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      The Premier League Race Is Over. The Champions League Lottery Is Here.

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      Everyone knows who will win the Premier League. Most can guess who will be relegated. All of the drama is in the race for a spot in the Champions League.Here, then, is the home straight of the Premier League season, the final quarter of a campaign that was heralded as the most chaotic, and least predictable, of them all.At times, throughout autumn and into winter, the combination of empty stadiums, a packed schedule and a frantic pace seemed destined to usurp the established order. Contenders seemed to rise and fall every week. Earnest conversations were held about whether Aston Villa could win the league or if Arsenal was in danger of relegation.It did not, it turns out, quite come to pass. It soon became clear that Manchester City — the team with the best and biggest squad, the side with the brightest coach — would be champion while spring was still fresh in the air. Pep Guardiola’s team sits 14 points clear of Manchester United, its fingers already brushing a third crown in four years.Relegation, too, is largely settled. Sheffield United and West Bromwich Albion will be playing in the Championship next season; all that remains to be decided is whether Fulham can muster enough momentum to condemn Newcastle, drifting and directionless, to a place alongside them.In that relative certainty, the Premier League is something of an outlier across Europe’s major leagues. Elsewhere, the curious circumstances of the pandemic season do seem to have had an effect. In Spain, Barcelona and Real Madrid are slowly reeling in a stuttering Atlético Madrid. In Italy, Inter Milan has six points on its city rival, A.C. Milan, and 10 on Juventus and Atalanta. But with at least one fairly spectacular choke in fans’ relatively recent memory, that is not yet a gap broad enough to permit any comfort.In Germany, the title race may effectively be decided this weekend, when Bayern Munich travels to RB Leipzig on Saturday knowing that victory will all but see off its last remaining challenger. A couple hours earlier, the top two teams in France will meet, though neither Lille nor Paris St.-Germain is in a position to deliver a decisive blow. Lyon and a resurgent Monaco are within touching distance of both, four teams separated by four points.In the absence of questions at the top and bottom of the table, the Premier League has concentrated all of its drama, jeopardy and intrigue into the jostling for position immediately below Manchester City. There are three more spots available in the Champions League for next season and seven teams with a realistic shot at one of them.Some are fallen giants, teams desperate to salvage something from a bitterly disappointing season. Others are surprise packages, those teams that have best adapted to the strangeness of this season. It is at this point that the consequences of all the chaos and unpredictability of the last seven months are made flesh, and it is a race that is all but impossible to sort — at least not yet. “It will go until the last day,” Carlo Ancelotti, the Everton manager, said last month. The challenge, he said, is to make sure you are still in contention by then.Jamie Vardy and Leicester City enter the homestretch with a lead on the teams chasing them.Pool photo by Alex PantlingHead Starts and Tough RoadsA glance at the table would indicate that two of the seven Champions League contenders — Manchester United and Leicester City — have a considerable advantage. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s United has an eight-point lead on West Ham, currently the first team outside the places in fifth. Brendan Rodgers’s Leicester side has a seven-point cushion.But in Leicester’s case, certainly, that head start could yet be canceled out by the fact that its remaining schedule is considerably steeper than some of its rivals’. Leicester faces Manchester City this weekend before traveling to West Ham. Three of its final four games are against direct rivals for a spot in the top four: trips to Manchester United and Chelsea, and a home game against Tottenham. Rodgers’s team surrendered a place in the top four on the final day last season; this year’s calendar brings with it the ghost of past regrets.No other team has quite such an arduous finish to the campaign, though Chelsea is close. The extent of Thomas Tuchel’s impact at Stamford Bridge will be gauged by visits to West Ham and Manchester City, and looming home games against Arsenal and Leicester.If the calendar is kindest to anyone, it is Liverpool, marooned in seventh after a dismal run since late December. That may prove scant solace for a team that has spent the last three months losing at home to Fulham, Brighton and Burnley, but it at least gives Jürgen Klopp’s side a slim chance of returning to Europe.The Price of DistractionsTottenham’s Europa League elimination had a silver lining: fewer games this spring.Darko Bandic/Associated PressIf anything has marked this season, it is the capriciousness of crisis. It is barely two weeks since José Mourinho accused his Tottenham players of being unable to display “the basics of football and the basics of life” during a humiliation at the hands of Dinamo Zagreb in the Europa League. Now he may wonder if being out of that competition is not such a bad thing.Nine league games remain of Spurs’ season, and Mourinho must also make room for the Carabao Cup final on April 24. But, that aside, he has a clear run. So, too, do West Ham and Everton. Leicester has one extra game than its rivals — an F.A. Cup semifinal — but the rest have more demanding commitments to juggle.Chelsea, for one, is still fighting on three fronts: An F.A. Cup semifinal against Manchester City beckons, as well as a two-legged Champions League quarterfinal with F.C. Porto. Should Chelsea reach the final of both competitions, it would have to play almost twice as many games as some of its rivals.Liverpool has a Champions League quarterfinal, too — a more arduous pairing, against Real Madrid — and Manchester United will be expected to reach the final of the Europa League, adding another five games to its schedule. At the end of a season that has been particularly demanding, the strain of any added workload to tired legs may prove crucial.The Fatigue FactorNo Premier League player has logged as many minutes as Harry Maguire.Pool photo by Laurence GriffithsThat injury has proved a defining factor in the outcome of this Premier League season is neither surprising nor particularly debatable. The root of Liverpool’s collapse lies in its loss of its central defense; Leicester’s form stuttered with the absence, at various times, of Jamie Vardy, James Maddison and Harvey Barnes, among others; Everton’s results dipped when James Rodríguez was missing.It would be reasonable, then, to assume that the next two months will be decided by which teams sustain the fewest injuries, particularly to their key players. Liverpool, of course, is still missing Virgil van Dijk, Joe Gomez and Joel Matip. Tottenham is without Son Heung-min. Leicester is without Barnes, Maddison and James Justin, while Manchester United is sweating on Marcus Rashford, Mason Greenwood and Anthony Martial.Injuries can, of course, be sheer misfortune — a bad tackle, a mistimed movement — but they can also be cumulative, the effect of a player pushed too far into what Arsène Wenger used to call the “red zone.” But that is not the only consequence of fatigue. Even if injury is avoided, performance can dip.It is this, more than anything, that should give Solskjaer and Manchester United pause. United’s captain, Harry Maguire, has played 3,946 minutes this season, an order of magnitude greater than every other outfield player in England. He has played the equivalent of five full games more this season than his nearest rival, Leicester’s Youri Tielemans.But Maguire is not alone. United has seven players who have played more than 2,700 minutes this season. Leicester and Everton have only one, Chelsea two, and Spurs and West Ham three. Even Liverpool, its options reduced because of all those injuries, has only five. If fatigue does prove to be a factor, the core of United’s side is more likely to be afflicted in the final stretch than anyone else.To some extent, of course, that is offset by its resources: Solskjaer has options should any of his key players be sidelined or suffer an alarming drop in form. Having to play Donny van de Beek because Bruno Fernandes needs a rest should be no great sacrifice.Indeed, that may well be the formula, more than any other, that comes to define the next two months, that serves to find the signal in the noise of this season. More than in any other season, the final prize on offer in the Premier League will go to the teams that can best minimize the effects of fatigue, thanks to a reduced workload or by possessing the strength in depth to ride it out. In all the chaos, in the end, there will be some sort of order. More

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      Soccer Samples Streetwear and Likes the Fit

