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      From Everton to Portsmouth, Ownership Isn’t the (Only) Problem

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      Wealthy owners are an easy target for fans who want to vent their anger over failing teams. But money isn’t a solution when there is no plan.Michael Eisner has not, by the standards of English soccer, been a bad owner. He has not burdened Portsmouth, the third-tier club he and his sons bought almost six years ago, with colossal, asphyxiating debt. He has not sold off its historic stadium to build apartments. Nor has he plastered it with the lurid branding of his other businesses.He is not a cowboy seeking a quick buck or a crony looking for a laundry or a rampant egotist desperate for an audience. For all that Disney World might not be subject to quite the same laws as the rest of Florida, Eisner himself is not a nation state with a reputation to enhance or some flagrant human rights violations to disguise.The 80-year-old Eisner is not even a bad owner by the troubled standards of Portsmouth, though that is, admittedly, a relatively low bar: Eisner surpassed at least one of his predecessors by being definitively, provably real. He has not run the club into the ground. He has demonstrated, for a time, at least, a genuine desire to understand both the team and the place, and a sincere warmth toward both.He has not haphazardly hired players or ruthlessly sold off anyone who displays the slightest hint of promise. He has not wheeled carelessly through managers: In six years, he has employed only three — one, John Mousinho, so fresh that he has yet to be confirmed officially — and both of the first two were rational, credible appointments.And yet, for all that, when Portsmouth faces Exeter City on Saturday at Fratton Park, its evocative and somewhat ramshackle stadium, the stands will bubble with dissatisfaction. At least one group of fans has organized a “peaceful” protest against Tornante, Eisner’s investment vehicle, accusing the former Disney executive and his co-owners of having both no ambition and no plan.Michael Eisner in 2017, when he paid about $7.8 million to buy Portsmouth and promised to revive it.Rob Stothard for The New York TimesThere is a current of mutiny running through English soccer. Last weekend, Everton fans staged a sit-in protest against the club’s board, holding aloft signs calling for the dismissals of the chairman, the chief executive and even the finance director, a man whom a reasonable proportion of Goodison Park will have had to Google to identify.Leicester City’s fans have not gone for the finance director so far, but there were murmurs of dissent against the owners during its defeat to Nottingham Forest last Saturday. There is talk of protests at Tottenham Hotspur, and it is only a few months since Leeds United fans were demanding the resignation of their club’s board.Their Portsmouth counterparts have not gone that far, not yet. Their complaints, laid out in a detailed, lucid statement released on Thursday, are distinctly reasonable. When Eisner bought the club from a fans’ consortium that had rescued it from the brink of liquidation, he outlined a plan to turn Portsmouth into a sustainable, successful club. If all the club wanted was to drift aimlessly along in League One, he said, he was not the guy.Drift, though, is precisely what has happened. Portsmouth remains exactly where Eisner found it. He has expanded the stadium by a couple of thousand seats, but not enough to make a difference to its budget. There has been similarly scant progress on its youth system. Essentially, the fan coalition would like Tornante to explain how it plans to fulfill its own promises.Portsmouth fans at an F.A. Cup match at Tottenham this month. Their glimpse of the Premier League’s heights was brief.David Klein/ReutersThe circumstances at all of these clubs might be bespoke, but the pattern of dissatisfaction illustrates a broader truth.It is possible (and for a long time served as orthodoxy) to see soccer as a contest between players: the ideas they conjure, the moments of inspiration they experience, the instincts they follow, the mistakes they make. In this reading, it is a game, essentially, of physical and mental skill.It is also possible, though, to view it more as a test of strategy: the key figures, in this interpretation, are not the players but the coaches, the gurus and the visionaries and the ideologues who determine and refine the style and the approach and the tactics. The players, in much modern analysis, are treated essentially as automatons, carrying out their assigned tasks by rote, little more than pixels on a screen.Increasingly, though, it feels as if neither of those analyses encapsulates what English soccer, in particular, has become. The coaches and the players a club employs all exist downstream of the figure whose beneficence and engagement determines its horizons. The cutthroat, hyper-capitalist