Raphael Stevens

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    Premier League Cuts Everton’s Points Deduction

    The decision means the club will lose six points in the standings, not 10, potentially helping it to stay in the division and to remain financially viable.Everton, a storied English soccer club trying to weather a serious financial storm, secured a modest victory on Monday when a record penalty that had sent it to the bottom of the Premier League standings was reduced on appeal.Everton’s original penalty, a 10-point deduction for financial rules violations, was reduced to six points, lifting its chances of staying in the division — and of retaining access to the tens of millions of dollars in annual revenues that a place in the Premier League brings.The successful appeal immediately lifted Everton to 15th place in the standings and eased the club’s fears of relegation and potential financial ruin. The reprieve, however, might be short-lived.The Premier League in January announced that Everton and Nottingham Forest, another club at risk of relegation, faced additional charges of breaching cost-control regulations. If the teams are found guilty, the new case will almost certainly lead to another points deduction.Everton, a founding member of the Premier League, has in recent years become a symbol for poor management and financial risk-taking. Crippled by expensive contracts and the cost of constructing a new stadium, the club faces debts of about $1 billion and continues to require regular infusions of millions of dollars in external financing to keep its operations running.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Want to Lose a Lot of Money, Fast? Buy a Small Soccer Team in England.

    The country’s lower leagues offer a tempting entry to ownership. But the sport’s economics mean even multimillionaires can struggle to compete.Geoff Thompson knows there are plenty of people who want to buy what he has to sell. The phone calls and emails over the last few weeks have left no doubt. And really, that is no surprise. Few industries are quite as appealing or as prestigious as English soccer, and Mr. Thompson has a piece of it.It is, admittedly, a comparatively small piece: South Shields F.C., the team he has owned for almost a decade, operates in English soccer’s sixth tier, several levels below, and a number of worlds away, from the dazzling light and international allure of the Premier League. But while his team might be small, Mr. Thompson is of the view that it is, at least, as perfectly formed as any minor-league English soccer club could hope to be.South Shields has earned four promotions to higher leagues in his nine years as chairman. The team owns its stadium. Mr. Thompson has spent considerable sums of money modernizing the bathrooms, the club shop and the private boxes. There is a thriving youth academy and an active charitable foundation. “We have done most of the hard yards,” Mr. Thompson said.After a cancer scare last year led him to reassess his priorities, Mr. Thompson has, reluctantly, decided that he has to “hand the baton” to someone else.That is where things becomes complicated. There are plenty of very wealthy people who want to buy their way into English soccer. It is, as Mr. Thompson said, “fun.” Owning a team offers the chance to “be a hero” to a place. It is a pitch sufficiently compelling that, in a matter of weeks, at least four suitors — two British, two American — have inquired about taking South Shields off his hands.That is the upside. The downside is that — as the Premier League has become a playground for private equity firms and sovereign wealth funds, and as the “Welcome to Wrexham” success has focused Hollywood’s searchlight on the romance of the game’s backwaters — England’s minor leagues have become a place where even the very rich can feel poor.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Spring Training at Coachella: Can the M.L.S. Cash In on Its Preseason?

    AEG, the entertainment giant, is trying to organize large-scale training camps marketed to fans, as other sports have done. Will it work?On a recent Wednesday afternoon, Dan Perkin and Scott Bissmeyer, work buddies on vacation, sat on metal bleachers watching the Portland Timbers play the San Jose Earthquakes in the first of four preseason Major League Soccer games that day.They had spent $125 each on V.I.P. day passes, which included food, drink and access to tents to keep cool. Self-described “M.L.S. road trippers,” they have visited numerous M.L.S. stadiums, and have watched teams in Tucson, Ariz., where as many as 11 clubs came together for preseason training in the past.But this year, with 12 M.L.S. teams — along with two from the United Soccer League and four from the National Women’s Soccer League — gathered at a 1,000-acre property outside Palm Springs, Calif., for preseason training, Mr. Perkin and Mr. Bissmeyer decided to check it out.“Compared to Tucson, they put on a nice operation here,” Mr. Perkin said of the site, the Empire Polo Club, best known as the annual site of the Coachella Music Festival. “If you’re going to drive six hours, we might as well treat ourselves.”Attendance was expected to grow about 40 percent this year.Dan Perkin and Scott Bissmeyer are self-described “M.L.S. road trippers.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    A Billionaire Bought a Chunk of Manchester United. Now He Has to Fix It.

