Raphael Stevens

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    Sacramento Republic in U.S. Open Cup Final Against Orlando City

    Deep runs in the competition are rare for clubs from outside Major League Soccer. But Sacramento already knocked off three M.L.S. teams, and Orlando City looms on Wednesday.Professional soccer teams from cities like Omaha, Richmond or Detroit get only one chance a year to take their shots at opponents from America’s top league, Major League Soccer. That comes in the U.S. Open Cup, a competition for clubs at all levels that dates to 1913.M.L.S. teams have dominated the Cup since they first entered the competition after their league’s formation in 1996. Only the Rochester Rhinos, in 1998, have lifted the trophy as a lower-league team since then, and in the two decades since only one team from outside M.L.S., the Charleston Battery in 2008, had made the final.This year, Sacramento Republic, a team in the second-tier United Soccer League, has knocked off three straight M.L.S. teams in the Open Cup to advance to the final in Orlando, where it will have a chance to match Rochester by beating Orlando City on Wednesday night.“There is a gap, there’s no getting away from that,” said Coach Mark Briggs of Sacramento. “Over the course of a 35-game season, that gap would be shown pretty well. But that gap could shrink on a one-off occasion.”Coach Mark Briggs has led Sacramento to three wins over M.L.S. teams in the Cup run.Josh Pierce / Republic FCWe In the case of Sacramento, one-off wasn’t enough.After three early-round wins, Sacramento found itself in the round of 16 in May, hosting the San Jose Earthquakes, an M.L.S. team with a larger squad, more expensive players and far more resources. Republic beat San Jose, 2-0, then topped the Los Angeles Galaxy away from home as well, 2-1, in June. The Republic edged Sporting Kansas City on penalty kicks in July in the semifinals.The run has offered the team’s players, used to competing in the second-tier U.S.L., chance after chance to show how they measure up against a league that is, in most other respects, walled off to them. Those are chances they have missed for two years after the 2020 and 2021 Cups were canceled by the pandemic.“It’s a good opportunity to showcase your skills against some higher-level talent, some bigger teams,” said Conor Donovan, a Sacramento central defender. “It’s an opportunity that a lot of U.S.L. players and lower-division teams relish.”Maalique Foster, a Sacramento wing, said the divide that separates the leagues can serve as a powerful motivator. “You have to give it your all to show you deserve to be there,” he said. “I always have to be better than the guys who think they are better than me, or think that I don’t deserve to be there.”Sacramento’s home semifinal in July against Sporting Kansas City went 120 minutes without a goal before it was decided in a penalty-kick shootout.With both teams perfect, Foster stepped up for the fourth penalty for Sacramento. Rather than blasting the ball left or right, he delicately chipped the ball in the center, a shot known as a panenka, as Kansas City goalkeeper John Pulskamp helplessly dived to his right.Foster said that he had decided to try the panenka after Sporting’s William Agada had an earlier penalty saved, but then was awarded a retake that he made and celebrated.“That was the one penalty I couldn’t watch,” said Briggs, the Sacramento coach. “I had a feeling that he would try to do something clever. Fair play to him for making it. I trusted Maalique to score. I just didn’t know what he was going to do with it.”Foster celebrated with a back flip — a direct response, he said, to the flip that Agada had executed to a torrent of Sacramento boos after making his retaken penalty.With both teams perfect through four kicks, the longtime Sporting player Graham Zusi had his attempt saved by Danny Vitiello. Rodrigo López then scored to send Sacramento to the final.The victories over three M.L.S. teams have been especially sweet for Sacramento officials and fans after the city was initially offered a spot in M.L.S. in 2019, only for the deal to fall apart. Todd Dunivant, the team’s president and general manager, said the team was “still keeping the door open” for a berth in M.L.S. someday.For now, though, sandwiched between games against Louisville City and Loudon United, Republic will play Orlando City, who are currently on track for the M.L.S. playoffs.Both of Sacramento’s home games against M.L.S. teams drew capacity crowds of 11,569 to the club’s lively but tight stadium, Heart Health Park.Republic FCShould Sacramento pull off a fourth consecutive upset, there will be glory, but not much remuneration. “There’s not a big windfall at the end of the rainbow for us,” Dunivant said. “I think the biggest thing for us is that it reignites the fan base. We’ve had more interest from new partners, more interest from the community, and more people coming to our games.”Both of Sacramento’s home games against M.L.S. teams drew capacity crowds of 11,569 to the club’s lively but tight stadium, Heart Health Park. “The atmosphere at our home field was electric,” Donovan said. “It was probably the best atmosphere I’ve played in in my career.”Whatever happens on Wednesday night — the final in Orlando is a sellout, too — Sacramento Republic F.C. will be remembered as a rare lower-league team to make it that far. “We don’t think we’ve achieved anything yet,” Dunivant said. “There’s one massive game yet and its going to be the hardest one yet.” More

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    Our Interview With Kylian Mbappé: Audio Excerpts

    ‘I’m Going to Stay a Player’0:40Mbappé’s new contract has given him a new status and importance at P.S.G. But that also gave rise to reports that he now has the power to hire and fire coaches, or otherwise shape the direction of the club and its roster.That’s just not true, he told us. More

