Raphael Stevens

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    ‘Wagatha Christie’ Trial, a British Spectacle, Ends: There Was No Libel, Judge Finds

    The High Court in London ruled against the plaintiff, Rebekah Vardy, putting an end to a legal feud that turned into a reality-show-style event.LONDON — It began as an Instagram-related quarrel between the spouses of two British soccer stars and grew into a libel trial that provided a welcome distraction for a nation in turmoil.The High Court on Friday brought an end to the long-running legal feud by ruling against the plaintiff, Rebekah Vardy, saying that she had not been defamed by her former friend Coleen Rooney.In the verdict, Justice Karen Steyn ruled that the reputational damage suffered by Ms. Vardy did not meet what she described as “the sting of libel.” For that reason, she stated in a written decision published on Friday, “the case is dismissed.”With its combination of low stakes and high melodrama, the dispute between Ms. Vardy and Ms. Rooney did not amount to the trial of the century. But the case attracted months of overheated tabloid coverage at a time when Britain was navigating a stubborn pandemic and a struggling economy while its prime minister was on the ropes.The legal dispute was between Ms. Vardy, the wife of the Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy, and Ms. Rooney, who is married to the former Manchester United star Wayne Rooney. The women belong to a group known as WAGs, a common, if sexist, tabloid acronym for the “wives and girlfriends” of professional athletes, particularly Premier League footballers.In 2019, Ms. Rooney suspected that a follower of her private Instagram account was selling information about her, gleaned from her posts, to The Sun, a Rupert Murdoch-owned London tabloid known for its pungent celebrity coverage. To suss out the supposed leaker, Ms. Rooney set a trap: She made her Instagram Stories visible only to Ms. Vardy and used the account to plant false information about herself. Then she waited to see if it ended up in the press.At the end of her monthslong sting operation, Ms. Rooney claimed that Ms. Vardy was the culprit. She leveled that accusation in a social media statement in the fall of 2019 that was widely shared. Because of her sleuthing tactics, Ms. Rooney became known as “Wagatha Christie,” a mash-up of WAG and Agatha Christie, the 20th-century mystery writer.Rebekah Vardy left the Royal Courts of Justice in London in May.Toby Melville/ReutersMs. Vardy issued a swift denial that she was the leaker. She then said that she had hired forensic computer experts to determine whether anyone else had access to her Instagram account. In June 2020, after failed mediation, Ms. Vardy filed a defamation lawsuit against Ms. Rooney in High Court, which oversees high-profile civil cases in Britain.This May, it went to court. The proceeding, formally called Vardy v. Rooney, became known as the Wagatha Christie Trial. The term was so common that it appeared in crawls on Sky News right next to “War in Ukraine.”Tabloid photographers and cable news correspondents flocked to the steps outside London’s Royal Courts of Justice for the nine-day event, which proved to be a fashion spectacle as much as whodunit.Ms. Vardy, 40, arrived in an assortment of finery, including a buttery yellow tweed suit by Alessandra Rich and an Alexander McQueen blazer. On her left foot, Ms. Rooney, 36, wore a medical boot, an ungainly plastic device that she paired with a Chanel loafer, a Gucci loafer and a Gucci mule. She had sustained a fracture in a fall at her house.Ms. Vardy testified for three days. “I didn’t give any information to a newspaper,” she said under questioning early in her testimony. “I’ve been called a leak, and it’s not nice.”The trial had plenty of TV-worthy plot twists. It was revealed in court that laptops were lost and that WhatsApp messages between Ms. Vardy and her agent, Caroline Watt — which apparently disparaged Ms. Rooney — had mysteriously disappeared. Ms. Vardy’s lawyer added that Ms. Watt had “regrettably” dropped an iPhone containing WhatsApp messages into the North Sea. Ms. Rooney’s lawyer, David Sherborne, replied that the mishap seemed to have resulted in the concealment of evidence.“The story is fishy indeed, no pun intended,” he said.Ms. Vardy told the court she could “neither confirm nor deny” what exactly had happened to her missing digital data. At another moment, she began a response with the phrase “if I’m honest,” causing Ms. Rooney’s barrister to snap: “I would hope you’re honest, because you’re sitting in a witness box.”The case drew so much media attention because WAGs — like the players on the “Real Housewives” franchise in the United States — loom large in the British cultural imagination. They are photographed constantly. They star in reality shows and have their own fast-fashion lines and false-eyelash businesses. A TV series inspired by their shopping habits, feuds and love lives, “Footballers Wives,” was a hit in the early 2000s.WAGs had a breakthrough moment in 2006, when a group of them enlivened the staid resort town Baden-Baden during that year’s World Cup, which took place in stadiums across Germany. The ringleader was Victoria Beckham, who had risen to fame as Posh Spice in the Spice Girls before marrying the great midfielder David Beckham. Also on the trip: the 20-year-old Coleen McLoughlin, who was dating Mr. Beckham’s teammate, Mr. Rooney, and would later marry him.The tabloids ate it up. Reports from Baden-Baden told of WAGs singing “We Are the Champions” from a hotel balcony, dancing on tabletops and chugging Champagne, vodka and Red Bull into the wee hours. In the daytime, the women went on epic shopping sprees and sunbathed as the paparazzi snapped away.When England lost in the quarterfinals to Portugal, some sports pundits unfairly blamed the WAGs for the defeat. Predictably, the tabloids that had made them into celebrities tried to tear them down. “The Empty World of the WAGs” was the headline of a finger-wagging piece in The Daily Mail.Years later, Wayne Rooney and Jamie Vardy played together for England, which added to the delicious awkwardness of the recent court proceedings.The trial fit snugly into a culture that sometimes revels in images of how foolish it can be — see also the popular TV show “Love Island.” It also touched on betrayal and lies, which were defining themes in Britain as Prime Minister Boris Johnson incurred fines for breaking lockdown rules, then announced that he would step down after his party pushed him out over other deceptions.The trial also presented the complexities of the British class system. Online jokes from those following the case homed in on Oxford-educated lawyers reading aloud text messages filled with profane terms from women who are often dismissed as shallow or “chavvy,” to borrow a word Ms. Vardy used in reference to a cousin of Mr. Rooney’s.Unlike this year’s other high-profile celebrity court battle, Depp v. Heard, these proceedings were not streamed live, which added to the appeal. Old-school courtroom sketches made the parties look like a potato, the moon and, according to one commentator, “Norman Bates’s mother.” More

