Raphael Stevens

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    Juventus, Chasing Style, Forgets the Substance

    Juventus has thought for too long about the now, and too little about what comes next.Perhaps the best measure of how concerned Juventus is by image — of how central to the club’s identity is the way that identity is projected and perceived — is that it may well be the only team in world soccer to have its own, custom-designed font.It was commissioned in 2017, presumably after a raft of meetings that featured intense, sincere discussions about what typeface best conveyed the team’s values and mission. The font appears in all of the club’s marketing campaigns. It is deployed on all its social media pronouncements. It adorns the Juventus offices in Turin and Milan.Using the font is important to Juventus executives: uniformity of iconography, they believe, is crucial in helping build the club’s brand, in expressing to current fans and prospective ones and, where none can be found, putative customers, quite what Juventus stands for. Everything the club publishes has to have that distinctive, recognizable Juventus look. Image comes first.All of which makes the events of the last few months — perhaps longer — difficult to understand. First, there is the ongoing and now faintly masochistic devotion of Andrea Agnelli, the club’s president, to a Super League project that has not only cost him friendships and positions of power, but that has been met with pretty much universal opprobrium from fans. Continued commitment to it is not, as they say, a good look.And then, more serious still, there is the investigation by Italy’s financial authorities into six current and former executives — including Agnelli and Pavel Nedved, the club’s vice president — into Juventus’s transfer dealings. The authorities are said to be considering various charges of false accounting and reporting. The police have already raided the club’s training facility and its offices. That is not great for the image, either.It would be easy, then, to see more than a little hubris in Juventus’s on-field travails this season. There is a scene in the first episode of the club’s edition of the “All Or Nothing” documentary series — which started airing on Amazon Prime late last month, and over which the team’s executives hung like hawks, every step of the way — in which Agnelli gathers the members of the playing squad and lets them know, in no uncertain terms, the expectations.With an expletive or two thrown in, he tells the players that the previous season was not up to scratch. The year in question was the one before last, the one in which Maurizio Sarri led Juventus to a ninth straight Serie A title. The coach, an unlikely appointment who turned into an unpopular incumbent, had gone; Agnelli would not, he said, tolerate a repeat.The Juventus president Andrea Agnelli, right, and vice president Pavel Nedved are said be to be under investigation for the club’s transfer dealings.Massimo Rana/EPA, via ShutterstockIn comparison, of course, that year under Sarri would come to be seen as the last chapter of the golden era. Under his replacement, the novice Andrea Pirlo, Juventus barely scraped into the Champions League — relying on Napoli’s stumbling at home on the final day to make it — and then, over the course of the summer, discovered that Cristiano Ronaldo, the player it had brought in to turn domestic hegemony into continental success, no longer wanted to stick around.If that seemed like the nadir, it was not. After the failed experiments with Sarri and Pirlo, Juventus restored Massimiliano Allegri as coach this summer. His task was to prioritize “results,” as he has put it, over the pursuit of style that had captivated the club when it decided, a couple of years ago, that it had outgrown Sarri. Juventus had realized, it seemed, that the fact of winning was more central to its identity than the nature of it.Things are not, though, quite so simple. Allegri’s team has lost five games in Serie A already this season. Relative minnows, like Sassuolo, and actual minnows, like Empoli, have returned from Juventus’s Allianz Stadium with victories. Last weekend, Atalanta won in Turin for the first time in more than 30 years.Juventus sits seventh in Serie A, 12 points behind Napoli, the early leader. Allegri has already stated his belief that finishing fourth, and securing yet another season in the Champions League, may be the limit of this team’s ambitions. Even that relatively meager target is by no means guaranteed.Juventus fans are not used to watching a seventh-place team.Massimo Pinca/ReutersThe cause of that decline can be traced to the same root as the demise in Juventus’s image. There is a tendency, in soccer, to believe nobody is capable of doing two things at once: A player taking an interest in off-field activities — whether that is being on TikTok, running a fashion label, feeding hungry children — will, at some point, invariably be told to concentrate on their performances; a club that takes care of its brand identity will be told to focus, instead, on signing players.It is a false dichotomy, of course. Players can run a business, campaign or social media account and still remember how to mark opponents on corners. Clubs employ hundreds of people, not all of whom are devoted to tactics, nutrition or being a right back.Where the two threads of Juventus’s struggles entwine is in the rationale behind them. Agnelli favors a Super League because it solves his club’s immediate financial problems. The plusvalenza system that the team’s executives are accused of manipulating offers the same, short-term hit: It makes sure this year’s books look good, with little or no thought to what happens later.Manager Massimiliano Allegri is already setting limits on what his team can achieve this season.Ciro De Luca/ReutersThat is precisely how Juventus has been run, too. In 2017, after a second defeat in the Champions League final in three years, Agnelli became obsessed with winning instantly. The painstaking, intelligent work that had returned the club to the pinnacle in both Italy and Europe was out; signing players to triumph immediately became the order of the day. A year later, the approach reached its apogee when Ronaldo arrived in Turin.Now Juventus is paying for that impatience. Ronaldo may be gone, but there are countless others — all on hefty contracts, all eating up the club’s pandemic-ravaged finances, all too costly to be easily offloaded — who remain: Aaron Ramsey and Alex Sandro and Adrien Rabiot.Allegri has at his disposal the sketch outline of a young, competitive team: Matthijs de Ligt, Rodrigo Bentancur, Manuel Locatelli, Dejan Kulusevski and Federico Chiesa. The club’s decision to establish an under-23 team in Italy’s third tier was made with the future in mind, too.But none of it can come to fruition while the squad, and the