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      Kylian Mbappé Is Target of Record Offer From Saudi Arabia’s Al Hilal

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      Al Hilal of the Saudi Professional League made a bid to Paris St.-Germain to acquire the French striker in what would be the most expensive soccer transfer in history.Saudi Arabia’s turbocharged attempt to turn its domestic soccer league into one of the sport’s most glamorous has already attracted Cristiano Ronaldo, one of the greatest stars of his generation, and Karim Benzema, the reigning world player of the year. Those deals, though, pale into comparison with its most ambitious target yet: Kylian Mbappé.Over the weekend, one of the Saudi Professional League’s more prominent teams, Al Hilal, submitted an offer worth $332 million for the France striker to his current team, Paris St.-Germain. Should the deal go through, it would make Mbappé the most expensive player in the sport’s history by some distance, dwarfing the $263 million P.S.G. paid for the Brazilian forward Neymar six years ago.The official bid was sent to P.S.G.’s chief executive, Nasser Al-Khelaifi, on Saturday. It was signed by Al Hilal’s chief executive, and it confirmed the price the club was prepared to pay and requested permission to discuss salary and the length of a contract with Mbappé. On Monday, it was reported by some news outlets that P.S.G. had granted that request.Al Hilal was expecting to hold initial talks with Fayza Lamari, Mbappé’s agent and mother, early this week, according to three people with knowledge of the offer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the details. It is likely that the club will have to commit hundreds of millions of dollars more in salary to persuade Mbappé, 24, who is regarded as the likely heir to Ronaldo and Lionel Messi as the finest player on the planet, to leave P.S.G. for a team in what was most recently ranked as soccer’s 58th strongest domestic league.Mbappé is already lavishly remunerated at P.S.G., his hometown club. Last summer, he was handed a contract worth $36 million a year, complete with a $120 million golden handshake.Even the amount of money that P.S.G.’s ultimate owner — Qatar Sports Investment, drawing on the wealth of the Qatari state — can afford to pay him, though, may not prove off-putting to his prospective employer: Al Hilal is now one of four Saudi teams majority owned by the Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.There is an element of opportunism in Al Hilal’s approach. Mbappé’s future has been the subject of intense speculation since the start of June, when the player informed P.S.G. that he intended to see out the final year of his current deal and walk away as a free agent in 2024.P.S.G. has insisted that it will not contemplate losing such a prized asset for nothing, informing Mbappé that he must sign a new contract — one that would extend his stay beyond 2024 — or face an uncertain future: either being sold or having to spend the season on the substitutes’ bench.The club has sought legal advice to gauge the strength of its position. Mbappé has maintained that he intends to spend the coming season in Paris, although he was omitted from the squad for the club’s preseason tour of Asia last week as a result of the standoff.Al Hilal headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.Ahmed Yosri/ReutersAl Hilal is not the only team hoping to take advantage of the growing schism between P.S.G. and one of soccer’s most talented players and most marketable names.P.S.G. has received several inquiries about Mbappé’s theoretical price tag. Chelsea, now owned by a consortium that includes Clearlake Capital Group, the private equity firm, has asked P.S.G. how much the player would cost. Barcelona, the Spanish champion, has discussed a deal in which more than one of its own prime assets would arrive in Paris in an exchange.Real Madrid, long assumed to be Mbappé’s preferred destination, has yet to show its hand. Some executives at P.S.G. believe a deal is already in place in which Mbappé would move to the Spanish capital next summer.It is that expectation that Al Hilal — most likely not the sort of place that Mbappé, at this stage of his career, would ordinarily have considered as his natural next step — hopes may provide it with an advantage.It has been reported that, despite all the money it is prepared to spend to secure his arrival, the Saudi club would allow Mbappé to leave for Spain after just a season in the Middle East. More

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      Norway’s Lise Klaveness Is Calling Out FIFA From the Inside

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      Lise Klaveness was only a few weeks into her post as the president of Norway’s soccer federation last year when she decided to start saying the quiet parts out loud.Rising from her seat among the delegates at FIFA’s annual congress in Qatar, Klaveness strode purposefully to the raised dais where officials had, for the better part of an hour, offered little beyond perfunctory comments about the men’s World Cup that would be staged in the Gulf country later that year. There had been talk of procedural matters, and updates on the financial details.Klaveness, one of the few women in soccer leadership, had other themes on her mind. Addressing matters that for years had dogged FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, she spoke about ethical questions, about migrant workers, about the rights of women and gay people. She spoke of the responsibility of the (mostly male) officials in the room to ensure that soccer hold itself to a higher moral and ethical standard when it chose its leaders and the sites for its biggest competitions.By the time Klaveness had finished about five minutes later, she had, in typically direct style, issued a challenge to FIFA itself.But she had also made herself a target.Almost as soon as she had returned to her seat, an official from Honduras asked to speak. He bluntly told Klaveness that the FIFA Congress was “not the right forum or the right moment” to make such remarks. A few moments later, she was assailed by the head of Qatar’s World Cup organizing committee, who told her she should “educate yourself” before speaking out.“Ever since that speech in Doha so many people, and powerful people, want to tell me to calm down,” she said, describing how on several high profile meetings where she, and the Norwegian federation, have been obliquely and open criticized in a manner that she contends is a calculated effort to muzzle her.Lise Klaveness, the president of Norway’s soccer federation, walking through a crowd of men in March 2022 after addressing a FIFA congress in Qatar.Hassan Ammar/Associated PressFar from being cowed, Klaveness, who played on Norway’s national team before becoming a lawyer and a judge, has continued to speak, and continued to challenge soccer’s orthodoxy that sensitive matters should remain behind closed doors.“Politically it made me a bit more exposed, and maybe people want to tell me, ‘Who do you think you are?’ in different ways,” Klaveness, 42, said in an interview before the Women’s World Cup. Openly raising questions about human rights and good governance, she said, also “came with a price.”She also believes her positions reflect those of her federation, and her country. And she says she will not stop pressing them. “I’m very motivated,” she said, “and the day I’m not, I’ll quit. I have nothing to lose.”Klaveness’s style — so out of step with soccer’s conservative traditions — has been questioned even by some of her closest allies.“It’s maybe not the most strategic because it was very confronting,” Gijs de Jong, the secretary general of the Dutch soccer federation, said of Klaveness’s speech in Qatar. De Jong has worked closely with Klaveness over the past two years, and he said he shares many of the same frustrations over FIFA’s record on following through on its stated commitments, particularly when they concern human rights.But while he acknowledged soccer could afford to face a few hard questions, he suggested a more diplomatic approach was what produces results.“I learned in the last six, seven years that you have to stay connected,” he said. “And the risk of bringing such a confronting speech is that you lose connection with the rest of the world. And I think that’s the danger of this approach.”Klaveness said she has been told “not to exaggerate at least a thousand times” by other soccer leaders. They have encouraged her to speak in what she describes as an “indoor voice,” to be more diplomatic, to work differently. But she said that is difficult “when you have 100 years of proof of no change.”Klaveness, center left, played on Norway’s national team before becoming a lawyer and a judge.Feng Li/Getty Images“I think she is very, very popular in Norway because she never hides and she never lies and she speaks a language that everyone can understand,” said the coach of Norway’s men’s team, Stale Solbakken. “I think also that football needs voices that can dare to confront the men’s world that football is.”Earlier this year, Klaveness decided to challenge convention again by standing in elections for a place on the governing board of UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, against male candidates, instead of seeking election the one place reserved for women. She was soundly beaten, but afterward preferred to see the positives from the votes — 18, from Europe’s 55 member nations — she received.“I see it as one-third of the presidents of UEFA want change — 18 of them voted for this,” she said. There remains significant resistance from soccer’s top leaders to her priorities, she said, “but underneath them there are a lot of people reaching out.”Soccer remains infused by what Klaveness described as “a culture of fear,” a chilling effect that keeps officials, aware they could be ostracized and lose prestigious and often well-paid roles, from speaking out. For Klaveness, the conversation is still worth having.The plight of migrant workers in Qatar, for example, continues to be a concern. In March, FIFA promised to study whether it had any ongoing responsibilities in policing soccer projects if its statutes on human rights had been breached. European officials enlisted Klaveness and De Jong to join a FIFA committee on the matter, but now months have passed without any confirmation about how the committee will operate, Klaveness said. Letters and messages for updates, she said, are met with a now familiar response: “Let me get back to you.”Klaveness rejected the idea that any of the stands she has taken make her an activist, as some claim, or detract from her role as a soccer leader, something that will undoubtedly attract increased scrutiny should Norway’s national teams continue to struggle on the field.Migrant workers and other spectators watching a men’s World Cup match at a cricket stadium on the outskirts of Doha, Qatar, in November.Mads Claus Rasmussen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNorway’s men’s team, blessed by a talented generation that includes Erling Haaland and Martin Odegaard, could not take part in protests at the Qatar World Cup because it failed to qualify. The women’s team, which features the former world player of the year Ada Hegerberg, was humbled, 8-0, by England at last year’s European Championship,and opened the World Cup last week with a loss to New Zealand, which had never won a game in the tournament.Rather than distract her, Klaveness said the issues and platforms she an Norway’s federation and teams have championed are directly related to the game, particularly when it comes to questions about inclusivity.She said she is trying to set an example, to show other soccer leaders that they can be more than what the world has come to expect of them, more than the sea of men in suits that usually fills the hotel lounges and conference halls whenever FIFA comes to town.She has traveled to New Zealand with her wife, and three young children all under 10, and has told other officials in the Norwegian contingent that they can bring their families with them, too.“It’s a big issue for me and us at Norway federation,” she said, explaining how the travel commitments inherent in soccer’s leadership roles have made it hard to recruit women, and made it “easy for people to say women don’t want the job.”Klaveness, whose term as federation president expires in March 2026, knows her time is limited. She is not prepared to hang onto the role for the sake of staying in soccer, she said. But while she is there, she will continue to speak up. And that continued this week.Her current focus is the prize money at the Women’s World Cup. Before the tournament, FIFA announced that participating players would be guaranteed 30 percent of the $110 million prize money on offer, and a minimum of $30,000 per player. Some national federations, including England’s, appear to be using FIFA’s offer as cover to withhold supplemental bonus payments. And last week FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, declined to guarantee the money would eventually get to the players. Per FIFA rules, he said, the money will be paid to the federations, suggesting the proposed bonuses were a recommendation and not a guarantee.“He could and should be clear that it’s an obligatory payment,” Klaveness said. “Why would you ever say it’s not that straightforward?” More

