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      Threatened by Premier League Fan Zones, Burger Vans Hold Their Ground

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      As Premier League clubs create fan zones to collect yet more money from stadium visitors, a local economy of food trucks, pubs and small restaurants is holding its ground.Surveying his territory, Tony Aujla is pleased. His business, after all, is all about location, and he has a prime one. Like a general surveying a battlefield, he points to his right: a short walk that way is Aston train station. Over to the left is Villa Park, with its grand, brick-lined facade, home of the city’s Premier League soccer team, Aston Villa.On game days, hundreds of fans disembark trains at the former every few minutes and scurry — or, in some cases, amble — in the general direction of the latter. That is what makes Mr. Aujla’s patch so perfect. All of them have to walk past this precise spot. Should any of them require sustenance to complete their (not especially arduous) trek, he is there, spatula in hand, to sell them a burger. Possibly with cheese.Mr. Aujla has been a fixture outside Villa Park, in one place or another, for more than four decades, but Tony’s Burger Bar has been here, on this enviable and specific real estate, for three years — one of a handful of vans, all of them occupying much the same space, all of them offering roughly the same menu, all of them wreathed in the steam from their fryers.Recently, though, they have had to contend with the arrival of a rival on a slightly larger scale: an official fan area intended to lure customers, and some of the money in their pockets, away from the vans and straight to the club itself.Like most traditional British stadiums, Villa Park resides at the heart of the community it has occupied for more than a century.Mary Turner for The New York TimesIn March 2022, Aston Villa repurposed Lions Square, a trapezoid of land in the shadow of Villa Park, into a “fan zone” — a sort of officially sanctioned tailgate — complete with a stage for live music, interviews with beloved former players, a couple of bars and a smattering of food trucks.It is not the first Premier League team to explore the idea, long a staple of major international soccer tournaments. Crystal Palace, Liverpool, Manchester City and a number of others have experimented with variations on the theme, and more intend to follow suit: Newcastle has announced plans to establish one outside its home stadium, St. James’s Park.Identifying the primary motivation behind them does not take any great detective work. There are, according to Phil Alexander, a former chief executive of Crystal Palace, various ancillary benefits to fan zones. “Operationally, it’s helpful if some fans arrive earlier and leave later,” he said.Clubs are keen to “enhance the experience” of attending a game, too, Mr. Alexander said. “Traditionally, it’s always been a late fill,” he said. “People would arrive five minutes before kickoff and leave straight after the final whistle. Improving the in-stadium offering, which for a long time left a lot to be desired, turns it into a whole-day activity.”Aston Villa’s official fan zone, where supporters can buy beer, food and hear interviews with former players and club favorites.Mary Turner for The New York TimesMostly, though, the purpose is the obvious one: Fan zones are another revenue stream to be tapped.The amount of money to be made from catering — either through clubs’ providing their own or outsourcing to a third party — is relatively small compared with the fortunes provided to the Premier League’s clubs through broadcasting contracts, but it is a margin nonetheless. “You can’t discount it just because it is hard work,” Mr. Alexander said.Clubs, though, do not exist in isolation. Like most traditional British stadiums, Villa Park does not sit on the fringes of a city, surrounded by acres of empty space. Instead, it resides at the heart of the community it has occupied for more than a century, both an organic part of the neighborhood and an engine of the local economy.Mr. Aujla knows the rhythm of game days instinctively. About 90 minutes before kickoff, it is relatively quiet. Fans are still boarding trains, or parking their cars, or thronging the pubs. Trade will pick up as the game approaches. Peak time will come in an hour or so. “Come back then,” he said. “We’ll all have queues.”There is competition among the food trucks, of course, but it does not bleed into rivalry. There has always been more than enough trade to go around, Mr. Aujla said. “You see a lot of the same faces,” he said. “People tend to have a favorite and stick with that one.”Premier League clubs see the fan zones as a way to keep fans close, and spending money.Mary Turner for The New York TimesHis van, and those nearby, are just a couple of the dozens of pubs, bars, restaurants and takeaway shops that dot the terraced streets around Villa Park, a shoal of remoras all reliant on the great whale at their center for their existence. Fan zones, on some level, threaten that tacit arrangement. The whale, in effect, has decided it wants to keep more.Mr. Aujla admitted he was worried when Aston Villa first announced its plans; his fears were allayed slightly when he strolled up to see what the fan zone had to offer. There were burgers and hot dogs, his stalwarts, as well as more gentrified, vaguely hipster offerings. (Clubs are conscious of changes in consumer tastes, according to Mr. Alexander.)The key difference, though, was price.“They’re charging 7 pounds for a burger,” around $10, he said. “We do a triple for that price.”Others were more confident from the start. “I thought it was good news,” said Roshawn Hunter, standing behind the counter at Grandma Aida’s, the Caribbean cafe that he and his mother, Carole Hamilton, set up in 2019. “The more people we have around the stadium, and the longer they stay, the better for everyone.”The club, conscious of the need to be neighborly, invited him and a number of other local traders to a meeting last summer to outline its plans and address any concerns. In the long term, team officials said, there might even be the possibility of Grandma Aida’s taking a stall inside the fan zone.The Caribbean cafe Grandma Aida’s, near Villa Park. The cafe makes the bulk of its income on match days.Mary Turner for The New York TimesThat, Mr. Hunter said, would be ideal, but he is in no desperate rush. His optimism has been vindicated. While Grandma Aida’s works with the usual suite of delivery apps to feed its Birmingham clientele, the bulk of its income comes on match days.Its sliver of a storefront, on the other side of the stadium from Mr. Aujla’s stall, is well located to attract fans of Villa’s rivals. Traveling supporters are widely regarded as a more lucrative market than regulars, largely on the grounds that they are more likely to be hungry after a long journey into opposition territory.An hour before kickoff of a game in December, Grandma Aida’s was as bustling as it gets. “We’ve not noticed any sort of drop-off at all,” Mr. Hunter said. A doting son — or keenly aware that he might be overheard — he attributed that to the wonder of his mother’s cooking. “It’s her passion,” he said.His customers offered corroborating evidence. “We can’t get Caribbean food this good where we live,” said Richard Harris, a regular seated before a tray of curried mutton. His father had gone for the jerk chicken, Grandma Aida’s most popular dish.Roshawn Hunter set up Grandma Aida’s with his mother, Carole Hamilton, left, in 2019. “The more people we have around the stadium, and the longer they stay, the better for everyone,” he said.Mary Turner for The New York Times“We came in one day a few years ago and liked it,” the younger Mr. Harris said. “We’ve got to know the owner, and it’s nice to support a local business. So now we come in every time we come to a game.”That, of course, is just as important as cost and taste to the continued survival of the eateries and pubs that circle most soccer stadiums in Britain.Aston Villa, like most of its Premier League peers, is exploring a broad selection of options as it seeks to expand what it offers its visitors — its customers — in an attempt to monopolize what, and how, they spend. The architects Populous, for example, designed concourses at Tottenham Hotspur’s new stadium in London with the express purpose of “increasing the range and quality of food” available to fans, according to a representative for the firm.The received wisdom, as Mr. Alexander put it, is that there is “more than enough business for everyone.”But what and where fans eat at stadiums is not merely about nourishment. It is not particularly about nutrition. It can, at times, be about impulse. In many cases, though, it is about routine and ritual, ceremony and familiarity: the same walk, the same pub, the same pregame meal.“Coming here is part of going to the match for us now,” Mr. Harris said inside Grandma Aida’s. “It’s kind of become a family tradition.”In the stadium’s shadow, business can be brisk before and after games.Mary Turner for The New York Times More

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      Out of Sight, Out of Mind No More