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    France’s Corinne Diacre Is Not Interested in Your Opinion

    Coach Corinne Diacre set a high bar for France at the Euros. But tying one’s fate to results works only when they’re good.ROTHERHAM, England — Corinne Diacre punched the air, allowed herself a cursory smile of satisfaction, and then turned on her heel. She managed to dodge the first couple of staff members rushing past her on their way to join the celebrations on the field after France’s quarterfinal victory, only to find her path blocked by Gilles Fouache.Fouache, France’s assistant goalkeeping coach, is not an easy obstacle to avoid: broad-shouldered and shaven-headed and with the air of a kindly bouncer. Diacre, a redoubtable central defender in her playing days, quickly recognized there was no way past. Fouache swept his manager up in a brief bear hug, and then she sent him on his way, too.Once she had done so, her smile melted away. She sought out her Dutch counterpart, offered some words of congratulation and condolence, and then made her way to her players. A handful received a pat on the back. Others were offered only some immediate performance feedback. She had come to Euro 2022 on business, not pleasure.By some measures, that victory against the Netherlands last weekend was enough to ensure Diacre had done her job. France had never previously made it past the quarterfinals of a European Championship; Eve Périsset’s penalty, deep into extra time, finally ended the hoodoo.Diacre, though, arrived in England with slightly higher expectations, and so did her country. France, after all, is home to two of the most powerful women’s soccer clubs, the reigning European champion Lyon and its great rival, Paris St.-Germain. Diacre had an unrivaled pipeline of talent from which to create a squad.To her, and to French soccer, it felt reasonable to declare reaching the final the team’s “stated ambition.” On Wednesday night, it failed to meet it. France might only have fallen narrowly to Germany, by 2-1 in their semifinal in Milton Keynes, England, but it fell nonetheless. And that, unfortunately, gives Diacre a problem.Corinne Diacre and France have never reached the final of a major tournament.Molly Darlington/ReutersA couple of weeks after Diacre, 47, and her players arrived in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, the small town in rural Leicestershire where France’s national team has taken up residence for this tournament — that it chose a spot with a distinctly French name is, apparently, coincidental — a journalist from a French magazine contacted the team’s press officer to ask why no local junior team had yet been invited to watch a training session.Such outreach initiatives are a staple of major tournaments, a fairly simple public-relations maneuver designed to thank the community for its hospitality. France, by contrast, had made no contact with amateur sides in Ashby. The team, the journalist was told, was not in England to make friends.It is a tunnel vision that is characteristic of Diacre’s management style. She veers between distant and acerbic with the news media, despite employing a P.R. “teacher”; she has admitted that communication is not her strong suit. She makes no secret of the fact that she does not enjoy the public-facing aspects of her job.With her players, too, she has not always fostered the most conducive relationships. One of her first moves after taking charge of her nation’s team five years ago was to strip Wendie Renard, France’s totemic defender, of the captaincy.Wendie Renard, surrounded by celebrating rivals once again.Carl Recine/ReutersSince then, she has contrived to alienate a number of players from Lyon, the country’s dominant women’s team, to such an extent that Sarah Bouhaddi, the goalkeeper, claimed she had inculcated a “very, very negative environment.” Bouhaddi has subsequently said she will not play for her country while Diacre is in charge.Another veteran, Gaëtane Thiney, was dropped for criticizing Diacre’s tactics, and a third, Amandine Henry, was dropped after she had described the French squad during the 2019 World Cup as “complete and utter chaos.” The call in which Diacre broke the news lasted, Henry said, “14 or 15 seconds; I will remember it all my life.” More remarkable still was that Henry had inherited the captaincy from Renard; her banishment meant that Renard was restored to the post.Diacre’s biggest gamble of all, though, may well have been her squad for this tournament. Diacre was already without both Kheira Hamraoui and Aminata Diallo, a legacy of the assault scandal that has roiled French soccer for much of the last year, but she also chose to omit both Henry and Eugénie Le Sommer, France’s career goal-scoring leader.The manager defended the moves, citing the need to protect and preserve the “mentality” of her squad. Early results bore her out. There was no sign, in France’s month or so in England, of club enmities poisoning the atmosphere among the players. The longstanding divide between the Lyonnaises and the Parisians seemed to have evaporated.Besides, it was not as if Diacre did not have players of impeccable quality to replace them. The depth of talent at her command was such that she could juggle her team for each of France’s first four games of the tournament with no apparent diminution of quality.France became the first team to put a ball in Germany’s net at the Euros, but its score was officially credited as a German own goal.Rui Vieira/Associated PressThe issue, though, was that making those calls turned Diacre into a martyr of outcome. Had France met her aspirations, and reached Sunday’s final against England, she would have been vindicated; leaving Henry and Le Sommer at home would have seemed like a masterstroke, proof of her bold conviction.That France did not means it is all but impossible not to wonder whether the outcome might have been different had two of the key players on the best club team in the women’s game been on the field, or even on the substitutes’ bench, available to call on in an emergency.In truth, the border between those realities is slender, and blurred. It hinges on a moment, an instant: Had France remained attentive when Svenja Huth picked up the ball on the edge of the penalty area, rather than assuming it had drifted out of play, then perhaps it would still be in the tournament, and Diacre’s call would have paid off.It is the manager, though, who made that bargain, who made it plain that the gauge of success and failure was what she did, not how she did it. France came to Euro 2022 with a destination in mind. Now that it has fallen short, it cannot claim credit for the journey. More

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    England Routs Sweden to Seal Place in Euro 2022 Final

