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    Boston Celtics’ Jaylen Brown Talks Free Agency, Activism and Kanye West

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    HOUSTON — Boston Celtics guard Jaylen Brown was around 7 years old when he asked his grandmother Dianne Varnado for a new Xbox. Varnado, a longtime public-school teacher and social worker, made him write a paper about it.“‘If you want something, you’ve got to be able to explain why,’” Brown, 26, recalled her telling him.His wants are different now: to win an N.B.A. championship; for players to share in more of the league’s profits; to see an end to anti-Black racism in policing and school funding.Brown has used his celebrity platform to explain why he is passionate about issues like income inequality. Derek Van Rheenen, one of Brown’s former professors at the University of California, Berkeley, described him as “intellectually curious” and “politically invested, socially conscious.”But Brown’s growing profile has meant more pressure to explain himself: for working with the rapper Kanye West, who goes by Ye, after he made antisemitic comments, and for a misstep while supporting Kyrie Irving, who faced backlash after promoting an antisemitic film when he played for the Nets.While basketball has been Brown’s primary focus, it has never been the only one. Brown said his family is full of educators, who laid the foundation for his activist focus on education inequality. Varnado, whom he said recently died “peacefully,” also helped him develop his voice by teaching him to argue for what matters to him. (He got the Xbox.)Brown is averaging career highs in points per game (26.8), rebounds per game (6.9) and shooting percentage (49 percent). This is his seventh season.Mitchell Leff/Getty ImagesBrown sat down with The New York Times at a Four Seasons hotel in Houston on Sunday to talk about his career and his life, including the controversies. He had just come off a flight from Atlanta, where the Celtics had won the night before. Brown has firmly established himself as one of the elite guards in the N.B.A. on one of the top teams, averaging career highs in scoring and rebounding in his best season yet.This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.Work and Life in BostonHow important is making an All-N.B.A. team to you?You want me to answer honestly?I don’t want you to lie to me.I think it would be deserving. We’ve been pretty dominant all season long.Whether I’m in an All-Star Game, All-N.B.A., or whoever comes up with those decisions, is out of my control. I think I’m one of the best basketball players in the world. And I continue to go out and prove it, especially when it matters the most in the playoffs.You and Jayson Tatum have pretty much played your entire careers together at this point. How would you describe your relationship today?I would say the same as it’s always been. You know, two guys who work really hard, who care about winning. We come out and we are extremely competitive. People still probably don’t think it’ll work out.But, for the most part, it’s been rarefied air.The Celtics drafted Jayson Tatum, left, one year after they drafted Brown. Together, they led Boston to the N.B.A. finals last season but lost to Golden State.Tim Nwachukwu/Getty ImagesCeltics center Al Horford recalled that the speed of the N.B.A. game was “really, really fast” for Brown during his rookie season in 2016-17. But now, “he just completely understands the things that he needs to do on the floor,” Horford said.Brown made his second All-Star team this season, and his career-best 26.8 points a game places him among the top guards in scoring. He could be a free agent after next season, but he said he isn’t thinking about that yet. “I’ve been able to make a lot of connections in the city, meet a lot of amazing families who have dedicated their lives to issues about change,” he said.Brown, who is Black, has spoken publicly about racism in Boston, where about half the population is white and about a quarter is Black. In 2015, a jolting study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston estimated that the Black households in the Boston area had a median wealth of close to zero, while the figure for white households was $247,500. “The wealth disparity in Boston is ridiculous,” Brown said.What has your experience been like as a Black professional athlete in Boston?There’s multiple experiences: as an athlete, as a basketball player, as a regular civilian, as somebody who’s trying to start a business, as someone who’s trying to do things in the community.There’s not a lot of room for people of color, Black entrepreneurs, to come in and start a business.I think that my experience there has been not as fluid as I thought it would be.What do you mean by that?Even being an athlete, you would think that you’ve got a certain amount of influence to be able to have experiences, to be able to have some things that doors open a little bit easier. But