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      Can This Man Make Soccer Smarter?

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      Ian Graham helped transform Liverpool from a faded giant into soccer’s most cutting-edge club. Now he wants to do the same for everyone else.Ian Graham does not make for an especially likely revolutionary. He has a distinctly academic air: genial, whip-smart, just a touch crumpled. He is not a natural salesman. He does not particularly enjoy giving interviews. Roughly once every 10 minutes, he allows a mischievous, outré sense of humor to get the better of him. He feels this makes appearing on any broadcast medium something of a risk.It is hard to deny, though, that he is a resoundingly successful insurgent. Twenty years ago, he was among the first to explore the idea that soccer might be able to understand itself better by examining the vast reams of data produced by every single player in every single game. He did not so much pioneer the field of soccer analytics as help to conjure it into existence.Then, over the course of a decade at Liverpool, he acted as proof of concept. From scratch, he built a data department that came to be regarded as one of the most sophisticated in the sport. His systems, his methods and his insights turned a club that had long been a drifting, fading giant into a beacon of innovation.There are two ways to gauge his influence. The simplest is soccer’s default: the weighing of silver and gold. In his time at Liverpool, the club was crowned champion of England — for the first time in 30 years — Europe and the world. It made the Champions League final, the sport’s biggest game, three times in five seasons.But a better measure, perhaps, is the wake he left rather than the trail he blazed. When he joined Liverpool in 2012, the fact that an elite team might employ an actual scientist — he holds a doctorate in polymer physics, but deploys his honorific only as a joke — was seen as either outlandish or absurd.Soccer had long been resistant to outsiders, those who had not established their bona fides within the sport as players or coaches. Insiders regarded academics with particular contempt. The sport still viewed itself as too dynamic, too fluid, too poetic to be reduced to the mundanity of numbers. The idea of a data department was still something of a novelty in itself.Liverpool’s victory parade after it won the Champions League in 2019. Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBy the time Graham left Liverpool earlier this year, however, it was closer to a necessity. It is widely accepted that any club serious about competing in the continent’s major leagues should consult data when signing new players and assessing performances.Almost every major team in Europe has a data department, increasingly including someone with a scientific background. Graham would be forgiven, perhaps, for thinking that the revolution he helped to instigate was complete. As far as he is concerned, though, it has barely begun.GravityThere are, in Graham’s mind, two reasons that soccer is more complex than theoretical physics. The first is that “hard science” — his term — has the benefit of being bound by a set of unassailable rules. The laws of physics are nonnegotiable. Particles behave in predictable ways. That is not the case in soccer. “In physics, you do not have to take into account that gravity works slightly differently in Germany,” he said.The second is that elite sports do not provide the “huge luxury” of controlled experimentation. European soccer does not operate in sterile laboratory conditions. There is no opportunity to formulate, test and modify a hypothesis. “It’s very emotional, very reactive,” Graham said. Fans and executives alike demand instant gratification.The long-term future extends, at most, six weeks or so. To Christmas at the latest. The one thing nobody in soccer has, as a rule, is time.He attributes much of his success at Liverpool to the fact that he did. This was, he said, the key ingredient in the “special sauce” the club developed. “The first thing I said to the owners was that they shouldn’t expect to hear from me for six months,” he said. “That’s how long it would take to build all the structures we needed. Every time there was something more pressing, we were able to hire someone else to do it.”That few — if any — other teams have that privilege limits soccer’s ability to make the most of the great advances made in analytics in recent years. Even Brighton and Brentford, the two English clubs that now function as Liverpool’s heirs at the cutting edge, with their fairy-tale ascensions to the Premier League powered by data, must keep pace with a field evolving at breakneck speed.Brighton and Brentford have used their own data-driven improvements to punch above their weight in the Premier League.Justin Setterfield/Getty Images“If you look at what people are doing outside the sport, people who have the time to try things out, it’s often a lot more advanced,” Graham said. “The tools available, the technology, the data are all a lot better now. If you were to start building a system today, you’d have a much higher baseline. Inside a club, you have to stop developing at a certain level. There’s so much day-to-day work that there’s no time for research.”That is not the only limiting factor. Clubs operate in distinct silos: The work they do on data is largely proprietary. That teams should not share knowledge or disseminate best practices makes perfect sense on a sporting level. But not only is it antithetical on a scientific one, it serves to diminish the scale of data’s potential impact.Teams that did not have the foresight to be early adopters are, Graham estimates, “10 years behind” the likes of Liverpool, Brighton and Brentford today. Those who had the appetite but not the resources are locked out, too. “The teams who could benefit the most from it often can’t afford to do it, or at least do it properly,” he said.It has been almost a year, now, since the 45-year-old informed Liverpool that his role there had reached “a natural end.” Working for the club he had supported as a child was his “dream job,” he said, but he felt as if he had achieved all that he could. He knew that, at least in a professional environment, he would not be able to start from scratch again.When the news of his impending departure got out, he quickly received a flurry of offers from other teams, all hoping he could do for them what he had done for Liverpool. Graham did not find the prospect appealing. The systems he had designed for Liverpool were now the club’s intellectual property; he did not particularly want to build something for someone else. “I felt like I’d done it,” he said. “It would have been crazy to work for just one club again.”Instead, he set his sights on helping soccer as a whole to become just a little bit smarter.Known UnknownsOver the past couple of months, Graham has met with a succession of owners, and prospective owners, of soccer teams. They are — largely, though not exclusively — extremely wealthy Americans, often executives from private equity and venture capital firms, all of them keen to acquire the services of Ludonautics, the firm he established after leaving Liverpool, for the clubs they have bought or the clubs they hope to buy.The appeal is obvious. In a sport chronically lacking in time, Ludonautics has the feel of a shortcut. Graham’s résumé is compelling. So, too, is that of Michael Edwards, the feted, publicity-averse sporting director who worked with him at Liverpool and who is now engaged by the company as a “sporting consultant.”A year after it won the Champions League, Liverpool claimed its first English championship in 30 years.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe pitch, though, is not that they can repeat the success they had at Liverpool; it is that they can expand upon it. Graham no longer has to work according to the strictures and demands of an individual team. He can, instead, use the full gamut of modern technology at his disposal to build something new, something better, and to drive the sport’s next great leap forward.In time, he said, that may even allow him to attain what he regards as the “holy grail” of analytics: assessing the actual significance of a manager. “That’s very complicated,” he said. “It tends to be conflated with who has the best players, the best team. There are a lot of second-order effects. It’s very hard to know exactly how good any manager is, and what sort of impact they have on results.”What has struck him most in his recent meetings is how little soccer still knows about itself. It is not just that complex things — how much of a team’s performance can be attributed to luck, how much it is spending for each point it has acquired — remain a mystery. The simplest building blocks often do, too.Most pressing is that, in many cases, teams do not know what should be regarded as success. Ludonautics has seen sale prospectuses for teams in which the values of the squads are little more than finger-in-the-air estimates. That, Graham said, represents more than just a little sales sleight of hand; it has a tangible and detrimental effect.“In terms of performance, they often do not have a systematic way of knowing who they are and where they are,” he said. “They do not have a sense of the underlying strength of the team. Without that, how do you know where you should be finishing? How do you know if coming fifth is good or bad? And how do you hold people accountable?”As far as he is concerned, that is in the sport’s interest as a whole: The more teams that know the simple things as well as the complex ones, the better the sport becomes. “There’s a quote from John Keats about Isaac Newton using the prism to explain the colors of a rainbow,” Graham said. “But knowing why it happens doesn’t make a rainbow any less beautiful.” More

