Raphael Stevens

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    New Heights and Old Grudges as Turkey Crowns Its Champion

    Trabzonspor claimed the title almost two weeks ago. Its team, and its fans, aren’t done celebrating.Asked why her team’s next home game on Sunday is being played in Istanbul instead of in its usual setting, the official from the Turkish club Trabzonspor said the turf at the team’s Senol Günes Stadium had been damaged after — in her words — “some people got on the field in our last match.”Her description was entirely accurate, and yet her words did not quite do justice to the significance and scale of what took place on the field, and beyond, on April 30 in Trabzon. The wait for a Turkish championship, nearly four decades in total (or far less, depending on who is doing the counting), was too much for some to contain themselves.Hundreds of fans stormed the field even before the final whistle of Trabzonspor’s Turkish Super League game with Antalyaspor. Hundreds became thousands soon after that, when Trabzonspor officially secured the point it needed to ensure it would become Turkish champion for the first time since 1984.Players were engulfed by the crush. Delirious fans lifted others on their shoulders or lit flares. Soon, smoke shrouded the arena, where barely a patch of turf was visible. Outside, the crowd was even bigger, the referee’s whistle seemingly the cue for pretty much all of Trabzon’s 800,000 or so residents to flood the streets of this city 600 miles north east of Istanbul to participate in a celebration — images of which were beamed around the world — late into the night.And that outpouring came even before the official celebration and the trophy presentation. That will come on Saturday, when a delegation from the Turkish soccer federation will travel to Trabzon, an ancient city on the south coast of the Black Sea, to deliver a title that had, for so long, seemed as if it would never materialize. There were near misses, late-season implosions, and then a bitter, decade-long and still unresolved pursuit for a championship that Trabzonspor continues to claim but which remains, to this day, in the trophy cabinet of its bitter rival Fenerbahce even though the Istanbul team was found to have been at the center of a match-fixing scandal that year.Trabzonspor’s players clinched the title with three games left in the season.Str/EPA, via ShutterstockFor Trabzonspor, getting its hands on the championship trophy at last will bring some sort of closure for a team that has for long cast itself as an outsider, and a victim of the power wielded by the three Istanbul clubs — Besiktas, Fenerbahce and Galatasary — that have long dominated Turkish soccer.“It became almost an expectation they would get close and then pretty much guarantee it would all fall to pieces,” said Emre Sarigul, a co-founder of Turkish Football, the largest English-language website solely devoted to Turkish soccer. “The fans felt they are cursed and everyone was conspiring against them.”Sometimes the tensions have boiled over, not in wild celebration but in angst and anger. Like the time in 2015 when club officials — incensed at the award of a late penalty kick against Trabzonspor — locked a referee inside the stadium for hours and refused to release him. It required the intervention of Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to free him.Trabzon, its much loved soccer club and those who follow it have long considered themselves a community apart from the dominant teams of Istanbul, where the three giants have combined to win 57 of Turkey’s 66 national championships. That has fostered not only a type of siege mentality but also frequent bouts of bad blood.The pitch invasion after Trabzonspor’s title was secure left the field invisible, and the air filled with smoke.Str/EPA, via ShutterstockThe fiercest enmity has been reserved toward Fenerbahce, a domestic powerhouse whose influence spreads well beyond the soccer field. Games between the teams have frequently been marred by crowd disturbances — to be fair, not uncommon events at the top of Turkish soccer — but the relationship plumbed new depths in 2015 when a bus carrying the Fenerbahce team came under attack as it traversed a steep mountain road on its way to the Trabzon airport after a game nearby. Shots were fired through its windshield, wounding the driver.He survived, and the bus did not, thankfully, plunge off a mountain — but the attackers have never been identified, and in the febrile conspiracy- world inhabited by Turkish soccer, blame for the incident continues to center on the intensity of the soccer rivalry.Time has not softened the ill feelings. As Trabzonspor basks in continued citywide celebrations, the sense of bitterness among many of the millions of followers of Fenerbahce appears almost as strong. That much was abundantly clear in a news conference given by Fenerbahce’s president, Ali Koc, in the aftermath of Trabzonspor’s triumph. Koc railed against the new Turkish champion, saying it had benefited from curious refereeing appointments (claims that seem to be made by all Turkish teams about all of their opponents all of the time). He then claimed the team’s decision to relocate its final home game to Istanbul was an act of provocation; mocked Trabzonspor’s claim on the controversial 2011 championship; and even resurrected the bus shooting, which he argued is still commemorated by Trabzonspor fans, including on a banner at a match this season. “While the incident in 2015 is engraved in our memories,” Koc said, “we will not accept them making a mockery by reflecting it on a banner.”Fenerbahce will probably finish second to Trabzonspor. But it isn’t going quietly.Murad Sezer/ReutersBesting Fenerbache, which is second in the league table, undoubtedly has made this year’s title sweeter for Trabzonspor. The team has a significant following in Istanbul, Turkey’s economic powerhouse, which has only grown larger as Trabzon’s own population has declined. But the ardor of the support for the local team remains as strong as ever. That was clear in the celebrations, which have continued for more than a week with gatherings, concerts and rallies. And not only in Turkey: While not of the scale of the mayhem that ensued back home, impromptu celebrations also took place in cities as far away as Berlin, Munich and London.