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      Chelsea’s Spending in Transfer Window Puzzles Its Rivals

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      The Premier League club’s American owners have splashed roughly $750 million on new players since last year. Puzzled rivals can’t see a strategy behind the spending.LONDON — As the last few hours of the January transfer window ticked by, and as a small group of Chelsea executives were painstakingly trying to piece together the $131 million deal that would make Enzo Fernández, the 21-year-old Argentine midfielder, the most expensive player ever signed by an English team, Todd Boehly, the most high-profile of Chelsea’s new owners, was on the phone, trying to sign someone else.Since arriving in the Premier League last May, Boehly has taken an unusually hands-on approach to the transfer market, regularly leading negotiations for prospective signings. In the summer, he appointed himself as Chelsea’s interim sporting director. He has since relinquished the title, but his appetite for involvement is undimmed.So as Behdad Eghbali, the founder of Chelsea’s biggest investor Clearlake Capital now seven months into his tenure as one of Chelsea’s co-owners, was fine-tuning the structure of the Fernández transfer with the Portuguese side Benfica, Boehly decided that he would personally follow up on an email a member of the club’s recruitment staff had sent to the Italian team Fiorentina. In addition to signing Fernández, Boehly told Fiorentina, Chelsea wanted to take Sofyan Amrabat — another midfield player who had starred in the World Cup — on loan.That, he was informed, would not be possible. The Italian club wanted to keep Amrabat, a Moroccan international, and even if it was interested in selling it would not consider letting its star player leave for anything other than a premium, and permanent, fee.Boehly declared Fiorentina’s eight-figure asking price unreasonable. An executive at the Italian team responded by asking how he would feel if some other club turned up on the final day of the transfer window and tried to poach one of Chelsea’s most valuable assets on the cheap. The call, and the negotiation, ended abruptly.Benfica’s Argentine midfielder Enzo Fernández was Chelsea’s prize winter signing.Carlos Costa/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAmrabat would, in the end, be a rare miss in what has been an eye-watering, gasp-inducing month of spending from Eghbali, Boehly and Chelsea. With only a few minutes to spare before the window closed, Chelsea filed the paperwork for Fernández, their eighth signing of the month, and at $131 million the most expensive. The club had agreed to pay Benfica roughly 10 times what the Portuguese side had paid for him only six months ago.That took Chelsea’s outlay in January alone to more than $370 million, the kind of spending that is criticized when done by oligarchs and nation states. It was the most any club has ever spent in a single window and more than every team in the French, Spanish, German and Italian top flights combined. Since Boehly and Eghbali took charge, Chelsea has now spent somewhere in the region of three quarters of a billion dollars overhauling a squad that won the Champions League less than two years ago.They have done so with a frequency, extravagance and single-mindedness that has, at times, surprised even some of European soccer’s most seasoned operators. Early last month, for example, Sergei Palkin — the president of the exiled Ukrainian club Shakhtar Donetsk — was sitting in the Cullinan Belek hotel in the Turkish resort of Antalya when he received a phone call from Eghbali.Chelsea had asked, several weeks earlier, to be kept appraised of any bids for Shakhtar’s explosive winger Mykhailo Mudryk, but now seemed to be lagging behind Arsenal in the pursuit of the player. Arsenal had been discussing the terms of a deal with Shakhtar for some time, and Mudryk had even seemed to welcome his imminent transfer on Instagram.Then Eghbali called. “He said, ‘I’m here,’” Palkin told The New York Times. “I said, ‘What do you mean “here”?’ He told me he’s in the hotel.” Eghbali had landed by private jet that morning. After swift talks, he boarded his plane again the same day, this time with Mudryk in tow and $108 million on its way to Shakhtar. Chelsea’s offer, Palkin said, had been more “concrete” than Arsenal’s: It had offered to pay the nine-figure fee for Mudryk over two years instead of the four Arsenal had proposed.Palkin left those talks with the distinct impression that Chelsea’s principal owners — while perhaps a little keener on taking their share of the limelight afforded by soccer’s frenzied player trading business than many of their peers — had serious, coherent plans for the club they had bought at auction from Roman Abramovich.Eghbali, he said, had outlined their vision for what Chelsea would become. “They want to invest in players, new infrastructure; they have plans to build a new stadium,” Palkin said. “At a minimum there will be an increase in the income at Chelsea. In three or four years, Chelsea will look very professional.”Ben Stansall/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJason Cairnduff/Action Images, via ReutersNow vying for playing time at Chelsea: defender Benoit Badiashile ($42 million); David Datro Fofana ($13.1 million); and wing Mykhailo Mudryk ($108 million).Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockThat view, it is fair to say, is not universally held. Under Abramovich, Chelsea had been losing a million dollars a week, losses covered only by regular capital injections from the Russian billionaire’s personal fortune. How Boehly, Eghbali and their group plan to balance the books — given the enormous scale of their investment on players so far — is not clear.Their preferred mechanism, it seems, has been to defer the official cost of the deals. Though clubs pay the vast majority of a transfer fee upfront — or in a handful of installments over a couple of years — the price of the acquisition is often spread out over the duration of the player’s contract, a process known as amortization. Doing so allows a team to spread out of the cost of an expensive purchase — or, in Chelsea’s case, half a dozen or so — over multiple years, and allow it to stay within the cost controls required by the Premier League and UEFA, European soccer’s governing body.In several of their most expensive deals, Chelsea have sought to use that accounting to their advantage. Wesley Fofana, a defender signed from Leicester City last summer, signed a seven-year deal. Mudryk’s runs for eight seasons. Fernández, the costliest of them all, is contracted to Stamford Bridge until 2031.That approach has not gone unnoticed. The issue was raised at a meeting of UEFA’s executive board last month, and several teams have since contacted Andrea Traverso, the organization’s head of licensing, to ask European soccer’s governing body what action it plans to take to close the loophole. (Starting this summer, UEFA will only allow teams to amortize contracts over a maximum of five years when it analyzes whether teams are in compliance of its fiscal rules.)Long contracts, though, are not the only concern. Among Chelsea’s peers and rivals, the reaction to the club’s spending spree on players has been one of puzzlement. In interviews with a dozen executives at teams both in the Premier League and across Europe, all of whom spoke with The New York Times anonymously because they did not wish to be seen commenting on another team’s business strategy, few could immediately discern the logic of Chelsea’s approach.Some suggested the sheer number of players Chelsea has acquired — more than a dozen since the summer — made it hard to discern any clear sporting plan beyond a simplistic desire to stockpile the world’s best young talent, regardless of the cost. Others wondered if it made sense for a team with one of the most prolific academies in Europe to render its work so obviously futile. Chelsea’s owners have done little, publicly, to explain the frenzy of acquisitions or the thinking behind them.In England, most believe the fees Chelsea has paid in the last few months will have an inflationary effect, though nobody was quite sure if that was deliberate or merely an inevitable side effect.In the rest of Europe, the fear is a little more material. Chelsea, one executive at a major continental club said, has “destroyed the market,” a sentiment supported by Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, Spain’s top division. “The British market is doped,” he said. “It is a competition that loses billions of pounds in the last few years, financed with contributions from patrons, in this case American investors who finance at a loss.”While all of the executives immediately understood the purpose of Chelsea’s prolonged contracts, the majority were baffled as to whether the club was bravely exploiting an inefficiency in the market or mortgaging its future. After all, lengthening contracts might reduce the immediate financial impact on Chelsea’s accounts — and therefore help the club meet European soccer’s largely theoretical cost control mechanisms — but it does not represent the team’s actual cash flow.Chelsea still has to pay the transfer fees in the short term. It still has to commit to pay the players several million dollars more than it might have if they were on more standard-length contracts. It still has to rely on each of them fulfilling their undoubted potential. It still faces the risk of being encumbered with expensive, immovable assets in years to come if they do not.Selling players, certainly, has been a little more of a challenge for Chelsea. As Eghbali was negotiating for Fernández and Boehly was making his last-ditch bid for Amrabat, one of Chelsea’s current players, Hakim Ziyech, was sitting in the offices of Paris St.