws were a familiar approach in the heyday of what I think we can all agree was the true beautiful game — burly Englishmen booting balls as far as possible on mud-stained fields, their turf not so much mowed as plowed — in the 1980s and 1990s.Ben Tozer can probably reach you with a throw, wherever you are.Jon Super/Associated PressAfter that, the idea became a little bit stigmatized. It has had something of a renaissance recently, though, thanks to the data-inflected, marginal gains philosophy of teams like Brentford, the Danish side Midtjylland and the Real Madrid subsidiary Liverpool. Ben Tozer may be a harbinger of the future.Richard Lesser’s question is similarly pragmatic. “Why are Champions League knockout games scheduled at the same time?” he asks. “It makes no sense from a television fan’s perspective. Even if you record one game and watch the other, you still have to cloister yourself from hearing the other result.”There will, I suspect, be practical reasons for this — kicking off one game earlier or later would impact match-going fans, after all — but I would agree it seems a little outdated. It should not be beyond human imagination for the games to be staggered by an hour or so, at least.Ken Bariahtaris, on the other hand, is contemplating weightier matters: “The beauty of soccer at this level is the narrow margins. Goals, fundamentally, are hard to come by. Skill, technique, money to build a side all matter, but tactics, effort, a magical moment or two can overcome disadvantages. Over a season, the aggregate talent rises. But we all love the possibility of a single game or tie making the difference.” Scarcity, in other words, is soccer’s secret ingredient.And a point from Walid Neaz that already has been added, even before you read this, to my list of prospective subjects. “We’re witnessing some of the best ever players for their respective nations in terms of appearances and goals: Neymar breaking Pelé’s record, Messi and Ronaldo setting all time-greatest marks, the likes of Luis Suárez for Uruguay, Robert Lewandowski for Poland, Romelu Lukaku for Belgium, Olivier Giroud for France. Is this truly the generation where we’re seeing players reach the highest heights, or is it helped by playing more games and competitions than ever before?”My kneejerk, hot-take reaction is that the latter is certainly a substantial factor. Cristiano Ronaldo has scored a lot of goals for Portugal. Nobody is denying that. Nobody is devaluing his achievement. But it does seem like most of them came against Luxembourg, doesn’t it? More

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    Reputation Meets Reality in the Champions League

    The Premier League’s financial might should allow it to dominate Europe’s top soccer competition. So why hasn’t that happened?Everyone involved was taking the positives. In Dortmund, Chelsea’s Graham Potter was talking about a “step forward” in his efforts to solve the gilded thousand-piece puzzle he has been handed by his club’s new owners. In Milan, Tottenham’s Antonio Conte was happy his “trust” in a youthful emergency midfield pairing had been repaid.Both were doing all they could to project an air of calm assurance. Conte, a man who could never be accused of bottling up his emotions, even used the word “relaxed” to describe his state of mind. Sure, Chelsea and Tottenham had both lost the first legs of their Champions League round of 16 ties, but that was nothing to worry about. There are the home games to come in a few weeks. Things will be better then. Wrongs will be righted. Everything is breezy.Neither manager’s pose was particularly ludicrous. Neither team had played especially badly. Both sides might have felt just a little unfortunate to have lost. Chelsea, still feeling its way to a settled identity after its winter excess, created a raft of chances against Borussia Dortmund. Spurs, its squad winnowed by injury and suspension, had menaced A.C. Milan. Both had lost only by a single goal. Both remain firmly in contention to make the quarterfinals.And yet, for all the legitimacy of those mitigating circumstances, for all the fine margins that separate victory from defeat and one interpretation of history from another, it is hard not to feel as if this sort of thing should not happen to the moneyed elite of the Premier League any more.Kepa Arrizabalaga and Chelsea lost at Borussia Dortmund. But all is not lost. Yet.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesChelsea, in case you have forgotten, spent more on players in January than every club in France, Spain, Italy and Germany combined. A.C. Milan found itself unable to compete on salaries with Bournemouth, a team with a stadium that has a capacity of 11,379 people. Dortmund’s business model involves the annual sale of its best players to England.Here they were, though, not just standing up to two of the best that the Premier League can offer but beating them. It may have been with home-field advantage, the backing of 80,000 or so bellicose fans, and it may only have been by the skin of their teeth. And it may not, in the end, mean much at all, should Chelsea and Spurs assert themselves in the return legs.And yet still they beat them, the reality of England’s unassailable financial power not quite living up to the theory.Two games is far too small a sample, of course, to draw any firm conclusions, but those defeats are part of a broader, more established pattern.For years, as the Premier League’s wealth has grown — its television revenues more than twice that of its nearest competitor, its clubs the richest on the planet — the assumption among its clubs, and the fear among its competitors, has been that at some point it would be able to break the Champions League to its will. Its teams, stuffed with the choicest fruits the market has to offer, would leave the rest of Europe trailing in their wake.It has not, though, quite worked out