    Jim Ratcliffe spent $1.5 billion for a 25 percent stake in his boyhood English soccer club. On Wednesday, he laid out his vision.The process was six months old and already starting to wear on Jim Ratcliffe, the British billionaire, the first time he brought out the Champagne to toast his purchase of Manchester United. But even that celebration, at the Monaco Grand Prix in May, proved premature.There was no deal. Not yet.Doing one was never going to be easy. Mostly, that was because any potential sale for United offered a tantalizing marriage of money, power and history: Mr. Ratcliffe, the wealthy chairman of INEOS, the petrochemicals giant, had supported Manchester United since he was boy. United, the most decorated club in English soccer, was one of the most iconic brands in global sports. And the Premier League, to which it belonged, was the richest soccer league in the world.What ensued was an auction as unpredictable and chaotic as some of Manchester United’s most memorable games. The news media breathlessly tracked surges of momentum between Mr. Ratcliffe’s bid and a rival one led by a little-known Qatari sheikh.United fans, eager to see their club shake off its unpopular owners, the Florida-based Glazer family, devoured it all. Yet while the negotiations produced months of headlines, discussion and whispers, what they did not produce was a sale.Mr. Ratcliffe won out in the end. Kind of.On Dec. 26, the Glazers announced that they had agreed to sell 25 percent of United to Mr. Ratcliffe, one of the world’s richest men. The price — more than $1.5 billion — bought a curious arrangement in which Mr. Ratcliffe, the new minority owner, would take over day-to-day control of the club’s soccer operation. The deal was ratified on Tuesday night.On Wednesday, as Mr. Ratcliffe outlined his vision, newspapers and websites grabbed eagerly at the headline-ready quotes about new players, old rivals and stadium plans. But a closer listen to his words suggested that the grueling sales process might have been the easy part. Reviving United — a trophy-winning machine a decade ago, in recent seasons reduced to something closer to a punchline — is likely to be a yearslong process, he warned.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Sheffield Gave Soccer to the World. Now It Wants Credit.

    As far as the man in the food truck is concerned, the patch of land he occupies in Sheffield, England, is about as humdrum as they come. To him, the spot — in the drab parking lot of a sprawling home improvement superstore, its facade plastered in lurid orange — is not exactly a place where history comes alive.John Wilson, an academic at the University of Sheffield’s management school, looks at the same site and can barely contain his excitement. This, he said, is one of the places where the world’s most popular sport was born. He does not see a parking lot. He can see the history: the verdant grass, the sweating players, the cheering crowds.His passion is sincere, absolute and shared by a small band of amateur historians and volunteer detectives devoted to restoring Sheffield — best known for steel, coal and as the setting for the film “The Full Monty” — to its rightful place as the undisputed birthplace of codified, organized, recognizable soccer. More

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    UEFA’s Ceferin Says He Won’t Seek Another Term as President

