Raphael Stevens

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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

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    Karim Benzema, French Soccer Star, Is Convicted in Sex Tape Scandal

    The Real Madrid striker was found guilty of being part of an attempt to blackmail a fellow player, charges that had led to his being dropped from his national team for more than five years.PARIS — Karim Benzema, a star striker for Real Madrid, was found guilty by a French court on Wednesday on charges that he was part of an attempt to blackmail a fellow player in a case involving a sex tape, a scandal that saw Benzema excluded from France’s national soccer team for more than five years.Benzema, 33, was given a one-year suspended prison sentence and a fine of 75,000 euros, or about $84,000.He had been accused of helping four other men blackmail Mathieu Valbuena, a teammate in the France squad, over an intimate video that had been taken from Valbuena’s mobile phone.Benzema has always denied the accusations, and his lawyers quickly announced that he would appeal the verdict. He was preparing for Real Madrid’s Champions League match later on Wednesday against Sheriff Tiraspol and did not attend court for the decision.It was unclear how the verdict would affect Benzema’s standing on the national team. France dropped Benzema from the squad in 2015 because of the case, an exile that continued through the team’s World Cup victory in 2018. But Didier Deschamps, the French coach, surprisingly recalled him this year for the European Championship.Noël Le Graët, the president of the French soccer federation, had said this month that Benzema would not be automatically kicked off the team if found guilty, and on Wednesday he told RMC Sport that he had spoken with Deschamps and that both agreed that Benzema would not be “punished,” suggesting he would not be dropped from the team. “The manager has the right to pick whoever he wants,” Le Graët said.Since his return to the national team, Benzema has been a key player, despite France’s early exit from the Euros. Two of his most recent goals — in a match against Kazakhstan that qualified France for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar — moved him among the top five highest scorers for his country.Benzema has won three Spanish league titles and four Champions Leagues with Real Madrid. This week he was shortlisted by FIFA for its annual best player awards, and he is also seen as a contender for the Ballon d’Or, soccer’s biggest individual prize for players, which will be announced on Monday.Four other defendants were tried on the charges of attempted blackmail, including Karim Zenati, one of Benzema’s childhood friends, and three men who acted as murky intermediaries and occasional fixers behind the scenes of soccer’s cash-infused world. They were also found guilty.Zenati was sentenced to 15 months in prison. Of the others, two were given jail terms, of two and of two and a half years, and one received an 18-month suspended sentence.On top of criminal fines, the defendants were also ordered to pay €250,000, or about $281,000, in damages to Valbuena. They are jointly responsible for €150,000 of that total, with Benzema ordered to pay another €80,000 individually and the other defendants a further €5,000 each.The court in Versailles, southwest of Paris, heard at trial last month how Valbuena was first alerted in 2015 by another France teammate to the existence of an intimate video of him, believed to have been stolen from Valbuena’s mobile phone.In June of that year, Valbuena received several phone calls from men threatening to publish the video if he did not pay them tens of thousands of euros. Valbuena refused and instead filed a criminal complaint.After several unsuccessful attempts, the blackmailers were suspected of having contacted Zenati, in hopes that he would push Benzema to speak with Valbuena and encourage him to pay, the court was told.In October 2015, in a conversation with Valbuena at the French squad’s training facilities in Clairefontaine, near Paris, Benzema said that he could help his teammate by putting him in touch with someone who could fix the problem, the court heard.Benzema, who did not attend the trial, has acknowledged that he acted as an intermediary but has always maintained that he was merely offering Valbuena friendly advice on how to handle the blackmailing attempt, not taking part in it.But Valbuena said that he had interpreted Benzema’s role differently. “I felt like Karim Benzema wanted to scare me,” Valbuena testified at trial, according to French news reports.After the conversation between the players, Benzema spoke crudely and mockingly about his teammate in a phone call with Zenati that was tapped by the police and later leaked to news media.On the call, which was played at trial, Benzema told Zenati that Valbuena “isn’t taking us seriously” and that Benzema had told Valbuena, “If you want the video to be destroyed, my friend comes up to see you in Lyon and you sort it out face to face with him.”Benzema’s lawyers argued that deriding a teammate over the phone was not a crime and that the charges against Benzema rested solely on Valbuena’s interpretation of the conversation, in which money was not mentioned.Antoine Vey, one of Benzema’s lawyers, told reporters in Versailles on Wednesday that the court itself had acknowledged that Benzema did not know about the full extent of the blackmailing plot.“How, without being informed of the backdrop to this affair, could he have been an accomplice to the project?” Vey said, adding that Benzema would testify on appeal.But the court found that Benzema had gotten “personally” and “insistently” involved in the blackmail efforts and had used “ruses and lies” to convince Valbuena — warning him about the consequences if the video was published, portraying the blackmailers as more hardened criminals than they really were and advising him not to contact the police.Benzema “deliberately brought his aid and assistance” to the blackmailers, and the tapped phone call with Zenati showed that the striker harbored “no benevolence at all” toward his fellow player, the court said in a summary of its ruling.The case made Benzema the focus of intense criticism in France, especially on the political right, and it created a rift between him and the French squad. In 2016, Benzema, who is of Algerian descent, told a Spanish newspaper that Deschamps had “bowed to the pressure of a racist part of France” by agreeing to leave him off the national team.But the men appeared to have reconciled before this year’s Euros, when Deschamps said he had held a long discussion with the player before recalling him.“Everyone has the right to make mistakes,” Deschamps said in May. More