-Germain, waiting for confirmation of his departure.The deal had been in the works for a week or so. At one point, talks had been sufficiently relaxed that Boehly had suggested P.S.G.’s owner — the Qatar Investment Authority — might like to help Chelsea with its stadium project. As the minutes ticked down to the transfer deadline, though, P.S.G. officials became concerned at Chelsea’s lack of communication.Five minutes before the deadline — at 10:55 p.m. local time — Chelsea finally sent over a document. It was the wrong one. When that was pointed out, a second soon followed. It was not signed. By the time the new error was fixed, it was too late. The deadline had passed. P.S.G. could not register the signing.Ziyech, distraught, had to return to west London, where a raft of new teammates await him, including at least two who play his position. Chelsea has little need for him now. It has to pay his salary, though, for another six months. More

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      Welcome to Wrexham: It’s the Future

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      Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds seem sincere about their investment, emotionally and financially, in a Welsh soccer team. But they are not mere observers in its story.The first thing, and likely the most important thing, is that Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney seem to be sincere. It is hard to be absolutely certain, of course: They are both actors, after all, and a 45-minute Zoom meeting is, on balance, probably not the ideal format in which to take the measure of someone’s soul.If their enthusiasm and affection for Wrexham, the down-at-the-heels Welsh soccer team they bought two years ago — and the community that it calls home — is an act, though, then it is a convincing one. McElhenney watches Wrexham’s games these days, while “pacing back and forth, unable to sit still,” he said. “There is nothing quite like the anxiety soccer produces.”If anything, he has got off lightly compared to Reynolds. McElhenney is a lifelong Philadelphia Eagles fan, a blessing and a curse that served to inoculate him — to some extent — against the ravages of fandom even as he fell quickly, “deeply and madly in love” with Wrexham.Reynolds, on the other hand, was pure, unsullied, defenseless. He had nurtured something of a soft spot for the Vancouver Canucks and Whitecaps, his hometown hockey and soccer teams, but admitted he would be stretching it to identify as a fan.At first, he wondered if he was resistant to the sensation. He caught only half of Wrexham’s first few games after his and McElhenney’s takeover was completed in February 2021. He was, by his own admission, “pretty passive.” It did not last. When it hit him, it hit him hard.“It is a horrible, cyclical, prophetic hellscape that never ceases or ebbs,” he said, a sentence that suggests he has come to fully understand the appeal of soccer. “I love every second, but it’s torment in equal measure. Every second is pure agony. It’s a new experience for me. I am in awe of people who have survived in that culture their whole lives.”Wrexham’s battle for promotion was more than a TV story line to its fans.Lewis Storey/Getty ImagesNeither McElhenney nor Reynolds had quite anticipated the extent of the emotional impact when, late in 2020, the former approached the latter with a proposal. McElhenney had spent a considerable portion of lockdown watching sports documentaries: the acclaimed “Sunderland ’Til I Die,” for one, and more significantly an HBO series on Diego Maradona. He decided he wanted to add his own production to the canon, and he wanted Reynolds — an acquaintance, rather than a friend, at that stage — to help bankroll it.The result, “Welcome To Wrexham,” is heartwarming and funny and appealing, but it is also difficult to categorize. At one point, Reynolds describes it — perhaps as a slip of the tongue — as a “reality show,” but that feels reductive. So, too, does the faintly euphemistic term “structured reality,” a genre most recently characterized by Netflix’s glossy “Selling Sunset.”But nor is it, strictly speaking, a documentary, not in the traditional sense, not in the way that “Sunderland ’Til I Die” was a documentary. There is a long-held rule among wildlife photographers and documentarians that they are present to observe, rather than intervene. Even David Attenborough hews to the mantra that “tragedy is part of life.” To prevent it, he said, would be “to distort the truth.”“Welcome To Wrexham,” by contrast, is inherently interventionist. Wrexham had been drifting, hopeless and forlorn, in English soccer’s fifth tier for more than a decade when it was bought, out of the blue, by two Hollywood stars. Reynolds and McElhenney are not simply telling a story. They are shaping it, too.That is exemplified, most clearly, by what appears to be an innocuous jump cut halfway through the show’s second episode. All of a sudden, the viewer is at home with Paul Rutherford, Wrexham’s locally born veteran midfielder. With more than a hint of pride, Rutherford shows off all the work he and his wife, Gemma, have done to their home: They put in the staircase, lowered the ceilings, installed a downstairs bathroom.It turns out the house is about to get a little busier. The couple already have two boys; a third is on the way. Rutherford is currently building the baby’s crib. Later, he is shown playing soccer with his oldest son. He carries him home on his shoulders. It is heartwarming, touching and deeply ominous.Anyone who has seen a nature documentary in which a young giraffe becomes separated from the herd, or a horror movie in which a teenager experiences a power failure, or an installment of “Match of the Day” in which a player is shown picking up an innocuous early yellow card, knows the cue. Something bad is about to happen.The bad, in this case, comes in Wrexham’s last game of the season, a few months after the takeover. The team needs to win to make the playoffs. Rutherford, introduced as a substitute, is sent off for a reckless challenge. He is shown in the changing room, his chest heaving, urging his teammates to win without him. They do not. Wrexham is held to a draw. Its season is over. A caption appears. Rutherford’s contract expired the next day. He was released. He was the giraffe.“I love every second, but it’s torment in equal measure,” Reynolds said of watching Wrexham, and fandom more generally. “Every second is pure agony.”Andrew Boyers/Action Images Via ReutersSuch is the cold reality of soccer, of course, a sport that has no appetite for sentiment and — at the level Wrexham occupies — no money for it, either. Countless players suffer the same fate as Rutherford every season, victims of the game’s unapologetic mercilessness. His story, apart perhaps from the circumstances of his farewell, is not especially remarkable.Reynolds and McElhenney are clear that, while they are ultimately responsible for it, they did not make that call. Personnel decisions are left to those on the ground at Wrexham, those who know the sport far better than they do. Nobody is hired or fired because it makes good drama; their commitment, Reynolds said, is simply to do the best by Wrexham as an entity.Sometimes, sadly, that means individuals have to be cast as collateral. They take no pleasure in that. “It is a terrible feeling,” Reynolds said. “You don’t want to mess with people’s livelihoods. It’s genuinely awful. It feels mercenary, but it’s also part of our responsibility to the club.”It is impossible not to feel, though, that their very presence placed a thumb on the scale. Of course, Rutherford — and the other players who were cut — might have been released by a different ownership group. Reynolds and McElhenney’s vision and ambition, though, made it certain. They are not simply telling the story. They are writing it, too.McElhenney, certainly, is aware of the irony. Sports are compelling, he said, because they are “uncontrived,” authentic. “Any piece of scripted content has been contrived and created and manipulated to make you feel a certain way,” he said. “The masters can do that to great effect; they can make you feel like you’re not being manipulated, but that is the intent. There is no manipulation in sports. What is happening is what is happening.”By documenting that, though, they are necessarily adding a layer of manipulation. Any documentary, McElhenney said, has to take a “point of view,” to tease out a narrative thread from thousands of unhelpfully unstructured and often inchoate real-life moments for viewers to consume.