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    A Billionaire Bought a Chunk of Manchester United. Now He Has to Fix It.

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    Jim Ratcliffe spent $1.5 billion for a 25 percent stake in his boyhood English soccer club. On Wednesday, he laid out his vision.The process was six months old and already starting to wear on Jim Ratcliffe, the British billionaire, the first time he brought out the Champagne to toast his purchase of Manchester United. But even that celebration, at the Monaco Grand Prix in May, proved premature.There was no deal. Not yet.Doing one was never going to be easy. Mostly, that was because any potential sale for United offered a tantalizing marriage of money, power and history: Mr. Ratcliffe, the wealthy chairman of INEOS, the petrochemicals giant, had supported Manchester United since he was boy. United, the most decorated club in English soccer, was one of the most iconic brands in global sports. And the Premier League, to which it belonged, was the richest soccer league in the world.What ensued was an auction as unpredictable and chaotic as some of Manchester United’s most memorable games. The news media breathlessly tracked surges of momentum between Mr. Ratcliffe’s bid and a rival one led by a little-known Qatari sheikh.United fans, eager to see their club shake off its unpopular owners, the Florida-based Glazer family, devoured it all. Yet while the negotiations produced months of headlines, discussion and whispers, what they did not produce was a sale.Mr. Ratcliffe won out in the end. Kind of.On Dec. 26, the Glazers announced that they had agreed to sell 25 percent of United to Mr. Ratcliffe, one of the world’s richest men. The price — more than $1.5 billion — bought a curious arrangement in which Mr. Ratcliffe, the new minority owner, would take over day-to-day control of the club’s soccer operation. The deal was ratified on Tuesday night.On Wednesday, as Mr. Ratcliffe outlined his vision, newspapers and websites grabbed eagerly at the headline-ready quotes about new players, old rivals and stadium plans. But a closer listen to his words suggested that the grueling sales process might have been the easy part. Reviving United — a trophy-winning machine a decade ago, in recent seasons reduced to something closer to a punchline — is likely to be a yearslong process, he warned.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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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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      At P.S.G., a Coach’s Vision Collides With a Star’s Power

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      The system may be the center of the modern soccer universe, but stars like Kylian Mbappé exert a gravity of their own.Ultimately, a single wrong answer cost Rafael Benítez his job, the one he had coveted for most of his working life. The slight downturn in results, the disaffection of the players, the sudden loss of trust from those who had chosen to employ him — all of it, he believed, could be traced back to that single, relatively harmless, misstep.Not long into his ill-fated reign as coach of Real Madrid, in 2015, Benítez had been asked what seemed, on the surface, a simple question: Did he regard the team’s star, Cristiano Ronaldo, as the best player in the world? Perhaps Benítez was trying to be clever. Perhaps he was trying to challenge his star. Perhaps he was, unadvisedly, being honest.Either way, he did not really see the big deal. Ronaldo was certainly one of the best players in the world, he responded. But then so was Lionel Messi. Benítez said he did not want to have to choose between them. “It would be like asking my daughter if she prefers my wife or me,” he said, by way of explanation.Barely four months later, Benítez was out at Real Madrid. The contemporaneous reports suggested he had struggled to build a bond with the players.The reality, as far as Benítez was concerned, was more straightforward. His answer, all those weeks earlier, had displeased Ronaldo, and the coterie of advisers and power brokers and hangers-on who surrounded him. They would not forget the slight. From that day, Benítez was toast.Rafael Benítez, well-traveled and battle-scarred.Ander Gillenea/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn that context is a lesson. Even the simplest question — the one that sounds and looks and feels so much like a softball, so basic and brief that it could not possibly do any harm — is at best a test. At worst, it is a trap.You are a coach in charge of one of the world’s most prestigious clubs. In your care is one of the game’s brightest stars. What you believe, what you feel, what the objective truth might happen to be is irrelevant.Do you think your player is the best in the world? For the purposes of harmony and unity and your own continued viability as an employee: Yes, you do.That Luis Enrique, the Paris St.-Germain coach, chose a different path when asked precisely that question last month, then, constituted something of a risk. He had just watched Kylian Mbappé, not only his team’s unquestioned star but also its most valuable asset, its cornerstone and its unofficial sporting director, score a hat-trick in a 3-0 victory over Reims.Mbappé had spent most of the previous two summers threatening to leave his hometown. The club had, at various points, mobilized every single one of its resources — up to and including Emmanuel Macron, the French president — to persuade him to stay. The team’s hierarchy was reported to have afforded him powers so extensive and unorthodox that it is safe to say the leaders are operating on the assumption he very much is the best player in the world.Luis Enrique, though, took even more of a risk than Benítez. “I’m not really happy with Kylian today,” he said after the win over Reims. “Why? Because managers are strange. About goals, I don’t have to say anything, but I think he can help the team more in a different way. I told that to him first. We think Kylian is one of the best players in the world. No doubt. But we need more, and we want him doing more things.”It is to Mbappé’s credit that, just as the storm was gathering, he did his best to quell it. Luis Enrique had said precisely the same thing to him privately, he confirmed. He had, even if he said so himself, taken the criticism “well.” “He is a great coach,” Mbappé said. “He has a lot to teach me. From Day 1, I told him he would have no problem with me.”Whether that will hold — and for how long — is impossible to gauge today, but it is another reminder of the inherent, inexorable tension between soccer’s two overriding urges — one that is far from unique to the modern Paris St.