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    Manchester United and the Perils of Living in the Past

    Years of success under Alex Ferguson changed the way United viewed itself. But the glory days are gone, and the sooner the club admits that, the better.Old Trafford’s gangways were still packed with Liverpool fans, basking in the sight of their team’s sacking of the Theatre of Dreams last month, when Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, representing himself, made the case for the defense.What he had just witnessed, he admitted, represented the “darkest day” of his three years in charge of Manchester United. But, he said, he would not — could not — countenance the idea of stepping down, of walking away. “We have come too far as a group and we are too close to give up now,” he said.Leaving Old Trafford that day, the idea that Solskjaer might emerge unscathed seemed fanciful. He had become something worse than an object of pity: He had become a punchline. That night, United’s executives met to discuss how to react. Somehow, they came to the same conclusion as the man they had appointed: Now was not the time to turn back. Solskjaer survived.There are several ways to explain Manchester United’s reluctance to accept the blindingly obvious, the mulish refusal of the self-styled biggest club in the world to recognize that its manager was way in over his head until it had not only been humiliated at home by Liverpool, but swatted aside with disdain by Manchester City and then humbled, plaintive and pathetic, by modest Watford.One explanation — the easiest one, the Occam’s razor one — is cool, uncaring cynicism: United’s hierarchy appointed Solskjaer, initially temporarily and then on a series of ever-extending permanent contracts, and demurred from taking a decision that would effectively be an admission of error, and the club’s owners did not mind who was in charge as long as the money kept rolling in.Another, far kinder version, would point to the curious sentimentality that seems to infect Manchester United: For an organization that behaves in almost every other sphere of its existence as a faceless corporate monolith, carving up and selling off its history to whoever will pay for a slice, United thinks with its heart, rather than its head, more often than might be expected.That sentimentality was there in the rush to award Solskjaer a permanent contract after the uplift of his early caretaker months in 2018 and 2019, and again when the club extended his deal last summer after finishing a distant second to Manchester City in the Premier League.Solskjaer is a former player — a club legend, as the fawning statement that announced his departure put it — and the romance that it might be him who restored the team to its place at the pinnacle seemed to be irresistible to those who employed him. Solskjaer was even permitted an exit interview, a chance to say goodbye on his own terms, with tears in his eyes.Perhaps that should be standard practice: Managers, even ones who have lost heavily at Watford, are human, and should be treated as such. Certainly, the affection for Solskjaer among United fans made the interview entirely understandable. It is not, though, the move that most hard-nosed, unapologetically ruthless businesses would make.But then United is not quite as hard-nosed as it might be, not all of the time. There will have been plenty within the club rubbing their hands with glee at the impact of Cristiano Ronaldo’s return last summer: his vast Instagram following, his army of devotees, his huge commercial profile.It was not any of that, though, that persuaded Rio Ferdinand and Alex Ferguson and Patrice Evra to intercede when it looked as if Ronaldo might be about to join Manchester City. They helped make the case to Ed Woodward, the club’s central power broker, to intervene. Ronaldo’s talent played its part of course, as did the status he had acquired in all his years away, but so too did the allure of bringing home a prodigal son, the feeling that he was back where he belonged.United sent stars to Solskjaer’s rescue when what the club seemed to need was a strategy.