environment that the Premier League has engendered has turned soccer, effectively, into an owners’ game.That a team’s fate is tied, irrevocably, to its economic outlook is no great insight: The richest teams, after all, can attract the finest coaches, who in turn find themselves given a chance to work with the best players. (Whether it should be this way is an entirely different question, of course.)But paper wealth, alone, is not enough. It is, in fact, meaningless unless it is accompanied by a plan. Everton, its recent recruitment history a monument to waste, stands as the most potent example of that. But Leicester, Tottenham and even Portsmouth, in their own way, are suffering from the same affliction. Their owners all presumably have a destination in mind. None of them seem to know, precisely, how they want to get there.Jason Cairnduff/Action Images, via ReutersEverton fans, top, staged a protest last week demanding the ouster of the club’s leadership. Discontented Manchester United fans may soon get their wish: The Glazer family is exploring a sale of the team.Ed Sykes/Action Images, via ReutersGiven that the two biggest clubs in English soccer — Manchester United and Liverpool — are currently searching for new investors, the discontent at Goodison Park and Fratton Park and elsewhere is worth contemplating.It would be easy to assume that the best owner for either United or Liverpool would be whichever suitor has the most zeros in their bank account. It would be equally easy to suggest that the only contenders to be avoided are those who trail either debt or ethical doubt in their wake. (Alas, those in category A are almost certain to feature in category B.)That is, though, just the start. As much as it is the financial primacy of a prospective owner that tends to fire fans’ imagination most quickly and most vividly, it is more often how they choose to use it that separates those who are welcomed with open arms from those who are greeted with pointed fingers.At Portsmouth, Michael Eisner has not been a bad owner. He has not done anything wrong, in particular. It is just that, in the eyes of the fans, he has not done the things that he promised he would, and now they fear that, somewhere in the middle of six years of stasis, he has lost interest.When Portsmouth’s fans ceded control of the club, they did so on the understanding that this was the surest way to take their team out of League One, back on the way to the Premier League. That it has not done so is not, in all likelihood, solely down to Eisner. Perhaps the players have underperformed, too. Perhaps the managers have not delivered on their potential. But it is an owners’ game, now, and that means everyone knows who to blame.No ExcuseSara Björk Gunnarsdottir fought her club, the perennial French champion Lyon, after it refused to pay her when she was pregnant.Pool photo by Clive BrunskillIt is hard to know which detail in Sara Björk Gunnarsdottir’s account of how her club, the fabled Lyon’s women’s team, treated her during her pregnancy is most damning. It is probably the one where the team did not pay her. Or it might be the one in which she was threatened with ostracism if she chose to chase that unpaid salary all the way to FIFA.Or, perhaps, it was the moment in which Gunnarsdottir, the Iceland captain, was told that under no circumstances would she, a breastfeeding mother, be allowed to bring her infant son with her to away games. What if he cried, as babies famously do, on the bus or the plane, thus disturbing the rest of the squad?Gunnarsdottir’s story has, in some way, a happy ending: Last year, a tribunal ruled that Lyon was required to pay her every cent she was owed; she has since left the club and has resumed her elite career at Juventus; her son, Ragnar, is 15 months, which means he is old enough to marvel at the world but too young to offer a constant stream of opinions on everything.More than anything, though, her experience is a reminder — as Gunnarsdottir herself has said — that there is still much to be done on the “culture” of women’s soccer; or, more precisely, on how soccer sees and treats the women who play it professionally.There are plenty of times when the breakneck speed at which women’s soccer has grown in recent years provides a mitigating circumstance for structural shortcomings, when it is possible to feel some sympathy for those having to build the plane while at 30,000 feet. Gunnarsdottir’s case is not one of them. This one, ultimately, is pretty basic.Parting ShotIt will come as no surprise that Andrea Agnelli’s ideas on soccer dovetail with Andrea Agnelli’s interests.Massimo Pinca/ReutersAndrea Agnelli is, ultimately, correct. “European soccer needs a new system,” he said this week, in a speech marking his departure as the chairman of Juventus. Without it, he said, the landscape of the game will shift so that “a single, dominant league will, within a few years, attract all the talent,” thereby “completely