-Germain, but is perhaps drawn more clearly there than anywhere else.There is one, the one that plays out on the field, that holds that this is now resolutely a coach’s game, one in which strategy conquers all and players are cogs in a finely tuned wheel, each following intricate and comprehensive instructions about where to be and what to do. In this vision, everything is subordinate to the grand vision being concocted on the sidelines and in the data analyst’s office.And there is another one — the one that is rooted to some extent in the traditional economics of sports but has been exaggerated by the devotional nature of fandom in the digital age — that places individual stars at the front and center of a club. This theory has given these stars a heft and pull greater than the institutions that make and pay them.None of that is new, of course — managers have always been compelled to balance the needs of the team with the wants of the individual — but it has never felt so pronounced as it is now, the twin forces never quite so repellent. The system may be the center of the universe, but the stars exert a gravity of their own.Luis Enrique, still officially in charge.Lee Smith/Action Images, via ReutersP.S.G. has been struggling with that equation for some time. It is not so long, after all, since it named a team that included Neymar, Messi and Mbappé, none of whom was especially keen to submit himself to the sort of defensive duties that are the preserve of lesser mortals.Things have improved — Messi and Neymar have moved on, of course — but Mbappé remains: a wondrous, uplifting, irreplaceable talent, but still an entity that somehow remains distinct from the team itself.Luis Enrique’s ethos is, like those of all modern coaches, based on collectivism, the complex interplay of 11 individual components. At times, particularly in the Champions League — where it has now failed to beat Newcastle United twice, been dismantled by A.C. Milan, and may not reach the round of 16 — P.S.G. has the air of a machine spluttering to find a gear.It is caught, in essence, in a trap. Luis Enrique’s vision cannot take hold if Mbappé is an exception. Mbappé cannot be exceptional if he has to spend all of his time dutifully tracking his opponents. The star cannot shine without the system, but the system cannot hold in the shadow of the star.Luis Enrique will do well to find a solution to that riddle. Sometimes, as those who have been in his shoes can attest, there are no simple answers.Curious LimboDavid de Gea awaits your call.David Klein/ReutersThe reflexive response to the sight of André Onana standing, yet again, with his head bowed and his shoulders slumped after Manchester United’s gloriously puerile draw with Galatasaray on Wednesday is sympathy. Last year, Onana was the standout goalkeeper in the Champions League. A few months at Old Trafford seem to have drained him of all confidence.It is difficult not to wonder, though, what David de Gea must make of it all. For a decade, de Gea was not only United’s first-choice goalkeeper but frequently its saving grace and, at points, its highest-paid player. That the club did not seek to renew his contract when it expired over the summer was no surprise — his form had waned, and his salary was exorbitant — but the fact that he has yet to be picked up by anyone now borders on the bizarre.Is he pricing himself out of the market? Is he turning down offers in the hope of the perfect opportunity? Has he lost the motivation to play? Or is it — and this may be the Occam’s razor solution — that soccer has an inclination toward a potent blend of recency bias, faddishness and groupthink?This … Might Work?A share stronger than yellow? Let’s try it.Peter Nicholls/ReutersAt this point, it would probably be a good idea if the International Football Association Board — the faceless, unaccountable gaggle of bureaucrats who seem to have decided that soccer has to be played according to their wishes — took a little time away. Most of the board’s recent interventions, after all, ranging from V.A.R. to whatever the handball rule is this week, might broadly be said to have been a mixed bag.The decision to investigate an “orange” card — leading to a player’s entering a 10-minute sin bin for a range of specific offenses — does, though, have some merit. There are a plethora of incidents that feel too serious for a yellow card but not quite deserving of a red.That has only become a pressing issue, however, because of the increased officiousness with which games are refereed, the blame for which can squarely be placed with the IFAB, but the fact that the board is solving a problem of its own making should not be a disqualifying factor.Some change can be good. This may be one of those times.CorrespondenceThis week, a friend pointed me in the direction of something called a PANAS personality test, as endorsed (or created; I’m not sure) by the academic Arthur C. Brooks. It struck me as flawed — it separates people into four emotional categories, and yet none of them are “Yorkshireman” — but, with five minutes to spare, it struck me as a harmless diversion.My sunny demeanor, it turns out, makes me a “cheerleader,” one of life’s optimists. Jim Murphy and Scott Rehr, by contrast, would both get “poet,” I suspect, with their tendency to linger on negative outcomes. The N.F.L.’s experience, Jim wrote, would suggest that a Premier League commissioner — the role raised in last week’s newsletter — would be “pretty much a lackey for the owners.”Scott, if anything, was more dubious. “The idea of a Premier League commissioner sounds great until I think about FIFA and Gianni Infantino,” he confessed. “Would a Premier League commissioner more naturally slide into the autocrat role demonstrated by Infantino?”That would, of course, be a risk. A Premier League commissioner would be vulnerable to manipulation by the people who paid the boss’s wages. It might be offset just a little, though, by accepting the wise counsel of S.K. Gupta. “The problem is the unenforceable and arbitrary rules, which can only be enforced retrospectively,” he wrote, a reality that often results in things decided in courtrooms instead of league offices.”He added, “Rather than limiting the loss which a team incur, the better system would be to have a transfer cap which teams can spend, based upon the winnings of the team in all of the competitions they have been in.”I’m not sure you even have to go as far as instituting a salary cap — something that is much more easily applied in sports played in closed leagues drawn from a maximum of two countries — but there’s no doubt that real-time enforcement of the rules would improve the situation. The Premier League should not be left to pursue deferred punishment; it should be in a position to impose immediate prohibitions on teams that transgress its financial requirements.Quite where Keith Kreitman would fall on the Brooks test is not for me to say, but I will admit to a sneaking inspiration for people who are exasperated by trivialities. “I wonder about the constant use of the term ‘unlucky’ whenever a player bangs a ball off the upright or the crossbar,” Keith wrote. “It’s not like a stray bird or a sudden burst of wind affected the flight of the ball. The player merely missed the target. There is simply no component of luck involved.”This is technically correct, which as we all know is the best way to be correct, and it is a point I have made over the years to several players. All I can tell you is that they don’t like being told they should have aimed better. More

