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      Soccer’s Fastest-Growing Market Is the One for Ideas

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      Wealthy teams accustomed to pursuing players are simultaneously competing for the signatures of a new era’s most sought-after talents: data analysts.Markus Krösche’s first summer in his new job was a frenetic one. Within a couple of months of taking up his post as Eintracht Frankfurt’s sporting director, he found himself with not only a manager to replace but a couple of star players, too.Krösche, 41, hired from RB Leipzig, got to work. He hired Oliver Glasner as coach. He completed a complicated deal to sign Rafael Santos Borré, a Colombian forward, from the Argentine club River Plate, and acquired two young wingers to complement him. In total, he brought in 11 players that summer, and sold or loaned out a dozen more.The acquisition that may prove his most significant, though, passed by almost unnoticed. Quietly, Krösche returned to his former club to hire Bastian Quentmeier, a bookish former hockey player with unruly hair and a fisherman’s beard, as his new club’s head of data analysis.Even in the relatively small world of German soccer, few had heard of Quentmeier. Even fewer knew exactly what his role in Leipzig — data scout — actually involved. Those who did, though, regarded him highly. “He has something unique,” said Ralf Rangnick, the all-purpose visionary and current Manchester United manager who had approved Quentmeier’s hiring at Leipzig. “Really good, and unique.”The appointment did not generate headlines. Quentmeier’s arrival was so low-key, in fact, that Eintracht did not even see the need to confirm it on the club’s website. There was no announcement beyond a subtle update to Quentmeier’s personal LinkedIn profile.That modesty belied its importance. Krösche had pulled off a coup — strengthening his club’s hand while weakening a rival’s — in an arms race so new that it is still just taking shape. He had hired Quentmeier not merely for his skills but for something of increasing value to clubs across Europe: his knowledge.Sea ChangePerhaps the best way to gauge the speed with which soccer has embraced data is to compare Quentmeier’s circumstances in his new job with those in his previous post. At Eintracht, he is in charge of a team of three analysts: another, full-time staff member, plus two students in support roles. There is nothing unusual about that.When he arrived at Leipzig, in 2016, it was a little different. He had joined the club, initially on a part-time basis, after bumping into Johannes Spors, its chief scout, at a conference in Munich. At the time, Quentmeier was working for a subsidiary of Scout7, a company that provides data and video footage to clubs.“We had games from all these leagues around the world,” he said. “We had to pay for all of them, but we found that there were some leagues that the clubs, our clients, were not interested in.” His job was to track which leagues were being watched by teams that had signed up for the service, and which were not.Quentmeier thought nothing of the meeting until, a few months later, Spors got back in touch. Despite its corporate backing, Leipzig had always cultivated a deliberate start-up energy, and Spors was interested in finding out how best to use data to help with signing players. He asked Quentmeier if he would take on the “mini-job” of advising the club which data providers might be most useful.The pay was hardly lavish — a few hundred euros a month, Quentmeier said — but the trial was successful. A few months later, Spors and Rangnick asked if he would like to join the club permanently.Officially, he would be a data scout — one of only a couple employed in Germany at the time — but that did not capture the full extent of his role. Quentmeier was not joining an established staff to be trained. He was in charge of a department of one. “There was nothing, really,” he said. His job was, in effect, to find out what the job of a data scout would be.He spent the first few months trawling through the various data providers, working out which ones gave him the best quality of information. He spoke to Opta, Wyscout and InStat, three well-known providers, and then branched out, outside soccer, picking the brains of anyone he could think of who worked in data analysis.Mostly, though, he tried to work out the sorts of questions a soccer team’s data system needed to answer. “Every coach and every sporting director and scout has their own idea,” he said. He knew his model needed to be flexible enough to adapt to individual tastes. It was not enough just to compare defenders, for example. “It had to distinguish between someone who could play the ball and someone who was more a warrior,” he said.Designing and building the system occupied most of his first year. “It was easier to do it on my own, from the start,” he said, rather than simply buying an external system and trying to tweak it to suit Leipzig’s needs.The model Quentmeier built did not just allow him to assess players or performances. It let him, and his superiors, analyze how a coach played. It predicted young players’ development, based on historical parallels. It helped him discern whether a player was shining because he was a part of a good team, or because he had some special talent.Most of all, it gave RB Leipzig another edge. “Leipzig spent a lot of time and money to be at the head of the curve,” Rangnick said in a telephone interview last year. Those sorts of things do not stay secret for long in soccer. Quentmeier believes that when he started, only a couple of other teams in Germany were investing in data.Now, he said, it is “normal” for clubs to have a team of data analysts. That means it is normal, too, for teams to do all they can to make sure they have the best data analysts. That can mean looking outside the sport for expertise. Or, increasingly, it can mean taking the approach that brought Quentmeier to Eintracht, and plucking someone from a direct rival.Shopping ListsLike Quentmeier, a vast majority of data scientists — even at the game’s most decorated clubs — remain essentially anonymous. Only occasionally, when a team makes a particularly significant or an especially unusual appointment, do their names drift to the surface.Manchester United’s hiring of Dominic Jordan, in October, as its first director of data science was greeted as a major step forward for a team hidebound by conservatism. Last year, Manchester City’s appointment of Laurie Shaw, an academic with a Ph.D. in computational astrophysics who had previously advised the British government, seemed sufficiently exotic to attract attention.The picture inside the sport, though, is different. “There is much more knowledge of smart people, people doing good work, people making waves at other clubs,” said Omar Chaudhuri, the chief intelligence officer at the data-led consultancy Twenty First Group. “Executives will know them by name. They are much more likely to have them on their shopping lists.”These are not, in most cases, easy appointments to make. Krösche knew Quentmeier from their time at Leipzig; he could vouch for his work firsthand. Not everyone has that benefit. Clubs are reticent to share knowledge and information that they consider proprietary. Few, if any, are prepared to make public the work performed by their data departments. That makes establishing the credentials of any individual member of a staff extremely difficult.“Sometimes, proof of their success is enough to convince people,” said Chaudhuri, noting that clubs perceived to be doing well will find their staff in demand from others, eager to acquire a little of the magic. Even then, it can be hard to know exactly where credit should go.“Executives who aren’t experts in data do not necessarily know what good work looks like,” he said. “Sophistication of analysis and sophistication of presentation aren’t always the same thing.”In some cases, that has led clubs to the likes of Twenty First Group and Nolan Partners, a headhunting firm based in London that specializes in sports, to establish who is doing what and who is doing it well.“We have provided a picture of what exists in that space for a few teams,” said Stewart King, Nolan Partners’ lead for Europe. Twenty First Group has been commissioned to run recruitment processes, too, sitting in on panels and devising practical tests for potential candidates, Chaudhuri said.Often, there is an emphasis on communication: Quentmeier has found that analysts and the models they use have to be able to predict, and answer, the sorts of questions coaches and scouts are likely to ask. That, Chaudhuri said, is the thing clubs are looking for above anything else.Both expect these sorts of acquisitions to become more common over the next couple of years, as clubs scramble to keep pace with rivals or forge ahead. Ability is no longer the only currency in the transfer market. Information, and the skill to interpret it, is just as important now, too. More