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      Everton, 777 and the Business of Premier League Soccer

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      777 Partners had been scooping up big-name soccer teams for two years when it bid for Everton. Doubts about its finances could kill the deal.The acquisitions came so quickly that it was hard to keep up. An agreement to buy the oldest soccer team in Italy. An investment in one of the most popular teams in Brazil. Stakes in well-known clubs in Belgium and France, Germany and Australia.Each new deal was trumpeted by the Miami-based investment company, 777 Partners, that was hurriedly snapping them up.Then, in September, the investment group revealed its biggest deal yet: an agreement to acquire a controlling stake in Everton F.C., a founding member of the Premier League and one of the oldest soccer clubs in England.Suddenly, everyone in soccer had heard of 777 Partners. Beyond its name, though, little was known about the company. It said it had $10 billion in assets, but was so closely held that verifying that claim was difficult. Lawsuits against the firm raised concerns for potential partners. A string of unpaid bills, some as recent as this month, raised more.Now, in bidding for a place in the Premier League, 777 Partners faces something it had previously avoided: a forensic review of its holdings, its finances and its brash American co-owner, Josh Wander, who in one recent interview said he was “more serious about investing” in soccer than anyone in history.His company’s bid for control of Everton, an acquisition that would eventually require hundreds of millions of dollars in assumed debt and other obligations, is by no means a sure thing. The Premier League, England’s Football Association and an independent British government regulator, the Financial Control Authority, all must approve the proposed deal, a process that is likely to take months.What they discover could have implications not only for the future of Everton, a fallen, money-losing giant, but also for rest of the financially troubled teams in the 777 network.James Garner of Everton, left, and two teammates celebrate a goal. Nigel French/Press Association, via Associated PressThe stakes are just as high for the Premier League, which is trying to prove it can oversee its clubs’ finances amid talk of government regulation, and for an interconnected global soccer economy reliant on the simple premise that teams can and will pay their bills.None of the soccer or public agencies currently assessing 777 Partners would discuss their review or a timetable for its conclusion.Mr. Wander, the co-founder and public face of the company, declined multiple requests to be interviewed for this article, though he published a long letter to fans on Everton’s website on Saturday in which he acknowledged fans had been discomfited by media reports about the company’s businesses. But those reports, he said, were “misleading.”“The truth is far more boring than the fiction,” he wrote.“We are not asset strippers nor speculative investors. We build and hold businesses, and intend to hold the football clubs in our portfolio for a long term,” a spokesman for 777 wrote in an emailed statement. In the letter to fans, Mr. Wander wrote that he would share “player recruitment, data analytics and commercial development resources,” with the other teams in the group.More than a dozen current or former employees, club officials and others who have done business with 777, however, revealed new details and questions about the sources of its financing. The people asked not to be named because of relationships with the company.In interviews, they also shared details about unmet obligations and unpaid bills, and wondered if the company has the resources to manage a global network of clubs carrying hundreds of millions of dollars in debts and obligations.A successful takeover of Everton would bring the number of clubs in 777’s portfolio to eight. The teams in its existing stable are well known: Genoa in Italy, Hertha Berlin in Germany, Vasco da Gama in Brazil. All are different in size and ambition but shared a common theme before attracting the interest of 777: They were all in financial crisis.Mr. Wander, 42, and his co-founder Steve Pasko, a Wall Street veteran two decades his senior, would not have been seen as a typical sports team investors when they started 777 Partners in 2015. At the time, the company’s core investments were related to the world of structured settlements, an opaque industry in which recipients of long-term annuities, typically the result of compensation claims, cash them out for lump sums of immediate cash.In one recent interview, Wander, on the left, said he was “more serious about investing in soccer than anyone in history.”Luca Zennaro/EPA, via ShutterstockThe firm quickly branched out into other sectors, including low-cost airlines and litigation financing, according to Gary Chodes, who served as a board member of a 777 subsidiary until 2017. He said he parted on good terms, but that the firm he left had few profitable businesses. So he noticed when 777 started collecting soccer teams and committing to assume their sizable debts through loans and other upfront payments.“If I was to ask, ‘Is there a little bit of mystery as to how Josh would generate three quarters of a billion dollars to buy a sports team from the businesses he owns in 777?’ — I would say that’s somewhat of a mystery,” he said.In past interviews, Mr. Wander has painted a picture of a sprawling and successful business, one that manages $10 billion in assets, counts 60 subsidiaries across a range of industries: sports, insurance, aviation, media. Many of the company’s financial details are difficult to verify since the business is private and its financial structure, current and former staff members said, is closely controlled by Mr. Wander and Mr. Pasko. Last weekend, for example, it announced the sale of one of its insurance businesses without identifying the buyers or the price.The company relies on loans to operate many of its businesses, according to the current and former employees. One of the biggest lenders to 777 is A-Cap, a private company operating in the insurance and investment business, three people said. A-Cap did not respond to a request for comment. “Not all of our 60 businesses will be profitable at any one time, but the fundamental underlying business performance of the 777 Group is strong,” Mr. Wander wrote in Saturday’s letter to fans, adding the company was not a “typical private equity firm.”Yet as 777 executives have spoken of their ambition and the scale of their operations, some of the businesses they run, including their sports teams, have reported missed payments related to agreed-upon funding schedules and even routine operating expenses.In England, for example, the chairman of the British Basketball League, in which 777 owns a 45 percent share, wrote to its founders on Sept. 6 warning that the league was at risk of bankruptcy unless the firm delivered a late payment of about $1 million. Those funds eventually arrived.In Belgium, according to reporting by the soccer magazine Josimar, the lack of clarity around 777’s finances spooked Belgian soccer’s licensing officials enough that they considered refusing to allow the company to continue operating the 125-year-old club it owns, Standard Liège. Eventually a compromise was found, and the team was granted a license.A successful takeover of Everton would bring the number of clubs in 777’s portfolio to eight, including Vasco da Gama in Brazil. Buda Mendes/Getty ImagesIn Brazil, Vasco da Gama had been anxiously awaiting a scheduled payment of about $23 million due the same week as the basketball league was expecting its funds. Without the money, Vasco has been unable to make outstanding payments to its suppliers and to rival teams owed in past deals for players. When it missed some of the payments, soccer’s governing body prohibited the club from signing new players until its debts were paid.Through its spokesman, 777 said it had already delivered much of the money required in its payment schedule with Vasco. It also said it was ahead of “ahead of schedule” and “beyond our original commitment” to the British Basketball League. But to some outsiders, the repeated issues involving money suggested an exercise in financial plate-spinning rather than the kind of healthy, well-capitalized owner a Premier League team requires.Away from the soccer field, its co-founder, Mr. Wander, built an image of a risk taker with a knack for making money.One former associate, Rhonda Bentzen, recalled how Mr. Wander would request loans from colleagues at a structured settlements business he had set up with the promise of profits in a matter of days. “I did it with him a few times and he absolutely doubled the money every single time,” Ms. Bentzen said. But once, she said, she watched Mr. Wander drop about $5,000 in a Las Vegas slot machine, lose it all in less than a minute and “not bat an eye.”In the early years of his business career, Mr. Wander was shadowed by a cocaine-trafficking charge from his college days at the University of Miami. After he pleaded no contest in 2003, he spent more than a decade on probation. A spokesman for the company said his plea, and the successful completion of his probation, meant he “was not convicted of anything.”Court records reveal other details about Mr. Wander, his company and money. In 2012, the Bellagio casino sued Mr. Wander for failing to pay back a $54,500 cash advance. In March, American Express went to court seeking $324,000.89 that had been charged to a 777 Partners credit card. The spokesman for 777 said both matters were resolved. Court documents show the Bellagio repayment remained outstanding for at least six years.Just last week, a former business partner in 777’s airline business made an allegation of fraud against the company in the Court of Chancery in Delaware. The filing said the firm and a subsidiary, Phoenicia L.L.C., “are part of a web of companies 777 uses to move around money and assets to operate and conceal a sprawling fraudulent enterprise.” A 777 spokesman declined to respond to the accusation, citing a company policy not to comment on litigation.The pattern of late and delayed payments, rather than any lawsuits, raises the biggest doubts about 777’s suitability to run Everton, said Keiron Maguire, a lecturer in the management school at the University of Liverpool and a specialist in soccer finance. “It’s a red flag to a potentially more significant cash-flow issue, or incompetent management,” he said.Everton’s Goodison Park Stadium in Liverpool, England.Jon Super/Associated PressMoney is of paramount concern at Everton at the moment. The club’s current owner, Farhad Moshiri, has spent close to $1 billion on Everton since purchasing the team in 2016, and the club’s immediate financial needs are so acute that 777 has already lent the team more than 20 million pounds, or almost $25 million, just so it can continue to operate.By agreeing to take on its ballooning debts, as well as a Premier League wage bill and a half-finished stadium on the Liverpool waterfront, 777 Partners has essentially committed to injecting hundreds of millions of dollars into the club. Last weekend, they saw the job ahead first hand, taking in an Everton match from seats in the front row of the director’s box.Executives at Vasco da Gama in Brazil were watching. It had not escaped their attention that the $25 million loan that 777 Partners gave Everton last month was similar to an amount that was, at that moment, still owed to Vasco.On Thursday, a month after it was due, part of the payment arrived, with a promise that the balance would be paid on Friday morning. But it was not paid. The holdup, 777 Partners said, was a bank holiday in the United States.The missing $7 million, the company assured Vasco, would be there this week. More

