Raphael Stevens

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    P.S.G. President’s Roles Raise Conflict-of-Interest Concerns

    When the Paris St.-Germain president avoided punishment in a UEFA investigation, some worried that his power and his friendships were producing special treatment.It had been an electric night of Champions League soccer at Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu stadium, with Real Madrid coming from behind to eliminate Paris St.-Germain. The game in March had been billed as a showdown of soccer’s new money against European aristocracy, and Real Madrid, representing the old guard, had triumphed. But only just.Now that it was over, though, the Paris St.-Germain president, Nasser al-Khelaifi, was furious. And almost as soon as the referee blew his whistle, al-Khelaifi was moving.He and the P.S.G. sporting director, Leonardo, headed straight for the changing rooms used by the referee Danny Makkelie and the match officials. It is not uncommon for members of the losing side to express their frustration over a defeat, or to seek answers. But Makkelie, a highly experienced official from the Netherlands, felt what happened in the tunnel area in Madrid went beyond all acceptable bounds.After the match, Makkelie wrote in a report reviewed by The New York Times, al-Khelaifi and Leonardo “showed aggressive behavior and tried to enter the dressing room of the referee.” Even after Makkelie asked them to leave, he wrote, al-Khelaifi and Leonardo “blocked the door.” The president, he wrote, then “deliberately hit the flag of one of the assistants, breaking it.”The events created a crisis for European soccer’s governing body, UEFA. Al-Khelaifi is one of the most powerful men in the European game, an executive whose multiple roles — including a place on UEFA’s top board and a post as chairman of a media company that funnels hundreds of millions of dollars into European soccer through broadcast deals — have long aroused conflict-of-interest concerns.What happened next has only increased those worries among administrators and rivals. Within 24 hours of the incident, UEFA announced that it had opened a disciplinary investigation. And then it went silent.Weeks passed. Then months. Other incidents that had taken place at UEFA matches held after the game between Real Madrid and P.S.G. were investigated and adjudicated. But UEFA’s investigation into al-Khelaifi — who in addition to his role at P.S.G., one of Europe’s richest clubs, is also the chairman of beIN Media Group, the Qatar-based company that is one of UEFA’s biggest partners — dragged on.Only in June, after the European soccer season had finished, after much of the attention on the incident had faded, did UEFA quietly publish a short paragraph. It appeared on Page 5 of a six-page document listing outcomes of recent disciplinary cases: UEFA said it would ban Leonardo — who had since left P.S.G. — for one game for violating “the basic rules of decent conduct.”Curiously, there was no mention of al-Khelaifi, who according to the referee’s report had engaged in behavior that was worse. UEFA declined to provide details of its investigation, or why al-Khelaifi had avoided punishment. It said the delay could be explained, too: It had simply prioritized investigations involving teams still competing in its competitions. P.S.G. declined to comment.The referee Danny Makkelie with Lionel Messi of P.S.G. during a Champions League game in March. Makkelie accused top P.S.G. officials of aggressive behavior after the match.Javier Soriano/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesVeterans of disciplinary matters inside the organization, though, were not surprised in the outcome. Alex Phillips, a UEFA executive for almost two decades, most recently served as its head of governance and compliance until leaving the organization in 2019. He told The Times that the timing of the resolution alone felt intentional. “They would have waited to find a quiet time to bury it and hope people would have forgotten and it would blow over,” Phillips said.He suggested that UEFA’s disciplinary mechanism has been undermined in recent years. “The so-called independent judicial bodies are in reality far from independent, instead now being used as a power tool to ensure specific outcomes,” Phillips said. “We would tell the public that they are independent decisions when they really are not.”The al-Khelaifi case comes at a particularly sensitive time for UEFA. The European Court of Justice will rule next year after a group of clubs questioned UEFA’s role as a regulator and competition organizer. If it loses, its hegemony over how European soccer’s multibillion-dollar business can be organized, and by whom, may come under severe threat.The case of the tunnel fracas in Madrid is also not the first time P.S.G. has achieved a favorable outcome after being investigated by UEFA. In 2018, the club faced the possibility of being excluded from at least a season of Champions League soccer after being found to have breached UEFA’s financial control regulations. But P.S.G. was spared a humiliating — and expensive — punishment after UEFA’s administration sided with the team against its own investigators.Relations between al-Khelaifi and UEFA have only strengthened since then.He emerged as UEFA’s chief partner in early 2021, when the organization successfully fought off a bid by a group of European soccer’s biggest teams to create a breakaway Super League.But had the Super League succeeded, it would have at a stroke sabotaged the Champions League — UEFA’s chief financial engine and widely considered to be the top club event in global sports.Instead of signing up, though, al-Khelaifi said P.S.G. sided with UEFA, lobbying publicly and privately to help crush the revolt. That effort has been rewarded: Al-Khelaifi was soon elevated to chairman of the influential European Club Association, an umbrella group for more than 200 top clubs that is UEFA’s joint venture partner for selling rights to the Champions League and two other club competitions — and of which beIN Sports is one of the biggest customers.“There’s a clear conflict of interest,” said Miguel Maduro, the former head of governance at global soccer’s governing body, FIFA. “That he’s president of P.S.G. might not be a conflict, because clubs must be represented at UEFA. But the fact UEFA has serious economic interests with him and vice versa gives him undue influence. No one that has economic interests in terms of dealing with UEFA should be on its board.”Phillips, the former UEFA executive, said he had once tried to prevent al-Khelaifi’s elevation to UEFA’s executive committee but found little support among his colleagues.“You’ve got a conflict-of-interest article in the statutes,” Phillips said he told staff members. “You put it in, why don’t you apply it?”UEFA’s president, Aleksander Ceferin, has long brushed aside such concerns, and he even insisted that al-Khelaifi, a Qatari who is a close confidante and occasional tennis partner of the Gulf country’s ruler, remain on its board as he fought a corruption case in Switzerland. (Al-Khelaifi was cleared in the case earlier this year.) This week, as European soccer’s top power brokers meet in Istanbul around the draw for this season’s Champions League, Ceferin and al-Khelaifi, in his role as E.C.A. head, are likely to hold bilateral talks on the future of the game.That influence has not gone unnoticed by rivals already wary of P.S.G.’s deep pockets. Another executive with a team in the Champions League this season, Joan Laporta of Barcelona, lamented in an interview with The New York Times earlier this summer that state-backed clubs like P.S.G. can offer double the amount teams like his can for players in the billion-dollar transfer market.Maduro, meanwhile, said that UEFA’s actions have “created suspicions” that P.S.G. operates under a different set of rules. He described the outcome of the 2018 financial fair play case as “incredible.”“You have the political leadership of UEFA siding with a club against its own independent body, undermining the enforcement of the rules,” he said. Most of the members of the commissions that investigated and ruled on P.S.G. in its financial compliance case have either quit or been replaced.Aleksander Ceferin, the UEFA president, has brushed aside concerns about al-Khelaifi’s multiple roles.Kai Pfaffenbach/ReutersUEFA has since appointed Sunil Gulati, the former U.S. Soccer president, to lead its financial investigatory body. Gulati and Ceferin developed a friendship when both served on FIFA’s leadership council. It is Gulati who will be the one tasked with implementing the new financial control regulations that UEFA announced earlier this year. But those rules are more flexible than the previous regulations, and they have been renamed to highlight how UEFA is no longer reliant on them to promote a level playing field in its competitions. What had been known as the Financial Fair Play system now will be known as “financial stability” regulations.“Competitiveness cannot be addressed simply by financial regulations,” Andrea Traverso, the UEFA official responsible for establishing the rules, told reporters in April.The rules seem to have arrived at an opportune time for P.S.G., which has carried on spending lavishly even as the rest of the soccer industry was being buffeted by the financial impact of the pandemic. In this summer’s transfer window alone, the club has committed about 200 million euros on players, including a record new contract to retain the star striker Kylian Mbappé.At the same time, news media reports this week said the team was among two dozen that are likely to be fined, or agree to financial settlements with UEFA, for overspending under the new financial rules. Such a punishment is unlikely to hurt a team with the resources of P.S.G. or Manchester City, another club bankrolled by Gulf billions that has repeatedly challenged — and avoided — major sanctions from UEFA.“It seems that there could be some privilege for the clubs,” Laporta said this summer. “The state clubs that are close to UEFA.” More

