English Premier League

Subterms

    Latest story

    75 Shares149 Views

    Manchester City’s Premier League Hearing, Explained

    by

    The world’s richest soccer league accused its champion of years of financial violations. A hearing that began this week could tarnish the club’s accomplishments and reshape the competition.After six years of investigations, delays and behind-the-scenes battles, a hearing finally began this week into allegations that Manchester City used a yearslong cheating scheme to transform itself into a global soccer powerhouse and a serial Premier League champion.The hearing is among the most consequential in British sports history, the culmination of a case that has been the talk of English soccer since the Premier League charged Manchester City with more than 100 violations of its financial regulations last year.The charges — that City corrupted the world’s richest soccer competition for a decade or more — threaten to rewrite years of Premier League history. And the repercussions might go well beyond the soccer field. In accusing City’s owner, the deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, of presiding over years of rule-breaking, the case could veer into the highest levels of international diplomacy.And then there are the fans. With the suggestions that cheating helped to deliver trophies to City while wealthy rivals were left empty-handed, the hearing has incited the passions of tens of millions of soccer followers around the world.Whatever is decided will shape the Premier League for years to come: Either Manchester City will have been found to have corrupted the world’s richest soccer competition, or the league will have been unable to enforce its rules against one of its most powerful members.What is the Manchester City case about?It is now 19 months since the Premier League announced a set of charges against Manchester City so wide in scope that the reputational damage to the team’s decade of success will most likely be stained even if it prevails. The charges date back to 2009, a year after City’s purchase by the brother of the ruler of Abu Dhabi. That acquisition began a turbocharged era of spending — and success — for a club that had not won a championship since 1968.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 63 Shares99 Views

      in Soccer

      The Premier League’s Asterisk Season

      by

      As it concludes an epic title race, soccer’s richest competition is a picture of health on the field. Away from it, the league faces lawsuits, infighting and the threat of government regulation.With five minutes left in his team’s penultimate game of the Premier League season, Manchester City Manager Pep Guardiola found the tension just a little too much. As a rival striker bore down on his team’s goal, Guardiola — crouching on his haunches on the sideline — lost his balance and toppled over onto his back.Lying on the grass and expecting the worst, he missed what may yet prove to be the pivotal moment in the Premier League’s most enthralling title race in a decade.But the striker did not score. His effort was parried by goalkeeper Stefan Ortega, sending Manchester City above its title rival Arsenal in the standings and positioning it, if it can win again on Sunday, to become the first English team to win four consecutive championships.“Ortega saved us,” Guardiola said afterward. “Otherwise, Arsenal is champion.”That the destiny of the championship should have been determined only so late in the season seems fitting for what has, on the surface, been a vintage Premier League campaign.All of that drama, though, comes with a figurative asterisk. This season’s Premier League has been defined as much by turbulence off the field — points deductions, internecine bickering, legal disputes, fraud accusations and the looming threat of government intervention — as it has been by City’s (eventual) smooth sailing through it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Soccer

      Luton Learns the Power of Premier League Status

      by

      Having a team in the world’s richest sports competition might alter how people think of Luton, a place long dogged by a ramshackle image and links to extremism.As the announcement trilled out over Kenilworth Road, the jumble of rusted metal and peeling paint that Luton Town F.C. calls home, the tone started to shift. At the start of the sentence, it was little more than the traditional polite welcome to the stadium for that evening’s visiting team, Manchester City.By the end, though, the voice of the announcer seemed overcome by what sounded a little like awe. Luton, the fans in the stands and the players on the field were reminded, was about to face “the champions of the F.A. Cup, the champions of England and the champions of Europe.” Luton seems to be having a hard time believing the company it now keeps.There is a reason for that. Fifteen years ago, Luton Town had been relegated to the fifth tier of English soccer, a world away from the power and the prestige of the Premier League. There was, for a time, a genuine risk that the club, founded in 1885, several years before the invention of the zipper, might fold altogether. For years afterward, money remained tight, ambitions modest.Now, Luton Town’s horizons are much grander. Last summer, it won an unexpected promotion to the world’s richest, most popular sports league. Three decades after it last played in England’s top division, it could again call Manchester City, Manchester United and the rest its peers.Outside Luton Town’s Kenilworth Road stadium, which offers none of the polished sheen of the homes of many of its Premier League rivals.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesThat meant an immediate transformation in the club’s financial outlook: Playing in the Premier League for a single season is worth around $150 million. More important, the status that came with it gave the town — a place that has long suffered a chronic reputation problem — a global platform on which to change not just how it is perceived by others, but how it thinks of itself.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Soccer