marginalizing the others.”It is not hard to discern what he is talking about — the hegemony of the Premier League — and it is even harder to deny its accuracy. Chelsea alone has spent more this January than the clubs of the Bundesliga, La Liga and Serie A combined. Bournemouth, an English minnow but an apex predator on the continent, is busy acquiring reinforcements at $25 million a pop from teams in France. The Premier League is, slowly and loudly, eating the competition.What is — what has always been — so frustrating with Agnelli, though, are the bits he does not say, the bits he does not see.The Premier League’s supremacy is not some accident of fate. Yes, it has two inbuilt advantages that give it a head-start: It is conducted entirely in English, and it was the first league to design itself as a television product. But its competitors could still mimic at least some of its appeal: the sleek, modern backdrop; the glossy marketing; the sense of competition.That they have not is not despite Agnelli and those like him but because of them. When he talks about a new system, he does not mean finding a way to help Italian clubs build new stadiums, or develop young talent, or adopt cost controls to bring competitive balance. He is not investigating innovative ways to build new audiences, or more equitably share television revenue, so that Serie A’s Bournemouths might grow, too.No, what Agnelli means is that he wants to change the rules of the game so that Juventus is given more money, more protection, and everyone else can go and rot. Agnelli is not, in fact, worried about marginalization in the slightest. If anything, he is all for it, just so long as he is the one doing the marginalizing.CorrespondenceThere was, as George Sundell pointed out, an omission from my list of recommendations for Ellen Johnson, who wrote seeking a guidebook for her new soccer fandom: the Women’s World Cup in July and August. “Ellen might get a thrill viewing how magnificently the teams can play in that contest,” George wrote.No arguments here, of course — the World Cup was excluded only because it is still six months away — and this edition should be even more compelling than normal, given that the European teams, in particular, (seem to) have closed the gap so substantially on the United States.Mallory Swanson (formerly Pugh) ran out with a new name but some old tricks in the United States’ friendly win over New Zealand this week.Hagen Hopkins/Getty ImagesDavid Theiler, meanwhile, has an idea to improve that old correspondence section stalwart: the offside law. It is a relatively simple one, too: Why not thicken the line used by the video assistant referee to adjudicate if a player is offside? “It would allow a more generous interpretation,” he wrote. “A wider range makes it easier to see what is well offside.”The problems with offside are now so many and varied, David, that I’m not sure any one measure would solve them all, but this would be a good place to start. I believe that the Dutch, ever the forward-thinkers, have already run at least one trial with a substantially thicker line to see if it makes any difference.And Bruce Munro has something to get off his chest as regards celebrating goals. Lavish celebrations — players sprinting off, tearing their jerseys from their shoulders, sliding on their knees and so forth — have become “routine,” he wrote, “and I don’t remember that to have always been the case. Is it because of television? Where is the proportion? Is there any sense of foolishness if the scorer’s team goes on to lose the game?”As a rule, I’m happy to let people celebrate as they wish, but this is a subject that intrigues me, too. It may well be that it is playing up to the cameras, though I wonder if it is better thought of as a learned behavior: Players celebrate goals that way because that is what players celebrating goals looks like.It is striking, certainly, when someone goes against the grain, as Crystal Palace’s Michael Olise did this week. Perhaps his (rumored) policy would appeal to Bruce: He only celebrates goals that either put his team in the lead, or extend its advantage. Otherwise, he walks impassive back to the center circle, ready to resume. More

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      Everton's Women Are 'Not Shy About Being Ambitious'

