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      Teammates in Brooklyn, Rivals in M.L.S.

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      When Kevin Durant bought a stake in the Philadelphia Union last summer, he became the fourth member of the Nets with an ownership stake in Major League Soccer.In the early days of Major League Soccer’s restart last summer, Jim Curtin, the coach of the Philadelphia Union, told his players that he had lined up a special guest for a video conference call.The Union players were in the league’s bubble at Walt Disney World, outside of Orlando, Fla., and because of health and safety protocols that limited large group gatherings, they had scattered to their hotel rooms for the call. A familiar figure soon appeared on their screens. Kevin Durant, one of the team’s new owners, had arrived to deliver a pep talk.As Durant’s speech — a message about what it takes to succeed and become a champion — morphed into a nothing-is-off-limits discussion, the players asked him about his N.B.A. title runs with Golden State, about his decision to join the Nets in free agency and about his then-ongoing rehabilitation from Achilles’ tendon surgery.“It hit with our players because they’ve all been injured at certain times — how lonely that can be, and getting yourself back to the top,” Curtin said. “The interesting thing is that I have guys from 15 different countries in my group, and all of them were like, ‘That was amazing.’ I think Kevin contributed to the team in a bigger way than he realized.”When Durant agreed to purchase a 10 percent stake in the Union last June — an investment worth more than $20 million — he joined a growing but select club of basketball stars who have acquired interests in professional soccer teams. LeBron James was ahead of the curve when, in 2011, he secured a small stake in the English club Liverpool.For a short spell, Carmelo Anthony owned Puerto Rico F.C. of the now-defunct North American Soccer League, and the W.N.B.A. star Candace Parker recently bought a piece of Angel City F.C., an expansion team in the National Women’s Soccer League.Durant isn’t even the only soccer owner in the Nets’ locker room. He gets daily reminders of the N.B.A.’s rapid cross-pollination with M.L.S.: Steve Nash, the Nets’ coach, is a co-owner of the Vancouver Whitecaps; Joe Tsai, the Nets’ owner, has a stake in Los Angeles F.C.; and James Harden, one of Durant’s teammates, arrived in Brooklyn this season with an ownership slice of the Houston Dynamo.“I’m sure once we play those guys, me and James will have a nice little wager on it,” Durant said in a telephone interview, adding: “It’s cool to see guys in our sport stepping over and doing something different.”The involvement of top basketball players in North American soccer comes at a time when athletes — particularly Black athletes — are increasingly leveraging their wealth and their public profiles to upend the traditional athlete-owner dynamic. Consider that the N.W.S.L.’s ownership ranks now include not only Parker but also Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka, tennis stars who understand their influence and are seizing opportunities to wield it beyond the court.Harden has a partial ownership stake in the Houston Dynamo of M.L.S. and the Dash of the N.W.S.L.Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times“I think players are realizing now that they have the opportunity to not just play for these teams and get paid by these owners,” Parker said. “They have the opportunity to actually write the checks. This generation has a different mind-set.”Parker said she became more serious about the idea of team ownership in recent years as a player for the Los Angeles Sparks. She got to know the owners, she said, and was intrigued by what happens behind the scenes — and the profound effect of those decisions.Durant said that he had thrown himself into the Union’s affairs. He participates in the ownership group’s weekly conference calls. He has chatted with the coaches about development and training. He has offered opinions on everything from jersey design to community outreach. He has conferred with the players about social justice issues, joining a call that helped lead to the team’s role in a voter-registration drive last year. And he has shown a willingness to opine on dubious refereeing decisions, like any other good Union fan.After the Union parted with two of their best players in the off-season — midfielder Brenden Aaronson now plays in Austria and defender Mark McKenzie left for Belgium — Durant may be the team’s most high-profile addition in the last year.Durant was not exactly a soccer aficionado growing up in Prince George’s County, Md., outside of Washington, D.C. Tall for his age and 6-foot-10 by high school, he spent most of his time working on his jump shot. But he would kick the soccer ball around with his friends, he said, and he quickly identified a parallel between the sports.“I swear one of the things he loves about it is that it’s reliant on scoring a bucket,” said Rich Kleiman, Durant’s manager and business partner.Early in his N.B.A. career, Durant took a couple of promotional trips to Europe on behalf of Nike, one of his sponsors, and met some of the company’s other global pitchmen. They happened to be soccer players. Durant’s exposure continued to grow when he joined the Warriors and developed a relationship with Nash, who was then working with the team as a player development consultant. Nash, who has been a co-owner of the Whitecaps since 2008, is an avid soccer player whose brother Martin once played for Canada’s national team.Nash has had a stake in the Vancouver Whitecaps since 2008. He trained with prospects for the team in 2009.Andy Clark/Reuters“Steve is huge into soccer,” Durant said. “We’ve talked about what it is to be an owner, and how much traveling he does to stay up with the team and how often he goes over there.”Durant recalled a formative experience in 2019, when he saw a news release announcing that Harden had joined the ownership group of the Dynamo and the Houston Dash of the N.W.S.L. “I got more and more interested when I saw some of my peers get into this,” Durant said.For athletes like Durant, Kleiman said, soccer franchises are “a realistic entry point” for team ownership. Current players are not allowed to acquire stakes in N.B.A. or W.N.B.A. teams, and the valuations of N.F.L. franchises and top European soccer clubs can reach into the billions, putting significant ownership stakes out of reach even for wealthy athletes. (There are exceptions, of course: James purchased a minor stake in the Boston Red Sox last month from the same partners who own Liverpool.)Parker said the driving force behind her involvement with Angel City F.C. was her 11-year-old daughter, Lailaa. Parker, a two-time winner of the W.N.B.A.’s Most Valuable Player Award, has long been vocal about encouraging others to support and invest in women’s sports.Candace Parker is a superstar in the W.N.B.A. and has become a top commentator on the N.B.A., but she says her first love was soccer. She recently purchased a piece of Angel City F.C., an expansion team in the National Women’s Soccer LeagueJonathan Daniel/Getty Images“And my daughter, she’s the main one who kind of calls me on all my stuff. She was the one who was like, ‘But Mom, are you doing it?’” Parker said. “So I kind of had her in my brain when I decided to go about this, because I think it’s so important for us to not just say it but do it as well.”Parker said soccer, not basketball, was her first love. She played until she was 13, she said. “Until my parents crushed my dreams because I was going to be tall and they told me that they didn’t ever see any 6-foot-2 soccer players,” she said. “I wanted to be Mia Hamm or Brandi Chastain.”Durant had talked with a different M.L.S. team, D.C. United, about investing in the team before those negotiations stalled. After The Athletic reported on those discussions in October 2019, Jay Sugarman, the Union’s majority owner, reached out.“Sort of fortuitous timing,” Sugarman said. “We were looking for different voices in our ownership group.”Two months later, Durant and Kleiman visited with team officials at the Union’s training facility. Curtin operated as a tour guide. “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little star-struck,” he said.“You could tell right away with Rich and with Kevin that they were serious,” Jim Curtin, the coach of the Philadelphia Union, said of Rich Kleiman and Durant. Kathy Willens/Associated PressAny preconceived ideas that Curtin had about Durant’s potential role — that he only wanted to attach his celebrity to the team without having any actual involvement — dissolved as they went around the building. Durant had questions.“You could tell right away with Rich and with Kevin that they were serious,” Curtin said.Sugarman said he sensed that Durant and Curtin were philosophically aligned. In the weight room, Curtin talked about how “beach muscles” are out and core strength is in. In the cafeteria, he introduced Durant to the team chef and emphasized the importance of diet to recovery. In the film room, Curtin mentioned how he liked to keep those sessions as tight as possible, otherwise he risked losing the players’ attention.“I feel the same way,” Durant replied.Curtin also explained how he avoided the locker room because he considered it the players’ “sacred space,” and how the team prioritized its youth academy and innovation. Philadelphia has experimented with GPS trackers, he told Durant. The team flies drones at training sessions. It digs into analytics.“He was interested,” Curtin said. “Not only interested in the game of soccer but also interested in what we do on the field and how we get our players ready.”By last June, the deal was official. Durant’s ownership stake includes a marketing partnership with Thirty Five Ventures, the sports, media and entertainment company that he co-founded with Kleiman. But it also has given him a championship goal in another sport.The Union finished with the best record in M.L.S. in last year’s shortened season but were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. They, and Durant, want a better ending this year.“We just want to keep building,” Durant said. “It’s a lot of work to be done.” More