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      The Africa Cup of Nations and the Asian Cup, once seen as poorly timed intrusions by European soccer, may finally be getting the respect they deserve.At last, we appear to be getting somewhere. Late on New Year’s Day, Mohamed Salah’s beaming face appeared on British television screens. Salah always has the slightly ruffled appearance of a man who has not slept desperately well, but he was in distinctly good cheer.His Liverpool team had just dismantled Newcastle United to move three points clear at the top of the Premier League. He had played wonderfully: scoring two goals, creating one and missing a penalty so as to foster the illusion of drama in what was otherwise a hopelessly one-sided sporting contest.There was, though, a bittersweet tinge to the jubilation. That was the last Liverpool will see of Salah — in the flesh, at least — for several weeks. Immediately after the game, he was scheduled to travel to Egypt’s imaginatively-titled New Administrative Capital, just outside Cairo, to join his national team’s preparations for the Africa Cup of Nations, which begins next weekend. He does not plan to return to Liverpool until the middle of February.It is natural, of course, that the focus in Britain — and for those who follow the Premier League in general and Liverpool in particular — should be on how Salah’s absence might affect an unusually tense title race. (Liverpool will be fine, apparently. “Anyone can play where I play,” Salah said, modestly. “Anyone can do what I am doing,” he added, pushing his luck a bit.)In recent years, though, an awareness has seeped in that this approach might be considered just a little parochial.Achraf Hakimi anchors a Morocco team that reached the 2022 World Cup semifinals.Borja Sanchez-Trillo/EPA, via ShutterstockEurope tends to command soccer’s attention, dominating its discourse and setting the parameters of what is considered worthy of attention or praise. Europe, after all, is home to the world’s biggest clubs and the world’s strongest leagues and the world’s best players. Europe is, by pretty much any metric, the main event.The effect of this, of course, is the diminution of anything and everything that does not matter to Europe. The Cup of Nations is not the only example of that phenomenon, but it is likely the best. Every two years or so, it is presented as little more than a hindrance, as though it has been invented purely to test the squad depth of the major teams of the Premier League.There has long been a consistent undercurrent of conversation suggesting that, for the African stars invited to participate, it is somehow optional, in a way that the European Championship and Copa América are most certainly not.Recent years have brought a welcome corrective to that logic. There has, gradually, been a dawning realization that it is not really fair to frame the Cup of Nations purely in relation to its impact on the Premier League. Europeans seem to have accepted that it is not really for them to decide whether players ought to want to play in it, or when it might be held. At times, it has even been possible to believe we are on the cusp of a more profound discovery: that just because something does not matter to you does not mean it does not matter.Guinea forward Serhou Guirassy is the Bundesliga’s second-leading scorer.Thomas Kienzle/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat process has, admittedly, been a slow one. It is, certainly, hard to imagine that a German player might be asked to explain the importance of the European Championship, or a Brazilian invited to expound on the significance of the Copa América in the way that Salah was asked to elucidate why he wanted to bother going to the Ivory Coast this month, but still: slow progress is progress nonetheless.And yet soccer still cannot quite shake its innate Eurocentrism. There is, this year, another tournament running concurrently with the Cup of Nations. This week, 24 national teams from across Asia have gathered in Qatar — where they had some stadiums lying idle, not sure why — for the Asian Cup.This is, it goes without saying, a tournament just as significant as the Cup of Nations, and by extension the Copa América and the European Championship. It is, the South American equivalent aside, the oldest continental competition in soccer, predating the European Championship by a few years. It will attract hundreds of millions of viewers and, with an admittedly unlikely combination of results, might even capture the hearts and minds of the two most populous nations on the planet.And yet, even compared to the Cup of Nations, the Asian Cup is largely ignored. It is not even afforded the backhanded compliment of being presented as a nuisance. It is instead overlooked almost entirely.Don’t tell host Qatar that the Asian Cup is an afterthought.Karim Jaafar/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat might, in part, be down to its relative rarity. Though it is typically played at the same time of year as the Africa Cup of Nations — in January and February, in the middle of the European season — the Asian Cup only happens once every four years. It does not intrude quite so frequently on the European consciousness as the biennial Cup of Nations.The most significant reason, though, is its impact on Europe. Salah is hardly an exception when it comes to players leaving Europe’s major teams and traveling to Africa this month. Of the 24 teams in the Cup of Nations, only five — South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, Mauritania and Namibia — have not named any players drawn from Europe’s five major leagues. Many of the major contenders will base their campaigns on familiar faces.The contrast with Asia is stark. Only a couple dozen of the players gathering in Qatar have had to step away from teams in Europe’s most illustrious domestic leagues. Jordan has one, Iran two and South Korea six. Japan alone could name a full team drawn from the game’s highest-profile leagues. (There are larger contingents from the Dutch Eredivisie, the Belgian Pro League and, thanks largely to Celtic, the Scottish Premier League.)Son Heung-min of South Korea is the Asian Cup’s biggest star. But he’s not its only one.Tingshu Wang/ReutersEurope, in other words, is still afforded — or still assumes — the privilege of ordaining what is important and what is not. Perhaps it is not because attitudes have shifted that the Cup of Nations is tolerated; perhaps, instead, it is tolerated because it feels more familiar to Europeans. The teams, after all, are stuffed with players that Europeans recognize, we appreciate, we miss. The tastemakers have not changed to accommodate it. It has changed to better suit the tastemakers.There is, needless to say, a sadness here. There is a wonder in the very unfamiliarity of players and teams, one that has largely been lost in soccer’s digital age. There was a point when heterogeneity was one of the sport’s great pleasures, rather than a tendency that belongs to a distant past.The Asian Cup, with its squads drawn from distant and disparate leagues, has that in abundance. Its difference should be its strength. It would, certainly, be worth watching. CBS Sports has picked up the rights in the United States. In Britain, unfortunately, nobody has deigned to do so.Test of PatienceEddie Howe’s Newcastle has hit a bump in the road.Lee Smith/Action Images, via ReutersIn the two years or so since it acquired Newcastle United, Saudi Arabia — sorry, sorry, the Public Investment Fund, which is absolutely not the Saudi state, and you really must not think it is — has been substantially more restrained than might have been expected.Considerable sums of money have gone into transforming the Newcastle squad, but even the harshest critic of the project would struggle to deny it has been spent shrewdly. Newcastle’s backers have resisted the temptation to chase a quick fix. If anything — thanks, in part, to the Premier League’s financial rules — the club’s growth has almost been cautious.That has not been an issue while everything was working, while the club seemed to be ahead of schedule. It becomes more complex when there is a sense that things have stalled. Newcastle has won only three of its last 13 games. Eddie Howe has now overseen three defeats in a row. It is out of the Champions League. And even the club’s injury troubles do not excuse conceding 34 shots to Liverpool on New Year’s Day.Howe’s work this far should, really, insure him against a threat of firing during the first real downturn of his tenure. He has, as the saying goes, credit in the bank. In ordinary circumstances, doubtless that would be the case.But Newcastle’s is not an ordinary circumstance. It is one bound up with whatever image of itself its primary investor wants to project. Until now, its new ownership has been happy to come across as responsible, patient and understanding. That was easy, when times were good. Now they are not, and it is hard to know whether Saudi Arabia really is happy to take the rough with the smooth, whether it is ready to tolerate underachievement, whether it is really prepared to wait.User-Generated ContentThe people’s choice: Jan Oblak.Pau Barrena/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThankfully, the results are unanimous. The votes have been cast, the suggestions made, the forms processed, the information tabulated, the data crunched and the conclusions extracted and now we can say with some certainty that, if FIFA were to permit a team drawn from those nations outside the top 48 of its rankings to enter the expanded 2026 World Cup, Jan Oblak would be in goal.Pretty much everyone (and there were several dozen of you) who submitted an entry to the festive challenge set by Joe Rizzotti and Dolores Diaz-Vides — they are not married, Dolores wrote to inform me; their sending of joint emails is purely platonic — decided Oblak, Atlético Madrid’s redoubtable Slovene, should be in goal.Elsewhere, the picture was a little more muddied. Central defense was not a problem: There were nominations for Milan Skriniar (Slovakia), Stefan Savic (Montenegro), Evan Ndicka (Ivory Coast) and Edmond Tapsoba (Burkina Faso), among many others. Central midfield, thanks to the likes of Mohammed Kudus (Ghana), Henrikh Mkhitaryan (Armenia) and Yves Bissouma (Mali), was well stocked, too.In attack, the options are fewer in quantity but possibly higher in quality: Khvicha Kvaratskhelia (Georgia) and Leon Bailey (Jamaica) on the wings, perhaps, supplying Edin Dzeko (Bosnia and Herzegovina) or Sébastian Haller (Ivory Coast)? Or maybe a more fluid trident of Miguel Almiron (Paraguay), Iñaki Williams (Ghana) and Benjamin Sesko (Slovenia) would be more modern?At fullback, though, there is a hitch. A hitch sufficiently significant that you could feasibly build a whole theory around it: that the mark of an elite soccer nation is, it would seem, its ability to produce left and right backs. Ivory Coast’s Serge Aurier, currently of Nottingham Forest, and Bosnia’s Sead Kolasinac, now with Atalanta, were the best a slim field could offer.But that does not invalidate the purpose of the exercise. International soccer is always about compromise; it is inevitable, with resources limited by borders and birthrates, that teams should have flaws. It is, in many ways, what makes it special. And there is enough strength elsewhere to generate a side that could likely reach the quarterfinals in 2026. Joe and Dolores, consider me converted. Let’s get a world team to North America. More