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      A series of changes, big and small, has a strengthened Everton believing it can hold its own with deep-pocketed rivals in England’s Women’s Super League.LIVERPOOL, England — Some of the changes have been small, so small as to be imperceptible, at least from the outside. This summer, for the first time, Everton hired someone specifically to take care of the uniforms of its women’s team. It is the sort of thing that serves as a reminder that, in women’s soccer, many little battles are still being won.Those small changes, though, still have an impact; they still offer a marginal gain. The laundry will no longer have to be done by another staff member, someone who is supposed to be analyzing video or planning coaching sessions, or even by the players themselves. All that time saved can now be put to proper use. Everything can be just a little bit better.And some of the changes have been considerable, like the nine new players who have joined Everton squad over the last few months. There is Toni Duggan, an experienced England international, the German defender Leonie Maier, the Italian midfielder Aurora Galli, and three players signed from Rosengard, Sweden’s champion-in-waiting, dubbed the Swedish House Mafia by their new teammates.The most significant change, though, at least as far as the club’s coach, Willie Kirk, is concerned, is the one that is hardest to describe. It struck him, most clearly, while away with his team on a preseason camp in Scotland last month. Something, he could tell, had clicked.Everton’s coach, Willie Kirk, has found it easier, and cheaper, to close the gap between midtable and the top than his men’s counterparts.Catherine Ivill/Getty Images“Maybe it is self-belief,” he said, trying to put his finger on it. “Maybe it is the feeling of watching another player walk through the doors and thinking: Yep, that’s another quality signing. Maybe it is knowing that not one player can be sure they’re starting in the next game, and that competition driving standards.”Kirk may not be able to name it, not precisely, but he is happy to talk about it. The first time Izzy Christiansen, the club’s vastly experienced midfielder, sat down with Kirk — in the winter of 2019 — her abiding impression was of a coach who had absolutely “no fluff,” she said. He did not try to give her the hard sell as to why she should sign with Everton.“There wasn’t a pitch,” Christiansen said. He simply bought her a coffee — “That’s one way to persuade me to join a club,” she said — and explained how he saw her as a player, what he thought she would bring to the team, and what he, and his club, were trying to do. “It was matter-of-fact,” she said.He is exactly the same when it comes to his intentions for his team. “We are not shy about being ambitious,” Kirk said.It is telling that, when asked if the plan for the season is to challenge the Big Three of England’s Women’s Super League — Chelsea, Manchester City and Arsenal — when the season opens on Saturday, Christiansen recalibrated the question. “That’s what we intend to do,” she said. “To compete, and to surpass. We want to take the club back into the Champions League, where it belongs.”Of course, the landscape of women’s soccer has undergone a seismic shift, both domestically and in Europe, in the decade or so since Everton last graced that competition. At the start of the 2010s, Everton’s rivals for a place were Arsenal, Birmingham City, Liverpool. They were teams mostly populated by British players; few, if any, trained in the same facilities as their respective men’s teams.Chelsea used deep pockets and expensive signings to climb to the top of the Super League last season.John Walton/Press Association, via Associated PressThe W.S.L. of 2021 is starkly different: dominated by the polyglot squads constructed, at lavish expense, by Chelsea, City and Arsenal. The former boasts not only the most expensive women’s player of all time, the striker Pernille Harder, but the highest-paid female player in the world, Sam Kerr.Manchester City can call on the backbone of the England national squad — the captain Steph Houghton, Lucy Bronze, Ellen White, half a dozen others — and has sufficient financial clout that it was able to tempt one of Everton’s best players, the Australian wing Hayley Raso, to Manchester this summer. Arsenal, meanwhile, can lay claim to possessing possibly the world’s best player: the Dutch striker Vivianne Miedema. On Friday, it picked up one of the American star Tobin Heath.Those three teams have stood, almost unchallenged, at the summit of the W.S.L. for some time. They have combined to win the last five titles — Chelsea claiming three — and have accounted for every English spot in the Champions League since 2014. They are, as Kirk admitted, a formidable barrier.And yet the club believes it can break that stranglehold. “I’ve made it clear to the players that to do it we will have to punch above our weight in terms of budget,” he said. “Finance does come into it, but we feel we are there.”He credits the club’s “clever” recruitment, led by its sporting director, Sarvar Ismailov — a nephew of Alisher Usmanov, the business partner of Everton’s majority owner Farhad Moshiri, who has now been appointed to the club’s board — for much of that growth. “We have to be flexible, and we have to be smarter,” Kirk said.Within the club, Ismailov is credited with both having a keen eye for talent and an ability to drive a bargain: There are, Kirk has said previously and approvingly, “not many in the women’s game who like him.” It was Ismailov who led the campaign to land perhaps the most eye-catching of Everton’s summer recruits, the 18-year-old Swedish midfielder Hanna Bennison, the club’s record signing.Anna Anvegard, left, and Hanna Bennison, center, are teammates in Sweden. Everton added them both, as well as Nathalie Björn, with the three players earning the nickname Swedish House Mafia.Jamie Sabau/Getty ImagesBut that is only one element. When she looks back at the club she joined almost two years ago, now, Christiansen sees “something special,” something that Kirk traces not just to the raft of new players.