like that, certainly not as definitively as might have been expected.Chelsea beat Manchester City in the 2021 Champions League final, one of two recent finals matching Premier League opponents.Pool photo by David RamosIn the last five years, the Champions League has taken on a distinctly English inflection. Two of the finals in that time have been all-Premier League affairs, and there has been at least one English side (mostly Liverpool) in every final but one since 2018. And yet the long-anticipated wholesale takeover of the tournament has failed to materialize.Perhaps it is no more than an accident of fate that no English team has won a Champions League final against a foreign opponent since Chelsea’s victory against Bayern Munich in 2012. But it feels significant that only once — in 2019 — has the full cohort of four Premier League teams all made it through safely to the quarterfinals.The likelihood that this year will break that trend is minimal. Chelsea and Spurs might both be at only a slender disadvantage — and the absence of the away goals rule works in their favor from here — but even if they both recover to make it through, the chances of Liverpool’s overcoming Real Madrid remain slim.There are a host of possible explanations for that. The most obvious is that money is not necessarily a measure of virtue: Just because England’s teams have cash to burn does not mean they always spend it well, as Chelsea is currently doing its best to illustrate.Harry Kane and Spurs have work to do in the second leg against Milan.Marco Bertorello/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe most appealing, certainly in England, is that the very competitiveness of the Premier League is in itself a disadvantage; teams are so exhausted from domestic combat that they are prone to fatigue when it comes to Europe.The most likely explanation, and the most simple, is that an unwillingness to succumb to economic logic is coded into the algorithm of a knockout competition. Financial might is likely to prove decisive over the course of a league season. Turn a competition into an arbitrary shootout, conducted over the course of 90 or 180 minutes, and what can seem like a chasm in terms of revenue streams suddenly manifests as nothing more than the difference in the technical and psychological capacity of two sets of players.And that, most often, is nothing more than a hairline crack. Dortmund and Milan and all the others might find the English clubs calling every year, seeking to extract another star from them ranks in exchange for a king’s ransom, but they know too that there will be another player along soon enough, that they will be able to replace and replenish. There are, after all, always more players.There is something to celebrate and to cherish in that, a relief and a pleasure in the fact that wealth does not make a team — or a set of teams — invulnerable to misfortune or immune to the vicissitudes of fate, that European soccer has proved just a little more resilient to the Premier League’s supremacy than even its own clubs anticipated, that even now, money is no guarantee of happiness.Red Letter DayHistoric English soccer club seeks new owner. Serious offers only. Inquire within.Molly Darlington/ReutersTime for another addition to English soccer’s ever-expanding calendar of high holidays: alongside Cup Final Day, League Cup Final Day and the two Transfer Deadline Days, we can now reliably celebrate Soft Deadline for Investors to Submit Bids for a Major Club Day.Like Easter, this one moves around. It fell in April last year, in the midst of the scramble to take Chelsea off the hands of Roman Abramovich. This time, Raine, the investment bank that plays the role of Hallmark for this particular holiday, has decreed that the Manchester United sequel should come as early as mid-February.As of Friday, only one contender had gone public: Jim Ratcliffe, the British billionaire and one-time Chelsea suitor who seems to have remembered late in life that his real passion is for sports rather than chemicals, had confirmed he would bid. He was expected to face competition, though, from at least one “U.S.-based consortium,” as well as “private” bidders from both Qatar and Saudi Arabia.That last prospect, of course, might have been greeted with caution, or even concern. The questions are obvious. How “private” could any bid emanating from a tightly controlled autocracy ever really be? What would be the implication for the integrity of both the Premier League and the Champions League, given the Saudi ownership of Newcastle United and the Qatari control of Paris St.-Germain?Or it might have been greeted with a breathless frenzy, focusing exclusively on what Gulf ownership might buy for the club and its success “starved” fans: Kylian Mbappé, or Jude Bellingham, or (genuinely, inexplicably) a new monorail running directly from Manchester airport to a giant mall outside Old Trafford.There are no prizes at all for guessing which description best fits the tone of much of the coverage, because there are no winners here. That serious questions over the integrity of the sport — let alone the issue of whether it is ideal that the Premier League should be a stage on which global power games are played out — should be so easily ignored thanks to the specter of yet more consumption, yet more acquisition, makes you wonder if the spirit of the whole enterprise has been lost along the way. The way you celebrate your holidays, after all, says a lot about where you are as a culture.An Old Truth, RevisitedStop us if you’ve heard this before but P.S.G.’s star-studded experiment doesn’t seem to be working. Again.Anne-Christine Poujoulat/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIf the misadventures of the Premier League’s moneyed elite in the Champions League this week served as a reminder of one of this newsletter’s mottos — that there are always more