balance sheet, is filled by the underperforming and the overpaid. Juventus has thought for too long about the now, and too little about what comes next. And it is that, ultimately, which will do the damage to its image, to how it is perceived, and how it perceives itself. What matters, after all, is the story a club tells, not how it is written.Not Such a Walk in the ParcLionel Messi’s brilliance has not translated directly into French quite yet.Thibault Camus/Associated PressThere have been years when it has felt at least a little like either Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo won the Ballon d’Or by default, that they were awarded the most prestigious individual prize in soccer not so much for what they had achieved recently but because it seemed inconceivable to suggest one of the two of them was not the finest player in the world.This year was not one of them. Of course, Robert Lewandowski offered a compelling alternative case. Even discounting the emotional appeal of honoring a player who so richly deserved the award 12 months ago, Lewandowski, the Bayern Munich striker, had done enough — more than enough — to win it based on his 2021 alone. It is not every season, after all, that a player breaks a 50-year-old goal-scoring record.But it hardly requires some great suspension of disbelief to understand why, eventually, France Football’s jurors chose Messi: It was this year, after all, that he finally ended his — and his country’s — long wait for an international trophy. The Copa América was Argentina’s first senior triumph since 1993. Delivering international glory was the one hole on Messi’s résumé. Now he has filled it. That was, as it should have been, enough.The complication is that Messi won his seventh Ballon d’Or as his domestic form is — how to put this delicately? — stuttering. His final season at Barcelona brought 38 goals in 47 games, even in a bitterly disappointing campaign, but he has struggled to find that form at Paris St.-Germain.He has three goals in the Champions League — including a wonderful strike against Manchester City — but only one in Ligue 1. A delayed start to the season, a couple of interruptions from minor injuries and being part of a somewhat inchoate team have not helped, but he has certainly not found France’s top flight as easy as anticipated.That will change, obviously, as P.S.G. hits its stride and as Messi adapts to a league he has acknowledged is more physical to the one to which he was accustomed. He recorded three assists against Saint-Etienne last weekend.But for now it serves as a reminder, perhaps, that Ligue 1 — widely derided as the weakest of Europe’s major domestic tournaments — is not quite the cakewalk many believe it to be, that any player at all can find a new environment challenging, and that nothing is easy, not really, even for the greats.Twenty’s PlentyIt is hard to tell which is the more startling statistic: that England scored 20 goals — 20, two zero — in a single game on Tuesday, or that in the process, Sarina Wiegman’s team racked up 64 shots. That works out, math fans, to roughly one every 90 seconds.The victory, in a World Cup qualifier against Latvia, ranks as the biggest-ever win by an England team. It also represented a European record for a competitive women’s game, though there should be just a small asterisk there: the previous mark was set only a few days earlier, when Belgium beat Armenia, 19-0.The issue of what to do with overmatched teams is not exclusive to the women’s game, of course — the debate flares up pretty reliably in men’s qualifying, too — but, because of the rapid development of the game across Europe, the scale of the imbalance and the urgency with which it must be addressed feel much greater.Ellen White and Beth Mead each scored three goals against Latvia this week. Their teammate Lauren Hemp had four.Tim Goode/Press Association, via Associated PressIt is, certainly, no time to indulge the two nonsensical orthodoxies that infect this debate in the men’s game: that playing the very best helps the smaller nations to improve — even Wiegman quite rightly dispatched that idea — and that changing the format of qualifying, in some way, prevents everyone from having an even chance to reach a tournament.A two- or even three-tier qualifying system for major competitions exists in North America, Africa and Asia. It does not exist in South America, but only because the likes of Suriname and French Guiana compete (for reasons that are not strictly geographical) in Concacaf. There is absolutely no reason Europe could not do the same.As Wiegman said, Latvia learned nothing from losing, 20-0, to England, in a game in which it had 14 percent possession and no shots on goal. England, likewise, learned nothing. Streamlining qualification is not a mark of disrespect to developing nations. It is not depriving them of a chance to get better. If anything, the exact opposite is true.CorrespondenceTo be honest, I could just copy and paste Nitin Bajaj’s email and leave it there for correspondence this week: “I read the bit on managers’ captivation with condiments with a great deal of … er … relish,” he wrote, clearly very pleased with himself.Gary Brown, meanwhile, thinks there is some sort of ketchup-based conspiracy at play. “What’s the evidence that Dean Smith had ever allowed ketchup at Villa before his sacking?” he asked. “Steven Gerrard announced that he’d banned it before he’d even seen it on the table at his new club. On the other hand, a suspicious mind might follow Dean Smith to his quick appointment at Norwich, whose majority owner is Delia Smith, cookery writer and TV legend, who is on record as saying she and her husband have ‘Big Mac picnics in the car-park’ at evening games, with fries and loads of ketchup’.”A clutch of you, meanwhile — James Patch, Martin Maudal and Jim Yoder — all got in touch to suggest the perfect example of how much difference a manager can make: Thomas Tuchel at Chelsea. This is absolutely correct, of course, but once again: I cannot produce a newsletter that just runs to four words.Thomas Tuchel, the exception that proves the rule.Frank Augstein/Associated PressAnd Thabo Caves sends an email that leads me to another thought. “A team has 11 players on the pitch most of the time,” he wrote. “If one player has roughly the same impact as another, then each player would have roughly a 9 percent influence on their team’s performance. Bringing in a new manager could then be considered as almost as influential as signing a new player in the middle of the season. Single players are consistently lauded for having transformative effects on teams, so why can’t a manager?”Why not indeed, Thabo, which leaves me to wonder: Should we not limit when teams can change their managers — perhaps to two windows, one before and one during the season — as we do with players? Why the reason for the difference? More

