Raphael Stevens

More stories

  • 100 Shares139 Views

    in Soccer

    The Premier League’s Charges Against Manchester City, Explained

    Could City really get tossed out of the Premier League? The rules are clear. The outcome of a complicated case is not.The Premier League has accused Manchester City of more than 100 violations of its financial regulations, a laundry list of rules breaches that it says began more than a decade ago and continue to present day.Manchester City says it has done nothing wrong and declared itself “surprised” at the airing of what it referred to as “alleged breaches.” The Premier League’s statement suggests its thick rule book views the case quite differently.The looming showdown over the charges promises to be a monumental fight, matching the Premier League, one of the world’s richest sporting competitions, against Manchester City, one of the dominant clubs of soccer’s modern era (and one with seemingly bottomless financial resources).But what are the accusations? What violations do they refer to specifically? And if they’re true, what potential punishment does City face?What is the case about?Broadly, the Premier League has accused Manchester City of repeatedly failing to provide accurate financial information “that gives a true and fair view of the club’s financial position, in particular with respect to its revenue (including sponsorship revenue), its related parties and its operating costs.”City also stands accused of not disclosing contractual payments to managers and players — presumably to hide the true costs of building one of the world’s best teams — and of failing, as required, to abide by the financial control mechanisms set by the league but also UEFA, European soccer’s governing body. It is also accused of not cooperating with Premier League investigators.What has all that money delivered?More than a decade of relentless success, to start. Manchester City had won two English top-division titles in its history — in 1937 and 1968 — before its Gulf owners arrived in 2008. In more than a decade since, the club has claimed six Premier League titles, two F.A. Cups, six league cups and a berth in the 2021 Champions League final. Over that period, City has been — in the most literal sense of the phrase — one of the best teams money could buy anywhere on earth.Manchester City’s most recent English title was its eighth overall, but the sixth since its Gulf owners took over in 2008. Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockWhat kind of punishment is it facing?To be clear, City has only been accused of financial rules violations at this point.If the club is found to have breached the rules, however, the Premier League lays out sanctions that could include business penalties like reprimands and fines and — far more worrisome if you’re City — points deductions in the standings or even expulsion from the top division.That feels like a big deal.Expelling City from the Premier League would be a very big deal. Rewriting the league’s record books, and its title history, would be just as big. Manchester City has spent billions building a serial Premier League champion and annual Champions League contender. Losing any of it in the stroke of a pen would be astonishing.Explain the charges to me like I’m a child.The Premier League laid out its accusations against Manchester City in five points littered with legalese and references to rules like B.13, C.71, C.72 and C.75 (amended to C.79).Let’s simplify them:The first point contends that for every season from 2009-10 to 2017-18, Manchester City failed to abide by rules requiring member clubs to provide accurate financial information to the league, giving it “a true and fair view” of the club’s revenues (think sponsorships) and operating costs (think salaries).What does that mean? All Premier League clubs sign up to a code of compliance, promising to behave as good-faith actors and provide up-to-date and true versions of their accounts to be audited every year. City has long faced accusations that it has inflated the value of its sponsorship deals with entities linked to its Gulf owners, including with the United Arab Emirates’ national airline, Etihad, and the telecommunications company Etisalat.Another set of charges suggests that, in the Premier League’s view, Manchester City was not truthful in its reporting of contracts detailing the compensation of its manager and certain players in several seasons.What you might not know: City is accused of reducing the cost of player and coach salaries by paying portions of them through third parties or secret agreements, an allegation that first emerged when the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported that Manchester City’s former coach Roberto Mancini actually had signed two contracts when he joined the club in 2009. The first paid him £1.45 million (about $1.7 million) to coach Manchester City. The secondary agreement paid him slightly more to consult with a U.A.E.-based team, Al Jazira, for only four days a year. Manchester City’s chairman, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan, is also chairman of the company that owns Al Jazira.Manager Pep Guardiola has been among City’s most vocal defenders. But he once said he would quit if the club had lied to him. “I said to them: ‘If you lie to me, the day after, I am not here. I will be out, and I will not be your friend anymore,’” he said.Phil Noble/ReutersThe Premier League’s financial rules require that all member clubs comply not only with those regulations but also with the so-called financial fair play regulations of UEFA, the sport’s European governing body. For the seasons from 2013 to 2018, the Premier League contends, Manchester City was in violation of those requirements.We’ve been here before. In 2020, UEFA hit Manchester City with a two-season ban from European competition, a suspension that would have kept City from playing in the lucrative and hugely popular Champions League. City, however, had the judgment overturned on a technicality: It successfully argued at the Court of Arbitration for Sport that the most serious allegations — linked to its sponsorship agreements with Etisalat and Etihad — were outside UEFA’s statute of limitations. Essentially, the club argued (and won), it was too late to punish them.What about these references to Premier League rules on “profitability and sustainability”?A league wary of losses. After one of its teams, Portsmouth, fell into the equivalent of bankruptcy in 2010, the Premier League introduced stricter reporting rules on clubs that required them to provide details about how owners planned to cover losses, which were not allowed to exceed £105 million (or $126 million) across any three-year period. The Premier League contends City was in breach of these rules in multiple seasons.One of the more serious accusations against City is that it did not cooperate with the investigations into its actions, including providing documents and information. In the Premier League’s view, this lack of cooperation covers the entirety of its investigation, which is now in its fifth year, and extends to current day.To turn over, or not to turn over. City was perhaps most indignant about this set of charges in its response on Monday, “particularly given the extensive engagement and vast amount of detailed materials that the EPL has been provided with.” But the Premier League’s claim is one that was previously made by UEFA, and upheld by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and evidence of the league’s struggles to get City to fully cooperate has already emerged. Several years ago, City sued the Premier League, asking a court to block efforts to force it to turn over crucial documents. City lost that case, as well as an attempt to block the publication of the judge’s findings in the case once it was over.What’s next?The Premier League said, in following its rules, it had referred the accusations against City to an independent commission. That body will take the case to a confidential hearing — read: private, no media (but expect leaks) — and then the Premier League will publish the commission’s final decision on its website. City and the Premier League can appeal the judgment, which would be heard by a similar panel convened by Murray Rosen, a lawyer who heads the Premier League’s judicial panel. News reports have said Rosen is a member at Arsenal, City’s closest rival for this season’s title. More