      How European Soccer Made Peace With Fasting During Ramadan

      by

      In competitions like the Premier League, Muslim pros who once faced pressure to avoid daily fasts during the monthlong holiday now benefit from custom diets and in-game breaks.Youseff Chippo had a secret.A few months into his life as a soccer pro in Europe, Chippo, a Moroccan midfielder, was pushing to prove himself and didn’t want to do anything that might hurt his chances of success. That included revealing he was fasting for Ramadan, a normal practice for the world’s billion Muslims but not in the locker room of Portugal’s F.C. Porto in the winter of 1997.The team’s double practice sessions — morning and afternoon — were arduous. Taking part while going without food and water from sunup to sundown made things harder. Eventually, after enduring days of dizziness and headaches in silence, Chippo came clean, and the club quickly put together a plan to preserve his energy and his health.For decades, though, other Muslim players found teams to be less accommodating, at least officially. So in a sport where continuous play and a lack of substitutions offer little opportunity for a mid-game trip to the bench, those players have long relied instead on resourcefulness and improvised solutions to break their fasts: teammates who faked or embellished injuries just after sundown to buy a moment for their Muslim colleagues to rush to the sideline; a few dates or a sugary drink slipped into a hand by a staff member at the appointed hour; trainers rushing out to attend to an injured knee carrying a kit curiously well-stocked with bananas.But more recently, soccer, which once saw fasting by Muslim players as something to be discouraged or criticized, is actively changing its ways. In a shift that reflects both the increasing prevalence and the soaring value of soccer’s Muslim stars, some of the world’s richest leagues and teams — with one notable exception — have moved to fully embrace Ramadan fasts.In Europe, that means many Muslim players now benefit from bespoke nutrition plans before and during the monthlong holiday; fast-friendly practice schedules; and even league-approved stoppages in play that let them break their fasts on the field during matches.Tunisia players eating dates during a match against Turkey in 2018. The team’s coach at the time, Nabil Maâloul, center, said he had asked his goalkeeper to simulate an injury to pause the game.Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Soccer

      Where’s the Next Generation of Great Coaches?

      by

      Twenty years, it would appear, is a very long time indeed. This week, a brief video montage fluttered through the flotsam and jetsam that clog my (and your) social media feeds — the engagement-farming banalities, the craven attention-seekers, the willfully deranged Kate Middleton theories — to celebrate the glorious madness of 2004.That was the year, after all, when Greece won the European Championship, a triumph so unexpected that at least one squad member had to rearrange his wedding around the team’s progress. The Greek triumph came a few weeks after Porto, led by a charismatic young coach with hair more pepper than salt, lifted the Champions League trophy.That was after Werder Bremen finished the season as champion of Germany and Valencia secured its second Spanish title in three years. Whoever compiled the video did not even need to mention the victory by a Colombian minnow, Once Caldas, in the Copa Libertadores to declare that 2004 had been a year for the underdog.The compilation clip could, at a push, be used as a sort of generational Rorschach test. It might inspire, in older viewers, that bittersweet pang of nostalgia, the ghost of a memory that this is how things used — and therefore ought — to be. Werder Bremen should be able to win the Bundesliga. Porto should be contenders to be champion of Europe. You might not want to watch Greece win the Euros again, but it was nice that it happened.Younger fans, though, may well interpret it differently. They have grown up in an era of dominance and dynasty, in which the sport’s major teams have established unprecedented primacy over their rivals, and stasis has become the truest marker of excellence. The sight of all of these unfamiliar teams lifting trophies might reinforce their suspicion that soccer is rather better now than it was then.There are two things worth pointing out in rebuttal. The first is that 2004 was an outlier even by the standards of the time. The previous six editions of the Champions League, for example, had been won by Manchester United, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and A.C. Milan. And the second — albeit obvious only with the benefit of hindsight — is that it was a liminal year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Soccer

      Liverpool-Manchester City: Rodri Is the Premier League’s Best Player

      by

      Rodri’s genius is not in making things happen. He is employed by Manchester City, at least in part, to make sure they do not.Pep Guardiola would, in an unguarded moment, probably concede that he has a slight tendency toward hyperbole. With eyes wide and voice breathless, he will sing the praises of some hopelessly overmatched opponent his Manchester City team has just beaten by 6-1, his players’ jerseys untainted by sweat. “Guys,” he will say, “guys, they are so good. So, so good.”Where this reflex comes from is a matter of interpretation. The likeliest explanation is that it is just who Guardiola is: passionate and intense and deeply enthusiastic, still, about his sport. There might be just a dash of noblesse oblige in there, too, a little well-intentioned clemency from soccer’s great conqueror. And it is easy to wonder if Guardiola resents how much of his — and City’s — success is presented as an economic inevitability, and so feels the need to get his rebuttal in first.Whatever the truth, the effect is the same: At times, it can be difficult to be absolutely certain when Guardiola is being sincere and when he is indulging in some light lily-gilding.In the immediate aftermath of Sunday’s Manchester derby, for example, he suggested that Phil Foden might be the “best” player in the Premier League. It is by no means an outrageous claim. Foden, 24, has been outstanding for City this season, the finest campaign of his young career. He has sparkled in a suite of roles, and deserves a considerable portion of the credit for the fact that City did not particularly seem to miss Kevin De Bruyne while he was injured.But at the same time, there is a good chance that Guardiola was exaggerating, just a touch. Not because he does not appreciate Foden’s brilliance, but because he — more than anyone — should be aware that Foden is not even the best player on his team. The best player at Manchester City, and the best player in the Premier League, is Rodri.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 75 Shares159 Views