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      Manchester United Sells 25 Percent Ownership Stake to Jim Ratcliffe

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      The billion-dollar deal leaves the team’s unpopular owners, the Glazer family, in control of the club, but it delegates important responsibilities to their new partner.After a year of rumors, offers, final deadlines and final, final deadlines, the owners of Manchester United on Sunday announced that they had sold a minority stake in the team, English soccer’s most successful club, to the British petrochemical billionaire Jim Ratcliffe.The sale of the 25 percent stake in United, the former English and European champion, was confirmed by representatives of United and INEOS, Mr. Ratcliffe’s company, and announced by the club on social media.In addition to acquiring a significant ownership stake, Mr. Ratcliffe also agreed to provide another $300 million “intended to enable future investment into Old Trafford,” the club’s iconic stadium. As part of the deal, INEOS was given responsibility for managing the team’s soccer operations, granting it effective control over “all aspects” of the United men’s and women’s teams and also the club’s youth academy.The deal concluded a chaotic process that many of the team’s fans had hoped would end with something far more significant: the departure from the club of the team’s current owners, the Florida-based Glazer family, which has controlled United since acquiring it in a leveraged buyout in 2005.Instead, the Glazers will remain the team’s majority owners while netting a sum that values Manchester United around $6.3 billion, or more than five times the amount the Glazers paid to buy it almost two decades ago. And in deputizing the INEOS Sports group — which already has interests in soccer, auto racing, cycling and rugby — to run the soccer operations, the Glazer family may insulate itself from the harshest criticisms of fans.“Through INEOS Sport, Manchester United will have access to seasoned high-performance professionals, experienced in creating and leading elite teams from both inside and outside the game,” the United co-chairmen and brothers Joel and Avram Glazer said.Mr. Ratcliffe, through INEOS, agreed to pay $33 per share for his 25 percent stake, a price that represents a nearly 70 percent premium on the current value of the team’s shares on the New York Stock Exchange.“As a local boy and a lifelong supporter of the club, I am very pleased that we have been able to agree a deal with the Manchester United board that delegates us management responsibility of the football operations of the club,” Mr. Ratcliffe said in United’s statement on the sale. “Whilst the commercial success of the club has ensured there have always been available funds to win trophies at the highest level, this potential has not been fully unlocked in recent times.”Jim Ratcliffe, second from right, outside Manchester United’s stadium, in March. He agreed to pay $33 per share for his 25 percent stake in the club.Phil Noble/ReutersThe sale process began more than a year ago, kicked off by an offhand comment from Elon Musk on social media that he was buying the club. Musk later said his offer had been a joke, but the Glazers were apparently serious about hearing more.United hired the U.S.-based merger and acquisition specialist Raine Group to manage a prospective sale after the firm secured a record price, roughly $3 billion, for another English club, Chelsea. When the Glazers made clear they were open to hearing offers, bidders quickly lined up, including not only Mr. Ratcliffe, but also an American investment fund and a Qatari businessman with links to some of the Gulf country’s most influential figures. Their offers seemed to rise with each new media report.The entire process took place against a backdrop of months of conflicting headlines, fan protests and swings in the club’s stock price — and all as the team, once a fixture at the top of the Premier League standings, struggled for consistency, and wins, on the field.“It’s been a process that’s been all about the best interests of the Glazer family above the interests of the club,” said Duncan Drasdo, a United fan and the chief executive of the Manchester United Supporters’ Trust, a group that has protested the club’s ownership since the Glazers first arrived at Old Trafford.The nature of the original acquisition saw the Glazer family’s late patriarch, Malcolm, burned in effigy, and prompted the Premier League to belatedly draw up regulations so such a transaction could not be repeated. The Glazer family took control after borrowing the majority of the cost of their 805 million pound takeover (roughly $1 billion today) against United’s previously debt-free balance sheet. In the two decades since, the club has paid more than £1 billion in interest and other costs related to the Glazer takeover, while its debt has now surpassed £1 billion, too.The decision to consider even a partial sale was celebrated by the team’s enormous fan base when it was announced in November 2022. By then United had gone almost a decade without a Premier League title, a championship it last celebrated in 2013, and been usurped as English soccer’s dominant club by its cross town rival Manchester City, thanks to the backing of a member of the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates.A similar possibility for United emerged when the businessman son of one of Qatar’s men, the former prime minister Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, announced his intention to buy the team. That offer was widely promoted on social media by fans, influencers and even former players, including Rio Ferdinand, a former captain, who in June created a frenzy and a spike in United’s share price when he announced a sale to the Qatari group was “imminent.”That proved to be a false dawn. And it was not the only one. Other headlines in British news media, which treated the takeover in ways more typical of high profile player trades in the transfer market, led to similar lifts and dips in both hopes and the price of United shares.The transaction with Mr. Ratcliffe did not produce the outcome many fans had wanted, the Glazer family’s sale of the team.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe conclusion of the sale process will not produce the outcome many fans had hoped to see: the Glazers’ sale of the team. Mr. Ratcliffe now will control only 25 percent of the club’s voting rights through a mix of the Glazers’ stake and a portion of those owned by other shareholders. As part of the deal, the Glazers will relinquish day-to-day control of the sporting activities of the club but will retain control of United’s commercial activities and still hold the majority of board positions.Mr. Ratcliffe seemed pleased with the deal he had made — “We are here for the long term,” he said of his new management team — but the reaction of fans might not be as universally positive.“I think the problem with it is that it leaves the fan base feeling divided,” Mr. Drasdo said. “It leaves a sense of resentment and negativity that’s not helpful. A clean break would have been better.”Fans will be hoping the new era will lead to a return of United’s winning ways, and a reversal of the botched succession planning that followed the retirement of the legendary coach Alex Ferguson after he led the team to the last of its 19 league championships in 2013. Since then, new coaches have come and gone, and vast sums have been spent on new recruits. But without a discernible strategy, the club now finds itself with a bloated and underperforming roster, and clinging to eighth place in the 20-team Premier League.“It’s better than the status quo,” said Andy Green, a board member of MUST and the head of investments at Rockpool, a private equity firm. “Because they have proved themselves as being absolutely appalling at being football club owners.” More

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      It’s OK to Call It Soccer