  • 100 Shares109 Views

    in Soccer

    The Danger Lurking Behind the Premier League’s Wealth

    Teams that can’t match England’s spending now face a choice: Accept that they can no longer compete for the best talent, or risk everything to try.The precise nature of the hierarchy is, in truth, a little confusing. The job titles are, in isolation, grand and impressive, but taken together, all of those capital letters become somehow vague and a little meaningless. There were, for a while, two Technical Directors, one Director of Global Talent and Transfers, and a Co-Director of Recruitment and Talent.Quite which of those is most senior is not entirely clear. Perhaps that is intentional. And it feels, certainly, like Co-Directors should come in pairs, at the very least, but in this case there may be just the one. An unkind eye might suggest it is all just a touch Schrutian.The expertise of the individuals who fulfill each of those positions, though, is beyond reproach. In the gap between the summer transfer window and the winter equivalent, Chelsea’s owners set about hiring some of the most well-regarded recruitment staff that global soccer has to offer.They picked up — in no particular order, because what order they are supposed to be in is not easily assessed — Christopher Vivell to be Technical Director, and Joe Shields as Co-Director of Recruitment and Talent. Then there was Laurence Stewart, brought on to act as a “technical director to focus on football globally,” and Paul Winstanley, the Blues’ Director of Global Talent and Transfers.Their résumés were flawless. Vivell and Stewart both had connections to the Red Bull network of clubs, long regarded as one of the finest hothouses of talent in global soccer. Stewart also had worked at Monaco, another team famed for its eye for potential. Shields had helped turn Manchester City’s academy into one of the best in Europe. Winstanley had been central to Brighton’s emergence as arguably the Premier League’s smartest club. In gathering them together, Chelsea had assembled an unmatched brain trust to help it conquer the transfer market.How useful any of that experience would have been on Tuesday is open to question. Under the guidance of Behdad Eghbali, one of Chelsea’s co-owners, the club concluded a deal to sign Enzo Fernández, the finest young player in a World Cup watched by more than a billion people.To get it over the line, Eghbali and his team of crack negotiators agreed to pay the release clause written into Fernández’s contract at Benfica, a figure that was roughly 10 times the amount the Portuguese club had shelled out for him only six months ago. It was a remarkable coup, akin to walking into a very expensive shop, paying the price on the label and exiting in triumph.Benfica’s Argentine midfielder Enzo Fernández was Chelsea’s prize winter signing.Carlos Costa/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat is not, to be clear, to deride the qualifications of any of Chelsea’s appointments, or even to highlight the obvious disconnect between how they forged their reputations and what they will be required to do at Stamford Bridge.It is, instead, to stress the reality of the Premier League’s spending in general, and Chelsea’s in particular. For all of the armies of scouts that clubs employ, for all of the celebration of scouting gurus and technical directors with the magic touch, for all of the intellectual energy invested in the process of identifying and sifting talent, English soccer is now so impossibly wealthy that all of it is secondary, really. The clubs of the Premier League can see the players they want, the players everyone wants, and throw money at the problem until they get what they want.There have been two tones to the coverage of Chelsea’s January spending. One, perpetuated by television, the more breathless elements of the print media, the Premier League itself, and the many and varied financial firms for whom the staggering wealth of English soccer represents an opportunity, has been celebratory.In this view, the absurd figures that the club has spent are seen as a direct measure of power and status, and the club’s technique of spreading the accountancy cost of those deals over unusually long contracts has been presented as some ingenious mechanism, one that has brilliantly circumvented soccer’s halfhearted attempts to leash its clubs to the idea of sustainability.The other is not nearly so bombastic, so popular, so triumphalist. It feels a little like doom-mongering, like worrying about litter at Woodstock, or perhaps even somehow wonkish, like asking a Hells Angel about the fuel economy of a Harley. It uses terms like “competitive balance” and “inflation,” and it is generally met with accusations of base jealousy.And yet the latter is, sadly, correct. Chelsea’s spending in January has bordered on wanton, and the amount of money committed by the teams of the Premier League as a whole — as always — has been not only obscene but also dangerous, not only for the clubs themselves but also for English and European soccer as a whole.Chelsea’s new owners have spent lavishly to reshape a team that won the Champions League less than two years ago.Paul Childs/Action Images, via ReutersThe reasons for that are relatively well-covered ground. The higher Premier League clubs push prices, the greater the inflationary risk for everyone else. Chelsea might have the financial resources to pay more than $100 million for a player — Mykhailo Mudryk — who has played six games in the Champions League, and so might Arsenal. It may even have the backing to survive if it finds itself saddled with a cadre of underperforming players on long contracts. But most clubs do not.That leaves a vast majority of teams — even celebrated ones, even famous ones, even comparatively rich ones — facing a choice when the next Mudryk comes along: Either accept that level of talent is no longer available to you, or risk everything to try and compete. Barcelona has tried that. It led to ruin. Juventus, too. That led to disgrace. The only option, then, is submission.There are sporting effects, too. The disparity between the Premier League and the other major leagues — let alone everyone else — is now so vast that even executives at some of the greatest clubs on the continent admit that they are marooned in “feeder” competitions. In one recent example, A.C. Milan, the reigning Italian champion, could not match the financial package on offer to Nicolo Zaniolo, the Roma forward, by Bournemouth.That is not, as it happens, something that is in the Premier League’s long-term interests; England’s clubs need somewhere to offload their unwanted players in the future, after all. But it is more immediately devastating for soccer as a common endeavor across Europe and the world.As talent concentrates in one league, in one country, everything else fades and withers in the shadows, condemned to seeing its most precious flowers plucked by England as soon as they blossom. All of a sudden, the rationale behind a continental super league does not seem quite so brazenly venal.There is one aspect, though, that is not addressed enough. The people who emerge, for example, from the signing of Fernández with credit are not Chelsea’s team of negotiators, led by Eghbali himself, who managed to persuade Benfica to sell its best player for the fee it wanted in the first place.No, the credit goes entirely to Benfica, the club that took Fernández from Argentina and accelerated his development, and now gets a richly deserved (if bittersweet) profit from its work.Fernández and Gonçalo Ramos helped Benfica reach the Champions League round of 16 before star turns at the World Cup. Only the latter will be present when the team plays Club Brugge in two weeks.Pedro Nunes/ReutersA couple of days after the deal was finalized, Chelsea confirmed a small rearrangement of its star recruiters: Stewart and Winstanley would, now, be co-sporting directors (yes, both of them). But the truth is, it does not need their eye for talent, not really. It does not need to be smarter than everyone else, not when it can be richer. What it has done, what English soccer does habitually, requires no great expertise, and as a result it lacks glory, too.Recruitment is a valid part of soccer. A season is, perhaps, best thought of as a test of each club’s institutional strength: not just the talent of the players it puts on the field or the vision of the manager but