Football

The Canadian Football League has become the latest casualty of the Covid-19 pandemic.On Monday, the C.F.L. canceled its 2020 season after repeated efforts to play an abbreviated schedule fell through. The league said it was now focused on returning in 2021.“Our league governors decided today that it was in the best long-term interests of the C.F.L. to concentrate on the future,” Commissioner Randy Ambrosie said after the decision was made.The decision to shut down for the year comes as some college football conferences in the United States, unable to ensure the safety of their players and coaches, have canceled their calendar of games. The N.F.L. is continuing with its plans to play this season, though many teams have said fans will not be in attendance for some or all home games.With nine teams (three of them publicly owned), the C.F.L. has far fewer resources than the N.F.L. Unlike the N.F.L., which makes most of its money from national television and sponsorship contracts, the C.F.L. is more reliant on ticket sales. The league’s finances were stretched thin when it became clear there would not be fans in the stands because of a ban on large gatherings.The league tried to find a way to play an abbreviated season starting next month with all games in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and players living in an enclosed community to reduce the risk of infection. Though the league, the players’ union and local officials were on board with the plan, the league was unable to acquire public money to help pay for the venture.“Even with additional support, our owners and community-held teams would have had to endure significant financial losses to play in 2020,” Ambrosie said.“Without it, the losses would be so large that they would really hamper our ability to bounce back strongly next year and beyond.”Amid its search for financial support, the C.F.L., which was formed in 1958 and includes many former N.F.L. players, had delayed the start of its season. Because of the longer winters in Canada, the league typically starts its season in June and finishes in late November with the Grey Cup.With the cancellation, there will be no Grey Cup winner this year for the first time since World War I.In the spring, Ambrosie told the House of Commons of Canada that the entire season might have to be canceled. He asked lawmakers for $150 million in government assistance for the C.F.L., the largest football league outside the United States.While the National Hockey League has resumed its season, playing all of its remaining games in Toronto and Edmonton, Alberta, the American Hockey League, the main minor league for the N.H.L., with teams in the U.S. and Canada, said in May that it would not finish its season.In many cases, bans on large gatherings have been stricter in Canada, where much of the country has operated under a prohibition on all large gatherings, as opposed to the United States, where many states rushed to loosen restrictions on businesses and gatherings. More