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      The football-vs.-soccer debate is not about language at all.George Best’s résumé, in the late 1960s, was pretty much flawless. He was a dazzling, edge-of-the-seat winger, certainly one of the finest players on the planet. For a time, he perhaps did not even require the caveat. He was an English and European champion. Along with Bobby Charlton and Denis Law, he was a sanctified member of Manchester United’s Holy Trinity.More than that, he was a true crossover star. He was a fashionista. He was a heartthrob. He dated models. He graced the hippest nightclubs. He owned a trendy boutique. He was a darling of the swinging ’60s, a genuine celebrity. He had sufficient cultural cachet that he was known, in Spain, as El Beatle.All of that should, of course, have afforded him unquestionable authority when it came to the game that made him famous. Sadly, though, that is not how it works.There are rules at play here, whether you think they are fair or not, and Best transgressed them. In 1968, a couple of months after helping United win the European Cup, Best was invited, or decided, to write a book. It would be the first of several iterations over the coming years.Its title condemned him. He called it “George Best’s Soccer Annual.” And, as we know, nobody who calls it soccer can be taken seriously.In the seven, going on eight, years that I have been with The Times, no criticism has recurred with quite such frequency — and quite such conviction — as the idea that anyone who uses that word automatically forfeits any claim to either legitimacy or authenticity. Real fans call it football. Using “soccer” identifies you, immediately, as an interloper: at best a neophyte, at worst a fraud. Or, worse: an American.Mood when someone writes in to say, “It’s football, not soccer.”Andy Buchanan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn my case, of course, that’s fine. There are many reasons to dismiss my views on pretty much everything. But it seems a shame that Best should have fallen foul of the same regulations.Still, at least he was in good company. Matt Busby, the totemic manager of Best’s great Manchester United side, published his 1974 autobiography under the expertly triangulated title “Soccer at the Top: My Life in Football.” Walter Winterbottom, the long-forgotten pioneer of the idea that if players were allowed to practice with a ball they might get better at using it, produced a 1952 instruction manual named “Soccer Coaching.”And Raich Carter, one of the defining figures of the sport’s first half-century, started a magazine dedicated to the game the same year. He called it Soccer Star. A few years later, a sister publication would emerge. That one was, and still is, called World Soccer.The truth, of course, is that the soccer/football dichotomy is really quite a new thing. It is strange that a relatively small proportion of people do not seem to know that the word “soccer” itself is — like beans on toast, Sam Allardyce and stealing statuary from the Greeks — British. It derives, most likely, from an abbreviation of the “association” bit of “association football,” a shorthand to distinguish that sport from its arcane and absurd cousin, rugby.And, for years, it was a word that British people used. In their 2014 book, “It’s Football, Not Soccer (And Vice Versa),” the academics Stefan Szymanski and Silke-Maria Weineck posited that Britain used “soccer” almost interchangeably with “football” for much of the 20th century. Their theory runs that it only became “anathema” once Americans “started to take an interest” in a game they had, until that point, largely ignored.I would quibble with a couple of the finer points of this line of argument. Speaking as a child of the 1980s, the idea that “soccer” was value neutral is inaccurate. As a term, it was very much middle-class coded: It was only the rugby-playing classes, after all, who would need a way of differentiating between the two sports. (It is different in Ireland and Australia, where other versions of “football” held similar popular appeal.)Contemplating football vs. fútbol.Jose Jordan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt was also, somehow, futuristic. The 1980s had been a dark decade, after all, lying in the shadow of the disasters at Heysel and Bradford and Hillsborough. Football, as The Sunday Times wrote in 1985, was a “slum sport played in slum stadiums by slum people.” Soccer was cleaner, fresher, more modern. It may, in some ways, have been used as a form of rebranding.This dovetails with the other point of contention with Szymanski’s and Weineck’s approach: the timeline. Their suggestion is that the British backlash against the term began in the 1970s, with the advent of the North American Soccer League, and particularly the arrival of Pelé at the New York Cosmos in 1975. Soccer, in their reading, became an indicator of American cultural expansionism.Pinpointing an exact date is impossible, of course, but this seems a touch early. In the 1990s, the satellite broadcaster — and both benefactor to and beneficiary of the Premier League — Sky started programs titled “Soccer A.M.” (1994) and “Soccer Saturday” (1998). It is reasonable to assume that the executives who created the formats would have gone in a different direction if they had been aware the word was taboo.My personal theory is that 1994 represents the event horizon. England did not qualify for the World Cup that year, when it was held in the United States, but the tournament was given the usual wall-to-wall coverage regardless. (A decision was made, seemingly at a governmental level, that as a nation we would support Ireland; we did not ask the Irish if that was OK.)The broadcasts presented people in Britain with several hours of programming a day in which Americans discussed the popularity or otherwise of “soccer” on their shores. At the same time, football was shaking off the stigma of the 1970s and ’80s and emerging as a cornerstone of what would come to be called “lad culture.”“Football” was a way to express not just manliness but authenticity. It was, after all, the working man’s game. “Soccer,” on the other hand, had always been middle-class, which was bad enough. Now it was American, too. It had the air of an affectation, a word used by those who did not belong, who were not real. The terms were no longer interchangeable.That has not changed, to any great extent, in the intervening 30 years, even as football has become such a cultural phenomenon that it has long since become a sort of default; being interested in it is not a particularly useful social indicator. And yet the use of the word soccer still elicits an almost visceral response in most British audiences.That can, most likely, be traced back to its association with the United States. Britain’s interpretation of the trans-Atlantic relationship is an odd one. It craves American approval: For artists or bands or actors or even businesses, “cracking” America remains the final frontier, driven by not just a commercial imperative but a cultural one, too.Chelsea vs. Arsenal earlier this month.John Sibley/Action Images, via ReutersSoccer is no different. The Premier League is desperate to win American fans not only because of the money on offer in the world’s richest consumer market, but because it represents a sort of ultimate triumph for both the league and the sport. America’s embracing of English soccer could, on some level, be read as the diminution of its own sporting landscape.At the same time, though, there is little appetite for that to be a bilateral process. The idea that America might be able to shape soccer, that it might wish to change it, that it might even be able to improve it is either unthinkable or intolerable.It is why there is a surprising amount of energy dedicated to belittling Major League Soccer, why American owners of English teams are greeted with skepticism, and why the elimination of the United States from a World Cup is greeted with a disproportionate amount of glee.In England, there is a desire for America to like our game, to endorse our taste, in some ways to prove that we were right all along.But it should be understood, at all times, that it is very much our ball. Feel free to play with it, but do not mistake that for ownership. It belongs to us, and we will decide how it is structured, how it is played, and — crucially, angrily, in the face of all rhyme and reason, despite the fact that we came up with the word in the first place — what it is called.Super League AgnosticMost fans never left any doubt where they stood on talk of a European super league.Matt Dunham/Associated PressRoughly five hours elapsed on Thursday after a court ruling on European soccer’s intractable super league debate before we heard claims of victory from both sides.A22, the sports consulting firm behind the plan to remove the “UEFA” bit from “UEFA Champions League,” claimed the European Court of Justice’s ruling on the legality of its proposal meant that the sport was “finally free.” UEFA, on the other hand, interpreted the court’s decision as a ringing endorsement of its own position, proudly proclaiming that soccer is “not for sale” and pointing out that the judgment is “actually positive.”The popular position, here, is to support UEFA. The super league project, after all, was always a land grab by the world’s biggest clubs, an attempt to siphon off yet more of the money sloshing around soccer and to crystallize their places at the very summit of the game essentially in perpetuity. All of these things are bad. They are still bad even in the revised (and somewhat improved) proposal.The problem, of course, is that for all of the loaded language — you know it’s not a fair hearing when one side is consistently being accused of “plotting” — and the professions of undying love to the spirit of open competition and sporting merit, the world that UEFA is perpetuating is indistinguishable on a practical level: a handful of teams from an even smaller handful of countries who dominate the landscape, and everyone else left to rot.Neither side has a plan to address the many genuine challenges soccer faces across Europe. Both sides are driven entirely by self-interest. UEFA’s position both as a competition organizer and a governing body remains fatally flawed, and an insurmountable hurdle for actually improving the game. Thursday’s ruling means both sides can claim they have won. In reality, all it ensures is that everybody loses.A Fun GameMartin Odegaard, left, and Erling Haaland: still waiting on their first World Cup trip.Ntb/Ntb, via ReutersAt the end of last month, Dolores and Joe Rizzotti sent me an email that contained an attachment. As a rule of thumb, I know it’s a serious bit of correspondence when there’s an attachment involved. (Please note: It does not make it more likely that I will read it.)On this occasion, though, I was glad I did. “The only thing missing from the 2022 World Cup was some of the world’s greatest players,” they wrote. This is, of course, true: The tournament took place without Erling Haaland, Mohamed Salah, Victor Osimhen and every single Italian on the planet.“The World Cup occurs every four years and we wait almost 1,500 days to watch 30 days of soccer,” they explained. “It should be a tournament with all the best players on the field for all to see.” Their solution to this eternal issue — George Best and George Weah, we should remember, never played in a World Cup — is something they call Team World.It would, they say, be a “squad made up of international players from countries that did not make the World Cup.” Last year, it could have included Gigi Donnarumma in goal; a defense built around David Alaba; a midfield of Nicolo Barella, Dominik Szoboszlai and Martin Odegaard; and an attack of Haaland, Salah and Khvicha Kvaratshkelia.“We understand that the increase in teams for the 2026 World Cup from 32 to 48 takes away some of our proposal’s thunder,” they conceded. “But it still leaves 163 FIFA-recognized nations that will not field a team in 2026, but may have a player or two who deserve to be seen on the world stage.”According to their plan, Team World would occupy the 48th spot in the tournament, and it would compete like any other nation. Now, this is very clearly not going to happen, but I think it is an excellent idea. In fact, it is an even better idea in an expanded tournament, because it would most likely involve players from even smaller nations. (Nobody feels sorry for Norway or Italy, for example.)So the challenge for you, over the festive period, is simple: Name the best team you can from nations outside the top 48 of the FIFA’s men’s rankings. And to make it slightly harder, no country can have more than three players. The best answer wins — well, nothing, probably.To give you more time to compose your teams, we’ll be taking next week off, but we will return on Jan. 5. In the meantime, send your selections — as well as any questions or comments you may have — to askrory@nytimes.com.And, even more important, have a wonderful Christmas/winter solstice/Saturnalia. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this newsletter as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. I’ll see you in 2024. More

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      Soccer Watchalongs Like Stretford Paddock Offer a Broadcast Alternative