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    I.O.C. Says It Held Second Video Call With Peng Shuai

    Olympic officials said they ‘shared the same concern as many’ about the safety of the Chinese tennis star but offered no details of what they discussed with her.The International Olympic Committee said Thursday that it had held a second call with the Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai, trying anew to deflect criticism of its light-touch approach to China only months before the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing.“We share the same concern as many other people and organizations about the well-being and safety of Peng Shuai,” the I.O.C. statement said. “This is why, just yesterday, an IOC team held another video call with her. We have offered her wide-ranging support, will stay in regular touch with her, and have already agreed on a personal meeting in January.”IOC Statement on the situation of Peng Shuaihttps://t.co/7wDhc0w33f— IOC MEDIA (@iocmedia) December 2, 2021
    As with an earlier call with Peng on Nov. 21, the I.O.C. did not release video or a transcript of the call, nor did it say how Wednesday’s call was arranged or who took part. The previous call included the I.O.C.’s president, Thomas Bach but also an I.O.C. member from China.Peng, 35, disappeared from public view more than a month ago after she accused Zhang Gaoli, a former vice premier of China, of sexual assault. Her disappearance, China’s efforts to censor any mention of her allegations and its sometimes clumsy efforts to suggest she had retracted her claims, have only intensified concerns about her safety with tennis officials, fellow athletes and human rights groups.The I.O.C. statement, like its earlier statements on Peng, made no mention of her sexual assault claims, referring only to “the difficult situation she is in.”The latest call, which the I.O.C. said took place on Wednesday, came on the same day the women’s professional tennis tour announced it would suspend all of its events in China, including Hong Kong, until the Chinese government took several measures. It called for the government to stop censoring Peng, allow her to speak and travel freely and “investigate the allegation of sexual assault in a full, fair and transparent manner.”Olympic officials have been on the defensive for weeks for their relative silence on Peng’s disappearance, which critics of both the organization and of China have derided as an attempt to avoid even the appearance of criticizing a powerful partner. The looming Winter Olympics in China, which will make Beijing the first city to host the Summer and Winter Games, open on Feb. 4.The I.O.C. has countered that its effort to aid Peng has been a campaign of “quiet diplomacy,” a phrase it repeated in Thursday’s statement.“There are different ways to achieve her well-being and safety,” the I.O.C. said. “We have taken a very human and person-centered approach to her situation. Since she is a three-time Olympian, the I.O.C. is addressing these concerns directly with Chinese sports organizations. We are using ‘quiet diplomacy’ which, given the circumstances and based on the experience of governments and other organizations, is indicated to be the most promising way to proceed effectively in such humanitarian matters.” More