Jason Wright, a former N.F.L. running back turned business consultant, has been named the new president of the Washington Football Team, the team announced on Monday. He is the first African-American to hold such a position in league history.At 38, Wright, who played seven seasons in the N.F.L. and has worked for the past seven years at McKinsey & Company, the international consulting firm, is also the youngest team president in the league. As a consultant, he has helped reshape government agencies, industrial companies and institutions of higher learning.Wright has no experience working at an N.F.L. team, though he was his team’s union representative for two years heading into the lockout in 2011. While responsibilities can vary from team to team, club presidents typically oversee all business operations and sometimes look after the football side of the franchise, and report directly to the owner. Wright will be in charge of the team’s operations, finance, sales and marketing divisions, among others.“This organization is going through wholesale transformation on multiple fronts,” Wright said in a phone interview. “This is going to be a very challenging but exciting time.”Indeed, Wright will be joining Washington at a particularly fraught juncture, becoming the latest new hire by the team’s owner, Daniel Snyder, who is in the process of overhauling his foundering franchise. Wright replaces Bruce Allen, the longtime club president who was fired at the end of last season.After resisting pressure for more than two decades, Snyder last month abandoned the team’s longtime name, the Redskins. The club is in the process of selecting a new name and logo.The team also this summer removed references to its founding owner, George Preston Marshall, who named the team in the 1930s and was the last owner in the N.F.L. to integrate his roster.Snyder hired Ron Rivera, one of only four head coaches of color in the league, in late December. He has also brought in new front office personnel and broadcasters. He fired several top employees just before and after The Washington Post published an investigation that included accusations by 15 women of rampant sexual harassment by male co-workers in the team’s front office. Snyder hired a high-powered law firm to review the women’s claims.Wright, who as a consultant helped companies transform their corporate cultures, said he hoped to use the findings as a springboard to change the team’s internal operations.“There’s no time to waste on the culture side of it,” he said, so that the team has “a work environment that attracts the best people in sports.”Three of the team’s minority shareholders, who together own about 40 percent of the club, have also been trying to sell their stakes. Snyder has suggested in legal filings that one of those shareholders, Dwight Schar, may be involved in a scheme to defame him.Wright will have to lean on his business acumen to navigate the turmoil. Before joining McKinsey, he earned an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. After finishing high school in Diamond Bar, Calif., about 30 miles outside Los Angeles, Wright attended Northwestern, where he majored in psychology. He played wide receiver before switching to running back. In his four college seasons, he rushed for 2,625 yards, seventh most in team history.Wright was signed as an undrafted free agent in 2004 by the San Francisco 49ers, but was cut before the end of the preseason. He spent most of the season on the Atlanta Falcons’ practice squad before joining the active roster and appearing in two games at the end of the year.He spent the next four seasons with the Cleveland Browns. His best season was in 2007, when he rushed for 277 yards and a touchdown and caught 24 passes for 233 yards. In 2009, he signed a two-year, $2 million contract with the Arizona Cardinals.In July 2011, during a four-month lockout by the N.F.L. owners, Wright retired from the league to attend business school.Wright admitted he “was not the greatest player in the world,” but that as a lesser known player, he had time to talk to team business personnel and learn about marketing, public relations, finance and other aspects of club operations.Wright said his relative youth will be an asset as team president because he has connections to young people in industry and can “bring a set of ideas that haven’t come up through the grapevine.”He is also aware that he will be blazing a trail as the first Black team president.“For any people of color, when you’re the first of anything, it’s meaningful,” he said.The N.F.L. has been repeatedly criticized for the lack of diversity in its management ranks. While about 70 percent of the players are Black, there are only two team owners of color. While the league has increased the diversity in its executive positions at its headquarters, the record of its teams has been spottier.People of color make up less than 20 percent of senior administration positions at the league’s 32 clubs.Last season, there were only two club presidents or chief executives who were people of color. Kim Pegula, co-owner of the Buffalo Bills with her husband, Terry Pegula, is also the club’s president. Paraag Marathe is the president of 49ers Enterprises and executive vice president for football operations for the 49ers.There are only two female team presidents, Pegula of the Bills and Darcie Glazer Kassewitz of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.Before leaving to run the Big Ten Conference, Kevin Warren, who was legal counsel and chief operating officer of the Minnesota Vikings, functioned as a team president but did not have the title, according to Cyrus Mehri, who has worked with the Fritz Pollard Alliance to help establish the so-called Rooney Rule. The rule obligates teams to interview at least two candidates of color for top coaching and executive openings and requires at least one woman to be interviewed for openings at the league office. More