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      The Morocco Women’s Team Has Already Won

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      Khadija Rmichi’s path to the Women’s World Cup started on a bicycle.Rmichi, a goalkeeper, grew up in Khouribga, a mining city in central Morocco. As a girl, she tried many sports, including basketball, but always grew bored with them. She was frequently drawn instead to the soccer played by boys in the streets. Sometimes she enjoyed just watching the games. Many days, she couldn’t resist joining in, even when she knew it would mean trouble.“It was considered shameful to play with boys,” Rmichi, now 33, said in an interview in April. “My older brother would hit me and drag me home, and I would just return to the street to play whenever I had a chance.”A local coach liked her spirit. He told Rmichi that if she could find enough girls to form a team, he would train them. So she hopped on a bike and toured Khouribga’s side streets and playgrounds, looking for teammates. When it was necessary, Rmichi said, she would take her sales pitch directly into the girls’ homes, helping to persuade reluctant parents and families to let them play.“I tried to get into other sports,” she said, “but I just wanted to play soccer.”Morocco goalkeeper Khadija Rmichi, top. She and her teammates won’t win the World Cup, but that’s not the point of their journey.A Team of FirstsOne of eight first-time qualifiers in the Women’s World Cup field, Morocco may not win a game playing in a group that includes a former champion (Germany), an Asian regular (South Korea) and the second-best team in South America (Colombia).But the fact that Morocco is playing in this tournament, which began Thursday in Australia and New Zealand, and that its women’s team exists at all, is serving as an inspiration and a measurable source of pride at home and abroad.Morocco is the first Women’s World Cup qualifier from North Africa, and the first from a majority Arab nation. Still, its squad was little known even to most Moroccans before it hosted the event that served as the continent’s World Cup qualifying tournament on home soil last July. As it posted win after win, however, the country’s stadiums started to fill with fans, many of them seeing the team play for the first time.In a country where soccer is revered but where interest in the women’s game is a new phenomenon, that success raised the team’s profile. “They showed us that they can fill stadiums and make Moroccans happy,” the team’s French coach, Reynald Pedros, said. “They did it on the African stage. Now we are hoping to do the same on the international one.”Morocco’s presence in Australia this month is a testament to the efforts to develop women’s soccer in the country through government investments and a concerted effort to unearth talent not only in cities like Rabat and Casablanca but also from the vast Moroccan diaspora in France, Spain, Britain and the Netherlands.Nesryne El Chad, above, a 20-year-old central defender. She grew up in Europe as did several of her Morocco teammates.That diversity was on display on a cold but joyful night earlier this year in Prague, where the team had come to face the Czech Republic in a pre-World Cup exhibition match. During the evening training session, Pedros gave instructions to the group in French, and the players shouted commands and encouragement to one another in a mix of Arabic, French and English. An interpreter stood by the field in case he was needed. For most of the practice, he was not: Most of the players had by then established ways to communicate even when they didn’t share a common language.Their diverse paths were sometimes bound by similar threads. Sofia Bouftini, a 21-year-old who grew up in Morocco, initially faced resistance from her family when she expressed an interest in taking soccer more seriously. Like Rmichi, she had fallen in love with the sport playing against boys while longing to be part of a real team.“My grandmother advocated for me and convinced my father,” she said. “My dad was against it.” He eventually relented, Bouftini said, when he realized how talented she was.ExpectationsSitting in his office this spring, Pedros, 51, cautioned that expectations for his team should remain realistic. The stakes for his squad, a first-time qualifier to the biggest championship in women’s soccer, aren’t the same as those for the men’s team, which won admirers far and wide in December as it became the first African team to advance to the semifinals.Matching that achievement should not be the measuring stick this month, Pedros said. “Comparing them to the boys,” he said of his players, “is not a good thing.”Morocco’s men had participated in international tournaments many times, he pointed out, before mounting the stunning run in Qatar that produced cheers at home and praise nearly everywhere else. The stars of the men’s team are employed by some of Europe’s best clubs, and so long ago learned how to perform on soccer’s biggest stages. For the women, he said, it will all be new. Success will be marked in smaller steps. “There won’t be 20,000 Moroccan supporters in the stadiums in Australia,” he said.Playing the long game is something the country’s sports leaders seem to acknowledge. On the sprawling Mohammed VI football complex in Salé, close to Morocco’s capital, Rabat, ultramodern facilities built in 2009 are where the new generations of soccer players are being groomed to become tomorrow’s champions.Morocco in the tunnel and on the field for a warm-up match against the Czech Republic in April.But for those who started before such facilities were available, the path to elite soccer was not always easy. For the players who came to the team after growing up in Europe, choosing Morocco was a complex question of opportunity and identity. But even those who had better opportunities to learn the game and train in the European countries where they grew up acknowledged they often faced similar resistance from their families.Nesryne El Chad, a 20-year-old central defender, grew up in Saint-Étienne, France, a city steeped in soccer. The daughter of Moroccan immigrants, she learned the game playing against boys during recess when she was at school. When her family traveled to Morocco during summer vacations, she said she would buy a ball from a shop and play on the beach.When she was 12, her parents realized she might be talented enough to have a future in soccer, so her mother enrolled her in a sports study program and made sure she was excused from some of the household chores that her siblings had to do, so that she could rest on Sundays before games. Her father, a black belt in karate, initially resisted the idea of a soccer-focused future for Nesryne — until, she said, his own mother told him to let her play. He ended up taking her to every practice, and every game, and is now one of her most fervent supporters.It was never a question, she said, which country’s colors she would wear if given the chance.“I was raised feeling Moroccan,” she said. “I always wanted to play for Morocco.”Voices From HomeA few hours inside the Ledni Stadium in Chomutov, close to the Czech Republic’s border with Germany, showed both how infectious Morocco’s success has become for fans, at home and abroad, and how far the team still has to go.The crowd that had defied the cold to watch Morocco’s friendly in April was mostly Czechs, including a group of loud, inebriated hockey fans who had spilled inside 30 minutes into the game after leaving a different event nearby. But there were also small pockets of Moroccans — expatriates mostly, some of whom had traveled more than 100 miles to attend. They were filled with purpose and belonging, drawn in by an urge to express love for the country where they had been born, and by the need to share that sentiment with others who would understand. Gender mattered little to them.Morocco’s team was little known even to most Moroccans before it qualified for the Women’s World Cup on home soil last July. Now it will play on the sport’s biggest stage.“To me, girls or boys, it’s all the same,” said Kamal Jabeur, 59, who had come about 190 miles from the city of Brno. “We came here because we wanted the girls to not feel alone.”Jabeur stood perched on his seat the entire game, cheering and chanting, “Dima Maghrib” — Always Morocco. His enthusiasm, while welcome, only did so much: Morocco lost to a Czech team that didn’t qualify for the World Cup. A few days later, it did the same against Romania, another nonqualifier, by 1-0 in Bucharest. Rougher nights could lie ahead.On Monday, Morocco will open its first World Cup with its toughest test yet: a date against Germany, one of the tournament favorites, in Melbourne. The players know their countrymen, and their families, wherever they are, will be watching.El Chad, the central defender, said her grandfather has made a habit of watching all of her games from a favorite cafe back in Morocco, where he likes to boast to his friends and neighbors about his granddaughter.El Chad knows the joy that games like the ones she will play this month can bring. She hurt a foot jumping with joy while watching one of Morocco’s wins in the men’s World Cup on television. This month, it is her team’s turn. She hopes to inspire similar sentiments, though not similar injuries, no matter the outcome. More