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      in Soccer

      In Chaos of Super League Fiasco, Johnson Seizes an Opportunity to Score

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      The British prime minister was able to take the moral high ground by opposing the breakaway European soccer league that proved to be highly unpopular with fans.LONDON — Fans loathed it, politicians opposed it and even Prince William, warned of the damage it risked “to the game we love.”So swift and ferocious was the backlash to a plan to create a new super league for European soccer that on Wednesday six of England’s most famous clubs were in disarray, issuing abject apologies as they disowned the failed breakaway project they had pledged to join.Yet not everyone was a loser. For Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, the crisis has presented a rare opportunity to seize the moral high ground on an issue that matters to many of the voters who helped him to a landslide victory in the 2019 election.Threatening to use any means he could to block the plan, Mr. Johnson positioned himself as the defender of the working-class soccer fans whose forebears created England’s soccer clubs — and the enemy of the billionaire owners who now dominate the English game.“Boris Johnson is a populist by instinct,” said Anand Menon, professor of European politics and foreign affairs at King’s College London, adding that the prime minister spotted a political opportunity in a sporting disaster. The backlash to the super league plan was so complete that Mr. Johnson’s opposition was a “no brainer,” he said — the political equivalent of scoring in an open goal.“His only slight gamble in trying to stop it was that he might lose, but it was hard to see how that could happen,” Professor Menon said. Once English and international soccer authorities threatened reprisals against the super league clubs and players, their position was untenable, he said.Prime Minister Boris Johnson has positioned himself as the defender of the working-class soccer fans whose forebears created England’s soccer clubs.Rob Pinney/Getty ImagesOthers believe that there could be risks down the line, however, and that in allowing his government to threaten to put everything on the table to prevent the formation of the new league — even raising the prospect of tampering with the ownership of soccer clubs — Mr. Johnson might have raised expectations that could not be fulfilled.Significantly, the government refused to rule out suggestions that it could legislate over ownership or copy German rules that give fans real control by preventing commercial investors from owning more than 49 percent of clubs.In the short-term, however, the soccer crisis has helped Mr. Johnson by distracting attention away from negative headlines over a lobbying scandal largely centered on one of his predecessors, David Cameron, and his contacts with a current cabinet minister.On Wednesday that issue crept closer to Mr. Johnson with the emergence of text messages he sent to a businessman and Brexit supporter, James Dyson, promising that Mr. Dyson’s employees would not have to pay extra tax if they came to Britain to make ventilators during the early stages of the pandemic. Mr. Dyson’s company announced in 2019 that it would move its headquarters to Singapore, citing growing demand in Asia.In recent months, the successful roll out of vaccines against Covid-19 has revived Mr. Johnson’s fortunes after a succession of missteps last year when the government’s handling of the pandemic faltered.So prevalent is soccer now in Britain’s national life that it cropped up then, too.In April 2020, the health secretary, Matt Hancock, attacked highly paid soccer players, calling on them to “take a pay cut and play their part,” during the pandemic. But within months the government was outmaneuvered by Marcus Rashford, a star player for Manchester United and England.Invoking his own poor childhood, Mr. Rashford galvanized a campaign against child poverty, and ultimately forced Mr. Johnson to change policy over free school meals.This week the boot was on the other foot as Mr. Johnson was able to condemn the super league plans before Mr. Rashford, whose club initially signed up to the proposals.It required no expertise to be “horrified” at the prospect of the super league “being cooked up by a small number of clubs.,” wrote Mr. Johnson in the Sun newspaper.“Football clubs in every town and city and at every tier of the pyramid have a unique place at the heart of their communities, and are an unrivaled source of passionate local pride,” he added.Never a big soccer fan himself, Mr. Johnson framed his opposition to the plan in his belief in competition.Each year the three worst performing clubs are relegated from England’s Premier League — its top domestic tier — while the top ones qualify to play in European competitions the following season. The European Super League proposal would have seen a number of big soccer clubs becoming permanent members — something that Mr. Johnson likened to creating a cartel.In fact, when England’s first Football League was established in 1888 it was on a similar model and its membership was not selected on merit, said Matthew Taylor, professor of history at De Montfort University, Leicester who has written widely on soccer.Yet the furor over the European Super League illustrates the growing role soccer has played in national life in recent decades.An anti-Super League banner hanging from one of the gates of Stamford Bridge stadium in London where Chelsea fans were protesting on Tuesday.Matt Dunham/Associated Press“In the last 15-20 years it seems to be so pervasive and so significant to British culture — very broadly defined — that politicians have to say something,” Professor Taylor said.No longer does it seem odd for politicians and members of the government “to make statements on issues that 40-50 years ago would have been seen as private matters,” he added.That change first became noticeable under Tony Blair’s premiership as the growing success of the English Premier League, combined with the country’s “cool Britannia” branding, gave soccer a great profile.But soccer can be dangerous territory too for politicians. Mr. Cameron was much mocked when he once appeared to forget his long-running claim to support the Birmingham team Aston Villa and seemed to suggest he favored a rival that played in similar colors.Mr. Johnson, who appears to prefer rugby to soccer, has avoided that fate by never declaring his allegiance to any team.But suggestions that the government might legislate to control the ownership of clubs seemed to conflict with Mr. Johnson’s free-market instincts.Although a Saudi Arabian plan to buy the Premier League club Newcastle United ultimately failed, Mr. Johnson promised the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, that he would investigate a holdup to the proposed take over, according to British media reports.“One of the many dishonesties in all this is that it would allow money to corrupt football,” said Professor Menon, referring to the European Super League plan. “Money has already corrupted football. Rich clubs get richer.”The professor said he believed that very little would ultimately change because any substantial intervention would upset the successful operations of the Premier League, and therefore annoy fans.But Professor Taylor pointed to Germany as a successful alternative model, and said that in threatening to intervene in the running of soccer Mr. Johnson might ultimately disappoint some of those who are applauding him now.“Having made such a significant and bold statement, I don’t think this discussion will go away now,” Professor Taylor. More