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      Soccer fans are tuning out broadcasts in favor of watchalongs: streaming parties where you hear what you want to hear and see everything except the game.With the lights adjusted and the cameras rolling, the production team gives Joe Smith his cue. In five seconds, he will be broadcasting live to a couple thousand people. Mr. Smith’s mind, though, is elsewhere. “Slate is definitely the best way to build a roof,” he mutters to his co-host, Jay Mottershead, as the countdown hits three. “All these years on, they haven’t topped it.”And with that, they are on air. They will remain so for the next four hours, essentially uninterrupted: a broadcasting endurance test staged in a subterranean studio, all exposed brick and industrial lighting, in the middle of Manchester’s achingly hip Northern Quarter.Before they have finished, they will have touched on subjects as diverse as: the slightly alarming frequency with which Mr. Mottershead has nightmares; the declining popularity of lemon curd; and the story of a man who attends Mr. Smith’s gym exclusively to read vintage copies of “Cars” magazine.Occasionally, their freewheeling, faintly anarchic conversation to be interrupted by what is supposedly the purpose of the evening’s activity: keeping track of the game between the soccer team they support, Manchester United, and the Danish champion, F.C. Copenhagen.That is, after all, what will attract more than 100,000 people to their livestream over the course of those four hours. It is the diversions and the tangents and the stream of consciousness about roofing, though, that will keep them there.Watchalongs like Stretford Paddock’s have become big business, with full-scale production crews and hundreds of thousands of subscribers.Rory Smith/The New York TimesHard-Core CommunityThe concept of watching two people watch a soccer game might sound like a distinctly postmodern form of entertainment, a close cousin of the gaming streams that proliferate on Twitch and the unboxing videos that for some reason captivate children on YouTube.In soccer, though, the form has deep roots. The idea of making most games available to watch on television, after all, is a relatively recent one. In Britain, home to the Premier League, many games continue to be blacked out, in the interest of protecting in-stadium attendances.Barred from showing those games, broadcasters have for years had little choice but to find creative ways to keep viewers up-to-date on what is taking place in them. Most have settled on the format pioneered by Sky’s “Soccer Saturday” — launched in the 1990s — in which an array of former players sit in a studio, watching feeds of the games only they can see, and update viewers on key moments in real time. (Think of the N.F.L.’s popular Red Zone channel, only without seeing anyone actually playing football.)A group reaction to a last-minute goal on Arsenal Fan TV in 2021 made a compilation of the watchalong’s greatest hits.The form of the show that Mr. Mottershead and Mr. Smith host on Stretford Paddock, the Manchester United fan channel they co-own — or its counterparts on outlets like The Redmen TV (Liverpool) and We Are Tottenham TV (self-explanatory) — is essentially the same. The function, though, is distinct.Most of their viewers, Mr. Mottershead said, are also watching the games, either legally or illegally. “They turn the commentary down and listen to us instead,” he said. They do so because they want a much more narrowly focused product: Stretford Paddock’s audience only wants updates on Manchester United, for example, not news about anyone else who is playing at the same time.And, crucially, they want those updates delivered not by the compromised and biased mouthpieces of the mainstream media — what they see as retirees protecting their friends and business interests, or commentators with the nebulous but definite prejudice against their club — but by dyed-in-the-wool fans like them. “We might disagree on things,” Mr. Mottershead said. “But we all want United to do well.”Still, after more than six years leading watchalongs with Mr. Smith, Mr. Mottershead has come to believe that what draws in fans is not simply a matter of having their obsessions met and their biases confirmed.What his viewers are looking for, he thinks, is simple. They want someone to watch the game with them.Viral EmpireThe part of the soccer industry that is made for fans and by fans is necessarily tribal. Every club essentially exists in its own silo. The biggest names in the Manchester United content universe will be largely alien to those who follow Liverpool, just as celebrated Arsenal podcasters will have little or no resonance to Tottenham supporters.The crowning exception is Mark Goldbridge, soccer’s 44-year-old livestream kingpin and the genre’s only real crossover star. It is not just that his fan channel, The United Stand, currently has 1.77 million YouTube subscribers. It is that almost every time Manchester United loses (or draws, or concedes a goal), he is liable to reach many millions more.Footage from Mr. Goldbridge’s streams reliably goes viral: rants that are by turns splenetic, wildly N.S.F.W., and vaguely surreal. He will howl that Manchester United’s defense has “all the resistance of a papadum catching a bowling ball,” say, or that the club is accidentally employing “a team of slow giraffes.”Quite what it is about Mr. Goldbridge that has made him so prominent is difficult to pinpoint, and he offered no clues: He declined through his representation to be interviewed for this article, on the grounds that he is currently exploring opportunities away from “the watchalong space.”In interviews, Mr. Goldbridge has accepted that there is an element of cringe comedy, in the style of David Brent or Alan Partridge, to his delivery. Peter McPartland, a host on Toffee TV, a channel dedicated to Everton, agreed. “There is an awkwardness to him that makes him funny,” he said.Channels like We Are Tottenham TV and others all emphasize their bona fides as fans, and can offer faraway fans a glimpse of the in-stadium atmosphere they might never experience in person.Whatever it is, it is undeniably effective. “He has built an empire,” said Paul Machin, a founder of The Redmen TV, the Liverpool fan channel. The problem is less his success, other hosts said, and more in the copycats he has inspired.“People see his videos going viral,” Mr. Machin said, “so now there are a lot of Manchester United watchalongs where people you’ve never seen before are kind of performing their anger.”The economics of the internet, in theory, incentivize virality. In an industry in which there is a direct correlation between clicks and revenue, going viral is held to be both the greatest prize and the ultimate purpose of all online content.Those who earn their living from fan channels, though, see that kind of attention less as a goal and more as a danger. “We don’t want that virality,” said Ben Daniel, who founded We Are Tottenham TV with his brother, Simon, in 2017.Clips that break tribal lines tend to do so by attracting a considerable proportion of “hate watches,” he said — views from fans of other clubs relishing another team’s suffering. But those are not people who might hit the like button, or subscribe. Virality, it turns out, brings the wrong sort of fame.ParasocialOn the surface, the rewards for watchalong fame are thin. YouTube’s algorithm is weighted toward shorter videos, not hours of broadcast. The platform’s chats, which allow viewers to append payments to their comments or questions, drive only a couple of hundred dollars of revenue.The benefits are largely second-order ones. They are worth doing, Mr. Smith said, because they can drive subscriptions. Mostly, though, they do them because “it would be weird not to: The game is the culmination of everything we talk about.”He and Mr. Mottershead are old hands by the standards of the genre: Stretford Paddock has been doing watchalongs for almost a decade. Most of the newer versions trace their origins to the pandemic, when social distancing rules kept fans from attending games in person.Before then, fan channels focused on giving supporters who could not or did not attend games a digital version of the experience: a taste from outside the stadium, and inside the crowd, before, during and after games.“People want to feel that connection to their clubs,” one watchalong host said, wherever they happen to be watching.Rory Smith/The New York TimesWith the stands empty, that was not possible. All that was left was to offer running commentary on the games that they, like every other fan, were watching on television.When fans returned to the stands, though, the channels noticed there was still a sizable audience craving that type of in-game coverage. “It was so popular that we couldn’t drop it,” Mr. Machin said of The Redmen TV’s experience.Creators of Premier League watchalongs said they all appeal to roughly the same audience, distinguished only by tribal allegiance: fans generally between 16 and 35, though with a substantial proportion who are just a little older. A slender majority live in Britain, but there are healthy constituencies in Ireland, the United States and Australia, as well as whichever country a given team’s stars call home. Tottenham, for example, has a sizable following in South Korea thanks to the club’s beloved captain, Son Heung-min.They are all watching, too, for much the same reason. “People want to feel that connection to their clubs,” Mr. Machin said, wherever they happen to live.Watchalongs create a different sort of bond: a form of what psychologists call a parasocial relationship. Viewers want their biases to be reinforced. They want to know how other, like-minded fans are reacting to the games. But they also want the digressions, the asides about roofing and nightmares and cultural appropriation as it relates to hairstyles.They are, after all, watching from home, all around the world, each of them locked in their own little silo. What they want, more than searing insight or expert analysis or even a cheap laugh, is a connection to people who are doing exactly the same thing.Mr. Mottershead and Mr. Smith are not trying to offer them detailed commentary. They are trying to recreate the feeling, Mr. Mottershead said, of “watching the game with your mates.” More

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      The Premier League Needs a Commissioner

