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    Neymar, Brazil’s Star Player, Out With an Injury

    Neymar, the Brazilian soccer star, will not be playing in the team’s next World Cup match after he was injured on Thursday while playing against Serbia.Neymar injured a lateral ligament on his right ankle and has small bone swelling, said Rodrigo Lasmar, the team’s doctor, in a written statement on Neymar’s website. Another player, Danilo, injured his left ankle and also will not play in the next game, which will be on Monday against Switzerland, the statement said.“I can say in advance that we will not have both players for the next match, but they remain in treatment with the objective of trying to recover them in time for this competition,” Lasmar said.Both players received treatment after the match and were re-evaluated on Friday morning, with scheduled daily follow-ups planned. Neymar’s ankle was visibly swollen as he walked off the field on Thursday.Brazil beat Serbia 2-0 in its first match of the 2022 World Cup. After Switzerland, the team will play Cameroon on Friday.“Tough game, but it was important to win,” Neymar said on Twitter on Thursday. “Congratulations team, first step taken.”Thursday’s injury was one of the hardest moments of his career, Neymar said on his Facebook page. In the 2014 World Cup, he broke a vertebra after being kneed in the back and was sidelined for the rest of the tournament.“Yes, I’m injured, it’s frustrating, it’s going to hurt,” he said in the Facebook post. “But I’m sure that I will have a chance to return because I will do whatever possible to help my country, my teammates and myself.” More

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    Neymar Is Still a Singular Star, but He Has More Help on Brazil