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    Soccer’s Return to Ukraine Is Marred by Broken Contracts and Bad Faith

    European soccer offered support to Ukrainian teams when Russia invaded the country. Now, as rivals bargain shop in wartime, one top club says the sense of solidarity is gone.Like his fellow chief executives at soccer clubs across Europe, Sergei Palkin of the Ukrainian team Shakhtar Donetsk spent weeks this summer negotiating player trades.He and Fulham, a team newly promoted to England’s Premier League, settled on a fee of about $8 million for Manor Solomon, Shakhtar’s Israeli attacker. Then Palkin agreed to accept a payment around double that amount from Lyon, in France’s Ligue 1, for another of Shakhtar’s foreign-born stars, the 22-year-old Brazilian midfielder Tetê.The deals were a financial lifeline for Shakhtar: They would deliver a vital cash infusion to club accounts battered by war with Russia in exchange for valuable talents who, in some cases, no longer wanted to play in Ukraine.But just when the contracts for the deals, and others, were about to be signed, world soccer’s governing body, FIFA, announced that it had extended a regulation allowing foreign players under contract with Ukrainian clubs to temporarily go elsewhere without penalty. The rule — created in March as an interim measure when Ukraine’s season was suspended — would now remain in place for the entire 2022-23 season, FIFA said.And with that, both Lyon and Fulham informed Palkin that they were scrapping the multimillion-dollar deals the sides had discussed. Instead, they would take the players for nothing.“They just talk about the football family,” Palkin said. “But in real life there is no football family.”The Shakhtar chief executive Sergei Palkin.Bradley Secker for The New York TimesA Lyon spokesman said the club disputed Palkin’s recounting of events, but declined to provide details. Fulham declined to comment.Both teams abided by the rules, but the incidents — and others — have left Palkin frustrated and angry. In July, Shakhtar announced plans to sue FIFA for $50 million — the value, it says, of deals that vaporized when the rule allowing players to break their Ukrainian contracts was extended.The situation is a far cry from the widespread messages of solidarity with Ukraine from soccer’s leaders and rival teams in the days and weeks after Russia’s invasion began in February. Instead, Palkin says he has been left with a distaste for the way some in the soccer community have treated Ukrainian clubs like Shakhtar. Shows of support and kind words have been replaced by broken promises and the poaching of players and youth prospects, all of it, in his view, driven by the oil that lubricates the industry: money.The State of the WarZaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant: After United Nations inspectors visited the Russian-controlled facility last week amid continuing shelling and fears of a looming nuclear catastrophe, the organization released a report calling for Russia and Ukraine to halt all military activity around the complex.Europe’s Energy Crisis: European leaders are pushing through economic relief packages to soften the blow of soaring costs tied to the war. In Germany, officials are trying a range of measures to alleviate the crisis, including extending the lives of two of the country’s last nuclear reactors.Russia’s Military Expansion: Though President Vladimir V. Putin ordered a sharp increase in the size of Russia’s armed forces, he seems reluctant to declare a draft. Here is why.Relying on Old Tech: Russia’s new cruise missiles and attack helicopters appear to contain low-tech components, analysts found, undercutting Moscow’s narrative of a rebuilt military that rivals its Western adversaries.Lyon, for example, recently offered to pay Shakhtar 3 million euros, or about $3.01 million, for the permanent transfer of Tetê, Palkin said — less than one-fifth of what Shakhtar believed it had agreed on as a fee for him earlier this summer. Palkin turned down the offer.“It’s ridiculous,” he said. “It’s peanuts. It’s not respectful from FIFA or the clubs.”FIFA said its position of allowing foreign players under contract with Ukrainian teams to play elsewhere temporarily is better than the alternative: players’ unilaterally breaking their contracts. But while there appears to be no sign that the war is ending, there is now also little likelihood that many of the players will ever return to their Ukrainian clubs.When Shakhtar takes the field on Tuesday for its first game on Ukrainian soil since last December — part of the long-delayed restart of the country’s top league — very little will be the same beyond the team’s familiar burnt orange colors. For the first time in two decades, a team known for stocking its roster with imported stars will be almost exclusively Ukrainian. There will be no fans at the stadium in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital and Shakhtar’s latest temporary home, for the match against Metalist 1925. And the players from both teams will have gone through drills of what to do in the event they hear the air raid siren while they are on the field.Nothing is normal, Palkin admitted, but for the sake of Ukrainian soccer, the games must be played. If the season does not start, he said, some soccer clubs in the country would probably fold.Two clubs are already gone from the 16-team league: F.C. Mariupol and Desna Chernihiv, which both announced they their withdrawals ahead of this season. Chernihiv, near the border with Belarus, has been battered by Russian forces, and Mariupol, a southern port city, is now under Russian control. The city, besieged for weeks, has been described by the United Nations as the “deadliest place in Ukraine.”Even in other cities, though, signs of war will be hard to avoid. Palkin said the threat of a Russian attack on matches cannot be discounted.“They can target anything in Ukraine,” he said of the Russian military and its allies in the war. Shakhtar will play its games in Kyiv and Lviv, the city where, at the start of the war, the club helped pay to convert the soccer stadium it had been using into a shelter for refugees.Families living inside the Arena Lviv, which will host some of Shakhtar’s matches when Ukraine’s top soccer league opens its delayed season this week.Mauricio Lima for The New York TimesShakhtar also will play in Europe’s top club competition, the Champions League, but those games will be held in Warsaw because European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, has barred Ukraine from hosting international games as a safety precaution.Shakhtar officials had proposed playing the Ukrainian league games outside the country, too. But the government overruled the idea, deciding that live games, even in empty stadiums and in the comparatively safer western part of the country, would serve as an important prong of the propaganda war.“Ukrainian sports and the will to win on all fronts cannot be stopped!” Ukraine’s sports minister, Vadym Gutzeit, wrote on his Facebook page last week. His post, heralding the return of the Ukrainian Premier League, outlined a list of protocols that must be followed at each game, including evacuation plans, fixed shelters no more than 500 meters, or about 1,640 feet, from each stadium, and a script for stadium announcers in the event that air raid sirens sound: “Attention! Air alarm! We ask everyone to follow us to the shelter!”While Gutzeit’s post highlighted the extraordinary conditions in which soccer will return to Ukraine, it also underlined why many players were not eager to return and take part.Palkin said about 10 players from Shakhtar’s under-19 team had refused to return to Ukraine, where a youth league is also being organized. “I understand them,” he said. “I can’t guarantee they will be safe.” More