“Pretty much everyone in the city and the Trabzon region by and large supports Trabzonspor — it has become their identity,” said Sarigul, adding that those who have left in search of opportunities remain connected to the place that will always be home. They even have a phrase for the feeling: “Everywhere is Trabzon to us.”On Saturday, after decades of waiting, after decades of suffering, those fans — wherever they may be — will all get another chance to celebrate. Again.Yasin Akgul/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Super League HangoverIt has been just over a year since European soccer was almost torn apart by a group of top clubs and their (quickly abandoned) plans for the Super League. The group of 12 founders were branded the dirty dozen by Aleksander Ceferin, the UEFA president, for their effort to create a closed league that would have generated huge wealth for them at the expense of the hundreds of small- and medium-sized clubs that make up the continent’s soccer pyramid. When their plot collapsed almost the moment it was exposed to the light, though, Ceferin and the other leaders of European soccer were presented with the space they needed to follow through on their strong rhetoric about resetting the balance of power in the sport.This week we found out just what the post-Super League world will look like, and in many ways it doesn’t look much different to the status quo: The biggest clubs — and those that have caught up to them thanks to the wealth of their owners — are likely to remain just as dominant in the decade ahead.This week’s UEFA congress produced the rarest of soccer moments: Gianni Infantino and Aleksander Ceferin together. And smiling. Christian Bruna/EPA, via ShutterstockAt a meeting in sun-dappled Vienna this week, the framework for the future of the Champions League was finally approved. And after months of wrangling, the structure of what will be a redesigned 36-team competition starting in 2024 looks much the same as it did when it was first proposed in the days before the Super League teams — led by, among others, this season’s finalists Real Madrid and Liverpool — tried their failed putsch.Under pressure from the biggest leagues, who complained of too many matches, the number of group stage games was reduced to eight from a proposed 10. And in the other notable change, two of the extra four places in the event will not now go to clubs with historically strong track records in European competition but who failed to qualify on merit.What does it all mean? Well, since the extra places have been earmarked for the leagues with the best record in Europe the previous season, that most likely means even more Champions League spots for teams from the biggest, richest and most powerful league of them all: the Premier League. It’s also a reminder that for all their fighting and sniping and suing, UEFA and the dirty dozen need one another more than they care to admit. It is the big clubs, after all, who drive the billion-dollar television contracts, the multimillion-dollar sponsorship deals, the big ratings for all those midweek classics in UEFA’s showcase competition.But it also suggests European soccer leaders have blown their big chance, and maybe their best chance in years, to recalibrate European soccer in ways that would give more teams more chances to stand on level ground with the biggest and richest clubs, and break up what looks like a stratifying elite.Soccer’s Agent ProblemMino Raiola’s final deal was a doozy.Valery Hache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOn its face, Manchester City’s signing of Erling Haaland looked to be a bargain: The release clause City paid in Haaland’s Dortmund contract (reportedly 60 million euros, or just over $62.5 million) was probably less than half his value on a truly open market, and well within the means of what is arguably the richest team in the world.But look a little closer at the associated costs of the deal, and things suddenly become a lot murkier, and a lot more expensive. According to multiple news reports, City also paid fees to intermediaries involved in the deal, including an eight-figure payout to Haaland’s father for acting as a middleman, and about $40 million to the player’s agent, Mino Raiola. Those totals were comparable to the fee for Haaland himself. And City still has to pay Haaland, of course. The total price tag, when all the checks clear, should be well north of $250 million.Soccer has an agent problem. But FIFA, the world’s governing body, has been moving to resolve it. The announcement of Haaland’s move to Manchester came as FIFA appeared set to finally adopt major revisions to its regulations on agents, changes that were in many ways prompted by disclosures that Raiola, who died earlier this month as the pursuit of Haaland neared its endgame, received almost half the then world-record fee of $108 million that Manchester United paid Juventus in 2017 to acquire one of his other clients, Paul Pogba.What impact would the FIFA regulations have had on the Haaland deal? For starters, Haaland’s father would not have been able to receive a fee (at least officially), since the new rules allow for commissions to be paid only to licensed representatives. But the rules changes go far beyond that. Currently an agent can represent all three sides in a deal — player, buying team and selling club — and collect a piece of the deal from each. Under the new rules, that would no longer be permitted. Caps on commissions are also part of the revised regulations, and would top out at closer to 10 percent than the nearly 50 percent Raiola and others have pocketed in the past.The changes still would have allowed the agents to collect about $20 million in a deal as rich as Haaland’s — far less than the actual sums, but still a healthy return, and more than the $3 million the clubs that trained Haaland in his youth can expect. FIFA’s training compensation is capped at 5 percent.Of course, that’s if the reforms ever come into force. A group of agents is threatening legal action to block them.A Question for the AmbassadorPerhaps only a sporting icon with the star power of Lionel Messi could pull off the neat trick of providing his services to not one but two Gulf states without attracting the type of criticism routinely heaped on others who do the same.Having signed for Qatar-owned Paris St.-Germain last summer, Messi has now agreed to serve as an ambassador for Saudi Arabia. This week, he was welcomed by the kingdom’s minister of tourism, and within hours he had shared a sponsored post showing him relaxing on a boat in the Red Sea with his 326 million followers on Instagram. #VisitSaudi, read the hashtag.In doing so, Messi became the latest sports figure to accept the huge checks being doled out by Saudi Arabia’s leaders as part of a global push to change perceptions of the country, a process many have labeled sportswashing. But it also put Messi, not known for offering his views on matters of geopolitical importance, in quite the uncomfortable spot. Another one of the soccer star’s ambassadorial posts is with UNICEF, the United Nations-backed fund that provides humanitarian aid for children, which in March reported that at least 10,000 Yemeni children have been killed or injured since the start of the war launched by a Saudi coalition in 2015.Rory’s Back Next WeekThat’s all for this week, when Rory will return from a brief vacation and wrest back control of the newsletter. Until then, get in touch at askrory@nytimes.com with hints, tips, complaints or to share your favorite Turkish soccer conspiracies (5,000 words or less on those emails, please).Have a great weekend. More