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      Soccer Watchalongs Like Stretford Paddock Offer a Broadcast Alternative

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      Soccer fans are tuning out broadcasts in favor of watchalongs: streaming parties where you hear what you want to hear and see everything except the game.With the lights adjusted and the cameras rolling, the production team gives Joe Smith his cue. In five seconds, he will be broadcasting live to a couple thousand people. Mr. Smith’s mind, though, is elsewhere. “Slate is definitely the best way to build a roof,” he mutters to his co-host, Jay Mottershead, as the countdown hits three. “All these years on, they haven’t topped it.”And with that, they are on air. They will remain so for the next four hours, essentially uninterrupted: a broadcasting endurance test staged in a subterranean studio, all exposed brick and industrial lighting, in the middle of Manchester’s achingly hip Northern Quarter.Before they have finished, they will have touched on subjects as diverse as: the slightly alarming frequency with which Mr. Mottershead has nightmares; the declining popularity of lemon curd; and the story of a man who attends Mr. Smith’s gym exclusively to read vintage copies of “Cars” magazine.Occasionally, their freewheeling, faintly anarchic conversation to be interrupted by what is supposedly the purpose of the evening’s activity: keeping track of the game between the soccer team they support, Manchester United, and the Danish champion, F.C. Copenhagen.That is, after all, what will attract more than 100,000 people to their livestream over the course of those four hours. It is the diversions and the tangents and the stream of consciousness about roofing, though, that will keep them there.Watchalongs like Stretford Paddock’s have become big business, with full-scale production crews and hundreds of thousands of subscribers.Rory Smith/The New York TimesHard-Core CommunityThe concept of watching two people watch a soccer game might sound like a distinctly postmodern form of entertainment, a close cousin of the gaming streams that proliferate on Twitch and the unboxing videos that for some reason captivate children on YouTube.In soccer, though, the form has deep roots. The idea of making most games available to watch on television, after all, is a relatively recent one. In Britain, home to the Premier League, many games continue to be blacked out, in the interest of protecting in-stadium attendances.Barred from showing those games, broadcasters have for years had little choice but to find creative ways to keep viewers up-to-date on what is taking place in them. Most have settled on the format pioneered by Sky’s “Soccer Saturday” — launched in the 1990s — in which an array of former players sit in a studio, watching feeds of the games only they can see, and update viewers on key moments in real time. (Think of the N.F.L.’s popular Red Zone channel, only without seeing anyone actually playing football.)A group reaction to a last-minute goal on Arsenal Fan TV in 2021 made a compilation of the watchalong’s greatest hits.The form of the show that Mr. Mottershead and Mr. Smith host on Stretford Paddock, the Manchester United fan channel they co-own — or its counterparts on outlets like The Redmen TV (Liverpool) and We Are Tottenham TV (self-explanatory) — is essentially the same. The function, though, is distinct.Most of their viewers, Mr. Mottershead said, are also watching the games, either legally or illegally. “They turn the commentary down and listen to us instead,” he said. They do so because they want a much more narrowly focused product: Stretford Paddock’s audience only wants updates on Manchester United, for example, not news about anyone else who is playing at the same time.And, crucially, they want those updates delivered not by the compromised and biased mouthpieces of the mainstream media — what they see as retirees protecting their friends and business interests, or commentators with the nebulous but definite prejudice against their club — but by dyed-in-the-wool fans like them. “We might disagree on things,” Mr. Mottershead said. “But we all want United to do well.”Still, after more than six years leading watchalongs with Mr. Smith, Mr. Mottershead has come to believe that what draws in fans is not simply a matter of having their obsessions met and their biases confirmed.What his viewers are looking for, he thinks, is simple. They want someone to watch the game with them.Viral EmpireThe part of the soccer industry that is made for fans and by fans is necessarily tribal. Every club essentially exists in its own silo. The biggest names in the Manchester United content universe will be largely alien to those who follow Liverpool, just as celebrated Arsenal podcasters will have little or no resonance to Tottenham supporters.The crowning exception is Mark Goldbridge, soccer’s 44-year-old livestream kingpin and the genre’s only real crossover star. It is not just that his fan channel, The United Stand, currently has 1.77 million YouTube subscribers. It is that almost every time Manchester United loses (or draws, or concedes a goal), he is liable to reach many millions more.Footage from Mr. Goldbridge’s streams reliably goes viral: rants that are by turns splenetic, wildly N.S.F.W., and vaguely surreal. He will howl that Manchester United’s defense has “all the resistance of a papadum catching a bowling ball,” say, or that the club is accidentally employing “a team of slow giraffes.”Quite what it is about Mr. Goldbridge that has made him so prominent is difficult to pinpoint, and he offered no clues: He declined through his representation to be interviewed for this article, on the grounds that he is currently exploring opportunities away from “the watchalong space.”In interviews, Mr. Goldbridge has accepted that there is an element of cringe comedy, in the style of David Brent or Alan Partridge, to his delivery. Peter McPartland, a host on Toffee TV, a channel dedicated to Everton, agreed. “There is an awkwardness to him that makes him funny,” he said.Channels like We Are Tottenham TV and others all emphasize their bona fides as fans, and can offer faraway fans a glimpse of the in-stadium atmosphere they might never experience in person.Whatever it is, it is undeniably effective. “He has built an empire,” said Paul Machin, a founder of The Redmen TV, the Liverpool fan channel. The problem is less his success, other hosts said, and more in the copycats he has inspired.