“There is no manipulation in sports,” McElhenney said. “What is happening is what is happening.”Patrick Mcelhenney/FX, via Associated Press“Sports are kind of meaningless to me unless I know what is at stake for someone,” Reynolds said. “What a player overcame to be there. What a club means to a community. If I think about the movies that made an impression on me, is ‘Field Of Dreams’ a movie about baseball? Not really. It’s a movie about a father and son trying to connect. That context is what pulls you in.”It is a tension that more and more clubs will confront as the lines between sport and story blur ever further. There are ever more documentaries in production — Amazon’s “All Or Nothing” series will follow the German national team at this year’s World Cup — as soccer embraces the same logic as Formula 1 did with “Drive To Survive”: What happens on the field is not the only thing that can be harnessed to drive interest and, as a result, revenue.At heart, of course, what Reynolds and McElhenney have done with Wrexham is an inherently benign form of ownership, certainly by soccer’s standards. They have not saddled the club with debt. They are not using it to try to whitewash the image of a repressive state. They have given a club, and a town, reason to believe, and all for the price of a couple of camera crews.Their ownership does not, they insist, hinge on “Welcome To Wrexham” being a success. They are in it “for the long haul,” Reynolds said, whether the audience is or not. They have, of course, already affected the story of the team, and quite possibly the town. But they are not mere observers. They are in the story, too, and so the team, and the town, have done exactly the same to them.There but for the Grace of ToddPerhaps, Todd Boehly will reflect, a brightly-lit stage at a high-profile business conference is not the place to start spit-balling ideas.That, it seemed fairly clear, is all Boehly, Chelsea’s increasingly fascinating new owner, was doing when he brought up the notion of a Premier League all-star game this week at the SALT Conference in New York.His remark was not, in any reasonable reading, a “proposal.” It was a top-of-the-head sort of a suggestion, a back-of-the-envelope example. There was no PowerPoint presentation. He had not run the numbers. He was not submitting it to a vote. He was simply discussing ways in which English soccer — famously impoverished — might seek to generate yet more precious revenue, and an all-star game was the first thought that came to mind.None of that seemed to dampen the immediate storm of criticism generated by Boehly’s indulgence in some momentary blue-skying. Nobody, at any point, seemed inclined to treat it as nothing more than an idea. And why should they? It was far more fun to take it very seriously indeed.There were, after all, so many reactions available. Some of them were valid, since it is not, deep down, a very good idea. Dressing it up as a way to pump more money into the rest of the soccer pyramid was almost as transparent as it was cynical. As Jürgen Klopp said, there is player welfare to consider. As the Daily Telegraph’s Sam Wallace pointed out, it does not work on a practical level: the desires of the English are not the only factor in determining soccer’s calendar, a sentiment Bayern Munich’s fans clearly share.The most frequent reaction, though, was also the most ferocious. To many, Boehly’s suggestion was nothing less than an outrage, a betrayal of English soccer’s history, a misreading of its nature, an irruption of its purity. To Gary Neville, it was further proof that American investment into the Premier League represents a “clear and present danger” to English soccer.There were many ways to react to this outpouring of scorn, too. You might ask whether Neville was quite so upset by all of the money pouring into the Premier League from American broadcasters, or whether he was so troubled by Boehly’s shock-and-awe spending spree on Chelsea’s squad this summer.Or you might point out that an all-star game is certainly no more of an imposition than the Community Shield, and much less of one than the Premier League Asia Trophy and the Florida Cup. Best of all, you might suggest that Neville should be old enough to remember the various exhibition games between invitational teams in the 1980s. They weren’t called all-star games, of course, but that is precisely what they were. Boehly’s idea is, it turns out, neither American nor new.Mostly, though, it was hard not to notice the many layers of irony present in both the statement and the backlash.It is, certainly, one of the curiosities of soccer’s era of international investment that so many billionaires seem to think the most popular sport in the world, the one they have had to pay a fortune to buy into, just isn’t good enough at making money.It is another that they are so often accused of misunderstanding the sport. Boehly, like everyone else, has been attracted to soccer because it has spent the last three decades in a relentless, fervent and frequently amoral pursuit of profit. His idea might not have been a good one, but it is perfectly in line with the nature of the business he has bought into.CorrespondenceA wonderful way to start the week, thanks to Nona Cleland. “Would you be kind enough to explain the meaning of the corner flag photo?” she asks, in reference to a caption from last week.I would be delighted, Nona: clubs tend to use a stock photo of a limp, mournful corner flag, emblazoned with their crests, when they release a statement imparting bad news, most frequently the firing of a manager. I don’t quite know how it started — though I am, I admit, tempted to find out — but it is now a fairly reliable visual clue that a crisis has reached its inevitable conclusion.Oh no: Who got fired?Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockThere has also been a bit of a backlash to Tom Karsay’s suggestion that fans might object more to big-money acquisitions if they remembered the money funding them came, ultimately, from their own pockets. “Quite the opposite, when the alternative is our money going into the owners’ pockets and staying there,” wrote John Nielsen-Gammon.Brian Marx, meanwhile, pointed out that fans “choose to consume top league club soccer, it is not forced upon us. Also, for the fans of any specific team, the signing of a difference-making player, expensive or otherwise, is always another chance to allow those rays of hope to stream in the window.”And we can finish with a question, one that will make no sense to those of you who skipped last week’s newsletter, from Rich Johnson. “Which Premier League manager do you believe would have the most success at interpretive dance?” he wrote. This would, I think, be an intensely competitive field. Most managers, after all, essentially spend whole games performing elaborate dance routines. Antonio Conte’s body language is powerfully expressive, but it’s hard to see past Pep Guardiola, who often has the air of a man performing a complex choreography. More

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      In Premier League, Crisis Is a Constant

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      Change at Chelsea. A loss at Liverpool. Chaos is part and parcel of the Premier League story line. But it doesn’t have to be that way.Chelsea managed to cycle through it all in nine hours, give or take. First, bright and early on Wednesday, came the announcement that the club’s owners had decided to dispense with the services of Manager Thomas Tuchel, after a reign encompassing a mere 19 months and one measly Champions League title.The window for shock was a relatively brief one. Chelsea had only just concluded a summer of spending unlike anything the Premier League had ever seen — two months of shock and awe and photos of Todd Boehly, the club’s co-controlling chairman and interim sporting director — most of it seemingly conducted in accordance with Tuchel’s wishes.But no matter: An explanation emerged swiftly, centered on the desire of Boehly and the rest of his consortium to change the culture at Chelsea and their belief that Tuchel was not the right figurehead for that shift. Quite what form that new culture will take, and quite why the 49-year-old Tuchel could not be part of it, has not been adequately explained, at least not yet.Still, there was no time for questions. Graham Potter, the impressive coach of Brighton, had been installed as favorite to succeed Tuchel by lunchtime on Wednesday. Chelsea had been in touch with his current employer by dinner. He had “verbally agreed” to take the job — as opposed to agreeing by interpretive dance, presumably — by the time darkness fell.Welcome to the Thunderdome, Graham Potter. Rui Vieira/Associated PressAnd just like that, Chelsea’s crisis — one that had been difficult to discern, from the outside, before