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    The Women Who Finally Got Their Chance to Play Soccer

    Many players, particularly those in divisions for athletes over 60, are discovering the sport anew after growing up in a world before Title IX, the landmark gender equality legislation that opened doors to athletics for women and girls.

    Before Title IX’s passage in 1972, and in the years immediately after, girls’ sports were mostly limited to gym classes or playing on boys’ teams, if they were even allowed. More

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    Manchester United and the Mounting Cost of Failure

    The problem at United is not, and never has been, a lack of money. It is the lack of a plan.Manchester United’s problem has never been money. Not a dearth of it, anyway. Even now, in what may prove to be the twilight of the Glazer family’s 17-year ownership of the club, as prospective suitors and self-appointed saviors circle, great torrents of money continue to flow through Old Trafford.Enough, certainly, for the club to end a week that started with Gary Neville railing against the Glazers’ chronic parsimony by submitting not only a bid worth $60 million for a 30-year-old midfielder, but a contract offer sufficiently generous that the midfielder, Casemiro, reportedly indicated to his Real Madrid teammates that he could not, in good conscience, turn it down.There could have been more of it, of course. Since the Glazers’ arrival, United has in effect paid out somewhere in the region of $1.2 billion for the privilege of being owned by the family: a billion or so in interest payments, and a couple of hundred million in dividends, the majority of them paid to the Glazers themselves.All of that — the bottomless bounty generated by United’s relentless commercialism, the unstinting riches brought in by the Premier League’s broadcasting appeal — could have been invested in the squad, had circumstances been different, had the Glazers not effectively placed the club in debt bondage to itself all those years ago.But even without it, even with all of that money seeping away, Manchester United has never had to go without. The Glazers have, according to one estimate, spent around $1.7 billion in transfer fees alone since the family patriarch, Malcolm, took control at Old Trafford. The team broke the British transfer record to sign Paul Pogba. It made Harry Maguire the most expensive defender in history. It made Cristiano Ronaldo the highest-paid player in England.Cristiano Ronaldo is merely the most high-profile bad fit in Manchester United’s squad.Lindsey Parnaby/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAnd while precise figures are difficult to obtain, it pays just as well as its rivals, both domestically and in Europe. United’s salary roll is not drastically different to Manchester City’s, or Liverpool’s, or Chelsea’s: sometimes a little more, and sometimes a little less, but always among the highest in the world.No, as easy and as accurate as it is to berate the Glazers for what they have cost Manchester United, blaming the club’s demise on a lack of investment is to misunderstand what has gone wrong at Old Trafford, and to misrepresent the solution for any new owner. The problem is not, and never has been, a lack of money. It is that there has always been rather more money than sense.The last decade, since Alex Ferguson’s retirement, has brought any number of illustrative examples — trying to sign Thiago and Toni Kroos but deciding, in the end, that Marouane Fellaini served just as well; watching 804 right-backs and choosing Aaron Wan-Bissaka — but it is hardly necessary to strain the sinews of memory. There have been plenty of fresh examples this summer. There have been quite a few in the last week.The looming signing of Casemiro, say. It is a coup, without doubt, for United to bring in a player who has won five Champions League titles, and established himself as one of the finest exponents of his subtle art in the world in the process. But Casemiro is 30. He is being offered a four-year contract.He is also a very different sort of player than United’s primary target, the one the club spent much of the summer pursuing, the deep-lying Barcelona playmaker Frenkie de Jong. He is also hardly a straight swap for Adrien Rabiot, the player United identified as an alternative, once it became clear — after months of wasted time — that de Jong was not prepared to spend a season in exile from the Champions League.United never found a way forward after Alex Ferguson delivered its last title in 2013.Action Images/Action Images Via ReutersIt is possible, of course, that United reassessed its plans once it realized Casemiro might be obtainable. His arrival would, by any measure, make Erik ten Hag’s team more resilient, more obdurate, at least in the short term.But it still leaves a question hanging in the air: If ten Hag was adamant that he required a player of de Jong’s ilk to play the way he prefers, does being presented with Casemiro mean he now has to reimagine his whole approach? Is Manchester United doing what it has done for some time: acquiring players, or even coaches, and then figuring out how everything will fit together later?That, after all, is the abiding impression of the squad the club has built. It is not, despite appearances, stocked with bad players. It is, instead, littered with disparate — but high-quality — parts, a patchwork of ideas and concepts and impulses, rather than a cogent, coherent whole.Ten Hag, for example, wants to build play from the back, but finds himself with a goalkeeper, David de Gea, who might be among the finest shot-stoppers in the world but is far less comfortable with the ball at his feet. He wants to play an intense, high-pressing game, but is slowly confronting the reality that he — like both of his predecessors — will have to do so while incorporating a striker, Ronaldo, who has shown precious little inclination to buy in to such an approach.Erik ten Hag spent the summer chasing one kind of midfielder. After two losses, he wants something completely different.David Klein/ReutersThis is the failure that has held Manchester United back for the last decade. This is the failure that means the club is about to pass a decade without winning — or even, really, challenging for — a Premier League title. Neville, and the Glazers’ many other critics, are right to assert that United might have spent more if the club could only keep the money it generates. There is, sadly, precious little evidence that they would have spent it well.This, as much as anything, is the Glazers’ great failing, the shortcoming that has allowed United to drift: an absolute, and somewhat baffling, inability to staff their business adequately, to allow those charged with running it on their behalf to do so in such a haphazard, thoughtless fashion. Accountability, like money, flows up, after all.And it is this that any new owner, whoever they might be, must address. Quite what clubs want from those who buy them is indicated by the breathless way the various contenders for United are described: the billionaires and the magnates, the tycoons and the titans. That is the great dream of the modern fan, after all: to have a bigger, wealthier owner than everyone else.The experience of Manchester United and the Glazers, though, rather disproves that idea. Money has never been the problem at Old Trafford, and money, most likely, is not the solution, either. It is not how much of it you have. It is, instead, what you do with it that counts.The Super League Is HereMatheus Nunes traded a place in the Champions League for one at Wolves.Jose Sena Goulao/EPA, via ShutterstockMatheus Nunes should, logically, have stayed where he was. European soccer runs according to a strict, structural hierarchy, in which smaller domestic leagues feed into larger ones, and they, in turn, send their best and brightest — or at least their richest — to the Champions League. That is where players aspire to be. That, strictly speaking, is the aim.At 23, Nunes had made it. Last season, he was a key part of the Sporting Lisbon team that reached the Champions League knockout rounds. Sporting had qualified again; around this time next week, Nunes would have been waiting to discover whether he would have been visiting the Bernabeu, or the Camp Nou, or the Allianz Arena in this season’s competition.Instead, Nunes left. He did not leave, as the hierarchy would dictate, for a team with a better chance of winning the Champions League, or one with a realistic hope of making the semifinals, but for Wolves, last seen finishing 10th (creditably) in the Premier League. Wolves might, conceivably, reach the Europa League this season, but it is a safe bet that Nunes will never appear in the Champions League in an Old Gold jersey.He is not the only player to have inverted the hierarchy this summer. His erstwhile teammate, João Palhinha, traded Sporting for Fulham, for whom a 17th-place finish in the Premier League this season would be a success worth celebrating.Remo Freuler swapped Serie A for Nottingham Forest.Denis Balibouse/ReutersRemo Freuler, a cornerstone of the effervescent Atalanta team that has been a European fixture for the last few years, now plays for Nottingham Forest. He may yet be joined by Houssam Aouar, a quick-witted, inventive playmaker from Lyon. Forest’s relationship with Europe has long roots, but it is not likely to bloom any time soon.Moves like these are easily lost amid the thunderstorm of the transfer market. The eye, after all, is drawn much more easily to what Chelsea or Manchester United or Barcelona are doing than to whatever is happening amid the Premier League’s aspirants and also-rans.But their moves are, perhaps, the most significant transfers of the summer, not just because these clubs can afford these players, but because the players themselves, having made it to the Champions League, appear to be happy to remove themselves from it in order to scrap for survival in the Premier League.That speaks volumes for the status of European soccer, not simply in terms of its finances but in terms of its balance of power, too. The Premier League, it would appear, is just as much of a draw — if not more so — than the Champions League. Ambition always flows upward, and that suggests that the hierarchy no longer holds.CorrespondenceLet’s start this week with a clarification. “The Premier League doesn’t seem far off the Bundesliga or Ligue 1,” wrote Cristian Ardelean, referring to last week’s newsletter on European soccer’s lack of competitiveness. “Manchester City won four of the last five titles. Some were more thrilling than others, but the trend is very similar.”This, as it happens, is a position I agree with wholeheartedly, and was one I hoped was conveyed last week. Yes, the Premier League has more variety than the Bundesliga and Ligue 1, but no, it’s not by much. And yes, you can make a case that the form of oligopoly in play in England is actually more corrosive than its equivalent in Germany or France, by virtue of the fact that access to the Champions League has been cut off to all but a few, too.You’ll recognize this photo as one of a series.Toby Melville/ReutersMike Connell is on the same page as me on another matter, too. “This team dominance is why an N.F.L.-style league will be in place within five years, or at least after the 2026 World Cup,” he wrote. “Not aligned with FIFA, and owned by the clubs. Everything is in place.” My only caveat here would be that I suspect it will not, for now, include teams from the Premier League. As an idea, it makes more sense for the continental European teams than anyone is really prepared to admit.And finally, on the same subject, Tim Connor has kindly volunteered to further my baseball education (which currently extends to knowing that there is a team called the “Tampa Bay Rays.”)The subject of competitiveness, Tim wrote, made him “reflect on the days when the Yankees were unquestionably dominant in the American League, and there was an all-but-overt conspiracy to keep them so. The owners kept the Yankees on top because it was great for ticket sales when the team everyone loved to hate came to town. I’d like to think that unpredictability makes for more interest, but maybe people like to know in advance how the story is going to end.”The fact that the global explosion in popularity in the Premier League came at a time when the story always seemed to end with a late Manchester United winner in a strangely extended period of injury time would certainly support that thesis, Tim, so you may be on to something. More