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      The Joy of Playing Soccer With Strangers

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      Joining a pickup game can be a way of freeing yourself from the fear of failure.One warm spring day in London last year, I set off for a run to Hyde Park, a soccer ball wedged under my arm. The country, like the rest of the world, was still coming to grips with Covid-19; for weeks, I had been confined to my apartment, counting the days until restrictions would ease. Now that we were finally permitted meaningful time outside, I was eager to reclaim my favorite place, the soccer pitch.In the park near my flat, I sat beside a group of French boys kicking a ball around. Eventually I joined them, and we juggled the ball between us. Within minutes, we settled into a game, using our bags to make goal posts and trees to indicate the sidelines. I experienced a strange and familiar lightness, the gradual peeling away of the day. In that moment with those French boys, I felt just how universal this game was. Here on this patch of grass and around the world, strangers of every background and experience level play pickup soccer, or foot de rue or pelada or cascarita. And they do it on concrete, sand, cobbled streets, anywhere they can. My habit of playing began on the concrete tennis court of my elementary school in Toronto, where I was new and friendless, having recently moved from the suburbs. When I first walked into the classroom, I overheard another kid whisper, “Does she even speak English?” Every recess, I resolved to blend in, playing the game with my awkward, gangly limbs. I hoped that there, at that mostly white school, I could play my way out of my isolation. In middle school, the soccer coach decided that another girl and I played well enough to join the boys’ team. It didn’t last: One afternoon before kickoff, the opponent’s coach, stunned by the presence of two girls, argued that we couldn’t play. “My boys will be distracted,” he said to our coach’s disbelief. To prevent our team from having to forfeit the game, the two of us stepped aside. After that day, I left the team altogether, but I never stopped playing. By 14, my soccer career was taking off. I joined the provincial team for Ontario, a pipeline for the Canadian national team, and was scouted to play internationally for Trinidad and Tobago months before it hosted a youth World Cup. Playing on that team took me back to my father’s birthplace near the capital, Port of Spain, where I visited once as a child and barely remembered as a teenager, and to new pockets of the world, where it seemed there was always a pickup game to find. I played with strangers as a way of orienting myself, of feeling like less of an outsider everywhere I went. I played with strangers as a way of orienting myself, of feeling like less of an outsider everywhere I went.Playing those games felt like pulling a loose string, unraveling me until all I had left were the essentials. I was freed from the pressure to perform, freed from the fear of failure. With that freedom came a sort of clarity; the barrier between the person others saw and the one I imagined myself to be gradually softened, then melted away entirely. Years after knee surgery brought my soccer career to an end, I moved to London and wandered to Regent’s Park, interrupting a sweaty sea of (usually male) bodies to ask, with total confidence, “Can I join?”From Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro to a concrete slab at Macqueripe Beach in Trinidad to the cobbled road near a hotel in Venezuela or a park in London, there has always been something comforting about playing with complete strangers, people with whom I can be instantly rivalrous or harmonious, people to whom I have no obligation beyond the game. In a matter of moments, my body reveals itself. With a quick scissoring of feet, a furtive twirl on the ball or a sudden burst in another direction, I can be daring and unrelenting in a way I seldom am. I mirror and deflect, I taunt and praise, outmaneuver, yield and jostle. My initial reticence is soon replaced with the slapping of skin and barking of orders. One fleeting glance directs someone, and a slight lean of my body thwarts another. I feel a flush of satisfaction when my body reflexively twists and flinches, as if guided by someone other than myself. I do things in ways the men on the field never quite believe that I, a woman, can. The Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint once wrote, “Football, like painting, according to Leonardo da Vinci, is a cosa mentale; it is in the imagination that it is measured and appreciated.” We are conditioned to believe that even soccer is within the limits of our control. We erect goal posts, draw boundaries, enlist stern referees and craft pristine surfaces of play with measured breaks. Even today, the whole culture of the sport can be demeaning and exclusionary to women; many of my former teammates who now play professionally are paid less than men and aren’t afforded the same sponsorships, facilities or airtime. But those improvised games I’ve played with strangers transcend all of that. With them, I can imagine myself as capable of anything. On a recent day, I biked past the same patch of grass in Hyde Park where I played nearly a year ago. I think of the boys and how we all kept coming back, day after day. How despite speaking different languages, we shared a physical one. I think of this collection of strangers, here and elsewhere — of the innumerable, ever-changing faces, of all those people I met at the park, the street or the beach, who never deny me the opportunity to show what I can do.Geneva Abdul reports for The New York Times in London. More

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      US Women's Soccer Team Clears Hurdle to Continuing Equal Pay Fight

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      A judge approved a settlement between U.S. Soccer and its women’s team in their dispute over working conditions, allowing the players to resume their legal battle over compensation.A federal judge on Monday approved a partial settlement in the long-running dispute over equal pay between U.S. Soccer and its World Cup-winning women’s national team, but the players’ fight with the federation is far from over.The ruling by Judge R. Gary Klausner, of the United States District Court for the Central District of California, rubber-stamped an agreement on working conditions that the sides had reached last year. When he rejected the players’ core arguments about equal pay last May, Klausner let them continue their claims about unequal working conditions in areas like team flights, hotels, venue selection and staffing support.Before they could pursue an appeal of their equal pay defeat, the players needed to resolve those issues. With that agreement now in place, the players said, they will return to the core of their legal fight: an appeal of Klausner’s ruling that dismissed their demands for pay equal to what the men’s team earns.“Now that this is behind us, we intend to appeal the court’s equal pay decision, which does not account for the fact that women players have been paid at lesser rates than men who do the same job,” said the players’ spokeswoman, Molly Levinson.The women’s players sued U.S. Soccer in March 2019, contending they had been subjected to years of unequal treatment and compensation. Twenty-eight members of the team filed the initial lawsuit, which later grew to include anyone in a larger class of players who had been part of the women’s team since 2015.The players pressed their equal pay argument for years — through on-field protests, interviews and social media campaigns — as they piled up victories and two World Cup championships on the field. Then Klausner rejected them in a single devastating paragraph last May.In that decision, Klausner ruled that not only had U.S. Soccer not paid the women’s players less than their men’s counterparts, but also that he had been convinced that “the WNT has been paid more on both a cumulative and an average per-game basis than the MNT” over the years covered in the case.It is unclear how long an appeal of his decision could take, or even whether it will be decided in a courtroom or at the negotiating table.The women’s team’s collective bargaining agreement expires at the end of December. While the women won significant gains in their current agreement, the largest gap in compensation between men’s and women’s players remains the World Cup bonuses paid by FIFA, world soccer’s governing body. The bonus pool at the last men’s World Cup was $400 million, compared with $30 million for the women’s event a year later.While noting that it has no control over those payments, U.S. Soccer offered again on Monday to pursue a negotiated settlement that might end a legal fight that has damaged both sides financially and emotionally, and that has forced fans of both U.S. teams to take sides.“We expected the women’s national team to appeal the summary judgment ruling that determined U.S. Soccer has paid the USWNT fair and equitable compensation,” the federation said in a statement. “We remain hopeful that we can come to a resolution outside of the court system.” More

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      Real Madrid vs. Barcelona: Too Big to Fall