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      Juventus reimagined its look, P.S.G. partnered with Jordan Brand, and now Arsenal and Inter Milan are following suit. But soccer’s interest in design has little to do with the sport.The lights at the Allianz Stadium cut out, and the music swelled. In the darkness, a small patch in the middle of the field seemed to glow. The center circle started to pulse and ripple. And then the grass itself appeared to get pulled away, as if it were nothing more than a tablecloth. Three words ran around the electronic advertising boards: “History. Passion. Lols.”The extravagant buildup did not seem to match the occasion. Juventus was at home to Genoa that night, a run-of-the-mill Serie A game. It was late October 2019, much too early in the season for the title to be decided or a trophy to be won. What mattered, though, was not what Juventus was playing for, but what the team was playing in.That night, Cristiano Ronaldo and his teammates would showcase a special edition jersey, designed in collaboration with its apparel partner, Adidas, and Palace, the maverick British skate and streetwear brand.The design toyed with the history and passion of Juventus, incorporating the team’s traditional bianconero stripes and the disruptive touches that had made Palace a streetwear phenomenon. The team’s logos and the player’s numbers were displayed in an acidic green. Toward the bottom, the stripes started to pixelate.The jersey was greeted as a masterpiece, but Juventus would never wear it again. By the time Ronaldo and his teammates took to the field against Torino a few days later, they were back in their regular uniforms. It did not matter. Later that week, the Palace jersey came online — or, as the streetwear world would put it, dropped.It sold out in 12 hours.Soccer goes popP.S.G. and Jordan Brand released their first collaboration in 2018.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA couple of years earlier, Juventus had held a lavish reception at the Museum of Science and Technology in Milan. The guest list included players past and present, but also pop-culture fixtures like Giorgio Moroder, the pioneering music producer, and the model and actress Emily Ratajkowski.The party was arranged to herald the dawn of a new era for the club. Its team was in the middle of an unmatched period of success on the field, establishing a run of dominance in Serie A, however, it risked being left behind by its Continental rivals. To remain competitive, it needed to close the revenue gap on clubs like Barcelona, Real Madrid and Manchester United, its chairman, Andrea Agnelli said. To do that, he was convinced, Juventus had to become “more pop.”He is not the only executive in European soccer to have that thought. In 2018, fans lined up around the block outside the Parc des Princes to get their hands on the first drop of a collaboration between Paris St.-Germain and Jordan Brand, a subsidiary of its primary apparel partner, Nike. Earlier this year, Arsenal unveiled a collaboration with 424, a streetwear brand based in Los Angeles.As with the audience for Juventus’s collection with Palace, the core market for these collaborations is not the club’s fans. It is not even, necessarily, fans of the sport. The collections are not intended to be worn as soccer products or as declarations of loyalty to a team; the tie-ins are not, as they are often presented, attempts by Europe’s insatiable superclubs to sell more tickets or to pick up more fans.The Juventus chairman Andrea Agnelli oversaw a complete rebranding of the club.Miguel Medina/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“A lot of the people buying those P.S.G. Jordan shirts will not care about the team’s league position,” said Jordan Wise, a founder of Gaffer magazine and the creative agency False 9. “Many of them may not even like football.” That is precisely their value to clubs: an entirely untapped market, one not subject to the vicissitudes and tribalism that affect soccer fans.“Working with streetwear brands gives the clubs access to a completely different space,” Wise said. “But to do that, they have to think and look different: less like clubs, and more like sportswear brands.”No team has embraced that shift quite like Juventus. In 2016, at Agnelli’s instigation, the club decided to embark on a comprehensive rebrand. Every aspect of the team’s identity would be in play, including, most controversially, its iconic crest, a symbol that had roots stretching back more than a century.“It was more than just a change in the badge,” said Giorgio Ricci, Juventus’s chief financial officer. “It was a new visual identity, one which would enable us to be seen as innovative, one step ahead.”The club put the rebrand idea out to a number of marketing agencies, and eventually selected a pitch from Interbrand, a longstanding partner. Its approach had been risky: After consulting the company’s global network of creatives, Lidi Grimaldi, the managing director of Interbrand’s Milan bureau, decided against presenting the club with a suite of options, spreading their bets in the hopes that one caught the imagination.Instead, she said, Interbrand decided to go in with one design. Though the company had previously helped tweak the Juventus crest, making it a little less ornate, altering the color scheme a touch, this time Interbrand would suggest something more revolutionary. “Something really bold,” she said. Miguel Medina/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMarco Bertorello/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThey did not have much time. Because Juventus and Adidas needed to start work on the club’s jerseys for the next season, Interbrand had less than a month to get its ideas together. Rather than something that looked like a soccer crest, it designed a logo that had “more in common with Google or Apple or Nike,” Grimaldi said.There would be no depiction of a charging bull, as there had been on every version of the crest for more than a century. There would not even be a crest, as such: just a sleek and stylized J, a design that would form the centerpiece of and inspiration for an updated visual identity. That was no accident. “The whole strategy was to widen the spectrum of activities without abandoning the club’s core, which is football,” she said.To present the idea to the Juventus board, Interbrand made a short film, one that offered a glimpse into what this bold new future might look like: that stylized J emblazoned on cafes and hotels, adorning events, used in collaborations with cutting-edge fashion brands. The Juventus executives, including Agnelli, were thrilled, Grimaldi said. This was precisely the sort of sea change they had been seeking. The main response, she said, was: “Wow.”The club, of course, knew such a drastic change would not be universally welcomed. When the new logo was revealed, the reaction from fans was — at best — mixed. Juventus felt it had no choice but to ride out the storm.“We needed a new identity that could change the perception of Juventus among different stakeholders,” Ricci said. “One that could enlarge the scope and potential targets of our business. We needed a new identity that was suitable not just for core customers, but for new audiences, something that could be a trigger for creators.”Perhaps the best measure of its success came on Tuesday. After a similarly intensive design period, Inter Milan — Juventus’s fierce domestic rival — presented its own new crest, a simplified version of the badge that has graced the club’s jerseys for decades. Imitation, after all, is the sincerest form of flattery.The soccer entertainment complexFew clubs can match Manchester United’s revenue off the field.Oli Scarff/ReutersFor years, Manchester United has been held up as soccer’s gold standard in converting the sport’s unparalleled popularity into cold, hard cash.The partnership model it pioneered, combining 25 official club partners with a jumble of regional partners around the world, might have made it an easy target for satire — all those tractor and noodle endorsements — but it has also turned the club into a financial powerhouse, capable of earning a profit even during the coronavirus pandemic.Increasingly, though, the consumption habits of younger people are making that approach seem outdated. “We’re seeing a move away from the licensing model,” Wise said. “We know that Generation Z and millennials hate being sold to. That means it’s no longer enough to plaster a club’s badge on something and assume fans will buy it out of loyalty.”Instead, he said, partnerships must feel “authentic,” and the content used to promote them must “tell stories.” That authenticity was the logic behind the Juventus rebrand, not only of its crest but of the club’s whole visual persona, from its social media — using a bespoke font — to its branding.“It was about placing soccer in the broader entertainment framework,” Ricci said. “We see our competition not just as clubs, but things like the gaming industry.”For partners, the appeal is obvious. Soccer has a reach that no other aspect of culture can match. Cristiano Ronaldo has more followers on Instagram than anyone else on the planet. Lionel Messi might trail his rival there, but it will be some solace that he is, at least, ahead of Beyoncé.Cristiano Ronaldo is a global brand in his own right, with 273 million followers on Instagram.Marco Bertorello/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesLikewise, Juventus has a name recognition that can supercharge a brand like Palace. The difference is that, increasingly, soccer has to give a little, too. It has to accept the principles of what Grimaldi called “strategic design,” the idea that design itself can change consumer behavior and expectations.“The rebrand was not a way of being cooler or more contemporary,” Grimaldi said. “It was a chance to show you understand the verbal and visual codes you have to adopt if you want to be understood in other spaces. To do work with Palace, for example, you have to adopt the design codes of their world.”It is, though, a slow burn. Four years since its rebrand, Juventus is not in a position to pinpoint any immediate financial boost, which has traditionally been the primary motivation and metric for anything any soccer club does. When looking at the club’s books, Ricci said, it is hard to isolate what is a consequence of the rebrand, and what is a result of winning trophies or signing Cristiano Ronaldo.He is, though, “absolutely convinced” that it was worth it. Internally, the new identity gave the club a sense of direction, he said. Externally, the outrage over the new badge subsided fairly quickly: Signing Ronaldo and picking up another handful of Serie A titles meant the club’s traditional fans did not feel alienated.But at the same time, it meant that Juventus had become something more than a team, something more like a sportswear brand, too.It is still occasionally possible to buy one of those original pixelated, acid green, special-edition Palace jerseys in streetwear’s thriving resale market. Prices start at several hundred dollars, far more than even the newest Juventus jersey. And how the team is doing on the field makes not the slightest bit of difference. More

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      The Champions League Is Changing. Here’s How It Will Work.