even with me being who I am, trying to start a business, trying to buy a house, trying to do certain things, you run into some adversity.Other athletes have spoken about the negative way that fans have treated Black athletes while playing in Boston. Have you experienced any of that?I have, but I pretty much block it all out. It’s not the whole Celtic fan base, but it is a part of the fan base that exists within the Celtic nation that is problematic. If you have a bad game, they tie it to your personal character.I definitely think there’s a group or an amount within the Celtic nation that is extremely toxic and does not want to see athletes use their platform, or they just want you to play basketball and entertain and go home. And that’s a problem to me.ActivismErik Moore, the founder of the venture capital firm Base Ventures, mentored Brown in college after Brown interned at his company. He said Brown was always focused on social justice. “It’s not new or shocking or weird,” Moore said. “It’s just who he is.”In April 2020, Brown wrote an op-ed for The Guardian decrying societal inequalities exposed by the coronavirus pandemic. The next month, he donated $1,000 to the political action committee Grassroots Law, which, according to its website, fights “to end oppressive policing, incarceration, and injustice.” Weeks later, Brown drove 15 hours to Atlanta from Boston to protest the police killing of George Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis.Brown spoke about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. before a game against the New Orleans Pelicans in January 2022.Adam Glanzman/Getty ImagesDo you think things are better for Black Americans when it comes to dealing with police than they were three years ago when you went down to protest?I have not seen it, to be honest. I think the issue is more systemic. I think what I learned about policing is that it’s not like the N.B.A., where everybody has these kind of rules that they kind of follow. How a police station in Memphis runs their police station is different from how they might run it in the New York Police Department. I don’t want to say it’s like the Wild West, but it’s different, you know?I read an interview where you said “Educational inequality is probably the most potent form of racism on our planet.” What do you mean by that?There’s different forms of bigotry or racism or inequalities. Directly confrontational still happens to this day, where people come up to you and just tell you their distaste for the way you walk, the way you talk, your skin color. And those are all extremely emotionally detrimental.There’s other forms of hegemonic racism that are subliminal, such as the inequalities in the education system: the lack of resources and opportunities through local elections and people voting on how much money or resources should go in this area versus this area.What about those kids who are extremely talented? What about those kids who are gifted who have contributions to make to society? But they’re stumped because of lack of opportunity.I’ll forever fight for those kids because I’m one of them.Ye and IrvingBrown first received widespread attention for his political views in 2018 when he told The Guardian that President Donald J. Trump was “unfit to lead” and that he had “made it a lot more acceptable for racists to speak their minds.” He also said sports were a “mechanism of control.” It was an unusual degree of outspokenness for a young, unestablished player.So Brown raised eyebrows in May 2022 when he became one of the first athletes to join Donda Sports, the new marketing agency of a well-known Trump supporter: Ye.“I think people still are loath to believe that Kanye really is a Trump fan,” said Moore, Brown’s mentor, adding, “So it might be easy to compartmentalize those things for Kanye specifically and say he’s a marketing phenom and he’s an amazing artist and he’s got that side of the world first and be OK with that.”Brown was one of the first athletes to sign with the marketing agency of the rapper Kanye West, who goes by Ye, left. Jed Jacobsohn/NBAE via Getty ImagesAs Ye spiraled with a series of antisemitic comments and social media posts in the fall, Brown initially defended his association with Donda Sports before apologizing in October and cutting ties.Months after your interview in The Guardian in 2018, Kanye goes to the White House and very publicly aligns himself with President Trump. When you decided to sign with Donda, how did you reconcile those two things?You know, just because you think differently from somebody, it doesn’t mean you can’t work with them. I don’t think the same as [the Celtics owners] Steve Pagliuca or Wyc Grousbeck on a lot of different issues. But that doesn’t mean we can’t come together and win a championship.What are the things you aligned with Donda on specifically?One, education. Donda was his mother’s name and she was an educator, similar to my mom. And she was an activist and they