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      The Clásico has lost some of its luster as a season-defining day, but while its profile has fallen, its importance has not.It does not require a great leap of the imagination to envision the final few weeks of the season playing out like this:Atlético Madrid, shredded by nerves and running on fumes, surrenders its place at the summit of La Liga. Barcelona, restored and unbeaten since the turn of the year, supplants Diego Simeone’s team, reclaiming its crown.At the same time, Real Madrid, the familiar scent of European glory in its nostrils, breezes past Liverpool and edges Chelsea to win a place in the Champions League final. Real Madrid would, by most measures, be the underdog in Istanbul. Manchester City and Bayern Munich, certainly, are more coherent, more complete teams. Even Paris St.-Germain, its mission for revenge fueled by the brilliance of Kylian Mbappé, has more star power, more forward momentum, as it proved so thrillingly on Wednesday night in Munich.But it is Real Madrid, and it is the Champions League, and these things do not necessarily conform to logic. It and Barcelona, the twin, repelling poles of the Clásico, each may be no more than seven weeks from glory. Both have spent much of this campaign in what looked like free fall. It is hardly inconceivable that, in a few weeks, they will have come to rest, still at the pinnacle.That does not mean that the perception was an illusion. Barcelona’s financial strife is alarmingly real, even after the election of a new president. Its salary commitments are still greater than those of any other team. Its squad is still aging. It has still frittered away hundreds of millions of dollars in the transfer market. It has still squandered its legacy, still alienated the greatest star in its history, still lost sight of itself.Real Madrid’s situation is not quite as perilous, but here, too, are the telltale signs of institutional complacency and endemic drift. Its team is starting to creak with age. Its policy of paying premium fees for prodigious young talents — often with only a smattering of senior games under their belts — has not yet yielded the fruit the club imagined.Vinicius Jr. of Real Madrid, which is chasing a record 14th Champions League title.Juanjo Martin/EPA, via ShutterstockIts payroll, too, is littered with unwanted high-earners; Real Madrid’s finances have been stretched by the revamp of the Santiago Bernabéu that has forced it to play home games at its training facility for a year; its belief that it can sign both Erling Haaland and Mbappé over the next two summers seems fanciful at best and faintly hubristic at worst. Lulled by glamour and success, Real Madrid has allowed itself to be transformed into the personal fief of its president, Florentino Pérez.All of those issues were not imagined by a muckraking, scurrilous news media; they are not proof of some sweeping anti-Barcelona and yet somehow also anti-Madrid conspiracy. They are real, and they all manifest on Saturday, when the clubs will meet on the outskirts of the Spanish capital for the second Clásico of the season.When, 50 years from now, sports historians come to look back on European soccer’s imperial phase, examining how it became what David Goldblatt has described as the single greatest cultural phenomenon of the modern era, they could do worse than to start with those 18 days in 2011 when Real and Barcelona played one another four times.Even from the relatively shallow vantage point of 2021, those two and a half weeks have the air of a seed and a flower, a dawn and a dusk and the midday sun. It was, in the first decade of the 21st century, what soccer had been building toward. It would be what soccer, in the second decade of the 21st century, would measure everything against.Juan Medina/ReutersFelix Ordonez/ReutersThe War of 2011: Guardiola and Mourinho, Messi and Xabi Alonso and polite disagreements.Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Clásico was not only the meeting of soccer’s two great powers or the world’s two best teams. It was also the clash of its two brightest stars, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, the supernova game. It was a battle of wills and a battle of minds: José Mourinho against Pep Guardiola, defense against attack, destruction against creation, darkness against light.These were days when soccer held its breath.It is somehow fitting, then, a decade later, that the most materially impactful Clásico of the last few years will take place on Saturday night in the Éstadio Alfredo Di Stéfano, rather than the Bernabéu. It is a reduced circumstance for a diminished game.The stakes are high. The winner will take prime position to dislodge Atlético Madrid from the summit of La Liga. The loser, as is the case whenever these two meet, will suddenly be flirting with crisis. It is, without question, the biggest game of the weekend. It is not, though, the centerpiece of the European season as once it was, the fixture that makes the world stand still.In part, that is because of the decline of the teams themselves. Barcelona and Real Madrid are no longer the two best teams on the planet. That honor, currently, falls somewhere between Manchester and Munich. It would be possible to build an argument that neither Spanish giant is, at this moment, in the top five.Even in a pandemic, even in a closed stadium, the world will be watching.Nacho Doce/ReutersThere is still Messi, of course, but there is no Ronaldo, no Xavi, no Andrés Iniesta, no Xabi Alonso. Both teams are in the throes of (reluctant) generational change, works in various stages of progress. The quality — aesthetic and technical — will not be as high as it was on Wednesday night, when P.S.G. stormed the Allianz Arena.But that is also because of the broader decline of La Liga. Spain has long since vacated its position of primacy. France is the world champion, and the world’s most prodigious producer of players. Germany — and, to some extent, the city of Leeds — is the wellspring of soccer’s ideas. England is home to its finest league. Spain, as a whole, has lost its place at the vanguard.And yet, for all that, it is not difficult to envision the season ending with celebrations on Las Ramblas and at the Plaza de Cibeles, with Barcelona anointed kings of Spain and Real Madrid restored to its traditional status as Rey de Copas.That such a denouement is possible is testament, first, to our tendency to assume that decline — soccer as a whole, in fact — runs in straight lines, to reverse-engineer an explanation for every event. If Barcelona wins a championship, rumors of its demise must have been greatly exaggerated. If Real Madrid wins the Champions League, its methods must work.Luka Modric and Real Madrid won the season’s first Clásico, 3-1, in October.Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt does not always, if ever, work like that. Sometimes things happen. Sometimes stars align. Not everything has a deeper meaning, and not every success illustrates some broader truth. Sometimes Liverpool wins the Champions League with Djimi Traoré at left back. Sometimes Croatia gets a golden generation. Had Real Madrid been paired with Manchester City, rather than Liverpool, in the Champions League quarterfinals this week, its almost mystical relationship with the European Cup would not seem quite so potent.But that Barcelona and Real Madrid can be so close to the summit after a season spent at the depths is also a reminder that how far, and how fast, you fall is only one part of the equation. The other is where you are coming from.Between them, Barcelona and Madrid account for seven of the last 14 Champions League titles. They were soccer’s animating force for more than a decade. Each, at different times in that period, reached heights that few teams have reached. Both remain fabulously wealthy, in terms of talent and in terms of revenue. Both retain many of the players who helped them to touch the sky. Their talent may have waned, but it has not evaporated.Eras do not end overnight. History does not run in a straight line. The Clásico of 2021 will be a shadow of the Clásicos of 2011. That Real Madrid and Barcelona have fallen is not in question. But it should be no surprise that there might yet be glory awaiting one, or both of them. They did, after all, have quite a long way to fall.Take a Stand, but Lose 3 PointsValencia supported Mouctar Diakhaby after he said he was racially abused, and then played on.Roman Rios/EPA, via ShutterstockIt is hard to identify the most dispiriting part of the episode last weekend in which Valencia’s Mouctar Diakhaby reported that he was racially abused by the Cádiz defender Juan Cala. Ordinarily, there would be a clear answer: that it happened at all. This time, though, there is another option: that it is hard to identify whether that was, in fact, the most dispiriting part.First of all, there is the fact that it was not the only episode of racist abuse of a soccer player that weekend: several more players, as always happens, were racially abused online. Then there is the fact that, even if Cala is telling the truth in his stringent denials of the accusation, if there has just been some sort of misunderstanding, we are still in a position in which it is easy to believe a soccer player might have been racially abused by an opponent, on the field, in 2021.And finally, there was the sight of Valencia — having initially walked off the field in solidarity with Diakhaby — returning to play out the game, without the victim, but against the accused perpetrator. Cala had asked to play on, and did so. Diakhaby, on the other hand, was understandably not in the right mind to continue.His club played on, it revealed later, because it had been warned — by some unidentified third party — that it would be risking a points deduction if it did not return to the field. If this is true, it does not reflect especially well on Valencia: How many points, exactly, is your player’s dignity worth?More important, the decision to continue (and to threaten to punish a team that will not) reflects appallingly on soccer’s antiracism posturing. All the slogans and all the campaigns in the world are worth nothing if, when presented with an accusation of racist abuse on the field, the immediate reaction is to try to stifle protest, to protect the product at all costs.As usual, this is an area in which soccer’s authorities — more than the players, certainly, and to an extent the clubs — are complicit. These decisions should not be ad hoc, rested on the shoulders of the individual who has endured abuse. If a player believes he has been racially abused, the referee should be under instructions to call off the game. There should be no threat of punishment, no gray area. It is for the sport as a whole to make a stand, on behalf of those who play it.Sign of the TimesIt’s spelled Haaland, with three As.Phil Noble/ReutersIn hindsight, maybe it was the context, not the act itself, that caused such consternation. The officials in Manchester City’s 2-1 win over Borussia Dortmund on Tuesday did not, it is fair to say, have a great evening: The decision to rule out Jude Bellingham’s goal — and, more to the point, to do so before the video assistant referee was able to contribute — did not exactly scream competence, after all.Still, the outrage that followed those fleeting glimpses of the assistant referee, Octavian Sobre, asking Erling Haaland to autograph his red and yellow cards felt a little overblown. The point of autographs has always eluded me — look at this scrap of paper that a person I have seen on television unthinkingly and resentfully scrawled on! — but it is hard to read the incident as anything other than entirely harmless and even, deep down, quite sweet.Why should an official not want a souvenir of what is likely to be one of the biggest occasions of his career? Who, exactly, is suffering here? Why would we automatically assume that Sobre, who has devoted decades to his job, would sacrifice the integrity of his decisions just because he happened to be a big fan of everyone’s favorite goal cyborg? (Sitting at the Etihad as the controversy unspooled, it was hard not to notice quite how much emphasis seemed to be placed on Sobre’s nationality, too.)As it turned out, of course, there was a wholly different rationale for it. Haaland was not particularly special. Sobre had also hoped to get an autograph from Pep Guardiola. He has been collecting them for years, then auctioning them on behalf of an autism charity he supports in his native Romania. At that point, the shouting was quieted, just a little.It would be nice to think that a lesson might be learned here: to gather all of the available facts before rushing to judgment; to avoid leaping to the most aggravating conclusion possible; to resist the temptation to meet the slightest perceived transgression with fury. You probably wouldn’t hold your breath, though.CorrespondenceAn open goal presented by Alexander Da Silva, who is (admirably) starting a “book club themed around soccer history, politics and tactics,” and wants advice on possible reading material. Well, Alexander, this one was critically acclaimed. It didn’t sell especially well, but if anything that just makes it more exclusive.As for other — some might say lesser, not me, but some — works, there is an abundance. So many, in fact, that I wonder if I should put some sort of list together: It’s a question we get reasonably frequently.A reading list, you say? Let me check in the back.Fethi Belaid/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn short: Jonathan Wilson’s “Inverting the Pyramid” remains the compulsory work on tactical history. Depending on which sort of politics you’re interested in, there’s “Fear and Loathing in La Liga” (Sid Lowe), “Angels With Dirty Faces” (Wilson again, you can’t escape him), “Brilliant Orange” (David Winner) or Simon Kuper’s “Football Against the Enemy,” which is more than 25 years old now, but remains genre-forming. For more modern material, “The Club,” by Josh Robinson and Jon Clegg, encapsulates the Premier League era.I’d also recommend the James Montague canon: “When Friday Comes,” “Thirty-One Nil” and particularly his most recent, “1312: Among the Ultras,” all of which are fantastic. My favorite soccer book of all, though, remains “This Love Is Not for Cowards,” by Robert Andrew Powell.Mark Gromko, meanwhile, takes me to task for my “evident disregard for Manchester City. You are tired of the money, the organization, the style of play. Some of us, however, find watching the skill of the players, the coordination and precision of the teamwork, the depth of the squad, and the brilliance of the coach wonderful to watch.”There is no argument from me on any of that — though I’d contest that I’m tired of any of it; not emotionally stimulated is probably a better description — but I would hold off on any particularly ardent criticism. City will, of course, come much more into focus as they pursue all four major trophies — starting in a couple of weeks, in the Carabao Cup final — and we will be covering them in the detail they deserve. More