the structures it has built to enable them to succeed. Scouts, like the medical staff or the marketing team, contribute toward every trophy.That, at least, is how it should work. The wealth of the Premier League distorts it. There is no sport in arbitrarily having more money than everyone else. Making wealth a precondition to success is effectively asking fans to cheer rich people’s ability to buy things.And yet that is exactly what the Premier League has become. There is no reason to expect fans to object to that; if that is the game, then their only concern is that their club plays it, too. There is no reason to expect the Premier League itself to take action, either. English soccer, you may have noticed, has no problem at all with its own direction.The league’s owners, perhaps, might be expected to exercise some self-control, what with being trapped in a spiral of conspicuous consumption that makes them vulnerable to the arrival of someone with even more money than them, but that may be a little too utopian.Instead, the only place to turn is to the game’s governing bodies, to UEFA and to FIFA and their dependent federations, and to ask what they intend to do about it, whether they are content to watch as the Premier League cannibalizes the sport as a whole, whether they are satisfied that the game is now determined as much in the frenzied capitalism of the transfer market as it is on the field.These organizations are not powerless. They do not have to stand by. They could institute transfer levies or luxury taxes or squad limits or homegrown quotas to try to staunch the spending, to reinstitute some sort of balance. Or they could sit and watch, as they have for so long, as soccer fractures and splinters and breaks under the weight of all that cold, hard cash.Germany Learns a New Word: TitelkampfThe perception that the Bundesliga has, in the course of the past 10 years, been little more than a procession toward glory for Bayern Munich is not quite true. In almost every season, there has been a moment in which a challenger seems to have a glimmer of a chance. It has mostly proved fleeting and it has always proved futile, but it has helped a little to stave off the sense of dread inevitability.In some senses, then, the Bundesliga table after 18 games of the current season is not especially unusual. Bayern is on top, of course, with just a narrow gap to its nearest challenger, the remarkable Union Berlin. What is different this time, is what is happening just below that. Union, in second, and Eintracht Frankfurt, in sixth, are separated by only four points. Bayern is not facing one usurper. It has to confront five of them.Thomas Müller and Bayern Munich are at the top of the table in Germany, but looking over their shoulder for a change.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat is significant. In a scenario in which one team is desperately clinging to Bayern’s coattails, all it takes is a single setback for everything to unravel. Bayern’s big red machine keeps winning. A lone defeat for its challenger transforms a small points deficit into an apparently insurmountable one.With five contenders — Union, RB Leipzig, Borussia Dortmund, Freiburg and Eintracht, in that order — the possibility of Bayern’s striding off into the distance is reduced. One or two challengers might lose ground one weekend, but they are unlikely to collapse all at the same time. Bayern will not be able to burn everyone off in the course of a few weeks.Instead, Julian Nagelsmann’s team, stuttering just a little itself, will have to get used to having company for a vast majority of the season, with all of the pressure that brings. In all likelihood, it will still finish the campaign as Germany’s champion. This time, though, it may well have to work for it.Rising TideManchester United, in the end, stood firm. In the closing days of the January transfer window, Arsenal tried on several occasions to persuade the club to part company with the England striker Alessia Russo. The final bid, by all accounts, would have broken the world record — paid by Barcelona to sign Keira Walsh last year — by some distance. United, though, said no.Much of this is a good news story for the Women’s Super League in particular and for women’s soccer in general. Arsenal, deprived of two of its finest players by long-term injury, is prepared to commit significant funds to sign a replacement. United is serious enough about its pursuit of the W.S.L. title that, even with Russo out of contract in the summer, it decided to refuse the potential six-figure windfall.Arsenal failed in its bid to pry Alessia Russo away from Manchester United.Ed Sykes/Action Images, via ReutersRising transfer fees are, in general, a sign of health, a marker that more money is coming into the women’s game, that clubs are pushing resources toward their women’s teams, that players are being accorded the sort of value that befits their status as elite athletes and evermore high-profile stars.The one note of caution is the same as in so many things where women’s soccer, a sport forging its path in the 21st century, seems wedded to ideas rooted in the 20th century conventions of the men’s game.Or, to put it more plainly: Are we really absolutely sure that transfer fees are a good idea? Is this definitely the best way to run the industry? If you were designing a sport from scratch, would that be the mechanism that allowed talent to move around and competition to flourish? Or would you be cognizant of the risks, aware of what the men’s game has become, and at least ask if there might, perhaps, be an alternative?CorrespondenceThe subject of whether American sports have enough swearing continues to prompt rather more conversation than Google’s algorithm might expect, with Dan Rosenbaum losing points for citing New York Rangers fans chanting “Potvin sucks” as an example of spite — that’s a bit P.G. for my tastes — but recovering admirably with an outstanding theory about the differing natures of crowds.“Most soccer fans see the opposition once a season,” he wrote. “Maybe two or three times, in various cup competitions. In baseball, we see a division rival around 10 times a year, in three different sets of games. The vitriol is therefore expended over time, rather than being focused. Except for Phillies fans, who seem to have boundless depths of bile.”The newsletter regular Shawn Donnelly, meanwhile, has a question. “Chelsea bought Enzo Fernández for a cool $130 million,” he wrote, correctly. “Do they pay Benfica this sum immediately? Or is that payment spread out over a number of years, the way I pay off my Subaru Impreza?”I’m not quite sure whether that last bit is boasting or a subtle message to Subaru, but regardless: Some Premier League teams, in particular, will put the full cash total down for a deal, often as a way of improving their chances of signing a player they really want. In most cases, though, payments are delivered in installments: perhaps two or three, front-loaded in the first couple of years of a contract.An inquiry from Brett Jenkins, too, a confessed “novice” fan who is seeking recommendations for “soccer books, fiction and nonfiction.” The first recommendation is, always: Do not read soccer fiction. Unless it is written by Steve Bruce.Nonfiction is richer territory. It pains me to do it, but Jonathan Wilson’s “Inverting the Pyramid” is probably the precise book you are seeking, but there is a whole canon worth exploring, most of it also written by Wilson, but with noble exceptions from David Winner, Sid Lowe, David Goldblatt, Joshua Robinson and Jon Clegg, and some idiot. I love all of James Montague’s work, too, but my favorite soccer book, by a whisker, is Robert Andrew Powell’s “This Love Is Not for Cowards.”The final query comes from Alex Converse, who I can only presume is the person who invented the sneakers. “I follow Tottenham and I wonder why, with five substitutes available, Antonio Conte doesn’t routinely put on fresh wingbacks at halftime,” he wrote. “Don’t you want someone with fresh legs, who can move fast, end to end?”This is a great point, and not only for Spurs. It feels to me as if coaches have yet to tap deep into the potential effects of having five substitutes. At the World Cup, they seemed to be used not so much to help coaches change their approach as to maintain energy levels. At club level, I’m not sure we’ve seen quite the same policy yet. We will, I think, in time. More

