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      Copa América Will Return to U.S. in 2024

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      The relocation of the South American soccer championship is part of an agreement that also includes expanded events for clubs and women in the Americas.The Copa América, South America’s biggest soccer championship, will return to the United States in 2024 as part of a broad collaboration agreement between soccer officials in the Americas that also includes at least one new tournament as well as expanded intercontinental competitions for clubs and women’s national teams.Concacaf, the confederation that governs the sport in North and Central America and the Caribbean, and Conmebol, which rules the game in South America, announced their agreement on Friday.Among its obvious soccer and financial benefits — a previous Copa América in the United States was the largest and richest edition in the competition’s history — the agreement signaled a significant restoration of trust between officials from North and South America.Many soccer relationships in the region were seriously damaged in the years after 2015, when a corruption investigation led by the United States Department of Justice led to the arrests and convictions of dozens of soccer and marketing officials throughout the Americas. Television rights to the Copa América, the century-old South American championship, were central to some of those cases, and two former television executives charged with other crimes are currently on trial in New York.Despite all that, South American soccer nations have long looked to the United States, with its vast pool of expatriates but also its vast pool of capital, as a market they wanted to tap. But they wanted to do it on their terms.Now, South America will get access to both, while the United States, Mexico and Canada — the three co-hosts of the 2026 World Cup — will have the opportunity to play in a meaningful and competitive tournament two years before that global event. The success of the 2024 Copa América will go a long way toward determining if a longer term collaboration will become a fixture for soccer in the region.The Copa América was played in the United States in 2016, the only other time it was held outside South America and also the only time it included as many as 16 teams. Chile beat Lionel Messi and Argentina in the final, denying Messi a coveted trophy he has since claimed. (Messi also led Argentina to the World Cup title last year, but it is unclear if he will still be playing internationally in 2024.)In 2024, the 10 South American nations that would normally contest the Copa América will be joined by six teams from the Concacaf region.It is not uncommon for the Copa América to include “guest teams” from other regions. But for 2024, the teams from Concacaf will qualify through the 2023-24 Concacaf Nations League, rather than by invitation. A guest team has never won the Copa América, although Mexico made the final in 1993 and 2001. The United States has appeared in the tournament four times, making two semifinal appearances.The federations said the expanded Copa América would serve, in part, as a vital window of top-level preparation in the Western Hemisphere ahead of the 2026 World Cup, which is to be co-hosted in the United States, Mexico and Canada.The tournament will be held from mid-June to mid-July 2024, putting it in scheduling conflict with that summer’s European Championship, a tent-pole event on the soccer calendar that is held every four years, but keeping both tournaments well clear of the Paris Olympics that open in late July 2024.Argentina won the most recent Copa América in 2021, a career highlight for Lionel Messi, and his first major national team title. He and Argentina followed that with a World Cup win in 2022. In all, Argentina and Uruguay have won 15 Copa Américas each and Brazil nine.The federations also announced that the 2024 women’s Concacaf Gold Cup will include the top four South American teams alongside eight teams from Concacaf, a rare (and welcome) bit of heightened tournament competition for the region’s best teams outside the Women’s World Cup or the Olympics.A new men’s club competition for the region is also planned, to include two club teams from each confederation. The federations said they hoped to launch that tournament in 2024 as well. The tournament comes as the Club World Cup, for club teams around the world, is in flux, with FIFA planning to expand it but hold it less frequently.The club tournament is another sign of the deepening relationship between the regional bodies and the willingness of Conmebol to seek new territories for its teams. It already has a relationship with UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, that has seen the revival of an intercontinental championship matching the winner of the Copa América against the European champion. Argentina beat Italy, 3-0, in the game last year, the first time it had been held since 1993.The new four-team club tournament is likely to feature the finalists from the Concacaf Champions League and the finalists from the Copa Libertadores, the South American club championship, or the winner of that event and the champion of South America’s second-tier competition, the Copa Sudamericana.The new ventures come against the background of intense negotiations ahead of FIFA finalizing the global calendar for the next decade, a keenly anticipated plan that will shape the future of soccer across the world. More

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      Fox Sports Could Be Focus of FIFA Trial in Brooklyn