    Alessia Russo’s backheel highlighted her team’s 4-0 rout of Sweden and sealed England’s place in Sunday’s Euro 2022 final.Follow live updates of the Euro 2022 final.SHEFFIELD, England — The crowd at Bramall Lane required three viewings before it could settle on the appropriate response. The first, in real time, prompted a jubilant, triumphal roar. The second, on the giant screen in a corner of the stadium as England’s players celebrated below, drew a gasp of appreciation.It was only when almost 30,000 people had the chance to watch the close-up replay, though, that they could see what, exactly, had happened. Alessia Russo, the substitute striker, had not only scored for England with a backheel. She had not only scored with a backheel with a defender on her back, or while also nutmegging Hedvig Lindahl, Sweden’s goalkeeper.What she had done, in fact, was all of the above, and she had done it in the semifinals of a major international tournament, and certainly the biggest game of her life so far.RUSSO WITH THE BACKHEEL NUTMEG TO PUT ENGLAND ONE STEP FROM THE FINAL 😳🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 pic.twitter.com/EGz34224Wl— ESPN FC (@ESPNFC) July 26, 2022
    It was only then, armed with a full suite of information, that the crowd could determine the correct reaction. Bramall Lane, in unison, laughed. Not cruelly, not derisively, but in delight and wonder and disbelief.England does not, as a rule, expect to win games of this magnitude. It certainly does not expect to have fun while doing it.Carl Recine/ReutersCarl Recine/ReutersRusso’s backheel caught goalkeeper Hedvig Lindahl by surprise, the ball passing right between her legs. By the time she realized what had happened, Russo and the stadium were celebrating.Molly Darlington/ReutersThat can be attributed to the general undercurrent of fatalism that infuses the country’s sporting psyche at all times, of course, but this team — which humbled Sweden, the world’s second-ranked team, by 4-0 — has its own bespoke ghosts, too. England’s women had, after all, made it to the semifinals of their last three major tournaments. They met Japan in the 2015 World Cup, and lost. They met the Netherlands in the 2017 European Championship, and lost. They met the United States in the 2019 World Cup, and by then a pattern was emerging.By the time Euro 2022 got underway, England’s players were aware that the pressure to end that streak was considerable. The tournament was on their home soil. The Football Association had appointed Sarina Wiegman, the coach of the Dutch team that had broken English hearts in 2017, as manager, at no little expense. The vast majority of the squad was corralled from elite teams competing in England’s booming Women’s Super League.As if that was not exacting enough, England’s imperious sweep through the group phase — scoring five goals against Northern Ireland and a dizzying eight against Norway — served to swell hopes and lift expectations.The players have, in keeping with bizarre tradition, started to receive curious questions at news conferences about whether their success might soothe, in some ill-defined and deeply improbable way, the country’s very real concerns about the price of fuel and the soaring cost of basic amenities and a government in self-inflicted disarray.That confluence of circumstances might have been expected to inhibit England as the prospect of the final, of glory, hovered ever closer on the horizon. Wiegman’s team had struggled in its quarterfinal against a depleted Spain. Sweden threatened to pose a sterner test still. It is not yet a year since the Swedes had competed in the Olympic final. Its team is regarded, by no less an authority than the FIFA rankings, as the finest side in Europe.England’s Ellen White. She and her teammates have outscored their Euros opponents by 20-1.John Sibley/ReutersSweden, the world’s second-ranked team, endured its heaviest defeat ever in a European Championship.Matthew Childs/ReutersAnd for a while it seemed as if this might be another calvary. Sweden carved open a glaring opportunity with its first attack of the game. Inside the first 15 minutes, England had required three fine saves from its goalkeeper, Mary Earps, and the intervention of the crossbar to retain any hope.But while the individual talent at Wiegman’s disposal is, perhaps, only rivaled in this tournament by that of the French, the collective she has crafted is marked by its composure, its serenity, its abiding self-belief. England did not wilt as Sweden battered at its door and pummeled its defenses. It did not allow itself to be overawed, or intimidated, or fretful.Instead, it waited for its opportunity, taking the lead through Beth Mead, the tournament’s leading scorer, a little after half an hour. That might, for a different team, have been the cue to sit back, to hunch its shoulders and grit its teeth. But that is not Wiegman’s way, and so it is not England’s, either.At halftime, the stadium announcer declared that, “as things stand, England is going to the final.” It felt just a little hubristic, the sort of pronouncement that might come to be seen as a source of regret, though not for long. Within four minutes of the start of the second half, Lucy Bronze had doubled the lead, her header drifting achingly slowly past Lindahl’s dive.That goal would, in hindsight, have been enough, but at the time it was not, not enough to be sure. Only with Russo’s improvisational, instinctive brilliance could the crowd — could the players — relax. A few minutes later, Fran Kirby, England’s creative heartbeat, ran through on goal. She, too, was in one of the biggest games of her career. She, too, knew this was serious.But still she chose the indulgent option, lofting a delicate, arcing chip just beyond Lindahl’s grasp, deflecting off her gloves into the net behind her. It was the sort of thing a player tries when they are, despite the situation in which they find themselves, having fun.Sarina Wiegman, who led the Netherlands to the Euros title on home soil in 2017, is one win from doing the same for England.Molly Darlington/ReutersAfter the final whistle, the players lingered on the field. They took the applause from all four corners of the stadium. They listened as all of soccer’s great standards — Dua Lipa and Dana International and the White Stripes — crackled from the speakers.Ellen White, the striker, led the crowd in a chorus of “Sweet Caroline,” her eyes wide and her smile almost baffled. Wiegman, regarded even by her squad as an austere, demanding presence, bounced and jumped and danced with the players. England had been in the semifinals of a major international tournament, and not only had it won, but it had enjoyed itself, and nobody wanted to let that feeling go. More

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    Hope Solo, Former U.S. Soccer Star, Pleads Guilty to Driving Impaired