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      Liverpool, V.A.R. and the Problem With Process

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      If process and hubris trump getting calls right, the system has broken down.There are very few coherent sentences in what will, in time, doubtless come to be known as the Luis Díaz Tape, a sort of Premier League equivalent to the Zapruder film. The various protagonists communicate in clipped and meaningless phrases, any clarity sacrificed on the altar of self-important brevity.The tape lasts only two minutes, and while it is not a particularly thrilling video — a group of faceless voices discussing procedure while staring at screens, advancing resolutely toward a presaged outcome — it is, by turns, tense and frustrating and never less than compelling.It is best considered, really, as a character drama. The setting is this: Díaz, the Liverpool forward, has just scored to put his team ahead against Tottenham Hotspur. The goal is ruled out, on the field, for offside. A few miles away, in a building at Stockley Park west of London, the Premier League’s Video Assistant Referee studio whirs into action.Darren England, the game’s designated V.A.R., wants to check if the goal should be allowed to stand. He commands that the footage be rewound and paused and decorated with a line. He determines that, no, Díaz had timed his run perfectly. “That’s fine, perfect,” he says to his colleagues in the video room and to Simon Hooper, the on-field official. “Check complete.”It is here that everything unravels. The goal should count, but England seems to have declared that the original call — no goal — is “perfect.” “Well done, boys; good process,” Hooper mutters. Tottenham restarts the game with a free kick. A couple of pregnant seconds pass by. Nobody seems to have noticed the non sequitur. The audience, though, knows.Luis Díaz, hero denied.Peter Cziborra/Action Images, via ReutersAt this point, the hero enters. Mo Abby is not a qualified referee; he is the technological specialist, present to operate the video equipment while the officials issue their expert judgments. “Are you happy with this?” he asks, a hint of nervousness in his voice, as if he knows he is stepping outside his role.Now, it all goes to pieces. The precise nature, the exact scale, of the error is suddenly clear to England and Dan Cook, his assistant. Another outsider, Oli Kohout — the hub operations manager, which is not a title that can be pithily explained — suggests pausing the game and allowing Hooper to correct the mistake.England is the one with the power to make that call. In the inevitable dramatization, it is at this point that the camera will focus intently on his face. His eyes will betray his panic, his fear, his dawning realization of his powerlessness. His voice, though, does not. The game has resumed. “Nothing I can do,” he says, again and again, with surprising conviction, his hubris sealing his fate.It is this that is, in truth, most troubling about the incident at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. The last week has been rife with false equivalences. When the Liverpool manager, Jürgen Klopp, suggested that the most sporting consequence of the mistake would be for the game itself to be replayed, the response was predictable. Should we replay the 1966 World Cup final? Argentina’s defeat of England in 1986? The 2019 Champions League final? That game last year where my team was on the end of a disputed, subjective call?The difference should not need to be spelled out, but since we are here: Plenty of teams have been the victims of errors no less consequential than the one that cost Liverpool last Saturday. In almost all of those cases, though, those decisions were made in good faith. The officials believed they were right. They did not press ahead in the clear, undisputed knowledge that they were wrong.There are plenty of reasons to be object to the existence, or at least the application, of V.A.R. It interrupts the rhythm of games. It diminishes the experience of watching soccer in a stadium, allowing the nature of the action to be determined remotely, by some apparently unaccountable external force. It creates and enforces an expectation of perfection that is impossible to attain and will, therefore, be a source of eternal disappointment.Liverpool’s Jürgen Klopp, offering some thoughts.Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockThe Díaz tape, though, is a perfect distillation of what may be the most significant objection to V.A.R. Darren England’s response, both plaintive and brash — “nothing I can do” — is rooted in a belief that what matters, above all, is the correct implementation of protocol. The rules, the sainted Laws, decree that once a game has restarted, it cannot be stopped. Errors are material reality. The referee’s decision is final, even when it is known to be wrong.This is indicative of what V.A.R. has done to soccer. Recently retired officials have a cloying tendency to lionize the days when they could apply what is known, euphemistically, as “game management.” Generally, this means referring to players by their nicknames, indulging in a false and unreciprocated chumminess, and allowing the more famous participants in a game rather more leeway than their lesser colleagues.Such an approach is, of course, flawed, but it is perhaps preferable to the technologically induced alternative, which is a world in which any form of discretion has been almost entirely removed. Quite how much soccer has shifted to allow itself to be adjudicated from afar is overlooked worryingly frequently.The most obvious example of this is handball, the definition of which seems to change with the seasons. The motivation behind this is not an attempt to hew closer to the spirit of the game, but to make it possible for a decision to be made on a screen.There are others, though. The shifting thresholds for red and yellow cards and the shrinking border between reckless and malicious are both inspired by the need to make an objective decision, one that does not rely on any human allowance for context or intent.This is the atmosphere in which referees now function, one in which they are not there to apply the rules as they see fit, but in which the rules are unyielding and inflexible and do not brook any interpretation. It is a world in which what matters is not whether anything makes any sense, but in which protocol — officious and unapologetic and blind — is king.This search for absolutism has led, ironically, to a sense of greater arbitrariness. That, in the aftermath of the Díaz incident, almost every club could pick out a litany of its own injustices in the recent past was designed to illustrate that Liverpool’s response was somehow excessive or self-pitying. Instead, it highlighted more than anything how fractured fans’ belief in the fair implementation of the Laws of the Game — always portentously capitalized — has become.Nobody is quite sure what the rules are anymore, because they have a tendency to change so often. This week, this is a handball and the referees are clamping down on time-wasting or players who demand yellow cards, and next week they are not.Decisions are imposed without adequate explanation by an officiating body that has issued 14 formal apologies since the start of last season but seems still, for some reason, convinced of its infallibility. The letter of the law is applied rigorously, but the spirit of it has been lost almost entirely. And the feeling that follows is the same as that which can be detected in the Luis Díaz tape: a sense of unmitigated frustration, of wild confusion, of total powerlessness. There is nothing Darren England can do, and in that he is no different from the rest of us.The 2030 World Cup Will Be Held … EverywhereTomas Cuesta/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is to Gianni Infantino’s credit, really, that he resisted the temptation to announce the location of the 2030 World Cup in the style of Oprah Winfrey giving out cars. Spain: You get a World Cup. Portugal: You get a World Cup. Morocco, Uruguay, Argentina and, for reasons that will have to be explained later, Paraguay: You can all have a World Cup, too.The FIFA president will insist that this plan is perfectly sensible. Admirable, even. Hosting the tournament across three continents, Infantino explained on Wednesday, sends a message of “peace, tolerance and inclusion.” It means spreading the financial burden of a 48-team tournament, and by consequence sharing the joy.There is even just a hint of romance. South America has long believed it would be fitting if the World Cup’s centenary edition took place back where it all began: in Uruguay, the host of the 1930 tournament, and Argentina, the losing finalist.It had looked for some time, though, as if that might be impossible. Even with their resources pooled, the South American bidders did not possess the infrastructure — specifically the stadiums — to meet FIFA’s exacting requirements.Infantino’s solution — handing the tournament’s opening three fixtures to Montevideo, Buenos Aires and Asunción and then shifting the rest of the tournament to the Pillars of Hercules — will doubtless be sold as an ingenious compromise. That this plan effectively clears the path for the 2034 tournament to go to Asia, and to Saudi Arabia, is obviously just a coincidence.At this stage, all of this is still just an idea. The plan still has to be ratified by a vote of all 211 FIFA members next year. That it has been suggested at all, though, makes the organization’s ecological attitude abundantly clear. The 2022 World Cup might have been the single most environmentally damaging event ever staged. The 2026 edition is being held across a whole continent. The likelihood is that 2030 will take place across three.That may be the most consequential objection, but there is something less tangible to be mourned here, too. Elite sports may now be a televisual event, dislocated and remote, but it is the connection to a place that lifts a World Cup into something beyond mere content to be consumed.It is a chance for a country to go on hiatus, to revel in itself, to spend a month being swept away. That was true of Russia in 2018 and of Australia and New Zealand this year. It was that sense of proximity, the feel of a global carnival, that illuminated Qatar, far more than the stadiums. Spreading the World Cup around does not diffuse that. It dilutes it. Sure, everyone gets a little piece of it, but that does not have the same effect. Not at all. More

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      A Night at the Best Pickup Soccer Game in the World