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      Two former executives are accused of paying bribes to obtain broadcast rights, including for the World Cup. Testimony could reveal what the company knew.The World Cup may be over, but the FIFA corruption scandal never seems to end.Nearly eight years after a series of predawn raids exposed corruption at the highest levels of international soccer, and more than five years after the conclusion of the first trial in the Justice Department’s sprawling probe of bribery in the sport, a second trial is set to begin on Tuesday in federal court in Brooklyn.Once more, the defendants stand accused of being involved in complex schemes to pay millions of dollars in exchange for the rights to matches. Once more, prosecutors are expected to focus on the same tournaments and to rely on many of the same witnesses. They will make their arguments before the same judge in the same courtroom and, they hope, they will add three more convictions to the long-running case’s already impressive ledger: to date, the government has netted 29 convictions in the case.But after years of focusing on soccer officials and sporting bureaucrats, the new trial has the potential for a dramatic twist: revelations about the involvement of one of FIFA’s most important media partners, Fox Corporation, in a secretive scheme to pay millions of dollars in bribes to enhance its position in international soccer — and to seize the sport’s biggest broadcasting prize, the rights to the World Cup itself, from a rival network.Fox itself is not on trial. But the fact that two of its former executives have been accused of orchestrating bribes, hiding payments and trafficking in insider information could damage the reputation of the $17 billion media giant. It could also breathe fresh relevance into a corruption investigation that once captured worldwide attention but which long ago faded from the news.Since the conclusion of the last trial, FIFA, soccer’s governing body, which is based in Zurich, has managed to stage two World Cups — in Russia in 2018 and Qatar last year — and bank record revenue, all while casting itself as the victim of its own corruption. It has been a successful strategy: Last summer, the Justice Department returned $92 million of the money it had recovered in the case to FIFA and its federations, part of a plan to award the soccer bodies more than $200 million in restitution overall.Gianni Infantino, the current FIFA president, has repeatedly made the claim that the organization he leads is now free of corruption. But the case, at least in the view of the Justice Department, is far from over.In the trial that begins this week, Hernán López, the former chief executive of Fox International Channels, and Carlos Martínez, who served as president of the subsidiary’s Latin American operations, face wire fraud and money laundering charges. Prosecutors have accused them of running a scheme to pay bribes to “advance the interests of Fox” and help the company secure television broadcast rights to both the popular Copa Libertadores, the South American club championship, and the World Cup. If found guilty, López and Martínez face up to 20 years in prison.A third defendant in the trial, the Argentine sports marketing firm Full Play Group SA, faces a laundry list of charges for what prosecutors described as years of bribe-paying to win rights to tournaments. If convicted, it could join a short and ignominious list of corporations found guilty of felonies in the United States, among them banks, energy companies and the Trump Organization.Lawyers for all three defendants declined to discuss the case, as did a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York. But new convictions in federal court could help prosecutors justify the millions of dollars spent on an investigation that began in secret more than a dozen years ago and long ago more than proved its point: that global soccer has a profound corruption problem and — critically — that almost nothing is outside the reach of American justice.FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, has claimed his organization is free of corruption, but a trial in the United States could bring new revelations.Martin Meissner/Associated PressThe trial in Brooklyn, which is expected to last four to six weeks, largely concerns activities in South America. According to the March 2020 indictment, López, who holds American and Argentine citizenship, and Martínez, a dual citizen of the United States and Mexico, helped pay and conceal “annual bribe and kickback payments” to at least 14 soccer officials to secure television rights to two lucrative annual club championships, the Copa Libertadores and the Copa Sudamericana.Prosecutors also contend that López and Martínez used relationships forged through bribes to obtain “confidential information” from a top FIFA executive from Argentina that helped the company secure the American broadcast rights to the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. Rights to the event had been held by ESPN since the 1994 edition of the tournament, but in 2011, Fox announced it had snatched them away. Four years later, FIFA announced it had also awarded Fox rights to the incredibly lucrative 2026 World Cup, to be held in the United States, Canada and Mexico, without so much as giving ESPN a chance to bid.The allegations involving Fox appear to match 2017 trial testimony given by Alejandro Burzaco, the former chief executive of the Argentine sports marketing firm Torneos, who pleaded guilty in the case and has been cooperating with the government.As the prosecution’s star witness, he claimed López and Martínez helped cover up $3.7 million in bribes by using a phony contract with a firm partially owned by Fox.Fox has denied any knowledge of any bribes, saying at the time that “any suggestion that Fox Sports knew of or approved of any bribes is emphatically false.” López and Martínez have emphatically denied the charges against them in court filings, claiming that any bribes would have been paid by Burzaco.López left Fox in January 2016, seven months after the first indictment in the FIFA case, and subsequently founded the podcasting company Wondery, which he sold to Amazon for a reported $300 million nine months after he was indicted in the soccer case.Both his fate, and that of Martínez, may depend heavily on new testimony from Burzaco, who is once again expected to be the government’s chief witness — and, potentially, the source of any major revelations. 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      Opening the Post-World Cup Mailbag