  • 100 Shares189 Views

    in Soccer

    Chelsea’s Spending in Transfer Window Puzzles Its Rivals

    The Premier League club’s American owners have splashed roughly $750 million on new players since last year. Puzzled rivals can’t see a strategy behind the spending.LONDON — As the last few hours of the January transfer window ticked by, and as a small group of Chelsea executives were painstakingly trying to piece together the $131 million deal that would make Enzo Fernández, the 21-year-old Argentine midfielder, the most expensive player ever signed by an English team, Todd Boehly, the most high-profile of Chelsea’s new owners, was on the phone, trying to sign someone else.Since arriving in the Premier League last May, Boehly has taken an unusually hands-on approach to the transfer market, regularly leading negotiations for prospective signings. In the summer, he appointed himself as Chelsea’s interim sporting director. He has since relinquished the title, but his appetite for involvement is undimmed.So as Behdad Eghbali, the founder of Chelsea’s biggest investor Clearlake Capital now seven months into his tenure as one of Chelsea’s co-owners, was fine-tuning the structure of the Fernández transfer with the Portuguese side Benfica, Boehly decided that he would personally follow up on an email a member of the club’s recruitment staff had sent to the Italian team Fiorentina. In addition to signing Fernández, Boehly told Fiorentina, Chelsea wanted to take Sofyan Amrabat — another midfield player who had starred in the World Cup — on loan.That, he was informed, would not be possible. The Italian club wanted to keep Amrabat, a Moroccan international, and even if it was interested in selling it would not consider letting its star player leave for anything other than a premium, and permanent, fee.Boehly declared Fiorentina’s eight-figure asking price unreasonable. An executive at the Italian team responded by asking how he would feel if some other club turned up on the final day of the transfer window and tried to poach one of Chelsea’s most valuable assets on the cheap. The call, and the negotiation, ended abruptly.Benfica’s Argentine midfielder Enzo Fernández was Chelsea’s prize winter signing.Carlos Costa/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAmrabat would, in the end, be a rare miss in what has been an eye-watering, gasp-inducing month of spending from Eghbali, Boehly and Chelsea. With only a few minutes to spare before the window closed, Chelsea filed the paperwork for Fernández, their eighth signing of the month, and at $131 million the most expensive. The club had agreed to pay Benfica roughly 10 times what the Portuguese side had paid for him only six months ago.That took Chelsea’s outlay in January alone to more than $370 million, the kind of spending that is criticized when done by oligarchs and nation states. It was the most any club has ever spent in a single window and more than every team in the French, Spanish, German and Italian top flights combined. Since Boehly and Eghbali took charge, Chelsea has now spent somewhere in the region of three quarters of a billion dollars overhauling a squad that won the Champions League less than two years ago.They have done so with a frequency, extravagance and single-mindedness that has, at times, surprised even some of European soccer’s most seasoned operators. Early last month, for example, Sergei Palkin — the president of the exiled Ukrainian club Shakhtar Donetsk — was sitting in the Cullinan Belek hotel in the Turkish resort of Antalya when he received a phone call from Eghbali.Chelsea had asked, several weeks earlier, to be kept appraised of any bids for Shakhtar’s explosive winger Mykhailo Mudryk, but now seemed to be lagging behind Arsenal in the pursuit of the player. Arsenal had been discussing the terms of a deal with Shakhtar for some time, and Mudryk had even seemed to welcome his imminent transfer on Instagram.Then Eghbali called. “He said, ‘I’m here,’” Palkin told The New York Times. “I said, ‘What do you mean “here”?’ He told me he’s in the hotel.” Eghbali had landed by private jet that morning. After swift talks, he boarded his plane again the same day, this time with Mudryk in tow and $108 million on its way to Shakhtar. Chelsea’s offer, Palkin said, had been more “concrete” than Arsenal’s: It had offered to pay the nine-figure fee for Mudryk over two years instead of the four Arsenal had proposed.Palkin left those talks with the distinct impression that Chelsea’s principal owners — while perhaps a little keener on taking their share of the limelight afforded by soccer’s frenzied player trading business than many of their peers — had serious, coherent plans for the club they had bought at auction from Roman Abramovich.Eghbali, he said, had outlined their vision for what Chelsea would become. “They want to invest in players, new infrastructure; they have plans to build a new stadium,” Palkin said. “At a minimum there will be an increase in the income at Chelsea. In three or four years, Chelsea will look very professional.”Ben Stansall/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJason Cairnduff/Action Images, via ReutersNow vying for playing time at Chelsea: defender Benoit Badiashile ($42 million); David Datro Fofana ($13.1 million); and wing Mykhailo Mudryk ($108 million).Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockThat view, it is fair to say, is not universally held. Under Abramovich, Chelsea had been losing a million dollars a week, losses covered only by regular capital injections from the Russian billionaire’s personal fortune. How Boehly, Eghbali and their group plan to balance the books — given the enormous scale of their investment on players so far — is not clear.Their preferred mechanism, it seems, has been to defer the official cost of the deals. Though clubs pay the vast majority of a transfer fee upfront — or in a handful of installments over a couple of years — the price of the acquisition is often spread out over the duration of the player’s contract, a process known as amortization. Doing so allows a team to spread out of the cost of an expensive purchase — or, in Chelsea’s case, half a dozen or so — over multiple years, and allow it to stay within the cost controls required by the Premier League and UEFA, European soccer’s governing body.In several of their most expensive deals, Chelsea have sought to use that accounting to their advantage. Wesley Fofana, a defender signed from Leicester City last summer, signed a seven-year deal. Mudryk’s runs for eight seasons. Fernández, the costliest of them all, is contracted to Stamford Bridge until 2031.That approach has not gone unnoticed. The issue was raised at a meeting of UEFA’s executive board last month, and several teams have since contacted Andrea Traverso, the organization’s head of licensing, to ask European soccer’s governing body what action it plans to take to close the loophole. (Starting this summer, UEFA will only allow teams to amortize contracts over a maximum of five years when it analyzes whether teams are in compliance of its fiscal rules.)Long contracts, though, are not the only concern. Among Chelsea’s peers and rivals, the reaction to the club’s spending spree on players has been one of puzzlement. In interviews with a dozen executives at teams both in the Premier League and across Europe, all of whom spoke with The New York Times anonymously because they did not wish to be seen commenting on another team’s business strategy, few could immediately discern the logic of Chelsea’s approach.Some suggested the sheer number of players Chelsea has acquired — more than a dozen since the summer — made it hard to discern any clear sporting plan beyond a simplistic desire to stockpile the world’s best young talent, regardless of the cost. Others wondered if it made sense for a team with one of the most prolific academies in Europe to render its work so obviously futile. Chelsea’s owners have done little, publicly, to explain the frenzy of acquisitions or the thinking behind them.In England, most believe the fees Chelsea has paid in the last few months will have an inflationary effect, though nobody was quite sure if that was deliberate or merely an inevitable side effect.In the rest of Europe, the fear is a little more material. Chelsea, one executive at a major continental club said, has “destroyed the market,” a sentiment supported by Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, Spain’s top division. “The British market is doped,” he said. “It is a competition that loses billions of pounds in the last few years, financed with contributions from patrons, in this case American investors who finance at a loss.”While all of the executives immediately understood the purpose of Chelsea’s prolonged contracts, the majority were baffled as to whether the club was bravely exploiting an inefficiency in the market or mortgaging its future. After all, lengthening contracts might reduce the immediate financial impact on Chelsea’s accounts — and therefore help the club meet European soccer’s largely theoretical cost control mechanisms — but it does not represent the team’s actual cash flow.Chelsea still has to pay the transfer fees in the short term. It still has to commit to pay the players several million dollars more than it might have if they were on more standard-length contracts. It still has to rely on each of them fulfilling their undoubted potential. It still faces the risk of being encumbered with expensive, immovable assets in years to come if they do not.Selling players, certainly, has been a little more of a challenge for Chelsea. As Eghbali was negotiating for Fernández and Boehly was making his last-ditch bid for Amrabat, one of Chelsea’s current players, Hakim Ziyech, was sitting in the offices of Paris St.-Germain, waiting for confirmation of his departure.The deal had been in the works for a week or so. At one point, talks had been sufficiently relaxed that Boehly had suggested P.S.G.’s owner — the Qatar Investment Authority — might like to help Chelsea with its stadium project. As the minutes ticked down to the transfer deadline, though, P.S.G. officials became concerned at Chelsea’s lack of communication.Five minutes before the deadline — at 10:55 p.m. local time — Chelsea finally sent over a document. It was the wrong one. When that was pointed out, a second soon followed. It was not signed. By the time the new error was fixed, it was too late. The deadline had passed. P.S.G. could not register the signing.Ziyech, distraught, had to return to west London, where a raft of new teammates await him, including at least two who play his position. Chelsea has little need for him now. It has to pay his salary, though, for another six months. More