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      in Soccer

      Battle Over Super League Begins With Letters, Threats and Banners

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      The founding members of a league that would reshape soccer have warned the sport’s leaders that they will fight any effort to block their plans.LONDON — The superclubs have called in the lawyers. The president of European soccer has responded, calling the teams’ leaders “snakes and liars.” And the fans want no part of any of it.The pitched battle to pursue, or prevent, a breakaway European soccer superleague started to take shape on Monday, hours after the stunning announcement late Sunday night by 12 of the sport’s richest and most popular teams that they were forming one.The plan threatens to redraw the European soccer economy, from rich clubs in the Premier League to tiny ones in every corner of the continent, and funnel billions of dollars toward a handful of wealthy elite teams. It would represent one of the biggest wealth transfers in sports history, imperil the future of marquee events like the Champions League and threaten the existence of the domestic leagues and the smaller clubs that were left behind.By first light on Monday, the fight was on. In a letter written by the breakaway teams, they warned soccer’s authorities that they had taken legal action to prevent any efforts to block their project.A few hours later, Aleksander Ceferin, the president of European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, used his first public appearance to denounce the group behind the plan and vowed to take stern action if it did not reverse course. He raised the possibility of barring players on the participating teams from events like the World Cup and other tournaments, and threatened to banish the rebel clubs from their domestic leagues. Sunday’s announcement, he said, amounted to “spitting in football fans’ faces.”By then the outrage was spreading. In Germany, Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund — clubs seen as potential joiners of the breakaway league — distanced themselves from the plan. In France, Paris St.-Germain midfielder Ander Herrera lamented “the rich stealing what the people created.” In Spain, La Liga has convened a meeting of its clubs but will hold it without the three teams — Real Madrid, Barcelona and Atlético Madrid — who have agreed to join the Super League.And in England, coaches and players revealed they had not been consulted on the move, fan groups united in their opposition to the proposal, and, in Liverpool, supporters demanded the club remove their banners from the team’s stadium before its next home game on Saturday.“We feel we can no longer give our support to a club which puts financial greed above integrity of the game,” one of the groups said on Twitter.Aleksander Ceferin, the president of European soccer’s governing body, threatened to punish the clubs leading a breakaway league, then offered them an olive branch.Richard Juilliart/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAs they went public on Sunday with their plans for the European Super League, though, the proposal’s backers simultaneously wrote to the president of FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, and to UEFA’s Ceferin saying that they would like to work with the organizations but that they had also taken measures to protect their interests.The group includes a dozen top teams from England, Spain and Italy, such as Manchester United, Liverpool, Real Madrid and Juventus, and its six-page missive made clear its intent to proceed, and to overcome any opposition.Rumors of the creation of the breakaway competition, which hopes to add three more permanent founding members to what will be an annual 20-team league, prompted FIFA in January to bow to pressure from UEFA and issue a statement that threatened severe repercussions against players and clubs involved in any unsanctioned tournament. FIFA issued a statement of “disapproval” of the breakaway plan on Sunday, but notably did not repeat the threat of expelling those who took part.Faced with that threat, though, the company created to control the new Super League said in its letter sent on Sunday that motions had been filed in multiple courts to prevent any moves to jeopardize the project, which, its organizers said, has $4 billion of financing in place.The company has “taken appropriate action to challenge the legality of the restrictions to the formation of the competition before such relevant courts and European authorities as may be necessary to safeguard its future,” said the letter, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times.At Arsenal, some fans vented their anger at the owner Stan Kroenke.Tolga Akmen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe superleague the clubs have agreed to form — an alliance of top teams closer in concept to closed leagues like the N.F.L. and the N.B.A. than to soccer’s current model — would bring about the most significant restructuring of elite European soccer since the creation of the European Cup (now the Champions League) in the 1950s.Yet even as it detailed its pre-emptive legal actions, the six-page letter invited soccer’s leaders to hold “urgent” talks to find a common path forward for a project that the group says will benefit soccer even beyond the narrow group that will enjoy unparalleled riches. Under the plan announced Sunday, the 15 founding members of the Super League would share an initial pool of 3.5 billion euros, about $4.2 billion.That equates to some $400 