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    How Haaland’s Advisers Worked the System on the Way to Man City

    A carefully crafted strategy for a young striker’s career paid off handsomely for him and his agents. But will everyone get what they want out of the deal?A few days before last summer’s transfer window drew to a close, a handful of Manchester City’s most senior executives gathered in a conference room at the club’s sprawling campus to pick through what had gone right, and what had gone wrong, over the previous couple of months.Though City, the Premier League champion, had succeeded in persuading Aston Villa to relinquish Jack Grealish, the impish playmaker who had emerged as England’s breakout star during the European Championship — making him the most expensive player in English history in the process — it had failed to land its other priority target, the Tottenham striker Harry Kane.What had always been a complex, fraught pursuit had descended, instead, into a squabble over who was to blame. Kane had, at one point, refused to train with Tottenham, the club he supported as a child, in the hope of forcing Spurs’ hand, but his act of brinkmanship failed. Tottenham claimed City had failed to present an offer that might act as a starting point for negotiation.That afternoon, City’s executives reflected on their strategy, contemplated why a deal had not materialized and considered how they would proceed. As the meeting wound up and his colleagues stood to leave, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, the club’s chairman, made one final remark. It amounted to only two words, an ambition and an instruction. “Erling Haaland,” he said.A little more than nine months later, that objective has been achieved. On Tuesday afternoon, City confirmed it had reached an “agreement in principle” with Haaland’s current club, the German side Borussia Dortmund, to acquire the striker, one of the two most coveted forwards in world soccer this summer — the scorer of 85 goals in 88 games for Dortmund, and regarded alongside Kylian Mbappé as one of the twin standard-bearers for soccer’s first post-Messi, post-Ronaldo generation.In reality, of course, it had not taken nine months to strike any sort of agreement with Dortmund. Haaland’s contract contained a buyout clause, somewhere in the region of $75 million, that gave Dortmund little to no say over where he might play next season. All City, all anyone, had to do was to inform Dortmund of an intention to pay it. Haaland’s employer was in no position to haggle.The Manchester City chairman, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, with the club’s chief executive, Ferran Soriano.Phil Noble/ReutersFar more convoluted was the process of persuading Haaland that City was the correct next step in his meticulously planned career. Haaland, 21, might have an emotional bond to the club: His father, Alfie, played for City at the turn of the century, and though his son has no memory of his time in Manchester, he told the Times in 2019 that he has some affection for all his former teams.But, as City would have known, there has been precious little room for romance in Erling Haaland’s inexorable rise. Every stage of his journey has been mapped out with surgical — possibly cynical — precision by his twin sherpas: his longstanding representative, Mino Raiola, the divisive Dutch-Italian agent who died last month; and his father.When Haaland left Norway as a teenager, he rejected the overtures of the English and German teams pursuing him in favor of Austria’s Red Bull Salzburg, home to both a reliable production line of talent for Europe’s major leagues and the prospect of matches in the Champions League. When he left Salzburg, it was not for England but for Dortmund, a club with a track record of developing and selling players and a willingness to set a reasonable buyout clause.That meant, of course, that not only was Haaland recession-proof — $75 million is, by modern standards, pretty good value for a player who appears to have been designed and engineered to score as many goals as possible — but that, when the inevitable auction started, the bar would not be who could pay Dortmund the most, but who could put together the most attractive package for the player and his advisers.The agent Mino Raiola helped draw up Haaland’s carefully planned career path. Raiola died last month, only weeks before Haaland’s move to City was arranged.Valery Hache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTo ensure the best possible outcome, Raiola and Alfie Haaland traveled around to Europe’s superclubs, stoking interest and fanning flames. There were visits to Real Madrid and Barcelona. There were eyelashes fluttered in the vague direction of Chelsea and Manchester United. There was even, for a time, a flirtation with Bayern Munich.That, of course, was their job. It is exactly what Raiola, in particular, was paid to do. He did it with startling effectiveness: not only because current estimates suggest the deal, in total, will be worth somewhere north of $200 million, once Haaland’s salary and sundry fees to agents are taken into account, but because in the course of doing so he may have invented a whole new paradigm for how agents shape their players’ careers.Received wisdom, in soccer, has always had it that players should — to be blunt — always take the money, the big break, as soon as they can. It takes only one injury, after all, to explode the finest-laid plans; one summer’s passion may be an afterthought by the next. Clubs are fickle, and everything has an expiration date.Raiola overturned that for Haaland, preferring instead a policy of delayed gratification. He did not chase the eye-watering transfer fee — as he had done, perhaps, for another of his clients, Paul Pogba — but rather built his client’s appeal a little more slowly, gradually ensuring he was in a position not only to make the leap to one of Europe’s elite teams, but to do so in a way that favored the player (and his representatives) rather than the club that happened to own his contract at that point.City’s offer is the reward. It is not a move without its caveats: Manager Pep Guardiola has worked with some of the finest strikers of the modern era, but not always successfully. He has spent six years painstakingly fine-tuning his system at City, only to have to refit it completely to suit Haaland. Sometimes, though, soccer is a startlingly simple game. A player who scores lots of goals joining a team that creates lots of chances should really have only one outcome.Pep Guardiola has conquered England, but not Europe, with his Manchester City teams.Carl Recine/Action Images Via ReutersWhether it is the final reward, though, is a different matter. At roughly the same time City was preparing its announcement, Mbappé was busy being pictured having lunch in Madrid. His contract at Paris St.-Germain expires in a few weeks and despite an impossibly large offer to stay, he seems set to move to Real Madrid this summer. The financing of that deal will, most likely, dwarf what City has offered Haaland.This is the logical next step in the model that Raiola and the Haaland family has pioneered. It is a reflection of soccer’s financial reality. There is no price point at which City, or P.S.G., feel compelled to sell a player. That leaves only one option: running down a contract and stepping out on to the free market.That is the challenge that awaits City, somewhere down the line. It has won out, this time, by convincing Haaland — its first true, plug-and-play superstar, someone who will be thought of but never referred to as a franchise player — this was his best next step. The question, for a player whose career has been planned out so coolly, so ruthlessly, is whether it is also his last one. More

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    Erling Haaland and Manchester City Near a Deal

    City, which is nearing its fourth Premier League title in five years, confirmed that it had reached an agreement with Dortmund to acquire the 21-year-old striker.Manchester City has won the race to sign striker Erling Haaland, confirming Tuesday that it had reached an agreement to make the 21-year-old Norwegian goal-scoring machine the latest addition to a star-studded roster that is on the cusp of winning its fourth Premier League title in five years.“Manchester City can confirm that we have reached an agreement in principle with Borussia Dortmund for the transfer of striker Erling Haaland to the Club on 1st July 2022,” the team said in a curt statement on Tuesday. The club said it only needed to resolve contract terms with Haaland to make the deal official.Haaland’s departure this summer from Dortmund, the German team where he has spent the past two and a half seasons, had been widely expected. City outbid (or outmaneuvered) potential suitors like Real Madrid and Bayern Munich for Haaland, one of the world’s most sought-after young forwards.City and its rivals had been facing a June deadline to activate the release clause in Haaland’s Dortmund contract — said to be worth as much as 75 million euros, or just under $80 million. It still needs to agree to contract terms with Haaland, whose new salary is expected to make him one of the dozen or so highest-paid players in the world.Those figures are not an issue for Manchester City, which is bankrolled by the billionaire brother of the ruler of the United Arab Emirates and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to assemble one of the world’s most-talented squads. But the numbers most likely put Haaland out of reach of other teams, including Barcelona, which is mired in a financial crisis that led it to lose Lionel Messi for free last summer, and Bayern Munich, whose sporting director said recently that adding Haaland “doesn’t make any sense” for the perennial German champions since the team already employs a world-class striker in Robert Lewandowski.Closing the deal for Haaland this week will allow him to say farewell to Dortmund’s fans in the club’s final game of the season on Saturday, at home to Hertha Berlin.City currently leads Liverpool in the Premier League title race by 3 points with three games remaining, but it surely entered the chase for Haaland with an eye on finally winning the Champions League. The trophy has been the goal of City’s leadership for more than a decade; the club finally reached the final for the first time last season, losing to its London rival Chelsea, and then returned to the semifinals this season before being eliminated stunningly by Real Madrid last week.A prolific scorer who possesses a fearsome mix of size, speed and skill, Haaland, who turns 22 in July, has been ticketed for global stardom since his teens. The son of the former Premier League midfielder Alfie Haaland, Erling Haaland made his debut for his boyhood club, Norway’s Bryne FK, as a 15-year-old, and joined Molde a year later, signed by the former Manchester United star Ole Gunner Solskjaer, who was Molde’s manager at the time.Haaland made his first splash at Molde in Norway, where he scored his first professional goals as a 16-year-old.Svein Ove Ekornesvag/EPA, via ShutterstockBy 2018, he was at Red Bull Salzburg in Austria, where he scored 17 league goals in his only season and added eight more in his first five appearances in the Champions League. Dortmund scooped him up less than a year later, and he hit the ground running by scoring a hat trick in 23 minutes in his debut.Haaland has 61 goals in 65 Bundesliga games for Dortmund, and 15 more in three Champions League campaigns.Once the deal is completed, he would join Manchester City almost 22 years to the month after his father did the same. Alfie Haaland signed with City in June 2000, only weeks before Erling was born, but retired in 2003 after several injury-marred seasons in Manchester and one infamous foul at the hands of Manchester United’s Roy Keane.Rory Smith contributed reporting. More