players, no matter how many of them you buy — then the starting teams at the Parc des Princes brought another to mind.On one side, of course, there was P.S.G., a team that is rapidly becoming a definition of insanity in and of itself. It is now perfectly apparent that building a team around Lionel Messi, Neymar and Kylian Mbappé does not work, not at the elite level, not when all three of them essentially refuse to engage in any defensive effort. P.S.G. may yet recover from a first leg deficit to Bayern Munich, but this is not a side that can win the Champions League.On the other was a Bayern team, its attacking line led by Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting. The Cameroonian striker suffers, as many do, from the long shadow of the Premier League.He has spent the better part of a decade and a half as a professional. He has built a steady, respectable career, one crowned unusually late by trophy-laden spells at P.S.G. and Bayern. To many fans, though, he will always be a curiosity: Hey, look at that, it’s that guy who played for Stoke City, except that now he’s in the Champions League.That is a shame, because Choupo-Moting’s story is telling in a number of ways. It proves, as he discussed with the Times, the value of patience. The timing of his rise suggests a shift in what elite clubs want from forward players, and as a corollary perhaps highlights a deficiency in the academy system. That tends, after all, to produce what teams want now, rather than what they might need in the future.Most of all, though, it illustrates that Choupo-Moting did not fail to shine at Stoke because of a lack of talent. Ability is often not what determines whether a move is successful or not. More important is whether the team, the style, the environment is right for a player to thrive. Choupo-Moting is evidence of the old truth that there is no such thing as a bad player, only the wrong context. More

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    M.L.S. Preview: St. Louis S.C., Apple TV+ and More

    St. Louis City S.C. will hit the field as the league’s 29th franchise, but to watch it, and every other team, fans will have to get to know Apple TV+.St. Louis, a city with a rich soccer history dating back more than a century, will finally get its Major League Soccer team this year. But to watch it, and the league’s other 28 teams, armchair supporters will have to make the transition from television to streaming, whether they like it or not.Here’s what is happening with M.L.S. in 2023.What’s new?For the seventh straight season, M.L.S. is expanding. St. Louis City S.C. will be the league’s 29th team — a total that may grow in the next few months — and play in a new stadium downtown, Citypark.St. Louis had long been a target for expansion; the city had a pioneering professional soccer league in the early 1900s and N.A.S.L., indoor and minor league teams more recently. But previous efforts all failed, torpedoed either by inadequate financing or, in 2017, a public referendum in which voters rejected a plan to finance a stadium for an expansion franchise.Even when St. Louis did finally get a team, its debut was put on hold for a year because of delays brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. Now, though, the team that M.L.S. and St. Louis fans have long coveted is here.St. Louis City will christen its new stadium, Citypark, with its home opener against Charlotte on March 4.Jeff Roberson/Associated PressThe new team includes Roman Burki, a 32-year-old Swiss goalkeeper with seven years at Borussia Dortmund under his belt, and Klauss, a Brazilian striker. But if recent M.L.S. history is any indication (not you, Atlanta United), St. Louis City is likely to suffer typical expansion woes as it tries to build a winner.It may not be the lowest team on the M.L.S. totem pole for long, however: Commissioner Don Garber has made clear that the league’s expansion will not stop at 29. “We do need more teams,” Garber said this week in New York. A 30th franchise will be announced by the end of the year, he said, with San Diego and Las Vegas currently leading the contenders. Garber also cited Phoenix, Sacramento, Detroit and Tampa, Fla., as possibilities for further expansion in the near future.What will Week 1 bring?Thirteen games will be played on Saturday, starting with New York City F.C.’s visit to Nashville on Saturday afternoon. The big game comes later in the day: M.L.S. is expecting a crowd of more than 70,000 in the Rose Bowl on Saturday to watch the Los Angeles Galaxy, now playing second fiddle in the city they once ruled, take on the defending league champion, L.A.F.C.The Philadelphia Union, which lost last season’s M.L.S. Cup championship game in an excruciating manner, will kick off against Columbus at home. And Atlanta United, which led the league in attendance again last season, expects another big crowd inside Mercedes-Benz Stadium for its opener against San Jose.Cory Burke and the Red Bulls will be hoping their 28th season delivers the elusive title their first 27 did not.Matthew Ashton/AMA, via Getty ImagesNew York City F.C. is expecting a breakout year from its 20-year-old Brazilian striker Talles Magno.Matthew Ashton/AMA, via Getty ImagesHow can I watch?M.L.S. is banking on its younger fan base’s familiarity with technology (and its aversion to traditional TV) as it moves the bulk of its games to Apple TV+ as part of a 10-year, $2.5 billion broadcast contract.For hard-core M.L.S. fans, that will mean a deluge of content: every game, including the playoffs and the Leagues Cup tournament with the Mexican league; English and Spanish broadcasts; a Red Zone-style whip-around show hitting the highlights of games as they happen; and no blackouts for out-of-market games.The cost is $79 a year with an Apple TV+ subscription and $99 without, but several games each week will be broadcast free throughout the season.As for