“We have improved our working practices,” he said, a category that doubtless includes the hiring of a uniform attendant. “We have signed a lot of previous winners. We have always had a positive environment, but that breeds a winning culture.”It is a trend he sees across the club. Everton is working on building a new stadium (principally) for its men’s team. The last two coaches of the men’s team, Carlo Ancelotti and Rafa Benítez, are both Champions League winners. The ambition for the women’s team, in Kirk’s eyes, is no different to the ambition for the men’s.Perhaps, though, that relationship does not function quite as it is often presented. Everton has been condemned — through sheer economics as much as anything else — to life in the upper mid-table of the Premier League. It would cost the club hundreds of millions of dollars in transfer fees to even have a hope of overhauling Manchester City’s and Chelsea’s men’s teams.In the women’s game, though, it can now consider itself a force. It can talk of winning a place in the Champions League, and it can think, not entirely idly, of winning a championship. It can contemplate meeting clubs that exist on a different stratum in men’s soccer as something approaching equals in women’s.That has not come cheap — Bennison alone cost a “substantial six-figure sum” to coax from Rosengard — and it has not been straightforward. But Everton, unlike many of its peers in the no-man’s-land below the elite in the Premier League, now has the reward: a chance to compete, to challenge, and perhaps to surpass. That impetus has not flowed from the men’s team to the women’s but, if anything, the other way round.That is what all of those changes, the small and the large alike, have added up to: a club that has a stage on which to be truly ambitious once more, and a team that is not afraid to talk about it. More

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      Everton Beats Liverpool at Anfield, Adding to the Champions' Pain

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn SoccerA Collision at Anfield Does Little to Slow Liverpool’s FallEverton’s victory, a cause for deserved celebration, reveals a broken Liverpool team holding tight to a system that has stopped working.Mohamed Salah cut down by Tom Davies, a fair reflection of Liverpool’s afternoon, its month, its season.Credit…Pool photo by Phil NobleFeb. 20, 2021, 4:50 p.m. ETLIVERPOOL, England — It is every week, now, that Liverpool seems to lose another little piece of itself. An unbeaten home record that stretched back more than three years disappeared in January, spirited away by Burnley. The sense of Anfield as a fortress collapsed soon after, stormed in short order by Brighton and then by Manchester City.The golden afterglow of the long-awaited Premier League crown that arrived last summer has been dimming for some time, but it darkened for good last week, with Jürgen Klopp conceding the Premier League title while still in the bitter grip of winter.And then, as fireworks boomed and car horns blared across Merseyside on Saturday evening, came what may be the most hurtful shift of all. Everton had not tasted victory at Anfield this century. It had not won a derby at all in more than a decade. For Liverpool, the impotence of its neighbor and rival had been a source of such unbridled glee that it had long since been fused into part of its self-identity.But now, all of that, too, has gone. Richarlison put Everton ahead after just three minutes. Carlo Ancelotti’s team held Liverpool at arm’s length with a degree of comfort, ruffled only in flurries, for the rest of the evening.The only hint that the Everton players knew they were close to making — or, perhaps, ending — history came in their celebrations when Gylfi Sigurdsson settled the game from the penalty spot with 10 minutes to play, completing the 2-0 score line. The reactions were raucous and definitive, the sound of a curse being lifted. On the touchline, Duncan Ferguson, part of the fabric of Everton for almost all of that 20-year spell, first as a player and now as a coach, bounced and roared.Liverpool’s defeat was its fourth straight at home.Credit…Pool photo by Laurence GriffithsEverton’s victory was its first at Anfield since 1999.Credit…Pool photo by Laurence GriffithsOf course, Ancelotti and his players deserve praise and admiration for the precision and the poise of their performance, but the approach