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      Messi Was Already a Hit in Miami. Then He Stepped Onto the Field.

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      The impact of the soccer star, who scored a game-winning goal in his debut on Friday, has already been felt in the city known as the unofficial capital of Latin America.Since Lionel Messi announced in early June that he intended to make a stunning jump to Major League Soccer for the twilight of his career, he has flipped the world of his new team, Inter Miami, upside down and shined an enormous spotlight on South Florida. Considered perhaps the greatest soccer player of all time, Messi brought an unprecedented amount of attention to a team that was in only its fourth season and mired in last place.And when Messi was fouled near the top of the penalty box in the third minute of added time in his highly anticipated debut on Friday, he had a chance to prove once again why he was worth all of this hoopla, money and adulation. As he lined up for the free kick in the waning seconds of the game, the crowd of 20,512 at DRV PNK Stadium wondered if he could author another unforgettable moment in an already storied career.The answer: of course. With his golden left foot, Messi drilled a shot into the top left corner of the net, providing the winning difference in a 2-1 victory over Mexican team Cruz Azul that seemed surreal but also quite fitting.“A tremendous joy to get our first victory after how we’ve been doing in the league,” Messi said in Spanish in a postgame television interview.Teammate Kamal Miller said it best when he noted that it was “crazy how that the whole crowd expected the ball to go right there, and he put it right there.” He added later, “We all had that feeling that if anyone could pull off something of that magnitude, that’s the right man.”Fans stood outside DRV PNK Stadium on Sunday to celebrate Messi’s arrival.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesThis is the power of Messi. Before he agreed to come here, Inter Miami was perhaps best known for a cheating scandal in 2021. And this season, Miami had not won since May 23, a span of 11 games. But Messi, 36, has already made an instant impact on and off the field.Messi, who led Argentina to World Cup glory in December and has claimed seven Ballons d’Or as the world’s best men’s soccer player, isn’t just an iconic athlete who has reached almost mythical proportions. He already has and likely will continue to have a substantial cultural influence on a city — and region — known as the unofficial capital of Latin America. Restaurants have changed their menus to include Messi-themed dishes. Murals and signs of Messi have popped up everywhere. Argentine culture is spreading through him.“The magnitude of this announcement — no matter how much I’ve prepared, envisioned, dreamed — is mind-blowing,” said Jorge Mas, the Cuban American billionaire and South Florida native who is the managing owner of Inter Miami. “You’d have to live in a cave to not know that Leo Messi is an Inter Miami player, no matter where in the world.”Look no further than the demand for tickets.A mural of Messi outside the Argentine restaurant Fiorito in Miami.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesGranted, Inter Miami plays in a stadium about 30 miles north of downtown Miami that has a listed capacity of 19,000 and is a placeholder until a proposed larger venue next to Miami International Airport is expected to be completed in two years.But the prices for many tickets to Messi’s first Inter Miami game jumped over $300 from roughly $40. As he acclimated to a new team, Messi didn’t start the game — part of a new monthlong tournament between M.L.S. and Liga MX called Leagues Cup — but it was a sellout anyway. From the beginning of the game, long before he stepped onto the field as a substitute in the 54th minute, fans had been chanting his name.The average ticket price on the secondary market for Inter Miami’s remaining home games skyrocketed to $850 from $152, with road games seeing an even bigger jump, according to Ticket IQ.While some fans have gotten their hands on a Messi Inter Miami jersey, the items are hard to come by online. A note on Inter Miami and M.L.S. official stores, which are run by the sports apparel retailer Fanatics, said that Adidas, the league’s official jersey supplier, would be “delivering this product in mid October.” The M.L.S. regular season ends around then. (Adidas did not respond to a request for comment.)According to Fanatics, since Messi’s new jersey launched on Monday, Inter Miami has been its top-selling team across all sports. The company said on Thursday that it had sold more Inter Miami merchandise since Monday than in the previous seven and a half months of 2023.“This is going to give a level of global exposure for us that we never could have achieved without a player like Messi,” M.L.S. Commissioner Don Garber said. “Whether that’s in South America or in Argentina, or in Europe because he had legendary careers in Barcelona and in France. The goal is try to capture as much of the interest in Messi as we can.”Before Messi’s announcement, Inter Miami’s Instagram account had one million followers. The count had ballooned to nearly 11 million as of Friday, surpassing Inter Milan, the storied soccer club in Italy, and all professional sports teams in the United States save for three N.B.A. teams.Some businesses across South Florida now feature homages to Messi.Saul Martinez for The New York Times“The city has got a bit of a buzz to it now,” Inter Miami defender DeAndre Yedlin said to nearly 40 reporters gathered before a Thursday morning practice, a crowd much larger than usual. “People are really excited, which is nice to see.”For Messi’s presentation event on Sunday — which was broadcast globally in English and Spanish on Apple TV, M.L.S.’s first-year streaming partner — nearly 500 media members were credentialed, according to Inter Miami. And nearly 200 were approved for Messi’s first practice, with a news helicopter circling above since early that morning. Even though reporters were given access to only 15 minutes of the training session, which is common in the sport, television and radio reporters from Argentina broadcast live from their spots on the other side of the field, and then later from the parking lot.“That’s a gift that Leo has given the sport,” said David Beckham, the former soccer star and an Inter Miami owner. “It’s about legacy for him. He’s at the stage of his career where he’s done everything that any soccer player can do in the sport.”Even beyond the field, Messi is among the most famous humans on Earth. At the World Cup in Qatar, it was common to see not only Argentina fans wearing his jersey and singing the national team chants, but also people from Bangladesh or the Philippines. A 30-foot-tall cutout of Messi stands, for example, in the southern Indian state of Kerala.Building on its popularity in Asia, Argentina’s national soccer federation had already begun its plans to grow in the U.S. market a year and a half ago. Leandro Petersen, the A.F.A.’s chief commercial and marketing officer, said the federation has 30-year deals in place in South Florida either to build new facilities (North Bay Village) or to renovate existing ones (Hialeah) to use as training centers for its national team ahead of the 2024 Copa América tournament and the 2026 World Cup.Demand for Inter Miami gear and tickets have skyrocketed. Argentine culture is spreading through him in Miami.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesBut now that Messi is around, Petersen said the federation is benefiting from the boost and seeing its timelines accelerate. Before, he said, it was more difficult to compete with the established American sports leagues, such as the N.F.L. or N.B.A.“What’s happening now is that different companies that didn’t invest in soccer because it’s not the most popular sport in the United States, they’re now starting to include in their budget a part to invest in soccer,” Petersen said in Spanish. Emi Danieluk, the brand ambassador for a local chain of Argentine steakhouses called Baires Grill, which has frequently hosted Messi, his family and his Argentine teammates, said Messi’s arrival had already given more visibility to Argentine culture, products and food. He sees more potential ripple effects of Messi’s presence.“We have today an example of what Messi is generating in Florida, but I can assure you when he starts to travel for Inter Miami to other stadiums that have more capacity, like Atlanta United and 80,000 people, the impact he is going to have in every state is really significant,” Danieluk said. “I don’t think people realize that right now.”Messi walked triumphantly off the field after his first Inter Miami game.Chandan Khanna/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThose in attendance at Friday’s game saw Messi’s substantial impact. After he and Sergio Busquets, a fellow newcomer and former teammate of Messi’s in Barcelona, entered the game, they began exposing Cruz Azul’s defense. In stoppage time, Messi drew a foul and worked his magic. He sent the crowd into a frenzy, celebrated with teammates and raced over to hug his family.“We want to start like that, giving the victory to these people and to thank all the people here,” Messi said afterward, adding later, “I hope that we continue like this and they keep accompanying us all year.” More