“People see his videos going viral,” Mr. Machin said, “so now there are a lot of Manchester United watchalongs where people you’ve never seen before are kind of performing their anger.”The economics of the internet, in theory, incentivize virality. In an industry in which there is a direct correlation between clicks and revenue, going viral is held to be both the greatest prize and the ultimate purpose of all online content.Those who earn their living from fan channels, though, see that kind of attention less as a goal and more as a danger. “We don’t want that virality,” said Ben Daniel, who founded We Are Tottenham TV with his brother, Simon, in 2017.Clips that break tribal lines tend to do so by attracting a considerable proportion of “hate watches,” he said — views from fans of other clubs relishing another team’s suffering. But those are not people who might hit the like button, or subscribe. Virality, it turns out, brings the wrong sort of fame.ParasocialOn the surface, the rewards for watchalong fame are thin. YouTube’s algorithm is weighted toward shorter videos, not hours of broadcast. The platform’s chats, which allow viewers to append payments to their comments or questions, drive only a couple of hundred dollars of revenue.The benefits are largely second-order ones. They are worth doing, Mr. Smith said, because they can drive subscriptions. Mostly, though, they do them because “it would be weird not to: The game is the culmination of everything we talk about.”He and Mr. Mottershead are old hands by the standards of the genre: Stretford Paddock has been doing watchalongs for almost a decade. Most of the newer versions trace their origins to the pandemic, when social distancing rules kept fans from attending games in person.Before then, fan channels focused on giving supporters who could not or did not attend games a digital version of the experience: a taste from outside the stadium, and inside the crowd, before, during and after games.“People want to feel that connection to their clubs,” one watchalong host said, wherever they happen to be watching.Rory Smith/The New York TimesWith the stands empty, that was not possible. All that was left was to offer running commentary on the games that they, like every other fan, were watching on television.When fans returned to the stands, though, the channels noticed there was still a sizable audience craving that type of in-game coverage. “It was so popular that we couldn’t drop it,” Mr. Machin said of The Redmen TV’s experience.Creators of Premier League watchalongs said they all appeal to roughly the same audience, distinguished only by tribal allegiance: fans generally between 16 and 35, though with a substantial proportion who are just a little older. A slender majority live in Britain, but there are healthy constituencies in Ireland, the United States and Australia, as well as whichever country a given team’s stars call home. Tottenham, for example, has a sizable following in South Korea thanks to the club’s beloved captain, Son Heung-min.They are all watching, too, for much the same reason. “People want to feel that connection to their clubs,” Mr. Machin said, wherever they happen to live.Watchalongs create a different sort of bond: a form of what psychologists call a parasocial relationship. Viewers want their biases to be reinforced. They want to know how other, like-minded fans are reacting to the games. But they also want the digressions, the asides about roofing and nightmares and cultural appropriation as it relates to hairstyles.They are, after all, watching from home, all around the world, each of them locked in their own little silo. What they want, more than searing insight or expert analysis or even a cheap laugh, is a connection to people who are doing exactly the same thing.Mr. Mottershead and Mr. Smith are not trying to offer them detailed commentary. They are trying to recreate the feeling, Mr. Mottershead said, of “watching the game with your mates.” More

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      Bobby Charlton, an England Soccer World Cup and Manchester United Icon, Dies at 86

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      A mainstay of Manchester United and one of the game’s best-loved figures, he won the World Cup in 1966 and the European Cup in 1968. Bobby Charlton, one of soccer’s greatest players, who won the World Cup with England in 1966 in a dazzling career that was tinged by the tragedy of losing eight of his Manchester United teammates in a plane crash at the start of his playing days, died on Saturday. He was 86.His death was confirmed in a statement from Manchester United, which called him one of the club’s “greatest and most beloved players.” The statement did not say where he died or cite a cause. It was revealed in November 2020 that Charlton had dementia.Charlton was famed for his bullet shot and his relentless goal scoring, even though he did not play as a traditional striker. He was England’s top scorer, with 49 goals, for 45 years until Wayne Rooney beat the mark in September 2015. Charlton was also Manchester United’s top scorer for decades, with 249 goals in 758 appearances over 17 years, until Rooney surpassed that figure, too, in January 2017. In addition to his scoring feats, Charlton’s career was indelibly marked by a plane crash in 1958, shortly after he had become a professional player. Following a European Cup match against Red Star Belgrade, the plane on which the Manchester United team was traveling crashed in heavy snow during a refueling stop in Munich. Of the 23 who died, eight were players. Charlton, who was dragged from the wreckage by a teammate, was 21 years old at the time.Barely three weeks later, with the United manager, Matt Busby, still in a hospital in Germany, Charlton was back on the field. Because of his dignity in leading the Manchester United team through that dark period, his sportsmanship, and his central role in United’s revival and in his country’s sole success on the international stage, several commentators referred to him as the first gentleman of soccer.Charlton became a director and ambassador of Manchester United in 1984. A statue of Charlton, alongside his fabled teammates George Best and Denis Law — known as the United Trinity — was erected outside Manchester United’s stadium, Old Trafford, in 2008, and in 2016 the club renamed the south stand of the stadium in his honor. Charlton is also credited with giving Old Trafford its nickname, the Theater of Dreams.Robert Charlton was born on Oct. 11, 1937, in Ashington, Northumberland, in the north of England, to Robert and Elizabeth (Milburn) Charlton. His father was a miner, but the family had soccer in its genes. Four of his uncles were professional players, and his mother’s cousin Jackie Milburn was a legendary striker for Newcastle United; Bobby’s brother Jack became a professional player with Leeds and also represented England.