    As Brazil begins its quest for a sixth World Cup, the team’s resources run deep — though Neymar still shoulders much of the load.LE HAVRE, France — As the announcer at the Stade Océane cycled through Brazil’s team on Friday, before the squad dismantled Ghana, 3-0, a murmur of appreciation greeted each familiar, stellar name. Alisson was granted gentle applause. Thiago Silva earned a respectful, admiring cheer. Raphinha drew a sizzle of anticipation.And then, leaving just a hint of a dramatic pause, the announcer came to Neymar.There were, perhaps, mitigating circumstances. The 30-year-old Neymar was, after all, on home turf, or something very close to it. Le Havre, a sleepy port town on the Normandy coast, sits just a couple of hours northwest of Paris. The stands were dotted not just with jerseys in Brazil’s bright canary yellow but with the rich, deep blue of his Paris St.-Germain club team, too.But still, the contrast in his reception and those of his teammates felt telling. Brazil’s squad shimmers with stars. Alisson may be the finest goalkeeper on the planet. Thiago Silva is probably the best defender of his generation. Casemiro was part of the most dominant midfield in modern history.Even among their number, though, Neymar stands out. Their fame is not comparable to his, not really; the excitement he engenders, the adoration he receives and the wonder he instills are of a different order of magnitude. It was Neymar who was picked out on the big screen, again and again, during warm-ups. It was Neymar who had to sing his national anthem with a camera no more than six inches from his face. In a team full of headline acts, he remains the undisputed main event, the leading character, the center of gravity.For now, at least. As the roar that had met Neymar’s name subsided, the announcer still had one player left to introduce. “Numéro vingt,” he said — “Vinicius Junior.” The cheer that followed was not quite so loud as Neymar’s. It did not last quite as long. But the difference was not so stark as might have been expected.Read More on the 2022 World CupA New Start Date: A last-minute request for the tournament to begin a day earlier was only the latest bit of uncertainty to surround soccer’s showcase event.Chile’s Failed Bid: The country’s soccer federation had argued Ecuador should be ejected from the tournament to the benefit of the Chilean team. FIFA disagreed.Golden Sunset: This year’s World Cup will most likely be the last for stars like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo — a profound watershed for soccer.Senegalese Pride: Aliou Cissé, one of the best soccer coaches in Africa, has given Senegal a new sense of patriotism. Next up: the World Cup.With two months to go before the World Cup, Tite, the Brazil coach, would not have it any other way. It has been 20 years since Brazil was declared champion of the world; miss out again in Qatar, and the wait for a sixth crown will match the lacuna between the third and fourth.More troublingly still, in the past four tournaments, it has not really gone close: beaten comfortably by the French in 2006, the Dutch in 2010 and the Belgians in Russia four years ago. The team made the semifinals on home soil in 2014, of course, but the less said about how that particular story ended, from a Brazilian point of view, the better.That defeat, though, highlighted the problem that has beset Brazil for the past decade. Neymar was missing with an injury as Germany etched a scar on the national psyche in the Maracana in 2014 (joined on the sidelines, not insignificantly, by Thiago Silva). In his absence, Brazil seemed bereft, adrift, unable to conceive of how to win the game without its leading man, the player to whom the team, as much as the country, was in thrall.He was present in Russia, but he was subdued, his legs weary and his inspiration dulled, easily corralled by Belgium in the stifling heat. Still, though, Brazil continued to look to him, to hope that he might somehow lift himself, and carry them with him. If he could not, they did not seem to know who might.This time around, things should be different. Vinicius, a few months on from scoring the winning goal in a Champions League final, is surging, European soccer’s breakout star. His teammates and his nation have rallied around him in the aftermath of the racist abuse he has received in Spain for having the temerity to celebrate his goals; several fans had made their way to the Stade Océane to urge him to keep dancing.He is not alone. Brazil’s attacking resources run so deep that Tite did not even have to call up Gabriel Jésus and Gabriel Martinelli, Arsenal’s forwards, for his squad; he could afford to introduce Rodrygo, Vinicius’s Real Madrid teammate, with just a couple of minutes to go. Roberto Firmino did not even make it off the bench. For what may be the first time in his international career, Neymar does not need to feel that everything hinges on him.Perhaps his performance, then, can be explained by a newfound sense of freedom. Perhaps he is playing unfettered by the suffocating pressure that he has carried for so long. Perhaps, on what may be the strongest team that Brazil has boasted since 2002 — a team, certainly, more than capable of ending the country’s wait — he feels more comfortable, more capable of expressing himself.Whatever the reason, his display against Ghana was that of a man neither willing nor ready to vacate center stage. It would have been enough that he created two of Brazil’s three goals, both of them finished off by Richarlíson — Marquinhos scored the other, a thunderous header from a corner — but that was the reward for, rather than the total of, everything he did.Neymar, it is fair to say, looks different this season. He has now registered 11 goals and 10 assists in 12 games for club and country, a streak of form that makes it feel somehow deeply strange that roughly two months ago, not only did P.S.G. appear willing to sell him, but nobody seemed desperately keen to buy the most expensive player in the sport’s history.The raw numbers, as ever, are merely an illustration. There has been a sharpness, a poise and, perhaps most encouraging of all, an invention to Neymar over the past couple of months. Tite has said that he is “flying,” his “speed and execution in perfection sync.” Even Thierry Henry, habitually unimpressed, feels he has “come to tell everyone: Don’t forget me.”Against Ghana, it was there in his delivery, whip-smart and inch-perfect. It was there in the moments he sped up, feinting and shifting his weight and accelerating away from his opponents. And, most of all, it was there in the moments he slowed down. More than once, he found himself with the ball at his feet, in the penalty area, and he seemed to stop, to pause, before picking the right pass, the perfect pass, the one that carved Ghana open.That has always been Neymar’s gift: picking his moments. As the World Cup hovers into view, as that sixth star starts to exert a gravity on Brazil, he seems to have done it again. More

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    World Cup 2022: What to Know as Teams Prepare for Qatar