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      European soccer’s premier club competition, the Champions League, is remaking itself. After more than a generation in its current form, the Champions League is about to become an actual league for the first time. Organizers say the changes will produce better matchups, fewer meaningless games, and more drama. Critics say it’s about what these kinds […] More

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      The Gambling Company That Had the Best Pandemic Ever

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      LONDON — At no point during the soccer game between Stoke City and visiting Watford did anyone say, “Tonight’s match is brought to you by bet365,” one of the world’s largest online gambling companies. No one needed to. It was pretty obvious.The game took place at bet365 Stadium, where “bet365” was stenciled across a huge swath of red seats, which were empty because of the pandemic. LED banner ads with the green-and-yellow bet365 logo blinked and rolled around the perimeter of the field throughout play. And every Stoke player had bet365’s insignia emblazoned on the front of his shirt. The company doesn’t just sponsor the team. The company owns it.“We’ve been stuttering a bit,” Peter Coates, who is chairman of both bet365 and Stoke City, said in a phone interview a few hours before the January game. “We need a win tonight.”He didn’t get one. Watford prevailed, 2-1, after more than 90 minutes of sporadically exciting play.Bet365 undoubtedly had a much better night.Bet365, in Stoke-on-Trent, England, thrives in a nation that loosely regulates online gambling.Nathan Stirk/Getty ImagesThe company is private and doesn’t report quarterly earnings. But publicly traded rivals have announced results, and they strongly suggest that gambling operators are one of the big winners in the pandemic economy. The gaming giant Flutter Entertainment announced in November that sports betting revenue rose more than 30 percent last summer from the previous summer. The average daily number of gamblers at all of the company’s chains rose 40 percent.In soccer-crazed England, gambling is one of the few legally available thrills for a nation that is bored, isolated and stuck at home. It’s the British answer to day trading in the U.S. stock market, which has boomed throughout the pandemic and is expected to rise again as a new round of stimulus checks arrives. With an efficiency that seems both grim and arbitrary, Covid-19 has struck down millions but left others unscathed and, in some cases, richer than ever.The latter group includes executives at a select group of companies in a variety of fields including e-commerce, like Amazon, and entertainment, like Netflix. Gambling has a singular distinction in this rarefied class. Much of its gains come directly from people in financial duress — and much of that duress has been caused by gambling.The Gordon Moody Association, a British charity offering residential treatment for gambling addicts, said over the summer that the number of calls from gamblers who said they felt suicidal had recently quadrupled. A House of Lords report found last year that 60 percent of the industry’s profits came from 5 percent of its customers — namely problem gamblers, or gamblers at risk of developing a problem.People like Lewis, a 25-year-old from Hampshire who requested anonymity because few people know about a compulsion he is still struggling to control. He won about $77,000 at age 16 with an online betting account and chased the high of that original hit for years. Since 2016, he said, he has toggled between total abstinence and flat-out mania.To him, bet365 is the most insidious of the many online gambling sites, because it outpaces the rest at catering to the always-on impulse of people who want to wager, day and night, on games happening anywhere in the world.“A gambler is desperate to distract himself, and during lockdown there was nothing to distract me,” he said. “Can’t meet your mates at a pub, can’t go out for a meal. You’re at home every waking second. You end up in a vicious cycle.”A character out of John le CarréDenise Coates, who runs bet365, earned more than $420 million in 2019, the company reported.Felix Clay/EyevineThe online gambling industry has long operated under exceptionally lenient rules in Britain, many of them codified in 2005, with a set of regulations that was largely designed for retail betting shops. It has been described as an analog law for a digital age, and it’s overseen by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, also known as “the Ministry of Fun.”By all accounts, no company has profited more under this light-handed regime than bet365. Which is why it is spectacularly profitable.In 2019, the company stated in an annual filing that Mr. Coates’s daughter, Denise Coates, the co-chief executive, had earned more than $420 million, making her the highest-paid executive in the country and the “highest-paid woman in the world,” according to The Guardian. That was many times more than the chief executives of publicly traded competitors and more than 12,000 times the average salary in Stoke-on-Trent, the struggling city, 140 miles north of London, where bet365 is based.The company floundered last year during the months when soccer games were suspended in Britain, Mr. Coates said. Bet365 leaned on its casino offerings and found some soccer games in Belarus and Australia. Revenue snapped back quickly when play resumed.Ms. Coates, 53, rarely gives interviews and did not respond to messages for this article. She has been described as intensely private, and even to some longtime rivals — the sort of people she might run into at conventions or associations — she remains elusive.“She’s like a character out of a John le Carré novel, a person you know exists but whom you never meet,” said Ralph Topping, a former chief executive of William Hill, one of the country’s largest betting companies. “When I was at William Hill, we would have liked to have had her input on matters important to the industry. I’ve never had a conversation with her.”Ms. Coates’s journey to the pinnacle of online gambling started after she graduated with an honors degree in econometrics from the University of Sheffield and joined her father’s catering business as an accountant. Mr. Coates then owned a few dozen retail gambling shops, essentially a side business at the time.“She said, ‘Dad, that’s the most boring thing I’ve ever done,’” Mr. Coates recalled. “She said, ‘I want to run those shops for you,’ and she was brilliant at it.”She spruced up the stores and added 15 more. In 2000, she bought the domain name bet365 from eBay.“She’s very driven, always likes to be better than anyone else,” Mr. Coates said. “Very organized, good with people. She turned out to be a bit of a star.”Offering wagers all game longA Stoke City match against Leicester at bet365 Stadium. “In-play betting” lets bettors place wagers throughout a game.Getty ImagesThe world that her father credits Ms. Coates with creating is reflected in a television ad for bet365 that ran before the Stoke-Watford game. It featured the actor turned pitchman Ray Winstone, who sat in the back of a luxury sedan, dressed in a dark suit, idling in traffic and exuding ease and control.“At bet365 we’re always innovating and creating,” he said in a Cockney accent, staring at the camera. Cellphone in hand, apparently ready to place some wagers, he ticked through a list of those innovations, including something called “in-play betting.”In-play betting allows customers to wager throughout a sporting event, on minutiae that has little bearing on the outcome. How many corner kicks will there be in the first half of a soccer game? How many players will be ejected? What will happen first during a 10-minute increment — a throw-in, a free kick, a goal kick, something else? When those minutes expire, the site takes wagers on the next 10.