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    Real Madrid a Great Test for Celtic’s Champions League Model

    Under its well-traveled Australian coach, the Scottish champion has become a gateway to Europe for Japanese players, and a model for clubs trying to punch above their financial weight.Ange Postecoglou did not have much time. The Australian coach was not Celtic’s first choice as manager: The Glasgow club had, instead, spent weeks last summer trying to persuade the Englishman Eddie Howe to take the post. By the time Postecoglou was hired in June 2021 — and served out his mandatory quarantine upon arrival in Scotland — he had little more than a month before his first competitive game.Time was not the only thing he was lacking. The situation at Celtic Park, as the 57-year-old Postecoglou would later admit, was faintly “chaotic.” Celtic’s team, recently beaten to the Scottish title by Rangers for the first time in a decade, was in dire need of an overhaul, a squad so lacking in both quality and quantity that Postecoglou was reduced to drafting in youth players to pad out his early training sessions.There was also nobody to tell him when reinforcements might be coming. Celtic had appointed a new chief executive only a couple of months earlier, but it was still searching for someone to serve as technical director. Postecoglou, who had never worked in Europe before, was on his own.His response to that challenge did more than simply restore Celtic to the pinnacle of Scottish soccer, wrenching the title back from the other side of Glasgow at the first opportunity and immediately transforming Postecoglou — whose arrival had been greeted with a skepticism that bordered on suspicion — into a wildly popular figure.It also did more than merely return the team, for the first time since the fall of 2017, to the group stages of the Champions League. The club begins its campaign on Tuesday evening by welcoming Real Madrid, the reigning European champion, to the place its fans call Paradise.Instead, Postecoglou’s approach laid down what amounts to a blueprint, showing how Celtic can ensure it does not have to endure such a prolonged absence from the continent’s elite again. And it might help the dozens of clubs caught in the same quandary — the brightest lights in the lesser leagues, the big fish in the small ponds — thrive in European soccer’s hopelessly skewed financial ecosystem.Celtic Manager Ange Postecoglou. He has turned his knowledge of Asian players into an advantage in Scotland. Russell Cheyne/ReutersPostecoglou, as he sought to revive Celtic, identified two key “points of difference.” The first was his style of play, a percussive, expansive approach best encapsulated by the slogan that became something of a mantra for the club last season: “We never stop.” It is easy, Postecoglou said this month, for a manager to claim they intend to play attacking soccer. He prides himself on delivering it.The second point, though, was arguably more immediately significant. One brief sojourn in Greece apart, Postecoglou had spent his entire career in Australia and Asia; Celtic hired him on the back of three successful years at Yokohama F. Marinos, Manchester City’s cousin club in Japan. There, Postecoglou thought, was an edge. “I could tap into some transfer markets that were a little bit unknown,” he said.Celtic already had a longstanding connection with Japan — the playmaker Shunsuke Nakamura spent four years at the club in the first decade of the century. But, in the absence of a settled structure at the club, Postecoglou leaned in to it, making Kyogo Furuhashi, a bright, prolific forward who had risen to prominence with Vissel Kobe, the first high-profile signing of his reign.Postecoglou was aware he was taking a risk. There was, as he said, plenty of doubt as to whether Furuhashi would be able to shine in Scotland.: Few fans would have known that, in the words of a scout at another Scottish club, the “standard of the J League is higher than the standard in Scotland.” Even fewer would have had a chance to see Furuhashi play.“Maybe if I hadn’t managed on that side of the world, I might have had the same skepticism,” Postecoglou said. The lack of time, though, meant he did not have much choice. He gave Furuhashi his debut before he had even trained with his new teammates. “He’d only had lunch with them once,” Postecoglou said.The risk, though, paid off so well — Furuhashi would end his first season in Scotland with 12 goals in 20 league games — that by December, Postecoglou was happy to go back. This time, he returned with three players: Reo Hatate, Yosuke Ideguchi and Daizen Maeda, a former charge from his time at Yokohama. All but Ideguchi are likely to start against Real Madrid on Tuesday.Postecoglou has been keen to stress that, though all four players are Japanese, they should not be grouped together. “They are different people; they are different players,” he said earlier this year. “They are all totally different. They all have different personalities. They have had different careers so far, and they offer something different to the club.”They are all, though, proof that Postecoglou was correct to identify his knowledge of the Japanese market as a potential advantage.Furuhashi has six goals in six games for Celtic this season. Russell Cheyne/ReutersThough there are sufficient Japanese players in Europe — primarily clustered in Germany, Belgium and Portugal — that earlier this year Hajime Moriyasu, the national team coach, could name an entire squad without a single J League player, few European teams employ permanent scouts in Japan.Indeed, until relatively recently, even those who sent representatives to scour the J League for players found it was not particularly easy. This was not just because of the cost and distance of travel, but because all of the league’s games tended to kick off at the same time, meaning a week’s trip might yield the chance to take in only one or two matches.Likewise, few European agencies have a footprint in Japan, disconnecting the country from the networks that can play a vital role in player recruitment. Those difficulties disincentivized European teams from looking too closely at the Japanese market. Celtic engaged only because of Postecoglou’s firsthand knowledge: “I’ve got that added advantage of knowing the market,” he said. “When I took over I was definitely going to use that expertise.”In doing so, he has helped to make Celtic a paradigm. Thanks to Postecoglou’s connections, Celtic has been able to retool its squad for a fraction of the cost it would have taken to acquire equivalent players from Europe, enabling the club to overcome at least a little of the financial disadvantage it experiences simply by virtue of calling a relatively small country — and by extension television market — home.It is an approach the club has started to build on. It has appointed Mark Lawwell, another alumnus of Yokohama — and the City Football Group network that runs the club — to oversee its recruitment division. Even before his official appointment, Postecoglou was bringing in players not just from England’s lower leagues, the traditional hunting ground for Scottish clubs, but from Russia and Argentina, Poland and Israel.The approach also makes the Celtic Postecoglou has built an example other clubs in its station — the champions cut adrift by the gathering of power and wealth by Europe’s major leagues — can follow. Those teams do not always have the time, or resources, that the continent’s true giants can match. By using a little knowledge, though, by finding something where scarcely anybody else has looked, they can level the playing field, just a little. More