traditional television, ESPN is out of the mix, as are all local broadcasts around the country. Fox and FS1 will broadcast roughly one game a week, part of a conscious effort to keep one foot in the traditional broadcasting world as the league dives headlong into something new. “We didn’t want to go cold turkey and shut it all down,” said Gary Stevenson, the league’s deputy commissioner.Who is going to win the M.L.S. Cup?The list of favorites has to start with L.A.F.C., which won the Supporters’ Shield with the best regular-season record last season and then added the M.L.S. Cup title, becoming the first team to pull off that double since Toronto F.C. in 2017. The Welsh star Gareth Bale, whose tenure was known for limited minutes and stunning goals, has retired, and the team’s top scorer, Cristian Arango, has moved to the Mexican league, so expect more of the load to fall on the club legend Carlos Vela, now 33.Philadelphia had the same number of points as L.A.F.C. last season and a much better goal difference (plus-46 to plus-28), but it lost the Shield because it had fewer wins and then the final in the most agonizing way possible.The Union are well equipped to find their way back. Andre Blake is the reigning goalkeeper of the year, Jakob Glesnes was last season’s defender of the year and Dániel Gazdag will again provide the goals.Nashville should rely on last season’s league most valuable player, Hany Mukhtar, who led M.L.S. with 23 goals. After a shaky first season, Austin took a huge step forward by reaching the Cup semifinal last season and now will look to improve even more. Inter Miami was a .500 team last season, but it has added Josef Martínez, who had 98 goals in six years with Atlanta United. If he can regain his past scoring form, he makes any team a title contender.Josef Martínez, who ran circles around defenders in six years at Atlanta United, now will try to do the same for Inter Miami.Matias J. Ocner/Miami Herald, via Associated PressThe playoffs changed again. How will they work?Expansion and playoff tinkering are two time-honored M.L.S. traditions, and this week the league announced yet another new postseason format. This season, 18 teams will make the playoffs, up from 14, and there will be a new play-in round for the lowest-ranked two in each conference. After four years of strictly one-and-done games, M.L.S. will introduce a best-of-three format for the round of 16. But the quarterfinals and beyond will revert to single-game eliminations. Confused? Here’s some supplemental reading with all the rules.What about side competitions?The Concacaf Champions League, the regional championship that was won by an M.L.S. team, the Seattle Sounders, for the first time in 22 years last season, begins in March with L.A.F.C., Philadelphia, Vancouver, Orlando and Austin participating. The two-legged final ends on June 4.League games will be halted from mid-July to mid-August for an expanded 77-game Leagues Cup that will include every team from M.L.S. and Mexico’s Liga MX. Those games all will be held in the United States and Canada.And the American M.L.S. teams will join the venerable U.S. Open Cup, which dates back to 1914, in April, with the final scheduled for Sept. 27. The defending champion is Orlando City F.C., but the safest of bets is that an M.L.S. team will win it again. The last non-M.L.S. team to win the Open Cup was the Rochester Raging Rhinos in 1999. More

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    John Motson, BBC’s Voice of Soccer for Five Decades, Dies at 77

    The broadcaster announced English soccer’s biggest moments, including 10 World Cups.John Motson, the soccer commentator whose animated voice was inseparable from many of the sport’s biggest moments over his 50 years at the BBC, died on Thursday. He was 77.The BBC confirmed his death, citing a statement from his family. The family did not specify a cause but said he “died peacefully in his sleep.”The network turned to Mr. Motson, who retired in 2018, for its top matches, including 10 World Cups, 10 European Championships and 29 F.A. Cup finals. He also offered analysis on “Match of the Day,” the BBC’s weekly highlights show.“John Motson was the voice of a footballing generation,” the BBC director-general, Tim Davie, said in a statement, adding that “like all the greats behind the mic, John had the right words, at the right time, for all the big moments.”Mr. Motson, often known by his nickname, “Motty,” was born on July 10, 1945, in Salford, England. He dreamed of becoming a print reporter, starting his career when he left school at 16 at the weekly Barnet Press and the daily Sheffield Morning Telegraph, according to a 2008 profile in The Independent.He was selected to participate in a local radio station’s experiment that relied on print reporters. An editor, after hearing his work on the radio, told him: “John, on the evidence of this copy, I really think you should try the world of the voice,” he told The Independent.He thrived on local radio, and joined the BBC in 1968 before starting on “Match of the Day” in 1971. He went on to become the station’s leading voice, calling nearly 2,500 games in his career, including more than 200 involving England’s national team.He was also in Hillsborough Stadium in 1989, when policing mistakes and overcrowding led the deaths of 97 fans of Liverpool’s team. The tragedy, which also saw more than 700 fans injured, has remained in the news decades later.For many soccer fans in Britain, the news of his death inspired remembrances of their favorite calls, many of which were attached to beloved games as they grew to love the sport. Gary Lineker, the current host for “Match of the Day,” was among those paying tribute, saying on Twitter that Mr. Motson was a “quite brilliant commentator and the voice of football in this country for generations.”Mr. Motson is survived by his wife, Anne, and son, Frederick, according to the BBC. More