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      Can This Man Fix France’s Women’s Team?

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      Hervé Renard has led two men’s teams to the World Cup. But in taking over his country’s talented but troubled women’s squad, he may have his toughest job yet.The banner hangs just beneath the central staircase of the elegant hotel that has been taken over by the France women’s national team for the World Cup. Hervé Renard wanted to make sure no one in his squad could miss it.The motivational words emblazoned across it are typical of the type of positive messaging teams rally around before major sporting tournaments. But for this French squad, and for Renard, its well-traveled coach, the words carry extra significance after a period many on the team would prefer to forget.“Only team spirit,” it reads, “can make you realize your dreams.”Renard used the phrase the first time he met the French squad earlier this year, only months before the World Cup. That was not long after he was chosen to replace the fired coach Corinne Diacre, but even then he knew it was a message that might resonate with a team that even its own federation had concluded was “fractured” beyond repair.“We were missing unity,” Renard said in an interview on a sunny terrace in front of the team’s base camp last week. It was perhaps the biggest understatement in women’s soccer.France has arrived in Australia this month as a World Cup favorite on the mend. Torn apart by bitter feuds, it has in recent months lost players, welcomed them back, and then lost them again. It has changed coaches, changed approaches and changed tactics. And now it has asked Renard, a respected 54-year-old with a decorated men’s World Cup résumé but no previous experience coaching women, to carry it at least as far as the semifinals.He started the process, he said, by being open about what he did not know.“For me everything was new because I did it know women’s football, how to manage the girls,” he said. “I was lucky because on our staff a lot of people were already working with women’s football. So I was listening.”What he inherited was a talented team in disarray. Its longtime leader, Wendie Renard (who is not related to Hervé), had announced that she would not play in the World Cup to preserve her mental health. Two other stars had followed suit, saying they would not return unless there was a change in leadership of the team.France’s longtime captain, Wendie Renard, had said she would skip the World Cup rather than play for the team’s former coach. William West/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere had been previous controversies under Diacre, the coach at the time, but nothing quite so serious or existential. A mutinous mood had turned into an open rebellion.Faced with a crisis as the World Cup loomed, the French soccer federation acted, announcing after a brief investigation that Diacre had to go. The rupture between her and the team, the federation said, had become so significant that it “has reached a point of no return.”Hervé Renard, enjoying a successful and lucrative stop on an itinerant coaching career in Saudi Arabia, said he acted on impulse as the news broke. He contacted Jean-Michel Aulas, one of the most influential men in French soccer and a member of the French federation’s board. Renard met him a decade ago, when he narrowly missed out on becoming the coach of Lyon’s men’s team. He told Aulas that he wanted to be considered for the opening.It promised a significant change of course for his career. Renard said that until the moment he picked up his phone to message Aulas, he had only once before considered coaching women: a flight of fancy that came as he watched France play in the last World Cup. His interest then, he said, had lasted “maybe just for a few seconds.”But now that his interest in coaching a women’s team for the first time was reciprocated, he faced a problem. To accept the job, he would need the permission of soccer officials in Saudi Arabia, where he was under contract, and he would need to accept a significant pay cut. The Saudi job, Renard explained with a smile, paid at least “20 times” what he would earn coaching France’s women.“When you are in Saudi Arabia it’s not exactly the reality,” he said. “So sometimes it’s good to go to reality.”Months later, Renard said he still cannot quite explain why he tossed his hat in the ring, before looking down at the French crest on the left breast of his tracksuit. Having coached five other national teams, he said, the chance to lead the country of his birth was clearly a major draw. But even then, some things, Renard said, cannot be explained. “I still don’t know why exactly I decided,” he said.Renard’s most recent World Cup experience came as the coach of Saudi Arabia, which was the only team to beat Argentina, the eventual champion, at the 2022 championship in Qatar.Julian Finney/Getty ImagesRenard is sanguine about his rare feat of coaching in two World Cups within a year. “The most important thing is not to participate in two World Cups in six months,” he said. “It’s to do something” in them.Of all the teams Renard has coached, his current squad is the highest ranked, at fifth in the world — a lofty profile it has maintained despite never making it beyond the semifinals of a major tournament. Renard said that is now possible.“We have to believe in ourselves,” he said.He is under orders to reach the semifinals, he said, a target he has accepted. “We can’t come here when you are fifth in the world and say, ‘Oh, no, a quarterfinal will be enough.’ No. We need to have a very a high challenge. So our first target is to reach the semifinals. Then afterward we will talk about other things.”Renard has had only months to mend a fractured squad, to inculcate the team spirit that his banner demands and that he believes his players need to win in what he considers the most competitive Women’s World Cup in history.In his first training camp, Renard told the team he was not interested in what happened in the past. He did not want to litigate past games, past feuds, past grievances — all the things that had made the atmosphere in the camp so poisonous that stars like Wendie Renard said they would rather not play for France at all. But he could not avoid confronting one final pretournament controversy.Kheira Hamraoui, an experienced and gifted midfielder and a regular on the national team, was attacked in 2021 by masked men following a dinner with her club, Paris Saint-Germain. The fallout had reverberations for both the club and the national team, with a former teammate on both teams, Aminata Diallo, charged with involvement in the attack, and others angered by Hamraoui’s initial claims that they or people they knew were also involved.The bizarre episode shadowed the national team for more than two years. Faced with reviving it in the France camp, Renard said he decided against bringing Hamraoui to the World Cup, and told her in a face-to-face meeting why she would not be selected.He said he told Hamraoui that she was not going to start, and that a place on the bench would be unsettling for a player of her experience. “I think for this kind of player, you start in the first 11 or it is very difficult to sit on the bench,” he said. “We can’t go forward in a competition if we don’t have a fantastic team spirit.”Renard acknowledged that not every choice he makes will be the correct one. But he said he has been frank with his players about what he knew, and what he did not.“I said to the girls: ‘Maybe I will make some mistakes. If I say something wrong, just let me know.’ But step by step, you learn how to manage,” he said.His players, for the moment, say they are hearing the right things. “He keeps pushing us to be the best versions of ourselves,” midfielder Grace Geyoro said in a recent interview. Said Wendie Renard: “As long as everyone has the same vision and a willingness to pull in the same direction, then we can achieve something great.”France’s women’s team practicing in Sydney on Saturday.Carl Recine/ReutersThe World Cup takes place with the sharpest focus on women’s soccer in the sport’s history, and with teams and players using the platform to push for greater recognition and compensation for their efforts. FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, has more than tripled prize money from four years ago, to $110 million. Its critics have said that new figure does not go far enough, that it should be the same as the $440 million prize pool awarded to men at the 2022 World Cup in 2022.Hervé Renard acknowledged the progress women’s soccer has made, particularly since the last World Cup. But, perhaps controversially, he said that “women still have to be a little bit patient” when it comes to pay.As interest continues to grow, he said, so will the earning potential. But commercial reality, he said, was reflected in the sports’ differing revenues, and he put forward an analogy to make his point.“If you have one restaurant with 1,000 meals in the evening and one with 300, it’s not the same,” he said. “At the end of the night in the register, it’s not the same amount. Football it’s the same. It’s business.” More

