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      Copa América Will Return to U.S. in 2024

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

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      Everton’s Identity Crisis

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      Europe is filled with big clubs that lost their way. But soccer’s fallen giants will never rise again until they face what they’ve become.Frank Lampard can, at least, be sure that there will be no lasting damage. The disappointment of his firing as Everton manager will sting for a while, of course, but there is little reason to believe it will be held against him. A failure to meet expectations at Everton has long since become the sort of thing that might happen to anyone.It did not, after all, stop Carlo Ancelotti — who steered Everton to the dizzying heights of 10th in the Premier League in his sole full season at Goodison Park — from getting the Real Madrid job. Less than a year after leaving Merseyside, Ancelotti picked up his fourth Champions League trophy (a record), and became the first manager in history to win domestic titles in all of Europe’s five most illustrious leagues.Ancelotti’s predecessor at Goodison, Marco Silva, has not done quite so well, but his Fulham team currently sits seventh in the Premier League. Ronald Koeman left England with his reputation shredded, but he has since managed the Dutch national team, Barcelona, and the Dutch national team again. Roberto Martínez spent eight years in charge of Belgium; his next task is to take Portugal to the European Championship next summer.Indeed, of the six most recent (permanent) managers to have clasped English soccer’s great poisoned chalice before Lampard, so far only one — Sam Allardyce — failed to recover, and that might be attributed at least in part to his pre-existing, not especially flattering and largely self-inflicted caricature. (Rafa Benítez, whom Lampard replaced a year ago, has yet to return to work.)That is instructive. Only one of those managers, Ancelotti, left the club on his terms and with the broad beneficence of the fans. The rest left Goodison Park bilious, rancorous and, more than once, on the verge of outright mutiny.Frank Lampard in better days. (Spoiler: There weren’t a lot of those.)Geoff Caddick/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat so few of those managers have been sullied by the manner of their departures indicates that soccer, as a whole, does not feel Everton, these days, is the sort of place where a manager’s talent can be accurately gauged. Lampard — now four years into his managerial career and with little proof, either way, of whether he is particularly cut out for the job or not — will benefit from that just as Koeman, Silva and all of the others did.Why that should be, of course, has been outlined frequently in the days since Lampard was fired.As noted by this newsletter last week, Everton’s majority owner, Farhad Moshiri, lacks a clear vision for what he wants the club to be, other than — as a statement put it — not in the Premier League’s relegation zone. He has, in the six years since he bought Everton, spent something north of $500 million on players, but the recruitment has been so scattershot that it has incontrovertibly made the team worse.He appointed a director of football and then, by most accounts, did not empower him to sign anyone. He has hired and fired managers with such speed that Lampard’s team for his final game, a defeat at West Ham, contained players brought in by four of his predecessors. Everton is a patchwork of different influences and ideas and policies, a consequence of years of failure.Both among the club’s fan base and soccer’s professional commentariat, conventional wisdom has it that it is from there that the tendrils of Everton’s chronic disappointment, its permanent crisis, climb: not with the manager but with the system in which they are expected, forlornly, to work. It is, of course, correct. It may not, though, quite get to the root of the issue.For the youngest Everton fans, glory is just a story passed down the generations.Molly Darlington/ReutersIt is impossible to escape Everton’s history. It is there, emblazoned on the stadium, in a series of snapshots commemorating the club’s finest teams, its greatest achievements. It is there, in the words to “Grand Old Team,” the song that long served as one of the club’s prematch standards. It even warranted a mention in the statement Lampard released after his departure, in which he paid homage to the club’s “incredible” history.That is understandable: Everton’s history is unusually illustrious. It is, depending on your preferred metric, either the fourth most successful team in English history — in terms of league titles won, ahead of Manchester City, Chelsea and Tottenham — or the eighth, if total trophy haul is deemed a better measure. That history is, as it should be, a source of immense pride.It is also, though, a prison. The metastasis of soccer over the last two decades has, effectively, rendered history largely irrelevant as a marker of power. Everton’s nine league titles do not mean it earns more from the Premier League’s television deals than Brentford, just as A.C. Milan’s seven European Cups do not give it more financial firepower than Bournemouth (Champions League titles: zero).The past that brings charm can also hold a club back.Phil Noble/ReutersThe old hierarchies no longer hold, as the rise of Manchester City and Paris St.-Germain make clear, toppled and leveled by the flood of money rushing into the game from broadcasters and sponsors, from oligarchs and hedge funds. History is no longer a draw. Or, rather, it is not nearly so significant a draw as wealth, or prospects, or status, or facilities, or plans.That adjusted reality has affected the game’s self-appointed superpowers, of course, just as surely as it has affected the vast majority of clubs, the minnows and the traditionally mediocre, all of whom have been forced to adapt to narrowed horizons and limited ambitions.The impact has been most profound, though, on the class of club to which Everton belongs, those on the second rung of the game’s long established and now defunct power structure, those who are best regarded as soccer’s cruiserweights.Those teams can be placed, broadly, into two categories. There are those who have accommodated themselves to the way things are now, who have managed to carve out a new definition of success that enables them to find some contentment in a hostile environment.For Benfica and Ajax, say, that has taken the form of trading continental prominence for domestic supremacy, secured thanks to a steady stream of young talent. For Borussia Dortmund, it has involved accepting a place as the game’s most reliable springboard, a role as a midwife to greatness.Unlike some other faded powers, Benfica has found its place in the modern soccer economy, and in this season’s Champions League.Pedro Nunes/ReutersAnd then there are those who seem to be weighed down by the burden of their history: Valencia, Inter Milan, Marseille, Schalke, Hamburg, West Ham, Aston Villa and, of course, Everton, all unable or unwilling to adopt the methods of their former peers to stake out a new place for themselves.It is no surprise that these teams have become, for the most part, the most unstable, the least contented clubs in Europe. Happiness is a fleeting thing in soccer; elite sport does not lend itself to lasting satisfaction. But these clubs often seem the most unhappy, caught in a grinding, unending identity crisis, trapped between what they were and what they are.That is what lies at the heart of the modern Everton. Like Lampard, even Moshiri, to some extent, can be viewed as a consequence as much as a cause of the problem. The club was so desperate to be restored to what it once was that it sold itself to someone who — on the balance of the last six years — has very little clue what he is doing, beyond hiring famous managers and signing expensive players and hoping for the best.And it is what will continue to undermine Everton until it is resolved, as the teams above them streak away and the teams traditionally beneath them — the smart, progressive ones, at least — roar past. Everton has never been willing to surrender the idea that it is more than a way-station, that it is a destination sort of a club, even if doing so is the first step to returning itself to relevance. To do so would be to think small, and thinking small is unimaginable when you believe, when history dictates, that you are big.CorrespondenceThanks, first of all, to the half-dozen eagle-eyed readers who got in touch to inform me that I had my magical kingdoms mixed up: Disney World is in Florida, by all accounts, whereas Disneyland is in California. I have, alas, been to neither, owing to a lifelong — and to be honest perfectly logical — fear of giant anthropomorphized mice.The issue of celebrations, meanwhile, seems to animate even more of you than the misattribution of theme parks. “I wonder if goal celebrations can (or used to) be culture-specific,” wrote Thomas Bodenberg. “In 1994, Brazil played Sweden at the late, unlamented Pontiac Silverdome. When Kennet Andersson scored for Sweden, putting them 1-0 up, he just jogged stoically back to his end, awaiting kickoff. I wonder if that was more a product of Swedish culture than the individual.”Quick: Which player scored the goal here?Ina Fassbender/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhat irks Allan Culham, on the other hand, is how often goal-scorers “do not recognize whoever set them up to get it. Often the assist is the most impressive part, but players celebrate as if it was a result of their effort alone.”It feels to me as if many players do, these days, opt for the “emphatic pointing” method of celebration, singling out the teammate who made the chance, but this hits upon an issue close to my heart, and one I have discussed with a host of current and former players: the cliché runs that scoring a goal is the hardest job in soccer, but I would contend that making one is infinitely more difficult. (They largely disagree with me.)Dan Lachman is not short on ambition. It is time, he wrote, to “retire” the tradition/habit/pretension of referring to players by the role seemingly predicated by their numbers. “Does the casual fan have any clue what a ‘No. 6’ is? How about calling it a holding, or defensive, midfielder? It’s time for this to go.”Oddly, this is a relatively new phenomenon: At a rough guess, the phrase “No. 6” would never have appeared in English commentary of a game even 10 years ago. It is a recent (and entirely harmless) import, and I would agree that it does not actually offer the clarity people assume. What a No. 6 does in Spain, say, is different from what one does in Germany, which is different again from how the Dutch perceive the position.Forward Lynn Williams wore the No. 6 in two recent victories for the U.S. women’s team. Lynn Williams is not a No. 6.Andrew Cornaga/PHOTOSPORT, via Associated PressAnd a forlorn request from Tony De Palma. “I long to know what is being sung by fans at Premier League stadia,” he wrote. “I love the feel of the spectacle, the ambient sound, but I am unable to make out all but the most well-known chants. How can I, an American onlooker, figure out what these English fans are singing?”Alas, Tony, the first assumption should always be that whatever it is, the lyrics would almost certainly make the Grey Lady blush. I remember going to a baseball game in San Francisco a few years ago with my wife, who is no fan of either sport. So powerful is social conditioning, though, that after a few minutes even she turned to me, with the air of a disappointed line manager conducting a performance review, and asked why it was that the fans were not swearing at the opposition team. More

