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    Manchester United Sells 25 Percent Ownership Stake to Jim Ratcliffe

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

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      Why Hasn’t The British Open Ever Been Played in Wales?

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      The Open is being played for the 151st time, this time at Royal Liverpool in England. It has never once been to Wales.The rain rat-a-tatted atop the umbrellas around Royal Liverpool Golf Club’s 17th green one afternoon this past week, the air so chilled that it did not feel like even an English summer. A veil of mist clouded the landscape. Still near enough to peek through, though, was the Welsh coast, a handful of long tee shots across the estuary.The British Open, scheduled to conclude on Sunday, may never come closer to Wales.First played when Queen Victoria was on the throne, the Open is a national rite that has encompassed only so much of the nation: Unlike England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, Wales has not hosted it. With sites through 2026 already selected and Wales still left out, the drought will last at least as long as the first 154 Opens. By then, Northern Ireland, which did not welcome a modern Open until 2019, will have had another.The R&A, the Open’s organizer, has explained Wales’s exclusion as rote matters of infrastructure and capability — no small subjects since the tournament requires temporarily raising a hugely guarded, hospitality-filled and championship-caliber coastal enclave for tens of thousands of people a day. The R&A’s stance, though, has invited years of questions about whether one of the country’s signature sporting events reflects Britain quite as much as it should.“Not all parts of the U.K. are being touched by the Open, and leaving an entire nation out of it doesn’t ring true to that mantra of golf being open to all,” said Ken Skates, a member of the Welsh Parliament who, when he was economy minister, lobbied the R&A to bring the Open to Wales.“It’s a little frustrating,” he politely allowed as he stood behind Royal Liverpool’s first green on Friday.Royal Liverpool Golf Club is hosting the British Open this year. But Wales, seen in the distance, never has.Jon Super/Associated PressJockeying for hosting rights is hardly new to sports, and men’s golf is an especially valuable target for the smattering of places with courses challenging enough to test the world’s best. Of the four major tournaments, three are played at different venues each year. (The exception, the Masters Tournament, is always held at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia.)The R&A’s roster of Open-eligible courses effectively numbers just nine these days, from a clutch of Scottish properties along the North Sea to Royal St. George’s in southeast England. After this weekend’s event at Royal Liverpool, in England’s northwest, the tournament is scheduled to return next year to Royal Troon in Scotland, followed by Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland and then England’s Royal Birkdale.By just about all accounts, the R&A routinely faces a predicament over where the Open can be put on to its customary standard. A handful of past venues are no longer in the mix, including Prestwick, the original Open course that was ultimately judged too small for teeming crowds. More recently, former President Donald J. Trump’s ties to Turnberry have kept the R&A away.Wales, though, has never had a turn at all. Indeed, one of the biggest problems for Wales is that the R&A has stopped staging Opens at more courses than the country has contenders to host one. Only Royal Porthcawl is considered a possibility, and even its cheerleaders acknowledge its shortcomings.The exclusion nevertheless stings.“We have an inferiority complex,” John Hopkins, a golf writer who has been a Royal Porthcawl member since the late 1990s, said of the Welsh people, smilingly adding that they were principally renowned “for our ability to play rugby and our ability to sing.”But hosting a British Open, he said, “would show that we punched our weight in golf.”Some believe forces beyond tournament logistics are at work to keep the Open elsewhere, perhaps historical inertia or an innate tendency for the St. Andrews-based R&A to favor England and Scotland. In 2019, The Telegraph urged the R&A to “cut out the politics” and “ignore the concerns about ‘infrastructure’ and the strength of the links because they are mere smoke screens.”There is little doubt that the R&A has been warming to Royal Porthcawl for other important events, an approach some have regarded as a consolation prize. Next weekend, the Senior Open will be decided there, and the Women’s Open is scheduled to make its Royal Porthcawl debut in 2025. Although there are concerns about whether Royal Porthcawl is long enough for the powerful men’s players of today, the course itself is seen as largely suitable for an Open, in part because it is especially vulnerable to the wild weather that can define the tournament, as Bernhard Langer saw during the two Senior Opens he won there.Bernhard Langer at Royal Porthcawl at the Senior Open Championship in 2017.Phil Inglis/Getty Images“One was bone-dry: The ball was running 100 yards on the fairway,” Langer, who also won two Masters Tournaments, said in an interview. “And one was wet and windy and just as miserable as can be, and that’s links golf.”Martin Slumbers, the R&A’s chief executive, said on Wednesday that the course was “absolutely world class.”“But we need a lot of land,” he added quickly. “We need a lot of infrastructure. We need a lot of facilities for a championship of this size. At present, that is just not possible in that part of the country.”Founded in 1891, Royal Porthcawl has a hemmed-in footprint, with relatively little space to erect gates, grandstands, premium seating, scoring tents and all of the other temporary facilities required for a major. This year’s Open was expected to attract 260,000 spectators, a showing second only to the 290,000 fans who filled the Old Course at St. Andrews last year. The last time the British Open reported attendance below 150,000 was a decade ago, at Muirfield.When Langer last played a Senior Open at Royal Porthcawl, in 2017, the tournament drew about 32,000, though poor weather stalked the event.Although the course is a drive of roughly 45 minutes from Cardiff, the Welsh capital, the area around the club has few of the restaurants, hotels and transit links that make the Open among the smoothest events in international sports. During this tournament at Royal Liverpool, many restaurants and rental homes in Hoylake have hosted legions of visitors. Still more have made the short journey to and from Liverpool, a city of about a half-million people, often using a train service running every 10 minutes.Langer, who had no doubts that Royal Porthcawl could prove an adequate Open host from a golf perspective, appeared far more reluctant to say that it could manage the other challenges of a tournament he played 31 times.“It’s hard,” he said, “to build new roads and highways and 100 hotels and create the room for a tented village and 50,000 spectators.”“It’s hard to build new roads and highways and 100 hotels and create the room for a tented village and 50,000 spectators,” Langer said about staging the British Open at Royal Porthcawl. Cameron Smith/R&A, via Getty ImagesWelsh leaders have signaled a willingness to pursue public investments in exchange for the Open going to Royal Porthcawl, and some Royal Porthcawl members have tried to buy nearby farmland that, if vacated, could make an Open far more feasible. But their yearslong efforts have not yet yielded the kind of breakthrough that could overcome the R&A’s misgivings.The ascendance of Northern Ireland’s Royal Portrush, though, has given Welsh officials something of a strategy, or at least a dose of confidence, ultimately misplaced or not.Skates predicted the R&A could bend within a decade.Then he wandered off to find his brother, Wales rising in the distance. More