Tuchel was dismissed, and one that seemed to be entirely of its own making — had come and gone. Just like nature, though, soccer abhors a vacuum.So it was fortunate, in many ways, that by 8:46 p.m. Italian time, Liverpool had stepped forward to produce arguably the worst Champions League performance of Jürgen Klopp’s tenure. Within 45 seconds of kickoff in Naples, Napoli had broken Liverpool’s holographic back line and hit the post. It went, it is fair to say, downhill from there.By the time the game ended, Liverpool had officially occupied the chaos space so recently vacated by Chelsea. Klopp, the coach who guided the club to two trophies — and a Champions League final — barely four months ago, was asked in his news media conference after the game if he was worried about being fired.Even by the standards of the Premier League, this was pretty good going: not just one major team in crisis, but two, and both of them on the same day. It is only a couple of weeks since Manchester United was afforded that status, a consequence of Erik ten Hag’s losing his first two games as coach, but that already seems to belong to the dim and distant past. Ten Hag’s stock is soaring: He has collected two more points than Tuchel, and three more than Klopp.Napoli 4, Liverpool 1: a single defeat, or an existential crisis?Ciro De Luca/ReutersIt is not ridiculous, of course, to suggest that both Chelsea and Liverpool have disappointed a little this season. Both have stuttered, in the Premier League and the Champions League alike. Both have seemed to be less than the sum of their parts. Both are not meeting the standard they set for themselves.Analyzing and interrogating why that might be is a legitimate exercise. Tuchel had seemed a little frostier, a little more downbeat than habitual in recent weeks; he seemed to chastise his team on a fortnightly basis in what proved to be the last couple of months of his tenure at Stamford Bridge. Rarely, if ever, did he indicate that he knew quite what was wrong, or how to fix it.That is the challenge facing Klopp, too. Liverpool, ordinarily so dogged and so fearsome, has looked distinctly fatigued through the opening weeks of the season. It has stirred itself only in patches, succumbing for vast periods of most of its games to a form of stagnant ennui, as if the players were running on fumes after six exacting years under Klopp.In those circumstances, it is in the nature of the world’s biggest teams that the scrutiny should be intense. That, in essence, is the bargain. Chelsea, like Liverpool and Manchester United, has been complicit in creating a sporting ecosystem in which it is expected to win all of its games, in which almost any defeat is unacceptable. The pressure, the hyperbole, when it comes, is the flip side of the bargain.And yet it was difficult not to be struck by the speed with which crisis descended. Liverpool was humbled in Naples, it is true, but it was still only the second defeat of the club’s season, and only its fourth of the calendar year. Chelsea had stumbled against Leeds and Southampton, but it is only five points adrift of Arsenal, the Premier League leader. It would be a stretch to suggest that, for either team, all is lost.Part of that rush to judgment can be attributed — point your fingers here — to the news media, to the breathless coverage of the major powers of the Premier League, to the desperate need to fill the bottomless digital maw, to the talking-point culture that has slowly consumed soccer (and then everything else) in the past two decades.Marcus Rashford and United beat first-place Arsenal on Sunday. Problems solved?Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPartly, too, it is because these clubs expect the best and have paid handsomely for it. Chelsea invested $300 million on players this summer and happily would have spent more if possible. Liverpool spends more on the salaries of its current squad than all but three or four teams in the world, one of which is Manchester United. Those fortunes are paid out, essentially, to ward off things like teething problems and dips in form. That, again, is the deal.And, partly, it is because of the game that these superclubs have created: one in which the default assumption, now, is that the team that claims the Premier League title will do so with an almost impossible points tally, in a league in which Manchester City continues to roll on, seemingly unstoppable, Erling Haaland trampling opponents underfoot, and everyone else knows that losing any ground at all now means spending the season treading water, waiting for a chance to start again. There is a fragility, a desperation, an awareness that there is no room for error.It is difficult, though, to believe that any of this is healthy: not for the players and coaches commanded to maintain almost superhuman standards or risk being branded failures and not for the fans, always awaiting the moment the gloom descends.Most of all, it is not in the best interests of the game as a whole, which increasingly seems to exist on a bloodthirsty knife-edge, eagerly awaiting its next victim, the next chance to cry crisis, to dissemble its latest false idol, knowing full well that it will not have to wait very long at all.The Romance BusinessCeltic Park on Tuesday.Andy Buchanan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFor an hour, Celtic Park was the stage of one of the great Champions League nights. It bubbled and simmered and, as Real Madrid struggled to contain Celtic’s delicately cultivated spirit of adventure, it boiled and roared. Callum McGregor hit the post, and for a moment the noise was such that even the reigning European champion struggled to regain its composure.The Champions League would be diminished beyond recognition without these occasions, of course. There is something visceral, something compelling about the precise sound generated inside one of Europe’s great stadiums — Celtic Park and Ibrox in Glasgow, Napoli’s Stadio Diego Armando Maradona, the Velodrome in Marseille — when one of the continent’s self-appointed elites rolls into town.It is important to note, though, that the root of all the son et lumiere that makes those nights so special is an inequality so deeply entrenched that it can make Celtic — one of the world’s great clubs — feel like an impossible underdog, as if it were a part-time outfit made up of cobblers and dental hygienists on an unexpected cup run.It is an inequality that has, to a large extent, been created and intensified by the Champions League itself, as it funnels more and more money to fewer and fewer clubs. As stirring, as emotive as those games can be, they come with a grim irony, too: At least part of the appeal of the Champions League can be traced to its ability to take the consequences of imbalance and turn it into spectacle.How to Solve a Problem Like the Premier LeagueToni Kroos, at least, is not worried.“The television money has been significantly higher in England for years,” Kroos, a Real Madrid midfielder, said this week, when asked about the yawning chasm between the spending of the Premier League’s clubs and everyone else. “It hasn’t resulted in English teams’ winning everything.” Europe’s three club competitions last season, as he pointed out, were won by teams that were conspicuously not English.Kroos is as articulate and thoughtful a player as they come — although he does harbor a worrying admiration for the music of Robbie Williams, a personal stain that cannot be disregarded — but his interpretation on this matter is a little glib. The contrast between the financial strength of the Premier League and the fragility of its rivals is a cause for concern.It is something, though, that can be addressed, should UEFA find the will or the conviction to do so. There is nothing it can do, of course, about the amount of money that flows into the Premier League, either from television networks or from external investors, be they private equity firms or nation states.But it can regulate the way that money can be spent. It has already imposed limits on the number of players a club can send out on loan. It could also increase the number of locally reared players each team must name in its squad or the number of players under a certain age. It could investigate the idea of regionalized leagues, too, to help decrease the competitive imbalance.It should, though, do something. Because the alternative is that the major clubs of continental Europe will determine that the only solution — the only way to try to keep pace — is to cut UEFA, and their national leagues, out of the equation altogether.CorrespondenceAs the adage has it, if there is one thing journalists like talking about — apart from other journalists, behind their backs — it is journalism itself. The craft. The art. The mission. The diminished expense accounts. Thanks, then, to Tim Lott for affording me the opportunity to clear my throat.“Reading all the coverage of Chelsea, I’m struck by the narrative that (I suppose) Todd Boehly and his folks are selling,” he wrote. “There are certain themes common in all stories: Thomas Tuchel’s detachment behind the scenes, a minor spat over Cristiano Ronaldo, so many attackers wanting out.