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      U.S. Men Fail to Qualify for Olympic Soccer Tournament

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      Honduras dashes the Americans’ hopes of a trip to Tokyo, the latest in a string of qualifying failures for U.S. Soccer.The United States failed in its latest bid to qualify for the Olympic men’s soccer tournament on Sunday, falling to Honduras, 2-1, in a regional qualifying tournament in Mexico. A goalkeeping blunder proved to be the difference this time, but the feeling — and the frustration — was all too familiar.The defeat was a humbling end to yet another Olympic qualifying campaign for the United States men, and it means the Americans will miss their third straight Summer Games. A United States men’s team last appeared in the Olympics in 2008, and now has failed to qualify for the Games in four of the past five cycles.Goals by Honduras on either side of halftime — a bundled finish by the Brooklyn-born striker Juan Carlos Obregón Jr. in first-half stoppage time and a deflected goal as a disastrous mistake by goalkeeper David Ochoa minutes into the second half — proved decisive, and sent the Hondurans to their fourth straight Olympics. Honduras finished fourth in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, losing to the eventual champion, Brazil, in the semifinals.“The goal was to qualify for the Olympics, and we didn’t get the job done today,” defender Henry Kessler said.Mexico beat Canada, 2-0, in the tournament’s second semifinal to claim its third straight berth in the Summer Games.U.S. Soccer will still have a representative in Tokyo: Its world champion women’s team qualified last year and will be a favorite to claim its fifth gold medal in the sport when the Olympics open in July. American men’s teams have played in the Olympics four times but have never won a medal.Defender Justin Glad with Juan Carlos Obregón Jr. of Honduras, which was bidding for its fourth straight Olympic berth.Henry Romero/Reuters“Obviously, we’re devastated, absolutely devastated,” United States Coach Jason Kreis said. “In our locker room, the guys are like it’s a tragedy — a tragedy.”Unlike most tournaments, the Olympic qualifying event is all about the semifinals. In CONCACAF, the region that includes teams from North and Central America and the Caribbean, only the two semifinal winners advance to Tokyo, making victory in one of those matches the goal and rendering the final — Honduras will play the host Mexico on Tuesday — an afterthought.The make-or-break semifinal game played out under a scorching sun in Guadalajara, Mexico, where the temperature was 90 degrees at kickoff. The game paused for hydration breaks in each half.The Americans tried to take control early, and produced two good scoring chances. But as Honduras held firm and settled in, the Americans seemed to run short of energy and ideas. Honduras took the lead four minutes into first-half injury time, with a long, inch-perfect cross-field pass headed expertly into the path of a charging Obregón in the goal mouth. Using his thigh, and then his hip, he clumsily muscled it over the line past Ochoa in goal.Honduras doubled its lead less than three minutes into the second half when Ochoa — under dutiful but minimal pressure — drove a pass off forward Luis Palma that ricocheted into his own net. Scrambling to his feet, Ochoa quickly fished the ball out of his net, but the Americans’ day suddenly had taken on a grim aura.Midfielder Jackson Yueill, the United States captain, got a goal back in the 52nd minute with a rocketed shot from just outside the circle atop the Honduran penalty area. And Jonathan Lewis had three excellent chances to tie the score — one on a header cleared off the line, another lost to a mystery foul spotted by the Salvadoran referee — as the tension built and the time ticked away. But the goals the United States needed never arrived.The two games in Mexico on Sunday completed the 16-team Olympic men’s field, which already includes teams like host Japan; Brazil (the gold medalist at home in 2016) and Argentina from South America; France, Germany, Romania and Spain from Europe; Egypt, South Africa and Ivory Coast from Africa; Australia, Saudi Arabia and South Korea from Asia; and New Zealand from Oceania.Jonathan Lewis had several chances to score in the second half.Henry Romero/ReutersThe Olympic men’s tournament has been an under-23 championship since 1992, an accommodation with FIFA, the sport’s global governing body, to maintain the primacy of the World Cup as the sport’s showcase event. (The women’s Olympic tournament is, like the Women’s World Cup, contested by senior national teams.)But it remains an important barometer of a country’s ability to produce young talent, and for a regional force like the United States, which was still reckoning with its senior national team’s stunning failure to qualify for the 2018 World Cup in Russia, missing out again and again had become a referendum on the nation’s soccer progress.Once a regular in the men’s event, the United States last appeared in it at the 2008 Beijing Summer Games, when it won only its opening game against Japan, tumbled out after the group stage and finished ninth. But soon, missing the Olympics troublingly became the norm. The Americans, who had failed to qualify for the 2004 Athens Games, then missed out on both the London Olympics in 2012 and the Rio Games in 2016.Honduras took the lead on a goal seconds before the halftime whistle.Henry Romero/ReutersU.S. Soccer made reversing that recent history a priority this year. It hired Kreis, a veteran of several head coaching jobs in Major League Soccer, to lead the team, and tried to take full advantage of some of the talent produced by the league’s recent investments in player development. All 11 United States starters on Sunday play for teams in M.L.S., but some of the country’s best under-23 talent that — European pros like Christian Pulisic, Weston McKennie, Sergiño Dest and Gio Reyna, among others — were unavailable because their European clubs were under no obligation to release them for Olympic qualifying play.Still, the Americans beat Costa Rica (1-0) and thumped the Dominican Republic (4-0) in their first two games before an errant pass led to a first-half goal, and a 1-0 defeat against Mexico, in their group-stage finale. The defeat was a blow to the United States team’s momentum, and perhaps to its psyche, as it represented the team’s first big test of the event, but Kreis moved quickly to dismiss it and turn his team’s focus to the semifinal.“I think we’ve been searching for a little more sharpness in this whole tournament,” Kreis said after the loss. But the only thing that mattered, he added, was not that result but that “the most important game is coming.”It came on Sunday. And the Americans lost it. More

