English Premier League

Subterms

    More stories

    • 75 Shares149 Views

      in Soccer

      It’s OK to Call It Soccer

      by

      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

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Soccer

      Soccer Watchalongs Like Stretford Paddock Offer a Broadcast Alternative

      by

      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

    • 75 Shares179 Views

      in Soccer

      The Premier League Needs a Commissioner

      by

      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

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Soccer

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

      by

      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

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Soccer

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

      by

      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

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Soccer

      Colombia Troops Search for Liverpool Star Luis Diaz’s Kidnapped Father

      by

      The parents of Luis Díaz, a Colombian star of the English club, were both kidnapped on Saturday. His mother was rescued hours later, but his father remains missing.The authorities in Colombia have mobilized the national police and the military to look for the father of the soccer star Luis Díaz, a Colombian standout for the English club Liverpool whose parents were kidnapped in his hometown on Saturday. Given soccer’s popularity here, the incident captured the South American country’s attention, but it also stoked fears of increasing insecurity in a nation where such kidnappings were becoming less common until a surge in recent years.Mr. Díaz’s mother, Cilenis Marulanda, was rescued hours after she was abducted, President Gustavo Petro of Colombia said on Saturday night. The Colombian national police, the military and a unit that specializes in kidnapping dispatched officers, soldiers, cars and aircraft to find his father, Luis Manuel Díaz.The parents of Mr. Díaz, who is known as Lucho, had been in a car at a gas station in Barrancas — a town in La Guajira, a region of northern Colombia along the Caribbean Sea and bordering Venezuela — when they were kidnapped by armed men on Saturday afternoon, according to local reports and the authorities.The Colombian authorities on Sunday morning announced a reward of 200 million pesos (roughly $48,000) for any information that would help locate the elder Mr. Díaz.They said they were in a rush to find him because they feared that he might be taken to neighboring Venezuela, a country marred by years of political, economic and social unrest. Luis Fernando Velasco, the Colombian minister of the interior, told reporters on Sunday that the authorities were trying to block the suspects’ path to Venezuela because their traveling there was “one hypothesis” they were operating under.“It’s not the only one, to cover all sides,” he continued. “But we’re doing a gigantic operation, and I ask all people in La Guajira that might be in the area to help us and turn in all the information that they can. What they’ve done with Lucho Díaz is not just to Lucho Díaz but to all of Colombia, and all of Colombia needs to react.”While details of Ms. Marulanda’s rescue were not immediately known, she was safe as of Saturday night, William René Salamanca, the head of the Colombian national police, said. In a video posted on Saturday night on X, formerly known as Twitter, Mr. Salamanca spoke briefly on the phone with Ms. Marulanda.Diogo Jota, a Liverpool player, held up Luis Díaz’s