    Ms. Solo had a blood-alcohol level of three times the legal limit while in a car with her two children, the authorities said.Hope Solo, a former star goalie with the U.S. women’s soccer team, pleaded guilty on Monday to driving while impaired, four months after she was found passed out behind the wheel in the parking lot of a Walmart in Winston-Salem, N.C., with her two children in the back seat, the authorities said.Her sentence of two years in prison was suspended for all but 30 days, the Forsyth County District Attorney’s Office said in a news release. The conditions of her sentencing allowed her to be relieved of that prison time through 30 days she spent at an in-person rehab facility, prosecutors said.During two years of probation, she will have to see a court-approved addiction expert and abide by any further court-mandated treatment, according to the District Attorney’s Office. She also had to surrender her driver’s license and will not be able to operate a car until she gets her license back, the release said.As part of her plea agreement, two other charges — misdemeanor child abuse and resisting a public officer — were dropped, Jim O’Neill, the Forsyth County district attorney, said in an interview.“I underestimated what a destructive part of my life alcohol had become,” Ms. Solo wrote in a statement posted to Instagram on Monday. “I made a huge mistake. Easily the worst mistake of my life.”Her legal team did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Monday night.On March 31, Ms. Solo was found by a police officer asleep at the wheel with two children asleep in the back while her car’s engine ran, according to the district attorney’s office. A police officer noticed a strong odor of alcohol and asked her to perform sobriety tests, but Ms. Solo refused, prosecutors said.She was arrested, but refused to submit to a breathalyzer test, the District Attorney’s Office. A police officer obtained a search warrant for a blood sample and found that Ms. Solo had a blood alcohol level of 0.24, according to the news release. That is three times North Carolina’s legal limit of .08. Additionally, the test showed she had THC in her system, prosecutors said.Ms. Solo is considered one of the top goalkeepers in recent soccer history. Her two Olympic gold medals came in 2008 in Beijing and in 2012 in London. She won the World Cup in 2015 in Canada. In that World Cup and the one before it, she won the award for best goalie.Yet she also became known for intemperate behavior that sometimes led to altercations.In August 2016, after the Swedish team beat the U.S. team in the quarterfinals of the Rio Olympics, Ms. Solo criticized the Swedes’ defensive playing tactics and called them “a bunch of cowards.” U.S. Soccer responded by terminating her contract, citing “conduct that is counter to the organization’s principles.”She was also suspended for 30 days in 2015 after U.S. Soccer learned through news reports that Ms. Solo had argued with the police when her husband, the former N.F.L. tight end Jerramy Stevens, was arrested on charges of drunken driving. More

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    Does Soccer Still Need Headers?