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    Chelsea F.C. Says It Will Sell to Boehly’s U.S.-Led Group

    Chelsea, the Premier League soccer team whose sale was forced after the Russian oligarch who bankrolled its success was placed under crippling sanctions, will be bought by a consortium led by Todd Boehly, an American billionaire who is a part-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, the club said on Saturday.The price of 2.5 billion pounds, or $3.1 billion, would be the most ever paid for a team in any sport. The sale, one of the more unusual in modern sports history, still requires the approval of the British government, which imposed the sanctions on the club’s owner, Roman Abramovich, and froze his assets, including Chelsea, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.In a statement posted on its website early Saturday, Chelsea said the proceeds from the sale would be placed into a frozen British bank account, with the intention that all of the funds will eventually go to charitable causes, as Abramovich has promised.In addition to the sale price, Chelsea said, Boehly’s group had pledged to invest 1.75 billion pounds in the club, some of it for much-needed stadium renovations.Boehly’s group is being backed by the American investment firm Clearlake and also includes Hansjorg Wyss, a Swiss businessman, and Mark Walter, an American financier who serves as a co-owner and the chairman of the Dodgers.The decision capped two tumultuous months for Chelsea, its fans and Abramovich, who said on March 2 that he had reluctantly agreed to part with the team, just as Britain’s government was moving to impose restrictions on his fortune and his businesses.The sale process was accelerated once the government formally froze Abramovich’s assets, part of a wider set of sanctions imposed on a group of wealthy Russians with ties to Moscow after the war in Ukraine began. The government has called Abramovich a close ally of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin.Roman Abramovich has owned Chelsea since 2003.John Sibley/ReutersChelsea has been in a kind of limbo ever since, operating under a special license issued by the government, which comes with strict conditions that have severely affected its business. The team is currently unable to buy or sell players in the summer transfer market, nor can it sell tickets or merchandise to its supporters. Its spending has been severely restricted, affecting everything from the team’s travel to the printing and sale of programs.The restrictions, meant to ensure that no money flows to Abramovich, will only be lifted once the sale is completed.Chelsea, led by Thomas Tuchel, the German coach who secured the Champions League title within months of taking over at Stamford Bridge last year, has endured on-field difficulties as it tries to navigate its new reality. The results have been mixed: While Tuchel’s team currently is in third place in the Premier League, it was eliminated from the lucrative Champions League last month. Several players with expiring contracts have announced that they will leave at the end of the season, and until the sale is completed, Tuchel and the club have no way to replace them.Boehly’s group was given a week to close the deal after being chosen last week as the preferred bidder by the New York-based advisory firm Raine Group and Chelsea’s board members.The sale was nearing a conclusion last week when it seemed to be upended, after one of Britain’s richest men, Jim Ratcliffe, announced a bid that mirrored the offer from Boehly’s consortium, after the deadline had passed. On Wednesday, Ratcliffe, who had emphasized his British credentials when making his offer, said Raine had dismissed his bid but vowed to keep fighting to secure the team.Chelsea’s price tag compares with the £1.8 billion valuation ($2.3 billion) for its London rival Arsenal, in 2018, after its American benefactor, the businessman Stan Kroenke, became the sole owner of the club by buying out the 30 percent stake of another now-sanctioned Russian oligarch, Alisher Usmanov, for more than $700 million. Unlike Chelsea, Arsenal has a modern stadium and its finances have been stable.Britain’s Treasury will have to issue a separate license for the sale to go through, with specific clauses that include a requirement that none of the sale proceeds go to Abramovich.The buyers and Raine have discussed the possibility of the proceeds going to victims of the war in Ukraine, an idea that Abramovich raised when he said he would waive an enormous debt owed to him by the club. But it is unclear how such a transfer would work.Todd Boehly, the American who leads the group that has reached an agreement to buy Chelsea, was at the club’s match against Wolves on Saturday.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAbramovich invested nearly $2 billion of his personal funds during his 19-year tenure as owner, during which he covered losses of about $1 million a week as he recruited some of the best players in the world. The strategy was expensive but successful: Chelsea enjoyed the most successful period in its history, becoming a serial contender for domestic and international honors and winning five Premier League and two European Cups.If Boehly’s deal to buy the team goes through with the required approvals from the government and the Premier League, which also has to give its blessing to the sale, his group will have to figure out a way to maintain that successes while paring losses associated with the on-field success and also committing hundreds of millions of dollars to renovating Chelsea’s aging Stamford Bridge stadium, which with a capacity of just over 40,000 is far smaller than the arenas that play host to the Premier League’s biggest teams.Russia-Ukraine War: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 4Russia’s punishment of Finland. More

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    Andrea Pirlo Is Timeless