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    Money to Burn: Lessons From the Premier League’s Transfer Window

    English teams awash in cash broke records for players and prices this summer, proving again that they operate on a plane apart from their rivals.To take just one snapshot from just one day in a whole summer of indulgence and excess, there was a point, last week, during which all of these things were happening at the same time:There were representatives of West Ham United pressing $58 million into the grateful palms of Lyon in exchange for Lucas Paqueta, a mercurial Brazilian playmaker. Their counterparts from Newcastle were offering Real Sociedad $72 million for the Swedish striker Alexander Isak.Chelsea’s self-appointed sporting director, Todd Boehly, meanwhile, had given up on his brief pursuit of the Manchester United captain, Harry Maguire, and was instead buffeting Leicester City with bids for Wesley Fofana. United, in turn, was peppering Ajax with offers for Antony, yet another Brazilian wing, working their way toward an unmoving asking price in what appeared to be increments of $10 million.This is what the Premier League does every year, of course: Every summer, and most winters, its clubs descend on Europe, the cash from infinitely spiraling television deals burning a hole in their pockets, and proceed to hose an entire continent with money. They swamp it, they flood it, they drown it with their wealth.And then, at the end of August, they go home, armed with a few more Brazilian playmakers and Swedish strikers, ready to play the games that will earn the money for them to do it all over again in a few months.The Swedish striker Alexander Isak scored in his Newcastle debut after joining from Spain’s Real Sociedad.Phil Noble/ReutersThe ritual, the great ceremonial spending of broadcasters’ money, is not just familiar — an annual tradition that has long since lost its power to shock, the figures involved now so inflated and improbable that they seem to mean almost nothing at all — but, in England at least, actively celebrated.The amount the Premier League’s clubs have spent is, without fail, heralded as a triumph by a variety of not entirely neutral onlookers: accountancy firms for whom the rude health of English soccer is a central plank of their business; the broadcasters who have, at heart, paid for it all; the league itself. The total sum is used as a proxy measure for power, a gauge for how big and strong English soccer has grown and, by extension, how weak and small everyone else must be.This summer has brought even more flexing than normal. The figures have been even more eye-watering than usual. By the time the transfer window closed on Thursday evening, the Premier League’s teams had burned their way through $2.3 billion, gross, in the space of just a couple of months.That is a record, of course, and not by a little: The previous high-water mark was almost $600 million lower. To suggest, too, that it is more than all the money spent by the rest of Europe’s so-called Big Five leagues — Italy, Spain, Germany, France — combined does not quite capture the full picture. Chelsea spent more money this summer than any English club has spent previously. Nottingham Forest signed more players than any English club has ever signed in a single window. Nine teams spent more than £100 million. English teams spent three times as much as their nearest challengers. It has been a wild and unrestrained festival of consumption.And yet, while that speaks volumes for the financial power the Premier League now wields over all of its competitors on the continent, the image it has created is not of a competition bristling with strength, but rather of one addled with desperation, filled by clubs consumed by fear, and so suffused by riches that it has, in some quarters at least, apparently divested itself of thought.There are clubs, of course, that have acquitted themselves well in the transfer market: Manchester City, say, surgically picking off Erling Haaland and Kalvin Phillips and then, at last moment, spying an opportunity to sign Manuel Akanji from Borussia Dortmund for a reduced fee and taking it. Or Crystal Palace, judiciously adding only a couple of new faces who might help its young, intriguing squad develop. Or Brighton, selling high and buying cheap and getting better in the process.But for the most part, there has been a wantonness to the spending: Chelsea, spraying money at almost anyone it could think of to sign any player who might be available, the club’s new owners apparently so confident of the rising tide of broadcast rights and merchandise deals that they are willing to write off a couple of hundred million here or there.Or Manchester United, who tried to cut a deal with Ajax for Antony but, when that didn’t work, simply paid what it had long regarded as an inflated asking price anyway, without so much as blinking. Or Fulham, signing the 34-year-old Willian on the final day of the window for, well, for some reason.Some of those signings will, of course, prove to be wise, worthwhile investments. Perhaps Antony will provide Manchester United with the balance its attack has lacked. Maybe the 20 players Forest has acquired — no, that is not a stray zero — will help it remain in the top flight. Chelsea may be improved by the presence of Raheem Sterling, Kalidou Koulibaly and the rest.The now former Ajax wing Antony, definitely not displaying his asking price to Manchester United.Maurice Van Steen/EPA, via ShutterstockThe broader impression, though, has not been of clubs smartly addressing their shortcomings, gradually tending to their needs. It has, instead, been of a reckless mercantile zeal, of acquisition for its own sake, of a gross hedonism at a time when the country which the Premier League takes as its host is in the grip of soaring energy prices and rampant inflation and wondering whether it will be able to afford to get through the winter. The Premier League’s clubs are not just inured to that, they stand as a direct contrast to it. It is almost as if they have internalized the idea that spending is, indeed, a measure of strength, a virtue in and of