jersey as he celebrated scoring a goal during a home match against Nottingham Forest at the club’s stadium on Sunday.Scott Heppell/ReutersIn another video, posted by Mr. Salamanca on Sunday morning, he spoke on the phone with the younger Mr. Díaz via the Colombian ambassador to the United Kingdom, Roy Barreras. Mr. Salamanca told Mr. Díaz, 26, that the Colombian authorities were sparing no effort in trying to find his father and that the situation had moved the country. He also told Mr. Díaz that he was already in La Guajira and was headed to his hometown soon to help lead the operation.Mr. Díaz is reportedly earning more than $3 million a year, and thus may have been a target for extortion, said Sergio Guzmán, the director of Colombia Risk Analysis, a political risk consultancy, based in the Colombian capital, Bogotá.“I’m presuming it’s an extortion kidnapping, which wouldn’t necessarily be out of the norm, because Luis Díaz is not politically connected or an important player politically, and neither are his parents,” Mr. Guzmán said. “But his notoriety, his rise to fame and perceived wealth could be more for that kind of hostage taking.”Although kidnappings have dropped dramatically since Colombia’s peace treaty with rebels in 2016, Mr. Guzmán said the practice had surged over the past two years. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, used extortion kidnapping to fund their operations. But in recent years, Mr. Guzmán said, other criminal groups have been battling for territory previously held by the demobilized FARC, and thus more extortions, kidnappings and ransoms have been happening.“I think it feeds into the existing pessimism about the country’s security situation,” Mr. Guzmán said of the kidnapping of Mr. Díaz’s parents. He also noted that Colombians were voting on Sunday in regional elections. “If you look at the latest polls, the majority of Colombians feel dissatisfied with the overall direction of the country, but also citizens feel less safe than they have previously,” he said.Mr. Díaz rose from playing for his local Indigenous team to larger clubs in Colombia before eventually landing in Europe and then last year at Liverpool.Daniel Munoz/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSoccer is the most popular sport in the country of nearly 52 million, and Mr. Díaz has shined for his country’s national team, winning the Golden Boot award, alongside the Argentine superstar Lionel Messi, for being the top scorer during the 2021 Copa América tournament.Mr. Díaz’s father was a gifted amateur player in Barrancas and trained his son. Mr. Díaz, who is of Wayúu descent and comes from an area often overlooked for soccer talent, rose from playing for his local Indigenous team to larger clubs in Colombia before eventually landing in Europe and then last year at Liverpool, one of the biggest clubs in the world, in the Premier League in England.Mr. Díaz, who has scored twice in nine appearances for Liverpool this season, was not in the lineup on Sunday against Nottingham Forest after a last-minute change by Liverpool’s manager, Jürgen Klopp. Mr. Klopp told reporters on Sunday that what was happening to Mr. Díaz and his family was “a worrying situation for all of us and it was a pretty tough night.”After the Liverpool player Diogo Jota scored during Sunday’s 3-0 win, he ran to the sideline and held up Mr. Díaz’s jersey.“It is our fervent hope that the matter is resolved safely and at the earliest possible opportunity,” Liverpool said in a statement on Sunday morning. “In the meantime, the player’s welfare will continue to be our immediate priority.” More