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    The Manchester United Sale Rumors Are False. For Now.

    The Glazer family isn’t soliciting bids for United. But selling a piece of the team could set the price for all of it.Manchester United is not for sale. But it kind of is, in the same way that everything is for sale if the offer is high enough.The rumors started this week with a tweet, a bad joke by a billionaire that he quickly shot down himself. But almost as soon as Elon Musk walked away, the sharks were circling.Jim Ratcliffe, a British billionaire, was first out of the blocks, saying he would be interested in buying the team if it was, in fact, for sale. An American private equity firm, Apollo Global Management, was reported to be in talks about acquiring a minority stake. Money would not be an issue. Ratcliffe, the chairman of Ineos, is one of the world’s richest men. Apollo has roughly half a trillion dollars under management.But lost in the swirl of breathless reports seemed to be an important caveat: Manchester United wasn’t actually for sale.Or was it?These would not seem like top-of-the-market times at United. The team is in last place in England’s Premier League, off to its worst start to a season in more than a century. It employs a squad of players who inspire more ridicule than reverence. Its fans now hold weekly protests against the team’s Florida-based owners, the Glazer family. Yet, despite its struggles, there may not be a more coveted sports franchise anywhere on earth than Manchester United.Manchester United is last in the Premier League after a 4-0 defeat at Brentford on Saturday.David Klein/ReutersIt is one of the biggest teams anywhere that can be owned outright. It plays in the most popular soccer league in the world. Its reach extends to every corner of the earth. Quite simply: There are few brands in any sector as powerful as Manchester United.But assets that rare are famously hard to value through traditional market fundamentals. United’s share price, for example — it is listed on the New York Stock Exchange — would suggest the club is worth $2.23 billion, a figure well below the record $3 billon a group led by the California-based fund Clearlake paid this spring for its Premier League rival Chelsea F.C.But Chelsea is not Manchester United, not in any meaningful sense. Yes, it has been successful. Yes it also employs some of the world’s top players. But in terms of global reach, popularity and brand power, the club does not compare with United. What Chelsea’s sale price proved, though, is that when it comes to elite soccer club valuations, what is on the balance sheet rarely counts.Chelsea lost more than $1 million a week under its former owner, the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. It needs a new stadium and will require tens of millions more in spending each season to keep its roster competitive. Its purchase price followed a highly public auction that drew interest from around the world.For Manchester United, the list of suitors will be even longer, and even more public. Ratcliffe and Apollo may have been the first. They will not be the last.The British billionaire Jim Ratcliffe said he would be interested in buying United “if it was for sale.”Eric Gaillard/ReutersThe Manchester United co-chairman Avram Glazer and his siblings have given no hint they plan to sell.Toby Melville/ReutersRatcliffe’s approach is perhaps the most instructive of what is likely to come. He appears to have made no effort to contact the Glazers directly, or even reach out to their bankers. Instead, he went straight to the news media, and suggested he would be open to buying even a piece of United, with an eye on one day acquiring it all.“We are interested in the club, if it is up for sale,” is all a spokesman for Ratcliffe was willing to tell The New York Times on Thursday. The tactic unleashed a groundswell of popular support, and heaped a new round of abuse on the current owners.For the Glazers, who have been under siege for most of their tenure, selling a minority might make sense. It might allow them to soothe growing fan hostility — many supporters have never forgiven the Glazers for heaping debt on the previously debt-free club in their 800-million-pound leveraged buyout in 2005 — while simultaneously bidding up the team’s overall valuation. That figure is almost certainly going to be higher than United’s share price might suggest.Despite nearly a decade of underperformance, United still earns more than nearly every other team in world soccer. Revenue has tripled under the Glazers, reaching a high of 627 million pounds ($756 million) in 2019. If Chelsea is worth $3 billion on the open market, United, because of its fame, its earning potential and its iconic status, is worth far more, perhaps even double, some experts contend.At the same time, the scale of the negative sentiment among Manchester United supporters toward the Glazer family is hard to overstate. For more than a decade, fans have rallied against them at matches and in street marches; once, they even burned an effigy of the family’s late patriarch, Malcolm Glazer. And when the club flirted with joining a proposed European Super League last year, United fans broke into the team’s stadium and protested on the field.But through it all — for almost two decades — the Glazers have hung on, keeping hold of what in many ways is as an asset as rare as a priceless painting, thrilled to watch the value of their investment go skyward and with the cachet that comes with owning one of the most famous teams in the world.United fans at a protest in April. Ed Sykes/Action Images Via ReutersIt is unclear if all six Glazer siblings who were parceled ownership of the team by their father when he died share the same commitment to owning Manchester United. The brothers Joel and Avram are the most hands on, directly involved in the team’s decision making. But a partial sale might allow less-invested family members to cash out at a premium price, and leave those that remain with a valuation that is almost certain to be the highest price ever paid for sports franchise.For the moment, the Glazers, as has been their custom for nearly two decades, have not uttered a word publicly about their plans. A Manchester United spokesman declined to comment on Thursday.And now, at least officially, Manchester United is not for sale. The Glazers’ banker, the 200-year-old London-based advisory Rothschild & Co., is not actively soliciting bids. But neither was Abramovich, even as he spent years quietly directing offers that arrived to the New York banker, Joe Ravitch, who ultimately sold Chelsea this spring.That is very likely how things will go at Manchester United. There will come a moment when the time and the price are just right, for the most unpopular owners in English soccer history to cash out of what will go down as one of the most profitable deals in sports history.It has already cost Manchester United more than one billion pounds — in interest, debt repayments and dividends — for the right to be owned by the Glazer family. Most fans will consider billions more, this time in the form of one final check, a price worth paying to be rid of them. More

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    Bayern Munich and the Myth of Competition