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    Real Madrid 5, Liverpool 2: Champions League Laugher at Anfield

    That Real Madrid delivered another memorable Champions League victory was no surprise. It was the manner of Liverpool’s defeat that spoke volumes.LIVERPOOL, England — It took a while for the frustration, the anger and the hurt to bubble to the surface. For about an hour on Tuesday night, Liverpool’s fans had watched with grim forbearance as their team was expertly dismantled by Real Madrid.They urged on Jürgen Klopp’s players after they threw away a two-goal lead in the first half. They stood by them as Real Madrid made it 3-2 and then 4-2 and finally 5-2, a loss turning into a rout. They remained stoic as they witnessed the collapse of their season, as they endured the most chastening evening in Anfield’s illustrious European history.But then there was the passing: The passing was the final straw. As the game wound down, as the crowd started to thin out just a little, Real Madrid decided to indulge in a little game of keepaway. They slipped passes between, beside and around their bedraggled opponents. They offered them a glimpse of the ball and then spirited it away at the last moment.They maintained it for a minute or two, Liverpool’s players lolling and lagging as they dashed around in hopeless pursuit. It was an indignity too far. It is one thing being beaten — particularly by Real Madrid — and it is quite another being taunted. The crowd started to whistle, and then to jeer: at Real Madrid, at its own players, chasing at shadows, at this whole long, damned, miserable season.Andy Robertson and Liverpool won’t play their second leg in Madrid until March, but their Champions League is effectively over after Tuesday night.Phil Noble/ReutersThat Real Madrid won at Anfield does not count as a surprise of any sort. This is Real Madrid, after all, and this is the Champions League. A stirring Real Madrid recovery is part of the deal. To a large extent it is increasingly odd that anyone else bothers entering the competition.Carlo Ancelotti’s team has mastered the comeback, turned it into an art form, boiled it down to its very essence. En route to European glory last season, Real Madrid generally required the full span of a two-legged tie, up to and including extra time in the second leg, to stage the miraculous recovery that has become its calling card.The only change this season — on this evidence — is that it has streamlined the process to such an extent that it now takes no more than half an hour, with a break in the middle for a quick bite to eat.Far more striking than the fact of Liverpool’s defeat on Tuesday, then, was the manner of it. Somewhere deep inside this Liverpool team is the muscle memory of what it once was, and not all that long ago. It is only nine months, after all, since it played its third Champions League final in five years, Klopp sufficiently confident that the halcyon days would keep rolling that he advised his team’s fans — even in defeat — to book their hotel rooms for this year’s showpiece.For 15 minutes, it was possible to wonder if this stage, and this opponent, might be enough to stir those ghosts to life. Liverpool surged to an early lead, thanks to an inventive, audacious flick from Darwin Nuñez, and then doubled it when Thibaut Courtois forgot how to work his legs and presented the ball to Mohamed Salah. In between, Salah had wasted two more chances. Here, at last, were the flickers that Liverpool’s fans had been waiting months to see.Darwin Núñez’s goal after four minutes had the Anfield crowd on its feet.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockAnd then the reverie suddenly evaporated and reality descended. Vinícius Júnior scored one goal, wonderfully, and then had a second presented to him by the Liverpool goalkeeper Alisson. It had the effect of breaking the spell. The clock struck midnight. Éder Militão made it three. Karim Benzema had a shot deflected into the goal for four, and then danced through, his shoes soft and his touch sure, to make it five.Liverpool, suddenly, looked to be what it has been for much of the season: a mid-table Premier League team caught in the throes of an awkward, jarring transition. The difference, this time, was that it was being forced to play the European champion.Quite how Liverpool’s collapse has happened remains, even now, something of a mystery. Thousands of words have been dedicated in recent months in an attempt to understand how a team that was so painstakingly constructed, put together with such thought and expertise and precision, could come apart at the seams so quickly and so easily. How something so good could prove so ultimately fragile.There are concrete factors that certainly seem to have contributed. Injuries have not helped, of course, compounding a failure to upgrade the midfield. The effects of last season, in which Liverpool became the first English team to play every game in every competition for which it was eligible — winning two trophies, but neither of the prizes it most wanted — have lingered, both physically and psychologically.But then there are the intangible factors, the theoretical and the emotional strands, the charges that can only ever take the form of questions: Has Liverpool been too loyal to the core of Klopp’s team? Has upheaval behind the scenes, the departure of several key members of the staff, disrupted the harmony the club had worked so hard to foster? If so, has that had any effect on performances?Karim Benzema finished off Liverpool with goals 12 minutes apart.