    • 75 Shares179 Views

      in Soccer

      When Saying Nothing Is Saying Something

      by

      Leagues and teams probably would have preferred not to take a public position on the Israel-Hamas war. That they could not avoid doing so is their own fault.By the end of last week, England’s Football Association doubtless felt that it had done the best it could, that after hours and hours of talks, it had settled on what might best be described as the least worst option.Last Friday night, England’s men’s team was playing an exhibition match against Australia. Most expected that the game would take note of the violence crackling across Israel and Gaza, commemorate the victims and acknowledge the suffering. Executives at the F.A. knew they would have to tread carefully.They had weighed the risk that a minute’s silence, soccer’s traditional manifestation of grief, might be interrupted, but they determined that having it was the appropriate thing to do. There would be black armbands. And to ward off the chance that either Israeli or Palestinian flags might appear in the crowd, they declared that all banners except for those of the competing teams would be forbidden.The most difficult decision, though, was to do with the Wembley Arch, the soaring steel beam that rises above the stadium.The Wembley Arch has become the way in which English soccer expresses its opinions. It was illuminated in the French tricolor in 2015, to show solidarity after the Paris terror attacks, and in Ukraine’s yellow and blue after that country was invaded by Russia last year. It has been used to mark the death of Pelé, to demonstrate admiration for Britain’s National Health Service and to show support for the L.G.B.T.Q. Pride campaign.John Mann, the British government’s antisemitism czar, assumed the F.A. would do the same for Israel. But, aware of the political sensitivity of such a gesture, he had suggested that the blue and white of the Jewish prayer shawl, rather than the Israeli flag, might act as a compromise.His suggestion was not adopted. It is hard to know, for certain, precisely why that was, but it seems a fair assumption that the F.A. believed it would be interpreted as taking a side at a time when civilians in Gaza were suffering, and dying, too. As fans starting streaming into the game, the arch stood dark.On this subject, more than most, saying nothing is interpreted in itself as saying something. The F.A.’s perceived inaction was met with fury. Rabbi Alex Goldberg, the chairman of the F.A.’s Faith in Football Task Force, resigned in protest. Eventually, the organization’s chief executive, Mark Bullingham, admitted that the decision had “caused hurt in the Jewish community.”Mann was rather less circumspect. “The Football Association,” he said, “looks hopelessly out of its depth.”England’s players before last week’s friendly against Australia.Naomi Baker/Getty ImagesThere is, of course, a very obvious reason for that. The issue of Israel and Palestine is the most intractable geopolitical problem of the modern age. Its complexity and its delicacy have perplexed diplomats, politicians, theorists and thinkers for more than half a century.For all that the F.A. employs plenty of sharp, bright minds, it is not a government. It does not have a department that deals with statehood. It exists, at least in part, to work out whom Mansfield will play in the cup, and to administer fines to part-time players who get yellow cards on Sunday mornings. It is not so much that it is out of its depth on geopolitics. It is that it occupies a wholly different pool.The F.A. is not alone, of course, in having struggled to calibrate its response to the devastation in Israel and Gaza over the last two weeks. The Premier League, too, has been accused of ducking the issue, of falling back on empty gestures and words picked clean of any meaning.The world’s most popular domestic league and the 20 clubs it comprises released almost verbatim statements last week, stating that they were “shocked and saddened by the escalating crisis” and condemning “the horrific and brutal acts of violence against innocent civilians.” They will, this weekend, wear black armbands and observe silences, too.Manor Solomon, the league’s only Israeli player, found that insufficient. The statement, he said in an interview on Israeli television, was “vanilla,” an attempt to say something while saying nothing. Erez Halfon, the chairman of the Israeli Professional Football Leagues, wrote to his Premier League counterpart, Richard Masters, to express his disappointment at what he perceived as an equivocal response from English soccer.At this point, it is worth pivoting away from the relative merits of these perspectives — the only thing less worthwhile than soccer teams commenting on a war is soccer writers doing it — and asking, instead, quite how the sport found itself in this situation.It is difficult not at least to acknowledge the faint absurdity of it all. The death toll from the conflict has already stretched beyond 5,000. Around a million people have been displaced. Many more have been deprived of water, gas and electricity. Quite why there should be so much energy expended on what