had a different approach to how they looked at agency, how they looked at representation through marketing and media.Everybody kind of follows the same script, especially in sports. They hire an agent. And that approach never really absolutely worked for me.Look, I’m a part of the union. I see the statistics every day. Over 40 to 60 percent of our athletes, 10 years after they retire, go broke or lose majority of their wealth. Our athletes silently suffer. Nobody’s helping them manage their money, and [the agents] just get a new client once the oil has run dry. Nobody looks at that model and that approach as an issue.Trying to be an example for the next generation of athletes.You described Kanye as a role model in the past. How do you feel about him now?Go to the next question. I’m not going to answer that.You got in a little bit of hot water in November for sharing a video of the Black Hebrew Israelites [an antisemitic group] outside of Barclays Center in support of Kyrie Irving. You said that you thought it was a fraternity. Did that incident make you rethink how you want to use your platform?At that time, being the vice president of the players association, Kyrie Irving was being exiled, so I thought it was important to use my platform to to show him some love when he was being welcomed back. And people took it with their own perspective and ran with it. That’s out of my control. I’ve always used my platform to talk about certain things, and I will continue to. But the more you make people uncomfortable, the more criticism you’re going to get. And that’s just life.Brown, right, was one of several players who expressed support for Kyrie Irving, left, as he faced strong public backlash for promoting an antisemitic movie. Irving denied that he was antisemitic.Michelle Farsi for The New York TimesBrown is one of seven vice presidents in the N.B.A. players’ union. Chrysa Chin, a union executive, recalled meeting Brown before his rookie year. She said he told her he wanted to be president of the union one day. “I thought it was very unusual,” Chin said.The N.B.A. and the union are negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement, with the players seeking a “true partnership” that lets them tap into more of the league’s revenue streams that would not exist without their labor, Brown said.“We’d like to see our ethics, morals and values being upheld internationally and globally,” Brown said, “and we would like to have a say-so with the partners and the people that are being involved with the league, because our face, our value, our work ethic, our work, our labor is attached to this league as well.” More

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      The Inside Story of N.B.A. Players and Their Socks

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      BOSTON — Several years ago, Kevin Porter Jr., then a high school basketball star in Seattle, made a profound decision, one that would affect his life. He was creating his own team for the video game NBA 2K, and he decided to outfit one of the players in super long, over-the-calf socks.“I really liked it,” Porter said, “so I tried it in real life. And I was like, ‘Yeah, this is my new look.’ ”Porter has remained loyal to the style. Now a fourth-year guard with the Houston Rockets, he often complements his high socks by covering his knees with compression sleeves that are designed for his arms.“So my legs can stay warm,” he said. “A lot of people make fun of having high socks. But honestly, it’s kind of like a ’70s or ’80s look. I’m different, and I like expressing that.”Kevin Porter Jr., of the Houston Rockets, first experimented with high socks by putting them on players in a video game.Carmen Mandato/Getty ImagesClad in their oversize sweaters, avant-garde scarves and bespoke suits, N.B.A. players have long moonlighted as style-conscious trendsetters. Before games, arena corridors double as fashion runways. And once fans find their seats, the league’s stars function as billboards for the hottest sneakers on the market.The N.B.A., though, has seldom allowed players much wiggle room when it comes to an undervalued component of their in-game attire: socks. Players, after all, are required to wear those manufactured by Nike, which has been the league’s sock partner for six seasons.But even within that relatively confined world, players are constantly finding ways to tailor their approaches. Some pull their socks high, while others scrunch them low. Some want a brand-new pair every game, while others are fine cycling through the same laundered pairs for weeks.There are even a few players who purposely take their Nike socks, which are labeled left and right, and wear them on the wrong feet — a practice that has always puzzled Pat Connaughton of the Milwaukee Bucks.“I’ve asked, and nobody’s given me a good answer,” he said.And while it seems most players prioritize function, some favor fashion — perhaps illustrative of a generational divide.