itself.Many of the deals, certainly, possess a transience, a fleetingness, an inherent futility. They offer an immediate reassurance, a jolt of excitement, a dose of adrenaline, but the suspicion is that, as the season plays out, the urgency to sign them — the clauses met and the demands accepted — will seem a little rash. Did Chelsea really need Marc Cucurella? Is Lucas Paqueta notably better than what was already available at West Ham? Had Manchester United not spent quite a lot of money on a winger last summer, too?On one level, it does not matter, of course. The Premier League’s coffers will be refilled over the course of the next few months. There is always enough money pouring in to cover any missteps. The league’s clubs always have the option of buying themselves out of trouble.But that is not to say there are no consequences. Each one of those signings represents a chance denied to a young player, one hoping to make the breakthrough, to find their way in the game.Kalidou Koulibaly, part of Chelsea’s most recent summer of splurges. Andrew Redington/Getty ImagesChelsea might have given time, this season, to Levi Colwill, a defender the club regards as one of its brightest prospects in years. Instead, he has been farmed out to Brighton, just so the club could bring in a senior left back to compete with Ben Chilwell. Liverpool could have used its mounting injury problems to blood the promising Stefan Bajcetic; instead, it moved to sign Arthur on loan from Juventus.That is the thing with soccer, the thing that the majority of clubs on the continent have to accept and that England’s teams do not seem to have noticed. There are always more footballers. They are, for all intents and purposes, an unlimited natural resource. Often, they are right there, under your nose, just waiting for an opportunity.England’s clubs rarely offer that. Others, though, do. Ajax will find another Antony soon enough. Lyon will unearth another Paqueta. The urgency, the desperation, to sign any of these players is misplaced; there will be another one next year, just as good. And when they emerge, the English clubs will be ready again, drenching the teams who have discovered them and nurtured them and helped them shine with a great fire hose of cash, thinking only about today, and never about tomorrow.Great Business. For Now.Carlos Soler, on his way from Valencia to P.S.G.Jose Jordan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesCarlos Soler was the last of them. With a few hours left of the transfer window, Paris St.-Germain confirmed it had reached a deal with Valencia to sign Soler, a 25-year-old midfielder who has quietly been one of the most impressive performers in La Liga in the last few years, for somewhere in the region of $20 million.It was typical of the business the French champion has done this summer, under the guidance of Luis Campos, the recruitment guru hired to overhaul a bloated, incoherent squad: uncharacteristically quiet, undeniably competent, surprisingly good value. P.S.G. should be careful. People might start thinking it is a serious club.As well as Soler, after all, Campos has used his contacts in Portugal, in particular, to sign Vitinha, from Porto, Lille’s Renato Sanches and, perhaps most adroitly, Napoli’s Fabian Ruiz. In doing so, he has revamped the P.S.G. midfield, and all for less than $100 million — excluding agent fees — no mean feat given the club’s reputation and the looming specter of counteroffers from the rather less parsimonious Premier League.Only one doubt remains. To accommodate Campos’s cavalry, P.S.G. has had to unmoor Leandro Paredes, Ander Herrera, Georginio Wijnaldum, Idrissa Gueye, Julian Draxler, Ángel Di Maria and Xavi Simons this summer, too. Some, like Wijnaldum, will not be missed. Others, like Draxler, required a change of air.The nature of P.S.G.’s business might have changed, then, but it remains to be seen if the nature of the club has. It is not hard to imagine at least one of the players acquired this summer being on the market again next year, a deal that looks like a bargain now cast by hindsight as an error. P.S.G. has never had a problem recruiting good players. Its issue, for the last decade, has always been working out what to do with them.CorrespondenceSpeaking of Haaland — as we will be doing frequently this season, I suspect — Shawn Donnelly has a question. “I still can’t get over how Manchester City picked him up for just 60 million euros,” he wrote. “Did Borussia Dortmund get robbed? Couldn’t they have got two or three times as much?”They could, Shawn, if only Haaland had not been in possession of a contract with a release clause written into it. All City had to do was match it, and Dortmund was powerless to hold out for a higher figure. The frustration should be tempered, though, by the fact that the release clause was the only reason Dortmund was able to get him at all. Haaland signed for the club in the first place only on the understanding that, sooner rather than later, it would let him go.Erling Haaland, already looking like a bargain.Andrew Yates/EPA, via ShutterstockThere is one other point to be made on that transfer, though: It is more than a little misleading for it to be presented as a deal worth only 60 million euros. It was, in reality, substantially higher: All of the money City saved thanks to his release clause was incorporated, instead, to the fees paid to Haaland’s representatives. That gets you close to $100 million, which is far closer to his real value.Hopefully, we can provide Matt Bilello with similar clarification. “Can you please explain the difference between a ‘cynical’ foul and a professional one?” he asked. “Commentators use them interchangeably, but it seems to me that a cynical foul is a dirty one, whereas a professional one is ‘necessary’ to prevent an advantage to an opponent.”In my understanding, this is basically right. Any common-or-garden foul can be a cynical one, but a professional foul is something very specific: bringing down an opponent to deprive them of an immediate chance to score. (In my head, a professional foul is tackling someone from behind as they charge through on goal.) More