    New rules, new science and new tactics are already beginning to push heading out of the game. But doing so could have unintended consequences.It would be futile to predict when, precisely, it will come. It is not possible, from the vantage point of now, of here, to identify a specific point, or an exact date, or even a broad time frame. All that can be said is that it will come, sooner or later. The days of heading in soccer are numbered.The ball, after all, is rolling. England’s Football Association has received permission from the IFAB, the arcane and faintly mysterious body that defines the Laws of the Game — capital L, capital G, always — to run a trial in which players under the age of 12 will not be allowed to head the ball in training. If it is successful, the change could become permanent within the next two years.This is not an attempt to introduce an absolute prohibition of heading, of course. It is simply an application to banish deliberate heading — presumably as opposed to accidental heading — from children’s soccer.Once players hit their teens, heading would still be gradually introduced to their repertoire of skills, albeit in a limited way: Since 2020, the F.A.’s guidelines have recommended that all players, including professionals, should be exposed to a maximum of 10 high-force headers a week in training. Heading would not be abolished, not officially.And yet that would, inevitably, be the effect. Young players nurtured without any exposure to or expertise in heading would be unlikely to place much emphasis on it, overnight, once it was permitted. They would have learned the game without it; there would be no real incentive to favor it. The skill would gradually fall into obsolescence, and then drift inexorably toward extinction.From a health perspective, that would not be a bad thing. In public, the F.A.’s line is that it wants to impose the moratorium while further research is done into links between heading and both Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (C.T.E.) and dementia. In private, it must surely recognize that it is not difficult to discern the general direction of travel.Major League Soccer recently learned of its first confirmed case of C.T.E. in a former player.Albert Cesare/The Cincinnati Enquirer, via Associated PressThe connection between heading and both conditions has been soccer’s tacit shame for at least two decades, if not longer. Jeff Astle, the former England striker, was ruled by a coroner to have died from an industrial disease, linked to the repeated heading of a soccer ball, as far back as 2002. He was posthumously found to have been suffering from C.T.E.In the years since, five members of England’s 1966 World Cup-winning side have confirmed they are suffering from dementia, drawing focus on to the issue. Only one of them, Bobby Charlton, remains alive.One study, in 2019, found that soccer players — with the exception of goalkeepers — are three and a half times more likely to suffer from neurodegenerative disease than the general population. Two years later, a similar piece of research found that defenders, in particular, have an even greater risk of developing dementia or a similar condition later in life. The more the subject is examined, the more likely it seems that minimizing how often players head the ball is in their long-term interests.Head Injuries and C.T.E. in SportsThe permanent damage caused by brain injuries to athletes can have devastating effects.C.T.E., Explained: The degenerative brain disease has come to be most often associated with N.F.L. players, but it has also been found in other athletes. Here’s what to know.Soccer: Scott Vermillion, who died in 2020, became the first U.S. professional soccer player with a public case of C.T.E., as concussion fears rise in the sport.Sledding: Brain injuries in sliding sports — often called “sledhead” — might be connected to a rash of suicides among bobsledders.Football: Demaryius Thomas had C.T.E. when he died in December at 33, but that diagnosis alone does not capture the role football had in the N.F.L. star’s quick decline.In a sporting sense, too, it is easy to believe that heading’s demise would be no great loss. The game appears, after all, to be moving beyond it organically. The percentage of headed goals is falling, thanks to the simultaneous rise in analytics — which, speaking extremely broadly, discourages (aerial) crossing as a low-probability action — and the stylistic hegemony of the school of Pep Guardiola.Sophisticated teams, now, do their best not to cross the ball; they most certainly do not heave it forward at any given opportunity. They dominate possession or they launch precise, surgical counterattacks, and they prefer to do the vast majority of it on the ground. The sport as a whole has followed in their wake, hewing ever more closely to Brian Clough’s rather gnarled maxim that if God had intended soccer to be played in the clouds, there would be substantially more grass up there.Top clubs, like Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City, already do most of their best work on the ground.Logan Riely/Getty ImagesCertainly, it is more than possible to watch an elite game — in Spain, in particular, but in the Champions League or the Premier League or the Women’s Super League or wherever — and believe that the spectacle would not be diminished, or even notably altered, if heading was not only strictly forbidden, but had not, in fact, been invented.But that is to ignore the fact that soccer is defined not only by what happens, but by what might have happened, and by what did not happen. It is determined not only by presence but by absence. That is true of all sports, of course, but it is particularly true of soccer, the great game of scarcity.For much the same reasons that crossing has fallen from favor, so too has the idea of shooting from distance. Progressive coaches — either for aesthetic or for algorithmic reasons — encourage their players to wait until they have a heightened chance of scoring before actually shooting; as with headed goals, the number scored from outside the box is falling starkly, too.That, though, has had an unintended consequence. A team that knows its opponent really does not want to shoot from distance has no incentive to break its defensive line. There is no pressing need to close down the midfielder with the ball at their feet 25 yards from goal. They are not going to shoot, because the odds of scoring are low.And yet, by not shooting, the odds of finding the high-percentage chance are reduced, too. The defensive line does not break, so the gap — the slight misstep, the channel that briefly opens in the moment of transition from one state to another — does not come. Instead, the defense can dig into its trench, challenging the attack to score the perfect goal. It is not just the act of scoring from range that has diminished, it is the threat of it, too.The aerial game is one of threats, and possibility. Eliminating it would inherently change the game.Rob Carr/Getty ImagesThe same would be true of a soccer devoid of heading. It is not just that the way corners and free kicks are defended would be changed beyond recognition — no more crowding as many bodies as possible in or near the box — but the way that fullbacks deal with wide players, the positions that defensive lines take on the field, the whole structure of the game.Those changes, in the sense of soccer as a sporting spectacle, are unlikely to be positive. Players may not head the ball as much as they used to, now, but they know they might have to head the ball just as much as their predecessors from a less civilized era. They cannot discount it, so they have to behave in such a way as to counteract it. The threat itself has value. Soccer is defined, still, by all the crosses that do not come.Removing that — either by edict or by lost habit — would have the effect of removing possibility from the game. It would reduce the theoretical options available to an attacking team, and in doing so it would make the sport more predictable, more one-dimensional. It would tilt the balance in favor of those who seeks to destroy, rather than those who try to create. Clough did not quite have it right. Soccer has always been a sport of air, just as much as earth.If heading is found — as seems likely — to endanger the long-term health of the players, of course, then that will have to change, and it would only be right to do so. No spectacle is worth such a terrible cost to those who provide it. The gains would outweigh the losses, a millionfold. But that is not the same as saying that nothing would be lost.The Great UnknownSpain led England with 10 minutes remaining on Wednesday and was out of the Euros within an hour.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe end, for Spain, will always lead back to the start. It was only a couple of weeks before the start of the European Championship when Jennifer Hermoso, the country’s most reliable source of cutting edge, was ruled out of the tournament with a knee injury. It was only a couple of days before everything began that Spain lost Alexia Putellas, the game’s finest player, too.Those are the mitigating circumstances in which Spain’s campaign at Euro 2022 will — and should — be judged, making its quarterfinal exit to the host, England, on Wednesday night somewhere in the region of a par finish for a nation stripped of two of its best players. Regret at what might have been should outweigh disappointment at what came to pass.The reward for succeeding in this tournament, as well as the garlands and the trophy and all of that business, will, most likely, take the shape of considerable pressure at next year’s World Cup; the country that triumphs in the next week will be expected to meet, and perhaps overcome, the challenge posed by the United States and Canada, the game’s reigning powers.Spain will be spared that, at least. And yet it should not be discounted: Despite its reduced horizons, it came within six minutes of dislodging England from a tournament it is hosting, after all. Should Hermoso be fit this time next year — or Amaiur Sarriegi have blossomed sufficiently that Hermoso’s presence is not missed — and Putellas, in particular, have recovered in time, it is not especially difficult to imagine a world in which this week was not an end at all.The emergence of players like Amaiur Sarriegi, 21, will give Spain hope ahead of next year’s World Cup.Bernadett Szabo/ReutersThe Expanding MiddleIn the space of, by a conservative estimate, 30 seconds, the Netherlands might have gone out of the European Championship three times. Had Daphne van Domselaar, the Dutch goalkeeper, reacted infinitesimally more slowly; had Ramona Bachmann of Switzerland made a slightly different choice; had the ball rolled this way and not that, the Netherlands, the reigning champion, might have fallen.The temptation, within any major tournament, is to examine the likely contenders in search of some broader theme, some sweeping narrative. As a rule, it is just below the surface that the tides and the currents are most apparent.So it is with Euro 2022. One of the game’s established powers will win it — England or France or Sweden or Germany — and claim primacy among the continent’s elite, for the time being at least. More significant, though, may be what is happening below them. Belgium and Austria, denizens of the second tier, both made the quarterfinals. Though it ended ultimately in collapse, there was a moment when it appeared a genuine possibility that Switzerland might join them.The Netherlands and Switzerland were closer than expected.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat feels like the calling card of this tournament, more than anything else. That the level of the finest teams in Europe, the ones with abundant investment and industrialized development programs, is screaming skyward has been well telegraphed and amply documented.That the continent’s middle class is expanding is easier to overlook, but it is no less important. Women’s soccer — like men’s soccer — should not just be the preserve of populous and wealthy nations. Strength in these matters always comes from depth. It is not just how high the elite can soar that makes games entertaining and tournaments compelling, but how broad the challenges they face along the way.CorrespondenceAn oldie but a goodie from Alfons Sola this week. “Have you ever thought about just calling it football and stop pretending like it’s soccer?” he wrote, despite (or possibly because of) spending five years living in New Jersey. “We all know calling it soccer is some kind of strange situation that exists in the United States, right?”Well, yes and no, Alfons. In England, for example, there is a venerable magazine called World Soccer. Many people start their Saturdays watching a show called Soccer A.M. If they choose to do so, they can then follow all of the day’s action on a program called Soccer Saturday.I often wonder whether their presenters are told quite as often as I am that the term soccer is an American abomination. Or, for that matter, whether someone like Matt Busby, the legendary manager of Manchester United, was met with sound and fury when he had the nerve to call his autobiography ‘Soccer At The Top’.Forgive me if we are traipsing down a familiar path, but as far as I know, “football” and “soccer” were largely interchangeable in England until some vague point in the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s. Quite what changed to make people quite so angry about the very sight of one of those words, I’m not sure, but I’m going to guess it had something to do with increased American attention on the sport.Regardless, the furor over it has always struck me as odd (especially when we should be far more aggravated by the fact that the word is not, as America believes, “furor” but “furore”). Did you know the Italians call it calcio, like the thing you get in milk? That doesn’t even make any sense. More