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      Allowing clubs to block rule changes and money to delay punishments feeds the perception that the same rules do not apply to everyone.Pete Rozelle’s immediate reaction could not accurately be described as unbridled enthusiasm. He was 33. He had, for the last three years, been the general manager of the Los Angeles Rams. He was suave, charming and well liked. But he was nevertheless starting to wonder whether running an N.F.L. football team was really the job for him.And then, outside the Kenilworth Hotel in Miami in January 1960, he was cornered by a cadre of the league’s most fearsome power brokers: the Mara brothers, Jack and Wellington, owners of the Giants; Dan Reeves, the Rams’ benefactor; and Paul Brown, the coach and founder and all-purpose potentate of the team in Cleveland that still bears his name.They had an offer to make Rozelle. They did not want him to run a franchise. They wanted to put him in charge of the whole league.It was an offer, in Rozelle’s mind, that he had to refuse. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he told them, according to Michael MacCambridge’s magisterial history of the league, “America’s Game.” “That is the most ludicrous thing I have ever heard.”Rozelle’s logic was simple. The job of N.F.L. commissioner looked an awful lot like a poisoned chalice. The league’s various owners were split on almost every issue imaginable — not only on who should be commissioner, but also whether to add another slate of expansion teams, whether to sign a collective television deal and how to stave off the threat of the rival American Football League.There was even contention over where, exactly, the league’s offices should be. Rozelle was not the only one who might have looked at the job description and decided he would have to be a fool, or a madman, to accept.Still, over the course of the afternoon, Rozelle was won over. He was persuaded by Reeves, Brown and the rest that his candidacy would be successful, that the issues could be resolved, that he would “grow into” the position. His wife, Jane, reassured him that he would be a good fit. Later that day, Rozelle was elected as commissioner.The challenges faced by the N.F.L. of the early 1960s are alien to the Premier League of 2023. The Premier League is, by almost any measure, a picture of health. It is the most popular domestic sports league of all time. Television has made it rich beyond measure. It is a playground for billionaires and private equity funds and nation states. It does not fear the emergence of a rival; if anything, its primacy is such that it is asphyxiating its former peers, a wealth gap that isn’t good for the game.This weekend, the Premier League will return after a brief hiatus for international duties with a top-of-the-table meeting between Manchester City and Liverpool, the game that has become its marquee fixture. City is the world’s dominant team. Liverpool is one of soccer’s grandest names. The two teams are packed with global stars and each is led by one of the most influential coaches of their generation. Millions will tune in to watch. If the Premier League is in crisis, it has taken a strange form.And yet, below the surface, the competition is buffeted by currents that Rozelle would recognize. This week, the clubs of the Premier League met in London for one of their periodic conferences. Among other matters, they voted on whether to introduce a ban on — and this is catchy — “related party loans.”In truth, this is hardly an existential matter for the league. (It is far more pressing, and far more problematic, elsewhere.) More and more teams in England, as is the case across Europe, are now part of so-called multiclub networks, in which owners possess not one but a whole stable of teams.The Premier League had, correctly, recognized that this offered teams a chance to circumvent the competition’s extremely lax rules on spending: Nottingham Forest could, say, take a player on loan from its sister club, Olympiacos, at a cheaper rate than it might have to pay on the open market, boosting its performance without affecting its balance sheet.The fact that this is only an issue now, of course, has nothing to do with Forest’s links to Greece or Brighton’s relationship with a team in Belgium but with Newcastle, which is owned by the same Saudi sovereign wealth fund that has spent the last few months stuffing its four domestic teams with superstars. The Premier League wanted to head off the prospect of those players being conveniently diverted to Newcastle at discounted rates.Bernardo Silva and Manchester City will enter Saturday’s showdown against Liverpool with a one-point lead in the Premier League table.Ian Walton/Associated PressBut the motion did not pass. The Premier League’s rules state that, to be approved, any vote requires the support of 14 of its 20 teams. This time, it fell one short. Seven teams decided, essentially, that the idea of related party loans was a good one. It is no surprise that those seven teams either are, or soon might be, part of multiclub systems.It would be naïve, though, to assume that the motives on the other side of the argument were any more pure. It is possible that some of the 13 who did back the idea of a ban did so because they believed the loophole might in some way undermine the integrity of the league, or because they felt there really ought to be rules governing a sporting competition. More likely — as suggested by the timing — they saw a chance to deny their rivals a possible advantage.There is nothing new in this. Several years ago, a number of teams put to the league the idea that they might pool the performance data produced by their games, so as to allow teams to better understand their opponents. Bundesliga of Germany had already adopted a collective approach. A majority of teams rejected it. Such a move would, they said, favor the clubs that had been early adopters of analytics.This is how the Premier League works: as a sort of tyranny of a self-interested majority. And, on the surface, teams confusing what is in their interests with what is in the interests of the league as a whole has done little harm. The league has grown to become a global behemoth. It is probably now Britain’s greatest cultural export.Increasingly, though, that approach appears to be nearing a breaking point. Manchester City has been charged with — though not found guilty of — 115 breaches of the league’s financial regulations. This month, Chelsea brought to its attention huge discrepancies in its books.Everton has vowed to fight a Premier League punishment, but its pockets are not as deep as those of rivals facing the same threat.Peter Powell/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAnd the day before the league’s executives met in London to present craven self-interest as a form of democracy, Everton was stripped of 10 points in the standings for surpassing the maximum loss permitted by the league. (A lesson here: If you tell people that the aim is to lose no money, but that they can lose $130 million without being punished, they will assume that $130 million is not so much a ceiling as a target.)In a 41-page report exploring the Everton case, Paragraph 107 is the key. Part of the evidence submitted by Everton, it says, came from a representative of the club who explained that his job was not to make sure that it met the league’s financial requirements, but to “protect and interpret” those requirements “to the benefit” of his employer.“The Commission notes that the Premier League already needs to devote considerable resources to monitoring compliance by its member clubs,” the report adds. “If all clubs were to adopt a similar approach, the Premier League’s task would become yet more challenging.”That should not be the case, of course. The teams of the Premier League should understand that for a sporting competition to have any validity, any meaning, it needs to have an agreed-upon set of rules. But what Everton, Chelsea and Manchester City prove — like the vote on related party loans — is that the clubs do not want to engage with those rules in good faith. They see them instead as rules to be manipulated and circumvented and sometimes ignored, and view doing so as all part of the game.Whether that does any actual damage is difficult to say. The allegations against Manchester City have done little to dampen enthusiasm for the league, just as the sight of Newcastle reaching the Champions League with Neymar and Cristiano Ronaldo — on loan — would hardly drive fans away.There comes a point, though, when a fracture happens. Perhaps that is between the clubs, so ensconced in their own universes that they can no longer agree on anything. Or perhaps that is between the teams and the fans, once the asterisks start to pile up in previous seasons and nobody is sure whether what they are watching will actually count.There are two ways of averting that. One, rather utopian, is to persuade the clubs to work more collectively, to understand that growth is a shared endeavor and that their success is codependent. The other is to create an office, one with genuine power, to enforce the rules (ideally in real time), to issue punishments and to protect the interests of the league.On several occasions in the 1990s, the Premier League sent emissaries to the United States to see what English soccer could learn from America’s major leagues. They came back with an awareness of the power of television, an understanding of the significance of corporate revenue, and a surprisingly longstanding conviction that cheerleaders would be a good idea in a Yorkshire winter.Nobody, it seems, recommended instituting a commissioner to shape and guide their business. Given where the Premier League finds itself now, caught in an impasse between irreconcilable camps, it is apparent that is something of an omission. If the clubs cannot willingly work together, cannot operate for their own wider benefit, then it is obvious they have to be made to do so.The only problem, of course, is the obvious one. The clubs themselves would have to vote on not only the identity of the commissioner, but also the existence of one. As ever, they would do so entirely along the lines of their own self-interests. In that case, and in that case alone, though, they might just find an unfamiliar unanimity.A (Disputed) Vision of the FutureCristiano Ronaldo is confirmed for Saudi Arabia in February. Lionel Messi and Inter Miami? Not so much.Ahmed Yosri/ReutersIt is not absolutely clear, at this precise moment, if Inter Miami will be taking part in the tournament that everyone is talking about: the eternally prestigious Riyadh Season Cup.On Tuesday, Turki al-Sheikh, the chairman of the General Entertainment Authority in Saudi Arabia, was under the distinct impression that he had booked the world’s finest Barcelona tribute act to be part of a three-team tournament featuring Miami’s fellow “giants” — his words, not anyone else’s — Al-Nassr and Al-Hilal.A few hours later, sadly, it became clear that nobody had told Inter Miami. “Earlier today, an announcement was issued stating that Inter Miami is scheduled to play in the Riyadh Season Cup,” the club said in a statement that is, by any standards, a classic of the genre. “This is inaccurate.”It seems a fair bet to assume that this all ends with Inter Miami pitching up in Saudi Arabia in a few months anyway, and that the dispute was rather more about who was allowed to announce the news, and when, than it was about the actual content of it. Still, even if the whole thing does not materialize, it is hard to escape the impression that the episode offers a fleeting glimpse of soccer’s future.The appeal of bringing Miami to town, of course, is the prospect of bringing Lionel Messi and Ronaldo into direct competition again. It would be, as the now-disputed news release had it, a “Last Dance” sort of occasion, an assertion undercut only a little by the fact that: one, the actual “Last Dance” — the documentary series — is about a meaningful championship, not a friendly match; and two, there is every chance that either the Saudi authorities or M.L.S. will find a way to have them play each other again at the next available opportunity.Still, such quibbling is probably futile at this point. Inter Miami against Al-Nassr in Riyadh, in February, is not even a remote imitation of the sorts of games that defined the rivalry between Messi and Ronaldo. It is instead an exhibition, a staged production, more than a sporting contest. It is soccer as brought to you by W.W.E.But it is also, needless to say, what people want. Fans will buy tickets to see Messi and Ronaldo face-to-face once more. Broadcasters will pay — perhaps not much, but still — to show the game. People will tune in, idly, reluctantly, with half an eye on something else. And as they do, soccer will take another step on the road to becoming something further from sport and closer to what might best be described as “general entertainment.”CorrespondenceLast week’s newsletter touched, fleetingly, on Sweden, the only major men’s league in Europe that continues virgin and unsullied by the arrival of V.A.R. That means, of course, that Sweden is also blissfully ignorant of the infinite debate about V.A.R. that occurs every time anyone mentions V.A.R.(It seems now that soccer is essentially a year-round conversation about how much of our agency we should surrender to technology broken only by two breaks in which we talk about the acquisition of players. Perhaps, in years to come, we will finally do away with the actual sport entirely so as to concentrate exclusively on the bits we really like.)In honor of the Swedish approach, then, I am going to set aside the many emails about V.A.R. that arrived in the inbox this week and focus instead on three questions that are perhaps less pressing but almost certainly more original.“Why are Wolverhampton Wanderers referred to as Wolves by match commentators?” Rick Smith asked. “I can’t think of any other team regularly referred to by its nickname. The only thing I can think of is, way back in the days of print media, some editor or typesetter said Wolverhampton had too many letters to fit in a headline.”My sense here is that Rick’s assertion is essentially correct, though I can think of a few examples that come pretty close. The best is the Scottish team Heart of Midlothian, which is referred to almost exclusively as Hearts. It is increasingly common to see “Spurs” in a league table rather than “Tottenham Hotspur.” In all of these cases, I suspect the basic cause is the desire to abbreviate, both from the fans and the news media.Question No. 2 comes from Ted Richards. “With the margins in performance at the top level becoming smaller and smaller, and the improvements in data collecting and tracking, has there been any movement, at the club level, to preferring international players closer to home?” he asked. “Might a club prefer a Mudryk over a Martinelli, knowing international duty would not require hours in the air while crossing many time zones?”The short answer to this is yes. Clubs do factor international commitments into signing players — particularly in the context of African stars likely to be called up for the midseason Cup of Nations — but it is ordinarily only one factor to be weighed, rather than an outright red flag.And finally, Bob Bonpietro has hit upon another subject on which I already have thoughts. “After seeing France beat Gibraltar, 14-0,” he wrote, “isn’t it time UEFA reconsider its qualifying format for the European Championship? These types of games usually end in routs. Why not do something akin to Concacaf to winnow out the minnows?”Kylian Mbappé, Olivier Giroud and Ousmane Dembélé combined to score six of France’s 14 goals against Gibraltar.Valery Hache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe argument has always been that the smaller nations improve only by being exposed to the standard to which they aspire, and it is one with some evidence in its favor. Luxembourg, for example, traditionally one of Europe’s great walkovers, finished third in its qualifying group this time around. Albania, historically only a rung above, has now qualified for two of the last three Euros.All of that notwithstanding, the idea of holding some sort of prequalifying tournament does have some merit. Inviting the 16 “weakest” teams — decided by ranking, perhaps, or performance in the last round of qualification — to play off for a limited number of places in qualifying proper would allow those countries to play more meaningful games; would create a more attractive qualifying tournament; and would not stop the momentum of the upwardly mobile. More