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      Was Argentina-France the greatest final ever? Or a dull game with a great finish? Readers have their say, and our columnist holds his ground.For the better part of six weeks, the number has been ticking inexorably higher, the angry red of the icon on the corner of my inbox indicating the urgency of the situation. There was a flood of messages after the end of the World Cup, a steady flow as the holidays started, even a trickle on Christmas Eve, dashed off as gifts were being wrapped and stockings hung.Many of the notes were generous, touching messages of thanks and support, but others contained thoughts and ideas and comments and questions, and though they were all appreciated, they weighed heavy, too: all of those emails left unattended, unanswered, howling at me in their void.Well, New Year, New Me: at last, a chance to sit down and catch up on all of the passionate, intelligent, funny and occasionally downright outraged correspondence that has drifted into my inbox in the last few weeks. Thanks for every single one of them. Even the ones that are, as outlined below, wrong.Let’s start with the subject that seems to have animated more of you than any other: the assertion that December’s World Cup final might have been not just the greatest final of all time, but the greatest game.Perhaps, many of you suggested, that was written in the heat of the moment. It had been a long month in the dissembling unreality of Qatar’s, and FIFA’s, Snow Crash vision of the future. The lights had been so bright and the music so loud that it had, at times, been impossible to think clearly. Maybe that effect lingered?“Your judgment and perspective are usually spot on, but ‘Greatest World Cup final’? Really?” exclaimed Richard Fursland. Just as baffled was Greg Zlotnick: “The first 80 minutes were fairly dreary, and France barely made it into the Argentine half. Extra time was intense and exciting, but does the best game ever start with 80 of the first 90 minutes being lopsided and end in penalty kicks?”Lionel Messi, with the prize he chased for two decades.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesStuart Forbes, on the other hand, was straight to the point. “You are drinking the FIFA Kool-Aid,” he suggested, inadvertently offering for free the sort of sponsorship suggestion FIFA would happily pay a consultant a six-figure fee to make.“It was very entertaining, but surely Argentina dominated the first 75 minutes against a distinctly off-color France? Was it really the greatest World Cup final ever? And was the move for Ángel Di María’s goal better than that for Carlos Alberto in 1970?”With the benefit of a couple of weeks of perspective, looking at all of this in the cold light of reality — and there is no colder light of reality than Yorkshire in December — I would say: yes, to both.As the novelist Christopher Priest has put it, there are three parts to a magic trick. The first is the Pledge: something fundamentally routine, unremarkable, such as the first 80 minutes of the final. The second is the Turn: Kylian Mbappé’s devastating two-minute intervention.But both of those are building to the Prestige, the denouement that brings the audience to its feet. What happened in those final 40 minutes at Lusail is not separate from, or in some way diminished by, the relative ordinariness of what preceded it. The slow burn and the sudden ignition are all part of the same trick.Indeed, only one thing might have improved this year’s final: the swift, ruthless judgment of penalties should not count against the majesty of the game, but either Randal Kolo Muani or Lautaro Martínez scoring in the final minute of injury time in extra time would, admittedly, have proved more satisfactory, somehow.Still, though, it is hard to think of a compelling way to answer Robert Lanza’s question. “What other finals would be contenders as the greatest?” he asked, before pitching Uruguay’s victory against Brazil in 1950 as perhaps the most convincing.That was not quite a final, though: The tournament was not a pure knockout then; Brazil would have won the World Cup simply by avoiding defeat. A case can be made for England’s extra-time win against Germany in 1966 — a last-minute equalizer to take the game to extra time, a controversial, match-defining goal — and Argentina’s win in Mexico in 1986.Is it even possible to compare iconic moments from different eras?Anne-Christine Poujoulat/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJust as in 2022, both of those finals had overarching narratives: England’s quest to win its first World Cup in the former; Diego Maradona’s attempt to prove his status as the best player on the planet in the latter. Perhaps the answer is time, and age, and circumstance: The World Cup, after all, means different things to different people. Lionel Messi has been the player of my lifetime; his triumph, his glory, resonates in a way that Bobby Charlton’s or Maradona’s does not, for me.On the goal, there is less scope for mitigation and interpretation. Mary Loch may not even have regarded Di María’s strike as the best of the game — “I believe Mbappé’s second goal was the greatest goal of the final,” she wrote — but I’m inclined to go with the counterargument, as provided by Jurek Patoczka.“I would challenge anybody to show me a goal, anywhere, anytime, that was scored after a sequence of six one-touch passes,” he wrote. “And this was on the grandest stage possible.”Having relitigated all of that — and changed absolutely nobody’s minds in the process — we can move on, grumbling with discontent. Jacqueline Davis wanted to know if this would be the last time we see the World Cup take place in both the Arab world and the European winter.“I heard Saudi Arabia was being encouraged to throw its hat in the ring for 2030,” she wrote. “Would that not present many of the same difficulties as Qatar? Did the experience of 2022 improve the Arab world’s chances?”The answer, there, is unquestionably yes. If anything, Qatar has effectively provided a blueprint for what FIFA would like the World Cup to look like in the future. The nostalgic, romantic choice for 2030 is a South American bid that includes Uruguay, host of the first tournament a century earlier. The practical one, from FIFA’s point of view, is an impossibly wealthy autocracy that can provide the same sort of fantasyland as it enjoyed in Doha.Three men who got everything they wanted out of Qatar’s World Cup.Dan Mullan/Getty ImagesGunnar Birgisson is more concerned by the format of future tournaments. He worries that 32 teams is too few, but that 48 — as planned for 2026 and beyond — means teams that “don’t really have the quality to participate” will end up as seat-fillers and cannon fodder, rendering “qualification in North and South America largely meaningless.”His solution is both original and elegant. “Keep the 32-team format but create more playoffs between teams in different continents as a sort of pre-World Cup tournament,” he suggested. Continents would have a certain number of guaranteed slots, but an additional number of teams would participate in the playoffs, allowing a continent to earn additional spots.That is an idea FIFA has skirted, at times, as part of its ongoing Big Thoughts approach to growth, and it is one that has some merit: retaining the symmetry of the current set-up while allowing for some expansion. The downside, of course, is that it would take longer, and teams that have to go through the extra qualifiers would be at something of a disadvantage for the finals tournament itself.Given that FIFA has accepted that its original plan, for 16 groups of three teams, was as awful as everyone could see it would be as soon as it was mentioned, there is still room for these sorts of ideas to be adopted in time for 2026, though there is a different question occupying Jacob Myers.