    With elite soccer increasingly driven by coaches and systems, Pirlo feels as if he belongs to another era. But can a classic ever go out of style?Officially, whenever Andrea Pirlo has watched soccer over the course of the last year or so, it has been for work, rather than merely for pleasure. It might be almost a year since his first foray into management was ended, abruptly and unceremoniously, by Juventus, but being a manager is less a job and more a lifestyle choice, like being a monk, or a double agent. It cannot be switched off.He does not watch passively, losing himself in the thrill of the game. Instead, he tries to distill from what he is seeing some idea, some concept, some notion that might come in useful somewhere down the line. His appetite for coaching remains undimmed by his experience in Turin; he will, he knows, return at some point. Everything is research, revision, for that moment. “Anything that might help me do my job,” he said.But while Pirlo is now a manager by trade, he remains every inch an aesthete by inclination. That does not come with an off button, either. And so, he admits, he finds it intensely difficult, if not impossible, to watch a game if it does not bring him pleasure. “I want to see teams doing something positive,” he said. “They can do it well, or not so well, but I want them to try. But if there is not something interesting to see, I find a new game to watch.”For more than a decade, Pirlo served as elite European soccer’s version of Petronius, the sport’s appointed arbiter of good taste. He came to embody élan and panache and easy, timeless style. He made the deep-lying playmaker the game’s must-have accessory, for a while, at least. He single-handedly popularized the Panenka. He wrote a soccer autobiography that should not have immediately been pulped.It is intriguing, then, to know quite what, in Pirlo’s mind, qualifies as “interesting.” It is, after all, only five years since he retired — and only seven since he left Europe, where soccer’s searchlight shines brightest, for Major League Soccer — but, in that time, the game he left behind has changed considerably.The best measure of that, perhaps, is that Pirlo already feels as if he belongs to another era, another time, despite the fact that he has played in the Champions League final as recently as Lionel Messi. The last time either one graced that stage, the grandest that club soccer has to offer, was in Berlin in 2015, when Messi and Neymar and Luis Suárez swept Barcelona past Pirlo’s Juventus.That is not simply because soccer has a tendency toward instant amnesia. It is not just because, in the years in between his retirement as a player and his short-lived managerial tenure at Juventus he faded, just a little, from view. Nor can it be attributed, entirely, to the fact that many of the moments with which he is most indelibly associated are from what might politely be referred to as “some time ago.”Pirlo at Euro 2012. Maurizio Brambatti/European Pressphoto AgencyPirlo has spent the last few months designing and curating an NFT collection, like almost everyone else with a little time on their hands; it has taken as its theme his most treasured, most iconic memories. His first Champions League final, in 2003, when Babe Ruth’s curse still held. Winning the World Cup in 2006, something that occurred before the invention of the iPhone. His effortless, unfazed Panenka against England at Euro 2012, when Lance Armstrong was still a hero. These are all moments from a past so distant, both in a sporting and a cultural context, that it may as well be frozen in amber.And yet it is not that, or at least not only that, which makes Pirlo feel like an emissary from a different age. It is that players like him do not exist any more, not really. It is no surprise that, when asked which individuals he most likes to watch now, he picks out Sergio Busquets, Frenkie de Jong, Marco Verratti, Jorginho.They all contain trace elements of Pirlo, in different ways — position or technique or role or poise — but none are quite cut from his cloth. De Jong is too industrious, Busquets too defensive, Verratti too chaotic, Jorginho too busy. Pirlo was the last of his line. Modern soccer does not produce, does not tolerate, players as languid as him, not in his position; nor, increasingly, does it have room for the sort of unhurried imagination that was always Pirlo’s hallmark.It has become, instead, a game of “automatisms,” as another of Pirlo’s peers, Cesc Fàbregas, put it earlier this year. “The manager basically tells you where you have to pass the ball in every moment,” Fàbregas said. “The player has to be positioned in their exact place. It’s becoming a robotic game. I’ve had various managers and it’s not just happened with one or two. It’s happened with four or five. This thing is here to stay.”It has drifted, in other words, from being a game defined by players to one designed by managers. Pirlo has noted the same shift. “Before, there were maybe not as many coaches who were so prepared, so obsessed with their work, so dedicated to finding the smallest detail so that they could improve,” he said. “It was simpler, in that way, but it was also more difficult: There was less data, fewer ways to study.”The game has changed. Pirlo says he has not.Alessandro Di Marco/EPA, via ShutterstockWhere, then, would that have left him? Would Pirlo, had he been born a decade or two later, have been forced to adapt to a different role? Would he have been molded into an unwilling defensive midfield linchpin? Would he have been asked to press relentlessly from the front, devoting his energies to restricting space, rather than expanding it? Would he, perhaps, have been disregarded completely, rather than enjoying one of the most decorated careers of his generation?He has an answer for that. No. “Maybe I would have done even better,” he said, with a smile. His logic is based on more than unflappable self-confidence. “It was a little more technical when I was playing,” he said. “Now maybe it is more physical. But there were a lot of players in my generation, a lot of teams with technical players of the highest level.“Maybe now there are not quite so many, so a bit of quality goes a long way. It would be just as valuable in this sort of soccer, maybe more so. Those kinds of players, the ones who are a little smarter, or a little more technical, are harder to find now. In all that speed, all that haste, there are certain situations where the most important thing is a little intelligence, a little technique.”Besides, Pirlo is adamant that certain truths about soccer hold, regardless of how the game’s fashions, its tastes, ebb and flow. He might watch it now with a manager’s eye, scouring what he sees for some strategic insight, some tactical maneuver, but he remains a player at heart. “You have to work within systems now more than you did,” he said. “But it always comes down to the players.” A coach, he knows from personal experience, is never in complete control of events. Even the finest strategies, the most complex schemes, hinge on the humans tasked with implementing them.