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    AC Milan Sale: RedBird Capital Buys Team for $1.2 Billion

    Milan, a seven-time European champion, was acquired by RedBird Capital for $1.2 billion. The investment firm has ties to both the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox.A.C. Milan, the storied Italian soccer team, is teaming up with another storied franchise: the New York Yankees.The Italian team, which last season secured its first league title in 11 years, announced Wednesday the completion of its long expected sale to a group headed by the investment firm RedBird Capital Partners that includes the Yankees. The 1.2 billion-euro ($1.2 billion) price tag represents a major payday for Elliott, the vulture fund that secured the team in 2018 after its former Chinese owners defaulted on a $300 million debt.RedBird, led by its managing partner Gerry Cardinale, has been on a spree of acquisitions, with Milan becoming just the latest sports investments made by the firm. Last year, it paid $735 million for a stake in Fenway Sports Group, owner of baseball’s Boston Red Sox and the powerhouse English soccer team Liverpool F.C.The Yankees are not the only eye-catching name now attached to A.C. Milan. Media reports said the basketball star LeBron James, who owns a stake in F.S.G., and the rapper Drake would also own a minority stake of A.C. Milan.For the Italian team and its supporters, the sale will mark another chapter in its efforts to return to the top of European soccer after a decade of decline marked by financial crisis and poor performance. Last year, Milan, a seven-time European champion, qualified for the elite Champions League for the first time since 2014.Elliott seized the team in 2018 and set about repairing A.C. Milan’s balance sheet, which was one of the most distressed in all of sports. In 2020, the team had losses of nearly $200 million, with that figure halved a year later as the owners slashed payroll costs by moving out underperforming aging stars and replacing them with younger — and cheaper — alternatives.The changes paid dividends last year with a surprise run to the Italian championship, a success that positioned the team to be sold at what is most likely the upper end of its market value.“Our vision for Milan is clear: We will support our talented players, coaches and staff to deliver success on the pitch and allow our fans to share in the extraordinary experiences of this historic club,” said Cardinale, adding the owners would seek to leverage their sports and media assets to maintain “Milan’s place at the summit of European and world football.”Milan’s fan base has been energized by the team’s recent improvement. Last year, they qualified for the Champions League for the first time since 2014. Massimo Paolone/LaPresse, via Associated PressMilan’s sale is the latest high profile sale of a European sports team to American investors. It follows the 2.5 billion pound ($3 billion) purchase of Chelsea Football Club, the most ever paid for a team in any sport, by a group led by California-based private equity firm Clearlake.For Elliott, the sale means a tremendous amount of profit from an investment that started out as a $300 million loan to allow a little known Chinese businessman to buy the club from its longtime previous owner, the former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, in 2017. About a year later, it ended up in control of one of the world’s most well-known sports brands for an amount — despite all of Milan’s problems — that was below its market value.The club poached Ivan Gazidis, a former vice commissioner of Major League Soccer, from Arsenal in the Premier League to run the club and gradually began to move up the standings under Coach Stefano Pioli. A second-place finish in 2021 was followed by a title triumph secured by a victory on the last day of the 2021-22 season.“When Elliott acquired A.C. Milan in 2018, we inherited a club with a tremendous history but with serious financial problems and a mediocre sporting performance. Our plan was simple: to create financial stability, and to return A.C. Milan to where it belongs in European football,” Gordon Singer, Elliott’s managing partner, said in June when an agreement with RedBird was first announced.Now that the deal has been completed, RedBird will most likely need to reassure European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, that it will comply with rules barring one investor from owning a significant share in two teams playing in its competition. Milan and Liverpool will both play in this season’s Champions League but have not been drawn to play in the same opening groups. They could meet in the knockout phase. RedBird also owns the French soccer team Toulouse.Milan has made a solid start to the new season, unbeaten after four rounds of the new Italian season, relying on much of the same roster it used to win the title last year, spending just $50 million on new talent, about half the amount spent by the league’s richest team, Juventus.While Milan is savoring success again, its long-term future is unclear, with significant investment required to build a new stadium. The team currently leases the San Siro stadium it shares with city rival Inter from the local government and is planning to build a new facility that it will co-own with Inter. Progress has been halting, highlighting the difficulty team owners have in building new facilities in Italy, where most top-division soccer teams continue to play in aging public-owned arenas.Milan’s financial firepower is also lagging behind Europe’s top teams, particularly the biggest teams in England, where revenue — particularly television income — is considerably higher than in any other major soccer league. RedBird is co-owner of the Yankee Entertainment Sports Network, the most-watched regional sports network in the United States, and will look to tap that relationship to find new growth, Cardinale said.“We are very pleased to continue our partnership with them and will look to explore opportunities together to broaden our fan reach and expand commercial opportunities that are only available to franchises that operate at the highest levels of sports globally,” he said.The investment in Milan is not the Yankees’ first foray into international soccer. In 2001, the team signed a joint-venture agreement with Manchester United, which failed to yield the returns that either side expected, resulting in the deal being quietly shelved. It is currently a minority owner in Major League Soccer’s New York City F.C., which is controlled by United’s crosstown rival Manchester City.The takeover by RedBird comes just a year after the collapse of an effort by a group of 12 European clubs — including Milan — to set up a breakaway European super league. Though that endeavor embarrassingly collapsed within 48 hours, the factors that led to its creation remain as relevant today, including the untrammeled spending power of teams owned by wealthy Gulf nations. Owners of the most well-supported teams continue to demand a greater, and reliable, share of European soccer’s television revenue, irrespective of performance.With English teams pulling further and further ahead of rivals elsewhere, it is unlikely that the status quo will not be challenged again. 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    How an Afghan Soccer Player Escaped the Taliban and Began a New Life