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      A Tainted Election, Charges of Gender Bias and Then Nothing

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      A court confirmed claims about a tainted election for a FIFA post, but while the woman who filed the case was vindicated, there have been no consequences for the men involved.The ruling, when it eventually came, could not have been more clear.One of soccer’s six regional bodies had engaged in discriminatory behavior against a female official by hindering her chances of getting a seat on its board and a leadership position with the sport’s global governing body, FIFA.The official, Mariyam Mohamed, also convinced judges at sports’ top court that an influential Kuwaiti sheikh had actively interfered in elections held by the Asian Football Confederation in 2019 to achieve his desired outcome.The full ruling, which has not been published, was obtained by The New York Times. In it, a panel at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland concluded that the inaction by Asian soccer officials over several months amounted to a “denial of justice” for Mohamed. Yet two months since the decision was announced, the impact of what on paper appears to be a powerful denunciation of ethics breaches and a disregard for women’s rights has had all the effect of a snowball hitting a tank.Nothing has happened.The tainted elections will not be rerun. The men who offered Mohamed inducements to drop out have not been punished. And soccer’s leaders have taken no action.FIFA said in an email it had no comment on the matter, even though in the aftermath of the verdict it insisted it would follow up on the court’s findings with soccer officials in Asia. Asian soccer’s governing body also declined to comment, saying its leaders had nothing to add to a January statement in which they had pledged the organization would review the findings.For Mohamed, the silence has been maddening.“It’s just a game for them, justice denial, the same process that I was in,” she said in a phone interview. “They’re waiting for time to pass by, and hoping I get fed up. Now the verdict has come and it’s just very sad. I don’t know where else to go now.”Mohamed, who first filed her complaints to the Asian federation’s disciplinary department in May 2019, says the months since her victory have felt like history repeating itself. She initially celebrated the triumph, but has come to realize it may amount to only a Pyrrhic victory.She has not been contacted by officials from the A.F.C., she said. Nor has she heard from ethics investigators from FIFA, even though the organization’s rules state that gender discrimination is “strictly prohibited and punishable by suspension or expulsion.”The case and its aftermath have highlighted how power works in global sports. It shows how a tainted Gulf royal linked to other cases of corruption has been able to exert significant control over one of soccer’s largest governing bodies even though he has no official role in its affairs. And it shows how a strategy of delay can be its own kind of injustice.Mohamed’s case had roots in FIFA’s response to its own problems with discrimination: To address a lack of women on its governing board, the organization since 2013 set aside specific seats for women, starting with one voting member in 2013 and now a minimum of one from each of FIFA’s six regional confederations.Mohamed, a former soccer player and coach from the Maldives, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, had hoped to win the A.F.C.’s spot in a vote in Kuala Lumpur in April 2019. It did not take her long to realize that the power brokers of Asian soccer had already decided the election’s outcome.She filed her first complaints about the election to the Asian confederation’s disciplinary department a month later. Emails show the organization responded to her inquiries by insisting it had begun an investigation, though it appears little was done. The A.F.C., citing confidentiality, refused to supply any evidence of its investigation to the court.Then, at a hearing at the Court of Arbitration for Sport last July, the A.F.C. hardly put up a defense. Its lawyers offered no witnesses to challenge Mohamed’s testimony that a top confederation official and the head of the soccer federation of Qatar had been present in a luxury hotel suite when the Kuwaiti sheikh, Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah, told Mohamed he had decided that his preferred candidate, Mahfuza Akhter Kiron of Bangladesh, would be elected as the A.F.C.’s female representative to the FIFA Council.Mohamed was told she should drop her candidacy, and do so within 24 hours. She later claimed, in testimony that went unchallenged by the A.F.C., that Sheikh Ahmad attempted to mollify her by saying he had so much sway in international soccer circles that he could obtain for her “any other position of her choosing at the A.F.C. or FIFA” in exchange for her withdrawal.By this point, Sheikh Ahmad had no official role in soccer, having resigned his own position on the FIFA Council in 2017 after allegations emerged in a United States federal court that he had bribed Asian officials. But Mohamed’s decision to take her case to court provided a rare public glimpse into his continuing stature as a power broker in global sports through his role as the president of the Olympic Council of Asia, an organization created by his father in 1982.At a 2013 International Olympic Committee meeting, for example, Sheikh Ahmad’s support helped Thomas Bach secure the I.O.C. presidency and also deliver the 2020 Summer Olympics to Tokyo. Since he was indicted in a forgery case unrelated to sports in 2018, he has “self-suspended” from two prominent Olympic roles. But his opinion still carries weight.Ahead of the A.F.C.’s 2019 elections, his legal troubles did not seem to be an issue. A list of his favored candidates was distributed to A.F.C. voters on the eve of the elections and, aware of the talks with Mohamed and of Sheikh Ahmad’s preference for a different candidate, the leaders of several federations pressured Mohamed to drop out, she said.She declined to withdraw, but lost the vote anyway, 31-15. Every candidate on Sheikh Ahmad’s list, however, was elected either to seats on the A.F.C.’s executive board or, as in Kiron’s case, as a confederation representative to FIFA.After reviewing the evidence presented by Mohamed and her lawyers, the CAS panel made clear in the summary of its decision that it agreed with her version of the events. The panel confirmed that the 2019 elections had breached FIFA and A.F.C. rules on gender discrimination. It concluded that Sheikh Ahmad had tried to influence the outcome, and that the A.F.C. had denied Mohamed justice by not making a ruling on her complaint. It did, however, also say that by not bowing out of the elections, Mohamed ensured the sheikh’s efforts to influence the election in her case were not effective.But the court said it was powerless to order that the flawed elections be annulled, or to punish any of the individuals accused of interfering with them. Any decision on further action was for FIFA, and the A.F.C., to decide, the court said.Candidates and board members after the votes were counted in 2019.Fazry Ismail/EPA, via ShutterstockBecause of the rules governing the court, the panel’s full findings have been cloaked in secrecy since the verdict was announced on Jan. 25.“If nothing happens it is a disgrace for FIFA, the A.F.C., and undermines the authority of CAS indirectly,” said Miguel Maduro, the former FIFA governance head who gave evidence in Mohamed’s case. “This award and what follows tells us at once that CAS has exposed corruption at the highest level of elections in football and at the same time tells us they cannot do anything about it.“What does this tell us about entire structure of justice in sports? It’s an indictment.”Maduro added that at the very least, FIFA should have initiated an ethics inquiry after the ruling. To date, it has not.Such a move, though, would be extremely sensitive for soccer’s global leadership. The FIFA official responsible for overseeing the 2019 election, Eduardo Ache, told the CAS panel that soccer’s guidelines to improve female representation were mere recommendations. The panel said Ache’s evidence suggested he was “prepared to accept any discrimination provided at least one woman was elected to FIFA.”But pressing for discipline in the case also could be uncomfortable for FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, who relies on the support of national and regional soccer leaders to push his agenda. He recently spent two weeks touring Africa, for example, to ensure that his favored candidate, a South African billionaire with no high-level experience in soccer administration, was elected president of the continent’s regional confederation. And he is unlikely to press for discipline against the leader of Qatar’s soccer federation — reportedly present when Mohamed was offered inducements to step aside — or any other Asian leader a year before Qatar hosts the 2022 World Cup.The longer the full ruling in Mohamed’s case goes unpublished, though, the more it will give the appearance soccer’s leaders are trying to brush a problematic situation under the carpet, said Johan Lindholm, a professor of law at Umea University in Sweden who has published a book on CAS.“Whether it’s because of bad P.R. or there are other things going on, then you would probably want to keep it as secret as possible,” Lindholm said. More

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      FIFA Has a Plan for Africa. But Who Does It Serve?