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      The Joys of Links Golf Never Get Old

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      No matter which seaside, windswept course hosts the British Open, the final major tournament of the year puts a golfer’s imagination to work, and captures ours.Tired of the whole golf-gone-wild thing? The one that has turned the men’s professional game into a new toy for Saudi investors? The one that has U.S. senators dragging golf (minus the bag) to work? The one that has left the PGA Tour star Rory McIlroy saying he feels like a sacrificial lamb in the proposed PGA Tour-LIV Golf partnership?Rest easy. This week, links golf, the windswept and unadorned form of the game, takes its annual turn on golf’s main stage. It’s a chance for golf to tell its origin story all over again. The British Open, the fourth and last of the annual Grand Slam events, is upon us.The host course, this time around, is Royal Liverpool, also known as Hoylake to those who know the course and its bumpy fairways, which are rendered a pale khaki green by the summer sun and the brackish air.British Opens are always played, to borrow a phrase from the BBC commentator Peter Alliss, who died in 2020, “in sight and sound of the sea.” They are contested on links courses that are a century old — or much older. Royal Liverpool held its first Open in 1897 and is on Liverpool Bay, though you might think of it as the Irish Sea. The course is a mile from the train station in Hoylake — many fans will get there via Merseyrail — and about 15 miles from Penny Lane in Liverpool.The lifelong Texan Jordan Spieth, winner of the 2017 British Open, prepared for Royal Liverpool by entering last week’s Scottish Open, played on the links course at the Renaissance Club. One afternoon, Spieth slipped away and played North Berwick, an old and beloved links. Its 13th green is guarded by a stone wall because — well, why not? The wall was there first, and the course goes back to 1832.Jordan Spieth during the final round of his win at the British Open in 2017.Richard Heathcote/R&A, via Getty Images“In the British Isles,” the American golf course architect Rees Jones said recently, “they like quirky.”Promoting a course by way of its architect, a powerful marketing tool in American golf, is not much of a thing in Britain. Years ago, Jones was making a first visit to Western Gailes, a rugged course on Scotland’s rugged west coast. The club’s starchy club secretary — that is, the gatekeeper — told Jones he could play the course if he could name its architect.Jones offered a series of names.Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.“Who designed it then?” Jones asked.“God!” the secretary bellowed.Spieth’s plan was to play only a few holes at North Berwick, but he found he couldn’t quit. He played the entire course. While on it, he talked about the joys of links golf.“There’s nothing like links golf,” he said. “The turf plays totally different. The shots go shorter or farther than shots go anywhere else, depending on wind. It’s exciting. It’s fun. You use your imagination. There’s never a driving-range shot when you’re playing links golf.”In the background, somebody in Spieth’s group offered, “Good shot,” to another player. But you have to be careful with that phrase, when playing on links land.Nobody could know that better than Tom Watson, the winner of five British Opens in the 1970s and ’80s.“In 1975, I went to Carnoustie to play in my first Open,” Watson said in a recent phone interview. Carnoustie, on the east coast of Scotland, is famously difficult, bleak and tricky. Watson arrived at the course on the Sunday before the start of the tournament, but the overlords turned him away. He was too early. Good thing there are 240 traditional links courses across Britain.“So Hubert Green and John Mahaffey and I went down the road to Monifieth,” Watson said. “I hit my first shot right down the middle. Everybody says, ‘Good shot.’ We walk down the fairway. Can’t find my ball. It’s gone. I’m thinking, ‘I don’t know about this links golf.’”Watson won that 1975 British Open at Carnoustie. And he might have won in 2009 at Turnberry, but his second shot, with an 8-iron, on the 72nd hole, landed short of the green, took a wicked bounce and finished in fluffy grass. He need one simple closing par to win. Instead, his bogey meant a playoff, and Watson, 59 and spent, was doomed. Stewart Cink won.Watson came into the press tent and said, “This ain’t no funeral.” A links golfer, over time, learns to accept the good bounces and bad ones in any golfing life.Phil Mickelson with his caddie Jim “Bones” Mackay after making his birdie putt on No. 18 to win in 2013.Toby Melville/ReutersAfter Tom Doak graduated from Cornell in 1982 with the dream of becoming a golf course architect, he became a summer caddie at the Old Course at St. Andrews. Doak, now a prominent architect (and the designer of the Renaissance course), has been making a study of links golf ever since. In a recent interview, he noted that older golfers often do well in the British Open. Greg Norman was 53 when he finished in a tie for third in 2008. Darren Clarke was 42 when he won in 2011, and Phil Mickelson was 43 when he won in 2013.Links golf, Doak said, is not about smashing the driver with youthful abandon. When Tiger Woods won at Royal Liverpool in 2006, he hit driver only once over four days. Greens on British Open courses are typically flat and slow, notably so, compared with, say, the greens at Augusta National. There’s less stress over putting and the game within the game that favors young eyes and young nerves. What links golf rewards most is the ability to read the wind, the bounce and how to flight your ball with an iron.“In links golf, you have to curve the ball both ways, depending on what the wind is doing and where the pin is,” Doak said. “You have to figure out what the ball is going to do after it lands.”That takes guile and skill and earned golfing wisdom — all helpful whether you’re playing in a British Open or a casual match with a friend in the long dusk light of the British summer. Open fans will sometimes finish their golf day with a suppertime nine (or more) on a nearby seaside links. Greater Liverpool has a bunch of them. Every British Open venue does.Playing night golf on those courses, you might also see golf officials, equipment reps, sportswriters and caddies, Jim Mackay among them. Mackay, who is known as Bones and who caddies for Justin Thomas, was Mickelson’s caddie when Mickelson won at Muirfield a decade ago.Mackay, like millions of other golf nuts around the world, can’t get enough of the game. That is, the actual game, not its politics, not its business opportunities. Mackay knows, as a golfer and caddie, that success in links golf requires a certain kind of golfing magic, the ability to make the golf ball do as you wish.Playing links golf, he said recently, “is like standing 50 yards in front of a hotel and having to decide which window on which floor you want your ball to go through.”The caddie as poet. A golfer with options.Links golf, John Updike once wrote, represents “freedom, of a wild and windy sort.” On some level, the winner at Royal Liverpool will understand that. The winners of all those suppertime matches will, too. Yes, the Open champion will get $3 million this year. But he will also get one-year custody of the winner’s trophy, the claret jug, his name etched on it forever.Tiger Woods with his caddie Steve Williams after his win at Royal Liverpool in 2006.Andy Lyons/Getty ImagesDo you know how much Woods earned for winning at Hoylake in the summer of 2006? Not likely.But many of us remember Woods sobbing in his caddie’s arms. We remember Woods cradling the jug in victory. We remember the clouds of brown dirt that announced his shots, his ball soaring, his club head twirling.“Hit it, wind,” Woods would say, now and again, to his airborne ball, as if the wind could hear him, and maybe it could. More

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      Jiyai Shin Won a British Open at Royal Liverpool. She’s Got Some Advice.