    .interactive-content { max-width: none; width: 100% !important; } .g-topper { background-color: rgb(20, 20, 20); position: relative; width: 100%; } .g-topper .g-background { height: 100vh; position: sticky; top: 0; width: 100%; } .g-topper .g-background img, .g-topper .g-background video { height: 100%; -o-object-fit: cover; object-fit: cover; opacity: 0; position: absolute; top: 0; transform: translate3d(0, 0px, 0px); width: […] More

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    What the Champions League Is Lacking

    Europe’s richest competition offers the best of what soccer can deliver. But the World Cup still has something it can’t match.PARIS — There will be stories, of course. There are always stories. The Champions League delivers them so frequently and so reliably that it is impossible to dismiss the nagging suspicion that all of this might just be scripted, the product of some complex simulation being run from a secret lair in Nyon.Robert Lewandowski, clad in the blue and red of Barcelona, will return to Bayern Munich, only a few weeks after forcing his exit. Manchester City’s visit to Borussia Dortmund will see Erling Haaland standing once more before its Yellow Wall, that great force of nature no longer at his back but marshaled in his face.And there will be scenes, too. Real Madrid, the reigning and apparently perennial European champion, will walk out at Celtic Park and wince at the roar of a place that impressed Lionel Messi so much that he keeps a Celtic jersey at home as a memento, an atmosphere described by Xavi Hernández as “incomparable,” an arena where the host’s winning so much as a corner generated a noise that made Antonio Conte think “the stadium was falling down.”That is what the Champions League does best, after all. Like its great contemporary, the Premier League, the competition is as much an iconographical phenomenon as a sporting one. Even in those years — not so long ago, even now — when its product was more noted for its caution, its risk aversion, its brutalist cynicism, its appeal endured because of the way it was packaged.The searing lights, the swelling music and the packed stands across Europe all serve as immediately comprehensible prompts to observers and participants alike. They denote that what is unfolding is the pinnacle of the sport, the only thing that matters, the indisputable main event.Real Madrid, last year’s champion, and Manchester City are back where both feel they belong.Juanjo Martin/EPA, via ShutterstockAnd yet, for the first time in three decades, that may not be true this year. This season’s Champions League will be a staccato one. The first two months of the tournament will bring a great rush of fixtures, six rounds of games played in nine breathless weeks, the only breather coming in the form of an unwelcome and, on some level, somewhat greedy international break.Then the competition that has spent 30 years establishing itself as the unquestioned and unrivaled summit of the game — the place where the sport’s cutting edge is sharpened, where new ideas bubble and sizzle, where players put their talent to the ultimate test — will be suspended in uneasy hibernation, put begrudgingly on hold from November until February.Reluctantly, the Champions League — and the constellation of Europe’s great clubs who have come to regard it as their objective and birthright — will cede the limelight to the World Cup: five prime weeks in the middle of the season handed over to international soccer, that anachronism of a bygone age, glossy club soccer’s unwelcome, ugly cousin.There is no shortage of reasons for club soccer to resent this intrusion: the financial ramifications of losing those weeks of television real estate; the potential risk of injury to players paid not by their national associations but by the clubs; the sense that the engine of the sport is being forced to stall so that the hood can be polished.Read More on the 2022 World CupA New Start Date: A last-minute request for the tournament to begin a day earlier was only the latest bit of uncertainty to surround soccer’s showcase event.Chile’s Failed Bid: The country’s soccer federation had argued Ecuador should be ejected from the tournament to the benefit of the Chilean team. FIFA disagreed.Golden Sunset: This year’s World Cup will most likely be the last for stars like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo — a profound watershed for soccer.Senegalese Pride: Aliou Cissé, one of the best soccer coaches in Africa, has given Senegal a new sense of patriotism. Next up: the World Cup.But greater than all those, perhaps, is the unhappy reminder that, while the Champions League is the most glamorous and most exclusive club competition on the planet, it is only the most glamorous and most exclusive club competition on the planet. The qualifier — “club” — tells a story of its own. For all the money, for all the power, for all the stories and the scenes, the World Cup is still the biggest show in town.It is worth pausing to reflect on why that might be; after all, it does not fit neatly with what we assume modern consumers — sorry, fans — want from sports. As discussed in this space a couple of weeks ago, audiences are drawn to soccer games by two factors in particular: the familiarity of the brands — sorry, teams — involved, and the stakes for which they are playing.The World Cup, like the Champions League, delivers both in spades. There is no brand recognition quite like being a nation state, with your own seat at the United Nations and history of governmental corruption and fully equipped army, obviously. And there is no tournament quite so doused in risk as the World Cup, in which one misstep can waste four years’ work.In every other aspect, though, the World Cup comes up short. It cannot match the Champions League for prize money, or for star power — Haaland, like Mohamed Salah and the noted nation state of Italy, will be absent from Qatar — or, most crucial, for quality. The Champions League, now, is where the finest soccer in the world is played. The World Cup, by contrast, is pockmarked by flaws.That is unavoidable, of course. If Manchester City lacks a striker, it can go out and buy the best one it can find. Spain, as it has helpfully proved over the last several years, does not have that luxury. Like everyone else, it has to make do and mend. Its coach does not have the opportunity of endless training sessions to hone a system that might accentuate the team’s strengths and disguise its weaknesses; a few days is all that is available.And yet, still, the World Cup possesses the quality of a Black Hole; it draws in the light from even the brightest stars around it. The first phase of the Champions League, like the early rounds of domestic soccer, will have the feel of an appetizer, for fans and players. Games will be played with an awareness that nobody wants to miss the main course.Qatar, where World Cup grass and World Cup anticipation are growing.Mustafa