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    Report Questions Links Between Manchester, the City, and Manchester City

    A real estate joint venture has been profitable for the soccer club’s Gulf owners, researchers contend, but possibly less so for its English hometown.MANCHESTER, England — In the 14 years since an investment vehicle linked to the state of Abu Dhabi bought Manchester City, the emirate’s wealth has transformed the soccer club from a Premier League also-ran into a serial domestic champion and one of the sport’s global powers.The breadth of that investment, though, stretches far beyond the confines of the club’s Etihad Stadium, according to a report published Thursday by researchers in England. In it, the report’s authors said the club’s owners have benefited from what they called a “sweetheart deal” with local lawmakers that allowed them to buy vast tracts of public land in Manchester at substantially reduced prices.The 65-page report, published by academics at the University of Sheffield, found that Manchester Life, a joint development venture between the Manchester City Council and the Abu Dhabi United Group — a private equity company owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan, the deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and the brother of the country’s president — has resulted in a “transfer of public wealth into private hands that is difficult to justify as prudent.”A Manchester City Council spokesman disputed the report’s conclusions in a statement.“Land was valued by independent experts, using the nationally accepted ‘red book’ valuation benchmark, and we got the best overall deal we could for each site at a time when there was very little market interest in the area,” the city’s statement said, adding, “These were always envisaged as longer-term arrangements — the Council is due to receive several million pounds in this financial year through the first such payments.”Manchester has been held up, in recent years, as a standard-bearer for the regeneration of Britain’s cities, overhauling years of postindustrial decline to recast its downtown as dynamic and desirable. Its construction and property boom has been outpaced only by London; by some metrics, it is England’s fastest-growing city.Manchester City’s ownership group has been central to that, investing millions of dollars in the deprived areas in the immediate vicinity of the stadium that bears the name of the U.A.E.’s state-backed airline, Etihad. When the Manchester Life venture was launched in 2014, six years after the group bought the soccer team, it was designed to extend that investment to Ancoats, a district sandwiched between the stadium and Manchester’s city center.The Etihad Stadium in Manchester bears the name of the U.A.E.’s state-backed airline.Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty ImagesThe researchers claim, though, that A.D.U.G. did rather better out of the deal than its partner. They found that nine sites in the Ancoats district had been sold to holding companies registered in the offshore tax haven of Jersey — but ultimately owned by the investment vehicle — at prices below the comparable market value of similar sites.The Manchester City Council insisted that each of the deals — which granted the United Group’s holding companies leases on the properties stretching for 999 years — told the researchers that all of the proposals “achieved best consideration.” Yet despite a chronic homelessness problem in the city, the developers were excused from meeting commitments on including affordable housing by planning officers who decreed there was enough supply in the area to meet demand, the report found.The report also concluded that the “traceable rental and sales income streams” from the 1,468 homes built on the sites so far “flow to Abu Dhabi interests only.” Although the Manchester City Council claims to have a revenue-sharing arrangement with its partners, the researchers said they had found “no income from the Manchester Life investment in the council’s accounts.”Though the management company that oversees the developments booked 10.1 million pounds of rental income in 2021 (just over $12 million), the researchers found that because its ultimate owner is a holding company based in Jersey, it paid only 4,000 pounds in corporation taxes.“Our assessment of the Manchester Life development is that Manchester City Council ‘sold the family silver too cheap,’” the researchers concluded.That is particularly damaging, they said, in light of the “reputational risks” for lawmakers in a British city becoming sufficiently entwined with a group backed by the elite of an autocratic state, one described by Amnesty International as one of the “most brutal police states in the Middle East.” In recent years, countries like Russia, China, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have all been accused of using money and influence, in sports in particular, as a way to “wash” their reputations. But investments in property and other ventures, and the people that enable them, also have drawn scrutiny.“Longer-term, it raises questions about what values, and whose values, the city represents,” the researchers wrote of the land deals approved by the Manchester council, adding: “This is important because Manchester is heralded as an urban regeneration model that other authorities should follow, but if that model is built upon attracting developers in the short term by selling access to its assets at a discount, then that may not be a sound and sustainable model for others.” More

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    Uwe Seeler, One of Germany’s Greatest Soccer Players, Dies at 85