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      It is easy to forget, given just how thoroughly Jiyai Shin romped to victory at the 2012 Women’s British Open, that she did not lead from start to finish. But her triumph at Royal Liverpool, the English club often known simply as Hoylake, nevertheless stands as one of the most commanding performances in the tournament’s history.Her message to the world’s top men’s golfers, who will contest their British Open at Royal Liverpool beginning on Thursday, can be summed up in two words: Look out.“Royal Liverpool has a lot of small greens, as well as small, deep bunkers,” Shin, who also won the 2008 Open at Sunningdale, wrote in Korean in response to emailed questions.“There is also wind,” warned Shin, who still plays on the L.P.G.A. of Japan Tour and tied for second at this month’s U.S. Women’s Open. “You have to be patient against the constant toil of the wind.”Jiyai Shin celebrated her victory on the 18th green during the final round of the Women’s British Open at Royal Liverpool Golf Club in 2012.Andrew Redington/Getty ImagesThe wind may not be the only menace, not at a club with a record of weather headaches at its recent Opens. In 2006, when Tiger Woods won, signs warned of the risk of fires. Eight years later, before Rory McIlroy’s victory, a forecast for thunderstorms led to a two-tee start for the first time in Open history. And when Shin played there in 2012, poor weather led to the third and fourth rounds being condensed into a single day. At the time, she said Hoylake had offered up the “worst conditions I think I’ve ever played.”The coming days could pose problems, too.“My worry is now what the forecast is for Saturday and Sunday, which there’s some uncertainty about which way it will go,” Martin Slumbers, the chief executive of the tournament-organizing R&A, said on Wednesday. “But it’s going to be wet or it’s going to be very wet. We’ll see.”Weather notwithstanding, the course has a distinguished history: No club along the English shore, with the exception of Royal North Devon, is older than Royal Liverpool, which was founded in 1869 and first hosted a British Open in 1897, when the amateur Harold Hilton won. Its men’s Open champions later included Bobby Jones and Peter Thomson.The 151st Open, Shin predicted, “will be the beginning of another history.”No. 1: RoyalPar 4, 459 yardsThere are three bunkers near the green on the par 4 first hole at Royal Liverpool.David Cannon/R&A, via Getty ImagesMore often than not, Royal Liverpool’s first hole will play into the breeze, and there are fairway bunkers on both sides of the hole — right around the distances where many of this week’s players can drive their tee shots.Welcome to the British Open.“It is a dogleg hole that bends slightly to the left, and the width of the green is not wide, making it difficult to put the second shot on the green,” Shin said. “It is advantageous to aim a bit to the right to maintain the flow for the next shot when playing this hole.”There are three bunkers near the green, which hardly has Britain’s smoothest putting surface. Trouble on No. 1 does not necessarily doom a player, though: Shin had a triple bogey there during one round.No. 7: TelegraphPar 4, 481 yardsRory McIlroy on No. 7 during the final round of the British Open at Royal Liverpool in 2014.Ian Walton/R&A, via Getty ImagesWant to make it to the fairway? Hit the tee shot at least 250 yards into what could be a decidedly forbidding wind. Come up short, and you’re probably in the gorse that can be found all over Royal Liverpool. A successful tee shot, though, can position a player for an accommodating second shot toward the green, where two left bunkers lurk nearby.The green has been infused with more tricks since Shin and McIlroy won, but Shin suggested the wind was a greater challenge than the green.“It was difficult to adjust the distance from the second shot to the pin due to the back wind,” she remembered. “A strong wind had the biggest impact on the first bounce.”No. 13: AlpsPar 3, 194 yardsRickie Fowler on the 13th hole at Royal Liverpool in 2014.Stuart Franklin/Getty ImagesFew holes are more beloved among Royal Liverpool’s members than No. 13. Mounds obscure the green from the tee box, suggesting that there is not much of a green on the left side.But that’s not true, and there is actually more green on the left than the right.Shin counsels not to expect much bounce from the green, which is diagonal and runs left to right, and she remembers how she “aimed a bit harder at the back of the pin than the front.”And beware the right bunker.“It seems like the club members know a thing or two about golf if they love this difficult hole in particular,” Shin said.No. 17: Little EyePar 3, 136 yardsThere are many perils on the way to the 17th hole at Royal Liverpool.Andrew Redington/Getty ImagesThe British Open has never been played in Wales, but the new 17th hole will bring the competition awfully close: just across Dee Estuary. The raised green awaits players after a spread of bunkers and other perils, so there is little room for error off the tee. There are not many favorable spots for a ball that rolls off the green, either, and the R&A is hoping the hole will infuse some drama as the tournament nears its end on Sunday.Perhaps this is the year of the par-3. At Los Angeles Country Club last month, the course included five par-3 holes for the first time at a U.S. Open since 1947.“Personally, I think par 3 makes the game more exciting,” Shin said. “I think it will be a great hole with a variety of new variables.”No. 18: DunPar 5, 609 yardsOne of five bunkers near the 18th green.Andrew Redington/Getty ImagesShin arrived at the 18th tee box during the final round with virtually no chance of losing. The only question, really, was whether she’d win by a double-digit margin.“When I walked up to the hole looking at the grandstands surrounding the green,” she said, “I felt that it was my stage and that I was honored to be there.”It stands to reason that this year’s Open might not have such a runaway winner — the most recent player near Shin’s 2012 mark was Woods in 2000, when he won by eight strokes at St. Andrews — so No. 18 might be a bit more freighted. And it will assuredly be longer after the addition of a new tee, and it will also be narrower. The R&A itself is warning that the fairway can seem “just a handful of yards wide” in some spots off the tee.The hole, the 16th for members and a place where Open players have often used long irons in the past, will veer toward the right, by an extensive and expanded out-of-bounds area, for second shots. If a player can avoid the five bunkers around the green, including the three on the left side, eagle is a possibility.“Since the hole flows from the front to the back of the green, you can aim for the next shot without any worries even beyond the green,” Shin said.On Sunday, weather permitting, someone will stand on that green and hoist the claret jug freshly engraved with his name. More