million each, more than four times what the winner of the Champions League took home in 2020. In the letter, the founders of the Super League said they did not wish to replace the Champions League, but instead wanted to create a tournament that would run alongside it.The damage to the prestige and value of the Champions League, though, would be immediate and run into the billions of dollars, turning what has for decades been club soccer’s elite competition into a secondary event, one that is unlikely to retain anything close to its current commercial appeal.In a concurrent effort to make the event more valuable, UEFA on Monday ratified the biggest changes to the Champions League since 1992. And then Ceferin held a news conference in which he took direct aim at the rival league.Having digested the letter’s content, Ceferin said, he was in no mood to acquiesce to demands for an urgent meeting. Instead, he issued pointed rebukes to several of the men leading the effort, and singled out Andrea Agnelli, the chairman of the Italian champion Juventus.Agnelli, who resigned from his role on UEFA’s executive committee after the announcement of the breakaway, had spoken to Ceferin as recently as Saturday. At the time, Ceferin said, Agnelli had told the UEFA president he fully supported changes to the Champions League and dismissed talk of a breakaway as “just rumors.”“Agnelli is the biggest disappointment of all,” said Ceferin, who worked as a criminal lawyer before moving into soccer. “I’ve never seen a person who would lie so many times and so persistently as he did.”Ed Woodward, the vice chairman of Manchester United, gave his support for UEFA’s Champions League restructuring as recently as Thursday, Ceferin added. He said UEFA was considering seeking damages from the 12 clubs that formed the breakaway group, and even from some of their top officials.Still, he enters the next stage of the fight for control of European soccer with the support of some top club executives. Nasser al-Khelaifi, the chairman of the French champion Paris St.-Germain, was among the officials who voted to approve the changes to the Champions League, and he has resisted efforts to lure P.S.G., a club stocked with some of the world’s best players, to the new league.Teams in Germany, including last season’s Champions League winner, Bayern Munich, and its biggest domestic rival, Borussia Dortmund, also have declined to join the new venture. In another boost for UEFA, Bayern’s chairman, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, was chosen to replace Agnelli on UEFA’s board.The substantial changes to the Champions League may now be consigned to irrelevance, though, if the breakaway clubs manage to get their way and take to the field in a competition that they said they hoped to begin as soon as this summer. Their urgency stems from their financing; the investment bank JPMorgan Chase has provided four billion euros in debt financing to start the league, but it is contingent on the group’s securing a broadcast contract.Manchester City and Liverpool are among the six Premier League clubs that have signed on to the new Super League.Pool photo by Jon SuperIn the letter, the group said that its urgency stemmed from the huge losses piling up as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. The sight of games played in cavernous but empty stadiums has become the norm, and restrictions on public gatherings mean that hundreds of millions of dollars are being lost in gate receipts in every league in Europe, while broadcasters have also clawed back vast sums from leagues and competition organizers.The biggest European clubs have long been frustrated with sharing the wealth created by tournaments in which they are the biggest draw, and talks about a new league began well before the pandemic. Documents that leaked in 2019 showed that the president of Real Madrid, Florentino Pérez, an architect of the current plan, had sought to create an earlier iteration of a competition involving the biggest teams.The role FIFA will play in the fight over the Super League is intriguing, too. Its president, Gianni Infantino, has talked in recent years of creating new competitions to increase interest in soccer around the globe. As part of that push, he has given his backing to a 20-team superleague in Africa.FIFA issued a statement late Sunday in which it reiterated that it would not support a closed breakaway competition. The Super League’s founders, though, insisted that their event is not completely closed, since they plan to provide access every season to five teams outside the 15 founding members.Ceferin said he expected Infantino to dispel any doubts about his position on Tuesday when he addresses UEFA’s annual meeting.For now, UEFA and other groups opposed to the new competition are huddling to discuss their legal options, and engaging in talks with governments across Europe as well as with the European Union. Ceferin praised some of the politicians who have publicly condemned the Super League plan, including Britain’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, and France’s president, Emmanuel Macron.Yet he also offered an olive branch to the rebel clubs.He told them it was not too late to come back from the brink. While relationships have been damaged, he said, he vowed to act professionally for the benefit of European soccer. While he felt betrayed by the “greediness, selfishness and narcissism” of some of those involved, he would not — with the possible exception of Agnelli — make things personal. Ceferin is the godfather to Agnelli’s youngest child. More