“I think there’s a culture change with the younger guys,” said Tony Nila, who has spent 30 seasons with the Rockets, including the last 16 as the team’s equipment manager. “I don’t know if they have so many sock routines or pet peeves. I think they’re more about looking good.”For decades, most players simply wore the socks that teams gave them — sometimes lots of them. Mel Davis, a forward for the Knicks and the Nets in the 1970s, was known to throw on six pairs — six! — before lacing up his sneakers, which was a source of intrigue for opponents and teammates alike.“When I hear sock stories, he’s the first one who comes to mind,” said Kenny Charles, 71, a former guard with the Buffalo Braves and Atlanta Hawks. “Everyone was responsible for their socks. And if you lost them on a road trip, you didn’t say anything. You’d just wait until shoot-around and take a pair out of someone else’s bag.”Sock protocols became more formalized in 1986, when the league created a line of products that included socks, replica jerseys, shorts and warm-ups. It did not take long for the league to mandate that its players wear socks that were produced by its sock licensee, a company called Ridgeview.In the late ’80s and early ’90s, the socks were basic. Some had a couple of stripes around the ankle. Others had the team name running up the side. In 1999, the league began using an Indiana-based company called For Bare Feet, which made socks that were easily identifiable: plush and white with a small N.B.A. logo.A Denver Nuggets player wore socks bearing stripes and the N.B.A. logo during a game in 2005.Brian Bahr/Getty Images“Great sock,” said Eric Housen, Golden State’s vice president of team operations. “Guys loved those.”Before the 2015-16 season, the N.B.A. dropped For Bare Feet in favor of Stance. The Stance socks, though more playful and vivid, were not nearly as popular.“Stiff,” Marcus Smart of the Boston Celtics said. “Hurt your feet. Wasn’t too big on them.”The Stance experiment lasted just two seasons. Philadelphia 76ers forward P.J. Tucker was not enamored with the brand. So, he procured several dozen pairs of thick, padded socks from his favorite sock purveyor, Thorlos — “Most comfortable socks ever,” he said — along with several dozen pairs from Stance, and had them delivered to a tailor for surgery: She cut them all in half, then stitched the tops of the Stance socks to the bottoms of the Thorlos socks.The result was that the Stance design and the N.B.A. logo were still visible while affording Tucker the comfort of his Thorlos down low, where it mattered. It was an ingenious way of skirting league rules.“Socks are super important, bro,” Tucker said.Nike, which did not respond to repeated requests for comment, does offer some selection within the margins of its game-sock cosmos. Its socks, which are a polyester, nylon, cotton and spandex blend, come in four lengths: no-show, quarter, crew and tall. (Housen could not think of a current player who wears the no-show socks; the last player who did, he said, may have been Luke Ridnour, a journeyman guard who announced his retirement in 2016.) Players can opt for a type of sock called “Quick,” which is thinner, or “Power,” which has more padding.And there are different sizes. When Boban Marjanovic, a 7-foot-4 center, joined the Rockets in an off-season trade, Nila, the team’s equipment manager, was grateful that he had some size XXXL socks on hand.When Boban Marjanovich was traded from the Dallas Mavericks to the Houston Rockets, the Rockets’ equipment manager was ready with the right socks.Christian Petersen/Getty ImagesZion Williamson of the New Orleans Pelicans flips down the tops of his socks so the orange stripe will show.Michael Reaves/Getty ImagesBut while there is flexibility in terms of the style and fit of the socks from game to game, teammates must wear the same color. As they rotate through different uniforms, some franchises mix it up: purple socks one game, black the next. Others keep it simple. Keen observers of foot fashion may have noticed, for example, that the New Orleans Pelicans strictly wear white socks, which forward Brandon Ingram prefers. Zion Williamson, Ingram’s teammate, adds pizazz by flipping down the sock tops to expose a colorful thread that runs along an inside seam.“I like the orange stripe,” he said.Of course, getting players to color-coordinate their socks can cause the occasional complication. One N.B.A. equipment manager, who requested anonymity to protect the sock-wearing behaviors of the team’s players, recalled a long-ago playoff series when the team busted out black socks for the first time. During an early timeout, one of the players opined that they must have been made of burlap: Why are we wearing these?The player was so irritated that he removed his black socks in the huddle and replaced them with white ones. The equipment manager panicked, then lopped off the top of the player’s black socks and slid them over the white ones like wristbands to obscure the clashing color — all in the middle of a playoff game.Lest anyone think the N.B.A. is lax about its sock policies, consider Smart’s experience at the start of the 2017-18 season, when Nike was the league’s new partner. For the season opener, he folded the tops of his socks down because they felt more comfortable that way, he said. The problem was that he wound up hiding the Nike swoosh.