“What will it take for soccer fandom in America and Major League Soccer to take off following the 2026 World Cup?” he asked. “There has been this thought that the World Cup in the U.S. in 2026 will automatically launch the sport into new heights. There’s likely to be a boost, but this idea of soccer all of a sudden gaining a ton of popularity year-round is offered up without any interrogation of the logistics.”The problem with this question — and we ask a version of it on the other side of the Atlantic, too — is I’m never quite sure what the bar is supposed to be. Does the United States have a popular domestic league? Are attendances pretty strong? Is youth participation booming? Are your television schedules infused with endless soccer coverage that would have been unimaginable a decade ago?It’s very much a yes, to all of the above, right? Of course, M.L.S. can continue to grow in popularity. Viewing figures can go up. Things like the World Cup final will help to bring in new fans. But, from a few thousand miles away, it looks an awful lot like soccer is now embedded in the U.S. sporting consciousness. In such a competitive landscape, that is no mean feat. 2026 is not, in that sense, soccer breaking new ground; it is, if anything, its coming out party, a showcase of just how much it belongs.If that does not convince you, let’s finish on this, from Paul Bauer. “Living in a senior citizen condo complex in New Jersey, I am surrounded by neighbors whose understanding of soccer is that it exists,” he wrote. “This World Cup changed that. After the final, neighbors who never watch approached me and shared with me how much they enjoyed the game. I’m so glad that they now understand my passion for football. The rest will follow.”The Glaringly ObviousCody Gakpo should improve Liverpool’s attack. But attack isn’t Liverpool’s main problem.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJürgen Klopp is, as a rule, right about soccer’s unhealthy obsession with transfers. He is right to be exasperated, and more than a little irritated, by not only the demand for constant churn but the veneration of it, by the deep-seated belief that every problem is a recruitment problem, by the ease with which fans spend their own teams’ money.He must know, by now, that trying to persuade people to his way of thinking and Liverpool’s way of working is — in his own words — like talking to a microwave. But there is something admirable in the fact that he continues doing it. “We signed an outstanding player like Cody Gakpo,” he said last week, “and then next thing you can read is: ‘Who next?’ It’s like we didn’t have a team.”The problem, in this instance, is that those voices telling Klopp to spend money — not just fans, but members of the Premier League’s grand constellation of talking heads — are not doing so because they are bored, or fickle, or because they are unreconstructed spendthrifts. They are doing so because Liverpool, very clearly, has a problem in midfield, one that the $50 million signing of Gakpo — a wide forward — does not address.There might, in time, be a recognized condition in soccer in which a manager’s desire for their advocated approach to be proved right begins to impact, negatively, on their ability to win games. It might be called Mourinho Syndrome, for the camera-shy Portuguese, or Wengeritis, for the noted FIFA apparatchik.Ordinarily, it affects the way a manager wants their team to play, manifesting in a refusal to adopt new methods or ideas, or to amend obvious shortcomings on the field. Klopp is too open-minded, too happy to delegate, to be at risk of that. It is possible, though, that he has reiterated so often that not every problem is to do with personnel that he is either no longer able or no longer willing to recognize when that is precisely the issue. More

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      Shakhtar Donetsk Claims FIFA Rule Is Hurting Teams From Ukraine

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      A hearing will be held over a rule that allows overseas players to suspend their contracts with Ukrainian teams during the Russian invasion.LONDON — Fresh from the conclusion of the men’s World Cup, soccer’s governing body FIFA faces a legal challenge of its rule that allowed players to immediately leave Ukrainian club teams because of Russia’s invasion.On Thursday, sport’s top court will begin hearing a more than $40 million claim for damages brought against FIFA by a top Ukrainian soccer team.The hearing at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland, centers on a temporary rule by FIFA that allowed overseas players on Ukrainian teams to suspend their contracts and sign for teams elsewhere. The Ukrainian league stopped play for about six months, then restarted in August.Shakhtar Donetsk, the club that is bringing the claim, has lost several of its top players without receiving a transfer fee under a regulation first implemented in March. The system is slated to run at least until June next year.Under FIFA’s emergency statute change, the suspension is only temporary, meaning that many players will eventually have to return to their host teams in Ukraine as their contracts continue to run. But with little sign of the war ending, many of those players may be out of contract by the time FIFA lifts the temporary order, which would enable them to leave as free agents.The State of the WarA Botched Invasion: Secret battle plans, intercepts and interviews with soldiers and Kremlin confidants offer new insight into the stunning failures of Russia’s military in Ukraine.A New Russian Offensive? A top adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine is bracing for the possibility that Russia will sharply escalate the war in a winter offensive that could include mass infantry attacks.Putin in Belarus: President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia made a rare visit to Belarus, raising concerns in Ukraine that Russian forces could aim again at Kyiv, which is near the Belarusian border.The War in the Skies: As Ukrainian officials warn of a new Russian ground offensive, waves of Russian missiles continue to batter Ukraine’s infrastructure. The attacks are leaving a trail of destruction and grief.