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockWhatever the causes, the effects were all there, on the field, against a team that less than a year ago Liverpool could — largely rightly — consider its equal. When Klopp, upon reviewing last year’s final for the first time this week, commented that it was a game his team could have won, he was not simply presenting a brave face.Now, though, the gulf is wide. The temptation is to focus on the major mistakes — Alisson’s misjudgment for the second goal, the stationary marking for the third, Joe Gomez’s body shape for the fourth — but more telling are the little things.It is the speed with which Liverpool passes the ball, just a touch slower than before. It is the spaces between its players, a little too large, and the cohesion between its lines, now ever so slightly ragged. It is in the intensity of its press, somehow diluted and dimmed.Each element feeds on the others, eroding confidence and sapping purpose, until the whole system seems fractured beyond repair. And it was at that point that Real Madrid, with that air of total self-assurance, started to pass the ball around, Liverpool’s players powerless to stop them, their fall from the rarefied heights they once shared with these opponents complete. More

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    Manchester United Bidding War Already Has a Winner: The Sellers

    A Qatari royal and a British billionaire have designs on the Premier League giant. But the Glazer family still gets to set the price.The World Cup in Qatar was in its third day when Manchester United’s press office announced that its American owners were exploring an end game they had long refused to even consider: a potential sale of the famed English soccer club.Every day since that November morning, the swirl of speculation about who might buy United, one of the world’s most popular and most valuable sports teams, has gathered pace.A British billionaire quickly confirmed that he planned to bid. An American hedge fund kicked the tires. Reports of a Saudi Arabian offer sent the club’s stock price surging.But it was from Qatar, rumored for weeks to have investors interested in adding United to the country’s expanding sports portfolio, where details of the first official bid appeared. And just like that, the fight for the club’s future, a battle of differing visions for what kind of Manchester United would emerge from the auction, was on.The official word of concrete Qatari interest arrived in a statement on Friday night: an all-cash offer — reportedly worth as much as $6 billion — by Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad al-Thani, a little-known royal whose power may lie more in his post as the chairman of a major Qatari bank and in the influence of his father, a former prime minister who helped put their small nation on the international map.Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad al-Thani, the son of one of Qatar’s most powerful royals, was the first Manchester United suitor to confirm his bid.Karim Jaafar/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSheikh Jassim’s statement offered populism, or at least what sounded like a Gulf billionaire’s vision of it. Pledging to invest in United’s stadium and its teams without adding a dollar to its debts, his five-paragraph statement read like a box-ticking exercise in proposals designed to win the support of anyone eager to see the back of the Glazers, the family that has controlled the Premier League giant for nearly two decades.But Sheikh Jassim’s suggestion of a “debt-free” takeover also did nothing to hide the financial muscle behind the offer that would make United, in an instant, the most high-profile Qatari-owned property on earth.His public pitch took other bidders by surprise. Raine, the investment bank handling the sale for United’s board and the Glazer family, had asked prospective buyers to limit any public pronouncements, perhaps to entice as many offers as possible, or at the very least to avoid scaring off any suitors.The Qatari offer changed that, and quickly led another bidder, Jim Ratcliffe, a British petrochemical billionaire based in Monte Carlo, to first privately and then publicly confirm that he had made an offer for 69 percent of United, the amount of the club owned by the Glazers.Ratcliffe pointedly offered United fans an English alternative to the prospect of Gulf ownership. Manchester born and a lifelong United fan, Ratcliffe promised to put “the Manchester back into Manchester United,” to revive a club anchored not to foreign interests but to “its proud history and roots in the northwest of England.”The British billionaire Jim Ratcliffe is bidding for United only a year after losing out on Chelsea.Eric Gaillard/ReutersThe competing offers immediately split the United fan base, with many overseas supporters openly pining on social media for a sale that they hoped would see Qatar’s deep pockets do for Manchester United what billions of dollars from the United Arab Emirates have done for its neighbor Manchester City. That sentiment did not appear to be shared by much of the club’s matchgoing supporters, with concerns raised by fan groups in England about everything from human rights to sporting integrity.The latter may prove to be the more formidable obstacle, because Sheikh Jassim and Ratcliffe can expect to face scrutiny under rules set by European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, that prohibit teams with the same owner from playing in top continental competitions like the Champions League.Ratcliffe already owns OGC Nice, which plays in France’s top league and has drawn some of his fortune to finance its push toward European qualification.Sheikh Jassim will face the challenge of convincing soccer regulators that his interests are different from those of the Qatari ownership group that runs the perennial Champions League contender Paris St.