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      British Open Won’t Rule Out Saudi Deal

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      The Open is not looking for a title sponsor for one of the world’s most celebrated tournaments, but other options could be on the table.The leader of the R&A, who only a year ago was among the fiercest critics of LIV Golf, did not rule out the possibility on Wednesday that the group, the British Open’s organizer, could someday accept money from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.“The world of sport has changed dramatically in the last 12 months, and it is not feasible for the R&A or golf to just ignore what is a societal change on a global basis,” Martin Slumbers, the R&A chief executive, said at Royal Liverpool, where the Open will begin on Thursday. “We will be considering within all the parameters that we look at all the options that we have.”The wealth fund has lately surged to become one of the most prominent benefactors in sports, cumulatively spreading billions of dollars through golf and soccer and stirring speculation about where it might put its money next. Britain has been central to the wealth fund’s ambitions: In 2021, it purchased the Premier League soccer team Newcastle United.The fund and its allies have insisted that the investments are intended to broaden the Saudi economy, but they have faced skepticism and fears that Saudi leaders are partly looking to use sports to rehabilitate their kingdom’s reputation for human rights violations.Although Slumbers said last year that he was “very comfortable in golf globally growing,” he complained then that LIV’s Saudi-bankrolled model was “not in the best long-term interests of the sport” and “entirely driven by money.” Human rights abuses, he declared then, were “abhorrent and unacceptable.”He appeared far less fearsome on Wednesday, even as he placed a limit on a potential arrangement with the wealth fund, or anyone else, and insisted that he was uninterested in a so-called presenting sponsor for the Open, which will be played in the coming days for the 151st time. (Rolex is the principal sponsor for next week’s Senior Open at Royal Porthcawl in Wales. Next month, the AIG Women’s Open will be contested at Walton Heath, near London.)But asked directly during a news conference about the possibility of the wealth fund becoming “a partner,” Slumbers replied, “If I’m very open, we are and do and continue to do, talk to various potential sponsors.”Slumbers’s receptiveness reflects the swelling fears among golf executives about the financial sustainability of the sport, whose prize funds have recently soared. The purse for this year’s Open is $16.5 million, more than double that of a decade ago. On Wednesday, Slumbers said prize money was increasing far faster than he and other executives had expected.Some of the pressure swamping men’s golf could ease if the PGA Tour and LIV end what has amounted to an arms race for the world’s top players. The tour, the wealth fund and the DP World Tour took a step toward that last month, when they announced a plan to bring their golf business ventures into a new, for-profit company. The agreement, which the R&A is not a part of, may not close for months.Slumbers said that the R&A, which, along with the U.S. Golf Association, writes the sport’s rule book, would “absolutely welcome an end to the disruption in the men’s professional game.”He was much less eager for a partnership with former President Donald J. Trump, who has been one of LIV’s biggest boosters and has repeatedly asserted that the R&A is looking to return the Open to Turnberry, one of Scotland’s most spectacular courses. Trump purchased the property in 2014, five years after its most recent Open.“We will not return until we are convinced that the focus will be on the championship, the players and the course itself, and we do not believe that is achievable in the current circumstances,” Slumbers said in the days after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.Trump has nevertheless claimed since then that the R&A is looking to host another Open at Turnberry. Instead of acquiescing on Wednesday, Slumbers instead came close to repeating his 2021 statement.“We’ve been very clear,” he said. More

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      Cameron Smith Will Try To Defend His British Open Championship