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      Everton Stripped of 10 Points in Premier League, Deepening Team’s Crisis

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      A team operating under a mountain of debt and a proposed sale now faces a sporting penalty for violating financial rules. It vowed to appeal.Everton, a founding member of England’s Premier League that has fallen into financial crisis, faced yet more pain on Friday after it was given a 10-point penalty for breaching the league’s economic rules. The punishment sent Everton to the bottom of the league standings and left it facing the threat of relegation from England’s top division at the end of the season.The announcement of a points penalty was not a surprise, since the Premier League had come under pressure to act by rival teams angered by Everton’s rule breaches. But the decision will deepen the crisis that has engulfed Everton, one of English soccer’s oldest teams, at a time when its very future has been placed under a cloud by hundreds of millions of dollars in debt.An independent league commission hearing the case against Everton for breaching the league’s profit and sustainability rules announced the punishment. It said the penalty — the biggest in the Premier League’s history — must be applied immediately, a result that plunged the Blues to 19th place from their relatively safer position in 14th and on the same points total, 4, as last-place Burnley.At the end of each season, the bottom three teams in the Premier League table are relegated out of the division and into the second-tier Championship.Everton said it was “shocked and disappointed” by the scale of the penalty, and immediately announced its intent to appeal.“The club believes that the Commission has imposed a wholly disproportionate and unjust sporting sanction,” Everton said in a statement on its website. “The club has already communicated its intention to appeal the decision to the Premier League.”The team’s perilous financial state has required regular cash infusions from external sources to allow the club to continue operating. The most recent loan came from 777 Partners, an American group that in September agreed to acquire the storied club. That deal has not yet been approved by the Premier League and the Financial Conduct Authority, a regulator, amid questions about 777 Partners’ own finances.The Premier League referred Everton to an independent commission in March after Everton posted financial losses for the fifth straight year. Under the league’s regulations, teams are allowed to lose no more than 105 million pounds, or $130 million, over a three-year period. Everton acknowledged being in breach of those rules for the financial year through 2022.The panel, according to a 41-page written judgment, agreed with the Premier League’s assessment that Everton had breached the allowed amount of losses by £19.5 million (almost $25 million).The scale of Everton’s penalty raises the prospect of a far larger punishment that could await the league’s dominant team, Manchester City. The club has been charged with 115 rule breaches related to its financial declarations. That case, now in its fifth year, has yet to reach a conclusion; it is being heard by a similar panel to the one that decided the Everton case.While the points loss severely increases the chances of Everton’s suffering a costly demotion to the second tier for the first time in its history, the low point totals obtained so far by some of its relegation rivals may yet allow it to escape. Even with its 10-point penalty, Everton is only 2 points behind Luton Town, the team occupying 17th place — the final position offering safety, and a place in the league, for next season.A spokesman for 777 Partners said the company had no comment on the punishment or any effect it would have on its proposed acquisition, because that process remains ongoing. Its proposed deal contains contingencies for points deductions and even a possible relegation.Part of the reason Everton’s punishment was as harsh as it was, the panel said, was related to a claim, upheld by the panel, that the team had failed to engage with the league in good faith, a claim the team continues to reject.“Both the harshness and severity of the sanction imposed by the Commission are neither a fair nor a reasonable reflection of the evidence submitted,” Everton said. More

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      Megan Rapinoe, Emma Hayes and a Women’s Soccer Crossroads