    The World Cup draw is Friday in Qatar, even though the entire field isn’t yet complete. While we don’t know all the teams, we do know quite a bit about how things will play out. Here’s a primer on the world’s greatest sporting spectacle.When is the World Cup?The opening match is Nov. 21 (three days before Thanksgiving in the United States). Over the month that follows, all the games will take place in a tight circle of eight stadiums in and around Qatar’s capital, Doha, making it the most compact World Cup in history.The final is Dec. 18 — a week before Christmas, which means the Doha airport on the morning of Dec. 19 is going to look like the entrance to a Walmart on Black Friday.Wait, don’t they play the World Cup in July?They always had, until Qatar got it.Qatar, like the other bidders, initially proposed holding the tournament in its normal summer window, and brushed aside any suggestion it could not do so with the help of cooling technology that did not, at the time, exist. As The Times wrote on the day of the vote in 2010:“Qatar’s bid overcame concerns about heat that can reach 120 degrees there in the summer. Officials say they will build air-conditioned stadiums, spending $4 billion to upgrade three arenas and build nine new ones in a compact area connected by a subway system.”It took more than four years, but in 2015 FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, eventually concluded that a summer World Cup in 120-degree temperatures might bring unneeded problems (like, say, fans and players dying) and agreed to move the tournament to the relatively cooler months of November and December.The Education City stadium in Al Rayyan, one of eight built or remodeled for the 2022 World Cup.David Ramos/Getty ImagesWhat about the league games that normally take place then?Oh, the leagues grumbled. A lot. But they lost.The switch to winter will disrupt not only league competitions in Europe and elsewhere, but also the lucrative UEFA Champions League, and it will require starting seasons earlier or finishing them later, or both.A winter World Cup also would leave those professionals who do not go to Qatar — less than 800 of the world’s players take part — with a midseason break that could extend to two months, once pretournament camps and friendlies and post-Cup rest is factored in.Fox Sports, which paid hundreds of millions of dollars for the United States broadcast rights, will have to wedge in a month of soccer games around another fall sport that tends to demand attention that time of year. Maybe you’ve heard of the N.F.L.?How many teams get in?A total of 32. They’ll be split into eight groups of four. The top two finishers in each group advance to the round of 16. After that, the World Cup is a straight knockout tournament.Which countries have qualified?Qatar qualified automatically as the host, and 28 other teams so far have joined it. Those include most of the biggest teams from Europe and South America: England and Germany, Brazil and Argentina, France and Spain.Canada is in. The United States and Mexico joined the field on Wednesday night.Ukraine might still go. Russia will not.Three places remain unclaimed. One will come from Europe, where Ukraine’s playoff against Scotland was postponed by war. Those teams will meet in June, with the winner to face Wales for Europe’s final place.The other two entries will come from two intercontinental playoffs that month: Costa Rica will face New Zealand, the Oceania survivor, in one game, and Peru, the fifth-place team from South America, will face an Asian team, either Australia or the United Arab Emirates.Are Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo going?Yes and yes.Argentina, and Messi, qualified in November. But Portugal, and Ronaldo, needed to sweat out a European playoff after botching its guaranteed route to the finals in the group stage.Will Qatar be Lionel Messi’s last World Cup?Franklin Jacome/Pool Via ReutersWho won’t be there?Erling Haaland, for one. (Norway didn’t qualify.) Mohamed Salah. (Egypt lost to Senegal on penalty kicks for the second time in a month.)Oh, and Italy. But then that’s not new for them. The Italians missed the 2018 tournament, too. Whoops.When will the games take place?Qatar is in the same time zone as Moscow. So whatever strategy you used to wake up early (or stay up late) for the games in 2018 will work this time, too. But it will mean kickoffs as early as 4 a.m. Eastern, and no later than 2 p.m. Eastern.How can I find out who my team is playing?The World Cup draw is Friday in Qatar. In it, all 29 teams that have qualified and the three still to be determined will be placed in groups. So by the end of the day, you’ll know which three teams your team will face in the group stage, and have a good idea of who might await in the knockout rounds.Harry Kane and England made the semifinals at the last World Cup and the final at last summer’s European Championship. Could 2022 be their year at last?Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWho are the favorites?The usual suspects qualified early, so many of them, in fact, that our soccer columnist, Rory Smith, wrote in November that “the likelihood is that the winner is already there.”Quite what the tournament, riddled with scandal and concern from the day Qatar was announced as the host, will be like cannot yet be known. The identities of the teams who will contest it, though, are — for the most part — extremely familiar.Most, if not quite all, of the traditional contenders are already there: a 10-country-strong European contingent led by France, the defending champion, and Belgium, officially the world’s best team, as well as the likes of Spain and England and Germany. They have been joined by the two great powerhouses of South America, Brazil and Argentina.More than a dozen more teams have joined the party since those sentences were written last year. Which is to say that, in March, it’s still wide open. More