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      Lionel Messi Ventures Into Charted Territory

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      The Argentine star’s signing is seen as a way to push soccer into the American mainstream. But it’s already there.Tempting Lionel Messi to the United States could not solely be a matter of money. The money had to be right, of course. It had to be competitive. It was, Jorge Mas knew, perfectly possible that his attempt to persuade Messi, the greatest player of his generation, to sign for Inter Miami would fail because of money. But it would not succeed because of it. Not exclusively, anyway.Nor, really, could Mas rely entirely on the other selling point he had identified as a possible advantage. Miami would appeal to Messi’s family, that was true. He and his wife, Antonella, already owned property there. His sons liked it. There was a strong, proud Argentine community in South Florida that could provide him with the maté and the facturas and the asado he required.And while Miami could not offer Messi complete anonymity — he would still be mobbed when he went to the grocery store — it could offer him a version of normalcy in which it was theoretically possible for him to go to the grocery store in the first place. That, Mas was sure, would be appealing, but it could not be the whole appeal.Instead, over the yearslong span of his courtship of Messi — Mas has said that he first hatched the idea in 2019, and has spent no little time since manifesting it into being — he chose to emphasize something else.This, he repeatedly told Jorge Messi, the player’s father, agent and maven, was his son’s chance to leave a unique legacy. “When, in the history of a sport is there the possibility of changing the sport of a country?” Mas asked Jorge Messi. His son, Mas said, had the “opportunity and ability to change soccer in the United States, in the largest commercial market in the world.”This week, Mas at last had the moment that vindicated not only all of his labor, but the nature of his pitch. In the pouring rain at the DRV-PNK Stadium in Fort Lauderdale, he could finally present Messi not just as an Inter Miami player, but as what he called “America’s No. 10.”True, there is work to be done. Soccer stadiums are called things like the Parc des Princes and San Paolo. It is wholly unacceptable that Messi might retire at something called the “DRV-PNK Stadium,” particularly considering that it is in Fort Lauderdale.But still, Mas sensed that he was standing on the cusp of something epochal. For soccer in the United States, he said, there would always be “a before and an after Messi.”Lionel Messi with the team that brought him to America: Jorge Mas, Jose Mas and David Beckham.Rebecca Blackwell/Associated PressThis is, of course, a leitmotif in the story of soccer in the United States. It is a sport in constant search of its moment of ignition. At some point, the theory runs, the world’s game will assume its natural position at the top of the American sporting pyramid. Mas, doubtless, is sincere in his belief that the arrival of Messi will — at the very least — accelerate that process.It goes without saying, too, that soccer in the U.S. still has plenty of room for growth. Some of those areas are tangible, or at least demonstrable: Attendances — not helped by the fact that some teams in Major League Soccer do not play in soccer-specific arenas — and audience figures and sponsorship revenues can all increase substantially.Mexico would doubtless claim to be home to the highest-caliber domestic league in North America. M.L.S. certainly has some way to go before it can consider itself a peer of Ligue 1 in France, say, let alone the Premier League.And some of categories for growth are more intangible. Soccer does not yet have the grip on the American psyche that the N.F.L. can muster, for example. It is not as central to the culture as the N.B.A. It does not command the same sort of affection as baseball. It still feels, in many ways, far younger and far newer than it really ought to feel, especially this deep into its ascendant phase.For all that it is agreed that soccer in the United States needs to grow, though, at some point it is probably worth pausing and reflecting on what the actual target might be.Soccer, like all European cultural artifacts, has long been obsessed with cracking America, the place that has come to be seen as its final frontier. And plenty of people in the U.S. have spent vast swaths of their time working out how to make soccer happen. Nobody, though, has quite defined what success might look like.Messi needed no introduction in Miami.Chandan Khanna/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe landscape into which Messi descended this week, for example, is vastly different from the one David Beckham — his forerunner turned employer — encountered when he arrived in Los Angeles in 2007. At that stage, M.L.S. consisted of only 13 teams. Toronto F.C. marked the league’s first, ginger outreach into Canada. It was still not uncommon to hear discussion of whether the entire business would survive.Messi, on the other hand, finds himself entering a competition that now sprawls across much of a continent, from Vancouver to New York, Montreal to Miami. M.L.S. now has 29 teams, with a 30th, based in San Diego, set to be drafted into the league in 2025. It has an innovative, potentially lucrative streaming deal with Apple TV+ that served as a core part of the league’s pitch to Messi. The question is not whether M.L.S. will pull through. It is whether it has been a little too eager to acquiesce to all of those teams and all of those cities lobbying for expansion.Far more significant, though, is the game’s imprint on the United States as a whole. Soccer is now the second-largest participation sport in the United States, behind only basketball. One Gallup poll found that more people regard it as their “favorite” sport, whatever that means, than would say the same about ice hockey. Last year, the FIFA video game outsold Mario Kart and at least one edition of Call of Duty.Will Ferrell, Matthew McConaughey, America Ferrera and LeBron James all own portions of teams, either at home or abroad. Soccer is referenced on Modern Family and (the dearly departed) “Brooklyn Nine-Nine.” It is hard to find a picture of Drake not wearing some team’s jersey. Kim Kardashian single-handedly taught millions of Americans about the greatness of Vincent Candela and Aldair when she was pictured wearing a vintage Roma jersey. That is not an afterthought: It is what cultural cut-through looks like.All five of Europe’s major leagues have television deals in the United States. NBC has, in no small part, used its multiyear Premier League offering as a backbone for its Peacock streaming service. Fox, ABC, ESPN, Paramount, CBS, Univision and Discovery all broadcast soccer.Messi made his Inter Miami debut on Friday night.Rebecca Blackwell/Associated PressRobert Lipsyte, once a titan of these pages, might have bemoaned last week that European soccer does not have the same “emotional” impact to someone in Brooklyn as the fate of the Nets or the Mets might, but the evidence would suggest there are plenty of people who might disagree with him.By many measure, in other words, soccer has made it in America. It has the toehold in the United States that it has always craved. To borrow from the wrestling parlance of last week’s newsletter, the sport has got over, and spectacularly.That the sport does not perceive it that way — that it still feels as if this is a land to be conquered — might be to do with sheer, naked greed. Or it might be to do with just how accustomed it is to a monopoly position. Across most of the world, soccer is inarguably the national game, the sport of choice, by such a distance that everything else pales in comparison.In those countries where it encounters resistance, then — in the United States and Australia, with their established quadrumvirates of major sports, in particular, as well as India and Pakistan, where cricket remains king — anything less than total obliteration of any opposition is treated as failure. Soccer confuses popularity