“We want fairness and justice,” Sergei Palkin, Shakhtar’s chief executive, told The New York Times. “On one side FIFA protects players but it should also protect clubs.”FIFA did not respond to a message seeking comment.Shakhtar has seen millions of dollars’ worth of talent leave for nothing since the invasion started, losing a crucial source of revenue it requires to balance its books. Last summer, it could only watch as top players moved without fees to teams in England’s Premier League, historically a lucrative market for Shakhtar, and also to France’s top division.“Two days before FIFA made the announcement, we almost had a contract on the table: we were to sign the next day,” Palkin said of one high value sale that was scuttled. The club pulled out from the talks, he added, learning it could instead register the same player for free.To make matters worse, no special provisions have been put in place for Ukrainian teams whose finances have been crushed by the ongoing war. The league was initially suspended before restarting without fans, even as the war continues. Several matches have been suspended by air raid sirens, with players and officials forced to take cover in shelters.Shakhtar and the other Ukrainian teams are still required to pay money owed to teams outside the country, including for players that have been allowed to suspend their contracts.Palkin described an example of one situation in which the team agreed to sign a player from an Italian team just before the Russian invasion. The player never set foot in Ukraine and was allowed to move elsewhere, leaving Shakthar on the hook for about $9 million. It asked his former team to scrap the deal and to sell him elsewhere, but those talks floundered. Shakhtar has balked at the payment, Palkin said, and the club, which he declined to name, is asking FIFA to punish Shakhtar.Palkin said efforts to come to an arrangement with FIFA have largely been met with silence. Multiple Ukrainian teams have asked the governing body to suspend their obligations to other clubs until normal operations can be established. He also suggested FIFA, which announced it had made $7.5 billion from the World Cup in Qatar, could also establish “a reparation fund” for Ukrainian teams.Shakhtar, which is owned by the billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, has the highest payroll among Ukrainian teams. But it is also benefiting from playing in the Champions League, Europe’s top club competition. Its home games are played across the border in Poland and have provided a lucrative — and much needed — financial boost, as well as providing a platform for its domestically reared talent, which, unlike foreign players, are not able to suspend their contracts.That has allowed Palkin to try and negotiate player sales ahead of the opening of the midseason European player trading window next month. He attended meetings in London recently with English clubs interested in signing forward Mykhailo Mudryk, 21, who is considered to be one of European soccer’s biggest emerging talents.Palkin said he is conscious of teams looking to take advantage of his team’s situation and is unwilling to be forced to sell for a below-market price despite the ongoing hardship. That means Mudryk could remain with Shakhtar until next summer’s off-season, a time when the biggest trades are typically made. “It’s quite a long negotiation process,” he said.The Ukrainian league is currently on break for the winter and is scheduled to restart in March. By then, there should be a resolution in Shakhtar’s case against FIFA.“We want to sit together with all the stakeholders and work out a plan,” Palkin said. “And we want fairness and justice.” More

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      How FIFA Silenced a World Cup Armband Campaign

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      European teams had planned to highlight inclusivity on soccer’s biggest stage. They blinked when the sport’s governing body flexed its muscles.DOHA, Qatar — The opening match of the World Cup was only hours away when the leaders of a group of European soccer federations arrived for a meeting at the luxury Fairmont Hotel. The five-star property, converted into the tournament headquarters for FIFA leadership, was an unlikely setting for a fight. But with the matches about to begin, it would have to do.By then the federations and representatives of FIFA had been meeting on and off for months about a plan by the group of nine national teams to wear multicolored armbands with the message “One Love” during their matches at the tournament in Qatar. FIFA had been displeased by the idea, but the teams — which included the tournament contenders France, Germany, England, the Netherlands and Belgium — felt a tacit peace had been agreed to: The teams would wear the armbands, and FIFA would look the other way, then quietly fine them later for breaking its uniform rules.In a conference room at the Fairmont on Nov. 20, though, everything changed. With the room’s large windows and their sweeping views of the Persian Gulf to her back, Fatma Samoura, FIFA’s second-ranking executive, told the federations that their armbands would not only be against the tournament’s uniform regulations but also considered a provocation toward Qatar, the tournament host, and other Islamic nations and African countries. They would not be allowed, Samoura said. The Europeans were stunned.The 24 hours that followed, a flurry of meetings and threats and raised voices and brinkmanship, are just a memory this weekend, as Argentina and France prepare to play in the World Cup final on Sunday. FIFA did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the discussions; this article is based on interviews with multiple participants in the talks, many of whom asked for anonymity because they were not allowed to relate private discussions to the news media.The One Love