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    Italy and Portugal Drawn in Same Group for World Cup Playoff

    The draw for Europe’s final three qualifying places ensured that either Italy, the European champion, or Portugal, with Cristiano Ronaldo, would miss the finals in Qatar.Italy and Portugal were drawn into the same World Cup qualifying bracket on Friday, ensuring that either the reigning European champion (Italy) or one of soccer’s biggest stars (Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo) will be absent from next year’s tournament in Qatar.Italy will face North Macedonia at home in a semifinal in March, and the winner will travel to play the winner of the bracket’s other semifinal — either Portugal or Turkey — for one of the last three European places in the World Cup. The Portugal-Turkey winner would host that game five days later.🥁 The semi-finals are set for the European play-offs!🎫 One team from each of the 3 paths will reach the #WorldCup 🏆 pic.twitter.com/cvkFwdzQoX— FIFA World Cup (@FIFAWorldCup) November 26, 2021
    The potential for such a high-stakes showdown also raised the possibility that Italy would miss the World Cup for the second cycle in a row. Italy lost a playoff for a place in the last World Cup, in Russia in 2018 — a defeat that one newspaper declared a “national shame.”“It could have been a little better, for sure,” Italy Coach Roberto Mancini told the Italian broadcaster RAI2 after Friday’s playoff draw. “As we would have gladly avoided them,” he added, “probably they too would have avoided us.”The possible showdown was the most intriguing of several high-stakes matchups for Europe’s last three spots in Qatar, and the first test of a new qualifying format. In the past, the European playoffs have taken the form of two-legged, head-to-head matchups.Instead, this year, the 12 teams — 10 of which finished as runners-up in their qualifying groups — were split into three four-team paths, each with its own semifinals and final. Only the winning team from each path qualifies for the World Cup.In the other brackets, Scotland will face Ukraine, with the winner meeting Wales or Austria, and Russia will host Poland for the right to face Sweden or the Czech Republic.Wales, which made its only World Cup appearance in 1958, was drawn into the same bracket as Scotland, which has not qualified since 1998.Ten European teams — led by Germany, France, Belgium and England — have already qualified, as have the two South American favorites, Brazil and Argentina.Friday’s draw also set up second-chance routes to the World Cup for countries from four other regional confederations. In those games, the fourth-place team from Concacaf, the region comprising North and Central America and the Caribbean, would play the Oceania champion, and the fifth-place team from South America would play the fifth-place team from Asia.Those games will be played as single-leg matches in Qatar next June 13 and 14 — more than two months after the World Cup draw sorts the 32-team field on April 1. More

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    Lionel Messi Wins Record Seventh Ballon d’Or

    The Paris St.-Germain star capped a year in which he led Argentina to the Copa América title by edging Bayern Munich’s Robert Lewandowski.Some of the most illustrious names in soccer’s long history only managed to win the Ballon d’Or, the sport’s most prestigious individual prize, once. George Best, Zinedine Zidane and Eúsebio all have just a single award to their names. Ronaldo, the great Brazilian striker, won two. Johan Cruyff, arguably the finest European player in history, has three.After Monday night, Lionel Messi has seven.Messi, 34, effectively retained the trophy he last won in 2019 — controversially, the award was not handed out by France Football last year because of the coronavirus pandemic — after a year in which he ended his long wait for an international honor, winning the Copa América with Argentina, and left Barcelona, the club where he had spent all of his career, for Paris St.-Germain.When your dad wins an other Ballon d’Or 🙌#ballondor pic.twitter.com/UWKir71mX5— Ballon d’Or #ballondor (@francefootball) November 29, 2021
    “It’s incredible to be here again,” Messi said. “Two years ago I thought it was the last time. Winning the Copa América was the key.”“I don’t know how many years I have left,” he added, “but I hope many more.”Messi finished with 613 points in the voting, only 33 more than the runner-up, Bayern Munich striker Robert Lewandowski. In 2019, the last time the trophy was awarded, Messi beat Liverpool defender Virgil van Dijk by only seven points.Barcelona may have lost Messi this year, but it still took home some hardware on Monday: Alexia Putellas, a star midfielder on its treble-winning women’s team, became the third winner of the women’s Ballon d’Or, and the teenager Pedri, a rising talent who is already a fixture for Barcelona and Spain’s national team, was honored as the world’s best player under 21.Messi, who had arrived at the gala at Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris in a shimmering tuxedo, a look matched by his three young sons, was typically soft-spoken in accepting his award. He praised his former teammates at Barcelona and his countrymen with Argentina, and vowed to fight for new trophies with his new club, P.S.G.Messi defeated Lewandowski in voting by 176 journalists and conducted by France Football, which awards the Ballon d’Or (almost) every year. Many experts argued Lewandowski deserved the honor in 2020, when it was not handed out because, organizers said, disruptions to the soccer calendar had made it impossible to judge. Messi said he agreed with that position.“I think you deserved to win the award last year,” Messi told Lewandowski from the stage, calling it “an honor” to stand against him for top honors in 2021.Jorginho, the Brazil-born Italy midfielder, was third in the balloting, reward for a season in which his club team, Chelsea, won the Champions League and Italy won the European Championship. Real Madrid and France striker Karim Benzema was fourth, and Jorginho’s Chelsea midfield partner, N’Golo Kanté, was fifth.Ronaldo, who finished sixth in the voting, was absent from Monday’s ceremony, but his rivalry with Messi was not. On his Instagram account, Ronaldo angrily took issue with a comment made recently by France Football’s editor in chief, Pascal Ferré, in an interview with The New York Times about the award’s prestige.“Ronaldo has only one ambition, and that is to retire with more Ballons d’Or than Messi,” Ferré said, “and I know that because he has told me.”Ronaldo — despite suggesting as much in other interviews — denied he had made the comment, saying, “Ferré lied, used my name to promote himself and to promote the publication he works for.”“It is unacceptable,” he added, “that the person responsible for awarding such a prestigious prize could lie in this way, in absolute disrespect for someone who has always respected France Football and the Ballon d’Or.”Though 2021 has hardly been a vintage year by Messi’s standards — Barcelona was beaten to the Spanish title by Atlético Madrid and eliminated from last season’s Champions League in the round of 16 — his achievement with Argentina, as well as the attention drawn by his move to France after winning six Ballons d’Or at Barcelona, was enough to convince the award’s jurors.That Messi had never won an international trophy with his national team had always been held against him in the debate over whether he warrants the status as soccer’s greatest ever player. His rivals, after all, had triumphed with their countries as well as their clubs: Pelé led Brazil to three World Cups, Diego Maradona inspired Argentina to one and Cristiano Ronaldo helped Portugal claim the European Championship in 2016.Messi finally put that idea to rest in this summer’s Copa América, breaking down in tears on the field after Ángel Di María’s goal had given Argentina its first international trophy since 1993, beating Brazil, the host, in the final.His tally of seven Ballons d’Or now puts him two clear of Ronaldo, his great rival: The Portuguese forward remains on five, but he has not won the prize since 2017, and at age 36 he is more than two years older than Messi.Putellas, the 27-year-old midfielder who is captain of Barcelona’s all-conquering women’s team, won the women’s Ballon d’Or. Her victory completed a clean sweep of last season’s prizes, after she led her Barcelona side to the Champions League title and a league and cup double in Spain, and then was honored as Europe’s player of the year.Her main rivals for the Ballon d’Or were mostly familiar faces: Barcelona had become the first women’s team to register five nominees in a single year, and two of Putellas’s teammates — Jennifer Hermoso, who was second, and Lieke Martens, who was fifth — finished in the top five in the voting.“Honestly it’s a bit emotional, and very special,” Putellas said. “It’s great to be here with all of my teammates, since we have lived and experienced so much together, especially in the past year.”“This is an individual prize,” she added, “but football is a team sport.” More