    In several of Europe’s top leagues, it already feels like the title race is over. But is dominance what fans really want?Just like that, it was over. For two months or so, there had been just the slightest flicker of hope for the clubs of the Bundesliga. They had not felt it in some time. They did not want to admit to feeling it now, not publicly: It was fragile, guilty, most likely forlorn, but it was hope nonetheless.Robert Lewandowski was gone. Serge Gnabry, for a time, seemed as if he might follow. Thomas Müller and Manuel Neuer were another year older. For the first time in a decade, Bayern Munich seemed not weak — Bayern Munich is never weak — but just a little diminished, just a little more human.At Borussia Dortmund, at Bayer Leverkusen, at RB Leipzig, the thought would have formed, unbidden and silent. What if Dortmund’s reinforcements worked out? What if Florian Wirtz flourished? What if Christopher Nkunku was only just getting started? What if this were one of those years, the in-between ones, the liminal ones, when Bayern fades and another rises?And then cold reality intruded. Bayern’s first game of the season was at Eintracht Frankfurt: an intimidating stadium, packed to the rafters, cheering on a team that had won the Europa League only a few months earlier. It was no gentle start. Not for the first five minutes, anyway.Then Joshua Kimmich scored. Five minutes later, so did Benjamin Pavard. Then, on his debut, Sadio Mané, and Jamal Musiala, and Gnabry himself, and now the Bundesliga season was precisely 43 minutes old, and all of the hope had been extinguished and all of the what ifs had been answered. Just like that, for another year, it was over.Sadio Mané needed precisely one game to open his Bundesliga account at Bayern.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHope is, of course, a little hardier than that. Nobody, not even Bayern Munich, wins a championship in August. Its defeat of Eintracht was only one game. Perhaps, in the months to come, Julian Nagelsmann’s tactics will go awry. Perhaps Bayern’s squad will break out in full-scale mutiny. Perhaps it will be afflicted by an injury epidemic. Perhaps, as outlined in this space last week, the World Cup will cleave the season into two halves, both of them beset by randomness.Still, the impression left by that opening day rout was indelible. The departure of Lewandowski, and the lingering sense of generational shift that it has engendered at Bayern, has done nothing to change the power dynamic in the Bundesliga. The destiny of its championship feels preordained, if not from the moment the season started, then certainly from the 43rd minute.That, of course, has come to be seen as German soccer’s fatal flaw. Bayern has the most fans, the most commercial clout and the most Champions League prize money, and so it has a supremacy that now circles the absolute. It has won every title for the last 10 years. Sometimes, the gap to the nearest contender stands at 25 points. There is no drama. There is no doubt. It does not feel quite right, at the top of the table, to describe the Bundesliga as a competition.Germany is, at least, not alone. In France, Paris St.-Germain started its season by scoring three in 38 minutes against Clermont and ended up running out 5-0 winners. P.S.G. has won eight of the last 10 available titles in France. Its budget, swollen by Qatari beneficence, bears no relation to any of its rivals. The air in Ligue 1, too, is thick with inevitability.In theory, of course, this not only reflects badly on both of these leagues, but also limits both their appeal and their ambition. Sports, we are led to believe, require two things to retain old fans and attract new ones, to fill stadiums, to command the attention of drifting and distracted television audiences.They are related (and often confused) but distinct. One is what is generally called competitive balance: the idea that a number of entrants to a tournament might, in the end, win it. The other is known, academically, as the uncertainty-of-outcome hypothesis: the belief that an individual game within any given competition is only attractive if fans feel — or at least can trick themselves into feeling — as if both sides stand a chance.Lionel Messi, Neymar and Co. are already atop the Ligue 1 table.Mohammed Badra/EPA, via ShutterstockThe best measure of how important these concepts are held to be by leagues themselves comes in the form of the Premier League’s deeply hubristic, though undeniably successful, marketing strategy.In England, the top flight’s sense of self is inextricably bound to the idea that not only can any team beat any other team at any given moment, but also that it alone boasts a multiplicity of challengers for the ultimate crown.Germany and France, after all, have only one. Spain has a paltry three: Real Madrid, Atlético Madrid, and whichever bits of Barcelona have not been sold off to sign Marcos Alonso. Italy’s contenders might stretch to four these days, but that is only the case because Juventus very kindly decided to spend three years self-imploding.England, though, has no fewer than six, a full half dozen teams that go into the season with a shot of winning the championship that is at least more than theoretical. The reality, of course, is substantially more complex: not just because some of the six are more equal than others, but also because having a comparatively broad swatch of contenders means a less predictable season but more predictable games.But the truth, in this case, matters less than the belief. The Premier League’s success is down, it is broadly accepted, to the fact that it is less processional than all of its rival competitions. It follows, then, that the prospect of yet another season in which Bayern Munich and P.S.G. amble to their domestic crowns is a black mark against the leagues that home them.The Premier League sells stars for sure. But it also regularly offers something more valuable: jeopardy.Frank Augstein/Associated PressThis, to most fans, feels right. It feels just. It is obviously a drawback to know, almost from the start, which team is going to emerge triumphant. Like going to a movie in full knowledge that one lover lets the other drown despite there being plenty of space on the raft, or actually the guy is a ghost, there is not much point staying until the end. There should be competitive balance. There should be uncertainty of outcome. That, after all, is why we watch.Except that, as it happens, it isn’t. A paper published in 2020 by researchers at the University of Liverpool — and drawing on a welter of academic investigation into the motivations of sports fans — found that there was no correlation between how uncertain the outcome of any game was and how many people watched it. The link, they wrote, was “decisively nonsignificant.”That is not, it turns out, why most people watch sports, whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not. According to the researchers, there was a connection between viewership