campaign, begun in the Netherlands three years ago as an effort to promote inclusivity, morphed into one of the biggest controversies of the early days of the World Cup. A month after its sudden end, it remains instructive as an unusually forceful display of the power FIFA wields over its member federations; the leverage it can bring to bear to force their compliance in disagreements; and the way a social justice campaign set to take place on the sport’s biggest stage could be silenced in a single 24-hour period.FIFA’s secretary general, Fatma Samoura, informed the teams that players who wore the One Love armband risked serious penalties.Stuart Franklin/Getty ImagesWhen seven of the European teams arrived in Qatar in late November, their soccer federations insisted that the plan for their captains to wear the One Love armbands remained intact even though FIFA, advised about the plan months earlier, had yet to respond to the idea, despite letters mailed and talks held at the soccer body’s Zurich headquarters.The European nations competing in the World Cup — England, France, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, Wales and Switzerland — and two nations that had not qualified, Norway and Sweden, had found common cause months earlier. Buffeted by mounting criticism of the Qatar World Cup at home, they had planned to highlight their inclusivity message during matches at the tournament. The campaign came after the host country had faced a decade of scrutiny over its human rights record, its treatment of migrant laborers and its criminalization of homosexuality.The group of teams, eager to show solidarity with minority groups and highlight their concerns, but also wary of offending the sensitivities of their hosts, had decided months earlier that they would wear an armband whose design was similar to, but purposefully different from, the more well-known Pride flag.In September, they went public with the plan, with each soccer federation releasing an announcement simultaneously. In statements, captains like Harry Kane of England, Virgil van Dijk of the Netherlands and the goalkeeper Manuel Neuer of Germany — some of the game’s biggest stars — spoke about their eagerness to share the message.Behind the scenes, as the tournament grew closer, the federations sought clarity from FIFA about what it might do once the captains entered the field with an armband that had not been sanctioned by FIFA.At a meeting on Oct. 12 at FIFA’s headquarters in Switzerland, representatives of the teams met with high-ranking FIFA officials, including the governing body’s deputy secretary general, Alasdair Bell, and ​ FIFA’s human rights department, Andreas Graf. The officials talked about labor reforms in Qatar, about the possibility of compensation scheme for migrant workers and about the safety concerns of gay fans attending the World Cup. The final item on the agenda was the One Love armband.“We expressed quite strongly that we would wear the armband, that for us there was no discussion about it,” Gijs de Jong, the secretary general of the Netherlands soccer federation, told The New York Times. The group told the FIFA officials that their federations were willing to accept fines for breaching World Cup uniform regulations, which they understood to be the maximum punishment FIFA could impose for such a violation.The FIFA officials replied that they would discuss the armband plan and return with a response. They did not. News media inquiries went unanswered, too.De Jong said he took FIFA’s silence as a sign that while soccer’s governing body was clearly not pleased about the plan, it might look the other way long enough for the World Cup to play out.“I thought in this case that they would not forbid it but also not give permission, just sort of let it go,” de Jong said. “I thought that would happen, and maybe we would get a fine.”That all changed when the teams arrived in Doha in the days before the tournament.Some of the teams held events with migrant workers at their training bases, and in news conferences their captains were asked about the plan to wear the armbands. A few recommitted to the idea. But the France captain, Hugo Lloris, who had worn the One Love armband during games in Europe, said he would not join the campaign at the World Cup, citing respect for Qatar, a conservative Muslim nation and the first Arab host of the World Cup.Despite Lloris’s sentiments, nothing appeared to have changed for the other teams. They remained steadfast in their convictions at that point, even though they had been alarmed by a speech by FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, who bashed European attitudes toward Qatar on the eve of the opening game.The European representatives had decided to let his words slide when they entered a meeting room at the Fairmont. Seated around a table so large that one executive present compared it to ones used by Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, they held further talks on the rights issues and the armband, which by that point had a competitor. Days earlier, FIFA had surprisingly announced an armband campaign of its own: Its versions bear slogans like “No Discrimination,” “Save the Planet” and “Education for All.”The European delegation praised that campaign — which was co-sponsored by the United Nations — but reiterated that their captains would be wearing One Love armbands as planned. Once again, the federation representatives left with a feeling that there was an unspoken compromise in place.