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      in Tennis

      In Tennis, Tough Decisions as Players Adjust to Shrunken Paydays

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      With less money to be won, many players are working harder than ever, especially those not lucky enough to have million-dollar endorsement portfolios.Lloyd Harris has been on a bit of a roll this year.It’s a good thing, too, because if the 24-year-old from South Africa weren’t, he might be having a hard time breaking even as a professional tennis player these days. Even with his recent success — which includes making the third round of the Australian Open in February, the final of the Dubai Tennis Championships last month, and the second round at the Miami Open last week — his earnings are hardly the windfall they might have been, because prize money in his sport has been substantially downsized during the coronavirus pandemic and expenses are higher than ever.Harris, ranked No. 52 in the world, probably will not be able to go home until November. So he has to support himself on the road and pay for his usual coaching and physiotherapy, expenses that can run into the high six figures for a player of his caliber.“It was definitely tough last year,” Harris said last week after a tight first-round win over Emilio Nava. “This year, with the prize money being so reduced, it can really be a struggle.”Professional tennis may be the most economically top-heavy sport in the world. The best players are fabulously wealthy, in part because of lavish endorsement deals, and any player ranked in the top 30 lives very well.For those ranked between roughly 40th and 70th, a bad few months can cause serious problems. Life for those outside the top 80, and especially outside the top 100, can be precarious.The pandemic has made things more challenging, as cuts in prize money at most tournaments make each win more essential for players fighting for the extra cash that comes with making each successive round.Ann Li of the United States, who is ranked 67th in the world, hustles to earn a living.Rick Rycroft/Associated PressAt the Miami Open, which concludes this weekend, more than 200 players have been vying for $6.7 million. That is among the largest prize purses outside the Grand Slam events and the tour finals, but it is down nearly 60 percent from 2019, when the purse was $16.7 million.Heading into the season, the men’s and women’s tours worked with the players and tournament executives to figure out how to share revenues in an environment where only a fraction of the usual number of tickets can be sold.The professional tours have tried to structure prize payments so that players eliminated in the early rounds can still make a decent wage.In Miami, making the second round yielded $16,000 for a player this year compared with nearly $30,000 in 2019, the previous time the tournament took place. The winners will receive just over $300,000, a healthy payday but down nearly 80 percent from 2019. The tours are helping smaller tournaments avoid deficits by funding prize purses through broadcast rights deals and cash reserves.“It’s obviously a very challenging period of time for everybody,” said Steve Simon, chief executive of the women’s professional tour, the W.T.A. “Our approach was how do we manage this so we have prize money levels in a manner that would support players and make sure our events can operate.”No one needs to take up a collection for players who advance deep into tournaments, but the economics of being a solid professional tennis player can be challenging.Depending on the country where a player lives, roughly 50 percent of income can go to taxes. A decent coach demands $50,000 to $100,000 a year plus travel costs. Fitness training and physiotherapy over an 11-month season can cost an additional tens of thousands of dollars.Danielle Collins, the 27-year-old American ranked 40th in the world, trained with a four-person team before the pandemic — a tennis coach, a hitting partner, a physiotherapist and a fitness coach. With the cuts in prize money, though, Collins is now training largely with her boyfriend, Tom Couch, who is her fitness coach.“We don’t have an organization that pays for coaches, and physios and nutritionists like we would if we were on a team,” she said. “We have financial responsibilities that we are 100 percent committed to. Having to manage through that with the pandemic and ongoing uncertainty and with the prize money reductions, it’s taken a toll.”Danielle Collins, ranked 40th in the world, has had to reduce her support staff.  She says some players may lose money by competing.Geoff Burke/USA Today Sports, via ReutersAlso, travel this year figures to be more expensive, given the restrictions and quarantine rules that can change from week to week and country to country.This month the professional tours will shift to the clay- and grass-court seasons in Europe until mid-July. In typical years, players might return home several times during that period, especially if they lose early in one tournament and have a two-week lag until the start of the next event on their schedules. That might prove difficult this year.“If you can get to Europe, you might just want to stay there,” said Ann Li, a 20-year-old American who recently broke into the top 100.Housing abroad is complicated. When players are eliminated from a tournament, they lose their free lodging until the next tournament starts.And the pandemic presents more than logistical challenges.“We’re always at risk of contracting the virus and being in a two-week lockdown in a city far away from home,” said John Isner, a veteran player from the United States. “To do that in an environment where the money is much less is very risky on our part.”There is little choice but to keep competing. Endorsement contracts are often laden with incentives that require players to enter a minimum number of tournaments and earn rankings points by advancing. Collins said these deals — New Balance and Babolat are her main sponsors — had helped sustain many players during the past year.“For players outside of top 100, they might have opportunities to play, but they are losing money by playing,” she said.Harris had to default his second-round match in Miami. In the coming weeks, he plans to use Dubai as a kind of base camp, because if he returned to his home in South Africa, where the virus has been prevalent, he couldn’t be sure which countries would permit him to enter later.He has won nearly $300,000 in prize money this year, bringing his career total to $1.5 million. That may sound like a lot, but Harris turned professional in 2016. He spent far more than he earned during his first four seasons. He was fortunate that his two sponsors, Lotto and Yonex, remained loyal as he grinded through the lower-tier tournaments.Now, after a busy winter, he is trying to set aside his desire for a break, particularly from the restrictions players must follow while competing.“Most of the guys on tour have been very selective about where they can play,” Harris said.But he is finally winning more than losing at the top level. He is climbing the rankings and making decent money. For better or for worse, after a short break, he plans to play on. More