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThis is not, of course, the “best in class” behavior that United would like to think is its hallmark. It did not take any great depth of knowledge, even in advance, to wonder if this little jaunt down memory lane might come at the cost of United’s balance, that Ronaldo might relegate the club’s future — Mason Greenwood and Jadon Sancho, in particular — to the shadows.It did not require any sort of tactical qualification to work out that Ronaldo, Bruno Fernandes and Paul Pogba, as well as the rest of United’s glittering array of attacking talent, cannot be easily subsumed into a cogent system. No searing insight was required to see that the money might have been rather better spent on a defensive midfielder. After all, even Solskjaer knew that.But then that is the grand irony of the modern Manchester United, the one that sits at the heart of the third, and perhaps most compelling, explanation for how the Solskjaer experiment lasted this long — through the loss to City and the collapse against Liverpool and the defeat in last season’s Europa League final and the 6-1 loss at home to Tottenham and the 4-0 mauling by Everton and all of the other bright, burning red flags.This is a club that, for 20 years, did nothing but win. There is a banner at Old Trafford that sets out just how central ultimate victory is to this club: images in silhouette of every trophy available to an English soccer team surrounding the slogan “We’ve Won It All.” Most of them were accrued between 1991 and 2013, when Ferguson turned Old Trafford into a monument to his own greatness.That is the standard that Manchester United’s current and future iterations must match; that is the measure by which they have failed, again and again, in the eight years since Ferguson stood on the field at Old Trafford, an emperor believing the sun would never set, and assured the fans that the good times would never end.Manchester United embraces glory days, even as they move further away every year.Carl Recine/Action Images Via ReutersAnd yet, for all that winning, there is precious little indication that anyone at Old Trafford understands quite how it happened. Solskjaer spoke often about restoring United’s traditions, but what they were was never made especially clear.In that, he joins a long and not especially proud list of Ferguson’s alumni to have tried to follow in their mentor’s footsteps and have failed. United had plenty of players during Ferguson’s tenure who looked cut out for management: the calm authority of Steve Bruce, the inspiring anger of Roy Keane, the fierce intelligence of Gary Neville, his brother Phil.None has lived up to the billing. Ferguson’s former assistants have fared a little better — Steve McClaren and Carlos Queiroz, in particular — but there is little evidence of a Ferguson school.It is not a unique phenomenon — Liverpool’s dynasty of the 1970s and ’80s did not produce a string of managerial titans, either — but it is, in the context of United’s failures since its totemic figure departed, noteworthy.In retirement, Ferguson has built a lucrative cottage industry in books on management and leadership. It is not to disparage his genius or his legacy to suggest that he did not pass those lessons on to those around him contemporaneously. Few of his former players absorbed them effectively, and, according to all available evidence, none of his theoretical superiors did. Ferguson does not seem to have left behind anyone at Old Trafford who truly understood the inner workings of his winning machine, who could reverse engineer his brilliance.Solskjaer in 2019, when United only saw sunshine ahead.Rui Vieira/Associated PressIt is easy to drift into meaningless jargon when listing all of the things required for success in modern soccer: a clear vision, a defined philosophy, a coherent structure. At times, their importance is overblown; Real Madrid won three Champions League titles in a row because it had the best players, after all. But whether they come by accident or design, most elite teams possess them. Manchester United does not.Perhaps that is why the club’s executives could believe Solskjaer when he said that, in the face of all that had happened against Liverpool, the club was “too close to give up now.” It was not clear what United was supposed to be close to, a few minutes after the yawning chasm between Solskjaer’s team and its greatest rival had been laid brutally and surgically bare.But how were the people charged with deciding whether he kept his job or not to know if he was right? They know that Manchester United ought to be great, because it was great under Ferguson, but they do not know how Ferguson made that greatness happen, so they have no way of measuring the club’s current proximity to it.Instead, they fell back on the solitary lesson that the club does seem to have learned from Ferguson: that success lies in the gift of a single great individual, and that all it needs to do to be restored to its perch is to find that person. They hoped, with all of their hearts, that might be Solskjaer. It was not. And so now they will set out on their search again, hoping to get close once more, even as they drift further and further away. More

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    Manchester United Fires Solskjaer After a Loss Too Far