and the quality of player on show. Even more significant, though, was the name of the teams involved. The power of brand, they wrote, tended to “dominate any contribution to audience size.”Those two conclusions suggest that, rather than diminishing the appeal of the Bundesliga, Bayern’s victory did the precise opposite. Here, after all, was a team with a famous name and an established brand packed full of highly talented players. This, it would seem, is what fans want.That is the thinking that has convinced P.S.G. to try to blind the rest of Ligue 1, and much of Europe, with its sheer star power. It is the argument regularly trotted out by the Bundesliga to defend Bayern’s unimpeachable hegemony. Soccer’s dirty little secret is that it cherishes not balance, but dominance; it claims to want diversity, but nothing draws like dynasty.And yet, there is one other finding in that 2020 report that is worth noting. “A match with the highest championship significance observed in our data set would be expected to attract an aggregate audience size 96 percent higher than one with no implications at all for the prizes to be awarded at the end of the season,” even if the teams involved were the same, the researchers wrote.In other words, what fans really want — more than competitive balance, more than uncertainty of outcome, more than famous faces and powerful names — is jeopardy. They want, we want, as much jeopardy as we can get: games when it feels as if everything is on the line. That is what sells leagues. That is what attracts fans.Ultimately, neither Germany nor France can offer that. It is what is growing rarer by the season in the rest of Europe’s major leagues and quite a few of its minor ones, too, given the distorting effects of Champions League revenue throughout the continent.But that is what we want, more than anything. Seeing Bayern and P.S.G. ride roughshod over all and sundry offers a short-term hit, the fleeting satisfaction of awe but at the cost of the greater prize. There will, most likely, be no decider in the Bundesliga this season. There will be no ultimate showdown. How can there be, when everything felt settled 43 minutes in?Difficult NegotiationJorge Mendes: center of the universe.Enric Fontcuberta/EPA, via ShutterstockThe most fraught transfer of the summer, without doubt, was not the one in which a coterie of Europe’s biggest clubs sought to seduce Erling Haaland, or Manchester United’s futile pursuit of Frenkie de Jong, or even Real Madrid’s heartbreak at being rejected by Kylian Mbappé. It is, instead, Gonçalo Guedes’s move to Wolves from Valencia.Each step, after all, would have been full of snares and traps and pitfalls. First, the agent who retains a close bond with the Wolves owners, Jorge Mendes, would have had to get in touch with the agent most aligned with Valencia’s owner, Jorge Mendes, to see if the player was interested in the move.Next, those agents would have had to reach out to the player’s agent — Jorge Mendes — to see if his client was interested in the move. Guedes would then have had to get in touch with the Wolves manager, Bruno Lage, to discuss his role at his new team, perhaps through Lage’s agent: Jorge Mendes.And finally, politeness would have dictated that Guedes convey his desire to leave to Valencia’s new coach, Gennaro Gattuso. Gattuso, doubtless, would have been furious. He had tried to sign Guedes only last year, while Gattuso was (briefly) at Fiorentina. This was his chance to work with a player he so clearly admires. We can only imagine that he would have expressed his frustration at losing him in no uncertain terms to his agent. Jorge Mendes.CorrespondenceMark Cuban: N.B.A. owner and newsletter fixture.Kevin Jairaj/USA Today Sports, via ReutersAn abundance of emails arrived in the inbox this week, addressing an impressive variety of issues. On the ongoing Mark Cuban debate, Vincent LoVoi offers a handy rule of thumb: “A kid will last at a baseball game about as many innings as their age. A nine-year-old should enjoy a whole game, don’t bother taking a toddler, and be ready to leave mid-game with a four- or five-year-old.”That fits nicely, as it happens, with the suggestion from Joey Klonowski for parents of children who prefer TikTok over sports. “Take them to the game,” he wrote. The best way to assess these concepts, I think, is to test them in the wild. My son’s first taste of live soccer will come in September at our local (professional) team, Harrogate Town. He’s almost five, and I reckon he can do an hour, with snacks. I’ll report back.Joanne Palmer, meanwhile, was not alone in noticing an omission in last week’s discussion of next year’s World Cup. “Curious that Canada did not merit a mention, given that Canada beat the United States at the Olympics,” she wrote, and she is of course correct. Canada — like Australia and Brazil — will be a contender in 2023. It’s the U.S., though, that has represented the watermark for women’s international soccer for the last decade, regardless of the defeat last year, and it’s the U.S. that will offer the best gauge for where everyone else stands.As for the other World Cup, the one charging onto our horizons, Charles Kelley pointed out that it might not make this season all that strange in comparison to the 2019-20 campaign. “Temporary suspension of matches, ‘temporary’ rule changes, rescheduling of tournaments, empty stadiums, compacted schedules, emptying coffers, desperation player moves, and no kids to accompany players out onto the pitch,” he wrote.And that leads us nicely on to competing views about the World Cup itself. S.K. Gupta wanted to reflect the benefits of holding the tournament in Qatar. “It expands the game to a geographical region where it has never been held, encouraging the sport’s growth in the Middle East,” he wrote. “It will give ordinary people an opportunity to experience the culture of the Middle East and get beyond the stereotypes. Also, by having the World Cup in the Middle East, it would be feasible to have it broadcast live to most of the world during waking hours.”These are all absolutely valid, of course, though whether they are a counterweight to the fairly substantial “cons” column — the process by which the World Cup was acquired, the human rights issues, the sense that not everyone is entirely welcome in Qatar — is a matter of personal taste.To that list, we can add Juuso Sallinen’s (also valid, though not especially important) complaint. “Has anyone thought about the lack of partying in the country that will win the World Cup? The players are back in training only a few days after the final. It hardly leaves room for any proper celebration in the winning country itself.”I don’t think it’s especially shameful to think this is less than ideal, Juuso. These victories should be savored. The blame for that one, though, does not so much lie with Qatar as with everyone else in soccer, since they proved completely unwilling to sacrifice anything in order to make space for the tournament. More