“This has got me wondering about the sausage-making: How does everyone end up with mostly the same story? And why hasn’t anyone been able to report it beforehand?”The universal symbol of a club in crisis: the corner flag photo.Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockTim is right: There are times at which various lines are pushed by various interested parties, all of them effectively competing to make their version of the truth the one that takes hold (but none of them, for the most part, are actually willing to put their name to it). The journalist’s job, on those occasions, is to pick through the morass, to find the common themes, to try to work out what is most cogent.Tuchel’s dismissal is a little different. The reason most of the reporting covers similar ground this time is because — as far as my own investigation could gather — that is, largely, what happened. That it might have been reported earlier is a valid point, but there is a tendency, in soccer as in so much else, to reverse-engineer explanations, to determine cause only when consequence is clear.We had an anonymous question, too, on one of the finer points of transfer reporting. “You mention that Erling Haaland’s true cost was approximately $100 million,” the Mystery Correspondent wrote. “Does this mean the published fees are regularly less than the actual cost?”The answer to this is: kind of. As a rule, the fee that is reported has always been the amount the buying club pays the selling club. Increasingly, though, that convention seems inadequate, not just because salary is often the bulk of the cost to the purchaser, but because — as the Haaland deal illustrates nicely — a cheaper price can mean a higher cut goes to the agent(s). It is, perhaps, time to discuss transfers in terms of their total cost, rather than simply focusing on one aspect.A great point, meanwhile, from Tom Karsay. “Maybe it should be pointed out that the money Manchester United [and everyone else] spent doesn’t come from owners’ pockets,” he wrote. “It comes from the advertising revenues of the television networks, which comes from our labor, the sweat of our brows. Maybe fans, keeping that in mind, would be less likely to cheer new acquisitions.” More

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      The Problem With Chelsea (Hint: It May Not Be the Manager)

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      Six days after spending more in a single transfer window than any club in history, Chelsea’s new owners fired the team’s coach, Thomas Tuchel. Now what?The caveat, right from the start, was experience. The consortium, fronted by Todd Boehly and bankrolled by the private equity firm Clearlake, had the money. That much was plain. They had, after all, paid $2.8 billion to buy Chelsea in a frantic, opaque auction, making it the most expensive acquisition in the history of sports.They had expertise in the business, too, or some form of it: Neither Boehly nor Mark Walter, a comparatively late addition to the ownership group, was a sporting neophyte. Both own a slice of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and that investment, in recent years, has proved a relatively adroit one.No, the only thing that could be held against the new owners, the only thing that gave Chelsea’s fans pause for thought as they considered what a post-Roman Abramovich future might bring, was that none of them — Boehly, Clearlake, Walter or Hansjorg Wyss, the octogenarian Swiss billionaire who had brought the group together — knew the first thing about English soccer.Three months in, those doubts have been overcome. Scarcely 100 days have elapsed since the group took official control of Chelsea. In that time, it lavished more than $300 million on new signings — more than any club had ever spent in a single transfer window — and then, with the ink still drying on the last couple of contracts, decided to fire its manager only a half-dozen games into the season.If they carry on like this, Chelsea’s new owners will fit into the Premier League’s hyperbolic soap opera just fine.Todd Boehly and his partners have been remaking Chelsea all summer. Change has not been cheap.David Cliff/Associated PressFrom the outside, Chelsea’s decision to part company with Thomas Tuchel in the early hours of Wednesday felt distinctly, comfortingly familiar. The team had lost the previous evening in its opening Champions League engagement against Dinamo Zagreb. That defeat came on the back of a stuttering start to the Premier League campaign that has left Chelsea in sixth, just 5 points behind first-place Arsenal but already smarting from losses to Leeds United and Southampton.This was, then, the new Chelsea behaving precisely as the old Chelsea always had, with a short-termism so ruthless it almost qualified as proud. Spending an unimaginable sum of money to furnish a manager with the team he desired only to dismiss the manager at the first hint of trouble? Roman would be proud.Internally, the picture was a little more nuanced. Tuchel’s brief reign — he was in place for only 19 months — had hit its peak early, in the uncanny valley of lockdown soccer, when he took a team that had been struggling to qualify for the Champions League under his predecessor, Frank Lampard, and turned it into the champion of Europe in four months. Rarely, if ever, has a coach had such an immediate, spectacular effect.The 49-year-old Tuchel, though, failed to build on that starburst. He was presented, a year ago, with the $111 million signing of Romelu Lukaku, theoretically the player who could catapult Chelsea to a first Premier League title since 2017. It did not quite work out like that. Lukaku was allowed to leave the club this summer on loan.Though Tuchel steered the team to two domestic cup finals in his first full campaign — losing both on penalties against Liverpool — and handled with poise and dignity the geopolitical storm that engulfed the club in the wake of the British government’s decision to sanction Abramovich, Chelsea’s season petered out, with the German’s side eventually finishing 19 points behind Manchester City.Tuchel in better days. Last year.Susana Vera/Pool Via ReutersThat malaise had not gone unnoticed by the club’s newly installed hierarchy. Nor had Tuchel’s demeanor over the summer, which grew more detached, more disaffected with every passing week.In July, he bemoaned that his players’ “level of commitment, physically and mentally,” was insufficient. By August, he described them as “not tough enough.” On Tuesday, after losing in Zagreb, that had metastasized into admitting that “everything was missing” from his team’s performance.Those public complaints betrayed a growing unease in private. Tuchel had come to be known at Chelsea as a gregarious, warm, affable sort — at a club with plenty of managers to compare him to, he fared well — but a number of players felt he had become more truculent, more distant in recent months, particularly with those he did not consider his most reliable lieutenants.Boehly and Behdad Eghbali, the co-founder of Clearlake, noticed the same thing. As they attempted to retool the squad this summer, they had sought Tuchel’s counsel frequently, asking the manager — in the absence of a technical director — to direct them to his preferred targets.That was not a role that Tuchel relished particularly; he was far happier to be left alone to coach. As the transfer window gathered pace, Boehly and Eghbali found that Tuchel had a tendency to prove difficult to contact at critical junctures. Whatever relationship they had been able to establish in their few weeks working together began to fracture and fray.Kalidou Koulibaly and the rest of Chelsea’s players, new and old, opened the Champions League with a loss on Tuesday.Antonio Bronic/ReutersAs the relatively curt statement released by the club to announce his departure suggested, Boehly and Eghbali did not feel they had acted rashly. They had, instead, reached the decision to part company with Tuchel even before defeat in Zagreb. The travails of the early part of the season were supporting evidence for their conclusion, rather than the thrust of their case.For all the mitigating circumstances, though — and while the owners have been swift to identify Graham Potter, the intelligent, affable and talented Brighton manager, as Tuchel’s likely replacement — it does feel as if his dismissal fits a pattern.Boehly has taken on the role of interim sporting director with vigor and determination. Those at the club have been stunned by his work ethic, and he has made an effort to establish a rapport with many of the game’s most influential agents, inviting some of them to watch games from his box at the club’s stadium.In some cases, that has borne fruit. Chelsea spent a lot of money this summer, but it spent much of it well. Wesley Fofana may have been expensive, but he is also one of the most promising defenders in world soccer. Raheem Sterling has for years been one of the Premier League’s most devastating attacking