“There was nothing else in life, it didn’t appear to me, except football,” Bobby Charlton said in a 2010 Sky Sports documentary.Charlton turned professional in 1954 and made his first appearance for Manchester United on Oct. 6, 1956, at age 18. When called up to the first team by Busby, he had to hide the fact that he had an injury.“I actually had a sprained ankle, but I wasn’t going to admit to it,” Charlton said in a 2011 BBC documentary. He scored twice in his debut.Manchester United won the league title in the 1956-57 season, with Charlton becoming a central player. The team was known as the Busby Babes after the manager, who had combed the playing fields of England to find the best young talent to fit his vision of soccer played with panache, pace and quick passing.Its league success earned Manchester United a place in the European Cup, the forerunner of the Champions League, the next season. After a 3-3 draw with Red Star secured a spot in the semifinals, the plane carrying the team home stopped to refuel in Munich. Amid terrible weather conditions, two attempts to take off were aborted. On the third, the plane crashed.Crawling to safety through a hole in the fuselage, the team’s goalkeeper, Harry Gregg, dragged Charlton and another teammate, Dennis Viollet, clear. “I left them there dead,” Gregg told the BBC in 2011. “The biggest shock I had was when I turned and there was Bobby Charlton and Dennis Viollet staring at the rest of the plane exploding in the petrol dump. Just staring.”Charlton was 21 years old in 1958 when the plane carrying the Manchester United team crashed in a heavy snowfall. The crash killed 23, people including eight of his teammates.Allsport/Hulton ArchiveCharlton returned home to recover from his injuries, which were relatively minor. He also faced the psychological trauma of trying to return to the field of play without his lost teammates.But after watching a scratch United team featuring several youth-team players and loanees overcome Sheffield Wednesday in an F.A. Cup fixture soon after the accident, Charlton told the acting manager, Jimmy Murphy, that he would return. Many saw Charlton’s stoicism and refusal to give up as a ray of hope amid the tragedy.United rebuilt around Charlton. Busby recovered from his injuries, and through the course of the 1960s he set about creating a new team. By the middle of the decade, Charlton was a Manchester United mainstay and a linchpin of the England side as the country prepared to host the 1966 World Cup.England started the tournament slowly, but in the second game, against Mexico, Charlton provided the inspiration with a trademark goal. Advancing across the halfway line, he bore down on the opposition penalty area as the defender retreated, and he thumped a shot into the top corner of the net with such languid violence that the ball almost tore the goal posts out of the ground.“I hit it, and it was sweet as a nut,” Charlton said in 2011. “I thought, people will remember that, because I’ll remember it for a long time.”In the semifinal against Portugal, Charlton scored two more goals to put his team into the final against West Germany, thus setting up one of the most memorable games in World Cup history.Charlton was told by the England coach, Alf Ramsey, to shadow Germany’s best player, Franz Beckenbauer. Unknown to the English, Beckenbauer had been given the same instructions in reverse by his own coach.“He was so fit,” Beckenbauer later recalled. “He was running like a horse. It was very, very difficult to stop him. It was almost impossible.”Beckenbauer and Charlton largely canceled each other out, but the pulsating game went to extra time, when England took the lead, 3-2, with a disputed goal by Geoff Hurst. The shot hit the crossbar and bounced down, and the Russian linesman, Tofiq Bahramov, flagged for a goal. Whether the ball crossed the line is still a subject of dispute. Buoyed by the lead, England scored a fourth, with Hurst hitting his third of the match in the dying seconds. As Hurst lined up his shot and fired into the net, the BBC commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme uttered perhaps the most famous lines in English football: “Some people are on the pitch, they think it’s all over. It is now! It’s four!”Charlton and his wife, Norma, were applauded after a stand was named in his honor in 2016 at the Old Trafford stadium in Manchester.Nigel Roddis/European Pressphoto AgencyWith the trophy won, Charlton and his teammates were feted as heroes. But the Charlton fairy tale had not yet turned the final page.Busby had added Law, a predatory Scottish striker, and Best, a willowy, mercurial genius from Northern Ireland, to his retooled Manchester United team, which still had Charlton as its fulcrum. In the 1967-68 season, a decade after the Munich disaster, Manchester United again qualified for the European Cup.The team overcame Real Madrid, then a six-time champion, in the semifinal, and went on to meet Benfica of Portugal in the final at Wembley Stadium in London. Flushed with the memories of the players lost a decade before, the occasion dripped with poignancy.“The most important thing leading right up to it was that we were going to win the match,” Charlton said. “There was no alternative. We had to win that match.”Charlton opened the scoring with a headed goal, but the match went to extra time. Drooping with exhaustion but fired with the determination to finally win the trophy that had cost the club so much, United’s players dug deep. Best put the team ahead, Brian Kidd scored a third, and Charlton added the coup de grâce with a fourth.“We’d done it,” Charlton recalled in 2011. “When the final whistle went, everybody dashed to Sir Matt. They were his players that got lost in Munich. They were his lads, his team, and everybody in the whole crowd, maybe even in the whole country, thought a little bit about Matt Busby’s feelings that night.”Charlton is survived by his wife, Norma, whom he married in 1961; two daughters, Suzanne and Andrea; and grandchildren.Charlton finished his career in 1973 with a playing record that bears comparison with the world’s greatest. In his later role as a Manchester United director, he provided an important link between the era of the Busby Babes and a new period of dominance forged by another Scottish manager, Alex Ferguson.“Unquestionably the best player of all time,” Ferguson said of Charlton in 2011. “He could float across the ground just like a piece of silver paper.”Beloved by Manchester United fans, Charlton was also lionized by supporters of all teams, not only at home but also throughout the world. He became the embodiment of the fabled, perhaps mythical, nobility of English soccer.Hurst, his England teammate, said that when talking to people who didn’t speak English, Charlton’s reach became clear. “There’s only one piece of English they can say,” Hurst explained. “And that’s ‘Bobby Charlton.’” More