“I got a call from the league, and they said that Nike said I did it on purpose,” said Smart, who was sponsored by Adidas at the time. “So they were like, ‘You’ve got to wear your socks the right way or you’ll be fined.’ ”How much? “I didn’t want to find out,” said Smart, who now has a deal with Puma.Marcus Smart of the Boston Celtics once folded down the tops of his socks, obscuring the Nike logo. He said he was threatened with a fine.Brian Babineau/NBAE via Getty ImagesTeams typically order their socks from Nike about a year in advance. Last month, Housen ordered about 2,500 pairs of socks for Golden State — about 150 per player — for next season. Each team gets an annual stipend for Nike gear.“But based on the amount of product we need, it only covers about 20 to 25 percent of the overall spend,” said Housen, who added that game socks tend to last “as long as you launder them well.”Golden State has a warehouse in San Francisco where Housen houses heaps of team gear for players like Stephen Curry, a star who sometimes opts for crew-length socks but usually wears quarters under his ankle braces.A decent segment of the league wears two pairs. But within that subset are variations. Connaughton said he began doubling up when he was in high school because he believed it helped prevent blisters. Jabari Smith Jr., a first-year forward with the Rockets, wears a pair of Adidas socks underneath his Nike ones.Sometimes, it depends on the sneaker. Larry Nance Jr., a forward with the Pelicans, said one pair of socks typically sufficed when he wore LeBron James’s signature Nike shoes. But he wears two pairs whenever he reaches for his Air Jordan 10s, which are “a little flimsier,” he said.Tucker, who has an enormous sneaker collection, gets why all of this may sound so strange. Most people can get away with wearing crummy socks, he said. But professional athletes are different.“Your feet got to feel right,” he said. “If your feet don’t feel right, forget it.” More

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      in Soccer

      FIFA Without FIFA? EA Sports Weighs Reboot of Showcase Game

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      The end of a long and profitable relationship with soccer’s governing body would mean renaming one of the most popular video games of all time.It is one of the longest and most profitable relationships in sports. Nearly three decades after soccer’s global governing body licensed its name to a California video game maker looking to expand its offerings, the FIFA series that was born out of that partnership has become not so much a game as a cultural phenomenon.To millions of people around the world, the letters FIFA now represent not actual soccer but instead a one-word shorthand for the hugely popular video game series that has become a fixture in the lives of players as diverse as Premier League pros, casual fans and even gamers with no other relationship to the sport.Sales of the game, which releases an updated edition every year, have surpassed $20 billion over the past two decades for its California-based maker, Electronic Arts. But FIFA has cashed in as well: Its licensing agreement has grown to become the organization’s single-most valuable commercial agreement, now worth about $150 million per year.And now all of that money is at risk.At least two years of talks about renewing the contract that allows Electronic Arts, through its EA Sports division, to use the organization’s name have hit the wall, according to multiple people close to the negotiations. The possibility of a permanent break after next year’s World Cup in Qatar — when the current 10-year agreement ends — was made explicit in a letter released last week by Cam Weber, the executive president and general manager of EA Sports.In it, Weber raised the unthinkable: FIFA without FIFA.