“It’s very much like being in a casino,” said Jake Thomas, a former gambling industry executive who chaperoned a reporter, over the phone, through the website during the Stoke-Watford game. “Why wait 90 minutes to find out if your team is going to win? Why not get a little buzz betting on the next corner kick?”As Mr. Thomas spoke, and the minutes ticked by, the odds of dozens of wagers were constantly repriced. A bet that Stoke would score in the first 30 minutes paid 9 to 1 at just over 25 minutes into the game. A moment later, as that outcome appeared fractionally less likely, the same bet paid 19 to 2.The company has said it takes action on 100,000 events throughout the year, on sports and races around the world — greyhounds in New Zealand, women’s table tennis in Ukraine, golf in Dubai. There’s even a section on politics. (George Clooney is currently 100 to 1 to win the American presidency in 2024.)If no live events appeal, virtual events beckon. These are video-generated simulations of tennis matches; games of football, soccer, basketball and cricket; and on and on. One afternoon, bicycle races in a virtual velodrome were running every three minutes, each lasting about a minute.James Grimes, the founder of an antigambling group, and an ad for the gambling app Paddy Power in Manchester.Andy Haslam for The New York TimesOther gambling operators now offer just about everything found on bet365’s site. But rivals say Ms. Coates and her team led the way.“We were always looking at them to see what they were doing and how they were doing it,” said Peter Nolan, a former group director at William Hill. “And to the extent we could, we competed with them.”Because of that competition, fans 40 and younger grew up inundated with gambling ads. The subtext, and sometimes the text, was that soccer and betting don’t merely go together — they enhance each other.“I trusted the messages that football sent me,” said James Grimes, who lost $140,000, two jobs and all of his friends before he quit gambling and founded the Big Step, an antigambling group. “A slogan that I heard a lot as a kid” — from Sky Bet, an online gambling company — “was ‘It matters more when there’s money on it.’ And I believed that.”A tight-lipped companyPeter Coates, left, the chairman of bet365, at a soccer match in Stoke-on-Trent, where the company is the largest single employer.Nick Potts/PA Images, via Getty ImagesStoke-on-Trent is well known for ceramics — it’s where the reality fare “The Great Pottery Showdown” is filmed — but today, with a payroll of more than 4,000, it’s bet365 and not Wedgewood that is the city’s largest single employer. Few employees, even those who have been around for years, have met Ms. Coates. Her reticence is embodied in the company’s approach to the news media. It doesn’t have a press office, and no one responded to messages left with customer service representatives, even to say, “No comment.”Instead, after giving an impromptu phone interview, Peter Coates called to say he would forward any questions to relevant people at bet365. He added, good-naturedly, that speaking to this reporter had landed him in “some trouble.”The origins of bet365 start with Mr. Coates, a Stoke-on-Trent native and son of a coal miner. With money he had earned through a business selling food at stadiums across the country, he bought three local betting shops, essentially as a favor to the brother of an employee. The chain would eventually expand to 35 shops, stretching from the West Midlands to Liverpool.Two decades ago, after getting online at Ms. Coates’s urging, the company operated out of a portable cabin near one of the betting shops. It was a more complicated and expensive proposition than the family had initially realized.“We had to find about 20 million pounds,” Mr. Coates said. “In the early days, we lost a lot of money. They were worrying times, but I felt we were accumulating a customer base, and we eventually passed the critical mass you need.”The last time the company filed a financial report, in December 2019, it stated that operating profit had jumped 15 percent from the previous year, to roughly $1 billion. This capped an immensely lucrative period for Ms. Coates. Forbes recently estimated her net worth at $6.4 billion. For the second year in a row, the Coates family is the United Kingdom’s biggest taxpayer, according to the annual Sunday Times Tax List, published in late January. The family paid the equivalent of $785 million into state coffers last year. Ms. Coates has also set up the Denise Coates Foundation, which focuses on health care and research and charity and in its most recent filing reported $14 million in giving.More quietly, she has been buying hundreds of acres in nearby Cheshire and building what The Daily Mail called a $125 million “glass palace,” along with stables, a tennis court and a 75,000-square-foot artificial lake.In Stoke, Ms. Coates is both acclaimed and largely invisible. She can be counted on to chip in money for civic projects, as she did when the town needed additional funds to erect a statue for Arnold Bennett, a local author who died 90 years ago. Just don’t expect her to show up at the unveiling.“A lot of people who have made money in Stoke leave,” said Fred Hughes, 80, a retired police officer who attended the Bennett statue ceremony. “This is quite an impoverished area, and it’s always looking for outside investment. The Coates family is the exception.”Winners not always welcomeMark Palios, owner of the Tranmere Rovers in Birkenhead, has spoken out against gambling operators as a malign force in the game.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesThe success of bet365 stems in large part from the way it pampers bettors. It offers, for instance, refunds to anyone who bets on a soccer team to win in a game that ends without any goals. (Nil-nil ties enrage bettors.) And in certain circumstances, the company will pay out winners before a game is over.This is not exactly altruism.“The logic from their point of view is that if you’ve got your winnings before the game is over, you can use that money to bet again,” said Warwick Bartlett of Global Betting & Gaming Consultants.The company is far less hospitable to another type of customer: consistent winners. Brian Chappell said he had a falling out with bet365 a few years ago after earning about $4,800 over a summer of gambling on horses. A retired health care researcher, Mr. Chappell said he simply studied the sport and understood the complexities of hedging well enough to come out ahead on weekly races.“Then one Saturday I went to place a bet and the most I could wager was £1.60,” or about $2.20, he said. “They don’t tell you it’s going to happen — there’s no interaction at all. Just one day, your bet is restricted.”After learning that others had encountered similar obstacles, at bet365 and other operators, Mr. Chappell founded Justice for Punters — “punter” is slang for bettor — to fight back.“I call it the ‘ban or bankrupt’ strategy,” he said, describing what he calls an “amazing” business model: “If you’re any good, you get banned. If you’re useless, you get a V.I.P. manager who will keep you gambling.”Antigambling activists contend that such stratagems are just part of the problem, especially during the pandemic.“The lockdowns have accelerated the growth of online gambling and increased the use of more addictive gambling products,” said Matt Zarb-Cousin, who runs Clean Up Gambling, a nonprofit. “This means an entire generation is now far more vulnerable to gambling addiction.”Without new regulations, separating soccer and gambling will never happen, Mr. Zarb-Cousin and others say, because the two are now essentially fused. About 70 percent of teams in the top two English leagues earn millions by wearing betting company logos on their uniforms. Even the few soccer team owners who refuse gambling money, on principle, end up taking it just by competing.Mark Palios, owner of the Tranmere Rovers in Birkenhead has spoken out against gambling operators as a malign force in the game. He was appalled two seasons ago when bet365 wound up with broadcasting rights to some games. The Football Association, which markets those rights, shares revenue with teams in the league.“And bet365 decided that if you wanted to watch games you needed to go to the company’s website and sign up for an account,” Mr. Palios said. “The company was nakedly leveraging its market power to compel people to gamble. I thought that was obscene.” More

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      Jesse Lingard and Tricks of the Light