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      Smith, defending a major tournament title for the first time this week, is happy not to get too worked up about much of anything.It is possible that one of last July’s customers at the Dunvegan Hotel, which fancies itself only a 9-iron away from the Old Course, remembers more of Cameron Smith’s British Open than he does.It would not take much, because Smith recently recalled roughly this about the Sunday that left him a major tournament champion: teeing off, missing a putt on the ninth hole, learning he had seized the lead, then finishing to “the feeling of not really joy, but the feeling of relief.”He considers this, a memory mostly unburdened by brilliance or blunder, a strength.“That’s one of my greatest assets: hitting a golf shot and forgetting about it,” Smith said in an interview. He has friends, as every professional golfer does, who can “remember every single shot from every single tournament they’ve played in.”“But that’s something,” he continued, “I’ve never been able to do.”He is the one who has spent the last year filling the Open winner’s claret jug with beer — Australia’s XXXX Gold, he concluded, tastes best — and passing it around.Now comes his first major title defense, which will begin on Thursday at Royal Liverpool, the English course that is the site of the 151st Open.Assessing Smith’s year so far is an exercise in choose-your-own-adventure analysis. The Masters Tournament, where he had finished in the top 10 for three consecutive years, yielded a letdown in April, when he tied for 34th at the only major tournament where he has never failed to make the weekend.But Smith’s May outing at Oak Hill was his best P.G.A. Championship performance of his career (a tie for ninth), and after missing three U.S. Open cuts in five years, he left Los Angeles with a fourth-place finish. Less than two weeks ago, he won a LIV Golf tournament near London, his second individual victory since he joined the Saudi-backed circuit last summer. The event was, perhaps, exceptional preparation for the taunts and terrors of Royal Liverpool, even for a past Open champion.“And for sure, the last couple of majors it’s started to feel really good,” Smith said.Paul Childs/Reuters“The wind is very different, I feel like, in England and Scotland,” Marc Leishman, one of Smith’s LIV teammates, observed this month. “It’s a lot heavier. Getting used to that is pretty important, taking spin off the ball. Cam is very good at that time, and throw his wedges and putting on top of that, and he’s a pretty formidable opponent.”Smith’s slump — a relative term — at the year’s start probably had its origins in a holiday break that was the longest of the 29-year-old’s career. He had won the Australian P.G.A. Championship, missed the cut at the Australian Open and was desperately in need of a reboot after years of pandemic tumult and a rush into the global spotlight. Even now, he says, he is a professional athlete who would “prefer that people don’t know me.” If he had his way, he’d probably be out fishing.And so though the hiatus was a fine, vital salve for his mind, it was, at least in the interim, a hex on his golf game. Once he returned to competition, the shortcomings of his preparation were clear. He had middling finishes in two of the first three LIV events of the year, and he missed the cut at a tournament in Saudi Arabia.He still preferred to practice putting off a mirror in his Florida office (there, instead of on a green, “because I’m lazy”) but accepted, however begrudgingly, that his driver was in need of greater work. By the time he arrived in Los Angeles for the U.S. Open in June, he was eagerly embracing an old-school approach: Don’t worry too much about distance, try to land the ball in the fairway, have a chance for birdie.He finished 50th in driving distance but had 19 birdies, tied for second in the field and equal to the winner, Wyndham Clark. At Augusta, he had been 31st in driving distance and tied for 37th in birdies, with 13.“I feel like I worked on that quite hard, and the golf has been really good, and then it was just a case of letting go and letting stuff happen,” he said of his resurgence. “And for sure, the last couple of majors it’s started to feel really good.”But Smith’s at-ease sorcery, so plain to anyone who goes online and spends a minute watching him conquer the Road Hole on the Sunday he won the claret jug, flows in large part from his equilibrium. He draws it from his mother, he thinks, perhaps not surprising for a player whose early PGA Tour years were marked by homesickness.The pandemic did not help. When he won the tour’s Players Championship in March 2022, his mother and sister were at T.P.C. Sawgrass, having just reunited with Smith after more than two years of border restrictions. Six months later, he was ranked second in the world and was one of LIV’s most hyped signings.But he has so far managed to avoid being viewed like quite so much of a villain, even before last month’s surprise announcement of a potential détente between the warring circuits. He has spent only so much time airing grievances in public. He has acknowledged shortcomings in LIV’s fields compared to the PGA Tour’s. When his world ranking tumbled, which was inevitable since LIV tournaments have not been accredited, he did not lash out because his shot at reaching No. 1 was fading.“I made my bed, and I’m happy to sleep in it,” he said in an interview in March. Now, with a tentative peace perhaps taking hold in professional golf, he is wondering whether he will have a shot, after all.“Don’t get me wrong: I want to beat everyone else,” he said. “But there’s no reason why you can’t do it with a smile on your face.”He will face 155 other men this week, all of them clamoring to deny him another year with the claret jug. Now ranked seventh in the world, and preparing for a field that includes more than a dozen fellow Open winners, he has a backup plan for his beverages.“The Aussie P.G.A. Trophy is pretty cool,” he said. “You can definitely fit a lot more beer in that one.”Still, he said this week, his eyes welled with tears when he returned the claret jug to the Open’s organizers.“I wasn’t, like, not letting it go,” he said at a news conference on Monday. “But it was just a bit of a moment that I guess you guess you don’t think about, and then all of a sudden it’s there, and, yeah, you want it back.” More