players.The deals that did not come off tell a story too, though. There was the offer for Romeo Lavia, a player who had made just a handful of appearances for Southampton since moving from Manchester City in July; Chelsea offered to pay at least double what he had cost in August.Then there was an attempt to sign Edson Álvarez, a Mexican midfielder at the Dutch club Ajax, which bubbled to the surface as the transfer window was closing. The approach came so late, in fact, that Ajax was able to use it as proof that Chelsea was not spending to any plan, but rather for the sake of it — an argument that worked sufficiently well for Álvarez to decide to remain in Amsterdam.As they reached the (entirely artificial) watershed of their 100th day in charge of the club, Boehly and Eghbali reportedly spent considerable time contemplating the sort of culture they wanted to establish at Chelsea.They wanted to shift away from the urgency and the uncertainty of the Abramovich years and build something more sustainable, they decided, and they felt that Tuchel was not the right sort of figure to oversee that change. He was better suited, they determined, to the old ways, when nothing lasted forever, and Chelsea’s manager lived each day as if it could be the last.And yet here we are: Six games into the season, six days after the end of the transfer window, Chelsea has fired its manager on the back of a few poor performances and because of rumblings of discontent among the playing squad. Perhaps this will be the last hurrah of the old Chelsea, the final break with the past. Or perhaps a culture, once embedded, is not an easy thing to change, no matter how much money and ambition you have. More

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      Money to Burn: Lessons From the Premier League’s Transfer Window

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      English teams awash in cash broke records for players and prices this summer, proving again that they operate on a plane apart from their rivals.To take just one snapshot from just one day in a whole summer of indulgence and excess, there was a point, last week, during which all of these things were happening at the same time:There were representatives of West Ham United pressing $58 million into the grateful palms of Lyon in exchange for Lucas Paqueta, a mercurial Brazilian playmaker. Their counterparts from Newcastle were offering Real Sociedad $72 million for the Swedish striker Alexander Isak.Chelsea’s self-appointed sporting director, Todd Boehly, meanwhile, had given up on his brief pursuit of the Manchester United captain, Harry Maguire, and was instead buffeting Leicester City with bids for Wesley Fofana. United, in turn, was peppering Ajax with offers for Antony, yet another Brazilian wing, working their way toward an unmoving asking price in what appeared to be increments of $10 million.This is what the Premier League does every year, of course: Every summer, and most winters, its clubs descend on Europe, the cash from infinitely spiraling television deals burning a hole in their pockets, and proceed to hose an entire continent with money. They swamp it, they flood it, they drown it with their wealth.And then, at the end of August, they go home, armed with a few more Brazilian playmakers and Swedish strikers, ready to play the games that will earn the money for them to do it all over again in a few months.The Swedish striker Alexander Isak scored in his Newcastle debut after joining from Spain’s Real Sociedad.Phil Noble/ReutersThe ritual, the great ceremonial spending of broadcasters’ money, is not just familiar — an annual tradition that has long since lost its power to shock, the figures involved now so inflated and improbable that they seem to mean almost nothing at all — but, in England at least, actively celebrated.The amount the Premier League’s clubs have spent is, without fail, heralded as a triumph by a variety of not entirely neutral onlookers: accountancy firms for whom the rude health of English soccer is a central plank of their business; the broadcasters who have, at heart, paid for it all; the league itself. The total sum is used as a proxy measure for power, a gauge for how big and strong English soccer has grown and, by extension, how weak and small everyone else must be.This summer has brought even more flexing than normal. The figures have been even more eye-watering than usual. By the time the transfer window closed on Thursday evening, the Premier League’s teams had burned their way through $2.3 billion, gross, in the space of just a couple of months.That is a record, of course, and not by a little: The previous high-water mark was almost $600 million lower. To suggest, too, that it is more than all the money spent by the rest of Europe’s so-called Big Five leagues — Italy, Spain, Germany, France — combined does not quite capture the full picture. Chelsea spent more money this summer than any English club has spent previously. Nottingham Forest signed more players than any English club has ever signed in a single window. Nine teams spent more than £100 million. English teams spent three times as much as their nearest challengers. It has been a wild and unrestrained festival of consumption.And yet, while that speaks volumes for the financial power the Premier League now wields over all of its competitors on the continent, the image it has created is not of a competition bristling with strength, but rather of one addled with desperation, filled by clubs consumed by fear, and so suffused by riches that it has, in some quarters at least, apparently divested itself of thought.There are clubs, of course, that have acquitted themselves well in the transfer market: Manchester City, say, surgically picking off Erling Haaland and Kalvin Phillips and then, at last moment, spying an opportunity to sign Manuel Akanji from Borussia Dortmund for a reduced fee and taking it. Or Crystal Palace, judiciously adding only a couple of new faces who might help its young, intriguing squad develop. Or Brighton, selling high and buying cheap and getting better in the process.But for the most part, there has been a wantonness to the spending: Chelsea, spraying money at almost anyone it could think of to sign any player who might be available, the club’s new owners apparently so confident of the rising tide of broadcast rights and merchandise deals that they are willing to write off a couple of hundred million here or there.Or Manchester United, who tried to cut a deal with Ajax for Antony but, when that didn’t work, simply paid what it had long regarded as an inflated asking price anyway, without so much as blinking. Or Fulham, signing the 34-year-old Willian on the final day of the window for, well, for some reason.Some of those signings will, of course, prove to be wise, worthwhile investments. Perhaps Antony will provide Manchester United with the balance its attack has lacked. Maybe the 20 players Forest has acquired — no, that is not a stray zero — will help it remain in the top flight. Chelsea may be improved by the presence of Raheem Sterling, Kalidou Koulibaly and the rest.The now former Ajax wing Antony, definitely not displaying his asking price to Manchester United.Maurice Van Steen/EPA, via ShutterstockThe broader impression, though, has not been of clubs smartly addressing their shortcomings, gradually tending to their needs. It has, instead, been of a reckless mercantile zeal, of acquisition for its own sake, of a gross hedonism at a time when the country which the Premier League takes as its host is in the grip of soaring energy prices and rampant inflation and wondering whether it will be able to afford to get through the winter. The Premier League’s clubs are not just inured to that, they stand as a direct contrast to it. It is almost as if they have internalized the idea that spending is, indeed, a measure of strength, a virtue in and of itself.Many of the deals, certainly, possess a transience, a fleetingness, an inherent futility. They offer an immediate reassurance, a jolt of excitement, a dose of adrenaline, but the suspicion is that, as the season plays out, the urgency to sign them — the clauses met and the demands accepted — will seem a little rash. Did Chelsea really need Marc Cucurella? Is Lucas Paqueta notably better than what was already available at West Ham? Had Manchester United not spent quite a lot of money on a winger last summer, too?On one level, it does not matter, of course. The Premier League’s coffers will be refilled over the course of the next few months. There is always enough money pouring in to cover any missteps. The league’s clubs always have the option of buying themselves out of trouble.But that is not to say there are no consequences. Each one of those signings represents a chance denied to a young player, one hoping to make the breakthrough, to find their way in the game.Kalidou Koulibaly, part of Chelsea’s most recent summer of splurges. Andrew Redington/Getty ImagesChelsea might have given time, this season, to Levi Colwill, a defender the club regards as one of its brightest prospects in years. Instead, he has been farmed out to Brighton, just so the club could bring in a senior left back to compete with Ben Chilwell. Liverpool could have used its mounting injury problems to blood the promising Stefan Bajcetic; instead, it moved to sign Arthur on loan from Juventus.That is the thing with soccer, the thing that the majority of clubs on the continent have to accept and that England’s teams do not seem to have noticed. There are always more footballers. They are, for all intents and purposes, an unlimited natural resource. Often, they are right there, under your nose, just waiting for an opportunity.England’s clubs rarely offer that. Others, though, do. Ajax will find another Antony soon enough. Lyon will unearth another Paqueta. The urgency, the desperation, to sign any of these players is misplaced; there will be another one next year, just as good. And when they emerge, the English clubs will be ready again, drenching the teams who have discovered them and nurtured them and helped them shine with a great fire hose of cash, thinking only about today, and never about tomorrow.Great Business. For Now.Carlos Soler, on his way from Valencia to P.S.G.Jose Jordan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesCarlos Soler was the last of them. With a few hours left of the transfer window, Paris St.