“Everything can change,” he said. “It can be quicker or slower, it can have one style or another, but it is always the players that make things happen on the field.”In that, to Pirlo, it always remains the same, familiar, recognizable, as appealing as it has always been. “You can ask if it was more beautiful before, or more beautiful now,” he said. “But it is always beautiful.”A Straight SprintManchester City and Liverpool are separated by a point in the league, but by little else.Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe question this weekend is the same as it is every weekend. Will this be the moment the Premier League title race takes its twist? Will Liverpool’s exertions on four fronts, its pursuit of the impossible, finally catch up with its players? Or will Manchester City, so smooth and so relentless, stumble and fall, offering Jürgen Klopp’s team a gap, a glimmer, an edge?The answer, thus far, has been just as consistent: No. A deafening, resounding no. There is a curious lack of drama to what should, by rights, be the most compelling denouement imaginable to the English season. City and Liverpool, two modern greats, are separated by a single point. Neither has the slightest room for error. Neither would grant its rival any mercy for even a single slip.And yet it all feels just a little bloodless. Liverpool wins. City wins. City wins. Liverpool wins. It is a straight road, with no blind corners or switchbacks or chicanes. Not just in terms of results, but in the nature of the games. City has not trailed in a Premier League game since February 19. Liverpool was behind for 17 minutes, in total, against City when the teams met in early April; other than that, Klopp’s team has not had a game to chase since conceding first against Norwich the same February day. Other than in their encounters with one another, there has been a distinct lack of this column’s favorite quality: jeopardy.Perhaps this is the weekend that changes. Tottenham, certainly, presents the most formidable opposition Liverpool has met since its visit to the Etihad. City must overcome the exhaustion, physical and spiritual, that comes from prolonged exposure to the madness of Real Madrid. Maybe this is when the twist comes, when Liverpool falls away, or when City stutters. Experience suggests it is not. All we can do is hope.Timing Is EverythingImmortality, Garth Lagerwey called it, in those heady, breathless minutes after the Seattle Sounders team he has spent years shaping into a true Major League Soccer dynasty had become the first American team to break Mexico’s stranglehold on the Concacaf Champions League.Whether this proves to be a watershed or not will only become clear in time, for both the league and for Seattle itself. Lagerwey has expressed his hope that the Sounders might now become a “global” team, the first real international breakout brand M.L.S. has produced, and he may be right. He will worry, though, that the timing has hardly been ideal.Alex Roldan and the Sounders are the first U.S. team to qualify for FIFA’s Club World Cup.Steph Chambers/Getty ImagesIt is, frankly, baffling that the Champions League final was scheduled on the same night as a (European) Champions League semifinal. Seattle’s achievement might have resonated a little more outside North America had it not been overshadowed by events in Madrid. The time difference mitigates against attracting a considerable television audience, but that is not the only route to exposure. There are, though, other ways to attract attention in our fractured media age.More unfortunately, it is not yet clear when Seattle may get its chance to — as Lagerwey put it — face “Real Madrid or Liverpool” for a trophy (a claim the champions of South America and Africa might suggest is premature).This was supposed to be the year that FIFA’s much-vaunted Club World Cup expansion took place. That has been postponed, seemingly indefinitely. There is no word, as yet, on when or where the more traditional competition — the one featuring the six regional champions and a nominee from the host nation — will take place. That is a rather more complex issue than normal, of course, because there is a great big World Cup slap-bang in the middle of next season.FIFA will, doubtless, find a fix — most likely a late, unsatisfactory one — at some point. Seattle, certainly, has earned its moment on the international stage, to claim another first, becoming the first American team to have the chance to become world champion.CorrespondenceThe great thing about this newsletter is that it serves as an education to me, too. “I was confused by your expression ‘dopamine-soaked reverie,’” wrote Jim Goldman. “I’m a practicing endocrinologist — and a Tottenham fan — and this phrase didn’t make sense to me.”Now, I cannot claim to be an endocrinologist, not even a lapsed one, so I will bow to Jim’s wisdom on this. I was under the impression that dopamine was the chemical released during pleasurable situations, such as a reverie or when you encounter a really good sandwich. Further research suggests the reality may be a little more complex. I stand (partly) corrected.Line of the week, meanwhile, goes to Brian Marx. Or, more accurately, his daughter, Natalie. “She wondered why there is so much noise about finding a new owner for Chelsea, when it is clear the club is owned by Karim Benzema,” Bob wrote, doing the decent thing and not claiming the punchline as his own.Well played, Natalie.Juan Medina/ReutersJavier Cortés, on the other hand, forces me to issue a clarification that the views expressed in this section do not necessarily reflect my own; a mention is not, by any means, an endorsement. “I agree with your definition of fandom in Europe and Latin America,” he wrote. “It is part of a person’s cultural background.” In the United States, Javier — not me — believes, “most fans are just followers of commercial brands. That explains why, if people move from one city to another, they change teams.”He does, it should be pointed out, make an exception for baseball, where the existence of teams with more than a century of history possess “a real fandom.”There are, I will admit, elements to American sporting culture that are oblique to me, in particular the ability to disregard a team after a lifetime of support, even to disavow it completely, should it pack up and leave. (I understand why fans would take that measure; I just do not understand how.)My instinct, though, is not to decry those differences as evidence of inauthenticity, but rather to chalk them up to a different cultural reality. That is the authentic experience of supporting a team in the United States. It may not follow the same patterns and mores as fandom in Europe, but that does not make it any less sincere, any less genuine, or any less real.That’s all for this week. All thoughts, as ever, are welcome at askrory@nytimes.com; we take note of and appreciate them all. Well, most of them. Certainly more than 50 percent. You can find my thoughts on the gnawing tension of the Premier League title race on Twitter, too, if you’re that way inclined.Have a great weekend,Rory More