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      in Tennis

      Cameron Norrie Goes to Wimbledon as Britain’s Top-Ranked Player

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      He is the top-ranked British player at the tournament. Seven years ago when that was Andy Murray, he won.Cameron Norrie has had two mystical moments at Wimbledon. Both took place on Centre Court, the most revered venue in the sport.The first occurred in 2021 when Norrie faced Roger Federer in what turned out to be the eight-time champion’s last Wimbledon and the final singles tournament of his career.“Playing Roger on Centre Court at Wimbledon with my home fans there was surreal,” said Norrie of Britain, who had chances to break serve and send the match into a fifth set before losing 6-4, 6-4, 5-7, 6-4. “Obviously they love him there as well. I think they supported him more than they supported me that day.”The second moment happened last year, when Norrie reached his first major semifinal at Wimbledon. He became only the fourth British man in the open era — behind Roger Taylor, Tim Henman and the two-time champion Andy Murray — to reach the semifinals there.Murray won in 2016 when he was ranked No. 2 in the world; he is the last British man to have taken the tournament. This year, Norrie will be playing Wimbledon as his country’s top-ranked singles player.“There was already expectation to do well because I am the British No. 1,” said Norrie, 27, who won the first set from Novak Djokovic before falling in four sets last year. “Obviously you feel a lot of pressure. But the only way to go in is to embrace all of that. If you just run and hide from it, you’re going to get eaten alive on the court.”Norrie, who was ranked a career-high No. 8 last year and now sits at No. 13, already has wins this year over Rafael Nadal and Carlos Alcaraz, whom he upset to win a clay-court title in Rio de Janeiro in February. Last year, he also won two Association of Tennis Professionals tournaments.Cameron Norrie played a backhand return to Jordan Thompson during their round of men’s singles at the Cinch Championships in June.Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAs a junior player, Norrie was ranked No. 10 in the world. But instead of turning pro, he opted to go to college at Texas Christian University. There he met Facundo Lugones, who was a senior when Norrie was a freshman. The two would often share sideways glances as they destroyed their respective opponents. They became close friends. Now, Lugones is Norrie’s coach.“College was so valuable and so much fun for me,” Norrie said. “As a tennis player, you have to sacrifice a lot, and it’s not a normal life. I wasn’t ready for this lifestyle when I was 18 years old. I made a lot of mistakes at college that don’t really cost you so much. I enjoyed myself more than I should have. If I was doing that on tour, I would be ranked nowhere.”Norrie admits to being undisciplined in the sport during his first year at college. He showed up late for practice, scrapped his team uniform and didn’t give all of his effort. A few indoor losses caused him to be dropped in the lineup from No. 1 to No. 3.Lugones said the coaches gave Norrie an ultimatum when he came back his sophomore year. “After that, you could tell he was a different player,” Lugones said.Norrie’s on-court strength is his ability to compete on all surfaces and to fight until the end. He’s left-handed, which aids him in hitting his favorite shot: a low, flat, short backhand from the right side of the court.“He reminds me a little bit of a left-handed version of David Ferrer,” said Jim Courier, a former world No. 1. “He’s very difficult to beat, doesn’t get tired and doesn’t beat himself often.”Norrie earned the ire of Djokovic in Rome in May by taking aim on a powerful short overhead shot and hitting Djokovic in the leg when his back was turned. While Norrie apologized at the time, he has no regrets about the shot.“I wanted to win,” said Norrie, who lost the match in straight sets. “It was in the heat of the moment for me to break [serve], and I was trying everything. I was competing as hard as I could.”Lugones said Norrie’s greatest strength is his mind game.“His mental skills are different from everybody else’s,” Lugones said. “He smells blood early and then raises his level. You can’t teach that skill.” More

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      in Soccer

      Gary Lineker to Return to BBC Soccer Show ‘Match of the Day’