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      Rapinoe, who helped define U.S. soccer for a decade, is retiring after this week’s N.W.S.L. final. Hayes, the Chelsea coach, will try to put her stamp on it next.Emma Hayes first met Megan Rapinoe before she was Megan Rapinoe. Or, rather, just as she was becoming Megan Rapinoe. She was not yet a winner of two World Cups, not yet an Olympic champion, not yet captain of her country, not yet a powerful and urgent voice away from the field. Rapinoe was not even a professional soccer player back then, not quite.Hayes’s job was to change that. In 2008, she had been appointed head coach and director of soccer operations of the Chicago Red Stars, one of the inaugural franchises in the start-up league Women’s Professional Soccer. Hayes had a blank slate to fill, a team to construct from scratch. Rapinoe was her first call.That, perhaps, is the best measure of how brightly Rapinoe’s talent shone. When coach and player first met, Rapinoe was just a 23-year-old straight out of the University of Portland, but the power dynamic already lay in her favor. She did not need to convince Hayes. Instead, Hayes had to sell her on the team, on the project, on the city.And so she showed Rapinoe, born and raised in California, around Chicago, hoping to persuade her that the move to the banks of Lake Michigan would suit her. It worked. The Red Stars drafted Rapinoe second overall ahead of the league’s first season.The W.P.S. did not last. It survived for just three seasons. By the time it closed down, Hayes had long since departed the Red Stars. Rapinoe, though, was just getting started.Rapinoe will be looking to add a first N.W.S.L. title to her packed trophy case.Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAs much as Hayes was convinced of Rapinoe’s promise, even she would not pretend to have known just how far she would go. This weekend, Rapinoe — 38 now — will finally call time on her career. Her plan is for her exit to be framed by ticker-tape and fireworks: with one last triumph, helping OL Reign to claim victory against Gotham F.C. in the N.W.S.L final, a suitably glorious coda to a glittering career.It is no exaggeration to say that, for more than a decade, Rapinoe has been the defining player in women’s soccer. It is not simply that she was a key part in the United States’ victory in the 2015 World Cup, and the driving force behind its repeat triumph four years later. It is that her activism, her unwillingness to shut up and play, turned the U.S. women’s team into something that transcended sports. As a consequence, she helped set the tone for women’s soccer as a whole.It is fitting that Rapinoe’s curtain call should come just as Hayes, the woman who did so much to launch her career, should return to the United States. Not officially, of course; at this stage, the fact that Hayes will be the next coach of the U.S. women’s team is merely an open secret, a fait accompli that must — for now — remain swaddled by a warm blanket of euphemism.Anonymous sources will go only as far as saying Hayes and U.S. Soccer have been “in talks.” Chelsea, the club Hayes has coached for the last decade to considerable success, will only say that the 47-year-old coach will depart at the end of the current season in order to “pursue a new opportunity” outside of England’s Women’s Super League and the club game. Quite what that opportunity might be is not revealed. Sure, maybe she’ll coach the U.S. Or maybe she wants to be a firefighter. It’s anyone’s guess.Emma Hayes is expected to leave Chelsea next year to coach the United States women’s team.John Sibley/Action Images, via ReutersThere is just one established fact, even if it is by some distance the most salient one. Hayes, winner of six W.S.L. titles and five F.A. Cups and easily the most prominent manager in the women’s game in England, has quit her job. She has told Chelsea she is going. That, more than anything, reveals exactly how far those mysterious talks have progressed.It is not hard to see why the prospect of coaching the United States appeals to Hayes. So rich is the team’s history that it remains the most prestigious job in women’s soccer. Given that she will be given salary parity with Gregg Berhalter, the coach of the U.S. men’s team, it will also be the most lucrative.Hayes will, though, have to earn that money. The last time she took a job in the United States, her task was to help kick-start an era. A decade and a half later, that is in the job description once again. The context, though, is starkly different. This time, before the start, Hayes has to oversee an end.It might be vaguely possible to spin Hayes’s appointment as a return — her early career résumé also includes spells at the Long Island Lady Riders (which we can all agree is not a great name for a team), the Washington Freedom and the Western New York Flash — but she has not been hired because of her familiarity with American soccer’s modern landscape. She has been appointed precisely because she is an outsider to it.Hayes in May, after leading Chelsea to its fourth straight league title.John Sibley/Action Images, via ReutersIt is not simply that Hayes represents a considerable break with tradition. Almost all of her predecessors as national team coach have come from positions on the side of the Atlantic that has been slow to embrace contactless technology. The U.S. job was, in some senses, the reward for success in American soccer.That made perfect sense. For decades, the United States was the driving force of the women’s game. Its professional league, in whatever guise, was the gold standard of the sport. Players from across the world, where domestic competitions were often professional only in name, flocked there. The national team was the pinnacle of that program, and therefore the zenith of the game.This summer, though, made it abundantly clear that had changed. The United States exited the World Cup in the round of 16. Its impact on the tournament was minimal. What happened in Australia and New Zealand illustrated a power shift that had been coming for some time. Two European teams contested the final. Five of the eight quarterfinalists were European.Those nations, including the U.S., who drew large portions of their squads from the N.W.S.L. tended to fall early. It was something that Hayes herself spotted. “There is still a huge amount of talent in this U.S. team,” she wrote in a column for The Daily Telegraph during the World Cup. “But with so many of the squad playing solely in the N.W.S.L., it doesn’t offer enough diversity to their squad in terms of playing against different styles.”She would, she wrote, be “shocked” if young players continued to migrate to the U.S. to play in the college system when professional teams were recruiting — and paying so well — in Europe. In the future, she predicted, it would be “very, very difficult” for the U.S. to regain its primacy without “the right conversations around their model.”This year’s World Cup was a major disappointment for the United States and its stars.Asanka Brendon Ratnayake/ReutersThat it will be Hayes leading those conversations is, of course, a tacit acknowledgment that her assertion was correct. By appointing someone who has built their career and reputation in Europe to overturn the reality that it has fallen behind, U.S. Soccer is effectively accepting the truth of it. One era is at an end, and it is time for another to begin.Perhaps, then, this weekend’s N.W.S.L. final is best thought of as the moment of transition. Rapinoe has never won an N.W.S.L. title. This is her final chance to end her wait, to complete her set, to place a golden bow on her career and all that she has accomplished and represented.That she would have that moment playing for OL Reign — a team controlled, ultimately, by owners in France — would feel appropriate, too, a nod not just to where the game has been, but to where it is going.CorrespondenceLast-place Sheffield United had to wait until November for its first Premier League victory.Marc Atkins/Getty ImagesWe were all too busy learning about the demographic transformation of Spain in the 20th century last week for Ben Coles to make the correspondence cut, but I wanted to return to his note this week, largely because the subject he raised is one I have been contemplating for a while. In a way. From the opposite perspective, in fact.“Is every team from Everton on up in the current Premier League table allowed a little room for complacency this season?” Ben asked, in direct contravention of the mantra that everything is necessarily the best in the best of all possible leagues. “Not because they’ve cracked the code of survival, but because Sheffield United, Burnley, Luton and Bournemouth are so poor? It almost feels like a noncompetition.”It is fair, I think, to suggest that the dimensions of the relegation battle seem to have been drawn unusually early in the Premier League this season. Sheffield United had to be rebuilt on the fly. Burnley and Bournemouth have both gone very — some might say excessively — heavy on young and unproven talent. Luton made no attempt to disguise the fact it was not intending to blow all of the money it made on promotion to the Premier League on the Sisyphean task of trying to stay there.That is not to say relegation for any of them is a foregone conclusion. Things change, and change quickly, in the early part of the season. It is hardly inconceivable that, in a few weeks, Fulham or Everton or Crystal Palace have hit a slump, or that one of those teams that currently looks doomed to a season of struggle has found some form. Luton, in particular, appears to be coming to grips with the exigencies of Premier League soccer at considerable speed, as last week’s (more than merited) draw with Liverpool illustrated.But there is one element working against those four clubs, and that is the quality at the other end of the Premier League table this season. Even allowing for the fact that Manchester City will, in all likelihood, streak to a fourth successive championship, the pool of teams immediately below them is unusually deep.There are eight clubs — Tottenham, Arsenal, Liverpool, Aston Villa, Newcastle, Brighton, Manchester United and Chelsea — that will harbor justifiable ambitions of qualifying not just for Europe but for the Champions League, given that England is likely to have five emissaries in the revamped competition next season.Anthony Gordon and Newcastle are sixth in the Premier League, but only seven points out of first.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockThe overall quality of the league may well, in fact, be higher than it has ever been. That assertion will, of course, be dismissed as recency bias, or willful exaggeration, or simply deeply ahistoric; such is the power of nostalgia that governs our relationship with sports.There is a potent tendency to assume that what went before was somehow better: We are inclined, after all, simultaneously to remember the good parts of the past (look at that Thierry Henry goal!) and to see only the flaws (Manchester City 6, Bournemouth 1) of the present.But it feels, increasingly, as if the Premier League is starting not only to fulfill the bombast of its own marketing material but its foundational premise: For the first time, a majority of its clubs have found a way to use the great piles of money at their disposal to become genuinely quite good at soccer. That is good for the clubs, and good for the fans, and good for the competition. It is less good for those teams thrown into it with precious little preparation. More