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    Sounders’ Concacaf Champions League Title Boosts Seattle’s Soccer Stature

    Sounders F.C. captured M.L.S.’s first CONCACAF Champions League title with a win over Pumas U.N.A.M. Our columnist remembers the day soccer took root in Seattle.SEATTLE — Everything broke right for the Sounders, who were prodded for nearly two hours of grinding action by a sea of Seattle fans in blue and green who pushed their trademark electric energy to the pitch.This was history — and it felt like a joint effort between a team and its supporters.For over 20 years, no Major League Soccer team had ever won the CONCACAF Champions League tournament, which includes the best teams from the United States, Canada, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. But the Sounders ended the drought with a Pacific Northwest downpour: a 3-0 win over the Pumas of Mexico on Wednesday.How important was the win?Sounders goalkeeper Stefan Frei, the tournament’s most valuable player, raised the championship cup after Seattle’s win. Jovelle Tamayo for The New York TimesDuring this week’s run-up to the match, Sounders General Manager Garth Lagerwey called it a chance at soccer immortality.In a promotional hype video, none other than the retired Seahawks icon Marshawn Lynch called it a “big (expletive) game.” At halftime on Wednesday, with the Sounders ahead 1-0, M.L.S. Commissioner Don Garber stood in his suite at Lumen Field, looked me steadily in the eye, and called this match the “biggest game in the history of the league.”Since its inception in 1996, M.L.S. has sought to become an American league of such quality that it could stand toe-to-toe with world powers. But until now, failure was a regular rite of passage for M.L.S. in this annual tournament, with teams from the rival Mexican league having won the last 13 Concacaf tournaments.Well, the Sounders buried those failures on Wednesday.Initially the match was choppy and bogged down by physical play that forced a pair of key Sounders, João Paulo and Nouhou Tolo, to leave with injuries. But Seattle flashed its trademark resilience. Goalie Stefan Frei, named the tournament’s most valuable player, backed up a stout defense, and Sounders kept up the attack until forward Raul Ruidiaz scored on a deflected shot late in the half. In the 80th minute, Ruidiaz added another goal off a smooth counterattack.Nicolás Lodeiro sealed the victory with a goal in the 88th minute and ran toward the stands to celebrate among a frenzy of fans.Winning qualifies the team for the FIFA Club World Cup, a tournament stacked with soccer royalty. The Premier League’s Chelsea won it last. Either Liverpool or Real Madrid will represent Europe next. Just being in the same draw as teams of that pedigree is entirely new for M.L.S.It’s fitting, then, that the Sounders will lead the league to this new precipice. Since entering M.L.S. during a wave of expansion in 2009, they have enchanted this soccer-rich city by winning two M.L.S. Cup championships in four runs to the finals. Seattle has led the league in attendance in all but two seasons, with area fans bringing the same fervor to Lumen as Seahawks fans have come to be known for. Maybe more. A tournament-record 68,741 fans showed up to watch the home team play the Pumas. On a Wednesday night.How did Seattle become an American soccer behemoth?Fans cheered a Sounders goal during Wednesday’s match.Jovelle Tamayo for The New York TimesThere is no single answer. Part of it is the city’s history of embracing the unconventional and outré — which still describes professional soccer in the American sports context. Seattle birthed Boeing and Microsoft, Starbucks and Amazon. It gave the world grunge rock and Quincy Jones. Jimi Hendrix went to high school three miles from Lumen Field. Bruce Lee sharpened his martial arts skills just a short walk away.One of its great works of art is a troll sculpture that sits underneath a bridge. It’s become customary to drape it in a mammoth blue and green Sounders scarf before big games.The love felt by this city for soccer in all its forms — from the Sounders to O.L. Reign of the N.W.S.L., to colleges and junior leagues — is also the product of a specific past and a specific team: the original Seattle Sounders of the long-defunct North American Soccer League.From 1974 to 1983, those Sounders teams were part of the first bona fide effort to bring big-stakes, U.S.-based competition to professional soccer within this hemisphere.If you ask me, a Seattle native who grew up in that era, I say the love began, specifically, with a single game.Since I was 9 years old I’ve called it the Pelé Game. That’s when I took a city bus downtown to watch that original iteration of the Sounders. The date was April 9, 1976, the first sporting event ever held at the now-demolished Kingdome.A crowd of nearly 60,000, then the largest in North American soccer history, watched Seattle host the star-studded New York Cosmos and its leader, the greatest player the game of soccer has ever seen: Pelé. The Black Pearl, as he was known, had come to the N.A.S.L. to celebrate a last stanza of his career — and as an ambassador to spark the game in North America. I don’t remember details of that match as much as I remember being in awe of the lithe and powerful Brazilian.Pelé didn’t disappoint. He scored two goals in a 3-1 win.The game was a harbinger. Those first Sounders players quickly became local legends, deeply woven into the city’s fabric. In those days, it seemed to me that a Sounder visited every classroom in every public school. In 1977, the Sounders made it to the league’s Soccer Bowl title match. Played in front of a full house in Portland, Ore., a three-hour drive south, they lost to the Cosmos, 2-1, in the last non-exhibition game Pelé ever played.Pele, center, looked on as his New York Cosmos teammate Giorgio Chinaglia, left, ran at the Seattle Sounders defense in 1977.Peter Robinson/EMPICS, via Getty Images“I still have his jersey,” Jimmy McCalister said in a phone interview. I could almost see the smile in his voice. A defender on that Seattle team and the N.A.S.L. rookie of the year in 1977, McCalister told me how he’d somehow summoned the nerve to ask Pelé for his fabled No. 10 jersey. The legend obliged. The jersey now sits in McCalister’s lockbox.“People call me from time to time, wanting to buy it,” he said. It’s not for sale. Some things are worth more than money. The jersey contains memory and soul.McCalister loves the modern day Sounders. He hailed their cohesiveness, blue collar work ethic, and their growing talent. Raised in Seattle, he is one of many Sounders who remained in the city after their playing days were over. These days he runs one of the top junior development clubs. Many others stayed to teach the game, coaching in clinics and at high schools and colleges. Some helped guide a now-defunct minor league team — also called the Sounders.They kept soccer alive in the fallow pair of decades between the N.A.S.L.’s demise and the birth of M.L.S.Fredy Montero met fans who stayed nearly an hour after Sounders’ win.Jovelle Tamayo for The New York TimesOn Wednesday night, nearly an hour after the game, fans remained in Lumen Field. Vast swaths of them. Joyful chants rumbled down to the confetti-covered field. Players responded by lifting the gold Champions League trophy high. Unlike that Kingdome game of 1976 — the original Sounders versus the glitzy, star-studded Cosmos — this matchup wasn’t memorable because of the opponent. It was memorable because of the home team, which just put itself on the international map. And that would surely make Pelé, long soccer’s proudest ambassador, more than a little proud. More

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    When Will the Seattle Sounders Play in the Club World Cup?

    One prize for Seattle’s Concacaf Champions League title was a chance to face some of the world’s best clubs. When are those games? “No clue,” one FIFA official said.The Seattle Sounders won the Concacaf Champions League on Wednesday night, beating Pumas of Mexico, 3-0, to claim a 5-2 victory on aggregate in the two-legged final. The victory made Seattle the first team from Major League Soccer to lift the trophy in a generation, and gave the United States the continental title it has coveted for more than 20 years.It should also make Seattle the first M.L.S. team to play in the FIFA Club World Cup.Except that no one, not even FIFA, is sure when that event will take place, or what it will look like. The tournament’s traditional December window is unavailable this year because of the World Cup in Qatar, and grand plans for an expanded Club World Cup in China have gone nowhere after they were announced and then promptly disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.“No clue,” one FIFA official said in a text message when asked when Seattle could expect to take part in the event.The Club World Cup has been held annually since 2005, with representatives of each of FIFA’s global confederations facing off to determine a world club champion. Top European teams have dominated the event, with the likes of Barcelona, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Liverpool and Chelsea lifting the trophy in the last decade. Facing off against teams like that in an international competition has been a dream for many M.L.S. players, executives and fans.FIFA, which runs the Club World Cup, has been eager to expand the tournament, and it put a plan on the table for a 24-team tournament shifted to the summer and held every four years instead of annually. In a meeting in Shanghai in October 2019, it approved the change and awarded China the hosting rights for the first edition in 2021. The coronavirus soon made that plan unworkable.The pandemic-delayed 2021 Club World Cup that was held in February, and won by Chelsea, was nominally the final one under the old, smaller format. Holding another one in 2022 could be problematic, with league schedules already being squeezed by the enforced break caused by the World Cup that opens in November. There has been talk of holding the first expanded version in the summer of 2023, but as of now there is no official date for the event.Under the original plans for the expanded tournament, three teams from the Concacaf region — covering North and Central America and the Caribbean — would participate. One of them presumably could be the Sounders after Wednesday’s victory, although the official qualifying criteria has not been announced.It is also possible that the old, smaller format will be retained for a few more years: Not even Sounders officials were sure in the afterglow of Wednesday night’s win.“We don’t have the format yet; we don’t have the location,” Garth Lagerwey, the team’s general manager, told reporters. “We’re told, probably February-ish. Probably Middle East maybe.”Despite the uncertainty, Lagerway, a longtime M.L.S. executive, did little to hide his excitement at the achievement. “We’re going to play Real Madrid or Liverpool, man,” he said. “In a real game.”Officially, FIFA would only say Thursday that “further details about the FIFA Club World Cup 2022 will be announced in due course.”An American team has nearly played in the Club World Cup once before. The very first Club World Cup, in 2000, was an eight-team event in Brazil. That year was the last one in which an American team, the Los Angeles Galaxy, won the continental championship. So for the 2001 world event, expanded to 12 teams, the Galaxy was duly entered alongside Real Madrid and other teams from around the world.But financial concerns and the collapse of a sponsor led the event to be scrapped. It was revived in 2005 in its current format. Too late for the Galaxy. Mexican and Costa Rican teams — to the immense frustration of M.L.S. — have won the title every year since.Now that the Sounders have broken that streak, they and M.L.S. will hope the Club World Cup — whenever it is held, and whatever it looks like — goes more smoothly.Tariq Panja contributed reporting. More