-Germain. Sheikh Jassim’s father was, with the country’s former emir, one of the architects of Qatar’s vision of itself as a player on the global stage, and one of the driving forces behind its flashy purchases of showcase assets like another British institution, the department store Harrods, and the Shard, Britain’s tallest building. The father’s close links to the country’s leadership already have raised doubts that his son’s pursuit of United is merely a private investment.Ratcliffe and Sheikh Jassim may soon face other challenges, too. Friday’s deadline for bids was an artificial one, confected by United’s bankers to create urgency. Other bids may already exist, and new (and possibly higher) ones can still be presented.But one thing all the bids — public, secret or still to come — may benefit from is near universal agreement among United fans of all stripes that the club should no longer be run by the famously unpopular Glazers. The family acquired the team in a highly contentious deal in 2005 in which it leveraged the majority of the purchase price against the club, meaning United has spent hundreds of millions of dollars paying for the right to be owned by the family.Many Manchester United fans agree on one thing: They want the Glazers to sell.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat deal, while infuriating supporters, has been hugely profitable for the Glazers. Through fees and dividend payments, the family has already secured a return far higher than its initial direct investment (a fraction of the roughly $1.4 billion purchase price at the time). The club’s value has skyrocketed, with news media reports suggesting the family is now seeking as much as $7 billion to part with it.That price point will narrow the pool of potential owners considerably. At least one potential buyer told The New York Times last week that anything close to that figure was “madness,” and said that his group had walked away because it believes that United, which still carries debt of nearly $600 million, is not worth more than 3 billion pounds, or $3.6 billion.Yet in Raine, United’s owners have entrusted the job of soliciting offers to a bank with a recent track record of finding buyers willing to pay above-market prices. The firm, led by the New York banker Joe Ravitch, secured £2.5 billion (about $3 billion) last year in the sale for Chelsea. But that was more of a forced sale, one sparked by British government sanctions against Chelsea’s Russian owner, Roman Abramovich, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.The Glazers do not face similar pressure. Their call for bids for United was framed as merely an effort to “explore strategic alternatives for the club.” That means whatever the billionaires offer, whatever they promise, wherever they call home, Manchester United will be sold only at a price the Glazers are willing to accept. More

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    Christian Atsu Is Found Dead in Turkey After Earthquake

    Mr. Atsu, a Ghanaian national who played for the Turkish club Hatayspor, had been among the thousands of people missing. He was 31.The body of Christian Atsu, a professional soccer player from Ghana whose career took him to England’s Premier League and the World Cup, has been recovered from the rubble in southern Turkey nearly two weeks after a powerful earthquake struck the country, his club and his agent said on Saturday. He was 31.“It is with the heaviest of hearts that I have to announce to all well wishers that sadly Christian Atsu’s body was recovered this morning,” Nana Sechere, Mr. Atsu’s agent, wrote on Twitter on Saturday. “My deepest condolences go to his family and loved ones.”Mr. Sechere said Mr. Atsu had been found in Hatay Province in southern Turkey, one of the hardest-hit areas in the earthquake.Mr. Atsu, who played for the Turkish club Hatayspor, had been among the thousands of people missing since Feb. 6, when a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck Turkey and Syria. Just hours before the quake, he had scored his team’s winning goal in its match against Kasimpasa, a team from Istanbul.His club also confirmed the news and said he was being repatriated to Ghana.“We will not forget you, Atsu. Peace be upon you, beautiful person,” Hatayspor said in a statement on Twitter on Saturday.There had been conflicting accounts of Mr. Atsu’s whereabouts after the earthquake, and earlier statements that he had been rescued had initially raised hopes that he had survived the earthquake.Mr. Atsu, a member of Ghana’s World Cup team in 2014, had spent the bulk of his career with European clubs, and signed with Porto, Chelsea and Newcastle United. He joined Hatayspor last year.Condolences poured in on Saturday on social media, including from Newcastle United, the Premier League and FIFA, soccer’s world governing body. The Ghana Football Association said that weekend games would hold a moment of silence for Mr. Atsu.“Ghana football has lost one of its finest personnel and ambassadors, one who will be difficult to replace,” President Nana Akufo-Addo of Ghana said on Twitter.As the club desperately searched for Mr. Atsu after the earthquake, Volkan Demirel, Hatayspor’s manager, had pleaded for aid.“I thought the day of judgment had come. I immediately thought of my players,” Mr. Demirel told Hurriyet, a Turkish newspaper, about the moment the earthquake hit.“May God not cause such pain to anyone,” he added.More than 45,000 people have died in the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, according to figures from the Turkish authorities and from the United Nations, and the death toll was expected to continue to rise. More

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    Manchester City Beats Arsenal, and the Premier League Season Pivots