Daniel Snyder, the owner of the Washington Football Team, has accused a disgruntled former team employee of taking money and assisting in a campaign to spread damaging information against him, his latest effort to fight back attacks on his ownership of the N.F.L. club.In a filing on Monday in Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., Snyder asked for access to documents that the former employee, Mary-Ellen Blair, who was an executive assistant in the front office, has, including confidential team records, that might bolster his defamation case against an Indian media company that he contends published defamatory rumors about him.“We are aggressively pursuing Mary-Ellen Blair, a disgruntled former employee who is clearly in the pocket of another and complicit in this scheme to defame Mr. Snyder, in order to ensure that the full weight of the law comes down heavily on all those responsible for these heinous acts,” one of Snyder’s lawyers, Joe Tacopina, said in a statement.The filing, known as a request for discovery, was made three days after Snyder filed a defamation lawsuit in New Delhi against Media Entertainment Arts WorldWide, whose parent company is in India. Media Entertainment Arts WorldWide published articles on its website in July that Snyder considered slanderous and that have since been taken down. Snyder accused the company of accepting money to publish the articles. He wants to identify who paid for them.Nirnay Chowdhary, a founder of M.E.A. WorldWide, admitted errors were made in the publication of the articles, but he denied that his company accepted money in exchange for their publication.The case comes amid a growing battle between Snyder and three of his largest minority shareholders, who have been seeking to sell their stakes, which amount to roughly 40 percent of the team. The minority shareholders, including Frederick W. Smith, the chairman of FedEx, hired an investment banker to broker a sale. Snyder has shown no interest in selling his majority stake in the team, which he has owned since 1999.While Snyder pursues the source of the articles, he has also hired an investigator to look into accusations, detailed in a Washington Post report, of widespread sexual harassment in the team’s front office, which he has not denied. In July, he agreed to drop the team’s name and logo after many years of protests by Native American groups and others who considered it racist. Snyder was pressured by several sponsors, most notably FedEx, which threatened to sever its multimillion-dollar stadium naming rights deal if the team name was not changed.According to the filing on Monday, Blair, starting in late May or early June, started reaching out to current and former team employees seeking information that would discredit the team owner. In July, she called someone that the filing describes as a team employee who works daily with Snyder and said the person could “probably make a lot of money” by providing damaging information about Snyder, the filing said.Reached briefly by phone on Monday, Blair said she was unaware of the filing. “That’s funny,” she said when told of some of the details included in it. She didn’t respond to further request for comment.In an emailed statement, Lisa J. Banks, Blair’s lawyer, said that Snyder’s naming of her in the filing is “an obvious and inappropriate attempt to silence Ms. Blair and others who may wish to communicate with legitimate news organizations about the culture of sexism, harassment and abuse that has existed at the highest levels of the Washington Football Team.”The filing also said Blair told a personal employee of Snyder’s and two other team employees that “she was in contact with and working in coordination with a third party” and that she and that third party were involved in preparing articles that were going to be damaging to Snyder. The third party, she told them, was not a journalist, but was “well known to each of the involved persons.”According to the filing, Blair also told a team employee who has frequent contact with Snyder that she had been told by someone not employed by The Washington Post, but well known to this employee, that an article would be published in the newspaper in approximately a week that would not be “good for Dan.” This was weeks before rumors about the subject of the article began circulating on social media.According to the filing, Blair also told a “longtime personal employee” of Snyder’s before the social media whispering about the publication of damaging stories that “something big was going to happen.” Blair also told this employee that “several of the team’s minority owners did not want to do business” with Snyder any longer.In the filing, Snyder said Blair left the team on bad terms and “has since admitted to having absconded with confidential information” belonging to the team. The filing also describes what it says are Blair’s financial difficulties and says that while she worked for the team, her wages were garnished.Snyder contended that she has an unidentified “financial benefactor” who has provided discounted rent in luxury apartment buildings in Virginia that are connected to a minority shareholder who is seeking to sell his stake.Tracy Schar, the daughter of Dwight Schar, one of the team’s minority shareholders seeking to sell, is on the board of directors of Comstock, the real estate development company that owns the building where Blair lives, and also serves as senior vice president for marketing at Comstock Holding Companies. Two other members of Comstock’s board worked for Red Zone Capital, which is co-owned by Dwight Schar and Snyder, according to a 2018 government filing.Snyder, in the filing, requested the right to have access to documents from Blair and Comstock to gather more material to bolster his defamation suit in India against Media Entertainment Arts WorldWide. More

“I’m literally bear-hugging another creature on the other side of the ball every single play,” Leo Koloamatangi, a Jets offensive lineman, said. “If that guy has any symptoms, I’m going to get them.” More

Workers who have been ordered back to the league’s headquarters are resisting, arguing that the reopening was rushed and that in some ways they have been put in an “impossible situation.” More

The actor and former wrestler, who is known as the Rock, is part of a group of investors that bought what remains of the XFL for $15 million, pending bankruptcy court approval. More

The All-Pro receiver was penalized for his role in a January dispute at his home and for sending threatening tests to a woman who had accused him of sexual misconduct. More

Ryan Zimmerman, David Price, Buster Posey, Carlos Vela and Wilson Chandler are among the players who are opting out of playing this summer because of health concerns. More