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      The move calms a crisis at the publicly funded broadcaster after Gary Lineker, a former soccer star, was removed from a flagship show because of a tweet about immigration policy.The BBC announced on Monday that it had reached an agreement with Gary Lineker, a star sports personality, that will allow him to return to hosting its flagship soccer program, “Match of the Day.”The move defuses a crisis that began with a politically charged post that Mr. Lineker posted on Twitter last week about the British government’s immigration policy and escalated into a staff mutiny that threatened the BBC’s reputation and stability.“Gary is a valued part of the BBC and I know how much the BBC means to Gary, and I look forward to him presenting our coverage this coming weekend,” Tim Davie, the broadcaster’s director general, said in a statement.Mr. Davie said the BBC would launch an independent review into its social media guidelines.In a Twitter post, Mr. Lineker said, “After a surreal few days, I’m delighted that we have navigated a way through this.” He also thanked his colleagues at the network who had supported him.Mr. Lineker’s standoff with the BBC had set off a noisy national debate about free expression, government influence and the role of a revered, if beleaguered, public broadcaster in an era of polarized politics and freewheeling social media.It came after a walkout by Mr. Lineker’s soccer colleagues forced the BBC to radically curtail its coverage of a national obsession, reducing the chatty flagship show he usually anchors, “Match of the Day,” to 20 commentary-free minutes on Saturday.The BBC struggled over the weekend to work out a compromise with Mr. Lineker that would put him back on the air, after days of controversy about his criticism of a government plan to crack down on asylum seekers.But the fallout from the dispute is likely to be wide and long-lasting, casting doubt over the corporation’s management, which has made political impartiality a priority but has faced persistent questions about its own close ties to the Conservative government.“All this has put the BBC’s independence at risk, and its reputation at risk,” said Claire Enders, a London-based media researcher and the founder of Enders Analysis. “That’s unfortunate because this is, at heart, a dispute over whether the BBC can impose its social media guidelines on a contractor.”Mr. Lineker, 62, is no ordinary contractor, of course. He is perhaps the BBC’s biggest name, a beloved sports figure who made a smooth transition from the playing field to the broadcasting booth, where he has been a weekly fixture since 1999, analyzing games and shooting the breeze with other retired sports stars. He is the BBC’s highest-paid on-air personality, earning 1.35 million pounds, about $1.6 million, in 2022.But Mr. Lineker, who grew up in a working-class family in Leicester, has never kept his views on social issues a secret. When the government announced strict new immigration plans to cut down on asylum seekers, he posted on Twitter, “This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s, and I’m out of order?”The British home secretary, Suella Braverman, who is spearheading the policy to stop migrants from crossing the English Channel in small boats, said that Mr. Lineker’s comments diminished the atrocities of the Holocaust. Other Conservative lawmakers said that he had misused his BBC platform — not for the first time — to voice a political opinion.“We need to make sure we maintain that trust in the independence and impartiality of the BBC,” the chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, said on Sunday to a BBC journalist, Laura Kuenssberg.The BBC is not the only media organization to hit turbulence over questions about political expression and social media. Tensions have flared at British newspapers, as well as at The Washington Post and The New York Times, over the Twitter posts of journalists, sometimes critical of their own employers.