English soccer thinks of it all is not clear.Armbands and moments of silence have been criticized as insufficient, an effort to signal something without saying anything.Henry Nicholls/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut then perhaps the F.A. and the Premier League only have themselves to blame. Officially, both relentlessly self-define as apolitical. Such is soccer’s official sense of self: It is a force for unity, for joy, for bringing people together, not to divide and to pontificate and to judge.Obviously, that position has always been a bit of a stretch. Soccer indulges in plenty of politics. It has just conveniently decided that things are only political if it disagrees with them.And so the political symbolism of the poppy, for example, is ignored completely. The Premier League’s stance on ownership — that everything is fine as long as you are not a convicted criminal, essentially — is presented as a form of neutrality, rather than an ideological acceptance of Thatcherite economics and a tacit embrace of some of the most brutal governments in the world.In recent years, though, another of the sport’s defining traits — a self-importance that bleeds into pomposity — has made its stance even more tenuous. There was a point, not all that long ago, when it was relatively rare to witness a minute’s silence at a soccer game in England.If a beloved player or manager died, a club might identify a moment’s reflection as suitable tribute. Occasionally, the sport would come together to commemorate a soccer-specific disaster — the Munich air crash, or the tragedies at Hillsborough, Heysel, Bradford and Ibrox — or, by governmental edict, to honor the death of a member of the royal family.Slowly but surely, that has shifted. This year alone, there have been minutes’ silences for the victims of earthquakes in Turkey, Syria and Morocco and the flooding in Libya, as well as for the death of John Motson, a longtime BBC commentator. They are now so frequent, in fact, that some clubs are reported to have complained privately of “grief fatigue.”It is hard to argue that any of those instances were unworthy of remembrance — it is no great suffering, after all, to stay quiet for 60 seconds — but piece by piece they have helped to feed a sense that soccer must say something, must do something. That part of its role is to act as an arbiter of significance, a national barometer of sorrow.The conclusion of that, of course, was always going to be what happened over the last two weeks: the game’s being expected to make a statement about an issue that is inherently divisive, one in which both doing something and doing nothing could only be interpreted as political. It is tempting to say that, to some extent, English soccer brought this on itself.But it is not wholly true. That at a time of international crisis lawmakers have seemingly spent so much time focusing on soccer’s response is not simply a matter of political expedience — it being much easier to criticize someone else’s response than to think about one’s own actions — but a measure of the role the game plays in national life.Britain is an increasingly secular place: Only 6 percent of the country regards itself as actively Christian, and while (roughly) a quarter of the four million or so Muslims in Britain attend mosque, that still equates to only 1.5 percent of the population. The nation’s politics are, like everywhere else, a mess of tribalism and division. Very few national institutions could reasonably claim to offer a snapshot of the British public.Except, of course, for soccer. More than a million people attend soccer games across the country every weekend. Several million more watch on television, and still more do so internationally. The clubs themselves are seen not as transactional franchises but, with a naïve romanticism, as trusted civic institutions.It is in its soccer stadiums, more than anywhere else, that Britain can both see and project itself. It is there that people can, or at least feel like they can, make themselves heard. It is as good a gauge as any as to the country’s feelings, its mood, its priorities. It is where it speaks, and where it is seen to speak, whether it says something or nothing at all.Free Hit for BrazilNeymar will be out for months with a knee injury.Andres Cuenca/ReutersFor Brazil, the last couple of weeks started badly and then grew steadily worse. First, the country’s national team was held to a draw on home turf by Venezuela, traditionally one of South America’s afterthoughts. Several players, in the immediate aftermath, suggested they had been struggling to adapt to the methods employed by their new coach, Fernando Diniz.A few days later, Brazil traveled to Montevideo to face rather more daunting opposition: Uruguay, now under the tutelage of soccer’s foremost philosopher-purist, Marcelo Bielsa. The hosts won, 2-0.Neymar, still his country’s brightest star, left the field in tears just before halftime. Tests have subsequently confirmed that he tore the anterior cruciate ligament and the meniscus in his left knee. He could be absent for as much as a year. He described it as one of “the worst” moments in his career.That is the bad