“We will wear the armband, we will acknowledge your campaign and you will take it slow with disciplinary procedures,” de Jong said when asked to describe the mood after that meeting broke up. “Fine us after the World Cup.”Ritzau Scanpix/via ReutersMatthias Schrader/Associated PressSeveral European politicians and officials made quietly colorful protests at the World Cup, including the former Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, top left, and Germany’s interior minister, Nancy Faeser, top right. Belgium’s foreign minister, Hadja Lahbib, wore a One Love armband into a V.I.P. box, where she sat near the FIFA president, Gianni Infantino.Natacha Pisarenko/Associated PressWithin 24 hours, though, the mood and tone suddenly shifted. After a summit for FIFA’s 211 member federations led by Infantino, the European teams and representatives of Norway and Sweden, two countries that did not qualify for the World Cup but had been outspoken over the Qatar World Cup, were ushered once more to the conference room. There, Samoura, a former U.N. official from Senegal who had not been present at the earlier meeting, took a more forceful tone.Stunning those present, she warned that the punishments they faced would be immediate and directly target the players involved. Voices were raised. According to a European official who attended the meeting, Samoura, during a coffee break, even suggested to a delegate from Belgium that, should its team continue to promote the One Love armband, it might embolden African teams to wear versions protesting past colonial abuses. FIFA, asked directly about the incident, said it would not comment on the specifics of the meeting.As the meeting passed the two-hour mark, creeping closer to the time all those present needed to head to Al Bayt Stadium for the World Cup’s opening game, a question was eventually put to FIFA: What are you going to do if the teams go ahead? A FIFA official suggested the match commissioner could remove the armband off any captain who wore one. “We said, ‘Good luck with Virgil van Dijk,’” said de Jong, referring to the 6-foot-5 Dutch captain.Still, by the time the meeting broke up, sporting punishments became, for the first time, a distinct possibility.Upset about a plan by European teams to wear One Love armbands, FIFA came up with its own.Jennifer Lorenzini/ReutersThe FIFA versions included uncontroversial slogans about education and discrimination.Friedemann Vogel/EPA, via ShutterstockAt the stadium that evening, while Qatar was losing the opening game to Ecuador, the members of the European group huddled, preparing for the worst. They quickly came to an agreement that if there was to be a punishment for their players — FIFA was by then threatening to hand out a yellow card to any captain in violation of the uniform rules — they would not put their top stars in a position where they had to make a choice.But FIFA had still not provided any clarity, and by then the World Cup had begun. Three of the European teams would be playing the next day, and the rest in the days that followed. On Monday, the morning after the opening match, the first of those teams, England, received a high-profile delegation from FIFA, including the tournament director Colin Smith and FIFA’s head of communications, Bryan Swanson, at its hotel in Al Wakrah.There, FIFA ratcheted up the pressure. According to de Jong, who said he was called immediately by Mark Bullingham, the English federation’s chief executive, FIFA made clear that the yellow card threat was merely a minimum sanction. “They implied it could be a one-game ban for a player,” de Jong said.The federations agreed that the FIFA threat was “unprecedented” and would likely be overturned in a legal challenge. But they were out of time. “What will you do on the pitch?” de Jong said. “Send your lawyer out there?”The campaign collapsed. The teams announced that they had asked their captains not to wear the armbands. The players complied, and the tournament moved on.All of the teams eventually took the field without incident. When they did, many of their captains were wearing armbands emblazoned with FIFA-approved messaging. More

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      When World Cup Reality Isn’t What It Seems

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      LUSAIL, Qatar — Fatih pulls the car over, letting the engine idle, and reaches for his phone. He hurriedly swipes away the various ride-sharing apps he has open and scrolls through his WhatsApp chats with a practiced finger. He is searching for a group called “Brazil Fans Qatar.” This, he says, will explain everything.Last month, as teams started to arrive in Qatar ahead of the World Cup, several found guards of honor waiting for them at their hotels and training bases: groups of a few dozen fans, clad in national-team jerseys, waving national flags, carrying homemade banners and beating drums.In most circumstances, that would not be especially noteworthy. Here, though, it was impossible not to wonder.There had long been doubts about how many fans would attend the first World Cup in the Middle East, thanks to both practical concerns — the cost of spending weeks in Doha, the relative scarcity of alcohol — and ethical ones, centered on Qatar’s treatment of the migrant workers who had built the tournament, and its criminalization of homosexuality.Qatar, it had already emerged, had recruited several hundred “fan leaders” from across the world, paying for their flights and accommodations in exchange for their enthusiastic, public support. The suspicion ran that the groups waiting to welcome the teams, apparently wholly composed of South Asian men, were another arm of the same program.No, no, no, Fatih said, suddenly stopping the car. He is ordinarily “an accountant and a sales executive,” he said, but for the duration of the tournament he has set up — with permission — as a taxi service, too. Like most foreign workers here, he preferred not to use his last name out of fear of drawing unwanted attention from the country’s authorities.Fireworks and a full house before the United States played Iran.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesAfter a minute or so, he finds what he wants: a video from Kerala, his home state in India. It had been shot that day but had already been forwarded many times. It showed two groups of men, some carrying sticks, brawling in the center of a village. Half of them are wearing bright yellow Brazil jerseys. The others are in the distinctive sky blue and white of Argentina.“This happens every FIFA World Cup,” Fatih said. There are other fans whose loyalties lie with Portugal, or England, or Spain, he explained, but mostly it is Brazil and Argentina. The affiliations run deep. Fatih might change his club team, he said, but Brazil was nonnegotiable.It was fans like these, like him, who had greeted the teams in Doha: Keralans who live and work in Qatar and had been sufficiently enthused by the prospect of seeing these usually remote, distant stars in the flesh that many of them paid hundreds of dollars for tickets to games. Fatih himself was going to see Brazil play Cameroon, he said. Any cost was worth it.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      David Beckham Is the World Cup’s Missing Mouthpiece