  • 113 Shares199 Views

    in Soccer

    Saudi Sponsorship Catches Women’s World Cup Hosts by Surprise

    Officials from Australia and New Zealand were blindsided by reports that FIFA would make Saudi Arabia’s tourism authority a partner for the tournament.MELBOURNE, Australia — Before their presence was first permitted by an easing of government restrictions in 2018, women in Saudi Arabia who slipped inside public stadiums to watch soccer games risked being arrested. So published news reports this week that the kingdom, via its Visit Saudi tourism brand, had reached a deal with world soccer’s governing body to become a prominent sponsor of this year’s Women’s World Cup were met on Wednesday with a sense of startled dismay.Players, fans and supporters of the tournament, the largest women’s sporting event ever held in Australia and New Zealand, scrambled to understand what to them appeared an uneasy corporate marriage between Saudi Arabia and FIFA, world soccer’s global governing body. And local World Cup organizers, blindsided by the news, were demanding an explanation.“We are very disappointed that Football Australia were not consulted on this matter prior to any decision being made,” a spokeswoman for Football Australia, the country’s governing body for soccer, said in a statement. Football Australia said its leaders, and those of its World Cup partner, New Zealand Football, “have jointly written to FIFA to urgently clarify the situation.”FIFA did not respond to messages seeking comment. A representative of the Saudi Tourism Authority did not immediately respond to a similar request.Others, particularly in Australia, saw little to clarify. They suggested a Visit Saudi sponsorship for a women’s championship was just the latest example of what critics have described as an effort by a government to use money to finance the kind of reputation-cleansing efforts derided as “sportswashing,” and of FIFA’s willingness to be an active partner.“Saudi Arabia sponsoring a global women’s sporting event is like Exxon sponsoring COP28 or McDonald’s a healthy eating or anti-obesity symposium,” said Craig Foster, a former captain of Australia’s men’s soccer team whose human rights advocacy has at times made him a vocal critic of FIFA. “It is perfectly in line with FIFA’s thirst for money at any cost and complete disregard for its human rights policy, let alone principles.”Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo during an exhibition match in Riyadh last month. Messi has a contract with Saudi Arabia’s tourism authority, and Ronaldo recently signed with a Saudi club.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhen it came to FIFA, Foster added, “concepts like gender equality are only as durable as the amount of money received from abusing companies or countries, and inevitably, money wins.”Others, however, said Saudi sponsorships in sports like soccer, golf, boxing and wrestling, along with its investments in business, entertainment and the arts and an expansion of opportunities for women across society, represent a broader push by the Saudi government to diversify its oil-dependent economy and boost its importance on the world stage.“It’s part of a far larger strategy, across various sports, irrespective of gender, which is designed to, as Saudi Arabia wants to do with everything, make it the regional center of gravity,” said James M. Dorsey, a scholar at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute.“Yes, it is about image, but it’s about positioning the kingdom as a powerhouse,” he added.In the last five years, Saudi Arabia has emerged as a key power player in soccer, cultivating a close relationship with the FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, and investing billions in events, programs and partnerships (as well as in the acquisition of a Premier League soccer team). FIFA, meanwhile, has sought to increase investment in the women’s game, which despite its growth continues to receive a fraction of the financial support that underwrites the men’s game.At the same time, led by its powerful crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia has sought to burnish its reputation as the kind of country one might associate with major global sporting events, and where Lionel Messi might choose to vacation, rather than as a conservative monarchy that murders dissidents, according to United States intelligence, and imprisons citizens for their activity on social media.“There is an evident desire by the elite, very much driven by Mohammed bin Salman, to exact an enormous kind of cultural revolution in a really short time frame,” said David B. Roberts, a scholar of the region at King’s College London. “At the same time, you have qualitative changes that no one thought remotely plausible or possible, with the comparative or significant emancipation of women as independent economic actors in the kingdom.”Women were not allowed to attend soccer games in Saudi Arabia until 2018. But empowered by an easing of restrictions across public life, they attended World Cup matches in Qatar by the thousands.Luca Bruno/Associated PressWinning over women’s soccer players and fans, and Australians, may be more difficult. Sydney, which has had a surging demand for tickets to the World Cup, is home to some of the world’s largest L.G.B.T.Q. pride events, including a three-week Mardi Gras festival, and some of the tournament’s most prominent players, including Sam Kerr, the captain of Australia’s women’s team, and her girlfriend, the United States midfielder Kristie Mewis, are gay.L.G.B.T.Q. people in Saudi Arabia, as in many other parts of the Middle East, face discrimination and potentially arrest and prosecution.“If these reports are true, they are deeply perplexing,” said Moya Dodd, a former vice-captain of Australia’s team who was from 2013 to 2017 among the first women to appear in FIFA’s governing board. “If FIFA is planning to take money to tell L.G.B.T.Q.+ fans and players to ‘Visit Saudi,’ it’s hard to see how this could pass responsible business principles, let alone meet FIFA’s own human rights obligations and policies,” Dodd added. More

  • 113 Shares99 Views

    in Soccer

    La Liga Must Register Barcelona’s Gavi, Spanish Court Rules

    As rivals haggled over prices on the final day of the transfer window, Barcelona found a new way around the Spanish league’s financial rules.The frenetic last days of European soccer’s midseason player trading market — that whirlwind of spending and sales known as the January transfer window — are always full of drama. Rumors fly. Deals are made. For most clubs, the final hours, which arrived Tuesday, are spent engaged in last-minute haggling over the prices for new players.At F.C. Barcelona, the Spanish club trapped in a yearslong financial crisis, the close of this year’s window was even stranger than usual: While most of its rivals scoured the market for players, Barcelona went to court to keep hold of one of its own.The crisis was of the club’s own making. Having spent heavily on new talent last summer despite repeated warnings that its spending violated league cost controls, Barcelona was told by the Spanish league that it could not register any new players until it could find savings or new revenues. That did not stop the team from offering a new contract to Gavi, a prodigiously talented teenager who is one of the club’s most valuable assets.The new contract meant a new, higher salary and, crucially, a new registration with the league. The league balked, and refused to register Gavi. And so Barcelona turned to a hometown court, and on Tuesday it got the ruling it sought.In a statement, the club said it had persuaded a local commercial court to require Spanish league officials to register Gavi, an 18-year-old midfielder, before the trading window closed at midnight. The court had agreed with Barcelona’s argument, the club announced, that the league’s failure to register the player would have caused the club “serious, irreparable damage.”The Spanish league, known as La Liga, was not represented in the hearing. It said it would study the ruling before deciding the next steps, but it signaled that its battle with Barcelona over its financial controls was not over.“If the court tells us to register Gavi, we will,” a league spokesman said. “And if there are grounds for appeal, then we will appeal it.” Should there be a successful appeal, the league, the spokesman said, would deregister Gavi.The case of Gavi’s new contract highlights the dire financial straits Barcelona continues to find itself in, even after its president, Joan Laporta, swept back into office in 2021 on a promise to restore the club’s reputation and its finances after a fiscal collapse that had sent F.C. Barcelona spiraling toward bankruptcy.Laporta managed to raise money quickly. Lots of it, in fact, under a program in which Barcelona sold club assets — including years of commercial rights — to outside investors. But instead of using that influx of cash to balance the books, Laporta went on a mammoth shopping spree, bringing in a slew of new players. The acquisitions left the club’s fortunes reliant on sporting success, coupled with the need for even more new revenue sources.The results have been mixed. Barcelona sits atop the Spanish league with half the season remaining, but a humiliating — and financially disastrous — exit from the Champions League in the group stage has raised new doubts about its financial prospects.La Liga’s president, Javier Tebas, this week offered an explanation for why Barcelona could not register Gavi. In the league’s view, he said, the new deal would put Barcelona in violation of financial limits when it went into effect.“The issue of not registering Gavi comes as a consequence of the fact that it is a registration that takes effect next season and has no effect in the coming six months,” Tebas said in comments reported by the Spanish news media this week. He said Barcelona’s budget deficit next season would be more than 200 million euros — more than $217 million — based on current income projections, “so it does not seem appropriate to accept that registration.”With the Spanish league unequivocal in its refusal to bend regulations to allow Barcelona to register any more players, the club’s board took its plea to the local court.In its submission, made on Friday, the club said not being able to sign Gavi to his new contract — which he had agreed to in September — by the close of the January window “would imply the player’s free agency and therefore cause serious, irreparable damage to F.C. Barcelona.”If the ruling stands, La Liga’s decade-old fiscal regulations, which had been drawn up with the clubs’ input in an effort to reduce volatility, would be rendered unenforceable, with teams able to bypass the regulations by challenging them in civil courts. Barcelona has largely been an outlier in failing to stay within the designated spending cap, which is calculated as a percentage of each team’s earnings from its soccer operations.The league in recent months has moved to tighten those rules further by limiting the impact of the type of asset sales Barcelona has employed on teams’ salary and player cost caps. More