“As we look ahead,” Weber wrote in discussing the future of the series, “we’re also exploring the idea of renaming our global EA Sports football games.”The core of the dispute is financial. FIFA is seeking more than double what it currently receives from EA Sports, according to people with knowledge of the talks, a figure that would increase its payout from the series to more than $1 billion for each four-year World Cup cycle.The dispute is not just about money, though. The talks have also stalled because FIFA and EA cannot agree what the gamer’s exclusive rights should include.FIFA would prefer to limit EA’s exclusivity to the narrow parameters around use in a soccer game, most likely in an effort to seek new revenue streams for the rights it would retain. EA Sports, meanwhile, contends the company should be allowed to explore other ventures within its FIFA video game ecosystem, including highlights of actual games, arena video game tournaments and digital products like NFTs.A decision is likely by the end of the year, but EA officials are already planning for a post-FIFA future. Earlier this month, the company registered two trademarks, one in the European Union and the other in Britain, for the phrase EA Sports F.C.Both FIFA and EA Sports declined to comment publicly on the talks. But the dispute has surprised industry watchers, including Peter Moore, who held senior roles at Electronic Arts for a decade before leaving in 2017 to become the chief executive of the Premier League team Liverpool. Moore is now a senior executive at Unity Technologies, a video game software company.“I don’t recall them ever putting out a statement saying we’re in negotiations on a renewal of the license,” Moore said in a telephone interview. “That’s clearly sending a little bit of a signal.”Part of EA’s calculation is that — even if it is forced to rebrand one of the most popular video franchises of all time — it is unlikely any competitor can challenge its market dominance. EA’s position has grown to almost complete control over the soccer gaming industry thanks to more than 300 other similar licensing agreements with organizations like UEFA, which runs the Champions League, and domestic leagues and competitions around the world. Those deals allow EA to use the names and likeness of players, world-famous club teams and prominent leagues in its game. (On Tuesday, EA renewed one such deal with FIFPro, the global players union.)A break with FIFA would not affect EA Sports or the experience of its game significantly, since the company also owns licenses for clubs like Liverpool and Chelsea through separate agreements.EA SportsBecause its license with FIFA grants EA Sports only the use of the organization’s name and logo and the rights to the World Cup, a monthlong championship that takes place every four years, the game maker appears to have concluded that losing the relationship would not be the kind of existential threat that it might face if it were to lose the licenses to another hugely popular sports franchise, Madden N.F.L.Unlike the FIFA series, the N.F.L. video game is predicated on only two key licenses, one with the National Football League and another with the league’s players’ union.The vast number of other licenses that EA Sports holds in soccer means that even if it were forced to rename its FIFA series, gamers brought up on a diet of digital soccer would notice little change when it came to the playing experience.Still, any rupture would have consequences. The FIFA franchise is immensely profitable, said Gareth Sutcliffe, a senior analyst specializing in the video games sector at Enders Analysis, because EA Sports is able to make little more than cosmetic changes to its game most years and still enjoy millions of sales with the release of each new edition.The game’s profitability has grown through innovations like player packs, similar to trading cards, that require users to spend money within the game as they seek to build the best rosters. Piers Harding-Rolls, a gaming industry analyst at Ampere Analysis, estimated the in-game feature known as Ultimate Team was worth as much as $1.2 billion to EA last year.It is this new economy that EA is looking toward as part of its growth strategy. It is also the kind of feature that FIFA would prefer to wall off, and perhaps sell in lucrative — and separate — deals.For FIFA, a break with EA Sports, and the loss of its nine-figure licensing payments, could threaten some of the innovations proposed by FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino. He is seeking to raise as much as $2 billion, for example, to finance a new expanded World Cup for clubs. At the same time, he is trying to persuade members to back his plan to increase the frequency of the World Cup to every two years.To find those new revenues, FIFA officials have studied the possibility of selling licenses to video games and digital products that are not soccer-related. A partnership with another company like Epic Games, the maker of the hit Fortnite franchise, for example, would broaden FIFA’s reach but dilute the exclusivity for which EA pays a premium. That, according to former gaming industry insiders like Moore, could be why his former company is considering walking away.“I’m going say, ‘Wait a second: We have literally spent hundreds of millions of dollars building this and you’re telling me that Epic Games can come in and get a license to the name that we have built and that we have put front and center and that has become synonymous with games?’” Moore said. “Then, yeah, I’m negotiating and I’m fighting that.” More

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      in Soccer

      Why Are Soccer's Stars Talking to Ibai Llanos?