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    How Much Does a Top Club's Manager Matter?

    One set of researchers estimated a manager is responsible for only eight percent of a team’s results. But eight percent, when you think about it, is a lot.That first day, for an incoming manager at a new club, must be overwhelming. There is an entire squad of players to meet, to get to know, to win over. There is a staff, nervous of your intentions and fearful of what the future may hold, to convince and, hopefully, to command.There are training schedules to draw up and tactics to implement and a great pile of footage to watch, to try and work out where it went wrong — because it has, more often than not, gone wrong, and that is why you have a job — and how it might be put right. There are political currents to detect, alliances to forge, enmities to soothe. And there is no time, because there is a game looming on the horizon, a first impression to make.And yet, before all of that, there is one thing that seems to consume all new managers, young and old, fresh and wizened, hopeful and worldly-wise, one question that must be addressed before anything else can happen, one decision that will set the tone for your reign: Where do you stand, exactly, vis-à-vis ketchup?Managers seem to spend more time than might be expected establishing their precise policy on condiments. Within a few days of arriving at Aston Villa, Steven Gerrard had banned them. So, too, had Antonio Conte, when he joined Tottenham.Of course, as much as anything else, this is a power play. It is a way of establishing dominance over every aspect of the players’ lives, casting yourself as an authority figure, making plain that fitness is your absolute priority. (Most managers, when they take a new job, are struck by how terribly out-of-shape the squad of lean, musclebound elite athletes suddenly at their disposal seems to be.)Steven Gerrard banned condiments at Aston Villa. Enthusiasm is still approved.John Sibley/Action Images Via ReutersThere is an alternative route, though: The absence of condiments can be diagnosed as a problem just as much as their presence. In cases where a manager is replacing an anti-ketchup extremist, some will consider reinstating them as an olive branch — well, a tapenade — to the squad, a way of signaling that the brutal, flavorless days of the previous regime are over, and that a more collaborative, trusting approach is at hand.The significance of all of this is, of course, overplayed. Journalists focus on minor details like whether a manager has banned ketchup because — to offer the kindest interpretation — it serves as an illustrative, immediately comprehensible shorthand for what sort of coach they intend to be, in a way that detailing exactly what sort of running drills they are doing does not.The news media’s apparently insatiable obsession with condiments does, though, hint at a greater truth, one that generally goes unspoken, one that flirts with breaking the fourth wall: that managers, as a rule, do not matter as much as we think they do. For the most part, they are tinkering around the edges, their decisions and their choices and their approaches largely irrelevant to how their tenures will play out, their power limited not to their own destiny but to what players can have with their main courses.Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was given plenty of time to find a path forward at Manchester United. But last week, it ran out.Carl Recine/Action Images Via ReutersThat, certainly, is what almost every academic study on the influence of soccer managers has concluded. Some have entered popular discourse: the research in “Soccernomics” that estimated that a manager is responsible for only 8 percent of a team’s results; the work in “The Numbers Game” that placed the figure at around double that.Some have remained adrift in academia — one, in 2013, found that interim managers tended to have more direct impact on results than permanent ones — but reached the same broad conclusion.Only the true greats, people like Alex Ferguson and Arsène Wenger, had a tangible, discernible impact. Everyone else was at the mercy of factors not entirely within their control: a club’s financial potency, the quality of player on the books, the strength of their opponents. It is only necessary to glance at Paris St.-Germain to know that, even with a high-caliber manager and a high-quality squad, sometimes the mix is not right; something has to spark, something between chemistry and alchemy, to make things work.That conclusion, though, is not quite as straightforward as it appears. Eight percent, to use the lowest available estimate, may not sound like a lot, but in the context of elite soccer, in particular, it is a huge and unwieldy variable.This is a sport, after all, of fine margins: a brief loss of concentration, a slight tactical distinction, a single decision made instinctively by a brilliant player can all decide a game. That the identity of a single staff member can be directly responsible for almost a tenth of the outcome is proof not of a manager’s irrelevance, but of the opposite.Manchester United has problems, but star power, talent and budget are not among them.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockManchester United — yes, them again — is a case in point. United has one of the most expensive, richly remunerated squads in soccer history. This is supposed to be the great corollary with performance: How much you pay your players is, in theory, the best gauge for where they will help you finish in the league.But, at the point that Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was fired, United was marooned in seventh place in the Premier League. It had been humiliated, in quick succession, by Liverpool and Manchester City and Watford. There was little or no cohesion in defense, no identifiable plan in attack, no real sense that anyone knew what they were supposed to be doing at all.Not all of that is the manager’s fault, of course: United’s haphazard recruitment policy and its outdated, flawed structure were the primary culprits. But that the problems should have been so visible, so pronounced under Solskjaer, a coach so obviously out of his depth, serve as a potent reminder that, no matter how good your players, they are not enough on their own.They need to be organized effectively, too: not only to compete with City and Liverpool, two of the four best teams on the planet, but to survive against a straggler like Watford. In a sport of fine margins, after all, it does not take much to shift the balance, and to shift it drastically. A merely good manager may look like they do not have much of an impact. When one does not meet even that bar, the effect, as we have seen, is obvious, whatever they do with the ketchup.When the Reward Comes After the SeasonErling Haaland and Dortmund are out of the Champions League. He may be back in it before his old club is.Ina Fassbender/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere are, at least, mitigating circumstances. Borussia Dortmund went into its game against Sporting Lisbon in the Champions League on Wednesday without a raft of first-choice players: no Mats Hummels, no Giovanni Reyna, no Raphael Guerreiro and, of course, no Erling Haaland. Marco Rose, the coach, had resources so diminished that he could not even fill his quota of substitutes.Still, that Dortmund’s involvement in the Champions League should be over not only before spring, but before December, should be regarded as something of a failure. Not least because — in Ajax, Sporting and Besiktas, the Turkish champion — Dortmund could hardly bemoan the cruel vicissitudes of a tough group-stage draw.That even that pool proved too much, though, hints that balance has been lost at Dortmund. For more than a decade, the club has been held up as a paradigm of how to thrive in soccer’s new world: Dortmund’s success has been built, essentially, on turning itself into a springboard for the world’s brightest young talents, a way-station on the road to greatness.That praise was not misplaced. Though there has been no Bundesliga title at Dortmund since 2012, the club has remained competitive — by and large — while regularly selling off or being divested of soccer’s next generation: Robert Lewandowski and Christian Pulisic and, most recently, Jadon Sancho.There is a sense, though, of ever-diminishing returns. While the stars keep forming — Haaland will go next summer, and probably Jude Bellingham the year after that — the results are dwindling.The suspicion is that Dortmund’s priorities have changed: that selling players is no longer a byproduct of composing a young team capable of competing, but that competing is now a happy, occasional consequence of composing a young team that can be sold. Not reaching the knockout rounds of the Champions League is a failure, of course. But that is not the trophy Dortmund was hoping to win this year. Its aim, instead, is to make sure that Haaland can be sold at a vast profit in the summer. That remains on course. Whether that is the right course, though, is a different matter.The Super League Will Come AgainIt is, in a way, the punishment they deserve. Six months ago, the architects of the European Super League had grand, hubristic visions of breaking free from the unwanted control of faceless, supranational bureaucracies. Now, their revolutionary idea only exists — so much as it exists at all — in the legalistic quagmire of the European Parliament.We will not dally on the details of this, because they are, by their very nature, intensely boring: This week, the European Union’s assembly passed a resolution opposing “breakaway leagues,” and pledging to uphold what it described as the “European model for sport.” The motion was nonbinding, so has no material consequence, but it represented yet another setback for the cabal of clubs who refuse to let the subject rest.Before the various uneasy allies who came together to suppress the revolt celebrate too loudly, though, it is worth considering the situation — as things stand — in the Champions League. All four English teams have made it safely through despite, in three cases, barely breaking a sweat, and in one, that of Manchester United, not being very good.Manchester City and its Premier League rivals are waltzing through the Champions League again.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat contrasts starkly with the reality of life at their traditional, continental counterweights. Juventus has made it through, but was humiliated by Chelsea. Both Atlético Madrid and Barcelona may miss the knockouts. Germany and Spain may have only one representative each in the last 16.The dynamics here are clear: England has emerged unscathed from the pandemic — as witnessed by the multibillion-dollar broadcast deal the Premier League signed with NBC last week — while most of Europe’s major leagues have not. A handful of teams, like Bayern Munich and Paris St.-Germain, might not have lost ground, but nor have they gained it. For most, though, the gap that was already opening between England and everyone else has suddenly become a chasm.There have already been two all-English Champions League finals in the last three years. The economic currents swirling around the game make it very likely there will be more, many more, in the near future.That is not, to be clear, healthy for soccer as a whole. It is obviously not healthy for Europe’s major powers. More and more may come to recognize that in seasons to come. The idea of a Super League — one excluding the English teams — may not remain tangled in the European Parliament for long.CorrespondenceLluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAn excellent alternative viewpoint on last week’s newsletter from William Ireland, who from memory may, in fact, be a Bill.“The inability of Barcelona and Real Madrid to treat the Premier League as a feeder league is a problem for the Premier League, too,” he wrote. “The reality is that moving players before they grow stale and distracted has been great for the English teams. You wonder how much better their teams could be if some of their older players had been plucked away by the Liga duopoly. That problem is likely to get worse as teams keep acquiring more players and do not have any easy way to lose any from their current roster.”This is, I would agree, an issue that Premier League clubs are going to have to think about more and more. There is no longer a viable outlet for the players they would like to move on, either to cash in when their value is highest or their decline imminent, or because a newer, shinier trinket has captured their attention. Part of me wonders if it is a natural part of the cycle: the same phenomenon that has undermined Barcelona, say, but writ large across a league.George Gorecki, meanwhile, contests the idea that Africa should have more than five spots at a World Cup. “The African countries are among the least impressive, when it comes to their performances at the finals,” he wrote.“In every World Cup from 1990 to 2010, only one African team reached the knockout stage. In 2014, there were two, while in 2018, there were none. An African team has reached the quarterfinals only three times.” If anything, he suggested, this means “Africa should probably relinquish some of their places.”I would quibble with that. For one: Africa might send more teams to the knockout rounds if it had more teams in the tournament. Two out of five reaching the last 16 in 2014 is pretty good going, isn’t it?Second: African qualifying is substantially more arbitrary than it really ought to be. The final round of home-and-away playoffs, in particular, means there tends to be at least one, if not two, of the continent’s best sides left behind. I would agree, though, that Africa’s performances have not improved as it looked as if they might in the 1990s. But at least part of the responsibility for that, to me, is structural. More

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    He Knows the Ballon d'Or Winner. No, He Won't Tell.