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      A Night at the Best Pickup Soccer Game in the World

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

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      A Premier League Love Story Has Heartbreak Ahead

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

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      Quinten and Jurrien Timber Share Title Dreams and a Bedroom

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      Quinten and Jurrien Timber are on opposite sides of the Dutch championship race. At home, they may be closer, literally, than any two players in European soccer.Perhaps the following exchange provides the best example of the precise dynamic of the Timber household. One brother, Quinten, is reflecting on the various virtues that have helped his Feyenoord side soar, just a touch unexpectedly, to the top of the Eredivisie — Dutch soccer’s top division — this season.“Maybe we do not have the best individuals,” he says. “But we are a good team. We fight to the end.” He pauses for breath. Sitting next to him, his twin brother, Jurrien, takes the break as an invitation to interject.“You’ve been a bit lucky sometimes, too,” he tells his brother. His voice trails off as he does so, making it sound as if no team has ever been more fortunate than Feyenoord this season.Graciously, Quinten concedes the point. Yes, he says, but then, that’s sports. Any successful team needs the ball to bounce its way at times. He says it with the sort of tone that suggests he has clocked his brother’s attempts to be provocative, and that he does not intend to rise to them.The Timbers met when their teams played a 1-1 draw in January. Sunday’s rematch will help decide the Dutch championship.Sipa, via Associated Press“It changed after the World Cup,” Quinten says, picking up his train of thought. Suddenly, Feyenoord and its fans realized a first Dutch title since 2017 might be feasible. “The pressure was very high after that,” he says. “But we have stayed first since then.”“Yeah,” Jurrien says, turning back to take another swing, “but you want to be No. 1 in May. Let’s see how long they can handle the pressure.”This sparring works both ways: A little while later, Quinten will need no second invitation to remind Jurrien that Feyenoord is still in contention for three trophies, and that Jurrien’s team, Ajax, is, well, not. It contains not a hint of malice. This is just how it has to be, when you share not just a house but a bedroom with someone who plays for your fiercest rival, and your direct opponent in a title race.For most of their lives, Jurrien and Quinten Timber were on the same team. They played together for their school and for their local grass-roots team. At age 7, they joined Feyenoord together, and then early in their teens both made the leap to Ajax. The only exception was in pickup games. “Then we had to be apart,” Jurrien said. “Otherwise it wasn’t fair.”Quinten and Jurrien began their careers as teammates at Ajax.Sipa, via Associated PressNow, though, they are 21, and they find themselves on either side of Dutch soccer’s most intractable divide. An energetic, inventive midfielder, Quinten left Ajax a couple of years ago, determining that a move to Utrecht, his hometown club, would offer a quicker route to elite soccer. He did enough in a season there to win an immediate move to Feyenoord.“It was one step back to take two forward,” he said. “I had to make that choice to play more at the highest level. It was a good choice.”Jurrien supported him in that decision, even as he remained at Ajax. He is now in his fourth season as an intelligent, assured mainstay of the club’s defense. He has already picked up a number of Dutch titles. (“Is it two?” asked Quinten. “Three,” Jurrien countered. “But the first one was the season canceled by coronavirus.”)That, of course, would be schism enough for any family: The rivalry between Ajax and Feyenoord is as deep-rooted as any in Europe. “I don’t want to use the word hate,” said Quinten. No alternative, though, leaps immediately to mind. “Yeah, Feyenoord fans really hate Ajax.”Rivals and roommates, but not for long: Both say they plan to move out of their family home this summer.Melissa Schriek for The New York TimesThis season, though, the enmity has become more immediate. Last summer, Ajax lost not only its coach, Erik Ten Hag, but a swath of players: the defender Lisandro Martínez and the winger Antony both joined their mentor at Manchester United; Ryan Gravenberch and Noussair Mazraoui left for Bayern Munich; Perr Schuurs, Nicolás Tagliafico and Sébastien Haller all departed, too.Early in the season, the club — Dutch champions in three of the past four seasons — searched for its usual form. “We lost a lot of stupid points,” Jurrien said. “We were not playing at our level. It was the first time that had happened to me, the first bad patch I’d known. A lot of things had changed, and it takes time. It is difficult when you lose that many players. But now we are getting back.”(“Yes,” says Quinten, with just a hint of joyful condescendence. “Maybe now you are ready to compete.”)For Feyenoord, Ajax’s struggles represented an opportunity. The club won 10 of its first 14 games to move to the top of the Eredivisie before the World Cup. It has not lost since league play resumed after the tournament, even if a run of four draws in six games in January and February slowed its momentum a little. Still, though, it has a three-point lead over Ajax as the two clubs prepare to meet in Amsterdam on Sunday.The brothers’ only chance to play on the same side these days is with the Netherlands.Eric Verhoeven/Soccrates, via Getty ImagesThat should, of course, have the potential to be intensely awkward for the Timber family. The brothers said they were confident that there was no risk of split loyalties for their mother and their three older brothers, at least, given that Quinten has been ruled out of the game with a knee injury. “Normally our Mum supports the underdog,” Jurrien said. “But because Quin’s injured, I think she’ll be for Ajax.”In the bedroom they have shared since childhood, there is no sign of tension. Both plan to move out in the coming months but even in the thick of a title race, both seem ambivalent about the prospect. “We’ve lived together our whole lives,” Quinten said. “It will be weird.”He probably ranks as a little more enthused at independence than his brother, which may or may not be related to the fact that, when asked which of the two was messier, Jurrien looked immediately sheepish and Quinten looked immediately at Jurrien.They have not felt the need to institute a rule banning soccer talk when they get home; the only taboo is that they will not divulge potentially sensitive information to each other. “Giving details would be dangerous,” Jurrien said. “But it’s interesting how it goes at the different clubs, how they think, how we think.”