    He led West Germany to the 1966 World Cup, but his teams never won a title. Pele included him on his list of the world’s premier living players.Uwe Seeler, who led West Germany to the 1966 World Cup final as captain of the national team, has died. He was 85.Christian Pletz, a spokesman for Hamburger SV, the club Seeler played for from 1953 to 1972, said on Thursday that Seeler’s family had confirmed the death. The cause was not given. A local newspaper in Norderstedt, north of Hamburg, said he died at his home in that city.Regarded as one of the best German players of all time, Seeler was famous for his overhead kicks and his ability to score goals from the unlikeliest of angles.He was also known for his humility and fairness, and respected for his unwavering loyalty to his hometown club. He received offers from clubs in Spain and Italy, most notably a huge offer from Inter Milan in 1961, but he opted to stay with Hamburg.Seeler scored 445 goals in 519 appearances for Hamburg in the Oberliga and Bundesliga leagues. He remains the team’s all-time high scorer in the Bundesliga, the top league in Germany, with 137 goals.Hamburg, which had been the only remaining team to have played every season in the Bundesliga since the league’s formation in 1963, was relegated to the second division in 2018.Seeler scored 43 goals in 72 games for West Germany, which was the runner-up to England in the 1966 World Cup and won a third-place medal four years later in Mexico. He was a member of the German team for 16 years.“While I was at four World Cups, I’d have liked to have won the title once,” he said. “I didn’t have the luck.”“Still,” he added, “everything was wonderful. I regret nothing.”He was voted German soccer player of the year in 1960, 1964 and 1970.Pele, the Brazilian soccer great, included Seeler in his list of the world’s greatest living players in 2004.“His handling of the ball was perfect, his shot precise, and what really amazed me was his ability to head the ball,” Pele said.In a special supplement to celebrate Seeler’s 80th birthday in 2016, the Hamburg club wrote: “If Uwe Seeler laced up his boots, then the opposing goalkeeper could dress up warmly and preferably put on a second pair of gloves, because Seeler scored from everywhere and in every possible way. Whether overhead kicks, flying headers, shots from distance, volleys, lobs, opportunist strikes — he always found a way to get the ball over the line.”Seeler won the German championship in 1960 and the German Cup in 1963 with Hamburg, but he also endured heartbreak with near misses in the European Cup and the European Cup Winners’ Cup. Hamburg lost to Barcelona in the European Cup semifinals in 1961 and to Milan in the Cup Winners’ Cup final in 1968.Seeler, who was born in Hamburg on Nov. 5, 1936, suffered repeated health setbacks in recent years. In May 2020 he underwent an operation to repair a broken hip after a bad fall at home. He lost his hearing in his right ear and had problems with balance after a car accident in 2010. He also had a pacemaker fitted and had to have a tumor removed from his shoulder, the news agency DPA reported.Seeler and his wife, Ilka, were married for more than 60 years. They had three daughters. His grandson Levin Öztunali plays for the Bundesliga club Union Berlin. Seeler’s older brother, Dieter, also played for Hamburg. His father, Erwin, worked on a barge in Hamburg’s port and was also known for playing soccer in that city.Complete information on survivors was not immediately available. More

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    The Problem in Coaching Style Without Substance