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      Be patient, West Ham’s David Moyes said when he signed the out-of-favor forward from Manchester United in January. Both are already reaping the rewards.For possibly the first and only time this season, David Moyes was wrong. As the January transfer window drew to a close, his West Ham side had agreed on a deal to sign Jesse Lingard on loan from Manchester United, and Moyes was keen to stave off the Premier League’s proclivity for rushing to judgment.As far as Moyes was concerned, Lingard was a smart option. He was well aware that what his team needed more than anything was a striker: Sebastian Haller had left for Ajax, leaving the redoubtable Michail Antonio as the club’s only specialist forward. And even he, strictly speaking, was a late-in-life sort of a striker.The problem, as Moyes put it, was a scarcity of plug-and-play replacements on the market. Lingard, he said, might offer a way to think around the problem. He could play as a forward if necessary, but he could also play wide right, wide left, or in a deeper role through the middle. With West Ham chasing a place in Europe for next season, that versatility made him a great value.Not everyone saw it that way. The reaction to Lingard’s arrival at West Ham was mixed. In English soccer’s ever-voluble punditocracy, its content-industrial complex, some saw him as a “diamond.” Others questioned whether a player who had been an outcast at Manchester United would be “good enough” to earn a place at West Ham.As he fell out of favor at Manchester United, Lingard became the butt of jokes.Carl Recine/ReutersA former teammate, Rio Ferdinand — long before he produced what may be the most extraordinary take of the season, on any subject, in any sport — had always been a staunch supporter of Lingard, but even he could see the player was a polarizing figure. He had, he said, “argued with pundit after pundit, on air and off air,” over the 28-year-old Lingard’s merits.Moyes knew all of that, and so he asked for patience. “It will take him a little bit of time to settle, so let’s give him a chance,” he said a couple of days after Lingard arrived. And that is where he was wrong, because 24 hours later, Lingard was busy scoring twice on his West Ham debut, inspiring a rout of Aston Villa, and looking for all the world like the best player on the field.Since then, Lingard has hardly stopped. He did not, it turns out, need any time to settle at all. He has five goals in seven appearances for West Ham, the sort of form that has not only persuaded Moyes to attempt to sign him on a permanent deal but that has attracted the attentions of Leicester City and Aston Villa, too. This week, he returned to the England squad for the first time in two years.Lingard’s form drew the attention of the England coaching staff, which called him up for this week’s World Cup qualifiers.Pool photo by Carl RecineReputations rise and fall precipitously in soccer, but even by those standards, Lingard’s transformation, what he has described as his “new lease of life,” is eye-catching. He had not just become a bit-part player in Manchester United’s eyes; he had, to the wider world, become something close to a figure of fun.Every month, a meme borrowed from the influential, worryingly prescient British comedy series “The Day Today” made its way round Twitter, asking if Lingard had scored or assisted on a league goal over the last four weeks. It had been started innocently enough, but, as is the way of things on social media, had been co-opted by cruelty.The joke, of course, was that he never did. Lingard had enjoyed one golden month in December 2018, scoring four goals and creating two others, but had done nothing before or since. His reputation had been built on the exception, rather than the rule.That the impression stuck was, at least in part, because Lingard was seen as fair game for mockery. Partly, that was through no fault of his own. Pundits assailed him for his extracurricular business interests. The news media, meanwhile, bizarrely insisted on identifying him as a young prospect, long after he had outgrown that particular label. Fans, at least some, objected to his performed, public persona, particularly online.And partly, he did not help himself. It is deeply unfair and moderately pompous to judge a young man for expressing his personality, but at the same time it seems likely that the elaborate goal celebrations, the social media antics and the use of the nickname J-Lingz did not help others take him seriously. Lingard, to some extent, was complicit in his Peter Panning.By January this year, the combination of all those factors seemed to have brought Lingard’s career to a standstill. He had barely played for Manchester United, despite, in his view, the fact that he had returned from lockdown in good form and fine fettle. The only clubs interested in handing him a second chance were West Bromwich Albion and Newcastle United — the transfer market’s last refuge of the damned — and, thanks to the fact that Moyes had worked with him at Old Trafford eight years ago, West Ham.The evidence of the last three months is that he chose correctly. Some credit for Lingard’s renaissance, of course, must go to Moyes, who has filled him with trust and confidence, and provided a space in which he can thrive. Much of it, too, must go to Lingard. He has a whiteboard on the wall at his home filled with a set of targets for him to achieve, including the number of shots he takes, the number of players he beats. In private, he is clearly very serious about his career.But there is a lesson in Lingard’s story, too. More than one, in fact. The first is an old one: that, in soccer, the stage matters as much as the ability of the actor. Players thrive and talent shines in a conducive environment; being in the right place, at the right time, with the right people is as important as an individual’s baseline of talent.Trust me, David Moyes told critics of his decision to acquire Lingard. He knew the player from his brief tenure at Manchester United.Pool photo by Justin SetterfieldThe second lesson is that perception can be skewed by circumstance, that it is too easily forgotten that the higher up soccer’s pyramid one goes, the thinner the air. It is easy to forget that only players of the very highest quality are good enough to be surplus to requirements at Manchester United and the rest of Europe’s rarefied elite.Too often, there is an assumption that those who fail to make the grade at Old Trafford or the Bernabéu or the Allianz Arena have been exposed as talentless hacks, a curling of the nose at the idea of signing another team’s rejects.The reality is not only different, it is the precise opposite: A player who has survived for as long as Lingard did at Manchester United will stand out, in fertile soil, almost anywhere else. Perhaps Lingard was not good enough, not any more, for the club where he started his career. That he was, at one time, should have been reason enough to take him more seriously than we did.Postponing ProblemsBurak Yilmaz and Turkey opened World Cup qualifying with a win over the Netherlands in Istanbul. South America’s players had the week off.Pool photo by Murad SezerThe managers of Europe’s elite clubs would hardly have been alone at breathing a sigh of relief, a couple of weeks ago, when South America’s soccer authorities confirmed the round of World Cup qualifiers scheduled to be held this week would be postponed.It is precisely the outcome Pep Guardiola, Jürgen Klopp and several of their peers had wanted, of course, and it was the correct course of action from a public health perspective. But they were not the only beneficiaries.A two-week break in this most frantic of seasons will be of considerable benefit to those players who would, otherwise, have been traveling thousands of miles to play two matches inside five days. It is an unexpected blessing in a campaign that has pushed those whose job it is to play the game to their limits. Weary bodies will have had time to rest and repair. Tired minds will have had chance to reset.There is, though, a drawback. Obviously there is a drawback. And it is that those games now have to be slotted in somewhere else, and the calendar is no less forgiving once this season is finished.There is little space to play the postponed fixtures this summer. South America’s teams already have two delayed qualifiers to play in early June, squeezed in before yet another Copa América. (There is, as we have seen previously, always a Copa América. But don’t worry, they’ve changed this one, altering the format to make it worse.) And there is little room to breathe next season, with the schedule compressed anyway by the looming logistical problems of a mid-season World Cup at the end of 2022.We have learned this lesson before, of course, but it bears repeating: There is too little slack in soccer’s calendar. What is dressed up as compromise is, in reality, often nothing more than greed, every interested party happy to sign up to anything as long as they get what they want. And, at the end of it all, the people who suffer are the ones who have to fulfill these ludicrous schedules: the players.In Case You Missed It: U.S. 4, Jamaica 1Christian Pulisic newsletter klaxon: The United States, playing regulars like Pulisic and Sergino Dest, left, but also the newcomer Yunus Musah, right, thumped Jamaica, 4-1, in a friendly on Thursday in Vienna.Jakub Sukup/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Reward and the RiskTo many in women’s soccer in England, Monday was a day of vindication. After months of negotiation, the Women’s Super League — regarded by many, now, as the finest domestic competition on the planet — confirmed that it had agreed to a three-year television deal with Sky and the BBC, one that will earn its clubs almost $11 million per season.The triumphalism is, in large part, warranted. Nobody will pay more to broadcast women’s soccer anywhere in the world. Sky has promised to give the W.S.L.’s games the same treatment — hope you like bombast and slow-motion montages, W.S.L. fans! — that it affords the Premier League. It is a level of exposure and, bluntly, revenue that those who have worked tirelessly to advance the women’s game deserve.The hope, of course, is that the new deal will kick-start a virtuous circle: more investment means better facilities; better facilities attract (and produce, the thinking goes, though whether that part is correct or not is debatable) better players; better players lead to better games; better games attract more viewers; and more viewers lead to more investment.There are, though, two notes of caution worth considering. The first is that the W.S.L. is, increasingly, dominated by two clubs: Manchester City and Chelsea, two teams that have packed their rosters with international players. Indeed, lack of competitive balance is as much an issue for the women’s game as it is the men’s.A new television deal will expose more fans to Women’s Super League stars like Chelsea’s Sam Kerr. But it’s important that the money trickles down, too.Mike Egerton/Press Association, via Associated PressWill this television deal give their rivals the resources to compete, or will it simply entrench their dominance? In the longer term, too, will the money not incentivize clubs simply to buy in talent, rather than develop homegrown players, a problem that men’s soccer has had to wrestle with for years?And second, and more pressing: Though the free-to-air BBC will be showing a handful of games (and matches will be streamed by the Football Association itself), the vast majority will be on cable, effectively paywalled off from consumers.Sports that have a far larger popular following than women’s soccer currently enjoys — including cricket and Formula 1 — have found that can be an obstacle to building, or even retaining, an audience. This W.S.L. deal is rich reward for all those involved in the undoubted success of women’s soccer in recent years. But lack of access is not, necessarily, a price worth paying.CorrespondenceRodrygo, right, and Vinicius Júnior were two significant investments in Real Madrid’s future.Juanjo Martin/EPA, via ShutterstockLast week’s column on the folly of signing Eden Hazard prompted an impassioned and, if we are all completely honest, quite accurate defense of Real Madrid’s transfer dealings from Sebastian Royo.“If you look at the players they have hired in the last few years — Vinicius, Rodrygo, Luka Jovic, Martin Odegaard, Ferland Mendy — they are all in their teens or early 20s,” Sebastian wrote. “If anything, Real can be accused of getting players who are too young and not ready to start, and not giving them enough opportunity to play and grow.”This is a valid rebuttal. Real Madrid has spent a lot of money on young talent; so, for that matter, has Barcelona. But perhaps the problem is that, at the same time, both teams have been unable to resist signing ready-made superstars, which has to some extent limited the young players’ chances.A great point, too, from David Hamlyn on the surprisingly enervating issue of quick free kicks’ being discouraged. “In this era of scripted play, the offensive side will still want to do their setup, thereby slowing play down,” he noted. This is right, I think: Teams work doggedly on set plays. I’m not sure they would automatically take them quickly, even if they could do so more easily.Lynton Smith was in touch on the evergreen subject of video assistant referees and offside, which I’ll be returning to again in the near future — put a note in your diaries for that one — but one (throwaway) comment caught my eye. “We want as many goals in the game as we can,” Lynton wrote, “and the new precision disallows goals which in the past would have stood.” I don’t know if I agree with that assertion. Do we want as many goals as we can? Would that not make them less special? Is the gratification not in the delay?And finally, Atticus Proctor asks a very good question. “Why is soccer so obsessed with always restructuring its tournaments and leagues? I’m only 25, but just in recent memory, Concacaf has restructured World Cup qualification, teams were added to the European Championships and the World Cup, the Nations League was created, and the Champions League has changed format four times since 1999.”The glib answers, obviously, would be a) to make more money and b) to reflect the ever-shifting currents of the sport’s politics. But the endless flux is, in itself, interesting, because I wonder to what extent a prior willingness to be flexible leads to an assumption that everything is permanently up for grabs. More