with primacy.That approach, though, is infused with futility. The Women’s World Cup this summer will, ideally, make more Australians like soccer. It will not make anyone turn away from Australian Rules Football to do so. Messi’s presence in the U.S. will expand the sport’s cultural reach. It is unlikely to affect viewership for the Super Bowl.It is not a zero sum game. You do not only have to like one sport. Soccer can get bigger in the United States, of course. Messi’s glamour, his star power, the brilliant white heat of his talent will help pull in new viewers and, slowly, turn them into fans. There are always more hearts and minds to win, more eyeballs to retain.Much of the work, though, has already been done. The change has already happened. Soccer has made it in the United States. As Mas might put it, we left the before behind long ago. We are already in the after, and have been for some time.Cruel BlowSam Kerr’s Instagram post, published only a couple of hours before Australia’s opening game at the World Cup on Thursday, was written in what can be recognized as the striker’s straightforward, matter-of-fact style. She had picked up a calf injury. She would loved to have been available for the match with Ireland. That would not be possible.The aim, surely, was to project an air that this was — to use the technical term — no biggie. Kerr did not want to be a distraction from a game her country has been anticipating for years. Still, her absence will have sent a shiver of anxiety through those fans heading to Stadium Australia. This was supposed to be Kerr’s tournament, after all, her chance to stage a “Cathy Freeman moment” of her very own.Of substantially greater concern, though, was the statement published not long afterward by Australia’s medical staff, the one that said Kerr would miss the first two games of the tournament. That would be just about tolerable: Tony Gustavsson’s team should be good enough to see off Nigeria, just as it had Ireland.Sam Kerr will miss at least the first two games at the World Cup.Carl Recine/ReutersThe really bad news was in the fine print. The extent of Kerr’s injury will be assessed only after Thursday’s meeting with Nigeria in Brisbane. There is no guarantee, in other words, that Kerr will be fit in time to play in the group stage at all. It is not an exaggeration to say she will struggle to be in peak condition much before the tournament’s final rounds. And that is far from a worst-case scenario.That is, of course, devastating not only for Kerr, but for Australia as a whole. In the buildup to the tournament, she has been more than willing to absorb expectation, to shoulder the burden of hope. It is to her credit that it does not seem to faze her in the slightest.And yet that role carries with it a cost: It is not just the country that has a tendency to look to Kerr for inspiration, but the team itself. Australia with Kerr is a potential world champion; Australia’s case without her is not nearly so convincing. Its fans know that, and so do its players. They, more than anyone else, will be hoping that the tone of her message was meaningful, that the injury really is no biggie.Psychological EdgeAs the World Cup has drawn closer, that part of The New York Times’ sports department that is based in Europe — all three of us — has been cleft into factions.One is very much of the view that the United States will, ultimately, lift a third World Cup in a row over the course of the next month. One believes that is hopelessly optimistic, and has taken to making dread prophesies of round-of-16 exits at the hands of Sweden. (Tariq has claimed, again and again, that “predictions are the preserve of the hubristic and the small-minded.”)These groups do not align along national grounds. I have no vested interest in the U.S.’s success: As demonstrated by my outright refusal to use the word “cleats,” I am not American. It is clear that this iteration of the national team is not as strong as those that emerged victorious in 2015 and 2019.Alex Morgan, standard bearer (in person) and statue (in New York).Michael M. Santiago/Getty ImagesIt is, instead, effectively two teams slightly clumsily stitched together: one from yesterday, taking part in what is in some senses a valedictory tour, and one for tomorrow, fizzing with energy and rich with promise. Teams that win tournaments exist in a Goldilocks zone, neither too young or too old. The Americans are both.And yet — with the U.S., there is always an “and yet” — the U.S. retains a psychological edge over almost every opponent it faces. Particularly during World Cups, it has an aura, the sort that can only be acquired over a generation, or more.Teams do not have to beat the U.S. as it is; they have to beat the U.S. as they perceive them to be. They have to overcome their own admiration of the jersey, as much as the players that now fill them. That is a powerful advantage for the U.S. Whether it will be enough, of course, neither faction knows, not really.CorrespondenceIt has been an educational week in the inbox. Michael Markman reminded me of something I did know, once, a long time ago: “The grammarian term for a base word that functions as either a noun or a verb is a gerund,” he wrote. (I had always assumed it was a participle that served as a noun, but I am willing to be corrected.)Someone only identifying as Red, meanwhile, informed me of something that I did not know at all. (And, I think, had no real reason to know.) What has come to be termed “generational wealth” lasts only for three generations, they wrote, in reference to Jordan Henderson’s looming move to Saudi Arabia. “That is the average of new wealth for the past 200 years.” I mean, whichever way you look at it, three generations is quite a long time. Maybe not a monument more everlasting than bronze, but definitely not bad.There were two subjects that dominated, though. One was your sincere, and sincerely appreciated, concern for the fate of this newsletter, and the mutually educational space it has fostered in the last few years. I won’t reproduce them out of deep-seated bashfulness, but suffice to say they were received with immense gratitude.And the other was the validity of parallels between soccer and professional wrestling (a vague existential uncertainty generates quite an exciting, devil-may-care freedom, I have found.) “Is the prime example of this not the transfer market?” asked Todd Reid, knowing the answer to his question was, “Well, yes.”“It consumes as much, if not more, energy and coverage than matches themselves,” he wrote. “And add in the Saudi Arabia story line, and it’s a morality play set on the global stage, discussed and debated whether or not anyone ever actually watches a Saudi League match or not.”There was a welcome reminder from Richard Duran on generalizations, too. “Not everyone reads the constant chatter about transfers, wages, Saudi involvement. I choose to enjoy soccer while the clock is running and it is still a beautiful game.” This is an admirable approach, and a legitimate correction. To some extent, though, how the industry that surrounds soccer presents the sport is as significant as how people choose to consume it.And finally, Mark Harris has arrived, asking for a little bit of self-reflection. “How ironic that you don’t perceive that you are one of the prime instruments in pushing the behind the scenes stories over the actual sport,” he wrote. “Read the last year or so of your articles and tell me if I’m right.”This is a charge I probably cannot deny, admittedly, but I’m going to take it as a compliment. Nobody has ever called me a prime instrument before. Not even when they’re really angry with me.That’s all for this week, and for a little while: Remember, this newsletter will graciously cede the limelight to our daily World Cup briefing for the next few weeks. You should subscribe. We know, after all, that you like soccer and you like receiving newsletters. It’s basically a product designed with you in mind. I’ll be writing it sometimes. But you should subscribe anyway. More

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      With Women’s World Cup’s Expansion Come the Soccer Games of a Lifetime