“Normally our Mum supports the underdog,” Jurrien said of Sunday. “But because Quin’s injured, I think she’ll be for Ajax.”Melissa Schriek for The New York Times“They asked me today whether Ajax was confident,” Quinten said. “I told them that Ajax is always confident. Even if they are playing badly and not winning games, they are confident. That’s always how it is at Ajax.”The Timbers are, though, making provisions for what happens after the game. Before the season, and after Quinten had completed his move to Feyenoord, they agreed on a silver lining: At least this way one of them would be champion. “We said it would be me or him,” Jurrien said. “Not PSV Eindhoven or AZ Alkmaar or anyone like that.”That brotherly affection only extends so far, though.“You don’t want to hear after the game that they won,” said Quinten. “Well, a little bit, maybe. That’s the fun part. You can talk about the game, how it went. But not too much.”Jurrien is not so sure. Asked what he might do if Feyenoord were to win in Amsterdam, and take another giant step toward the championship at his and Ajax’s expense, he said, “I think I might go and sleep at my girlfriend’s.”More, More, MoreGianni Infantino, probably after seeing the accounting projections for a 2026 World Cup.Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere could not, really, be a more perfect encapsulation of the problem with FIFA than the one that played out in Rwanda this week. No, not the part in which Gianni Infantino was elected for another term as president by acclamation, as though he were some sort of Roman emperor, but the part in which the organization’s congress casually decided to add 104 games to the 2026 World Cup.In one sense, of course, this is the correct decision. FIFA had long been toying with the idea of dividing the field in the first-ever 48-team World Cup into 16 groups of three, with 32 nations progressing to an extended knockout round. It was an unwieldy, inelegant sort of a plan, one that seemed to guarantee an awful lot of pointless soccer early in the tournament.The drama of the group stage in Qatar — remember the part in which Poland needed to avoid yellow cards in order to qualify? — persuaded FIFA to change course. Groups of four, it noticed, worked quite nicely. And so, this week, it resolved that 2026 would follow the same format: The tournament will start with 12 groups of four.It is a typical FIFA solution, a technocrat’s fix, one that betrays quite how little it understands the appeal of its own competition. Four-team groups are not inherently better than three-team pools; what made the group stage in Qatar (and in every World Cup since 1998) dramatic is that it served to halve the field.That will still not be the case in 2026: The top two teams in each of the 12 groups will progress, and so will eight teams who finish in third place. The stakes, in many of the games, will be infinitely lower. There will be more second chances. There will still be an awful lot of largely pointless soccer.That, ultimately, is the price FIFA has to pay for expanding its money-spinning, showpiece occasion. There is, after all, a balance in all things. FIFA can have more teams in the World Cup finals. It may well be richer for it, both metaphorically and literally. But it comes at a cost, somewhere along the line. Changing the scale of the tournament alters the nature of it. And there is no way to square that particular circle, no technical solution to an emotional problem.Might Makes RightRB Leipzig and Red Bull Salzburg met in the Europa League in 2018. The company won either way.Andreas Schaad/EPA, via ShutterstockIt has not been all that long since European soccer’s ultimate power broker, UEFA, published a report that identified the rising trend of multiclub ownership as a clear and present threat to the game. Indeed, the model is now so popular, and so prominent, that it has generated a neologism: Executives now happily talk about pursuing “multiclub” setups as part of their strategy.The downside to one group of investors owning multiple teams, though, is twofold. Most obvious is that it might damage the integrity of a competition that brings any two teams from the same stable into direct competition.Much more serious — though a little less tangible, and therefore more easily ignored — is that it raises uncomfortable questions about what the point of some of those teams might be. Do the lesser sides in a network exist to compete for trophies, as they really should, or are they reduced to acting as warehouses for storing what investors might refer to as assets but have, habitually, been calling “players?”For years, the primary bulwark against the popularization of that approach has been a single rule in UEFA’s statutes, one that outright forbids the same group having “control or influence” over two teams in the same European competition.It has been teetering for years — in 2018, UEFA found a workaround to allow RB Leipzig and Red Bull Salzburg not only to compete in the same tournament but to play one another in it — but now, as more and more investors gobble up more and more teams, its very existence seems to hang in the balance.“We have to speak about this regulation,” UEFA’s president, Aleksander Ceferin, said in an interview with The Overlap this week. “There is more and more interest in this particular ownership. We shouldn’t just say no to multiclub ownership, but we have to see what rules we set because the rules have to be strict.”He is right, to some extent: Multiclub ownership should not be dismissed out of hand as an emerging evil. In some circumstances, at least, it is possible to make a case for its benefits. It should be the subject of a mature and intelligent discussion, rather than a reflex rejection.At the same time, though, it is very hard to avoid the suspicion that UEFA’s about-face on the subject illustrates how powerless the organization is to protect and nurture the game in the face of an unrelenting tide of money. It rather gives the impression that UEFA will bend the rules to incorporate anything that the rich and the powerful want. It makes it abundantly clear, in fact, who is in charge, and it is not the people who exist to look after the best interests of the game. More

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      Manchester United Bidding War Already Has a Winner: The Sellers