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      Bayern's Alphonso Davies Wants to Share His Story

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      The Bayern Munich star didn’t learn his own refugee story until his parents talked about it in a team video. He has come to embrace its power, and its effect on others.For a long time, Alphonso Davies knew only the outline of the story. His parents had given him the bare facts, but little more: that they had fled the bloody civil war engulfing their native Liberia; that he had been born in the refugee camp in Ghana where they sought shelter; that they had moved to Canada when he was 5.He had been too young not only to understand where he was and what his family was enduring, but also for those years to leave any imprint on him at all. His memory kicks in, he said, at age 6 or so: He remembers starting school in Windsor, Ontario, but nothing before that. His parents, Debeah and Victoria, never volunteered to fill in the gaps.“They didn’t really explain it,” Davies said. “It’s not something they talked about a lot. They didn’t really want to. It was a dark time in their history. They just wanted us to enjoy our lives in Canada, to be really happy in a safe place, where we could be whatever we wanted to be.”Davies discovered much of the detail of his own story at the same time as almost everyone else. On the day in 2017 when he was officially granted Canadian citizenship, the Vancouver Whitecaps — the club where he made his name as a 16-year-old — produced a short film, part celebration and part commemoration of his journey.It was the first time Davies had heard his parents’ firsthand account of the part of their life — and his — that he had never known. They described the decision to flee the violence stalking Liberia. They spoke about the hand-to-mouth realities of existence in Buduburam, the camp on the edge of the Ghanaian capital, Accra, where they found themselves. They talked about the hunger, the poverty, the uncertainty, the fear.“They said it was like being in a container that you can’t leave, because you don’t know what would happen to you,” he said. “It was hard to find food and water. You don’t know what’s coming the next day. My mum didn’t know how she would feed me, take care of me. She cried. They were struggling, for themselves and for me. I didn’t know any of it until they did that interview.”Davies with his parents and family members in 2018, before his final game with the Vancouver Whitecaps. A few months later, just after he turned 18, he made his debut for Bayern Munich.Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press, via Associated PressDavies was not alone in being touched by his parents’ account. He had always known he was Liberian: The gospel music that Victoria played at 7 a.m. every Sunday at their new home in Edmonton, Alberta, gave that away. He had known, too, that he had been a refugee. “It is part of my identity,” he said. “It is part of me.”But it was only after his parents’ interview that he started to realize the significance of his story. “A lot of people reach out to me on social media to say what it means to them,” he said. “I started doing interviews about it, and I got a lot of feedback. It opens your eyes. It was amazing that people were inspired by it.”Over the last couple of years, Davies has done all he can to share it. He has given interviews to Gary Lineker and the BBC about his background. Bayern Munich — the club that signed him from the Whitecaps as a 17-year-old and made him a German and European champion before he turned 20 — produced a report from Buduburam on the early years of his life.Most important, though, in the first few months of his coronavirus-imposed lockdown last year, Davies started to use his fame and his platform to become an advocate for those suffering as his family once had.For many of the 80 million or so displaced people around the planet, he said, “food and water can be hard to come by.” He continued: “It is not always possible in those conditions to social distance. Access to the vaccine is difficult. People are passing away. I wanted to tell people that they are not alone, that there are people out there who were in their shoes.”He started to lend his support to the work being done by the U.N.H.C.R., the United Nations refugee agency, the body that helped organize his family’s resettlement in Canada. This week, the organization will appoint Davies as a good-will ambassador. He hopes to use the position to raise money to renovate soccer facilities in refugee camps. He is not only the first Canadian, but also the first soccer player, to be afforded the honor.It is fitting in more ways than one. It is not just the first act of Davies’s story that makes him suitable, but the second, too. In his first few years in Canada, he struggled a little academically, partly because of a language barrier and partly, he will admit, through a lack of inclination.As a gifted athlete, though, he never found any trouble fitting in. Edmonton is Gretzky country, but he did not take to ice hockey. (His skating has improved in recent years, he said.) Instead, he played a little basketball, and emerged as a talented track runner. But soccer was his first love, his clear gift, the sport he had grown up watching with his father, a keen fan of both Chelsea and, in particular, Didier Drogba.Alphonso Davies when he was younger in Canada.Courtesy Davies Family, via UNHCRHe was — this is no surprise — the standout player on every team he joined. As such, friends came relatively easily. “Other kids saw I was good at sports, so they wanted to be my friends,” he said. Being picked first on every team is a reasonably sure shortcut to preteen popularity. “Also,” Davies said, with the air of a man keen to underline the point, “I was a cool guy.”Though Davies’s soccer talent was unusual — not everyone, after all, is gifted enough to play for Bayern Munich as a teenager — this element of his story, according to those who work with refugees and asylum seekers around the world, is much more universal. “It is hard to think of an equivalent that has the same reach or impact,” said Naomi Westland, the founder of Amnesty International’s Football Welcomes program.Though it is natural, perhaps, to cite those from a refugee or migrant background who go on to professional careers as examples and inspirations — not only Davies, but the likes of Bournemouth goalkeeper Asmir Begovic and Bologna striker Musa Juwara, too — the most valuable work, in truth, is not concerned with unearthing talent.Instead, it is helping refugees and asylum seekers to build a new life, to integrate and combat racism and prejudice, through soccer. Europe is dotted with teams dedicated to doing just that: Some of them, like the five English clubs that are part of Amnesty’s program, use the resources of the professional game to help. Others, like Liberi Nantes and Afro Napoli in Italy, are grass-roots organizations.Davies’s trophy case already includes two Bundesliga titles, two German Cups and a Champions League winners medal.Pool photo by Adam Pretty“You don’t need to be able to speak the language,” Westland said. “But playing in a team gives you a chance to forget about the stresses of being in the asylum system, a way to make friends, a chance to make connections. For people who have had to leave their homes, their countries and their lives behind, it can give you a sense of belonging, and a sense of purpose. That’s incredibly important.”Davies would not disagree. In those earliest memories of his, what mattered was not just his nascent brilliance on the field, the preternatural talent that would eventually take him far from home, to Vancouver and on to Munich, but the fact that he could use soccer as a common language and a shared interest. It was his way of “settling in,” he said. “It wasn’t a big soccer school, but there were enough kids who followed and understood.”He can still recall the endless, cyclical conversations about whether Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo was the superior player; when he first met Arjen Robben, in the changing room in Munich, he remembers being “star struck” by the sight of the man Davies was ardently convinced should have been anointed world player of the year in 2013.He still, he said, has to remind himself at times that he is actually talking to Robert Lewandowski, the guy who used to score goals for him on the FIFA video games. He did not know that is how his story would turn out at the time, of course. He did not know he would go on to be an inspiration. All he knew was that he wanted to talk about, and play, soccer. “Talking about it, being surrounded by it, that’s how you make friends,” he said. More