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      in Soccer

      The Champions League Is Changing. Here’s How It Will Work.

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      European soccer’s premier club competition, the Champions League, is remaking itself. After more than a generation in its current form, the Champions League is about to become an actual league for the first time. Organizers say the changes will produce better matchups, fewer meaningless games, and more drama. Critics say it’s about what these kinds […] More

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      in Soccer

      Don’t Reject the Champions League’s Changes Out of Hand

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      The latest proposals to reallocate European soccer’s riches show that there may be sense even in dumb ideas.Say what you like about Andrea Agnelli, but at least he is not afraid of a bad idea. Even by the standards of Agnelli, the Juventus chairman, this has been a fairly spectacular week, a seemingly never-ending stream of free-form thoughts about the future of soccer, each one somehow worse than the last.There was, first, a stout defense of the coming reform of the Champions League, the so-called Swiss Model, which would see 36 teams qualify for the tournament and then play 10 group games, rather than six, all of them against different opponents.That was just Agnelli getting started, though. It is perhaps easiest to think of him as soccer’s equivalent to Stewart Pearson, the policy strategist/vapid marketing guru skewered so perfectly in “The Thick of It,” the British political satire. Legacy places in the Champions League? Banning elite clubs from buying each other’s players? Selling a subscription to the last 15 minutes of games? Yes, and ho (Parental Guidance: R).The reaction to all of these suggestions, of course, was what even Agnelli, presumably, has come to expect: a panoply of derision and disdain, the sort that in a strange sort of way unites soccer’s various warring tribes in hostility to the machinations of a smart, urbane businessman who seems determined to play the role of cartoonish supervillain.That so many of his ideas emerged in a week in which Agnelli’s Juventus was unexpectedly and dramatically eliminated from the Champions League by F.C. Porto simply served to underline his hubris. This, after all, was the sort of drama he wants to negate, inflicted by the sort of team he wants to disenfranchise. He got, in short, what he deserved.But while that reaction is both understandable and largely justified, it is not desperately constructive. Just as with Project Big Picture — the set of ideas tossed around by the owners of Manchester United and Liverpool for reform of the Premier League and leaked late last year — the immediate rush to outrage means that the islands of common sense in Agnelli’s thought torrent are swept away before they can be properly explored.Take, for example, the last of his suggestions. Why would it be bad, precisely, to sell the rights to watch the last 15 minutes of games? Of course the clubs would benefit from the tapping of another revenue stream, but who suffers?Those who wanted to watch the full match could still do so, through whatever subscription package they currently enjoy. But maybe others — those not able to afford it, those without the time to benefit from it, those who do not wish to watch an entire game — could use a cheaper, shorter, more ad hoc alternative.There will have been plenty, for example, who might have wanted to watch the denouement to Juventus’s game with Porto, once it became clear that it might prove more compelling than anticipated. So why not let them?Porto isn’t in a Big Five league, but it deserves nights to celebrate, too.Valerio Pennicino/Getty ImagesThat the idea could be dismissed out of hand is, in part, down to the fact that it was Agnelli who proposed it. He is, after all, not only the chairman of Juventus, but the president of the European Club Association, too, a body that is designed to represent the interests of all of its members but — in the popular imagination — is largely deployed to lobby for the game’s established elite.As such, it is assumed that everything that is in Agnelli’s interests is automatically tinged with not just self-interest, but also greed. The expansion of the Champions League, according to that argument, is designed to enable a handful of clubs to make more money, at the expense of everyone else, furthering the financial chasm that yawns between teams in the major leagues, and between the major leagues and the minor ones.The idea of legacy places — allowing teams with more European pedigree to leapfrog those with less, ensuring that the traditional powers always have access to the Champions League, regardless of where they finish in their domestic leagues — is seen as offering them a backstop, inuring them from the consequences of failure, breaking the contract that sport should be in some way meritocratic, ensuring their money keeps flowing.This is, doubtless, true. Agnelli is not advocating anything that would damage his, his club’s or his collaborators’ interests. But it does not follow that those who stand in his way are acting out of some sort of higher purpose. This week, several clubs — most notably Crystal Palace and Aston Villa — led the resistance to the reform of the Champions League, insisting that it would irrevocably damage domestic competitions.That Andrea Agnelli is largely looking out for the interests of Juventus