-Germain confirmed it had reached a deal with Valencia to sign Soler, a 25-year-old midfielder who has quietly been one of the most impressive performers in La Liga in the last few years, for somewhere in the region of $20 million.It was typical of the business the French champion has done this summer, under the guidance of Luis Campos, the recruitment guru hired to overhaul a bloated, incoherent squad: uncharacteristically quiet, undeniably competent, surprisingly good value. P.S.G. should be careful. People might start thinking it is a serious club.As well as Soler, after all, Campos has used his contacts in Portugal, in particular, to sign Vitinha, from Porto, Lille’s Renato Sanches and, perhaps most adroitly, Napoli’s Fabian Ruiz. In doing so, he has revamped the P.S.G. midfield, and all for less than $100 million — excluding agent fees — no mean feat given the club’s reputation and the looming specter of counteroffers from the rather less parsimonious Premier League.Only one doubt remains. To accommodate Campos’s cavalry, P.S.G. has had to unmoor Leandro Paredes, Ander Herrera, Georginio Wijnaldum, Idrissa Gueye, Julian Draxler, Ángel Di Maria and Xavi Simons this summer, too. Some, like Wijnaldum, will not be missed. Others, like Draxler, required a change of air.The nature of P.S.G.’s business might have changed, then, but it remains to be seen if the nature of the club has. It is not hard to imagine at least one of the players acquired this summer being on the market again next year, a deal that looks like a bargain now cast by hindsight as an error. P.S.G. has never had a problem recruiting good players. Its issue, for the last decade, has always been working out what to do with them.CorrespondenceSpeaking of Haaland — as we will be doing frequently this season, I suspect — Shawn Donnelly has a question. “I still can’t get over how Manchester City picked him up for just 60 million euros,” he wrote. “Did Borussia Dortmund get robbed? Couldn’t they have got two or three times as much?”They could, Shawn, if only Haaland had not been in possession of a contract with a release clause written into it. All City had to do was match it, and Dortmund was powerless to hold out for a higher figure. The frustration should be tempered, though, by the fact that the release clause was the only reason Dortmund was able to get him at all. Haaland signed for the club in the first place only on the understanding that, sooner rather than later, it would let him go.Erling Haaland, already looking like a bargain.Andrew Yates/EPA, via ShutterstockThere is one other point to be made on that transfer, though: It is more than a little misleading for it to be presented as a deal worth only 60 million euros. It was, in reality, substantially higher: All of the money City saved thanks to his release clause was incorporated, instead, to the fees paid to Haaland’s representatives. That gets you close to $100 million, which is far closer to his real value.Hopefully, we can provide Matt Bilello with similar clarification. “Can you please explain the difference between a ‘cynical’ foul and a professional one?” he asked. “Commentators use them interchangeably, but it seems to me that a cynical foul is a dirty one, whereas a professional one is ‘necessary’ to prevent an advantage to an opponent.”In my understanding, this is basically right. Any common-or-garden foul can be a cynical one, but a professional foul is something very specific: bringing down an opponent to deprive them of an immediate chance to score. (In my head, a professional foul is tackling someone from behind as they charge through on goal.) More

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      The Manchester United Sale Rumors Are False. For Now.

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      The Glazer family isn’t soliciting bids for United. But selling a piece of the team could set the price for all of it.Manchester United is not for sale. But it kind of is, in the same way that everything is for sale if the offer is high enough.The rumors started this week with a tweet, a bad joke by a billionaire that he quickly shot down himself. But almost as soon as Elon Musk walked away, the sharks were circling.Jim Ratcliffe, a British billionaire, was first out of the blocks, saying he would be interested in buying the team if it was, in fact, for sale. An American private equity firm, Apollo Global Management, was reported to be in talks about acquiring a minority stake. Money would not be an issue. Ratcliffe, the chairman of Ineos, is one of the world’s richest men. Apollo has roughly half a trillion dollars under management.But lost in the swirl of breathless reports seemed to be an important caveat: Manchester United wasn’t actually for sale.Or was it?These would not seem like top-of-the-market times at United. The team is in last place in England’s Premier League, off to its worst start to a season in more than a century. It employs a squad of players who inspire more ridicule than reverence. Its fans now hold weekly protests against the team’s Florida-based owners, the Glazer family. Yet, despite its struggles, there may not be a more coveted sports franchise anywhere on earth than Manchester United.Manchester United is last in the Premier League after a 4-0 defeat at Brentford on Saturday.David Klein/ReutersIt is one of the biggest teams anywhere that can be owned outright. It plays in the most popular soccer league in the world. Its reach extends to every corner of the earth. Quite simply: There are few brands in any sector as powerful as Manchester United.But assets that rare are famously hard to value through traditional market fundamentals. United’s share price, for example — it is listed on the New York Stock Exchange — would suggest the club is worth $2.23 billion, a figure well below the record $3 billon a group led by the California-based fund Clearlake paid this spring for its Premier League rival Chelsea F.C.But Chelsea is not Manchester United, not in any meaningful sense. Yes, it has been successful. Yes it also employs some of the world’s top players. But in terms of global reach, popularity and brand power, the club does not compare with United. What Chelsea’s sale price proved, though, is that when it comes to elite soccer club valuations, what is on the balance sheet rarely counts.Chelsea lost more than $1 million a week under its former owner, the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. It needs a new stadium and will require tens of millions more in spending each season to keep its roster competitive. Its purchase price followed a highly public auction that drew interest from around the world.For Manchester United, the list of suitors will be even longer, and even more public. Ratcliffe and Apollo may have been the first. They will not be the last.The British billionaire Jim Ratcliffe said he would be interested in buying United “if it was for sale.”Eric Gaillard/ReutersThe Manchester United co-chairman Avram Glazer and his siblings have given no hint they plan to sell.Toby Melville/ReutersRatcliffe’s approach is perhaps the most instructive of what is likely to come. He appears to have made no effort to contact the Glazers directly, or even reach out to their bankers. Instead, he went straight to the news media, and suggested he would be open to buying even a piece of United, with an eye on one day acquiring it all.