Abumunes/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat, perhaps, suggests the World Cup has something that the Champions League does not. That could be rarity: the fact that even the finest players might get only three shots at going to a World Cup when they can reasonably expect a dozen or so tilts at the Champions League trophy. It could be the jeopardy that is, for now, threaded into its structure. It could be good, old-fashioned patriotic fervor.Or it might be mystery. It may be the flaws themselves that make the World Cup so appealing. It could be that the tournament’s appeal is linked to the fact that Spain could turn up and win it or be eliminated in the group stage; that France, despite the quantity of its quality, could be eliminated on penalties by Switzerland; that South Korea can beat Germany and still not qualify for the knockout rounds.The Champions League has, over the years, lost all of that uncertainty. Every year, it feels more like a parade of the inevitable. There will be stories and there will be scenes this season, as there are every season, but they will be rooted in the same inequality that means it is already possible to be pretty certain of the identity of at least a dozen or so of the teams that will make the round of 16.The same cannot be said of the World Cup. None of the teams are perfect — none of them can be — and so the playing field is more level. The teams that do benefit from a disparity of resources do not have the safety net of five more group games, or a second leg, or the prospect of the transfer market.It is the flaws of the teams in the World Cup that make its appeal unrivaled. It is the uncertainty that they bring that make it the main event. It is the unpredictability that generates what the Champions League lacks, and what it might like to consider trying to capture once more.The Death of the Group of DeathThe Champions League groups for 2022-23.Emrah Gurel/Associated PressThere are, now, two types of Champions League groups. One features two heavy favorites, two teams whose seasons will be defined by how deep they can advance into the competition — Paris St.-Germain and Juventus, for example — and two comparative makeweights, in the form of Benfica, say, and Maccabi Haifa.These groups are something of a tease. The way UEFA draws the groups means that the eye is drawn to those first two names. P.S.G. and Juventus, you think: a clash of the titans. There will be genuine jeopardy here. This sensation lasts as long as it takes the observer to remember that two teams qualify from each pool, and so the games between the two resident superpowers may, in fact, mean nothing at all.The second sort of group is more interesting. Thanks to the quirks of the seeding system, these feature just one putative contender — Liverpool, despite its early-season form, or Chelsea, say — and three relatively evenly matched opponents: Ajax, Napoli and Rangers, or A.C. Milan, Red Bull Salzburg and (at a push) Dinamo Zagreb.Welcome to the big stage (for now), Viktoria Plzen.Martin Divisek/EPA, via ShutterstockIn this scenario, too, the superpower invariably makes it through — that is the nature of the modern Champions League, in which we all spend an awful lot of time making sure that the thing that always happens will, in fact, happen again — but it is generally with a lower points total and a degree of gratitude that their rivals all managed to beat each other.The sole exception to this rule of two groups comes on those occasions when there is a third kind: when one team in a group is notably weaker than all three of its opponents. That dubious honor, this year, falls to Viktoria Plzen, the Czech champion, drawn to face Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Inter Milan.There are eight groups in this year’s Champions League. This is the only one that does not fit the pattern. This is the only one that is not wholly predictable, that might just about be described as a Group of Death, and even that is only because it is impossible to be entirely sure how secure in itself this new vision of Barcelona might be. In ordinary years, even a club as famous as Inter would find itself succumbing to the inevitable, and European soccer would be facing up to the prospect of a fall without any jeopardy at all.CorrespondenceThanks to Jon Gilbert, first of all, for performing that most valuable of services: holding me to account for my attempt last week to hold Gary Neville to account.“Neville was railing against Glazer parsimony,” Jon wrote. “But that was nothing to do with buying players. Neville was apoplectic at the complete lack of investment in club infrastructure. He was hugely upset about the state of Old Trafford, now a leaky rust bucket. The club lacks a leading training facility, the lack of a sporting director has stifled progress and a soccer-competent leadership team is desperately needed.”The last couple of points were, I think, raised by last week’s newsletter, but I’ll concede the former: Neville was speaking more broadly than simply complaining that United should lavish more money in the transfer market. The decline of Old Trafford, in fact, is a pretty handy metaphor for the club as a whole: It still draws the crowds and rakes in the cash, but it is trading on memory.Manchester United beat Liverpool on Monday, righting its ship for a day.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA question, too, from Phil Friedman, soliciting an expansion to the suggestion that some revised version of the European Super League makes more sense for other teams from the continent than it does for the denizens of the Premier League. “Not sure I understand this thought,” Phil noted, which indicates a failure on my part to communicate with sufficient clarity.My logic — which may, caveat emptor, be faulty — is that the Premier League’s supremacy is now ensconced; its broadcasting income will continue to spiral, and so its teams essentially have no need to seek a more glamorous competition elsewhere. Indeed, you could argue that the Premier League will become a sort of de facto Super League anyway, with every other domestic competition in Europe feeding into it.For the elites of Germany, Spain, Italy and France (and potentially others) the only conceivable challenge to that hegemony is to join forces. A league not just boasting Bayern Munich, Barcelona, Paris St.-Germain and Juventus but also drawing on the combined populations of the countries they call home would, I suspect, be able to generate revenues that can match those on offer in England, allowing those clubs to gain access to the fortunes they so evidently believe they deserve.That is certainly not to say its advent would be welcome, of course. Regional leagues are an idea I can get behind; losing the variety offered by each domestic tournament would be a shame. It is just that, from my vantage point, it has a certain inevitability about it, even allowing for the fatal flaw in any proposed Super League: the fact that someone would have to finish bottom. More