    Manchester City’s 3-1 victory lifted it over Arsenal and into first place in the Premier League. But the title race is far from over.LONDON — Erling Haaland was just starting to sprint when he remembered his manners. He was about to race off to celebrate yet another goal with Manchester City’s fans when he stopped, turned on his heel, and bounded over to Kevin De Bruyne instead, grabbing him by the forearm, roaring wordlessly in his face.In the ecstasy of the moment, it was not entirely clear what Haaland wanted his teammate to do. De Bruyne, certainly, seemed a little confused. Was Haaland merely thanking him for the assist on his goal? Was he inviting him to join in the celebrations? For a breath, both players stood at an impasse, wondering what to do next. And then Haaland took off again, hurtling toward the traveling supporters at full speed, his arms flailing in the air.By this stage, it is a wonder Haaland, the Norwegian striker, elicits any excitement from scoring. His latest goal gave him 26 in only 22 games in the Premier League since joining Manchester City last summer. He is on 32 in all competitions. Haaland does not so much harvest goals as factory farm them. He knew, though, that Wednesday’s was not just another goal. This one was different.Not just because it sealed City’s 3-1 win against Arsenal, or even because it confirmed Pep Guardiola’s team would leapfrog its opponent at the summit of the Premier League. Its significance was more deep-rooted than that. That goal, this victory, effected a profound shift in the psychology of the title race. It had the air of the hinge on which the season turned.Erling Haaland and Manchester City pulled ahead of Arsenal, for the moment, in the Premier League standings.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesGuardiola, of course, had stressed this week that February is far too early for a single game to be conclusive, no matter how apocalyptic the tone of the prematch hype. The campaign is only narrowly past its halfway point. There are, as he said, so many games remaining. And besides, the arithmetic is skewed. Arsenal has a game in hand. Nothing, he was very clear, has been decided yet.Judging by the tableau of reactions to Haaland’s goal, that message had not quite made it through to City’s players. As Haaland tore away from De Bruyne, Ilkay Gundogan was in the corner, punching the air; Rúben Dias was locked in a tight, tender clinch with his coach, Guardiola cradling the defender’s face in his hands; Riyad Mahrez and Jack Grealish, both recently substituted, were racing back onto the field; and City’s coaching staff was howling into the night sky.It is only 10 days or so since Arsenal’s lead over City seemed if not insurmountable then certainly commanding. Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal team had beaten Tottenham in enemy territory, and had swatted aside Manchester United at home. Its lead over City had stretched to eight points. Arsenal’s youthful exuberance was slowly crystallizing into an imperious momentum; at some point, it had gone from being a club that hoped and become one that believed.Suggesting that tenor has been extinguished over the course of the last two weeks would be a stretch, but it is hard to deny that Arsenal has sputtered. First, Everton, its loins girded by a new manager, Sean Dyche, shut out the league leader at Goodison Park. Then Brentford, the Premier League’s specialist giant slayer, left the Emirates Stadium with a draw that was simultaneously fortuitous and largely merited.Suddenly, the daylight Arsenal had so painstakingly claimed at the top of the table had disappeared. City was right there, its breath hot on the necks of Arteta’s players. This game became less an examination of the comparative merits of two title contenders and more a test of Arsenal’s mettle.Martin Odegaard and Arsenal are winless in three games.David Klein/ReutersThe fact of defeat — to an opponent that has won four of the last five Premier League titles (for now, at least) — will sting rather less than the manner of it.Arsenal was hurried, rather than urgent, frantic, rather than intense. It looked, in other words, like exactly what it is: a work in progress, a young team on a steep trajectory but one that is yet to reach its apex. City’s first two goals, scored by De Bruyne and Grealish, came from avoidable errors, rushed decisions, poor choices. That happens to teams as they grow, of course. It was just not a great time for Arsenal to have a learning experience.City, by contrast, has honed its ruthlessness over the course of five seasons. On Wednesday, Guardiola’s team might not have played with its habitual control, the poise and the certainty that has become its hallmark; there was, instead, a frenzy to its performance, too, a fury that the club ordinarily reserves for any governing body that questions the legitimacy of its financial results.The temptation is to draw a direct link between the team’s performance and the 115 allegations of rule-breaking made by the Premier League last week, to suggest that Guardiola has successfully used those charges to convince his players — whom he had accused, not so long ago, of being rather too happy to rest on their laurels — that they have a cause to fight for, an injustice to set right.Perhaps that is true. Perhaps City’s squad has bought into the club’s conviction that it is on some rebel crusade, persecuted by the vested interests intent on doing it down. It is entirely possible that the players have been jolted out of whatever torpor Guardiola had detected by the seriousness of the allegations.Far more likely is that City’s players realized this was their chance. Manchester City has not been taking Arsenal lightly: that much was obvious when Ederson, the goalkeeper, was booked for time-wasting after barely half an hour, and when the team’s captain, Gundogan, was twice asked to calm his teammates down by the referee, Anthony Taylor.The difference, more than anything, was that City could channel that desperation, that hunger. That it could sense weakness and exploit it when Arsenal could not do the same. It does not mean anything is over, that Arsenal’s race is run. But for the first time in months, it feels like City has the edge, and that is often all it needs. More