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      As the players idled by the chain-link fence at the side of the field, taking great gulps of air and water and conducting an immediate autopsy of the game that had just finished, they focused their attention on three outstanding bones of contention. Instinctively, they separated into dedicated working groups to tackle each one.The first considered whether a penalty that had not been awarded absolutely should have been, as an aggrieved plaintiff was claiming. The second investigated if a particularly egregious foul was premeditated (yes) and/or warranted (also yes). The third explored the knotty issue of how many deflections preceded the last of the game’s 12 goals — estimates ranged from two to “about a million” — and whether allowing the goal could, therefore, reasonably be considered the goalkeeper’s fault.Before that matter could be settled, the debrief was cut short. Each player had to dig into wallets or pockets to find five pounds — just over $6 — to pay their share for the use of the field. As they strolled stiffly to the parking lot, the squabbling gave way to discussion of plans for the rest of the evening, and for next week.This is all part of the ritual of the scrimmage, the scratch game, the kickabout. It is a conversation that happens thousands of times a week, across the world, after thousands of games like this one. The only difference here is the qualifications of those involved.A typical chat before any pickup game, anywhere in the world. It’s just that Alex Bruce, center, played more than 300 professional games.The 20 players who have just paid about $120 to play for an hour on an unremarkable synthetic field in south Manchester are used to rather different surroundings. Between them, they have made more than 1,000 appearances — and scored more than 100 goals — in England’s Premier League. They have played professionally in a dozen or so countries. Among their number are players who have won trophies, tasted the Champions League, represented their nations.They wear their fame relatively lightly. There are no replica jerseys bearing their names. Only a couple go as far as to use shorts emblazoned with club crests. Watch them play for a few minutes, though, and it is clear this game is hardly ordinary.The quality on display, as one player has put it, is “frightening.” As it should be: The victim of the contested penalty is Ravel Morrison, once of Manchester United and West Ham. The judge of the debate on the foul is Joleon Lescott, a Premier League and F.A. Cup champion with Manchester City.It is universally agreed that the game’s most gifted regular participant — and most unapologetically competitive spirit — is Stephen Ireland, who played for a decade with Manchester City and Aston Villa. The two players stretching out their calves, tuning out the bickering, are Papiss Cissé and Oumar Niasse, once of Newcastle United and Everton.They are part of a rotating cast of professionals — most of them retired recently enough that rust has not yet set in — who come here every week to take part in what may be the best game of pickup soccer in the world.Papiss Cissé, formerly of Newcastle United, rising above Bruce for a header.It was not designed to be anything of the sort. The weekly game started a couple of years ago, as coronavirus lockdowns began to ease, when a group of friends — most of whom had played semiprofessionally, on the lower rungs of England’s soccer pyramid — set up an amateur team, the Farmers, to play together on Sundays.This part of Manchester, though, is a relatively small world. The city’s leafy southern suburbs, and the gilded villages of north Cheshire, are home to dozens of professional players, both current and former. It did not take long before a couple of them, friends of friends, had accepted invitations to join in.From there, it spiraled quickly, said Kial Callacher, one of the team’s founders. Soon, the Farmers were winning some games by “30 goals or so,” he said. “After a while, it wasn’t really fun.” The team’s opponents, presumably, were of broadly the same view. Everyone involved decided it might be better if the ex-pros just played among themselves.So their hourlong games, held on Tuesday or Wednesday nights, were born. The guest list only grew more stellar. Some weeks might feature Antonio Valencia, John O’Shea, Danny Simpson and Danny Drinkwater, all of them Premier League champions, or Nedum Onuoha, formerly of Manchester City and now an ESPN analyst. Dale Stephens, a Premier League player as recently as last year, is a mainstay.The consensus is that Stephen Ireland, once of Manchester City, is the most talented regular participant.Cissé and Oumar Niasse, who both also had Premier League careers, might disagree.There are many more who spent years in England’s Football League. Few, if any, of the 66 members of the team’s WhatsApp group do not have at least semiprofessional experience. Games are, to put it mildly, competitive.“I’ll get an early night the day before,” said Joe Thompson, a regular participant who spent 13 years as a pro, mostly for Rochdale. “I’ll stretch in the afternoon, eat right, hydrate: all of the things I did as a professional. You don’t want to do yourself a disservice, or take liberties with the standard. You feel like you are constantly on trial. You have to be on the mettle or the group will let you know.”There is no shortage of candidates eager to see if they can handle it; so many are waiting to join that there is now a one-in, one-out policy on the WhatsApp group. Priority is given to prospective new entrants who have made the most appearances in the Champions League and the Premier League.For some, the appeal is at least partly practical. “It keeps people ticking over,” Thompson said. “If you’re out of contract, looking for a club, you can keep as fit as you like in the gym, but nothing replaces match sharpness.” Simpson has said it helped him remain “football fit” as he waited for a new club. Many in the group expect Morrison, most recently with D.C. United in Major League Soccer, to be picked up soon as a free agent.For a vast majority, though, the game meets a spiritual need. Thompson is not a typical case. Twice, during his career, he was found to have a form of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. He returned to play on both occasions but retired on medical advice in 2019, at age 30. As a result, he said, he found it relatively easy to “make peace” with leaving the game.A single game last week produced 12 goals and at least three postgame inquests.Many find the transition much harder. Alex Bruce, a defender who represented 14 clubs in a career that spanned almost two decades, compared retirement to “dropping off a cliff.” “There’s no buildup, and then one day you’re at home, wondering what to do with yourself,” he said. As much as pining for the sport itself, players said they tended to feel bereft outside the confines of a locker room. “You’re institutionalized,” Bruce said. “You miss the environment.”The WhatsApp group — an ongoing stream of affectionate teasing, lighthearted criticism and off-the-cuff soccer punditry, according to members — offers a digital imitation of the daily rhythm of life inside a club. And the games themselves provide an outlet for the competitive urge. “It’s better than going to the gym and running on a treadmill on your own,” Bruce said.It is that, more than anything, that brings them all to an unremarkable field deep in south Manchester, whatever the weather.Being a soccer player is, of course, glorious, glamorous fun. But, Thompson said, “over the course of 20 years or so, it chips away at you.” The pressure is intense. The politics are toxic. There is little agency: A player’s fate can swing on an unfortunate injury, an unhelpful manager, a single bad decision.At the end, there is no sentiment whatsoever. “Most people don’t retire from the game,” Thompson said. “It retires them.” Soccer moves on, unforgiving. “You’re on a pitch, in the fresh air, with a ball,” one participant said as he watched his colleagues and friends slip into their cars. “It’s what it was like when we started playing.”Once a week, though, these players can engage with the game on their terms. There is no crowd. There is no money, other than the fee to use the field. There is no pressure, other than that which they put on themselves. They all carry the scars of a life spent playing a professional sport. Those days are over, now, but they do not want to say goodbye. What they want to do, instead, is to play.“You’re on a pitch, in the fresh air, with a ball,” Thompson said as he watched his colleagues and friends slip into their cars. “It’s what it was like when we started playing. I think for most of them, it’s an hour a week when they can feel free.”That is, they know, a precious thing. This summer, the group played a couple of exhibition games against local teams, operating under the moniker Inter Retirement. They have since been approached by a production company with the idea of launching a YouTube channel, of turning their private game into public content.They can see the merit in the suggestion, of course, but one drawback, above all others, gives them pause. The act of observation would change the nature of the event. It would turn soccer, once more, into work. They come to this field, once a week, because there are no cameras. There is no spotlight, no pressure.Here, at last, that they can play. More

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      What the NBA May Need: a Soccer-Style Way to Banish Bad Teams