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      Vietnam, one of eight nations playing in their first Women’s World Cup, will face the U.S. this week. Its presence highlights the growth of women’s soccer, but also the challenges that remain.When Vietnam fielded its first women’s national soccer team in 1997, its players wore oversized jerseys made for men. At times, the team had to travel an hour and a half from Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, to reach an available training site. Some players pushed carts on the street and sold bread to sustain their nascent playing careers.In the years after the Vietnam War — called the American War here — ended in 1975, economic reform took precedence over sports. The Vietnam Football Federation, which governs soccer in the unified country, was not established until 1989. In its early days, soccer was widely considered a game for men, too hard and demanding for women to play. With little money available, the sport hardly seemed a desirable career choice for girls. But that did not matter in most cases: Many parents were reluctant to let their daughters play.“Society didn’t accept the existence of such a team,” said Mai Duc Chung, 74, Vietnam’s women’s national coach then and now.A quarter of a century later, Vietnam is one of the dominant teams in Southeast Asia. This month, it will play for the first time in the Women’s World Cup, starting with a game against the United States, the two-time defending champion, on Friday night (Eastern time) in Auckland, New Zealand.Mai Duc Chung has coached the Vietnam women’s team for more than two decades.Vietnam’s arrival is the culmination of its nearly decade-long plan to develop women’s soccer, in part through expansion of the World Cup field from 16 to 24 and now to 32 teams, making this year’s tournament the largest in history. That growth is giving opportunities to nontraditional powers: Eight nations in this year’s tournament, fully a quarter of the field, are participating for the first time.This will be the biggest soccer moment for Vietnam and the other first-timers, a group that includes teams as diverse as Haiti, Ireland, Morocco and the Philippines. It will mean increased visibility and funding, enhanced professionalization of the sport and additional financial rewards. FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, has promised at least $30,000 in prize money to each player participating in this year’s tournament.But that same growth will bring inexperience and the prospect of severe competitive imbalance when the newcomers face off against the world’s best teams. It was with great fulfillment that Vietnam qualified ahead of its fiercest rival, Thailand. But gratification comes with burdensome pressure to avoid embarrassing performances, like losing by 13-0 to the United States, as Thailand did in the last Women’s World Cup in 2019.Vietnam’s players are paid about $850 a month to represent the women’s national team.FIFA’s improved bonus structure for World Cup players will mean a $30,000 payday for each one.“We witnessed the fiasco, and it’s a lesson learned for Vietnam,” said Huynh Nhu, the team’s star forward. She spoke through an interpreter, as did others interviewed for this article. “Thailand suffered such a big loss, they just kind of fell backward, and their fighting spirit is no longer there. No matter what happens against the United States and other powers, we will keep fighting.”Participating in the Women’s World Cup represents great national pride and international sporting achievement for Vietnam, a country that has won only one Olympic gold medal (in air-pistol shooting, at the 2016 Rio Olympics) and has never qualified for the men’s World Cup, and where men’s soccer is better known for regular episodes of corruption and match fixing.But similar pride and similar hardships overcome are echoed across the other debutantes in this year’s field. Ireland’s captain, Katie McCabe, grew up playing on boys’ teams, encouraged by an older brother and parents who now watch her play for the London club Arsenal. Haiti’s players navigated a national system in which federation officials have been accused of coercing young players into sex, and Morocco’s overcame profound traditional biases and frequent family objections to become the first team from a majority Arab country to qualify.“No matter what happens against the United States and other powers, we will keep fighting,” one Vietnam player said.Vietnam’s team has come as far as any of them. Once shunned, or simply ignored, the Vietnamese women are now national names. They were welcomed by their country’s prime minister after earning their World Cup place in a qualifying tournament in India last year and were given a parade on a double-decker bus through the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. Their World Cup matches will be broadcast live to their fellow citizens on various platforms.More than any Vietnamese player, Huynh Nhu, 31, represents possibility and inequality that coexist in her country and, effectively, for women’s soccer worldwide. She is the first female player from Vietnam to play for a club team in Europe, having scored seven goals in the recently completed season for Lank F.C. Vilaverdense in Portugal’s top division. After the World Cup, Huynh Nhu is expected to extend her contract with the club, which has reportedly offered to double her salary to 3,000 euros (about $3,200 per month).That is a stark contrast to the average salary of $200 to $300 per month in the semiprofessional women’s league in Vietnam. On an annualized basis, those salaries remain below the country’s per capita G.D.P. of $3,756.50 a year, according to the World Bank. Players often take second jobs to supplement their incomes. Before moving to Portugal last season, for example, Huynh Nhu operated a business selling coconuts in her rural hometown in the Mekong Delta.She said that she now had corporate affiliations with Visa, Coca-Cola and LG electronics. And she is the face of the unprecedented news coverage and sponsorship attention currently being lavished on the Vietnamese women’s national team. While away from their clubs and training and participating in international competitions, members of the national team can earn about $850 a month, according to Mai, the national coach. (Journalists said money was deducted for meals and housing.)Mai with a photo of the first Vietnam women’s national team in 1997.Players have also been awarded bonuses by the Vietnamese Football Federation and sponsors for recent triumphs. Not all bonuses are known, and it remains unclear exactly how much of the bonus pool is divided among the players and the coaches. But the publicized pool is equivalent to $8,000 apiece for winning the Southeast Asian Games in May for an eighth time and, according to journalists, $15,000 or more for qualifying for the World Cup. Bonuses are not always financial, either; they can also include motorbikes and cars.Those figures are “very modest” compared with what top male soccer players can make in salary and endorsements in Vietnam, said Cao Huy Tho, an executive, former sports editor and longtime advocate for gender equity at Tuoi Tre, a leading newspaper in Vietnam. But “it’s very meaningful, life-changing for the women, because most of them come from very poor backgrounds.”Huynh Nhu’s family, for instance, is building a three-story home, which includes a shrine to her career and appears to be the tallest in the area, in her hometown, Tra Vinh.Women in Vietnam’s national league who do not play on the national team endure a far more modest existence. League attendance is extremely low, roughly 100 to 300 people per match, journalists said, leaving many businesses reluctant to sponsor teams.The parents of Huynh Nhu, Vietnam’s top forward, keep a display of memorabilia from her career in a room in their home.When a team representing Son La Province in northwest Vietnam struggled to maintain sponsorships in recent years, its players’ monthly salaries plummeted to as low as $130 or even $70 — much less than could be earned doing factory work. Some players left for better-paying jobs, and Son La is no longer in the league. Last year, as the club faced disbanding, its coach, Luong Van Chuyen, lamented to an online newspaper that he had only four players available. The others, Luong said, “quit to return home to get married and to become workers.”The issue of disparate treatment of female soccer players reached the highest levels of government after Vietnam qualified for the Women’s World Cup. In greeting the returning players, Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh called them “diamond girls” but also noted that they still faced prejudice in playing what many still consider a man’s game, as well as hardships resulting from precarious incomes and lack of security in retirement.“We need to pay more attention to women’s football,” Pham said, calling on soccer officials, government agencies and sponsors to help develop a sustainable model for the sport. It is unclear what steps, if any, have been taken to pursue that goal.Soccer was introduced to Vietnam in 1896 during the French colonial period. The country claims to have fielded Asia’s first women’s team, which played briefly against men in the early 1930s. After the Vietnam War, though, an unofficial prohibition of women’s soccer existed into the early 1990s, according to Cao, the journalist who began covering the sport later that decade.Nguyen Thi Bich Thuy, commonly known as Bich Thuy, 29.Huynh Nhu, 32, the captain of the team. Her new goal is to score in a World Cup.To circumvent the ban, Cao said, a sympathetic pharmacy executive in Ho Chi Minh City transported female players to matches against men’s teams by hiding them in cargo trucks covered with tarpaulins. When a women’s national team was officially formed in 1997, Nguyen Thi Kim Hong was one of the players who sold bread to maintain their careers.“It was our passion only; money was never the purpose for the first generation,” said Nguyen, now 51 and the goalkeeper coach for the women’s national team.Even some of today’s current stars faced resistance from their parents when they began playing. Nguyen Thi Bich Thuy, 29, was the youngest of three children, and though her father had been a soccer player, her parents worried that if she moved away from home in central Vietnam, “nobody will mother you anymore.” Eventually, she said, her father became her biggest supporter.In February 2022, after Vietnam’s bid for World Cup qualification nearly imploded as the coronavirus ravaged the women’s team, Bich Thuy scored the most important goal in the country’s history — a deft touch with her right foot and a decisive and historic shot with her left in a 2-1 playoff victory over Taiwan, which FIFA refers to as Chinese Taipei. She dedicated the goal to her father, who died in 2016.Vietnam players in Hanoi. Their first game at the World Cup will come against the United States, the two-time defending champion.“I’m still feeling it now, like a dream,” Bich Thuy said of the goal. “My father always expected a lot of me. I’m sure he would be happy to see that.”Huynh Nhu, the team’s star, had more unconditional support from her parents. Her father, a former player, began coaching her when she was 3 or 4. Her mother worked in a market in rural Tra Vinh and brought home a soccer ball at Huynh Nhu’s request. Her father said he had attached the ball to a rope to keep her from kicking it into a canal outside the home. Now she leads Vietnam’s national team, with the aim of scoring a goal in the World Cup. That may be, for now, a more achievable goal than expecting to win a game in a group that includes the United States, the Netherlands (the 2019 World Cup runner-up) and Portugal, a fellow debutante that lies just outside the top 20 in the latest world rankings.Told that the benefactor of Thailand’s team at the 2019 Women’s World Cup, one of the richest women in the country, had exhorted her players by saying, “If you score, I’ll buy you a $5,000 Chanel bag,” Huynh Nhu laughed.“I look forward to having such a billionaire in my country,” she said.Linh Pham contributing reporting from Tra Vinh, Vietnam.Players on the Vietnam women’s team walking to their training field in Hanoi. More