    England’s 8-0 thrashing of Norway was a stunning triumph. But it also exposed a failure of leadership.As the changing room door closed behind them, England’s players could not help but laugh. They were halfway through what was, in theory, the most arduous challenge awaiting them in the group stage of Euro 2022. They were facing a Norway team sprinkled with representatives of Lyon and Barcelona, Chelsea and Manchester City, the powerhouses of the women’s game.And they had, in the space of a single half, scored six goals.It was not a cruel laughter, or a mocking one. It was, instead, a disbelieving laughter, a giddy laughter. The entire experience seemed somewhat surreal to many of the players, as if there had been some sort of glitch in the code. Once they had regained some measure of composure, the first question many asked was simple:What had just happened?Routs happen, of course. It has not been long since Sarina Wiegman’s England scored 20 goals in a single game against Latvia. It has been only three years since the United States did its bit for the talking-point business by beating Thailand, 13-0, at the World Cup, giving rise to at least a week of discussion on the relative ethical merits of celebrating goals in a blowout.Routs happen both in men’s and women’s soccer, and in both cases they generally prompt further interrogation about the health of the sport. In the men’s game, as a rule, that focuses on the yawning financial chasm that has spirited the elite club sides away from their opponents. In the women’s, it is more likely to emphasize the difference in resources that separate richer nations and poorer ones.Beth Mead, England’s hat-trick heroine.Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesEngland’s drubbing of Norway, though, did not fit that pattern. Norway does not, of course, boast a handful of impossibly wealthy clubs pouring money into their women’s sides. It is not home to one of the strongest leagues in the world, staffed now by some of the best players on the planet. It does not, on a very basic level, possess as many human beings as England. Its talent pool, as a result, is naturally smaller.But Norway is not Latvia, and it is not Thailand. Its developmental structures have been good enough to produce Ada Hegerberg, gradually reasserting her claim to being one of the world’s best players; and Caroline Graham Hansen, a vital cog in Barcelona’s attack; and Chelsea’s Guro Reiten; and Julie Blakstad, a star in the making; and Maren Mjelde and Maria Thorisdottir, two of the elite players who have been tempted to England by the booming Women’s Super League.This was not a humiliation that could be cleanly attributed to structural inequality, a defeat that could be dressed up as a learning experience, the inevitable denouement of vastly superior firepower. It was not inevitable at all, in fact. It was, in many ways, self-inflicted.What was most striking, during that surreal first half in which England’s delight metamorphosed first into euphoria and then a dizzying, incredulous frenzy, was the precision of Wiegman’s team’s ruthlessness. It would not be quite right to suggest that England scored the same goal eight times. But it would not be entirely wrong, either.The plan was simple. Ellen White, the central striker, would drop deep, drawing with her one of Norway’s two central defenders, neither of whom is blessed with what might be termed searing pace. Beth Mead, helped by the relative inexperience of Blakstad, her direct opponent, would fill the deserted channel. With a single pass, either from midfield or from Lucy Bronze, the right back, Norway’s penalty area unfurled in front of her.Maria Thorisdottir got an up-close look at several of England’s goals.Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMartin Sjogren, Norway’s coach, would later suggest that it was England’s first goal, a rather soft penalty, that had unsettled his team. “We began to crack a little and made some poor decisions,” he said. There is some truth in that. Thorisdottir, having conceded the penalty, seemed to freeze, unsure of her every touch, her every move, as if haunted by her error.Sjogren’s claim is not, though, the whole truth. To attribute Norway’s collapse exclusively to individual mistakes is, at heart, to confuse symptom with cause. The problem, the one that caused Sjogren’s side to bend and break so spectacularly, was not an isolated series of unrelated incidents but a systemic shortcoming. England showed its hand, and its opponent failed miserably to adapt.Part of the responsibility for that lies with the players, of course. Mjelde and Thorisdottir, certainly, are experienced enough to have identified their team’s weak point and reacted accordingly: sitting just a little deeper, perhaps, or refusing to be coaxed out of their line by White’s movement, or drawing Blakstad in closer for greater protection.But a vast majority of it falls on the shoulders of Sjogren himself. A sequence of individual errors could be evidence of some great psychological failing, but it is distinctly more likely to be proof of a flaw in a team’s strategy. High-caliber players make consistently poor choices only when they are faced with limited options. And that, ultimately, is down to the coach.The caliber of player in women’s soccer, particularly in Europe, has risen steeply in recent years. The slick, technical style that has proliferated at this summer’s European Championship has offered ample proof of that. It is hard to make the argument, though, that the quality of coach has tracked quite the same trajectory.Or, perhaps better, the type of coach. There has long been an emphasis on player development in the women’s game, for wholly obvious, entirely understandable and broadly admirable reasons. It is that focus that has allowed the game to foster a whole galaxy of emergent stars — Vivianne Miedema and Delphine Cascarino and Lauren Hemp — and help them flourish.Ellen White scored two of England’s eight goals on Monday.Damien Meyer/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut development coaching is a different skill, a different art, from what might be termed results coaching: The first is concerned with process, after all, and the second with outcome. It is hard not to wonder if a coach more focused on the latter might have acted more swiftly to staunch Norway’s bleeding, or even to shut the game down entirely, accepting a 3-0 defeat as the price to pay to avoid embarrassment.It is that which may prove the decisive factor at the Euros over the next two weeks. Most of the genuine contenders for the trophy — England, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany and, at the outside, Spain — have an abundance of attacking talent. Generating players who can decide games is where women’s soccer, like men’s, now pumps most of its resources.It is possible, of course, that the tournament’s eventual champion will simply be the team with the greatest weight of sheer, glimmering ability, the one most capable of expressing its own brilliance, the one that shines brightest. It is more likely, though, that the team left standing will be the one that is best prepared and most willing to make everyone else look dull.Not as Old as They LookKalidou Koulibaly is trading Napoli blue for Chelsea blue.Massimo Pinca/ReutersReceived wisdom would have it that Chelsea’s decision to spend $40 million on Kalidou Koulibaly is a bad idea. He is already 31, and by the time his contract at Stamford Bridge comes to an end, he will be 34. Even if he has proved a wise investment, there is precious little prospect of the club’s being able to recover any of its costs.The general rule of thumb, when it comes to accepted best practice in soccer, is that well-run teams buy young and, with a degree of cold-eyed dispassion, cull the old. Chelsea’s decision to commit so much money to a veteran central defender like Koulibaly, by those standards, suggests that the club’s new owner and sporting director, Todd Boehly, has not quite internalized the game’s abiding logic.That logic, though, feels somewhat outdated. The idea that players are old — and therefore worthless — as soon as they hit their early 30s dates to an era before the sport took things like nutrition seriously, when players did not have personal osteopaths, when their every move, from their early teens, was not governed by the diktats of sports science.It may well be, in fact, that being 31 today has very little in common with being 31 in 2010, or being 31 in 2000. Koulibaly — his quality perhaps slightly underestimated by the fact that he has spent the last eight years of his career in Italy — could yet have six or seven years of elite performance in him.It should be noted that Thiago Silva, the player with whom he will partner at Stamford Bridge, arrived at Chelsea a couple of years ago, at age 35, for what many assumed was a swan song. It has gone rather better than that. Perhaps, for elite players, the clock ticks a little more slowly now.An Update on BarcelonaLast week, you may remember, Barcelona was busily trying to persuade Frenkie de Jong — a player who does not appear to be in any desperate rush to leave Camp Nou — that the only way that he might be allowed to stay is by agreeing to a new, reduced contract.This week, you will be delighted to know, the very same Barcelona has spent somewhere in the region of $65 million to acquire Raphinha from Leeds United, and then granted Ousmane Dembélé — a player who excels in exactly the same position as the Brazilian — a new two-year contract.Joan Laporta and Ousmane Dembélé signing away just a little more of Barcelona’s future.Enric Fontcuberta/EPA, via ShutterstockThese two Barcelonas — the one that needs its current squad to take pay cuts to stay and the one that can lavish a vast sum on new contracts — can exist because the club’s president, Joan Laporta, has hit upon the brilliant strategy of selling tomorrow to pay for today. Barcelona’s parlous finances mean it needs to raise $3 for every $1 it spends. Laporta has accomplished this by selling a portion of its future broadcast income. It may yet cash in some of its future revenue from hosting major events, too.Of the many and varied problems with this approach, perhaps the most galling is that Barcelona is risking its long-term health for players that it does not really need. This is a club, after all, whose very identity is rooted in its ability to nurture homegrown talent.For all its troubles, it continues to do just that. In Gavi and Pedri — a cheap signing, rather than an academy product, admittedly — it is already in possession of a midfield that will last a decade. Ansu Fati, should his injury issues abate, is as bright an attacking prospect as there is in world soccer.And yet still, Barcelona remains addicted to short-term fixes, to stocking its bloated wage bill with players who are, if far from mediocre, hardly the sort worth risking everything. Andreas Christensen, Franck Kessié and Raphinha are all fine players. They all make Barcelona stronger. But are they worth gambling with tomorrow? Come to that, is anyone? Is the idea of a couple of trophy-less years nurturing a new generation so unpalatable to the club’s board and its fans that it is compelled to spend money it does not have?That’s all for this week. As ever, all thoughts, questions, ideas or responses are welcome at askrory@nytimes.com, and some of them are welcome on Twitter, too. And remember: If you’re in the general vicinity of Britain, you are four days away from the last ever Set Piece Menu*, so feel free to come along and wave us off/make sure we’re finishing.Have a great weekend,Rory*Unless we all get fired More