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      Our experts separate fact from fiction in the talk about an African super league. Plus, a Champions League update, World Cup qualifying upsets and Erling Haaland’s next move.A couple of weeks ago, a tweet caught my eye. It seemed, unexpectedly, to reveal that a continentwide African Super League was under construction. Cross-border leagues, as regular readers will know, are something that this newsletter generally supports: They are the most readily available way of addressing soccer’s chronic financial imbalance.On the surface, notwithstanding the complex logistics, Africa is a prime candidate for such a venture. Many of the continent’s domestic leagues struggle to find investment, to retain talent, to compete for interest with the European tournaments beamed onto their television sets. Africa’s major clubs would, I think, be stronger together.There is, though, always a below the surface. As a rule, whenever I want to know what it is, I ask my colleague Tariq Panja, who spends so much time in the depths that he could be a submarine. For the last week or so, we’ve been exchanging emails on the subject. This conversation is the result.Rory Smith: Something strange has happened, Tariq. A few weeks ago, someone drew my attention to a tweet from Barbara Gonzalez, the chief executive at Simba, one of the biggest clubs in Tanzania, that seemed to reveal a plan that would change the face of African soccer: a pan-continental super league.But that’s not the strange part. The strange part is that it turns out it’s the brainchild of Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president. As a general rule, making sure you’re on the opposite side of any argument from Infantino is a solid strategy. But in this case my instinct is to say that, at least as an idea, this kind of makes sense.Please explain to me why I am wrong, so that the world can be restored to its axis.Tariq Panja: As with everything when it comes to FIFA — and typically FIFA under Gianni Infantino — the devil is in the detail. Or, in this case, the lack of detail.Infantino first announced his big idea for Africa in 2019, but it had been dormant until this random tweet (more on that in a minute). But when Infantino first went public, people inside FIFA say there was no business plan: just Gianni firing from the hip, claiming it could generate $200 million in revenue. That’s a big number as far as African club football is concerned, but there is no evidence of where it came from.To be clear: African already has a continental competition, the Champions League. Egypt’s Al Ahly won its record ninth title last year.Amr Abdallah Dalsh/ReutersIt reminds me of the time Gianni walked into a FIFA Council meeting and told the board to sign a document that would allow him to sell the Club World Cup to private investors (who turned out to be SoftBank). The members, led by European officials, wanted details. An internal audit found the event was worth considerably less than Gianni had suggested.Now, back to the tweet: It turns out FIFA officials were surprised, too. Barbara González walked up to Gianni at the Confederation of African Football Congress and asked to have her photo taken with him. Five minutes later, she sent out the tweet. Now I’m not saying a league in Africa is a bad idea, but surely there must be a robust plan before such a major project is undertaken?RS: If nothing else, you have to admire the chutzpah of that, not least because Infantino strikes me as precisely the sort of person who would fall for the old “as you were saying” ruse.There does, as you say, have to be a robust plan: economically, of course, but in a sporting sense, too. The basic idea strikes me as sound. Certainly south of the Sahara, African club soccer struggles horribly for investment. That means that the vast majority of nations that produce a constant stream of players for European clubs rarely see any of that talent on show in domestic leagues. That, in turn, hardly entices fans to go and watch games live. And that completes a neat but vicious circle, because it means that, yes, clubs struggle horribly for investment.A Super League would address some of those issues. A better television deal, if nothing else, would enable clubs to invest in infrastructure. That might help nurture young talent and keep it for a little longer. It doesn’t seem impossible to me that a Pan-African league might be able to rival one of the talent-generating leagues in Europe — the Netherlands or Portugal, say — for quality in a relatively short space of time.Of course, there is one thorny issue that I haven’t yet had the nerve to bring up. I reckon I could come up with a fairly cogent list of 20 or so African teams that would have a good case for inclusion, thanks to history or support or location. But I am guessing that Infantino and CAF, which is now run by a staunch ally of his, might have a different system in mind?Infantino recently helped an ally, Patrice Motsepe, win the top job in African soccer.Themba Hadebe/Associated PressTP: The little we know so far is that there is an expectation that participating teams would have to invest at least $20 million per season, for five seasons. For clubs in Africa, that is a significant outlay, and it suggests it would not be the most popular teams, so much as the ones that have the backing of wealthy benefactors. But again: Beyond the odd tweet and Gianni’s off-the-cuff remarks, we have nothing concrete.There are other ways of trying to come up with likely participants. You could use the CAF club coefficient, which is essentially a points system for clubs in the region based on their historic success. But that would mean a league dominated by clubs from wealthier North African countries, with only a dozen or so of the continent’s 54 countries likely to be represented.RS: That lack of representation would, I think, ultimately be unavoidable. For a tournament like this to be valid, there are certain clubs that would have to be included. Al Ahly and Zamalek from Cairo, would be names one and two. Both Raja and Wydad from Casablanca, and Esperance and Étoile du Sahel, the twin totems of Tunisian soccer.You would certainly need South Africa’s Orlando Pirates and Kaizer Chiefs. And you could throw Mamelodi Sundowns in there, too: It is owned by Patrice Motsepe, Infantino’s ally and the new CAF president. Simba, of Tanzania, clearly expect to be involved. TP Mazembe, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, would have to be.Congo’s TP Mazembe, in black, and Morocco’s Raja Casablanca would both merit places in any pan-African super league.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBeyond that, the continent’s powerhouse nations — Cameroon, Senegal, Algeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast and, particularly, Nigeria — would command at least one place each. Suddenly, the whole thing looks pretty full, even before thinking about Angola, Sudan and Ethiopia.TP: If there was a method to wrap this league into the existing pyramid, there would probably be far more buy-in. The idea that teams from across the region would have — at least in theory — a shot at one day making it into the competition would make the proposition far more palatable to those, even among the larger clubs, who are not enthused about it.Even then, there are the logistics of it: not only to create a level playing field, but a sensible calendar and schedule, given the enormous differences in weather and transport infrastructure across the region. Given the uncertainty and sense of unease among the African football community, there needs to be an urgent and transparent discussion about what this is, and what this is not. A series of clandestine meetings followed by a high-profile announcement that does not stand up to scrutiny is not enough.RS: There is, definitely, a back-of-a-cigarette-packet air to the idea. And worse still, it has the feel of something that is being imposed on Africa, rather than generated from within it. The problem of representation bears that out: this sort of thing is much easier to conceive if, deep down, you regard Africa as a single, homogeneous entity, grateful for your interest.And that — given Infantino’s apparent passion for the idea — makes you wonder what the purpose of it all is. Has it been suggested in an attempt to make African domestic soccer stronger, a challenging but essentially admirable aim? Or is there something else at play here?TP: There’s a suspicion that Gianni’s motivations may be less to do with securing the future of African soccer and more his hopes of creating a club competition that can rival and, eventually, overtake the Champions League. For that to happen, the expanded Club World Cup needs teams from all over the world who can compete with the powerhouses of Europe.Bayern Munich won the most recent Club World Cup. FIFA has plans to expand the event.Mohammed Dabbous/ReutersIn that light, Africa might just be the start, the canary in the coal mine. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but those involved should be clear about their intentions. And a defining project for the future of African soccer should be guided by those with skin in the game, no question, rather than a Swiss bureaucrat intent on a legacy project.RS: Ah, that’s a relief. I feel as though I am on much more solid ground now: the idea might have some merit, but the rationale behind it may not. That may not be good news for African soccer, which finds itself being used as a pawn in a broader power game, but it’s good news for my personal moral compass, because it means I don’t have to worry about being on the same side of an argument as Gianni Infantino.Pushing Back Another Bad IdeaNo one has proposed melting down the Champions League trophy to sell the silver. Yet.via ReutersThere was, just as there was always going to be, one last hurdle to clear. Most European soccer executives were expecting a blueprint for a new vision of the Champions League to be approved — both by UEFA, the competition’s organizer, and the European Clubs Association, Andrea Agnelli’s bad-idea factory — and announced this week.That had to be pushed back, though, when several of the continent’s major teams blew up the deal at the 11th hour: It turns out that actually they want to have final say on the competition’s commercial rights, too. Suddenly, it seems as if the new-look Champions League may end up being the lesser of two evils.Quite how that revamped competition will work is laid out clearly and concisely — and, crucially, in the form of a graphic — here. So clearly and concisely, in fact, that for the first time it is possible to say without fear of having missed something that this iteration of the Champions League will make the tournament immeasurably worse.Not, though, for the reasons so often given. Yes, there will be more meetings between the game’s superpowers, and for lower stakes. Yes, the whole thing is bloated. Yes, it will starve domestic competitions of oxygen. And yes, it still might serve to entrench the financial inequality that is the real enemy of the game’s ongoing health.But the main problem is much simpler: The redesign reduces the Champions League’s competitive integrity. It is, essentially, invalid to draw up a league table in which all of the teams play different opponents. It renders it meaningless. And it is quite likely that fans, who are not as stupid as they are taken to be, will notice.The Week the Tables TurnedNorth Macedonia’s Eljif Elmas, right, with Stefan Spirovski, after scoring the winning goal in a World Cup qualifier at Germany.Sascha Steinbach/EPA, via ShutterstockA few days ago, as England threatened to run up the score in a World Cup qualifier against San Marino, the poacher-turned-pundit Gary Lineker suggested it was time to admit that these mismatches — which characterize a substantial amount of international soccer — were of benefit and interest to precisely nobody.Instead, he said, perhaps it would be in everyone’s interests for some of Europe’s smaller nations to engage in a prequalifying tournament, playing one another for the right to face the continent’s elite, and England. The reaction — Do I really need to say this? You know what the reaction is, because it’s always the same reaction — was furious.To Lineker’s critics, those who accused him of trying to ghettoize soccer’s underdogs, what followed was karmic retribution. Luxembourg won at Ireland. Spain needed a late goal to avoid a draw with Georgia. Latvia tied Turkey. And, best of all, North Macedonia beat Germany, the country’s first loss in a World Cup qualifier for 20 years.It goes without saying that all of these results were welcome, impressive, and hilarious. But it does not mean that the idea Lineker espoused — one that has been around for years — should be dismissed.First of all: That is how qualifying works in Africa, Asia and North and Central America. It helps to thin the calendar a little, something that matters at a time when players are being run into the ground by all of the teams they represent. Second: The success of the Nations League has shown that games between smaller nations are more competitive, and therefore both more entertaining and more educational, than watching the same teams be steamrollered by the giants.And third: At the same time as all those shocks were rumbling through Europe, England was scoring five against San Marino, the Czechs ran in six in Estonia, and both Belgium and Denmark scored eight, against Belarus and Moldova. Worse still, a team managed by Frank de Boer scored seven against Gibraltar. Some of soccer’s lesser lights are competitive. Some are not. If only there was a way of selecting which teams fell into which categories.The Haaland ShakeDortmund, like everyone else, may have trouble holding on to Erling Haaland.Pool photo by Marius BeckerWe have been here before. On Thursday, it emerged that Mino Raiola and Alfie Haaland — respectively the agent and the father of Erling Haaland, the goal cyborg — were in Catalonia for a meeting with Joan Laporta, the freshly-minted president of Barcelona. The race for the hottest property in European soccer is, it seems, on.It is a move straight from the playbook that eventually led the younger Haaland to Borussia Dortmund, his current home, about 15 months ago. Expect Raiola and Haaland’s father to turn up in relatively short order in Madrid, too. They will almost certainly stop off in London after that: Chelsea harbors hopes of signing the 20-year-old Haaland. They may need two days in Manchester; they would not want to rush United or City.The fact that they are doing their due diligence on their client/son’s next home is, then, no surprise. More eye-catching is the fact that they feel Barcelona’s hopes of signing Haaland are valid, given that Dortmund has made it plain that it will not sell him for less than $150 million, and because Barcelona is, well, currently about $1 billion in debt.Laporta, clearly, feels he can make a deal work. Perhaps he can. Perhaps there is some way of shifting the money around enough for Barcelona to remain a viable candidate. The appeal is obvious: Signing Haaland would, almost at a stroke, turn Barcelona into major players again. But then so, too, is the problem: After all the club has been through, would it really be a good idea?The Final SprintAside from the virgin hope of opening day — and possibly the breathless frenzy of Christmas — this is the best part of the soccer season. The end of the March international break heralds not only the arrival of spring, but the start of European club soccer’s race to the summit. Over the next two months, closure will arrive.Better yet, this time around, we hit the ground running. The top two in both France and Germany will meet on Saturday: first, Lille visits Paris St.-Germain, the two of them level on points, and only a nose ahead of Lyon and Monaco. (I’ll have a story on Lille posting in a few hours.) No sooner has that finished, though, than RB Leipzig hosts a Bayern Munich deprived of Robert Lewandowski, and knowing that a win would close the gap at the top of the Bundesliga to a single point.RB Leipzig and Bayern Munich: back at it on Saturday.Pool photo by Alexander HassensteinIn England, meanwhile, the ultimate prize is off the table: It is a matter of when, not if, Manchester City claims a third title in four years. But the battle to finish second, third and fourth — and therefore obtain a place in next season’s not-yet-ruined Champions League — promises to be enthralling. My money would be on Manchester United, Chelsea and Leicester, in that order, but it’s so close that it wouldn’t be much of my money.CorrespondenceOnly space for one, this week, from Charles Knights. “I’m trying to figure out how much disappointment is warranted right now as a supporter of the United States,” he wrote. “How do you rate the U.S.A. men’s team’s failed attempts to qualify for Tokyo? There’s a lot of talk about the Olympics as a training ground for the next generation, but when I look at the U.S. squad, the next generation is playing senior friendlies in Europe.”This is only a personal perspective, Charles, and it is a distinctly European one: My view would, I think, be different if I was South American or African. But in the narrow context of soccer, I’m not convinced the Olympics matter particularly.The United States will miss its third straight Olympic men’s soccer tournament. Honduras is going to its fourth in a row.Refugio Ruiz/Getty ImagesIt is special for the players to win a gold medal, of course, particularly when it at least rivals the high-point of that country’s soccer achievements thus far (Nigeria in 1996, Cameroon in 2000, Mexico in 2012) or when it is Argentina (2004 and 2008), and the World Cup brings nothing but misery.But in terms of being used a signpost for greater things to come? In men’s soccer, no, not really. Put it this way: I had to check who won the gold at Rio in 2016. Turns out it was Brazil! They must have enjoyed that. It probably didn’t make up for what happened in a different tournament on home soil a couple of years earlier.Women’s soccer, of course, has historically placed much more importance on it — the cover of Abby Wambach’s autobiography describes her as a gold medalist, rather than a World Cup winner — but I wonder if that, too, will change with the increased focus on the Women’s World Cup. More