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      A Qatari royal and a British billionaire have designs on the Premier League giant. But the Glazer family still gets to set the price.The World Cup in Qatar was in its third day when Manchester United’s press office announced that its American owners were exploring an end game they had long refused to even consider: a potential sale of the famed English soccer club.Every day since that November morning, the swirl of speculation about who might buy United, one of the world’s most popular and most valuable sports teams, has gathered pace.A British billionaire quickly confirmed that he planned to bid. An American hedge fund kicked the tires. Reports of a Saudi Arabian offer sent the club’s stock price surging.But it was from Qatar, rumored for weeks to have investors interested in adding United to the country’s expanding sports portfolio, where details of the first official bid appeared. And just like that, the fight for the club’s future, a battle of differing visions for what kind of Manchester United would emerge from the auction, was on.The official word of concrete Qatari interest arrived in a statement on Friday night: an all-cash offer — reportedly worth as much as $6 billion — by Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad al-Thani, a little-known royal whose power may lie more in his post as the chairman of a major Qatari bank and in the influence of his father, a former prime minister who helped put their small nation on the international map.Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad al-Thani, the son of one of Qatar’s most powerful royals, was the first Manchester United suitor to confirm his bid.Karim Jaafar/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSheikh Jassim’s statement offered populism, or at least what sounded like a Gulf billionaire’s vision of it. Pledging to invest in United’s stadium and its teams without adding a dollar to its debts, his five-paragraph statement read like a box-ticking exercise in proposals designed to win the support of anyone eager to see the back of the Glazers, the family that has controlled the Premier League giant for nearly two decades.But Sheikh Jassim’s suggestion of a “debt-free” takeover also did nothing to hide the financial muscle behind the offer that would make United, in an instant, the most high-profile Qatari-owned property on earth.His public pitch took other bidders by surprise. Raine, the investment bank handling the sale for United’s board and the Glazer family, had asked prospective buyers to limit any public pronouncements, perhaps to entice as many offers as possible, or at the very least to avoid scaring off any suitors.The Qatari offer changed that, and quickly led another bidder, Jim Ratcliffe, a British petrochemical billionaire based in Monte Carlo, to first privately and then publicly confirm that he had made an offer for 69 percent of United, the amount of the club owned by the Glazers.Ratcliffe pointedly offered United fans an English alternative to the prospect of Gulf ownership. Manchester born and a lifelong United fan, Ratcliffe promised to put “the Manchester back into Manchester United,” to revive a club anchored not to foreign interests but to “its proud history and roots in the northwest of England.”The British billionaire Jim Ratcliffe is bidding for United only a year after losing out on Chelsea.Eric Gaillard/ReutersThe competing offers immediately split the United fan base, with many overseas supporters openly pining on social media for a sale that they hoped would see Qatar’s deep pockets do for Manchester United what billions of dollars from the United Arab Emirates have done for its neighbor Manchester City. That sentiment did not appear to be shared by much of the club’s matchgoing supporters, with concerns raised by fan groups in England about everything from human rights to sporting integrity.The latter may prove to be the more formidable obstacle, because Sheikh Jassim and Ratcliffe can expect to face scrutiny under rules set by European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, that prohibit teams with the same owner from playing in top continental competitions like the Champions League.Ratcliffe already owns OGC Nice, which plays in France’s top league and has drawn some of his fortune to finance its push toward European qualification.Sheikh Jassim will face the challenge of convincing soccer regulators that his interests are different from those of the Qatari ownership group that runs the perennial Champions League contender Paris St.-Germain. Sheikh Jassim’s father was, with the country’s former emir, one of the architects of Qatar’s vision of itself as a player on the global stage, and one of the driving forces behind its flashy purchases of showcase assets like another British institution, the department store Harrods, and the Shard, Britain’s tallest building. The father’s close links to the country’s leadership already have raised doubts that his son’s pursuit of United is merely a private investment.Ratcliffe and Sheikh Jassim may soon face other challenges, too. Friday’s deadline for bids was an artificial one, confected by United’s bankers to create urgency. Other bids may already exist, and new (and possibly higher) ones can still be presented.But one thing all the bids — public, secret or still to come — may benefit from is near universal agreement among United fans of all stripes that the club should no longer be run by the famously unpopular Glazers. The family acquired the team in a highly contentious deal in 2005 in which it leveraged the majority of the purchase price against the club, meaning United has spent hundreds of millions of dollars paying for the right to be owned by the family.Many Manchester United fans agree on one thing: They want the Glazers to sell.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat deal, while infuriating supporters, has been hugely profitable for the Glazers. Through fees and dividend payments, the family has already secured a return far higher than its initial direct investment (a fraction of the roughly $1.4 billion purchase price at the time). The club’s value has skyrocketed, with news media reports suggesting the family is now seeking as much as $7 billion to part with it.That price point will narrow the pool of potential owners considerably. At least one potential buyer told The New York Times last week that anything close to that figure was “madness,” and said that his group had walked away because it believes that United, which still carries debt of nearly $600 million, is not worth more than 3 billion pounds, or $3.6 billion.Yet in Raine, United’s owners have entrusted the job of soliciting offers to a bank with a recent track record of finding buyers willing to pay above-market prices. The firm, led by the New York banker Joe Ravitch, secured £2.5 billion (about $3 billion) last year in the sale for Chelsea. But that was more of a forced sale, one sparked by British government sanctions against Chelsea’s Russian owner, Roman Abramovich, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.The Glazers do not face similar pressure. Their call for bids for United was framed as merely an effort to “explore strategic alternatives for the club.” That means whatever the billionaires offer, whatever they promise, wherever they call home, Manchester United will be sold only at a price the Glazers are willing to accept. More