that brought them victory relies on a confluence of factors. First, of course, is that your team must be focused and disciplined and organized: not far from perfect, in fact.Second, you must be, if not lucky, then at least not unlucky: even the most finely laid plan can be undone by an unfortunate bounce of the ball, an arbitrary deflection, a moment of wonder.And third, you need your opponent to be found wanting. A team full of confidence and energy and ideas will, most often, pick a way through even the most masterful defense. Liverpool lacked all of those things utterly and absolutely.It is not desperately hard to work out why Liverpool has toiled so much this season. Klopp, certainly, does not believe there is any great mystery here. Liverpool has lost not only Virgil Van Dijk, but Joe Gomez and Joel Matip to injury, tearing the base out of its defense, of its team. Klopp has had little choice but to dismantle his midfield to patch up his defense.But that is just the start. At times, it has seemed as if everything that could have gone wrong for Liverpool this season has gone wrong. It is easier to list the players who have not spent at least a few weeks in the treatment room: Andy Robertson, Georginio Wijnaldum, Roberto Firmino, Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mané.Fabinho, the first midfielder drafted into defense, is currently absent with his own injury. Jordan Henderson, the second, limped off in the first half Saturday with a groin injury. Alisson Becker, widely regarded as the one of the world’s best goalkeepers and the one reassuring presence in Liverpool’s make-do-and-mend back-line, made three glaring errors in the defeats to Manchester City and Leicester.Jordan Henderson became the latest indispensable Liverpool player lost to injury.Credit…Pool photo by Laurence GriffithsIf the root of the problem does not require forensic investigation, though, the response to it might. Klopp has, at times, appeared noticeably more irascible than usual this season, clashing with television reporters, snapping at journalists in news conferences, exchanging cross words with opposing managers.When it emerged earlier this month that he had endured a personal tragedy — the death of his mother — it seemed as if that offered an explanation for the change in mood. Klopp, though, is adamant that he is able to compartmentalize his emotions; those who work with him say there has been no real change. Klopp has always been prickly. What has changed is the perception. Terseness from a position of strength is a flexing of the muscles. From a position of weakness, it looks a lot like a tantrum.Indeed, it is striking that, even as what started as a dip has become a slump and now, on the back four consecutive home defeats — the club’s worst run since 1923 — has the look of a spiral, Liverpool has not sought change of any sort.That is true of the club as a whole — its failure to have a central defensive reinforcement ready to go on January 1 was the act of a club operating in the old world, not the new — and it is especially true of Klopp. The style has stayed the same. The system has stayed the same. “The only way I know is to try it again, and again, and again,” he said Friday.It was a telling statement. Klopp is the archetype of what might be called a system coach: He has a way of playing that is baked into his soul. His counterpart at Everton, Ancelotti, is the opposite: a manager who once coached Andrea Pirlo but who is perfectly content, in a different time, to instruct Michael Keane and Ben Godfrey to punt the ball long and hopeful, over and over again, hoping to catch the right current in the wind.Everton’s victory pulled it even with Liverpool on points in the Premier League table. But the teams are headed in different directions.Credit…Pool photo by Laurence GriffithsSuch pragmatism is anathema to Klopp. Changing his style, so integral to his identity, would mean changing himself. That is the trait that has brought him such success, of course; it is possible, though, that it might also be what limits it in certain circumstances, that his loyalty to the system is damaging when external factors mean the system itself can no longer work.Klopp has experienced a run like this — a period when it feels as though nothing goes right — once before, in his last year at Borussia Dortmund. Then, too, his squad was ravaged by injuries. He had, in the previous seasons, dealt with the departure of a raft of key players, too. He refused to compromise his beliefs. Dortmund finished seventh, and he stepped down.The echoes of that year grow stronger with every passing week at Liverpool, with every new and unwanted record that falls. Liverpool keeps doing the same things, expecting different results, a team banging its head against a brick wall. It keeps losing all those little pieces of itself, lost in the shadow of an identity that cannot countenance change.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More