  • 100 Shares149 Views

    in Soccer

    Copa América Will Return to U.S. in 2024

    The relocation of the South American soccer championship is part of an agreement that also includes expanded events for clubs and women in the Americas.The Copa América, South America’s biggest soccer championship, will return to the United States in 2024 as part of a broad collaboration agreement between soccer officials in the Americas that also includes at least one new tournament as well as expanded intercontinental competitions for clubs and women’s national teams.Concacaf, the confederation that governs the sport in North and Central America and the Caribbean, and Conmebol, which rules the game in South America, announced their agreement on Friday.Among its obvious soccer and financial benefits — a previous Copa América in the United States was the largest and richest edition in the competition’s history — the agreement signaled a significant restoration of trust between officials from North and South America.Many soccer relationships in the region were seriously damaged in the years after 2015, when a corruption investigation led by the United States Department of Justice led to the arrests and convictions of dozens of soccer and marketing officials throughout the Americas. Television rights to the Copa América, the century-old South American championship, were central to some of those cases, and two former television executives charged with other crimes are currently on trial in New York.Despite all that, South American soccer nations have long looked to the United States, with its vast pool of expatriates but also its vast pool of capital, as a market they wanted to tap. But they wanted to do it on their terms.Now, South America will get access to both, while the United States, Mexico and Canada — the three co-hosts of the 2026 World Cup — will have the opportunity to play in a meaningful and competitive tournament two years before that global event. The success of the 2024 Copa América will go a long way toward determining if a longer term collaboration will become a fixture for soccer in the region.The Copa América was played in the United States in 2016, the only other time it was held outside South America and also the only time it included as many as 16 teams. Chile beat Lionel Messi and Argentina in the final, denying Messi a coveted trophy he has since claimed. (Messi also led Argentina to the World Cup title last year, but it is unclear if he will still be playing internationally in 2024.)In 2024, the 10 South American nations that would normally contest the Copa América will be joined by six teams from the Concacaf region.It is not uncommon for the Copa América to include “guest teams” from other regions. But for 2024, the teams from Concacaf will qualify through the 2023-24 Concacaf Nations League, rather than by invitation. A guest team has never won the Copa América, although Mexico made the final in 1993 and 2001. The United States has appeared in the tournament four times, making two semifinal appearances.The federations said the expanded Copa América would serve, in part, as a vital window of top-level preparation in the Western Hemisphere ahead of the 2026 World Cup, which is to be co-hosted in the United States, Mexico and Canada.The tournament will be held from mid-June to mid-July 2024, putting it in scheduling conflict with that summer’s European Championship, a tent-pole event on the soccer calendar that is held every four years, but keeping both tournaments well clear of the Paris Olympics that open in late July 2024.Argentina won the most recent Copa América in 2021, a career highlight for Lionel Messi, and his first major national team title. He and Argentina followed that with a World Cup win in 2022. In all, Argentina and Uruguay have won 15 Copa Américas each and Brazil nine.The federations also announced that the 2024 women’s Concacaf Gold Cup will include the top four South American teams alongside eight teams from Concacaf, a rare (and welcome) bit of heightened tournament competition for the region’s best teams outside the Women’s World Cup or the Olympics.A new men’s club competition for the region is also planned, to include two club teams from each confederation. The federations said they hoped to launch that tournament in 2024 as well. The tournament comes as the Club World Cup, for club teams around the world, is in flux, with FIFA planning to expand it but hold it less frequently.The club tournament is another sign of the deepening relationship between the regional bodies and the willingness of Conmebol to seek new territories for its teams. It already has a relationship with UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, that has seen the revival of an intercontinental championship matching the winner of the Copa América against the European champion. Argentina beat Italy, 3-0, in the game last year, the first time it had been held since 1993.The new four-team club tournament is likely to feature the finalists from the Concacaf Champions League and the finalists from the Copa Libertadores, the South American club championship, or the winner of that event and the champion of South America’s second-tier competition, the Copa Sudamericana.The new ventures come against the background of intense negotiations ahead of FIFA finalizing the global calendar for the next decade, a keenly anticipated plan that will shape the future of soccer across the world. More