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      Outside, in the bright Parisian sunshine, the world’s news media lined up on the edge of the field at the Parc des Princes. Producers fiddled busily with cameras and boom microphones. Reporters chattered away, dutifully filling airtime before their designated interview slots.They were under strict instructions and constraints: three questions apiece, a few minutes, no more, to mine the details of the biggest sports story of the summer, to get to the heart of a transfer that ended one era and ushered in another. And then their time would be up, and Lionel Messi would have to move on.Ibai Llanos’s setup was different. He had been ushered inside the players’ tunnel, along with two of his oldest friends, Ander Cortés and Borja Nanclares. They had no sound equipment. They were filming on a phone. Yet Llanos had, at that point, an audience of half a million people watching him.Llanos, 26, had, without really trying or particularly meaning to, usurped every news outlet on the planet. Messi’s first interview after leaving F.C. Barcelona for Paris St.-Germain would not be with a television network or a major newspaper. It would instead go out exclusively on Llanos’s Twitch channel.Over the last couple of years, Llanos has interviewed a succession of soccer’s biggest names, from Sergio Ramos to Paulo Dybala. He now counts some stars, like Sergio Agüero, as friends, and others, like Gerard Piqué, as business partners.Players who habitually distrust the news media have been happy to spend as much as a couple of hours talking to Llanos on Twitch, the Amazon-owned livestreaming service. That is turning him into a breakout star of the internet age in Spain and, at times, occasionally invoking the wrath of journalists from more traditional outlets who envy the access he enjoys and disdain his lack of training.Llanos, with the Argentine creator Momo, got his start as a teenager by filming himself and his friends playing video games. Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesThe interview with Messi was, by some distance, the most high-profile moment of his relatively brief career. It was also, from a journalistic perspective, a little unorthodox. Llanos was nervous. When he watched the video later, he saw that he had been threading a pen between his fingers throughout his talk with Messi without noticing. “It was a bit like having vertigo,” he said.Operating under the same strictures as everyone else, Llanos asked Messi if he had “eaten a lot” at the farewell dinner he had held for some of his closest friends in Barcelona a couple of days earlier. “Did I behave myself?” Llanos asked. Messi assured him that he had.Llanos asked Messi only one soccer question, on the appeal of playing alongside Neymar and Kylian Mbappé, and so there was only one soccer answer, delivered in that dampening monotone players adopt whenever their sport is brought up. Mostly, the entire exchange was light and cordial, its intimacy only undercut by Llanos’s referring to the world’s best soccer player as “Messi” — not Lionel, not Leo, not Señor Messi, but the word on the back of his jersey, somewhere between an honorific and a schoolyard nickname — throughout.That was exactly what Llanos had promised. “I am not going to ask him about Mauricio Pochettino’s tactics,” he had explained on his livestream just before Messi arrived. Llanos is not a journalist. He does not pretend to be a journalist. He is not trying to become a journalist. And that is what allowed him to get the exclusive every journalist wanted.Llanos has been a streamer since before the term existed. At age 15, he and some friends from Bilbao, his hometown in Spain, set up a YouTube channel, filming themselves playing the video game Call Of Duty. “It was growing, but it wasn’t so normal at the time to see gaming on YouTube,” Llanos said.They built a small but impressive audience — some videos attracted 20,000 viewers, he said — and earned a little money. “It was 30 euros a month, something like that,” he said. “It wasn’t money to live on, just to buy a little bit of equipment. It was a hobby, a pastime. It wasn’t a business.”He was still deciding “what to do with my life” when he noticed an advertisement for a casting call from the Liga de Videojuegos Profesional (L.V.P.), Spain’s esports league, looking for announcers. He and Cortés applied and, in August 2014, got the job.The pay was initially “quite low,” Llanos said, but he enjoyed the start-up energy not only of the company, but also the scene. “There was a lot of love,” he said. As the league grew, so did his profile. “There were more and more events, collaborations with brands, athletes,” he said. He moved to Barcelona. He did an ad for the release of the PlayStation 5.But Llanos turned into a more mainstream cultural phenomenon only last year. He had left the L.V.P. just before the coronavirus pandemic — “there was a bit of a generational shift, and I felt saturated” — and dedicated himself to creating content for an esports team, G2 eSports, streamed on his own Twitch channel. Cortés, Nanclares and several other creators joined him.Everything changed with the pandemic. As Spain went into lockdown, its population cloistered at home, Llanos saw his viewership figures explode: His Twitch channel currently commands 7.8 million followers, making him one of the 10 most followed creators on the platform. His YouTube account attracts a similar audience.After he announced plans for a virtual version of La Liga — filling the void left by the suspended league — it emerged that a number of high-profile players already ranked among his fans, including Sergio Reguilón, the Tottenham defender; Borja Iglesias, now of Real Betis; and Messi’s new teammate at P.S.G., Achraf Hakimi.