does not mean every one of his ideas must be rejected out of hand.Denis Balibouse/ReutersAnd they are right, but their motivations are no purer than Agnelli’s. Crystal Palace and Aston Villa benefit very nicely, thank you very much, from the status quo. They have been made immeasurably rich by their mere presence in the Premier League; they will reject any move that endangers their place on that particular gravy train.It is here that the problem becomes broader, more pernicious. There is a reason Agnelli — and John W. Henry, the owner of Liverpool, and Joel Glazer, his counterpart at Manchester United, and the powers-that-be at Bayern Munich and Juventus and all the rest — keeps having bad ideas, and it is one that cannot be put entirely (though that is relevant) to the big clubs’ greed for trophies and for profit.It is that on some fundamental level, the economics of soccer as they stand do not work, and they did not work even before the coronavirus hit, creating a colossal hole in the accounts of (almost) every club across Europe, rich and poor alike.Ideally, at this juncture, it would be possible to pinpoint just one problem — the spending of Paris St.-Germain and Manchester City, the wealth of the Premier League or the growing gap between haves and have-nots — and then to identify a panacea that would make it all better But that is not how it works. Fairness in top-flight European soccer is a vast and unwieldy and complicated issue, and one without an obvious solution.For the grand houses of continental Europe, the issue is the relentless march of the Premier League. For the big clubs of the Premier League, it is being expected to win an arms race against teams backed by nation states. For those teams, it is trying to crack a cartel that is arranged against them.For all its financial might, P.S.G. is still chasing its first Champions League title with Kylian Mbappé. For all its struggles, Barcelona has won four with Lionel Messi.Gonzalo Fuentes/ReutersFor the teams that fill out the five major leagues of Western Europe, it is finding a way to overcome the enormous financial advantages of their opponents. For those leagues that are not considered the major powers, it is identifying a way to compete with the Big Five, and to deal with the deleterious effect on competitive balance of the Champions League itself.And that is before we get further down the pyramid, to the teams struggling to breathe away from the continent’s top divisions. It is this that makes it too hard to sympathize with the plight of Crystal Palace, which currently makes more money than A.C. Milan and Feyenoord and Legia Warsaw and Panathinaikos and all but a couple of dozen other teams in the world. It is this that means it is dangerous to assume that what is good for Crystal Palace is good for soccer as a whole.There are, unfortunately, no easy answers. But that should not dictate that all suggestions for change are shot down, or that the underlying assumption should be that they are all rooted in bad faith, or even that self-interest itself precludes an idea’s having merit.The people who own clubs are within their rights to want steadier, more predictable incomes, or more restricted spending. It is not feasible to demand, as we currently do, that they just throw as much money against the wall as possible in pursuit of short-term success. Fans, above all, should know by now that such an approach rarely ends well.Will an expanded Champions League still have room for past winners like Ajax and Feyenoord?Maurice Van Steen/EPA, via ShutterstockThat is not to say that Agnelli has yet hit upon the answer. Legacy places for historic teams defeat the purpose of sport, though they are not exactly unprecedented: In South America, there have been various experiments — rarely for good reasons — to make relegation a punishment for years of underperformance, not just a single bad season.Expanding the Champions League — though not something that is personally appealing — has more positives, should the extra places go to national champions from lesser leagues, expanding the horizons of the competition, though even that might then have a distorting effect on those domestic tournaments. (Banning transfers between elite clubs makes no sense: How else would Agnelli, for one, have unloaded Miralem Pjanic’s contract?)But none of this should disguise the need both to talk about and institute change. The status quo might work for a handful of teams — the ones, largely, that finish in the top 15 of the Premier League pretty regularly, and possibly Bayern Munich — but it locks out the vast majority; according to a report this week from Football Supporters Europe, fans* are finding it increasingly off-putting.