    Encrypted email servers, secret meetings, strict confidentiality: How the identity of the winner of the Ballon d’Or, soccer’s biggest individual prize, is guarded like a state secret.At this time of year, Pascal Ferré seems to field the same call, over and over again. They come from across the world. Sometimes, it is a team executive or a club president. Often, it is an agent, charming and inquisitive. Occasionally, it might even be one of the world’s most famous players themselves.Regardless of the voice on the other end of the line, they all follow much the same pattern with Ferré, the genial, bearded editor in chief of the prestigious French soccer weekly France Football. They start by shooting the breeze, asking casually after Ferré’s general health. Then, they start to shift gear.They ask how preparations are going for the magazine’s annual gala, the one at which the men’s and women’s winners of the sport’s most coveted individual prize, the Ballon d’Or, will be announced. Fine, fine. Has the voting finished? Has it all gone well? Yes, yes. Ferré knows what comes next, the real reason for every call. They want to know the one thing he cannot tell them.There are, perhaps, two ways to best illustrate how jealously Ferré and his staff guard the identity of the winners of the Ballons d’Or. One is that he is one of only two people, even within the magazine, who knows who has won. The other is that the second, his trusted executive assistant, is only told in case something happens to him. “Imagine if I had an accident,” he said. “There would still have to be a Ballon d’Or.”Ferré cannot be coaxed into letting the name slip. “This is my sixth year in charge of the event,” he said. “I have not made a mistake yet.” All of those thinly veiled efforts to inveigle an answer are met with a stock response. “I don’t want to lie,” he said. He knows who has won. “But I tell them that I can’t share their name because the winners do not know yet, and it would not be right for them not to be the first to find out.”He leaves it until the last possible moment to invite the winners into his circle of trust. He was planning on informing this year’s winners this week, a few days before the gala at Paris’s Théâtre du Châtelet on Nov. 29. Even that is something of a concession to practicality: He has to alert them, he said, so he can make sure they know how the ceremony will work.It is only then that Ferré’s secret will be out of his control. For months beforehand, it is treated as a matter of the strictest confidentiality, protected by a regimen of such discretion that even Ferré will admit that it could, in a certain light, border on the “paranoiac.”In France Football’s offices, a book with a golden edge showcases the covers of the magazine with previous Ballon d’0r winners. James Hill for The New York TimesPreparations for the gala last, effectively, all year. But it is in late September that the work begins in earnest. Ten France Football staff members are tasked with putting together two lists: the 30 men’s players and the 20 women’s players who, they believe, warrant inclusion on the final shortlist. Once those names are submitted, they gather in the magazine’s office for what Ferré, gently, calls “a discussion.”In truth, of course, many of the names have a clear majority behind them. “For the men, maybe 20 or 22 players will be obvious to everyone,” he said. “We discuss the final eight or 10. The meetings can be long, two or three hours, but we need everyone to be proud of the final selection. It is not just the list of the chief. And we try not to forget anybody: We worked out a couple of years ago that, between us, we had watched 1,000 games or more that year. To be on the list at all is something very serious.”Once something approaching a consensus has been reached, France Football sends its shortlists to its jury of more than 170 vote-wielding journalists around the world (as well as announcing them in public) in early October.It is at this point that the veil of secrecy descends. The jurors — one per nation — submit their five choices, in order, to what Ferré describes as a “private email server.” Pressed on quite what form that takes, he demurred: The system is so secret that he declined to divulge even how it worked, except to say that only he and his secretary have access to it. The rest of the France Football staff are kept in the dark.“We are very careful,” he said. “But the identity of the winner of the Ballon d’Or is a big secret. There is not an equivalent in the rest of sport, I think.” He sounded vaguely doubtful when it was put to him that the most immediate parallel was, perhaps, the results of the Oscars.That the responsibility weighs so heavily on Ferré, and his magazine, should not be attributed to an inflated sense of their own importance. They treat the Ballon d’Or seriously because they know exactly how much it means to players. When Ferré called Luka Modric, the winner in 2018, to give him the news that he had won, the Croatian “cried like a child,” Ferré said.“It is Christmas for them,” he said. “It is the only chance you get in a team sport to celebrate by yourself.”It is a significance that only seems to grow with every passing year. The primacy of the Ballon d’Or is something of a curious phenomenon. In 2010, it was married to FIFA’s official equivalent, the World Player of the Year award, to become the FIFA Ballon d’Or.When that partnership ended, in 2015, and FIFA launched the imaginatively titled “The Best” awards, it would have been possible to believe that the Ballon d’Or’s luster might fade a little. Instead, the Ballon d’Or’s appeal only continues to grow. Kylian Mbappé has described it as “an ambition for any player who aspires to be the best.” His France teammate Paul Pogba made it plain several years ago that it was an award he was “aiming for.”Even Robert Lewandowski, who once scoffed at France Football’s choices — “I don’t know why one player finishes 50th and another 25th and another fifth,” he said in 2017 — has had a change of heart.Lewandowski, the Bayern Munich striker, was widely regarded as favorite to win the prize last year before it was canceled — not uncontroversially — because of the coronavirus pandemic. “My achievements answer this question,” he said when asked if he would be a deserving recipient. “It would mean a lot to me to win it.”Quite what lies at the root of that respect is open to debate. It could be that it is indicative of the sport’s gradual shift toward focusing on individual stars, rather than collective success, or the rise of a perception of players, first and foremost, as brands.“This is my sixth year in charge of the event,” Ferré said. “I have not made a mistake yet.”James Hill for The New York TimesIt may be that the rivalry between Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo to see who can win it the most has turned the award into a proxy measure of greatness. “Ronaldo has only one ambition, and that is to retire with more Ballons d’Or than Messi,” Ferré said, “and I know that because he has told me.”To Ferré, though, the award’s appeal is far more simple. The prize’s enduring glamour is rooted in its history. The Ballon d’Or has been running since 1956. George Best won a Ballon d’Or. Franz Beckenbauer and Alfredo Di Stéfano won two. Johan Cruyff won three. To claim one, to Ferré, is to claim a spot in the sport’s pantheon.“It is not to do with money,” he said. “It is only the trophy. But to have one is to have a place in history. I think that if you looked at the statistics of Messi and Ronaldo, you would see they always score a lot of goals in September and October, when the voting is happening. That is not a coincidence.”That is what is at stake as autumn draws in and the votes start to come through. It is that which explains why so many players and agents and executives simply cannot wait to find out if they, or their player, has won. And it is that which illustrates why Ferré and his magazine treat the name of their winner like a state secret until the last possible moment. Some things, after all, are worth the wait. More