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      Dave Checketts, a former Knicks executive, has seen firsthand the emotional, and financial, power of relegation through his post-N.B.A. career in European soccer.Dave Checketts believed he had experienced pretty much everything in his decades-long career as a sports executive. As the Knicks’ president, he had hired Pat Riley as coach in 1991, launching a memorable decade of championship contention at Madison Square Garden. As a founding owner of an M.L.S. franchise in Salt Lake City with his company, SCP Worldwide, he had negotiated a partnership with Real Madrid that helped to produce one of the early soccer-specific stadiums in the United States and an M.L.S. Cup title in 2009.But none of Checketts’s years in the N.B.A., N.H.L. (as owner of the St. Louis Blues for a few years starting in 2006) or M.L.S. had prepared him for a Sunday in May 2022 when Burnley, the English football club, was relegated from the Premier League for the first time in six years — in a stomach-churning, one-goal defeat, at home, on the season’s final day.“For a regular-season event, I’d never witnessed anything like that,” said Checketts, who had been appointed to the club’s board of directors in 2021. “It was gripping, and then, it’s over, you’re relegated, out of the top league. Fans were sobbing. It was a funeral service. But because I was at home in Connecticut, I could look at it from a distance, also see it as business strategy.”He recalled telling his wife, Deb, “The N.B.A. needs to do this!”In a calmer state, he recognized that North American professional basketball lacks the lower-league infrastructure of European soccer to consider for promotion/relegation, among other cultural and financial disqualifying factors. But in a recent discussion, Checketts, 67, spoke with The New York Times about the increasing connectedness of global sport.This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.How did your association with Burnley F.C. come about?Our M.L.S. team was not doing well the first two years. After we started badly in Year 3, I let everybody go. There was a young partner in our firm, Alan Pace, and I asked him to be interim C.E.O. Alan fell in love with the game. When he put together the deal to buy Burnley in 2020, he called and said, “The Premier League is telling me I’ve got to have someone who’s been around professional sports.” I put money in and joined his ownership group.Burnley was relegated from the Premier League in 2022 but won promotion in 2023. Checketts said he was the promotion-relegation system as “business strategy.”Richard Sellers/PA Images, via Getty ImagesAfter relegation in 2022, you experienced promotion, the flip side, with Burnley losing only three games in the second tier, or Championship. What was that like?There was a coach who had been there for a decade, Sean Dyche, who was so popular that there was a bar there named for him. But we were losing and Alan fired him with a few games left in the relegation season. The fans went crazy on social media; it was ugly. This guy’s an American — what does he know?Then Alan hired Vincent Kompany, who’d been a star at Manchester City and was coaching in Belgium. He shed payroll, went with young players and a new attacking system. When we won the Championship, they held a parade, which I was there for. Burnley is very industrial, one of the oldest clubs in the world. The stadium seats only about 20,000, but it felt like the whole city was there, tens of thousands.J.J. Watt, one of two former N.F.L. players — Malcolm Jenkins being the other — to invest in Burnley, was at the clinching game and got to carry the trophy. Why is English football suddenly attracting U.S. celebrities? (Watt’s wife, Kealia, who played in the National Women’s Soccer League, is also an investor.)Obviously, Ryan Reynolds’s buying Wrexham and the television series has been a huge factor, as well as “Ted Lasso” on Apple. But Americans have always had a fascination with England, anything with the royal family. And look, Americans are also used to watching what they think is the best in sport. It’s not surprising that with soccer’s growth there’s a fascination with the Premier League.If promotion/relegation would never fly in American pro leagues, including M.L.S., is there any sports entity where it could be workable?I think it’s an absolutely great idea to have a power conference in college football, and there you could have promotion/relegation, where the bottom three or four would go down, but would still be able to play major college teams. It would create incredible interest. But you’d need a central power source, like a pro commissioner, and the N.C.A.A. is not that.Speaking of borrowing from Europe, the N.B.A. is launching an in-season tournament, but it already has a tournament — it’s called the playoffs. Will this work?I think if you went out on the street, even in New York City, and asked, what is this N.B.A. tournament about, I doubt many would know. It’s a separate tournament, but the results count in the regular-season standings? They’re going to Las Vegas for the championship in December?Let’s say Phoenix goes to Vegas and wins the championship. Do they go home and have a celebration? In Europe, they certainly do celebrate winning any cup.It doesn’t feel like American fans need it, but [N.B.A. Commissioner] Adam Silver is never afraid to try something new, and maybe it will stimulate some interest.As the Knicks’ president, Checketts had hired Pat Riley as coach in 1991, launching a memorable decade of championship contention.Richard Perry/The New York TimesSome of the N.B.A.’s best players now are foreign-born. Might there ever be European team expansion?In 1990, when I was general manager of N.B.A. International, we were already identifying expansion cities, but I don’t think owners are spending any time on it anymore. It’s fine to go over and play a few games for marketing. But you start complicating things with collective bargaining, television contracts, labor laws. If we were looking at it 33 years ago and it hasn’t happened yet, I doubt it’s ever going to happen. Certainly not in my lifetime.On the aforementioned subject of American fans demanding the best in a particular sport, where is M.L.S. on becoming a true major league on the international stage?[Lionel] Messi has made an obvious difference this summer, but how long can he go and what happens after that? How many guys can be given $50 million? How do you get that huge network deal? For me, the financial side was impossible to carry on. (Checketts sold his stake in Real Salt Lake in 2013.)First of all, we play in the summer so foreign players have to leave to play for their national teams. It would also help if the best U.S. players stayed in M.L.S. except you usually have a national team coach who prefers they go to Europe because the game is so much better. So it’s a difficult challenge, but you do have the World Cup coming here in 2026 and it would help if the U.S. could be really competitive. This may be a make-or-break decade. More

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      A Premier League Love Story Has Heartbreak Ahead