[*This is a subject for another column, but the issue with these sorts of surveys is that they represent a specific cohort of fans, not a broad spectrum.]It is incumbent on everyone, then, to have the courage to have ideas: not objections rooted in tradition, not utopian daydreams, but concrete, considered suggestions. Would cross-border leagues help teams from smaller nations compete? Should elite teams be allowed to sign strategic deals with partner clubs? Is there a way to make the Champions League more compelling? How do you address competitive balance within and between domestic tournaments? (Answers below.)All of them will have drawbacks. All of them will elicit criticism. But it is a conversation we must be prepared to have, not one that should be shut down just because someone, somewhere, finds it does not align with his interests. Partly because that is the only way anything will change. And partly because if we do not, one of Agnelli’s ideas might just stick.a) Yes, it’s obvious; b) yes, so is that; c) you’d start by changing the seeding; and d) squad and spending limits, and a combination of a) and b).A Year OnA packed house and one mask at Anfield in March 11, 2020, hours before sports called time.Phil Noble/ReutersThe news seeped through as Jürgen Klopp was licking his wounds and Diego Simeone was basking in glory. It had been one of those electric Champions League nights: Atlético Madrid had eliminated Liverpool, the reigning champion, last March, storming what was supposed to be fortress Anfield with that distinctively Cholísta mix of strategy and steel.And then, as the managers were picking over the bones of what had happened, as 56,000 people were drifting into the night, the news flickered through from Italy. Daniele Rugani, the Juventus defender, had tested positive for the coronavirus. The club was sending its squad into isolation for 14 days. Its opponent the previous weekend, Inter Milan, quickly did the same.That was March 11, 2020, a year and a day ago. Even in the slightly frantic, vaguely frazzled surroundings of a press box, it was apparent that what had played out in front of us was not the story. It seemed obvious, even then, that the night’s theme was not just Liverpool’s facing up to an immediate future with no European competition.The World Health Organization had declared a pandemic. Across the Atlantic, Rudy Gobert had tested positive, bringing the virus into the N.B.A. Sports in the United States was shutting down. Over the next 36 hours, Europe reached the same conclusion. The patchwork solutions that had tried to hold back the tide — games in empty stadiums, games being postponed — gave way.In England, at least, the tipping point was Mikel Arteta, the Arsenal manager, and the Chelsea forward Callum Hudson-Odoi testing positive. The Premier League, until then content to stick its fingers in its ears and blunder through, called an emergency meeting. A few hours after insisting the show, that weekend, would go on, the league confirmed it would be mothballed. Nobody could be quite sure that it would come back.Two things now stand out about those few days. One is specific to Britain. It is important to remember that, at the time of Arteta’s positive test, the British government was dallying. The country was still almost two weeks from being locked down. Officials were encouraging people to go to work. Some 56,000 people had been allowed to go to Anfield, including some who flew in from Madrid for the privilege. A quarter of a million had been admitted to horse racing’s Cheltenham Festival.Looking back, it may not be too much of a stretch to suggest that it was the abandonment of the Premier League that concentrated a few minds and forced a few hands. Its elite soccer league is, deep down, one of England’s most high-profile institutions. Its sudden absence denoted, in the most incontrovertible tone, that the pandemic had arrived.The other, broader thing is that for all the criticism, for all the missteps and the arguments and the questionable motives, soccer deserves credit for finding its way back: its players for enduring the schedule; its executives for conjuring solutions; the countless, unheralded staff members at clubs and leagues and broadcasters for making it work. Soccer is not perfect. Sometimes, it is not even good. But in what has been an inordinately difficult year for so many, it has, in some small way, helped.CorrespondenceManchester City and ballet, you say? Set this photo to music.Pool photo by Clive BrunskillLast week’s column on Manchester City — a team that inspires an intellectual response, more than an emotional one, at least in my eyes — prompted many of you to get in touch to set me straight. Matt Noel highlighted not only that Pep Guardiola has been able to “make some tweaks and reunite” his squad, but also the “style in which City plays … is nothing short of miraculous, delicate and ephemeral.”I have no arguments there and, of course, it is not for me to dictate your responses to any team. I was, as the vernacular goes, simply offering you my truth. “I love watching City,” Charlotte Mehrtens wrote. “The skill is such a joy. You claim this football lacks soul? That’s like saying a choreographed ballet lacks soul.”This is a great parallel, because there is something inherently balletic about City, and also I find that ballet leaves me a bit cold, too. I appreciate the art and the skill, but I could do with a bit of talking. The issue here, then, may be that I am a philistine.David Ittah took exception with the idea that Guardiola has invented a new position for João Cancelo. “Marcelo has been playing exactly that role for many years at Real Madrid,” he wrote. He has indeed: Nobody loves Marcelo, pound for pound the greatest signing of all time, more than me. But Cancelo’s role is much more structured, much more part of the tactical blueprint, than the freestyle approach that makes Marcelo a joy.And a wonderful idea from Ian Greig. “Why not try to make a virtue out of the loss by holding games on out-of-the-way unknown pitches in remote places. Pitches without stands, or fans in beautiful places, rural Scotland, Georgia. Years ago I watched a game near Syanky in Poland, a lovely site surrounded by pines. I hold the memory dear.”Consider me on board. Let’s play the Champions League final in Lofoten. Or Qeqertarsuaq. More