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    Manchester United Picks Ralf Rangnick as Interim Manager

    Rangnick, an architect of the Red Bull soccer empire, will take over as United’s manager while the club pursues a permanent replacement for Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.Ralf Rangnick, the architect of the rise of RB Leipzig and the man widely regarded as the forebear of much of modern German soccer, has landed the most high-profile post of his career, albeit on a temporary basis: the 63-year-old Rangnick is expected to be named Manchester United manager, perhaps as soon as today.After three tumultuous, emotional years, United finally parted with Ole Gunnar Solskjaer on Sunday, less than 24 hours after his team endured a humbling 4-1 defeat at Watford. That loss came only a few weeks after Solskjaer’s team, reinforced over the summer with the likes of Jadon Sancho and Cristiano Ronaldo, was humiliated in quick succession, at home, by both Liverpool and Manchester City.Michael Carrick, a member of Solskjaer’s coaching staff and like him a decorated player during a decade-long playing career at the club, took charge for United’s victory in the Champions League at Villarreal on Tuesday, but the team’s executives had made it clear that his appointment would be a brief one.In the aftermath of Solskjaer’s dismissal, United had determined that the best course of action was to appoint an experienced interim manager — to take the club through to the end of the season — while it considered a long-term replacement for Solskjaer. The club appeared to be working on the logic that there would be a fuller field of candidates for the permanent post available in the summer.While the likes of Ajax’s Erik ten Hag and Mauricio Pochettino are the most convincing contenders for the full-time role, United considered a variety of immediately available coaches for the caretaker position that has gone to Rangnick. Lucien Favre, formerly of Borussia Dortmund, and Rudi Garcia, a French champion with Lille, both were considered.It was Rangnick, though, who quickly emerged as the front-runner. He has spent much of the last decade establishing and fine-tuning the Red Bull network of clubs, taking posts at both Red Bull Salzburg and RB Leipzig. He helped turn the former into regulars in the Champions League and the latter into one of the most consistent clubs in Germany.He came to prominence, though, by guiding Hoffenheim — a team with little or no history, based in the village of Sinsheim — from the lower reaches of German soccer into the Bundesliga, and by teaching and playing an intense, fast-paced style of soccer that formed the theoretical basis for the likes of Jürgen Klopp and Thomas Tuchel. To many, Rangnick is the godfather of the German pressing game that now permeates most top-level European soccer.He left the Red Bull group last summer, and established his own consultancy firm, together with his longtime friend and confidante Lars Kornetka. The company had taken on a handful of clients — including Lokomotiv Moscow — hoping to tap in to Rangnick’s experience and his club-building expertise.Those teams have accepted that Rangnick will place those projects on hold while he takes charge at United. His managerial role will last only until the end of the season. He will then move into a consultant’s role at United once a new manager is in place. More

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    Do Sports Still Need China?