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      Luton Town’s rise to the world’s richest soccer league proves England’s fabled merit system still works. What happens next may show that it does not.Within a few days of Luton Town’s promotion to the Premier League in May, the construction crews were moving in and the scaffolding was going up at its stadium, Kenilworth Road. The club’s first home game in English soccer’s top flight since its money-spinning, supercharged rebrand into the richest, most popular league in the world was not quite three months away. There was an alarming amount of work to do, and not nearly enough time to do it.Luton’s stadium has for some time been something of a throwback in English soccer: defiantly cramped, unapologetically tumbledown, the kind of careworn, hostile, raw sort of place most teams have long since left behind in favor of something more modern, more comfortable, possibly just a little bland.Kenilworth Road, though, was both a point of difference and a point of pride, a feature the club had come to regard as a source of strength, rather than weakness.“I don’t think anyone likes coming to the Kenny,” defender Amari’i Bell said last season, using the ground’s affectionate nickname. “When we played Chelsea, I don’t think they enjoyed it. If you come here and you’re not in the right frame of mind, you can’t wait to leave.”The Premier League, though, has commanded that the club dull the edge of that secret weapon, just a little. It has an image to maintain, after all, and that means ensuring all of its stadiums meet certain criteria.Luton’s stadium is tucked so tightly into its neighborhood that one entrance cuts through a row of homes.Carl Recine/ReutersUnsurprisingly, Kenilworth Road did not, and so Luton had to make the first substantive changes to the stadium in years. The work proved so extensive, in fact, that the team requested that its first home game — scheduled for a week from Saturday — be postponed because it couldn’t guarantee the most critical renovations would be completed in time.There were new floodlights to install, old ones to improve. It needed a room for news conferences with seating for 100 journalists, positions for 50 television and data-analysis cameras, and studio space for the league’s broadcasters. The gantry, the high perch where play-by-play commentators call matches, had to be removed, clad in nonflammable material, and reinstalled.One particular edict was relaxed — Luton will not start the season with undersoil heating installed beneath the field — but the preparations were still a colossal undertaking. Gary Sweet, the club’s chief executive, estimated that the cost had amounted to $15 million and rising, but Luton had little choice. The rules change when you make the Premier League.Luton’s arrival in the richest league in the world, 30 years after it last appeared in the top flight, is the culmination to the sort of fairy tale that is central to English soccer’s self-identity. It has been only a decade since Luton was marooned in the sixth tier, mixing with part-time opponents, after spending years sailing closer and closer to oblivion.Now here it is, awaiting Manchester City and Manchester United and Arsenal, in the promised land. One of its players, Pelly Ruddock Mpanzu, has been present every step of the way; he will become the first player in history to feature for the same team in each of England’s top five divisions. Its chief executive, Sweet, is a lifelong fan.The club has said it will pour its Premier League payday into the club’s infrastructure.Carl Recine/ReutersHigh on the list of improvements needed to meet Premier League standards: new floodlights.Lee Smith/Action Images, via ReutersIt is the kind of story that defines England’s romantic vision of its national game, living and breathing proof of the power of its fabled pyramid, the porous superstructure that bonds the Premier League not only to the Football League, which manages the divisions just below it, but to everything below the professional levels of the sport: the National League, the Northern Premier League, the United Counties League.The pyramid is supposed to be a model of social mobility, a pathway from the gutter to the stars. Luton is a case study in its continuing viability. It has made it, and in doing so it has demonstrated that every club — every player — has the right to dream, no matter where they might currently find themselves. Luton shows that anything is possible.Until a certain point. Luton’s prize for promotion was, as is the case for every team to pass through the gilded doors of the world’s most lucrative domestic competition, almost unbelievably rich. The club will earn a minimum of $215 million even if it remains in the Premier League for only a single season. For Luton, that money is transformative.The club plans, for example, to use a considerable proportion of it to finance a new stadium. Luton might love Kenilworth Road, might cherish its ragged edges, but it has long known it requires a new home if it is to have a stable future. A quarter of its Premier League income has been earmarked for that project, Sweet has said.“We are consummate long-term planners,” he said. “We look at planning for the club five or 10 years ahead, actually, rather than five or 10 minutes, which a lot of people do. That’s the golden rule of what our success will be: having a sensible, long-term, financial, strategic plan.” Luton sees its time in the Premier League as a way to “build the foundations for the future.”Victory in last season’s Championship playoff final sent Manager Rob Edwards and Luton Town to the Premier League. Staying there will be something else altogether.Matthew Childs/Action Images Via ReutersIt is hard to refute the idea that this is precisely where any team’s priorities should lie, certainly those outside of the game’s elite, a subset now grown so fat that it is effectively too big to fail.After all, it is another central tenet of English soccer that clubs are not just businesses but social institutions, operated by boards and chief executives and suits of variable origin and quality but owned — on a spiritual level, if not a legal one — by the fans. Their primary interest is, or at least should be, existential: always having a club to support.The problem is that spending money on infrastructure means not spending it on players. This has been another summer of excess for the majority of the teams in the Premier League, where the scale of the spending has at times bordered on the irrational, almost wanton.Declan Rice is now the most expensive English player in history. Manchester City, which won the treble last season with five elite central defenders, added a sixth, Josko Gvardiol, for more than $100 million. Manchester United spent just as much on Rasmus Hojlund, a Danish striker with a grand total of 27 career goals. Liverpool has committed $110 million to two midfielders, and its owners are currently being accused of modern soccer’s greatest sin: parsimony.Luton, by contrast, has performed the sporting equivalent of winning the lottery and immediately investing its winnings in low-yield, long-term bonds. It is not that the club has not spent. By its modest standards, it has: Seven new players have arrived, at a total cost of $20 million or so. Sweet has been at pains to point out that two of those fees have been club records.The emphasis, though, has been on using the Premier League windfall as judiciously, as prudently, as possible, not sacrificing tomorrow for fleeting satisfaction today. The budget, Sweet has conceded, has been “somewhat restricted” by that choice, but the club does not believe such an approach automatically leads to failure.Weeds grew on the steps inside Kenilworth Road this summer.Carl Recine/ReutersWith work on the stadium still not complete, Luton postponed its first home game.Carl Recine/Reuters“We can be competitive,” he said. “We firmly believe that