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    World Cup Worries Mount With 100 Days (Give or Take) to Go

    A last-minute request to change the tournament’s start date is only the latest bit of uncertainty surrounding soccer’s showcase event.At a flashy ceremony on Nov. 21 last year, some of Qatar’s most senior officials, including the Gulf nation’s prime minister, joined the FIFA president Gianni Infantino, top soccer executives and invited guests for a celebration. They gathered on Doha’s corniche, the sweeping promenade that hugs the city’s shimmering waterfront, to unveil an ornate countdown clock and to mark a milestone: the day they were celebrating was precisely one year before the opening of the 2022 World Cup.Infantino, who now resides in Qatar, offered exultant praise for his hosts. He said their preparations for the event — roughly $200 billion in investments since Qatar was awarded the tournament in 2010 — were beyond compare: So good, in fact, that Infantino, a veteran soccer administrator, declared that he had “never witnessed anything like what is happening here.”Infantino’s bullish language might now better describe something few in soccer have seen before: the state of uncertainty and rising concern that surrounds several elements of the tournament affecting fans, sponsors and broadcasters. Not least of them? The day the World Cup will actually begin.World Cup organizers this week made an unprecedented request to reschedule the start date of the tournament in order to give Qatar, as the host, pride of place in the opening match. They asked for a ruling by Thursday, only months before the tournament and a matter of hours before a series of events marking 100 days to kickoff is set to begin.FIFA President Gianni Infantino was asked only this week to approve a change to the World Cup schedule.Mohammed Dabbous/ReutersThe request to play the first match on Nov. 20 — a day earlier than previously announced — is expected to be approved. But moving the date of the opening game, and shifting the kickoff time of another match the next day, will disrupt plans made by teams, fans, sponsors and broadcasters and even the tournament’s marketing staff, which has spent millions of dollars buying advertising space around the world to mark the 100-day countdown to the World Cup — a day now cloaked in questions — in signage wrapping buses and taxis in major capital cities around the world. All of those campaigns, as of Thursday, could now launch with the wrong start date for the tournament.The late schedule change, though, is only the latest high profile question that is adding to a growing air of uncertainty, inside and outside Qatar’s World Cup organization, about the ability of the tiny gulf nation — the smallest ever to host the World Cup — to pull off a tournament for which organizers have had 12 years to prepare.Three months before the tournament, for example, Qatar has yet to unveil concrete plans about the kind of experience fans can expect during their visits, including what they will need to enter the country; where they will stay when they arrive; how the police will handle violations of Qatari laws about public behavior; and where and how fans will be able to consume alcoholic beverages in Qatar, a conservative Muslim country where the sale of alcohol is tightly controlled and where the public consumption of it is almost nonexistent.London cabs decorated to mark 100 days until the start of the World Cup. The date on the door, though, soon may be wrong.How the tournament — with more than one million visitors expected to visit — will be secured also still has not been articulated. Qatar has signed policing agreements with several nations, notably Turkey, which in January said it would be providing more than 3,000 security personnel, including riot police, for a tournament in which fans of the 32 competing nations — some of them bitter rivals — will rub shoulders for weeks in an area smaller than the state of Connecticut.Read More on the 2022 World CupA Last-Minute Change: Only months before the tournament, FIFA is considering a request for the event to start one day earlier, allowing Qatar to be featured in the first match.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.Unofficially, Qatari officials have said the imported security officers will not be in direct contact with fans. But so far — and unlike for previous World Cups — scant detail on that matter, and several others, has been publicly available. Asked two days ago for clarification on questions about several World Cup topics, Qatari officials have yet to respond.There have also been concerns about accommodations, with delays in the release of rooms to the public and fans reporting a lack of availability on a portal reserved for ticket-holders, who are expected to be the only foreigners who will be allowed to enter Qatar during the monthlong World Cup. (This guidance, too, remains unclear as of this week.)Those who have managed to find accommodations, which can only be booked after fans have paid for tickets, have complained about high prices even in the rare cases where they have found availability.Ronan Evain, the executive director of Football Supporters Europe, an umbrella organization of fan groups, said the numbers of official fan groups traveling to Qatar to support European teams most likely will be significantly lower than for the last World Cup, which was held in Russia. The defending World Cup champion France, in one example, expects only 100 fans to attend as part of its official supporters group.Other fan groups, Evain said, are considering flying in and out of Qatar for matches because they have concluded doing so would be cheaper, and easier, than staying in Qatar. Germany’s fan club has already said it will be commuting to games from Dubai. “I don’t think they realize how problematic their accommodation situation is,” Evain said. “The whole system to book accommodation is so unclear ticket-holders are reluctant to book.”At the same time, representatives of some participating teams are discovering that finding space for players to socialize outside of their hotels in such a small geographic area has been an issue. “I don’t know if they get out of the hotel, they will be surrounded with thousands of fans,” said Iva Olivari, the team manager for Croatia.“I cannot tell you exactly what we are facing,” she added. “We will have to deal with it when we get there.”Warning: World Cup timing is, for now, not set in stone. Mustafa Abumunes/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFor FIFA’s partners, the continuing uncertainty has been an unrelenting challenge. The last-ditch plan to change the tournament’s start date in particular will create chaos for the plans crafted months in advance by sponsors, according to Ricardo Fort, the former longtime sports marketing head at Coca-Cola.“They invited and confirmed hospitality guests, booked flights and hotels, and contracted with all necessary logistics,” Fort wrote in a Twitter post. “Imagine changing it all!”Officials in Qatar’s organizing committee have by now gotten used to such last-minute and sometimes inexplicable revisions to plans that were months in the making. In 2019, for example, staff members who had prepared a detailed marketing and communication plan to announce the opening of what was to be the al-Wakrah stadium were stunned to discover — only minutes before the country’s emir arrived to open the venue — that he had taken to social media to say it would instead be called the al-Janoub stadium.At other times, Qatar and its ambassadors have been their own worst enemies. Asked on a call with reporters last year about how many migrant workers have died on construction projects, a question that organizers have faced since work first began on World Cup projects almost a decade ago, Nasser al-Khater, the chief executive of the organizing committee, appeared to guess at the number before being corrected by a staff member. In April, World Cup officials had to provide clarifications after a senior security official told a reporter that rainbow flags, a symbol of gay rights, could be seized from fans for their own protection.To help tell its story, Qatar also enlisted — at great expense — a group of former soccer players, most prominent among them David Beckham, the former England captain. But despite receiving millions of dollars to bless Qatar’s World Cup project with his fame, Beckham has proved to be a reluctant advocate, preferring to attend events only when the news media is not present. Beckham has never said publicly why he signed up to endorse the tournament, and his spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.This week brought a new crisis over the tournament’s start date. FIFA’s secretary general, in the letter sent to top soccer leaders requesting the change, said FIFA had assessed the commercial and legal effects of moving Qatar’s opening game against Ecuador forward one day and “determined that any risk is sufficiently outweighed by the value and benefits of the proposal.”Some fans, though, will be left disappointed. In addition to shifting Qatar’s game, FIFA also proposed moving the time of a game between Netherlands and Senegal set for the original opening day, Nov. 21, to an evening kickoff from its original afternoon start.Martín Bauzá, a New Yorker, said that would mean he could no longer use the tickets he has bought for the Netherlands game, because he also has tickets for the United States-Wales match that begins an hour after it ends. And he probably will not be the only one grumbling.“I would imagine it would cause a few headaches for broadcasters,” said Graham Fry, chairman of IMG’s production unit, a veteran of major event coverage.“They would have already planned programming for that day, scheduled previews for the World Cup,” he added, noting such decisions often must be made months in advance.Another issue of direct interest to many fans — the plan to serve alcohol at the World Cup — has still not been articulated, despite months of discussions and even though one of FIFA’s biggest partners is Budweiser, which expects its products to be available to supporters across World Cup sites.The most recent proposal, which has yet to be made public, is for beer to be sold after the security check outside stadiums but not inside the stadiums themselves. Fans also will be able to drink at fan parks, but at the moment that privilege will only be available at certain times of the day. Which times? World Cup organizers still have not said. More