“This is a period of social change, where public attitudes toward the media and social media are rapidly evolving,” said Mark Thompson, a former director general of the BBC who was later the chief executive of The New York Times Company. “Editorial teams around the world are racing to catch up.”What makes Mr. Lineker’s case especially complicated is both his job status — he is a contractor, not a full-time employee, who works for BBC Sports as opposed to BBC News — and the broadcaster’s enforcement of its social media guidelines, which critics say is haphazard at best and hypocritical at worst.Alan Sugar, a British businessman who hosts the BBC’s version of the American reality TV show “The Apprentice,” has tweeted vociferously against a union leader who has pursued a confrontation with the government, as well as against a former leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, whom Mr. Lineker has also criticized.Mr. Lineker got into no apparent trouble with his bosses about that, or for speaking out on the air about human rights abuses in Qatar during his coverage of the World Cup soccer tournament there last year.Mr. Davie, a former marketing executive who also had links to the Conservative Party, has come under fire for his handling of the dispute with Mr. Lineker. In an interview with the BBC over the weekend, he apologized for the spiraling crisis, which forced the broadcaster to all but scrap two days of sports programming.“This has been a tough time for the BBC,” Mr. Davie said. “Success for me is getting Gary back on air and together we are giving to the audiences that world-class sports coverage which, as I say, I’m sorry we haven’t been able to deliver today.”Mr. Davie, who was appointed during the Johnson government, has made upholding the BBC’s political impartiality one of his major goals as director general. But he denied that the broadcaster was bowing to pressure from the government or Conservative politicians, and said he had no plans to resign. More

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      in Tennis

      Boris Becker Returns to Germany After Release From British Prison

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      The tennis champion left for his home country after serving time in Britain for hiding his assets in a bankruptcy case.Boris Becker, the three-time Wimbledon champion, returned to his home country of Germany on Thursday after he was freed from prison in Britain, his lawyer said.The Southwark Crown Court in London sentenced Mr. Becker to 30 months in prison in April for hiding his assets after he was declared bankrupt.Mr. Becker’s lawyer, Christian-Oliver Moser, said in a statement that the former tennis player left for Germany after he was released from prison. “Thus he has served his sentence and is not subject to any restrictions in Germany,” Mr. Moser said.Mr. Becker, 55, was sentenced to prison after he was found guilty of four charges under the Insolvency Act in Britain, where he had lived since 2012.Neither Mr. Becker’s lawyer nor the British authorities said whether he had been ordered to leave the country.“Any foreign national who is convicted of a crime and given a prison sentence is considered for deportation at the earliest opportunity,” the Home Office, which oversees immigration in Britain, said in a statement.Under Britain’s Early Removal Scheme, foreign nationals who are imprisoned in Britain and are subject to deportation can be removed from the country up to 12 months before they would have otherwise been eligible for release. From 2020 to 2021, the Home Office removed more than 1,100 people under this program.After Mr. Becker was declared bankrupt in June 2017, he was legally obligated to disclose all of his assets so they could be used to pay his creditors. The London court found in April that he had concealed, failed to disclose and removed assets, including a loan of 825,000 euros (around $875,000) and property valued at €426,930.90 (around $453,000), according to Britain’s Insolvency Service.As he tried to fend off creditors, Mr. Becker made an unsuccessful bid for diplomatic immunity from the British courts in 2018, after the Central African Republic had in April of that year named him as its attaché to the European Union for sports, culture and humanitarian affairs.Nearly two decades earlier, in 2002, Mr. Becker was sentenced to two years’ probation and fined nearly $300,000 after being found guilty of income tax evasion in Munich.The court battles followed a stellar career in tennis.In 1985, Mr. Becker, then 17 years old, became the youngest champion in the history of men’s singles at Wimbledon. He won six Grand Slam titles, including three at Wimbledon, before he retired from tennis in 1999. He was a frequent commentator for the BBC at Wimbledon and coached Novak Djokovic, a 21-time Grand Slam singles champion, for three seasons. More