if a group of players are good enough to get you there, they’re generally good enough to keep you there.”That is not quite how it has been received by the Premier League’s never-knowingly underemployed commentariat. Common consensus has it that Luton has effectively doomed itself to relegation — “100 percent,” one former player suggested on the talkSport radio station — by refusing to invest sufficiently, or even suitably, in its squad. Others have suggested that the club’s caution betrays a lack of ambition.It is here, of course, that the reverence for the pyramid begins to look a little like a comforting delusion. There is, indeed, a common thread that binds the game’s lower reaches to the foothills of the Premier League, and a communal romance in witnessing a team traverse it. That ends as soon as the final step is taken. The promised land, it turns out, is all business. The rules change when you make it to the Premier League.Luton can take its place among the elite, but it can never truly belong there, not unless it is prepared to risk its future in favor of its present. It might survive for a season, maybe two, standing by not only its players but its methods, investing in its infrastructure, acting as it should, but at some point it will be caught by sheer, brutal economic reality.As Luton will soon discover, climb high enough, and the nature of the pyramid comes into focus: The sides are not so much steep as sheer cliffs, and off in the distance, the capstone has detached itself completely, separated from the rest of the game by thin air, a gulf that cannot be crossed.Neil Hall/EPA, via Shutterstock More

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      Chelsea Says Executive Accused of Bullying Has Left the Club

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      A Premier League team confirmed the departure after an investigation into workplace behavior, but employees said they had received little information about its findings.Almost a year after one of England’s richest and most decorated soccer teams opened an investigation into a senior executive accused of workplace bullying so severe that several staff members said colleagues took mental health leave to escape it, the team, Chelsea F.C., confirmed that the executive has left the club.The accusations against the executive, the former Chelsea director of marketing Gary Twelvetree, were outlined in a report in The New York Times last June that detailed mounting concerns about a toxic workplace culture inside the department he led. The Times article was based on interviews with almost a dozen Chelsea employees who described how being humiliated and berated in front of colleagues had become commonplace in the club’s marketing department.Chelsea declined to comment on any aspect of its investigation but did confirm that Twelvetree no longer worked at the club. Twelvetree did not respond to telephone and text messages requesting comment.He had not returned to the team’s offices at its Stamford Bridge stadium since the allegations against him surfaced in the Times article, team employees said, but remained on the payroll for months until his exit. Several employees said the team’s failure to inform them of the findings of its investigation had only created new frustration inside the club.The pressure of working under Twelvetree’s leadership led multiple employees to quit their jobs. Others took medical leaves that in some cases lasted months. Several of the employees came forward after the death in January 2022 of a former well-liked member of the department, Richard Bignell, who killed himself after being forced out at Chelsea.While suicide is a complex issue and it is unknown if other factors played a role, Bignell’s death stunned many of his former colleagues. Speaking with family members at a memorial service for him early last year, a group of them said they were convinced that Bignell, the married father of 8-year-old twin daughters, had died because of events at Chelsea. A coroner’s report had seemed to concur, stating after Bignell’s death that he had been “deeply troubled by anxiety, depression and despair following the loss of his job.”Months after his death, Chelsea was under new ownership, with an American-led group having acquired the club from its longtime owner, the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich. In July, the new owners said the club would conduct an investigation into the accusations, led by outside lawyers, to get a clearer picture of how the marketing department of one of the world’s most well-known sports teams had become so dysfunctional and marked by unhappiness, intimidation and fear.“The club’s new board believes strongly in a workplace environment and corporate culture that empowers its employees and ensures they feel safe, included, valued and trusted,” the club said at the time. No replacement for Twelvetree was named, and in his absence the marketing operation was directed by consultants from Viral Nation, a company in which a Chelsea co-owner, Todd Boehly, is an investor.It is unclear how many people were interviewed by investigators looking into the workplace claims, or how those people were selected. Interviews began shortly after the club issued its statement in July and lasted several months. Some former staff members told The Times that they had to reach out to the club to ask to be included as part of its process. Others were contacted directly.One former club executive said she spoke with a lawyer last September and was allowed “the opportunity to say what I needed to say” without being steered in any particular direction.She declined to be identified because of concerns about future employment in the soccer industry. And while she said she was pleased to learn there had been a resolution to the matter, she also noted there had been several missed opportunities by the previous management to correct the situation.After several complaints from staff in the marketing department, for example, Chelsea’s former leadership hired outside consultants to undertake a “cultural review” of workplace practices. But the review was to be led by Twelvetree, who had been the focus of many of the complaints. That decision incensed many former employees, and several who contributed to the monthslong process said it was unclear if it was ever completed.The more recent review also dragged on for months, employees said. Beyond the departure of Twelvetree, they said little has been said about what was learned. The club declined to comment on whether the investigation had been completed or if any changes had been made as a result of its findings. Chelsea would only confirm that Twelvetree had left the club, without providing details of the terms of his exit.His quiet departure was in stark contrast to other recent high-level moves at Chelsea, many of which were marked with a statement or news release. In the last few months alone, Chelsea has heralded the arrival of a new chief executive and a new head coach — its fourth manager since the American-led takeover last year — and a redeployment of leaders in its development and recruitment departments.Away from the field, Chelsea had been in contact with Bignell’s family over compensation, but the status of those talks remains unclear. The family continues to receive bereavement counseling, according to friends, and has taken part in fund-raisers for his children. Another one is planned for next month at the stadium of Wycombe Wanderers, a lower-league team that Bignell supported.If you are having thoughts of suicide, the following organizations can help.In the United States, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.In Britain, contact Samaritans at 116-123 or email jo@samaritans.org. Calls are free and confidential. Or call Papyrus at +44 800 068 4141 (9 a.m. to midnight), or message Young Minds: text YM to 85258. You can also find a list of additional resources on Mind.org.uk. More