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      Qatar paid David Beckham tens of millions of dollars to promote the country and its interests. To its frustration, it has not received much return on the investment.DOHA, Qatar — In the early days of the World Cup, with the group stage underway and the world’s eyes locked on Qatar, the host of soccer’s biggest championship was eager to take advantage of the spotlight shining on its tiny desert nation.To sell itself to the world, Qatar had spent millions of dollars on celebrity endorsements, including agreements with a battalion of former soccer players who could speak to fans with street cred and in a common language. Now, the time had come to roll out its biggest signing, the one star in its arsenal in a league of his own: David Beckham.So during a midweek lunchtime, plans were drawn up for Beckham and several other ex-players to show up at a fan zone set up close to Doha’s bayside Corniche. There, they would greet fans and be interviewed by an employee of the organizing committee on a specially built stage. Beckham’s team agreed to the request that he attend but set two conditions: his presence was not be announced ahead of time, and reporters were not to be alerted.The event was a dud. The fan zone at Al Bidda Park was so deserted at the arranged time, in fact, that the event was canceled, even though Beckham and the others were already backstage, according to multiple people familiar with the plans.The curious incident, though, was emblematic of the unusual relationship between Qatar and Beckham. It is a partnership with a pitchman who rarely pitches and an arrangement that has shadowed, rather than showcased, the host country. But it also has produced a strange reality in which one of the world’s most recognizable celebrities is at once everywhere but also nowhere.Beckham has been visible, but not vocal, in Doha.Alex Pantling/Getty ImagesBeckham’s face is plastered on billboards all over Doha. He appears in advertisements on television during halftime breaks and in social media feeds promoting a pass to access cultural events in Qatar. He also has been spotted in the V.V.I.P. stands at World Cup stadiums, and he was filmed visiting the England team before its elimination.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      How Qatar Keeps Its World Cup Stadiums Cool Enough for Everyone

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      A mechanical engineer at Qatar University used giant tanks of cold water to create a cooling system in one of the hottest places on the planet.DOHA, Qatar — Saud Ghani knows cool.In his air-conditioned Porsche, he pulled up to a shady spot at Qatar University. He entered one of the many laboratories in the engineering department where he studies thermal dynamics — mainly, how to keep people comfortable in a warming world.Even his title is cool: professor and chair of air conditioning.The university’s campus was empty because the semester had been suspended for the World Cup. The temperature outside was about 90 degrees Fahrenheit. The indoor labs were noticeably chilly.This was the quiet epicenter of what became a global story of audacity. This is where Ghani and his associates oversaw the design of systems that dared to air-condition the eight outdoor World Cup stadiums in and around Doha, one of the world’s hottest big cities.“People think, oh, you have too much money and you’re just pumping cold air,” Ghani said. “That is not it at all. But what can you do? If people want to criticize from the sideline, I think that’s an oversight. But if they want to learn, they are 100 percent welcome here.”So Ghani set off on a private tour.He wanted to show the scaled replicas of each stadium, most of them tweaked during the design stages — at Ghani’s behest and to the architects’ chagrin — to better keep out hot air. He wanted to show the garage-sized wind tunnel and smoke and laser lights used to examine how air would circulate through each design. He wanted to show the miniature model of bleachers, with little hollow humans made on a 3-D printer and steadily injected with warm water — at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit — to simulate body temperatures, and where infrared cameras could tell which of the fake people were too warm or too cool.“I want people to feel neutral,” Ghani said. “I don’t want them to feel cold. I don’t want them to feel warm. It’s about perception. It’s not just temperature. But how do they feel?”This Goldilocksian pursuit raised plenty of questions. Not the least of them are two big ones:Did this man, in these labs and at this World Cup, just alter the future of stadium design in a warming world?Could open-air stadiums that keep athletes and spectators comfortable at room temperature, no matter the heat of the day, exist?Ghani shrugged off the first one. He said yes to the second.A City Humming With CoolSaud Ghani, center, explaining the cooling system to visiting journalists in June. Ghani has said he wants people to feel “neutral,” neither warm nor cold.Tasneem Alsultan for The New York TimesGhani, 52, is from Sudan and got his doctorate in mechanical engineering at the University of Nottingham in England. Married with three children, he came to teach at Qatar University in 2009, just as the country was preparing its long-shot bid for the World Cup.One day he got a call from Qatar’s highest levels: Can you design a system that keeps people cool, even in an outdoor stadium, even in Doha, even in the summer? The bid’s success, or failure, might rest on it.Sure, Ghani said.In 2010, Qatar won the right to host this year’s tournament, for reasons that have to do with corruption more than thermal dynamics.In 2015, acknowledging that scorching temperatures, in and out of stadiums, could be both miserable and dangerous, FIFA moved the competition from its traditional summer dates to late fall. The change may have made Ghani’s mission easier, with daytime temperatures in the 80s and 90s instead of 110 or higher, but he insisted that it did not matter.These eight stadiums of various sizes and designs were not just for the World Cup. One will be dismantled, but seven will be used, year-round: for big events, for club teams, for university athletics, maybe even as part of a bid for the Olympics. (Such promises for everyday uses can go unfulfilled, as the ghost venues of past Games attest.)In Qatar, the heat for nine months of the year is almost unbearable, Ghani said. And it is not going to get better.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More