    Aleksander Ceferin prevailed in an effort that would have allowed him another four-year stint as president. Then he announced he wouldn’t seek one.European soccer leaders on Thursday fell squarely in line behind their powerful president, Aleksander Ceferin, by approving a change to term-limit rules that would have allowed him to retain his post through 2031, years beyond the organization’s 12-year term limit.The vote, though, may have been meaningless: About an hour after winning the right to pursue a new four-year term as president of European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, Mr. Ceferin said he would not seek one.“I’ve decided I am not planning to run in 2027,” a stony-faced Mr. Ceferin said as he read from prepared notes. He said he had made the decision six months ago, after growing tired of dealing with issues such as the effort to suppress a breakaway super league and managing European soccer through the pandemic and wars in Ukraine and Gaza.He said he had not revealed his decision earlier because he wanted to first understand the loyalty of UEFA’s members. In recent months, several members of the governing body’s leadership had objected, publicly and privately, to any weakening of term limits.That had raised the prospect that Thursday’s vote might offer a rebellion. Instead, it brought near-total capitulation: Only one of UEFA’s 55 member federations, England, voted no on the term-limits change.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Joel Embiid Wants the African Diaspora to Flourish Onscreen

    “I’ve always been passionate about storytelling,” said the N.B.A. star, whose production studio will create a documentary about Memphis Depay’s success on the Dutch soccer team.Joel Embiid knew as early as his rookie season in the National Basketball Association that he eventually wanted to enter the media industry.Seven years later, he is now at the pinnacle of the sport — the league’s reigning most valuable player, Embiid set a Philadelphia 76ers record last week by scoring 70 points in a game — and is ready to take on that new challenge.Embiid, 29, who moved from Cameroon to the United States as a teenager, has created a production studio, Miniature Géant, that he hopes will amplify the culture of his home continent. The studio intends to profile athletes and entertainment figures of African descent, with an initial goal of selling content to streaming services.“We’re dabbling in a lot of different spaces, but the common denominator is Africa and the joys and the quest of African people and the African diaspora,” said Sarah Kazadi-Ndoye, who is the studio’s lead creative executive and was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo.Miniature Géant’s first documentary will explore themes of race and identity as it follows Memphis Depay, a Dutch soccer player who was born to a white mother from the Netherlands and a Ghanaian father. The studio is also having exploratory conversations with the Cameroonian mixed martial arts fighter Francis Ngannou, a former Ultimate Fighting Championship heavyweight champion. In addition to coverage of athletes, the studio hopes to also explore the entertainment world.Embiid is one of several athletes to enter the world of content creation. The basketball player Giannis Antetokounmpo recently announced the start of a production company with the ESPN analyst Jay Williams. The retired National Football League quarterbacks Tom Brady and Peyton Manning created similar organizations and have released projects with ESPN and Netflix.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    Jürgen Klopp Dragged Liverpool Into the Future. Now He’ll Let It Go.

    A trophy-winning manager’s announcement that he will step down at the end of the season is a chance to take the measure of success.For Jürgen Klopp, the montages will be long and they will be emotional. There will, naturally, be artful drone shots of Liverpool’s skyline. There will be slow-motion footage of red-and-white scarves, twirling and writhing. There will, absolutely, be a stirring, possibly classical score.But most of all, in the wake of Klopp’s announcement on Friday that he will step down as Liverpool manager, there will be images of all the memories he made: the bus parades and the trophy lifts, the fist pumps and the bear hugs, the rich and wide iconography of glory.The chances are that when they come — and they will come, in great number, as Klopp’s last game at the club rolls around toward the end of May — they will not linger too long on the immediate aftermath of a 2-2 draw with West Bromwich Albion in 2015, a game that lifted Liverpool to the dizzying heights of ninth place in the Premier League.And yet, more than eight years later, that night has the feel both of a signpost of what was to come and an encapsulation of how it would be achieved. Klopp had been in charge of Liverpool for only a couple of months back then. In the piercing clarity of hindsight, though, that match looks an awful lot like the moment Liverpool became his club.Klopp with the player Jordon Ibe, Divock Origi and Roberto Firmino “celebrating” a draw with West Bromwich Albion at Anfield in 2015.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTo recap: A patchwork Liverpool team had required a late goal from Divock Origi — another leitmotif, there — to rescue a point at home to a West Brom squad battling relegation. At the end of the game, Klopp insisted his players link hands and walk over to the Kop, the soaring grandstand that is home to Liverpool’s most ardent fans, and thank them for their efforts.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More