“There are a lot of players that play video games in their free time,” Llanos said. “And because they could not go out, because in the first lockdown they did not have training or games, they had more time to dedicate to it.”Llanos streams his videos and interviews from the basement of his house near Barcelona. Sometimes, star players pop in for visits.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesThe most significant guest, though, may have been Aymeric Laporte, the Manchester City and Spain defender. “Laporte was already following me,” Llanos said. “We agreed to play Fortnite and stream it, and while we were playing he told me that he had messaged Sergio Agüero and invited him to play, and asked if it would be OK if he joined us. It was his first time on Twitch.”Others have followed. Earlier this year, Llanos launched a weekly, longform interview segment on his channel: Charlando Tranquilamente, or Chatting Quietly. The likes of Dybala, the Juventus forward, Ramos, the former Real Madrid captain, and Agüero himself have all appeared as guests.That a 26-year-old streamer could attract names of that magnitude sparked criticism from more traditional news media outlets.“Who is Ibai? I called Agüero for an interview, but Ibai beats me, and if Ibai beats me, I have to retire,” the Argentine announcer Gustavo López said. “They talk to the powerful, and disregard those of us who are paid in pesos.” Others derided Llanos as an “entertainer,” rather than a journalist.To Llanos, though, that is kind of the point. “Maybe I am the sort of person they like,” he said of players. “A little bit different.” He does not attempt to pry into their personal lives. He does not try to ask them challenging questions about what, for them, is often simply their work. Instead, he tries to talk to them as informally as possible, while doing something — playing video games — that they enjoy.“They come because they like it,” he said. “They don’t get paid. They come because they want to come.”The players’ motivation is perhaps a little more calculating than that. “Twitch is the Generation Z platform,” said Julian Aquilina, a broadcasting specialist at the media research firm Enders Analysis. “It skews very young, and quite male. It is quite a different audience to traditional broadcasters.” Llanos offers a precious route into that audience: His interview with Dybala, for example, attracted more than 100,000 live, largely teenage viewers.That soccer’s biggest stars find it a more appealing prospect than a more formal interview, though, is not in doubt. “Twitch has much more of a community vibe,” Aquilina said. “It’s much more interactive.” To at least one of Llanos’s guests, the allure was that talking to Llanos did not feel like an interview at all. There was no camera, no sound equipment, no call-and-response of questions, no defined structure. The players feel safe talking to someone who seems like a friend.In his underground studio, Llanos can play a game, interview a soccer star and stream it all live at the same time.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesThat, ultimately, has been the secret to his success. He and Agüero have grown close enough that the striker invited Llanos, surreptitiously, to Messi’s farewell dinner in Barcelona. The encounter earned Llanos his invitation to Paris, to Messi’s presentation, and to his world exclusive.At the table that night, too, was another player now firmly in Llanos’s orbit: Gerard Piqué. The Barcelona defender was the first guest on his talk show segment; he is now, in effect, Llanos’s business partner.In August, the two men bought an e-sports team. This was after Piqué’s investment vehicle, Kosmos, bought the Spanish streaming rights to this summer’s Copa América, and broadcast it on Llanos’s Twitch channel. It did the same for Messi’s first game as a P.S.G. player last month.That match also was shown on Telecinco, a Spanish broadcast network. About 6.7 million people watched at least a little of the game on television; Llanos attracted roughly 2 million viewers (though he also has a large following in Latin America, so the figures are not immediately comparable).It is an approach, Aquilina said, that may become more common. “Twitch is becoming a broadcaster,” he said. “Amazon has done that with some N.F.L. games, putting them on Twitch as well as Prime. If you have the rights to something, you want it distributed across platforms: You can sell the broadcast rights but still have an online presence.”Llanos was not thinking about that, he said, that day in Paris. He was, instead, simultaneously dealing with the nerves from “the most pressure I have ever felt,” and marveling a little at “being able to do this with two of my best friends.” The combination was enough to give him that dizzying feeling of vertigo. He, and the revolution he represents, are not going anywhere, though. He will get used to the height. More

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      Meyers Leonard Will Be Away From Heat ‘Indefinitely’ After Use of Anti-Semitic Slur

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The NBA SeasonVirus Hotspots in the N.B.A.LeBron and Anthony DavisThe N.B.A. Wanted HerMissing Klay ThompsonKobe the #GirlDadAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyMeyers Leonard Will Be Away From Heat ‘Indefinitely’ After Use of Anti-Semitic SlurLeonard, a reserve center for the Miami Heat, lost gaming sponsorships after a video emerged of him using the slur while playing a video game on the livestreaming site Twitch.Meyers Leonard, right, during the 2020 N.B.A. finals. This season, he had played only three games and was expected to miss the rest of the campaign after having shoulder surgery.Credit…Kim Klement/USA Today Sports, via ReutersSopan Deb and Published More