news. The good news is that, in contrast to the personal impact on Neymar, the consequences for Brazil will be vanishingly small.South America’s qualifying process for the World Cup has long been one of the most compelling, most exacting contests in global soccer. The pool is far smaller, and the reward far closer, than in Europe, Africa or Asia — 10 teams going for four automatic spots — but what it has lacked in variety it has always made up for in intensity.There might, after all, be two overwhelming favorites to qualify in every cycle — Brazil and Argentina — but their progress is rarely smooth and never straightforward. It is not just that a pack of as many as six teams lies in wait, more than capable of capitalizing on any misstep, but that the very geography of the tournament presents a challenge.Bolivia plays many of its home games 12,000 feet above sea level. Ecuador, which tends to play at an altitude of 9,000 feet, has lost just one competitive game on home soil this decade. Qualifying for the World Cup, for any South American nation, has always been climbing a mountain.Not so much these days, though. The World Cup’s expansion means that six South American teams will qualify automatically to play in the United States, Canada and Mexico in 2026. A seventh will be routed through the intercontinental playoffs. South American qualifying, for so long such a high-wire act, now operates with a colossal safety net. Brazil has had a bad start, yes, but in all likelihood it will mean little or nothing in a couple of years’ time. It is going to have to try a lot harder than this not to qualify for the World Cup.CorrespondenceJames Warren and Diane Kravif both came away from last week’s newsletter, on Ian Graham’s attempts to help soccer learn more about itself, feeling shortchanged. The idea sounds all well and good, they both wrote, but it was distinctly lacking on concrete examples.“What kind of data did Dr. Graham analyze and how did the team apply his analyses to improve Liverpool’s performance and outcomes?” Diane asked. James was thinking along similar lines: “Might you at some point give an example or two of how Graham helped Liverpool improve? What do they, and others, have data on regarding their teams, and how is that used to attempt to improve performance?”This is quite a complex thing to explain quickly, which is why it was omitted last week. So strap yourselves in: Graham’s view — shared by most people in what everyone now calls “the space” — is that data is still most effective in recruitment. Adding the right player to a team, he and others argue, can have a much more pronounced, and faster, impact than using complex algorithms to fine-tune tactics.That data (in Liverpool’s case; other teams will focus on other things) can essentially be boiled down to whether every decision made by an individual player makes it more, or less, likely that that player’s team will score a goal.That is established by using both event data — passes, shots, actual things that happen, measured in detail sufficiently granular that it includes not only where a pass was played, but at what height and speed — and so-called tracking data, which examines where players move when they are not in possession of the ball. The metrics that soccer favors — such as expected goals (the quality of shots a team or player has) and expected assists (the quality of chances they create) — all flow from that model.That is not to say, though, that clubs like Liverpool have not used the information they possess to try to change the way their teams play. Liverpool has spent a long time working out how a team might best be spread across the field in order to dominate space, both in and out of possession. A lot of other work has been done, across the game, on what sort of offensive maneuvers are most likely to lead to shots on goal.In fact, that may well be where data has made its most obvious contribution to the way the game is played. There has, over the last decade, been a steady decrease in the number of shots teams take from long distance, a reduction that tracks quite neatly with the rise of analytics. A long-range effort is, by definition, a low-percentage chance. The data discourages such shots, and so teams, increasingly, do too.This newsletter would not be complete, though, without at least some airy, left-field challenge to an unchallenged convention. So thanks to Jeff Cadman for obliging.“Do we still need the offside rule?” he asked. “Would goal-hanging still occur in the modern game? It is hard to see any of the top teams changing their style or formation to have one player constantly standing next to the opposing goalkeeper.”This is a great question, and one I will admit to having previously contemplated. My conclusion was that Jeff’s thesis is basically right, but that soccer operates according to the law of unintended consequences: Nobody, when soccer decided to abolish the back pass to the goalkeeper, foresaw the rise of the high press. My guess is that abolishing offside would lead teams to defend deeper regardless, but I am also prepared to accept that my guess might be wrong. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Soccer