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      Cuban Soccer Is Stocking Up on Overseas Players. Why?

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      Cuba’s soccer team has called up a handful of players who developed outside the country’s sports system for its World Cup qualifying matches, a subtle but potentially significant shift in policy.When its campaign to qualify for the 2022 World Cup begins this week, Cuba will try an approach it has not tried in years: fielding many of its best eligible players.For years, only Cuban players who had contracts with INDER, the country’s governing body for sports, were selected to represent the national team. This month, that will change. Cuba has called in several players who are based abroad — and outside the official Cuban sports system — to play in a set of World Cup qualification matches.That means potential national team debuts for Norwich City wing Onel Hernández, the Spain-based defender Carlos Vázquez Fernández and the San Marino-based forward Joel Apezteguía. It also means a return to the national team after six years away for defender Jorge Luis Corrales.“I didn’t know if I should shout or laugh because there are a lot of conflicting feelings,” said Corrales, who currently plays in a second-tier league in the United States. “The images of many years playing with the national team and all the great moments went through my mind. I think once again participating in those moments will be one of the best experiences I’ve had since arriving here to the United States.”To outside observers, the overseas-based players fall into a category that is difficult to distinguish from Cubans who walked away from national teams during tournaments abroad or defected elsewhere. But there is an important distinction that makes all the difference to Cuban officials: All of them either left the island with their parents as children, or were given permission by the government to go abroad.Corrales, for example, was allowed to visit his father in Miami after the 2015 Gold Cup, a major regional championship, and decided to stay after he was granted a five-year visa. He has since played for several teams in Major League Soccer and the U.S.L. Championship, the second division in the United States, including for his current employer, F.C. Tulsa.Jorge Luis Corrales, left, during his days in Major League Soccer. He is hoping to make his first national team appearance in six years.John Raoux/Associated PressApezteguía is hoping to make his national team debut at age 37. He played in Cuba until he was 24 before leaving to help his father run a bar and restaurant in Spain. After years of laboring in Europe’s smaller leagues (Moldova, Albania and his current home in San Marino are highlights) and hoping to be noticed by Cuban soccer officials, the call finally came.Hernández, 28, left Cuba when he was a child to move to Germany. He started his professional career in the German second division before moving to Norwich City, which he helped earn promotion to the Premier League in 2019. That summer, he became the first Cuban to play in the Premier League. A few months later, in a match against Manchester United, he became the first Cuban to score a goal in it.Hernández had expressed interest in representing his country of birth in the past, even accepting an invitation to train with the national team, but suiting up in an official game still seemed impossible until this month.Vázquez Fernández, a 21-year-old known as CaVaFe, left for Spain with his parents when he was 3. He developed his soccer game there, rising through Atlético Madrid’s academy and training with the first team at times. He has expressed his desire to wear the Cuba jersey for years, but had no timeline in mind.“I knew this first call-up was going to come,” he said. “What I didn’t know if it was going to be sooner or later, in 2028, 2025, 2021, but I knew it was going to happen. I’ve always been positive.”What none of the players is sure about, though, is why the calls are coming now.Cuba has rarely been competitive against regional powers like the United States. It is currently ranked 180th by FIFA, just behind Chad and Puerto Rico, and just above Liechtenstein and Macau.Scott Taetsch/Getty ImagesHernández has had regular contact with Cuba’s manager, Pablo Elier Sánchez, including video chats to get up to speed on the team’s tactics. He and the other players said they felt Sánchez and a handful of other officials had facilitated their call-ups by working for several years to convince soccer and government officials to bring them into the fold.Sánchez addressed the new faces in a brief airport interview upon arrival in Guatemala on Sunday, saying they would “undoubtedly” strengthen his team.“They’re players who are playing in important leagues, first-class leagues in the world,” he said. “They’re going to bring a lot when it comes to the results the team can get.”Cuba has offered no official explanation for its sudden openness to players from outside the national sports system, or if the success of these initial steps might usher in an openness to a prospect that has to date been unthinkable: reinforcing Cuban sports teams with the defectors who represent the elite of the Cuban sporting diaspora, not just soccer players like Osvaldo Alonso and Maikel Chang but potentially baseball stars like José Abreu and Yuli Gurriel.Messages left with Sánchez, federation officials and INDER were not returned.The players are hoping they can make a difference. Apezteguía said it had been difficult to watch Cuba’s national team, ranked 180 of 210 FIFA members, and know he could raise its level of play.“It bothers you a bit because you feel a bit powerless,” he said. “You’re watching it on TV without being able to help or represent your country, fight and give everything on the field. Now that this opportunity is here, we have to think about the present and about this chance we’ve been given.”Cuba’s dream is to see its name called at a World Cup draw again. It has played in only one, in 1938.Kurt Schorrer/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesCuba plays both of its first qualification matches in Guatemala, playing the hosts on Wednesday and Curaçao, the favorite to advance to the next round, four days later. But these games could lay the groundwork for a larger Cuban goal: a run at qualifying for an expanded 48-team World Cup in North America in 2026.Even without a concrete answer about the timing of the decision, Cuba’s reinforcements are optimistic this will be a first step toward the nation’s realizing its potential, especially if Cuba-based players are increasingly allowed to go abroad to try their luck in the world’s best leagues.“We have so many kids in Cuba that love football, and they want to live the dream that I lived,” Hernández said. More

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      Rooting for Your Home Team in Person? Here’s What You Need to Know.