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    Bob Falkenburg, Tennis Hall of Famer Turned Entrepreneur, Dies at 95

    He won at Wimbledon in 1948 and took some doubles titles before decamping to Brazil and founding a fast-food chain.Bob Falkenburg, the Tennis Hall of Famer who captured the 1948 Wimbledon singles championship in a thrilling fifth-set comeback and also won a pair of Grand Slam men’s doubles titles, then forged a second career as a businessman who introduced fast food outlets to South America, died on Thursday at his home in Santa Ynez, Calif. He was 95.His death was confirmed to The Associated Press by his daughter Claudia.Falkenburg was ranked among the nation’s top 10 tennis players at age 17 and remained in that elite category for the next five years.His signature achievement came at Wimbledon in 1948, when he was down three match points facing John Bromwich of Australia. Relying on powerful backhands and a strong serve, he came back to win his only major singles championship. A year later, Falkenburg won the first two sets facing Bromwich in the Wimbledon quarterfinals, but Bromwich won the last three.Falkenburg teamed with Don McNeill as men’s doubles champions at the U.S. Nationals at Forest Hills in 1944 and with Jack Kramer in the Wimbledon doubles in 1947.The International Tennis Hall of Fame, which inducted Falkenburg in 1974, called him “a thinking man’s player, one who took calculated risks when others might play it safe.”“He was confident that his big booming serve wouldn’t fail him and that his forays to net would lead to winners,” it said.Falkenburg’s brother, Tom, and his sister, Jinx Falkenburg, competed in the U.S. Nationals. But Jinx was best known for her career in show business. She was a model and movie actress, then joined with her husband and manager, Tex McCrary, on the popular radio and early TV breakfast chat program “Tex and Jinx.”Falkenburg entered his last Grand Slam tournament in 1955 after moving to Brazil with his wife, Lourdes Mayrink Veiga Machado, a Brazilian native, whom he married in 1947. He played for Brazil in the 1954 and 1955 Davis Cups.According to the Tennis Hall of Fame, Falkenburg once remembered how on one of his trips from the United States to Brazil he was “distressed that I couldn’t get a decent hamburger or milkshake.”He founded South America’s first fast food and ice cream outlets in 1952 in the Copacabana neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, calling them Bob’s. His mini-chain consisted of about a dozen outlets when the Falkenburgs, having moved back to Southern California in 1970, sold Bob’s to Nestlé’s Libby operation in 1974. Bob’s has had several ownerships since then and has expanded to more than 1,000 outlets in Brazil and beyond South America as well.Robert Falkenburg was born on Jan. 29, 1926, in Manhattan and grew up in Los Angeles. His father, Eugene, an engineer, and his mother, Marguerite (Crooks) Falkenburg, played in amateur tennis events, and Bob began wielding a racket at private clubs when he was 10 years old.He won a junior tennis tournament to the Bel-Air Country Club in 1937 and, while at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles, won the U.S. Interscholastic singles title in 1942; he also teamed with his brother to win the doubles title that year. He was later a fine amateur golfer and won the Brazilian amateur championship three times.After serving in the Army Air Forces during World War II, Falkenburg won the 1946 intercollegiate singles and double championships while at the University of Southern California.In addition to his wife and daughter, he is survived by his son, Robert, four grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, according to The A.P. Both Tex and Jinx (her birth name was Eugenia; her mother provided her nickname) died in 2003.Describing Falkenburg’s stunning final-set comeback at Wimbledon in 1948, The New York Times reported that “Wimbledon championship fans have seen far better tennis than today’s match, but they’ve rarely witnessed a more exciting one.”As for Falkenburg’s serve that ended the match, 7-5, The Times related how “there was one clear loud pop.”“Bromwich stood flatfooted as the service ace whizzed by him,” The Times wrote. “When a few minutes later, the Duchess of Kent up in the Royal Box presented the coveted trophy to Falkenburg, he looked as surprised as he was pleased.” More