      Everton Sale Stalls Amid New Questions About 777 Partners

      by

      The U.S. firm bidding for the Premier League club, 777 Partners, has failed to provide required information to a British regulator.The proposed sale of the Premier League soccer team Everton F.C. to a Miami-based holding company has stalled because the firm, 777 Partners, has failed to provide audited financial statements to a British government regulator that must approve the deal.The regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, delivered its request to 777 Partners this month, according to multiple people with direct knowledge of the approval process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. If the company does not provide the requested financials or an acceptable explanation, its proposed takeover of Everton — a deal involving hundreds of millions of dollars in assumed debt and a coveted place in the world’s richest soccer league — could fall apart.The missing documents are the most significant complication to date in the effort by 777 Partners to add Everton to the collection of high-profile but financially troubled teams it has acquired over the past two years.A failure to close the deal could have severe consequences for the financial viability of Everton, a founding member of the Premier League saddled with the ongoing costs of a half-built new stadium, more than $500 million in debt and a projected annual loss of about $100 million. Everton’s finances are so dire that the club requires monthly infusions of millions of dollars, most recently a multimillion-dollar loan from 777 Partners, to keep operating.“Out of respect for the process, 777 Partners will not be commenting on the ongoing regulatory approval process for its proposed acquisition of Everton F.C.,” the company said in a statement.Everton’s current owner, Farhad Moshiri, on Monday dismissed concerns of any holdup or the suitability of 777 Partners as custodian of Everton. “They are highly professional and deliver exactly when they say they will, and I look forward to them achieving all their regulatory approvals and proceeding to completion on the timetable we set,” he told Sky Sports News.When it announced in September that it had reached a deal for a controlling interest in Everton, 777 Partners said it hoped to complete its takeover by the end of the year. That timeline now seems questionable.For the sale to be approved, 777 Partners must convince not only the Financial Conduct Authority but also the Premier League and England’s Football Association that it would be what they classify as a “fit and proper” steward of the 145-year-old club.But according to multiple people familiar with the process and a review of documents related to it, those bodies are unsatisfied with the financial statements that have been provided. In particular, they are uneasy about the failure of 777 Partners to provide up-to-date audited financial records for a holding company whose subsidiaries include not only well-known soccer teams in Belgium, Brazil, Germany and France but also investments in structured finance, insurance, media and airplane leasing.Wearing caps, Steven Pasko, left, and Josh Wander, the owners of 777 Partners, attended an Everton match last month. Peter Byrne/PA Images, via Getty ImagesThe audited records are not the only hurdle to approval of an Everton sale. The authorities are also asking the firm, run by its owners, Josh Wander and Steve Pasko, to provide details of the source of the funds behind the acquisition.The questions mirror concerns that the Belgian soccer authorities raised last year as they considered whether to grant a license to another one of the company’s teams, Standard Liège. In those discussions, 777 Partners told the Belgian soccer federation’s licensing committee that it could not provide the firm’s most recently audited accounts — a routine requirement in any assessment of the suitability and solidity of the businesses financing teams in the country’s top league.Eventually, the prospect of tossing one of Belgian soccer’s biggest teams out of the league was deemed unacceptable by the committee, and a compromise was found. Now, 777 Partners finds itself in the same position, and the clock is ticking again.While 777 Partners is focusing on completing its purchase of Everton, current and former employees have questioned its own viability. The company, which has rapidly expanded since it was founded in 2015, continues to miss routine payments to businesses, vendors and partners, including brokers that acted on some of the soccer deals, four people familiar with 777’s operations said.One person said the firm, which Mr. Wander recently claimed had 3,000 employees, has missed payroll on at least two occasions. Current and former employees have also reported that bonus payments, a major component of some executives’ compensation, have gone unpaid.777 Partners said Tuesday that “all contractually guaranteed bonuses have been paid,” but acknowledged a different incident this year in which it failed to pay the electric bill for its headquarters, an oversight that a spokesman attributed to a miscommunication.Should 777 Partners provide a fuller picture of its finances to British regulators, they most likely will find that most of 777’s soccer adventures have been funded by a single company, A-Cap. A longtime lender to 777 Partners, A-Cap has the largest exposure to many of 777’s businesses, including the soccer investments.A unit of A-Cap, for example, funded most of a loan of at least $25 million to Everton after the deal to buy the team was announced, two people familiar with the matter said. At 777 Partners, the reliance on money from A-Cap — loans now totaling at least $1 billion — has grown so large that 777 Partners is required to regularly update A-Cap executives about continuing business plans, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.The relationship between the firms is so enmeshed that last year 777 Partners provided A-Cap with a $9 million loan to acquire a beachfront apartment in one of Miami’s wealthiest neighborhoods. Officials from 777 Partners declined to comment on the arrangement. A-Cap did not respond to an email seeking details of its relationship with 777 Partners.The questions about 777 Partners’s finances and its soccer ambitions have not appeared to affect its figurehead, Mr. Wander. He was recently elected to the board of European Club Association, an influential grouping of European soccer’s top teams.That board seat was highlighted in a prospectus produced by 777 Partners to raise even more capital for its soccer business. The group hopes to raise about $250 million by the end of the year to help finance its purchase of Everton, which, without a new owner or fresh capital, risks bankruptcy. More