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      This spring, big-league games are luring fans to stadiums and arenas. Expect varying levels of mask-wearing, social distancing and pregame testing.From strict testing, masking and physical-distancing protocols in New York and California, to a full 40,000-seat stadium with almost no coronavirus restrictions outside Dallas.These are the widely varying conditions sports fans can expect as large-scale spectatorship returns to big-league stadiums and arenas this spring. Americans are still getting infected with the coronavirus each day, and hospitalizations and deaths continue to add to the virus’s ghastly toll — but even the most Covid-weary cannot deny the life-affirming joy of root-root-rooting for the home team.The question is, should you be rooting in person?“The devil’s always in the details,” said Dr. Thomas A. Russo, chief of infectious medicine at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo. But when masking and distance standards are closely enforced, “the risk is going to be low,” he said.Fans were present on a very limited basis for some games at the end of last baseball season and in the N.F.L. season that concluded last month, and more recently for some N.B.A. and N.H.L. games. As of Friday, there have been no reports of community spread, but an argument can be made for waiting a bit before applying the face paint and heading out.“We’re still going to have a moderate community burden of disease for another six to eight weeks,” Dr. Russo said. “After that, as we’re working on the vaccinations, I expect it to lighten. So baseball in July may be very comfortable,” he continued, “whereas Opening Day may be less so.”This spring, the spectator policies of big-league baseball, soccer, hockey and basketball teams in the United States are governed primarily by the Covid-19 regulations of the 27 states where they are located, and the District of Columbia. The N.H.L. has extensive protocols for players, fans and buildings, and “none are independent of local, state, provincial or federal guidelines,” said John Dellapina, the league’s senior vice president of communications.But that leads to wide variations in how many are able to watch a game at the stadium or arena — and the lengths to which they must go to get in. The best thing for prospective spectators to do is check on their favorite team’s website and see what they need to do for a ticket.In New York, regulations currently allow 10 percent capacity at indoor sports venues — that translates to roughly 2,000 fans at Madison Square Garden for Knicks and Rangers games, 1,300 Islanders fans at Nassau Coliseum and 1,800 Nets fans at the Barclays Center — and 20 percent at outdoor venues.Those fans must present evidence of a negative virus test taken within 72 hours of the game (at a cost of $60 or more); have that test result linked to their ID via an app, like the tech company Clear’s digital health pass or New York State’s Excelsior Pass; complete a health survey before entry; submit to a temperature check; and, once inside, wear a mask except when eating or drinking.Outdoors, the same entry procedures will be in place, but with 20 percent capacity, when fans return to Yankee Stadium on Opening Day, April 1, and to Citi Field for the Mets home opener on April 8. (Both teams also say they will accept proof of full vaccination.) Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced the doubling of capacity for outdoor stadiums on Thursday, which means the Yankees can host almost 11,000 fans and the Mets about 8,400.That will also hold true for the Toronto Blue Jays, who are likely to play home games in Buffalo’s intimate Sahlen Field starting in May or June if the U.S.-Canada border remains closed. At Sahlen, 20 percent capacity translates to about 3,300 fans.Limited tickets and lots of social distancingOf course, all of this is dependent on scoring a ticket. Season-ticket holders get first crack at seats, so resale sites are the best bet for the casual fan.For some teams those secondary prices will be steep, given the limited supply, like the $260 nosebleed seat listed on Thursday for Islanders-Rangers at the Coliseum April 11. The cheapest resale price for a Red Sox-Orioles Opening Day ticket at Fenway Park (12 percent capacity) was put at $344. Currently, resale sites don’t even list tickets for Yankee Stadium or Citi Field until June.Baseball fans kept their distance from each other during the game between the New York Yankees and the Pittsburgh Pirates at George M. Steinbrenner Field in Tampa, Fla., on March 13.Eve Edelheit for The New York TimesNew Jersey is allowing 10 percent capacity at Devils games indoors in Newark (about 1,800 fans), and 15 percent capacity for Red Bulls games outdoors in Harrison (about 3,750) when the Major League Soccer season starts on April 17. But unlike New York, no negative Covid-19 test is required. “If you buy tickets together, you can sit together, but otherwise, we have to spread apart,” said Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey.Sports and health officials use algorithms to determine what percentage of capacity allows for six feet of spacing. For most arenas, that figure is 20 to 25 percent, so the Devils are well below that threshold.In California, a color-coded system determined by local infection rates determines restrictions. Until recently, Los Angeles County was in the strictest purple tier, which would have restricted attendance to 100 fans at LA Galaxy and LAFC soccer games and Dodgers baseball games.But the county has since moved to the red tier, which allows 20 percent capacity at sports venues. So when the Dodgers play their home opener on April 9, as many as 11,200 fans will be on hand at Dodger Stadium. Orange County also moved to red, which will enable 9,000 fans to turn out at Angel Stadium. So did San Diego County, giving the OK for 10,000 Padres fans at Petco Park.And so it goes in a checkerboard manner across the country. The Colorado Rockies can fill their ballpark to just over 42 percent of capacity, or 21,000 fans who must wear proper masks. In Missouri, the St. Louis Cardinals can fill up to 32 percent of their stadium, and in Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia Phillies and Pittsburgh Pirates can fill 20 percent. But in Michigan, current regulations mandate that the Detroit Tigers admit only 1,000 fans, though the team says that figure could be increased.In Oregon, state officials have not yet cleared the Portland Timbers men’s and Portland Thorns women’s soccer teams to allow fans into Providence Park. That’s also true for 13 N.B.A. basketball teams, though that number could shrink in the coming days.Indeed, the N.B.A. has perhaps the most uniform leaguewide policy regarding Covid protocols. In the 17 arenas that currently admit fans, none are allowed to sit courtside and must be at least 15 feet behind team benches. Fans with seats within 30 feet of the court must present a negative Covid-19 test within 48 hours of game time or pass a rapid test on-site, and they are prohibited from eating.The N.H.L. has also made rink-side adjustments after a few early-season outbreaks among players and officials in closed-door games. The plexiglass panels were removed from behind the team benches and the penalty boxes to promote air circulation. And at 18 of the 24 U.S. rinks that now or will soon allow attendance, fans are prohibited from sitting behind the benches and penalty boxes or along the glass.And then there’s Texas…Then there’s the Lone Star state, where Gov. Greg Abbott recently removed all Covid-19 restrictions.The Texas Rangers took that as their cue to allow full capacity, all 40,518 seats, for the first three games at their new retractable-roof baseball stadium in Arlington — the first team in North America to do so. There will be no protocols beyond a mask-wearing rule at those two exhibition games on March 29 and 30 and the season opener on April 5. Subsequent games will be at less-than-full but still undetermined capacity.Dr. Catherine Troisi, an infectious disease epidemiologist at UTHealth School of Public Health in Houston, said she would not recommend attending those first three games in Arlington.“Will people keep their masks on, will they be drinking alcohol, will they be shouting, will the roof be open or closed?” she said. “There are so many risk factors. Even if you’re fully immunized, I’d advise against going.”However, another Dallas team is showing more restraint. The N.B.A. Mavericks will continue to cap their attendance at about 25 percent capacity and require fans to complete a health questionnaire. “Nothing will change,” the Mavericks owner, Mark Cuban, said.Golf fans, buoyed by the principle that outdoors is better when it comes to the coronavirus, are returning to PGA Tour events. Some 10,000 were expected for this weekend’s Honda Classic in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. That’s 20 percent of maximum capacity.But if it still seems like a lot of people on a golf course, don’t worry. The PGA Tour website reminds all spectators to make sure their temperature is under 100.4 degrees before they arrive and to maintain six-foot distancing.And, as a final reassurance for those who simply must get out and watch a tournament in person, the PGA warns that “no autographs, fist bumps or selfies are permitted with players.”Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. 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