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      Facing P.S.G., Lille Clings to First Place as the Bottom Falls Out

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      Lille will play its deep-pocketed rival Paris St.-Germain for the league lead on Saturday. But not even a title may spare it from a financial reckoning.On the surface, the pitch was a convincing one. Last year, the owners of Lille O.S.C. commissioned a graphic designer to produce a glossy prospectus, one intended to entice an investor into buying out their stake in the French soccer club.There are dozens of these documents swirling around soccer’s financial netherworld at any given time, passed around by the army of bankers, lawyers, private equity investors, deal-makers and middlemen who serve as gatekeepers to the handful of individuals both wealthy and foolhardy enough to buy and sell teams.Generally, pitches like the one about Lille are treated with both caution and cynicism, but this one probably would have been worth a second glance. The club’s infrastructure was sound: It had a large training facility at Luchin, and a capacious, modern stadium. Its location, too, was fertile ground for an ambitious, dynamic sort of a team: at the center of a transport nexus connecting London, Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam, in the center of a part of northern France that contains the headquarters of dozens of corporations and a population of two million people, almost a third of them younger than 20.The centerpiece of the sales document, though, was Lille’s squad itself. The club’s real value, the prospectus claimed, lay in its talent. Every year, the club had invested substantial sums in crops of bright, young prospects, thanks in no small part to the work of Luis Campos, the Portuguese recruitment guru who oversaw the team’s transfer activity.Each influx of players was referred to as an “acquisition vintage”; as with wine, the idea was that the prospects would get better with age. The club estimated that its squad, at the time, had a cumulative transfer value of around $420 million. Its ceiling, though, was much higher: If all the players developed as they should, the club claimed it was sitting on a pool of talent worth as much as $1 billion.In ordinary circumstances, this weekend would be the moment that Lille’s approach was vindicated. On Saturday, Lille travels to Paris St.-Germain for the most significant game of the Ligue 1 season: The teams are tied atop the standings, with the P.S.G. side built for hundreds of million of dollars, the one that can call on Neymar and Kylian Mbappé and the rest, ahead of Lille only on goal difference.But for Lille, the season when everything came together is also the season it all fell apart.A Lille fan last fall. Stadium closures have added to the team’s financial problems.Pascal Rossignol/ReutersThe Gathering StormGérard López, Lille’s former owner, used to boast that if his team was not “the best in the world in trading players, we’re probably in the top three, four or five.” This season should have been his proof.But if anything — and through no fault of their own — the market value of Lille’s players has not only fallen this season, but it has also dropped to such an extent that, in December, López had no choice but to cede control of the club.The end game arrived just before Christmas. López was summoned to London to meet with Lille’s two main creditors, JP Morgan Chase and Elliott Management, the activist investment firm founded and run by the hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer.In that meeting, the French sports newspaper L’Equipe reported, López tried everything he could to broker a deal to pay back the loans — worth around $140 million — that were set to come due this summer. He suggested a five-year financial restructuring, and proposed bringing on board an investor from the Middle East. He did not, it seems, want to give up Lille easily.Whenever he could, he found time to call Christophe Galtier, Lille’s coach, to update him on the progress of the talks. “He kept me informed of the situation last night,” Galtier said in December. “We talked a lot, when it was possible to talk.” Galtier was clearly touched: He dedicated the team’s win against Dijon the next day to the man who had brought him on board in 2017.Lille’s manager, Christophe Galtier, in an empty stadium last month.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesElliott and JP Morgan, though, were unmoved. López’s reign was over. The director Marc Ingla soon followed him out the door. Eventually, so would Campos. In their stead, almost immediately, came a company called Callisto Sporting SARL, a subsidiary of an investment firm called Merlyn Partners.Both companies are registered in Luxembourg. Both are linked to Maarten Petermann, a former European head of special situations at JP Morgan. Olivier Létang, a veteran soccer executive, was named Lille’s president. The creditors’ decision, and the swiftness of their action, was rooted in the unavoidable fact that the financial reality of French soccer had shifted too much for López to be able to meet his commitments.Like every club in Ligue 1 — with the exception of Qatar-funded P.S.G. — Lille was facing a cash-flow crisis. The league’s decision to cancel last season meant it had forfeited a tranche of broadcast revenue. Stadiums had been empty, at that stage, for almost nine months, and there was no sign that fans would be permitted to return any time soon. And, most pernicious of all, the league’s new television deal had collapsed; if a replacement could not be found, French domestic soccer was facing ruin.Lille’s circumstances, though, were particularly perilous. López’s tenure had always been something of a roller coaster; the club had been sanctioned on several occasions by the D.N.C.G., the body that oversees the economic health of France’s soccer teams, and at one point was threatened with relegation because of its precarious finances.Its release valve was always Campos’s seemingly never-ending pipeline of talent. In the summer of 2019, Lille had sold players — including the wing Nicolas Pépé, to Arsenal — for almost $180 million. A year later, even at the height of the pandemic, it had managed to turn a profit of $71 million in the transfer market.Despite those impressive returns, the club was barely keeping its head above water. Quite how it burned through so much money is not entirely clear, although the considerable running cost of its stadium is generally regarded as a significant factor. In 2018-19, the club posted an operating loss of $77 million. The year before, that deficit was $120 million.In a bull market, the club’s creditors had been prepared to tolerate those figures. That changed as 2020 became 2021, as revenues cratered, and as French soccer teetered on the brink. The club was heading for “bankruptcy in January,” according to Létang. This time, Lille could not sell its way out of trouble.Lille’s American forward, Timothy Weah, with his Canadian teammate, Jonathan David.Stephane Mahe/ReutersThe Midas TouchThe squad that has brought Lille into contention for its first French title since 2011 — and, more impressively, its first since the Qatari investment in P.S.G. fundamentally altered Ligue 1’s competitive balance — is testament not only to the deft and astute management of Galtier, but also to the keen eye of Campos.There is a reason that even José Mourinho, not a man given to complimenting other humans, is happy to talk about his friend’s “great career.” Campos, after all, is the technical director who pieced together the Monaco team that made the semifinals of the Champions League in 2017 and was then sold across the Continent for the better part of a billion euros.His work at Lille was, quietly, no less impressive, even if he was never, technically, an employee of the club. Instead, he was employed by a company called Scoutly, which was wholly owned by Victory Soccer, the vehicle through which López and Ingla owned Lille.López insisted that this Byzantine approach was necessary so that Campos could operate with “independence” in the market. Regardless, Lille benefited from the arrangement. Its squad is replete with the fruits of Campos’s labor: Boubakary Soumaré and Jonathan Ikoné, spotted in the reserve ranks at P.S.G.; Zeki Celik, plucked from the obscurity of the Turkish second division; Renato Sanches, offered a shot at rejuvenation after four years in the wilderness; and the two crown jewels, the most salable assets, the Dutch defender Sven Botman and the Canadian forward Jonathan David.The belief that they might, together, one day be worth as much as that Monaco team of Mbappé and Bernardo Silva and Fabinho and the rest was, of course, overstated. That assumption rested on the idea that every single player would reach his maximum value, but it was, for a while, an explicable delusion.That changed as soon as the pandemic struck, and it calcified as the scale of French soccer’s financial crisis was laid bare. Ligue 1 expects to sign a new television deal in the coming weeks, almost certainly with Canal Plus, the broadcaster it ditched last summer.Lille’s team has always been its biggest asset.Michel Spingler/Associated PressBroadcast money will bring some respite for the country’s clubs, but it will not fill the hole left by the empty promises of Mediapro. The teams of Ligue 1, then, are hurriedly trying to cut their budgets accordingly. Several already have agreed to pay cuts with their players. Lyon has offered a reduction in exchange for stock options.Most, though, will still need to sell players, trading on Ligue 1’s self-styled reputation as the “league of talents.” The problem is not only that prices will be depressed by the fact that so many teams in France need to raise funds, but also that few clubs in Europe retain their purchasing power.It was that, ultimately, that forced the hand of Lille’s creditors: Campos might still have provided players who can be sold, but in a market likely to be saturated by cut-price deals, Lille can no longer rely on premium fees.What happens next — what happens this summer — is not yet clear. Létang has said little beyond an insistence that the club cannot rely on qualification for next season’s Champions League for its financial health. Stability, he said, will be his watchword. The players have, as yet, not been alerted to a looming fire sale.A place in Europe would go some way, of course, to boosting the club’s finances. A French title, combined with a good showing in Europe next season, might help increase demand for some of the more recent acquisition vintages. Like wine, they will get better with age. The problem, now, is that what is inside the bottle matters rather less than the amount someone is prepared — or able — to pay for it. More