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      Overlooked No More: Lily Parr, Dominant British Soccer Player

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      She persevered at a time when women were effectively banned from the sport, and was the first woman inducted into England’s National Football Hall of Fame.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.In 1921, the Football Association, English soccer’s ruling body, effectively banned women from playing the sport, deeming it “quite unsuitable for females.” But by then, a standout player named Lily Parr had already gained fame for her skill on the field.Her renown was part of the growth of women’s soccer at the time, exemplified by a match in which she played at Goodison Park in Liverpool that drew a crowd of about 53,000, with thousands more outside the stadium. (It would remain the largest crowd for a women’s club soccer match for 99 years, until Atlético Madrid hosted Barcelona in front of 60,739 fans in March 2019.)Though the association’s ban would hamper Parr’s career, barring her and other women from playing in stadiums, she competed where she could, in fields and parks in England and abroad, and continued drawing attention over her 31 years with the same team, Dick, Kerr Ladies Football Club.In 1927, the English newspaper The Leicester Mail called her “a remarkably nimble and speedy performer” with “a kick like a cart-horse.” By the time she retired from soccer, in 1951, she had scored an estimated 1,000 goals.Parr was “a great player in a great team,” said Gail Newsham, author of the 1994 book “In a League of Their Own!: The Dick, Kerr Ladies 1917-1965,” and she contributed to the club’s immense success alongside other star goal scorers like Florrie Redford, Jennie Harris and Alice Kell, the team’s longest serving captain.Soccer officials began lifting the ban in England — as well as those in other countries — in the 1970s. The first official Women’s World Cup was held in 1991, and interest in the event has grown considerably since then.This year, the Women’s World Cup, which is currently underway in Australia and New Zealand, includes an expanded field of 32 teams, up from 24.Club competition in England has grown, too; the Women’s Super League, which began in 2011, became fully professional in 2018. In the United States, the National Women’s Soccer League began in 2013.In 2002, Parr became the first woman inducted into England’s National Football Museum Hall of Fame, now in Manchester, and in 2019, the museum installed a life-size statue of her there, also a first for a British female soccer player.“We have come a long way since Lily Parr’s days, and she deserves recognition as a true pioneer of the sport,” Marzena Bogdanowicz, a spokeswoman for women’s soccer at the Football Association, was quoted as saying in The Guardian in 2019.Parr, with dark hair, leaps while training with her team. She drew attention as “a remarkably nimble and speedy performer” with “a kick like a cart-horse,” as one newspaper wrote.GettyLilian Parr was born on April 26, 1905, in St Helens, about 10 miles northeast of Liverpool, to Sarah and George Parr, a glassworks laborer. Growing up, she played soccer in the street with her brothers.Women had been playing soccer in Britain since the late 19th century, but World War I offered an opportunity for them to blossom. As men were sent to fight and women filled the country’s factories, the government encouraged soccer as an after-work activity.Parr went to work for Dick, Kerr & Co., a locomotives factory that had switched production to munitions during the war, and joined the company’s team as a left back when she was about 15.Her manner could be rough and abrupt, but with a quick wit and a dry sense of humor she enjoyed strong friendships with many of her teammates, Newsham wrote.In one perhaps apocryphal story, the team was playing at Ashton Park in Preston, England, northwest of Manchester, when a male professional goalkeeper declared that a woman would never be able to score on a man. Parr, famous for her powerful left foot, accepted his challenge. She lined up to take a penalty kick against him and broke the man’s arm with her shot.Parr and her team in 1939 discussing tactics for a forthcoming match.GettyParr, who later moved to left winger, exploded onto the scene in 1921.On Feb. 5 that year, she scored a hat trick — three goals in a single match — at Nelson, England; she scored another three days later at Stalybridge in a 10-0 win. In a 9-1 win in Liverpool at Anfield Stadium the next week, she netted five goals against a team of all-stars assembled by the comedian Harry Weldon. That May she scored every goal in a 5-1 win over a visiting French team.Parr’s shooting and crossing abilities, as well as her impressive physique (she was a sturdy 5 feet 10 inches tall or so), quickly made her a star, and she finished 1921 with 108 goals, according to Newsham.That year the team won all 67 games it played and scored some 448 goals in the process while allowing just 22. Other players, including Redford and Harris, contributed to the team’s dominance. In one April 1921 match at Barrow, for example, the team won 14-2 with seven goals from Redford, four from Harris and three from Parr. Redford led the year’s scoring with a 170 goals.On Dec. 5, 1921, the Football Association unanimously passed its resolution declaring that soccer “ought not to be encouraged” among women. It mandated that all of the association’s clubs “refuse the use of their grounds for such matches.” Because association clubs owned virtually all stadiums, women’s soccer on any significant scale was, in effect, banned.Similar bans were common across the world for much of the 20th century. The momentum that had been building since World War I screeched to a halt, and the sport, for women, withered on the vine.Parr’s team nevertheless continued to play in front of smaller crowds and on tours abroad. In 1922, she captained a trip to the United States. That October, the team tied a men’s team, 4-4, in Washington, D.C. Some sources suggest that President Warren G. Harding kicked off the game and autographed the match ball.As she continued playing, Parr trained to be a nurse and worked at what was then known as Whittingham Hospital, a psychiatric facility northeast of Preston. Some have viewed Parr as a queer icon, but there is no evidence that she was gay. “Like all our great football stars there are as many myths as there are facts, and we all embroider her story with our own influences,” said Jean Williams, a professor of sports history at the University of Wolverhampton. “That is why she means so much to so many.”Parr’s career lasted into her 40s; she played her last game in 1951. In 1965, she retired from nursing. A few years later, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy. She lived to see the ban on women’s soccer lifted in 1971, but died of cancer on May 24, 1978, at her home in Preston. She was 73.Only in recent decades has recognition of Parr and her club’s accomplishments gained momentum. Historical markers for her team are now at the Preston factory site, Preston North End’s stadium and Ashton Park. The English National Football Museum installed a permanent display about her life in 2021.“Lily is a lens through which to look at the women’s game in the ’20s,” Belinda Scarlett, then the curator of women’s football at the museum, told The Guardian in 2020. “It will tell the stories of all the women she played with and against.”She added that “women’s football probably wouldn’t have continued if those groups of women didn’t fight that ban and just play wherever the hell they could find a space to play football.” More