    Lopsided defeats against Liverpool and Manchester City had the one-time fan favorite teetering. A humbling loss at lowly Watford finished him off.Manchester United had not done it after a humiliation by Liverpool. And the club’s executives had managed to tolerate the sight of Manchester City’s cruising to victory at Old Trafford while barely breaking a sweat. After each defeat, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, the manager who had overseen both calamities, somehow remained in his post.He could not, though, survive a third. Solskjaer had promised, two weeks on since that defeat against Manchester City, that his team would react, that it would use the embarrassment as fuel for the rest of the season. Instead, his squad, one of the most expensively assembled in soccer’s long and lavish history, went to Watford — struggling at the foot of the Premier League, the sort of team United used to swat aside, unthinking — and contrived to lose on Saturday, 4-1.That was the end. A board meeting was called. A decision was made. Solskjaer, a favorite son finally out of rope, was out.Manchester United can confirm that Ole Gunnar Solskjaer has left his role as Manager.Thank you for everything, Ole ❤️#MUFC— Manchester United (@ManUtd) November 21, 2021
    “Ole will always be a legend at Manchester United and it is with regret that we have reached this difficult decision,” the club said on Sunday in a statement that seemed to take pains to avoid saying Solskjaer had been fired. “While the past few weeks have been disappointing, they should not obscure all the work he has done over the past three years to rebuild the foundations for long-term success.”The decision to remove him, though, did little to resolve the uncertainty around United’s future. United said Michael Carrick, Solskjaer’s assistant and another former United player, would take over on an interim basis “while the club looks to appoint an interim manager to the end of the season.” That decision — naming a placeholder for a to-be-announced interim manager — raised new questions about the direction of the club, the most decorated team in English soccer but one that has not won the league since 2013.Saturday’s defeat had seemed to spark a sudden shift in the players’ attitudes. United’s squad had, for the most part, remained staunchly behind Solskjaer: He is, and has been, well-liked by his charges. After the loss at Watford, though, United’s long-serving goalkeeper David De Gea acknowledged that it appeared his team did not “know how to defend.” He bemoaned his colleagues’ tendency to give up a host of “easy chances, easy goals.”For the first time, that view appeared to be shared by United’s hierarchy, too. Solskjaer’s managers convened a meeting on Saturday evening to discuss the best course of action. The conclave’s very existence was message enough: From that point on, Solskjaer’s departure was a matter of when, rather than if.He could not have been surprised. Solskjaer returned to Old Trafford almost exactly three years ago, answering his former team’s distress signal after the firing of José Mourinho. His reign has been variable in the extreme: mercurial, in a kind light, and violently erratic, in a harsher one.He restored morale to a team heavily exposed to late-stage Mourinho. He masterminded several surging, emotional runs of good form, and he put together a record-breaking streak on the road. He sent out a team that eliminated Paris St.-Germain from the Champions League. He reached a Europa League final. He finished (a distant) second to Manchester City in the Premier League.But he also failed to harness all of the richly talented players at his disposal into something approaching a coherent unit. He lost home games to the lesser lights of the Premier League at an alarming clip. He lost that Europa League final. He did not win a trophy. After the 5-0 defeat to Liverpool last month, he was subjected not just to anger and pity but also to ridicule. He became, to his team’s rivals, a laughingstock.Particularly in the early days of his tenure, Solskjaer made a habit of evoking Manchester United’s glorious past, the history in which he had played such a stirring role. He would joke about the club’s tendency to score late goals or to mount comebacks or to make things dramatic. The leitmotif might have chafed after a while, but Solskjaer was nothing if not sincere.He cherished United’s history. He felt, keenly, that it was his job to make sure that this iteration of the team lived up to the standards set by its predecessors. He can have few complaints, then, that his time in charge has come to an end after a month in which it has become abundantly, painfully clear quite how far from that level it has fallen.In a way, his departure is vindication of his belief in the importance of United’s history. To tolerate three humiliations, Liverpool and Manchester City and Watford, would have been to betray how Manchester United sees itself; how Solskjaer sees it. To be true to what the club is, United had no choice but to part ways with the man who saw it as his job to maintain that standard. More

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    The World Cup Is a Year Away. Who’s In?

    The World Cup Is a Year Away. Who’s In?Rory SmithReporting on global soccer ⚽️Michel Euler/Associated PressWith Qatar 2022, arguably the most controversial World Cup in modern soccer history, now a year away, the field is starting to take shape.This is where things stand so far → More