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      Everton Stays in the Premier League. But for How Long?

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      A win on the final day of the season kept Everton in the league and relegated Leicester and Leeds. But those results may be subject to change.LIVERPOOL, England — The announcement rang out around Goodison Park before kickoff, and then again ahead of the second half. In a clear, commanding voice, it informed Everton’s fans that they were not, under any circumstances, to invade the field or throw objects at the players on it.With Everton’s long-held place in England’s Premier League hanging by a fraying thread, it was reasonable to assume that Sunday afternoon would end in one of two outcomes: ecstasy or outrage. There was no third option. All the final game of the season would decide, really, was which one materialized.In the end, the former won out. Everton beat Bournemouth, 1-0, on a single, priceless goal by midfielder Abdoulaye Doucouré, rendering the results at Leicester City and Leeds United — the two teams that were hovering, waiting for Sean Dyche’s Everton team to slip — irrelevant. Leeds lost, Leicester won; both were relegated anyway. Everton, for the second time in two seasons, clung to its place in the elite by the quicks of its fingernails.That should, really, have been cause for celebration. There were fans on the field within a couple of seconds of the final whistle ignoring the increasingly desperate pleas of the voice on the public-address system. Flags fluttered at their backs. Plumes of blue smoke trailed from pyrotechnics. Children slid on their knees on the turf.Peter Powell/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesCarl Recine/ReutersEVERTON 1, BOURNEMOUTH 0 Abdoulaye Doucoure’s goal set off the celebrations at Goodison Park, and gritty defending made it hold up.Carl Recine/ReutersRelief, though, is not the same as joy. As the fans milled around the field, many drifted as if on autopilot toward the area beneath the directors’ box. Its usual occupants, Everton’s owners and executives and power brokers, were absent, as they have been since January, when they were advised to stay away for their own security.Still, this was a chance for the fans to send a message. Loudly, repeatedly, they set aside their glee to demand the removal of the club’s board. In what might have been a moment of triumph — or at least something approaching it — the thought of Everton’s fans turned almost immediately to revolt.There is a reason for that. It is not just that the current regime at Goodison Park has brought one of English soccer’s great traditional houses low, thanks to a combination of poor planning, reckless spending and good, old-fashioned witlessness.Even Dyche, brought in as a firefighter, seemed determined to point out after the game that survival should not be a source of pride. “There is still massive amounts of work to do,” he said, as if preparing the fans for the idea that there is more struggle to come. “This has been going on for two years. It is not a quick fix.”That is true, of course. The ownership of Farhad Moshiri has reduced Everton to days like these — ones filled with fear and jeopardy and dread — with ever-increasing regularity. But more damning, and more urgent, is that the club has been managed so poorly that this game, this win, may be nothing but a stay of execution.Joe Giddens/Press Association, via Associated PressMichael Regan/Getty ImagesLEICESTER 2, WEST HAM 1 Early goals and late tears, but the 2016 Premier League champions could only watch the bitter end.Michael Regan/Getty ImagesIn March, the Premier League charged Everton with failing to comply with its catchily titled Profit and Sustainability rules, the regulations formerly known as Financial Fair Play. From 2018 to 2021, the club recorded losses of almost $460 million, three times more than the amount permitted under the league’s protocols.The case is, slowly, making its way through the league’s labyrinthine quasi-judicial system. An independent panel will be appointed to investigate. Representations will be made. Appeals will, doubtless, be lodged. The whole process is dragging to such an extent that even the Premier League itself has suggested it might need to be expedited just a little.In the end, Everton’s punishment might extend beyond being forced to pay compensation to Leeds, Leicester and Southampton, the three teams relegated this season. It could face a points penalty next season. It may even have one retrospectively imposed on this campaign. As things stand, Everton has avoided relegation. But only as things stand.Regardless of the merits of the case against Everton, the fact that 38 games have been played and the table cannot quite be entered into the records should be a source of considerable embarrassment for the most popular sporting competition on the planet.The season has ended and the Premier League cannot say, for certain, which 20 teams will comprise its membership next season. Given that there is also an open case against Manchester City, champion for the last three campaigns and on the verge of a domestic and European treble, it is fair to say that everything that has happened over the last 10 months is still subject to change.Lee Smith/Action Images, via ReutersGareth Copley/Getty ImagesTOTTENHAM 4, LEEDS 1 Two goals from Harry Kane helped send Sam Allardyce and his team down to the Championship.Gareth Copley/Getty ImagesThe significance of that cannot be underestimated. If the Premier League cannot wrangle its teams to abide by the rules that they themselves have established, then it does not so much have a regulatory issue as a legitimacy one. Sports are, in effect, policed by consent. If that process is seen to be tainted, if the playing field does not appear to be level, then that consent is removed.More important, those who watch the league — the people who follow it, fund it, afford it a significance that is not inherent — cannot trust that what they are watching has any meaning. If the outcome of a game cannot be known until a legal process has been exhausted, then the game itself becomes secondary.Just after Doucouré’s goal, as Goodison Park was fizzing and bouncing and melting in euphoria, a fusillade of fireworks exploded in the sky just above the Gwladys Street Stand. They produced, in truth, more sound than light: Their sparkle and their shimmer was lost, just a little, against the bright sunlight.Still, each thud elicited a cathartic, ecstatic roar from the crowd, each one signaling a step closer to salvation. The display felt, though, a little premature. There was still a half-hour left in the game. All Bournemouth had to do was score and, with Leicester winning, everything would change.Everton survived the brush with hubris. It made it to the end unscathed. The whistle blew and the fans stormed the field and the table flashed up on the screen and the team occupied 17th place and sanctuary. And yet there was still a sense of uncertainty, a dull rumble of fear, that things were not yet settled. The fireworks have been set off, even if nobody knows for sure quite what there is to celebrate, not yet. More