      in Soccer

      Premier League Cuts Everton’s Points Deduction

      by

      The decision means the club will lose six points in the standings, not 10, potentially helping it to stay in the division and to remain financially viable.Everton, a storied English soccer club trying to weather a serious financial storm, secured a modest victory on Monday when a record penalty that had sent it to the bottom of the Premier League standings was reduced on appeal.Everton’s original penalty, a 10-point deduction for financial rules violations, was reduced to six points, lifting its chances of staying in the division — and of retaining access to the tens of millions of dollars in annual revenues that a place in the Premier League brings.The successful appeal immediately lifted Everton to 15th place in the standings and eased the club’s fears of relegation and potential financial ruin. The reprieve, however, might be short-lived.The Premier League in January announced that Everton and Nottingham Forest, another club at risk of relegation, faced additional charges of breaching cost-control regulations. If the teams are found guilty, the new case will almost certainly lead to another points deduction.Everton, a founding member of the Premier League, has in recent years become a symbol for poor management and financial risk-taking. Crippled by expensive contracts and the cost of constructing a new stadium, the club faces debts of about $1 billion and continues to require regular infusions of millions of dollars in external financing to keep its operations running.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 188 Shares99 Views

      in Soccer

      Want to Lose a Lot of Money, Fast? Buy a Small Soccer Team in England.

      by

      The country’s lower leagues offer a tempting entry to ownership. But the sport’s economics mean even multimillionaires can struggle to compete.Geoff Thompson knows there are plenty of people who want to buy what he has to sell. The phone calls and emails over the last few weeks have left no doubt. And really, that is no surprise. Few industries are quite as appealing or as prestigious as English soccer, and Mr. Thompson has a piece of it.It is, admittedly, a comparatively small piece: South Shields F.C., the team he has owned for almost a decade, operates in English soccer’s sixth tier, several levels below, and a number of worlds away, from the dazzling light and international allure of the Premier League. But while his team might be small, Mr. Thompson is of the view that it is, at least, as perfectly formed as any minor-league English soccer club could hope to be.South Shields has earned four promotions to higher leagues in his nine years as chairman. The team owns its stadium. Mr. Thompson has spent considerable sums of money modernizing the bathrooms, the club shop and the private boxes. There is a thriving youth academy and an active charitable foundation. “We have done most of the hard yards,” Mr. Thompson said.After a cancer scare last year led him to reassess his priorities, Mr. Thompson has, reluctantly, decided that he has to “hand the baton” to someone else.That is where things becomes complicated. There are plenty of very wealthy people who want to buy their way into English soccer. It is, as Mr. Thompson said, “fun.” Owning a team offers the chance to “be a hero” to a place. It is a pitch sufficiently compelling that, in a matter of weeks, at least four suitors — two British, two American — have inquired about taking South Shields off his hands.That is the upside. The downside is that — as the Premier League has become a playground for private equity firms and sovereign wealth funds, and as the “Welcome to Wrexham” success has focused Hollywood’s searchlight on the romance of the game’s backwaters — England’s minor leagues have become a place where even the very rich can feel poor.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 175 Shares119 Views

      in Soccer

      A Billionaire Bought a Chunk of Manchester United. Now He Has to Fix It.

      by

      Jim Ratcliffe spent $1.5 billion for a 25 percent stake in his boyhood English soccer club. On Wednesday, he laid out his vision.The process was six months old and already starting to wear on Jim Ratcliffe, the British billionaire, the first time he brought out the Champagne to toast his purchase of Manchester United. But even that celebration, at the Monaco Grand Prix in May, proved premature.There was no deal. Not yet.Doing one was never going to be easy. Mostly, that was because any potential sale for United offered a tantalizing marriage of money, power and history: Mr. Ratcliffe, the wealthy chairman of INEOS, the petrochemicals giant, had supported Manchester United since he was boy. United, the most decorated club in English soccer, was one of the most iconic brands in global sports. And the Premier League, to which it belonged, was the richest soccer league in the world.What ensued was an auction as unpredictable and chaotic as some of Manchester United’s most memorable games. The news media breathlessly tracked surges of momentum between Mr. Ratcliffe’s bid and a rival one led by a little-known Qatari sheikh.United fans, eager to see their club shake off its unpopular owners, the Florida-based Glazer family, devoured it all. Yet while the negotiations produced months of headlines, discussion and whispers, what they did not produce was a sale.Mr. Ratcliffe won out in the end. Kind of.On Dec. 26, the Glazers announced that they had agreed to sell 25 percent of United to Mr. Ratcliffe, one of the world’s richest men. The price — more than $1.5 billion — bought a curious arrangement in which Mr. Ratcliffe, the new minority owner, would take over day-to-day control of the club’s soccer operation. The deal was ratified on Tuesday night.On Wednesday, as Mr. Ratcliffe outlined his vision, newspapers and websites grabbed eagerly at the headline-ready quotes about new players, old rivals and stadium plans. But a closer listen to his words suggested that the grueling sales process might have been the easy part. Reviving United — a trophy-winning machine a decade ago, in recent seasons reduced to something closer to a punchline — is likely to be a yearslong process, he warned.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More