    Global outrage, broken contracts and shifting politics could change the calculus for leagues and teams that once raced to do business in China.The rewards for international sports leagues and organizations are plain: lucrative broadcast deals, bountiful sponsorship opportunities, millions of new consumers.The risks are obvious, too: the compromising of values, the public relations nightmares, the general atmosphere of opacity.For years, they have surveyed the Chinese market, measured these factors and come up with the same basic math: that the benefits of doing business there outweighed the possible downsides. The N.B.A. might blunder into a humbling political crisis based on a single tweet, and rich contracts might vanish into thin air overnight, but China, the thinking went, was a potential gold mine. And for that reason leagues, teams, governing bodies and athletes contorted themselves for any chance to tap into it.But recent events may have changed that thinking for good, and raised a new question: Is doing business in China still worth it?The sports world received a hint last week of a changing dynamic when the WTA — one of many organizations that have worked aggressively over the last decade to establish a foothold in the Chinese market — threatened to stop doing business there altogether if the government failed to confirm the safety of Peng Shuai. Peng, a top women’s tennis player once hailed by state media as “our Chinese princess,” disappeared from public life recently after accusing a prominent former government official of sexual assault.The WTA’s threat was remarkable not only for its reasoning, but for its rarity.WTA Tour officials, fellow players and human rights groups spoke up for Peng Shuai after China tried to censor her accusations of sexual abuse.Demetrius Freeman for The New York TimesBut as China’s president, Xi Jinping, governs through an increasingly heavy-handed personal worldview, and as China’s aggressive approach to geopolitics and its record on human rights make the country, and those who do business there, a growing target for a chorus of critics and activists, sports leagues and organizations may soon be forced to re-evaluate their longstanding assumptions.That sort of direct confrontation is already taking place elsewhere: Lawmakers in the European Union recently called for stronger ties with Taiwan, an island China claims as its territory, only months after European officials blocked a landmark commercial agreement over human rights concerns and labeled China a “totalitarian threat.”For most sports organizations, the WTA’s position remains an outlier. Sports organizations with multimillion-dollar partnerships in China — whether the N.B.A., England’s Premier League, Formula 1 auto racing or the International Olympic Committee — have mostly brushed aside concerns.Some partners have acquiesced at times to China’s various demands. A few have issued humbling apologies. The I.O.C., in perhaps the most notable example, has seemed to go out of its way to avoid angering China, even as Peng, a former Olympian, went missing.But an evolving public opinion may get harder for sports organizations to ignore. A report this year from the Pew Research Center, for instance, found that 67 percent of Americans had negative feelings toward China, up from 46 percent in 2018. Similar shifts have occurred in other Western democracies.Mark Dreyer, a sports analyst for China Sports Insider, based in Beijing, said the WTA’s standoff with China represented an escalation in the “them or us” mentality that appeared to be forming between China and its Western rivals.The threat from the WTA, then, could serve as a sign of showdowns to come, in which case, Dreyer said, China could lose out.“Frankly, China is a big market, but the rest of the world is still bigger,” he said. “And if people have to choose, they’re not going to choose China.”To some experts, then, the WTA’s extraordinary decision to confront China head-on might actually signal a turning point, rather than an aberration.“The calculation is one part political, one part moral, one part economic,” said Simon Chadwick, a professor of international sports business at Emlyon Business School in Lyon, France. He said that the WTA’s dispute with China reflected the “red line” growing between the country and many of its Western counterparts, with the sides seeming more entrenched in diverging sociopolitical ideologies.Some sports organizations are deepening their ties to China. Formula 1, for example, just extended its contract for the Chinese Grand Prix, keeping the race in Shanghai through 2025.Greg Baker/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“I think we are rapidly heading toward the kind of terrain where organizations, businesses, and sponsors will be forced to choose one side or another,” Chadwick added.The WTA’s own about-face was stark. Only three years ago, the organization was heralding a deal that made Shenzhen, China, the new home of its tour finals for a decade starting in 2019, accepting promises of a new stadium and a whopping $14 million annual prize pool. In 2019, just before the pandemic, the WTA held nine tournaments in China.Fast forward to last week, when Steve Simon, the WTA’s chief executive, said in an interview with The New York Times that if China did not agree to an independent inquiry of Peng’s claims, that the tour would be willing to cease operations in the country.“There are too many decisions being made today that aren’t based on what is simply right and wrong,” Simon said. “And this is the right thing to do, 100 percent.”The language raised eyebrows around the sports world.“They are not the first ones to have had a run-in with China,” Zhe Ji, the director of Red Lantern, a sports marketing company that does work in China, said about the WTA. “But I haven’t seen anybody else come out with as strong a wording as that.”The run-ins have proliferated in only the last few years.The N.B.A., for instance, was seen as a pioneer when it played its first games in China in 2004, including a game featuring Yao Ming, the Chinese star for the Houston Rockets. The ensuing years brought prosperity for the league there, and relative peace. It was praised for its patient, culturally sensitive approach to building there. Then, in 2019, Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Rockets at the time, tweeted in support of pro-democracy protests taking place in Hong Kong, and in the blink of an eye a relationship that had developed over several years imploded.Merchandise for the Rockets — China’s favorite team in China’s favorite sports league — was removed from stores, and the team’s games were no longer broadcast on television. Fans took to Chinese social media to attack the league. Then, when the N.B.A. issued what was widely taken as an apology, it sparked an almost equally robust wave of criticism back home. (The N.B.A. did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.)“The NBA should have anticipated the challenges of doing business in a country run by a repressive single party government, including by being prepared to stand in strong defense of the freedom of expression of its employees, players, and affiliates across the globe,” read a letter sent to the league by a bipartisan group of United States lawmakers.The N.B.A. saw its brand battered in China and at home after a team executive waded into Chinese politics on Twitter.Tyrone Siu/ReutersThe letter’s signees — a cross-party group that included Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a Democrat, and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican — accused the N.B.A. of compromising American values and effectively supporting Chinese propaganda.“If you’re angering both sides, it means there is no middle ground, which I think was significant,” said Dreyer, the Beijing-based sports analyst.Like other observers, Dreyer suggested the WTA’s stance was potentially game-changing. But he noted, too, that it was possibly easier for the WTA to defy China than it had been for, say, the N.B.A., for two reasons.First, because the pandemic had already forced the WTA to cancel its events in China for the near future, the tour was not necessarily forfeiting big sums of money in the immediate term. (Severing ties with China permanently would of course require the WTA Tour to replace tens of millions of dollars in revenue and prize money.) Second, because China has essentially erased any mention of Peng and the ensuing international outcry from its news and social media, the WTA’s brand may not take much of a hit there. Many in China simply do not know about Peng, or the WTA’s response.“With the N.B.A., they were burning jerseys,” Dreyer said. “You don’t have that reaction against tennis.”To be sure, big sports leagues that have deep, longstanding interests in China, barring some extreme turn of events, will not exit the market any time soon. And some organizations are still going all-in.The I.O.C., which will stage the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing in February, has tuned out any and all calls from critics for the organization to make some statement about China’s human rights abuses, including the treatment of religious minorities in the country’s western regions.The Beijing Olympics marked the start of its 100-days-out countdown on Wednesday.Andrea Verdelli/Getty ImagesFormula 1 this month announced that it had signed a deal to continue the Chinese Grand Prix, an annual race in Shanghai, through 2025, and the Premier League appears to have patched over a crisis that began when a top player infuriated China by criticizing its human rights record.Some in the industry, though, have already noticed a change, a slight cooling, among other companies pondering business in the sports market there.“With increased political tension and the complications of doing business in China, I’ve seen more companies focus back on Europe and the U.S., where the reward may not be as large but the risk is much less,” said Lisa Delpy Neirotti, an international sports marketing consultant and director of the sports management master’s program at George Washington University.That dynamic has been vivid in European soccer, which had collectively seemed to view China as a sort of El Dorado five years ago, but now seems to be coming to terms with reality after a series of disappointments. In Italy, Inter Milan, one of that country’s most storied clubs, is in a tailspin after its Chinese owner, Suning, a consumer goods company, became engulfed in a major financial crisis. The team has been forced to sell player contracts to meet its payroll.In England, the Premier League remains in litigation with a broadcast partner that failed to pay up after signing a record-breaking television deal to broadcast games in China. A new partner is paying a fraction of the previous agreement, leaving some clubs disillusioned.Manchester City’s Bernardo Silva in Shanghai in 2019. The Premier League had to find a new television partner in China after a record-setting deal collapsed.Hector Retamal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Over the last five years there had been a perception in the West that China is there for the taking — there’s lots of money, economic growth is strong, a growing middle class, disposal income, and we can go feast on this,” Chadwick said. “What has happened for some sports organizations in the West is that they have not found China as lucrative as they imagined, and they have also found China incredibly difficult to do business with.”The difficulties appear to be deepening.Half a decade ago, the Chinese government, emboldened about sports after hosting the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, announced plans to create an $800 billion domestic sports industry, the largest in the world. That captured the attention of Western sports organizations.What many organizations did not anticipate, though, were the peculiarities of the Chinese business landscape, the extent to which politics is woven through all aspects of China’s economy, and the growing spirit of nationalism under its increasingly autocratic president, Xi.“I absolutely think over the long term that major sporting events will be hesitant moving forward to schedule out in China right now,” said Thomas A. Baker III, a sports management professor at the University of Georgia who has done extensive work in China. “The China that welcomed the world in 2008 is not the same China that people are doing business with in 2021.”Tariq Panja More