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    Champions League Holds Its Draw

    Manchester City will face Borussia Dortmund, from whom it bought the star striker Erling Haaland.Real Madrid, the defending champion and winner of five of the last 10 Champions Leagues, will face RB Leipzig, Shakhtar Donetsk and Celtic in this year’s competition after the draw was held in Istanbul on Thursday evening.With the top two from each of the eight groups advancing to the round-of-16 knockout stage, most of the biggest teams in Europe seemed to be in strong position to advance. (The third-place teams drop into the second-tier Europa League; fourth-place teams are eliminated.)Big-spending Paris St.-Germain, with Neymar, Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappé, will continue its quest for a first Champions League title against Juventus, Benfica and Maccabi Haifa. While most of the field is made up of familiar names who return to the competition year after year, Maccabi Haifa of Israel is returning to the group stage for the first time since 2009-10.Manchester City, another big-spending team that is a favorite despite its lack of previous titles, will face Borussia Dortmund, from whom they bought the star striker Erling Haaland in June, along with Sevilla and F.C. Copenhagen.Barcelona is still spending plenty of cash despite its financial woes. One of the stars it signed over the summer was Robert Lewandowski, a striker for the perennial German champion Bayern Munich. Those teams will meet in the Champions League, in a group with Inter Milan and Viktoria Plzen.As for the three remaining English teams, they all look to have good chances to advance. Liverpool, last season’s runner-up, will face Ajax, Napoli and Rangers. The two big Glasgow teams, Celtic and Rangers, are in the group stage together for the first time since 2007.Chelsea will take on AC Milan, with Zlatan Ibrahimovic still seeking a first Champions League title in the twilight of his career, plus Red Bull Salzburg and Dinamo Zagreb.And Spurs will face Eintracht Frankfurt, Sporting Lisbon and Marseille.The final group, which many pundits saw as the weakest one, consists of Porto, Atlético Madrid, Bayer Leverkusen and Club Brugge.One wrinkle for Shakhtar Donetsk of Ukraine is that it is scheduled to play its home games in Poland because of the ongoing war. (Russian teams have been banned from European competition entirely.)The group stage will run on a compressed schedule from Sept. 6 to Nov. 2, covering nine weeks rather than the usual 13 or so because of the World Cup in Qatar in late November.The Champions League Final will be played on June 10 in Istanbul, which was to have hosted the 2020 and then the 2021 final, but lost both because of the coronavirus. More