  • 38 Shares149 Views

    in Soccer

    Everton’s Identity Crisis

    Europe is filled with big clubs that lost their way. But soccer’s fallen giants will never rise again until they face what they’ve become.Frank Lampard can, at least, be sure that there will be no lasting damage. The disappointment of his firing as Everton manager will sting for a while, of course, but there is little reason to believe it will be held against him. A failure to meet expectations at Everton has long since become the sort of thing that might happen to anyone.It did not, after all, stop Carlo Ancelotti — who steered Everton to the dizzying heights of 10th in the Premier League in his sole full season at Goodison Park — from getting the Real Madrid job. Less than a year after leaving Merseyside, Ancelotti picked up his fourth Champions League trophy (a record), and became the first manager in history to win domestic titles in all of Europe’s five most illustrious leagues.Ancelotti’s predecessor at Goodison, Marco Silva, has not done quite so well, but his Fulham team currently sits seventh in the Premier League. Ronald Koeman left England with his reputation shredded, but he has since managed the Dutch national team, Barcelona, and the Dutch national team again. Roberto Martínez spent eight years in charge of Belgium; his next task is to take Portugal to the European Championship next summer.Indeed, of the six most recent (permanent) managers to have clasped English soccer’s great poisoned chalice before Lampard, so far only one — Sam Allardyce — failed to recover, and that might be attributed at least in part to his pre-existing, not especially flattering and largely self-inflicted caricature. (Rafa Benítez, whom Lampard replaced a year ago, has yet to return to work.)That is instructive. Only one of those managers, Ancelotti, left the club on his terms and with the broad beneficence of the fans. The rest left Goodison Park bilious, rancorous and, more than once, on the verge of outright mutiny.Frank Lampard in better days. (Spoiler: There weren’t a lot of those.)Geoff Caddick/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat so few of those managers have been sullied by the manner of their departures indicates that soccer, as a whole, does not feel Everton, these days, is the sort of place where a manager’s talent can be accurately gauged. Lampard — now four years into his managerial career and with little proof, either way, of whether he is particularly cut out for the job or not — will benefit from that just as Koeman, Silva and all of the others did.Why that should be, of course, has been outlined frequently in the days since Lampard was fired.As noted by this newsletter last week, Everton’s majority owner, Farhad Moshiri, lacks a clear vision for what he wants the club to be, other than — as a statement put it — not in the Premier League’s relegation zone. He has, in the six years since he bought Everton, spent something north of $500 million on players, but the recruitment has been so scattershot that it has incontrovertibly made the team worse.He appointed a director of football and then, by most accounts, did not empower him to sign anyone. He has hired and fired managers with such speed that Lampard’s team for his final game, a defeat at West Ham, contained players brought in by four of his predecessors. Everton is a patchwork of different influences and ideas and policies, a consequence of years of failure.Both among the club’s fan base and soccer’s professional commentariat, conventional wisdom has it that it is from there that the tendrils of Everton’s chronic disappointment, its permanent crisis, climb: not with the manager but with the system in which they are expected, forlornly, to work. It is, of course, correct. It may not, though, quite get to the root of the issue.For the youngest Everton fans, glory is just a story passed down the generations.Molly Darlington/ReutersIt is impossible to escape Everton’s history. It is there, emblazoned on the stadium, in a series of snapshots commemorating the club’s finest teams, its greatest achievements. It is there, in the words to “Grand Old Team,” the song that long served as one of the club’s prematch standards. It even warranted a mention in the statement Lampard released after his departure, in which he paid homage to the club’s “incredible” history.That is understandable: Everton’s history is unusually illustrious. It is, depending on your preferred metric, either the fourth most successful team in English history — in terms of league titles won, ahead of Manchester City, Chelsea and Tottenham — or the eighth, if total trophy haul is deemed a better measure. That history is, as it should be, a source of immense pride.It is also, though, a prison. The metastasis of soccer over the last two decades has, effectively, rendered history largely irrelevant as a marker of power. Everton’s nine league titles do not mean it earns more from the Premier League’s television deals than Brentford, just as A.C. Milan’s seven European Cups do not give it more financial firepower than Bournemouth (Champions League titles: zero).The past that brings charm can also hold a club back.Phil Noble/ReutersThe old hierarchies no longer hold, as the rise of Manchester City and Paris St.-Germain make clear, toppled and leveled by the flood of money rushing into the game from broadcasters and sponsors, from oligarchs and hedge funds. History is no longer a draw. Or, rather, it is not nearly so significant a draw as wealth, or prospects, or status, or facilities, or plans.That adjusted reality has affected the game’s self-appointed superpowers, of course, just as surely as it has affected the vast majority of clubs, the minnows and the traditionally mediocre, all of whom have been forced to adapt to narrowed horizons and limited ambitions.The impact has been most profound, though, on the class of club to which Everton belongs, those on the second rung of the game’s long established and now defunct power structure, those who are best regarded as soccer’s cruiserweights.Those teams can be placed, broadly, into two categories. There are those who have accommodated themselves to the way things are now, who have managed to carve out a new definition of success that enables them to find some contentment in a hostile environment.For Benfica and Ajax, say, that has taken the form of trading continental prominence for domestic supremacy, secured thanks to a steady stream of young talent. For Borussia Dortmund, it has involved accepting a place as the game’s most reliable springboard, a role as a midwife to greatness.Unlike some other faded powers, Benfica has found its place in the modern soccer economy, and in this season’s Champions League.Pedro Nunes/ReutersAnd then there are those who seem to be weighed down by the burden of their history: Valencia, Inter Milan, Marseille, Schalke, Hamburg, West Ham, Aston Villa and, of course, Everton, all unable or unwilling to adopt the methods of their former peers to stake out a new place for themselves.It is no surprise that these teams have become, for the most part, the most unstable, the least contented clubs in Europe. Happiness is a fleeting thing in soccer; elite sport does not lend itself to lasting satisfaction. But these clubs often seem the most unhappy, caught in a grinding, unending identity crisis, trapped between what they were and what they are.That is what lies at the heart of the modern Everton. Like Lampard, even Moshiri, to some extent, can be viewed as a consequence as much as a cause of the problem. The club was so desperate to be restored to what it once was that it sold itself to someone who — on the balance of the last six years — has very little clue what he is doing, beyond hiring famous managers and signing expensive players and hoping for the best.And it is what will continue to undermine Everton until it is resolved, as the teams above them streak away and the teams traditionally beneath them — the smart, progressive ones, at least — roar past. Everton has never been willing to surrender the idea that it is more than a way-station, that it is a destination sort of a club, even if doing so is the first step to returning itself to relevance. To do so would be to think small, and thinking small is unimaginable when you believe, when history dictates, that you are big.CorrespondenceThanks, first of all, to the half-dozen eagle-eyed readers who got in touch to inform me that I had my magical kingdoms mixed up: Disney World is in Florida, by all accounts, whereas Disneyland is in California. I have, alas, been to neither, owing to a lifelong — and to be honest perfectly logical — fear of giant anthropomorphized mice.The issue of celebrations, meanwhile, seems to animate even more of you than the misattribution of theme parks. “I wonder if goal celebrations can (or used to) be culture-specific,” wrote Thomas Bodenberg. “In 1994, Brazil played Sweden at the late, unlamented Pontiac Silverdome. When Kennet Andersson scored for Sweden, putting them 1-0 up, he just jogged stoically back to his end, awaiting kickoff. I wonder if that was more a product of Swedish culture than the individual.”Quick: Which player scored the goal here?Ina Fassbender/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhat irks Allan Culham, on the other hand, is how often goal-scorers “do not recognize whoever set them up to get it. Often the assist is the most impressive part, but players celebrate as if it was a result of their effort alone.”It feels to me as if many players do, these days, opt for the “emphatic pointing” method of celebration, singling out the teammate who made the chance, but this hits upon an issue close to my heart, and one I have discussed with a host of current and former players: the cliché runs that scoring a goal is the hardest job in soccer, but I would contend that making one is infinitely more difficult. (They largely disagree with me.)Dan Lachman is not short on ambition. It is time, he wrote, to “retire” the tradition/habit/pretension of referring to players by the role seemingly predicated by their numbers. “Does the casual fan have any clue what a ‘No. 6’ is? How about calling it a holding, or defensive, midfielder? It’s time for this to go.”Oddly, this is a relatively new phenomenon: At a rough guess, the phrase “No. 6” would never have appeared in English commentary of a game even 10 years ago. It is a recent (and entirely harmless) import, and I would agree that it does not actually offer the clarity people assume. What a No. 6 does in Spain, say, is different from what one does in Germany, which is different again from how the Dutch perceive the position.Forward Lynn Williams wore the No. 6 in two recent victories for the U.S. women’s team. Lynn Williams is not a No. 6.Andrew Cornaga/PHOTOSPORT, via Associated PressAnd a forlorn request from Tony De Palma. “I long to know what is being sung by fans at Premier League stadia,” he wrote. “I love the feel of the spectacle, the ambient sound, but I am unable to make out all but the most well-known chants. How can I, an American onlooker, figure out what these English fans are singing?”Alas, Tony, the first assumption should always be that whatever it is, the lyrics would almost certainly make the Grey Lady blush. I remember going to a baseball game in San Francisco a few years ago with my wife, who is no fan of either sport. So powerful is social conditioning, though, that after a few minutes even she turned to me, with the air of a disappointed line manager conducting a performance review, and asked why it was that the fans were not swearing at the opposition team. More