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    FIFA Seeks Late Changes to Qatar World Cup Schedule

    In a letter sent only months before the tournament, organizers have requested that the World Cup start one day earlier and allow Qatar, the host nation, to feature in its first match.Qatar has had 12 years to plan for the World Cup. Now, with the first games of the tournament just over 100 days away and the intricate match schedule announced months ago, organizers have requested changes that would make the event start a day earlier so the host nation can have a featured place in the opening game.In recent years, the World Cup host nation has appeared in the tournament’s first match, as the headliner in the monthlong event’s elaborate opening ceremony. But this year, in a break with that tradition, organizers took the unusual step of scheduling Qatar’s first game as the third of four matches on a busy first day of competition on Nov. 21.Now a proposal to move Qatar’s game to Nov. 20 has been sent to the most senior officials of FIFA, soccer’s global governing body and the organizer of the World Cup. Those officials, a group that includes the leaders of soccer’s six global confederations and the FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, will decide whether to approve it.It is unclear why organizers — and FIFA — had not originally planned for Qatar to play in the tournament’s opening game, a stage reserved for every tournament host since the World Cup was staged in Germany in 2006. Before then, the defending champion was customarily granted the honor of opening the tournament.“It has been a longstanding tradition to mark the start of the FIFA World Cup with an opening ceremony on the occasion of the first match featuring either the hosts or the defending champions, a factor that is considered to have significant value from a ceremonial, cultural and commercial point of view,” FIFA wrote in a letter to members of the bureau that was reviewed by The New York Times.The Lusail stadium, the largest of the eight arenas built or renovated for the World Cup, is set to host 10 matches, including the final.Pawel Kopczynski/ReutersIn addition to changing the date of Qatar’s opening game against Ecuador, the proposed adjustment would affect another match set for the tournament’s opening day: Senegal’s game against the Netherlands, which would be moved out of its afternoon time slot into an evening window.Planning for the Qatar World Cup has been bumpy. Granting the hosting rights to Qatar eventually required FIFA to move the event to the Northern Hemisphere’s winter because the searing summer temperatures in the Gulf were deemed to pose a potential health risk to players, officials and the hundreds of thousands of fans expected at the tournament.The switch has upended the soccer calendar, leading to an unprecedented midseason interruption to the European league season and other competitions around the world. Negotiations with clubs — furious about the weekslong disruptions to their league schedules and television contracts — resulted in the tournament’s being played in fewer days (28) than any other event since it was expanded to 32 teams in 1998.“As the tournament approaches, the FIFA administration is now fully aware of the various sporting, operational, commercial and legal implications of this uniquely compressed schedule,” FIFA wrote in its letter.FIFA told officials that it would like them to approve the change by Thursday evening European time.The sudden push to change the date of the opening game has only added to concerns about Qatar’s readiness to stage the World Cup. Already fans are complaining about a shortage of accommodations and a lack of clarity over the consumption of alcohol during the tournament.Should the switch of the opening match be approved, overseas ticket-holders who had planned to attend would face the potential challenge of changing their travel plans and rebooking hotel rooms, and any players competing in European leagues — Ecuador at times has more than a dozen — would have one fewer day to travel and prepare.The plan has already caused disquiet among ticket holders, with the proposed changes making some combinations of games all but impossible for visitors to attend. New York-based Martín Bauzá told The Times he had secured tickets for the game between Senegal and the Netherlands and the United States opener with Wales later that day. FIFA switching Senegal’s game to the later slot means he would not be able to attend both games, with the second game starting an hour after the first ends.“I did purchase Senegal/Netherlands specifically because of the time difference between matches and in accordance with the FIFA ticket rules that require 4 hours between matches (i.e., cannot purchase tickets to back to back matches) which is now the scenario I will have to deal with,” Bauzá said in a message.World Cup organizers said they had consulted with Qatar and the soccer associations of the two affected teams before proposing the change. Its letter suggested neither national team objected to the change.Separately, a FIFA appeals committee is considering an appeal by Chile to throw Ecuador out of the World Cup over accusations that Ecuador had fielded an ineligible player. Several Ecuadorean players based in Europe would only have six days to prepare for the tournament, fewer than any others involved in the World Cup.“The FIFA administration has assessed the commercial and legal implications of the proposal — including the impact on contractual commitments across media rights, sponsorship, and ticketing and hospitality — as well as the impact on traveling fans, and has determined that any risk is sufficiently outweighed by the value and benefits of the proposals,” FIFA said in the letter. More