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    Chile Files Claim Seeking Ecuador’s Place in the World Cup

    A dispute over a player’s eligibility could alter the qualifying results in South America. Chile has asked for forfeits, and Ecuador’s spot in Qatar.Qualification for this year’s soccer World Cup, already disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine, now faces more uncertainty after Chile this week called on FIFA to throw out Ecuador and hand its place in the tournament to Chile instead. Chile contends that its South American rival fielded an ineligible player who is in fact Colombian.To support its case, Chile on Wednesday filed a multiple-page claim, reviewed by The New York Times, that contains registry documents, including birth certificates, that it says show the defender Byron Castillo was born in Colombia three years earlier than is stated on the documents used to identify him as Ecuadorean.Under the rules of FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, playing an ineligible player could result in a forfeit, or several of them — a consequence that could upend the qualifying results in South America. Ecuador finished fourth in the recently concluded qualifying campaign for Qatar, claiming one of the continent’s four automatic places in the World Cup, which begins in November.Chile is demanding that Ecuador forfeit the eight qualification games in which Castillo played, with the opponents automatically granted three points per game. If FIFA agrees, as it has in at least one recent case in South America, that would lift Chile into the World Cup at Ecuador’s expense.Castillo playing against Chile in November. Chile is asking FIFA to award it forfeit victories in both of its qualifiers against Ecuador.Marcelo Hernandez/ReutersChile’s legal effort added a new complication to the qualification process for the 2022 World Cup. FIFA oversaw an opulent ceremony in Doha last month to finalize the groups and schedule for the tournament’s opening stage even though four places have yet to be decided. The final teams will not be determined until June, when two intercontinental playoff games and the final European qualifiers take place.Castillo’s background has been shrouded in questions for several years after a wider investigation into player registrations in Ecuador looked into hundreds of cases and resulted in punishments for at least 75 youth players found to have falsified records. Wary of a mistake that might jeopardize Ecuador’s World Cup hopes, officials from the national soccer federation had held off selecting Castillo until this year.A Guide to the 2022 World CupThe 32-team tournament kicks off in Qatar on Nov. 21.F.A.Q.: When will the games take place? Who are the favorites? Will Lionel Messi be there? Our primer answers your questions.The Matchups: The group assignments are set. Here’s a breakdown of the draw and a look at how each country qualified.The Host: After a decade of scrutiny and criticism, there is a sense that Qatar will at last get the payoff it expected for hosting the World Cup.Traveling to Qatar: Thinking about attending the tournament? Here is what you should know.Two years ago, in fact, the president of a special investigation commission convened by the federation appeared to suggest Castillo was Colombian, something that Chilean officials now say they have substantiated.“The level, both in quantity and quality, of the information and evidence that we have been able to collect has surprised even us,” Eduardo Carlezzo, a lawyer representing the Chilean federation, said Wednesday. Carlezzo claimed that in addition to an Ecuadorean birth certificate used by Castillo, there was also a Colombian one for a child with a similar name born in 1995 and whose parents have the same names as Castillo’s. “How could we not act with this level of evidence in hands?” Carlezzo said.Concern over Castillo’s eligibility appeared to have concerned Ecuadorean officials as well. In March 2021, Carlos Manzur, the vice president of Ecuador’s soccer federation, suggested as much in comments reported by the local news media.“I think it’s a matter of playing it safe, avoiding problems,” Manzur told reporters at the time. “I think he is a good player. If it were up to me, I would not have him play for the national team. I would not take that risk. I would not risk everything we are doing.”About a month later, an Ecuadorean court provided Castillo with an identification document that appeared to pave the way for him to make his national team debut, which he did about five months later in a set of games that included a 0-0 home draw with Chile. He has since played in eight games overall, including a 2-0 victory at Chile in November that all but ended the latter’s hopes of qualification. After questions over Castillo’s eligibility were reported in regional media outlets, Manzur, the Ecuador soccer official, declared that any inconsistencies in Castillo’s documentation had been corrected and that his Ecuadorean identity had been confirmed. “The national team waited until that was corrected to incorporate the player into its squad,” said Manzur.That will now have to be determined by FIFA.“We understand, based on all the information and documents collected, that the facts are too serious and must be thoroughly investigated by FIFA,” Pablo Milad, the president of Chile’s soccer federation, said in a statement to The Times. “We have always respected the fair play principals and we hope that the other federations do the same.”Ecuador finished in the fourth and last automatic place in South America’s 10-nation World Cup qualification group, two points head of Peru, which will meet either Australia or the United Arab Emirates in June for a place in the finals. Chile finished below sixth-placed Colombia in the standings, but Castillo did not play in either of Ecuador’s games against Colombia or Peru. That has left Chilean officials believing the six points they should get from the forfeited games — and the six Ecuador would lose — would leapfrog them into Ecuador’s qualification spot.For FIFA, Chile’s complaint adds further complication to a World Cup qualification campaign that already has suffered significant disruption. The coronavirus delayed games around the world for months, and meant that Oceania’s entire series of games had to be held in Doha. Other games were pushed back until after the tournament draw. (One of those as-yet-unknown countries was placed in a group with the United States.) Then, in March, Russia was thrown out of the European playoffs after invading neighboring Ukraine, which also led to a playoff game between Ukraine and Scotland being rescheduled.Chile will point to recent precedent in another sport to argue its point. Last month, Spain was disqualified from rugby’s 2023 World Cup after being deducted points for fielding an ineligible player in two games. But it also has recent experience with a similar situation in soccer: During qualifying for the 2018 World Cup, Chile was awarded a forfeit after FIFA found Bolivia had fielded an ineligible player in two matches. More