  • 138 Shares149 Views

    in Soccer

    Witness Says Fox Used Inside Information to Win World Cup Rights

    A marketing executive testified that a top FIFA official provided secret bidding information that allowed his company to acquire valuable television rights.When the news broke a dozen years ago that Fox had been awarded the U.S. broadcast rights for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, many in television, and in soccer, were surprised. For decades, the sport’s showcase championship was the exclusive domain of ESPN, which had been instrumental in driving interest in the world’s most popular game in the world’s richest sports market.But according to a government witness testifying this week in federal court in Brooklyn, Fox didn’t acquire those tournaments on merit alone.Instead, said Alejandro Burzaco, a former sports marketing executive from Argentina, an executive working for the media giant used inside information obtained from a powerful FIFA official whom he was secretly bribing for years — and who controlled the committee that made final decisions on TV deals — to give Fox a decisive edge in what the other bidders, including ESPN and NBC, thought was a blind auction.“He said, ‘If Fox puts up $400 million, then it will win,’” Burzaco recalled being told by the FIFA official, Julio Grondona, in testimony Friday in federal court. The figure nearly matched the price reported on the day FIFA announced that Fox had won the rights.The testimony of Burzaco came during the second trial of individuals and corporations charged in the Justice Department’s long-running investigation of corruption in international soccer. In 2017, a jury found two South American soccer officials guilty of racketeering and other crimes as part of what prosecutors called “endemic” bribery and money laundering in the sport. Burzaco, who pleaded guilty in 2015 for his own role in the scandal, also testified at that trial.In the current case, the government’s focus has pivoted away from the officials who ran soccer at the time to the media rights deals that are the financial lifeblood of the game.Two of the current defendants, Hernán López and Carlos Martínez, served as executives at Fox International Channels, which controlled rights to two of South America’s most popular tournaments, the Copa Libertadores and the Copa Sudamericana. Prosecutors have for years maintained that those rights were acquired for far below market value thanks to millions of dollars in bribes paid annually to the continent’s top soccer officials, a scheme organized by Burzaco with, prosecutors contend, the full knowledge of López and Martínez.The third defendant in the current trial, Full Play Group, is an Argentine sports marketing firm that prosecutors said used bribes and other back-room deals to win commercial rights to friendly matches, World Cup qualifiers and South America’s continental championship, the Copa América.Fox Corporation, which broadcast the recent World Cup in Qatar and holds the rights to the 2026 tournament in North America, existed under a different corporate name and structure when the bribes took place and is not on trial in Brooklyn. When allegations about Fox’s potential involvement in corrupt acts emerged during the first trial, the company denied any knowledge, calling any suggestion to the contrary “emphatically false.”It has continued to distance itself from the bribery, and the former Fox executives, this week. “This case involves a legacy business that has no connection to the new Fox Corporation,” a company spokesman said this week. The spokesman noted that Fox International Channels, the subsidiary accused of involvement in bribes, and many other units that were part of a company then known as 21st Century Fox, were sold in 2019. Attorneys for the three defendants have declined to comment on the current case, as did a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York.Burzaco, who was indicted and pleaded guilty to racketeering and other charges in 2015, is the Justice Department’s star witness. A former banker who admitted to paying at least $160 million in bribes over a 15-year period, he took the stand Wednesday and is expected to testify well into next week. To date, the government has called only one other witness, a FIFA representative who testified briefly about the governance structure of global soccer, as well as the codes of ethics that the sport’s officials pledge to respect.So far, this trial has been lacking in some of the headline-grabbing fireworks that characterized the 2017 edition, when, for example, a former Argentine public official committed suicide by throwing himself in front of a train only hours after being described as a bribe recipient in court, and Burzaco said that Qatar had bribed three South American officials to ensure it would host the 2022 World Cup.On Thursday, the government’s lead prosecutor, Kaitlin T. Farrell, began asking Burzaco about how Qatar managed to acquire those rights despite its obvious problems with climate and infrastructure. But after defense attorneys objected, Judge Pamela K. Chen shut down that testimony, ruling that it was not relevant because none of the defendants are accused of being involved in the World Cup hosting decision.A courtroom sketch showing Alejandro Burzaco, left. He testified Friday that a former FIFA official, Julio Grondona, shown on a board at right, helped tip Fox officials on how much to bid for the broadcast rights to the World Cup.Elizabeth Williams/Associated PressInstead, Farrell has focused on the long and tortured relationship between the Argentine firm Burzaco led, Torneos y Competencias, and the Fox unit with which it had entered into a joint venture to control soccer rights. What started as bribes to a handful of South American soccer officials had, by 2011, expanded to nearly a dozen men who threatened to cancel lucrative contracts for the popular Copa Libertadores and Copa Sudamericana tournaments — which had been sold for far under market value — if they did not receive their annual bribes.In 2010, Burzaco said, he told López about the bribes at a beachside hotel in Florida, where both men had traveled to watch the Super Bowl. Burzaco testified that he told López a second time during a meeting in Fox’s corporate headquarters in midtown Manhattan later that year. In 2012, after Martínez took over the unit’s Latin American operations, Burzaco said he filled him in on the bribes over coffee at a Dean & DeLuca cafe in Rockefeller Center.One of the primary recipients of bribes was Grondona, who at the time served as a FIFA vice president, the chairman of the soccer body’s finance committee and the president of the Argentine soccer association. According to Burzaco’s testimony, when FIFA in October 2011 opened bidding for the English language rights to the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, López reached out to him to tell him Fox planned to bid. López, Burzaco said, then asked him to reach out to Grondona “to let him know that any help would be welcome.”Burzaco, eager to help his primary commercial partner, which helped keep Torneos solvent by hiring it to produce sports content throughout Latin America, did as he was asked. Grondona, he recalled, said he would do what he could but that it would be difficult because FIFA was under intense scrutiny in the wake of its controversial votes a year earlier awarding World Cups to Russia (in 2018) and Qatar. Regardless, Grondona soon relayed the news that the rights were as good as Fox’s.“Mr. López was very excited,” Burzaco recalled on the stand, saying López called it his “best accomplishment within Fox.” According to Burzaco, a number of other Fox officials, including Chase Carey, then in line to take over the company, and the Fox Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch himself all expressed delight at having acquired the prize.As for Grondona, he summoned Burzaco for a private meeting in Buenos Aires immediately after awarding the World Cup rights to Fox.“‘Look, Alejandro, I did this favor to you and Fox,’” Burzaco recalled him saying. “‘But this is the last time I do it for free.’”Grondona, who had been one of the primary targets of the Justice Department investigation, died of an aortic aneurysm in July 2014. Seven months later, FIFA announced that Fox had been awarded rights to the 2026 World Cup, too. This time, ESPN hadn’t even been allowed to bid. More