“We are interested in the club, if it is up for sale,” is all a spokesman for Ratcliffe was willing to tell The New York Times on Thursday. The tactic unleashed a groundswell of popular support, and heaped a new round of abuse on the current owners.For the Glazers, who have been under siege for most of their tenure, selling a minority might make sense. It might allow them to soothe growing fan hostility — many supporters have never forgiven the Glazers for heaping debt on the previously debt-free club in their 800-million-pound leveraged buyout in 2005 — while simultaneously bidding up the team’s overall valuation. That figure is almost certainly going to be higher than United’s share price might suggest.Despite nearly a decade of underperformance, United still earns more than nearly every other team in world soccer. Revenue has tripled under the Glazers, reaching a high of 627 million pounds ($756 million) in 2019. If Chelsea is worth $3 billion on the open market, United, because of its fame, its earning potential and its iconic status, is worth far more, perhaps even double, some experts contend.At the same time, the scale of the negative sentiment among Manchester United supporters toward the Glazer family is hard to overstate. For more than a decade, fans have rallied against them at matches and in street marches; once, they even burned an effigy of the family’s late patriarch, Malcolm Glazer. And when the club flirted with joining a proposed European Super League last year, United fans broke into the team’s stadium and protested on the field.But through it all — for almost two decades — the Glazers have hung on, keeping hold of what in many ways is as an asset as rare as a priceless painting, thrilled to watch the value of their investment go skyward and with the cachet that comes with owning one of the most famous teams in the world.United fans at a protest in April. Ed Sykes/Action Images Via ReutersIt is unclear if all six Glazer siblings who were parceled ownership of the team by their father when he died share the same commitment to owning Manchester United. The brothers Joel and Avram are the most hands on, directly involved in the team’s decision making. But a partial sale might allow less-invested family members to cash out at a premium price, and leave those that remain with a valuation that is almost certain to be the highest price ever paid for sports franchise.For the moment, the Glazers, as has been their custom for nearly two decades, have not uttered a word publicly about their plans. A Manchester United spokesman declined to comment on Thursday.And now, at least officially, Manchester United is not for sale. The Glazers’ banker, the 200-year-old London-based advisory Rothschild & Co., is not actively soliciting bids. But neither was Abramovich, even as he spent years quietly directing offers that arrived to the New York banker, Joe Ravitch, who ultimately sold Chelsea this spring.That is very likely how things will go at Manchester United. There will come a moment when the time and the price are just right, for the most unpopular owners in English soccer history to cash out of what will go down as one of the most profitable deals in sports history.It has already cost Manchester United more than one billion pounds — in interest, debt repayments and dividends — for the right to be owned by the Glazer family. Most fans will consider billions more, this time in the form of one final check, a price worth paying to be rid of them. More

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      Premier League Preview: Has Arsenal Pulled It Together? Will United Fall Apart?

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      Six contenders (more or less) and five story lines (plus a few extra) as the new season kicks off with everyone chasing Manchester City (again).Somehow, it is that time again. Cue the dramatic music, crank up the content generator and get ready to absorb the hottest takes around: the Premier League season is upon us once again.Quite what form this edition of soccer’s great hubristic soap opera will take is, of course, not yet clear. That, after all, is the fun of the thing.As the 20 teams in the richest league in the world return to the field this weekend, though, there are several questions that linger over everything. How they are answered will go a long way to determining how things play out.Will Manchester City Beat Manchester City?Manchester City’s reaction every time someone suggests its time with the trophy is up.Dave Thompson/Associated PressThe obvious question before the start of every new Premier League season is which team is likely to have won the thing at the end. Unfortunately, in the current incarnation of the league, it is not a particularly interesting inquiry. Manchester City will win it, as it has four of the past five editions, and it will most likely do so by seeing off a spirited but ultimately futile challenge from Liverpool. Although, this time, there is just one small caveat.The idea that Erling Haaland’s presence will somehow disrupt City’s rhythm sufficiently to impact the team has been overblown; it may be an awkward marriage for a few months, but both are more than good enough to thrive despite that.Far more important is the fact that Haaland is currently just one of 16 senior outfield players at Pep Guardiola’s disposal. That would be a risk in a normal season. This one has a great big World Cup in the middle, making it seem like a colossal gamble.Is Arsenal Back?Gabriel Jesus practicing a pose Arsenal expects to see a lot this season.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt sounds like damning Arsenal with faint praise to suggest that Mikel Arteta’s team has won the preseason — largely because it is — but, amid all of the hype and exaggeration, the last few weeks have produced some genuinely encouraging signs for the Spaniard and his fellow documentary stars.Gabriel Jesus, certainly, has the capacity to be a transformational signing, and his former Manchester City teammate Oleksandr Zinchenko may not be far behind. Arsenal looks like a much more complete side than it did a year ago. Not one ready to challenge City or Liverpool, perhaps, but one that could end the club’s long exile from the Champions League.Will Tottenham’s Impatience Pay Off?Richarlison traded life at the bottom of the table at Everton for a view of the summit at Spurs.Andy Buchanan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe biggest obstacle to Arsenal’s resurrection sits just down the road. Not at Chelsea, where a chaotic transfer window will most likely end with a stronger and yet somehow less coherent squad, but at a Tottenham transformed by Antonio Conte, the sort of supernova coach who comes in, pushes his players to the limit and then implodes. The worry, when he arrived at Spurs, was that the club had an almost diametrically opposed approach.That, it seems, was not a problem. Tottenham is very much in win-now mode. Ivan Perisic, Richarlison and Yves Bissouma have been brought in to turn a side good enough to get into the Champions League last year into one that can push for the title. Given the strangeness of the season, that does not seem impossible. Spurs has one chance under Conte, effectively. It has done all it can to take it.Manchester United: DiscussA rare sight this season: Cristiano Ronaldo happy at Manchester United.Ed Sykes/Action Images, via ReutersIn what may have been the purest distillation of modern soccer imaginable, Cristiano Ronaldo received a rapturous reception upon his return to Old Trafford last weekend. Manchester United’s fans clearly wanted him to know how much he meant to them, even as he has made it very obvious he does not wish to remain at the club.Roughly 45 minutes later, having been substituted, Ronaldo was leaving the stadium at halftime, very much against the wishes of his manager, Erik ten Hag, and apparently convinced that he did not need to stick around.There has, believe it or not, been progress at Manchester United this summer. Ten Hag is a smart appointment. The club has made a couple smart signings. But it is a curious progress, one tempered by the fact that United does not appear to have a list of recruits beyond players ten Hag knew and liked and undercut by the Ronaldo saga. As things stand, he may be forced to stay merely because nobody else wants to sign him. How ten Hag handles that will define the early months of his reign.Can Anyone Break the Seal?Declan Rice and West Ham floated into Europe last season. Is more in their future?Justin Tallis/AFP, via Getty ImagesIn one view, this season should be the best chance since 2016 for a team outside the traditional Big Six to make a run for a place in the Champions League. The whole campaign will be affected by the World Cup, and it is hardly ridiculous to suggest that the superpowers — stocked as they are by players headed to Qatar — may be more susceptible to fatigue in the aftermath.Whether any team can emerge from the pack, though, is a different matter. Newcastle ended last season on a Saudi-bankrolled high, but it has been substantially quieter than the LIV golf series this summer. Leicester and Wolves seem to be stagnating. That leaves, perhaps, West Ham — bolstered by a couple of smart additions — as the only viable candidate. More likely still, of course, is that David Moyes’s team cannot last the pace either and that at the end of a season unlike any other, everything will be precisely the same as before. More