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      Witness Says Fox Used Inside Information to Win World Cup Rights

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      A marketing executive testified that a top FIFA official provided secret bidding information that allowed his company to acquire valuable television rights.When the news broke a dozen years ago that Fox had been awarded the U.S. broadcast rights for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, many in television, and in soccer, were surprised. For decades, the sport’s showcase championship was the exclusive domain of ESPN, which had been instrumental in driving interest in the world’s most popular game in the world’s richest sports market.But according to a government witness testifying this week in federal court in Brooklyn, Fox didn’t acquire those tournaments on merit alone.Instead, said Alejandro Burzaco, a former sports marketing executive from Argentina, an executive working for the media giant used inside information obtained from a powerful FIFA official whom he was secretly bribing for years — and who controlled the committee that made final decisions on TV deals — to give Fox a decisive edge in what the other bidders, including ESPN and NBC, thought was a blind auction.“He said, ‘If Fox puts up $400 million, then it will win,’” Burzaco recalled being told by the FIFA official, Julio Grondona, in testimony Friday in federal court. The figure nearly matched the price reported on the day FIFA announced that Fox had won the rights.The testimony of Burzaco came during the second trial of individuals and corporations charged in the Justice Department’s long-running investigation of corruption in international soccer. In 2017, a jury found two South American soccer officials guilty of racketeering and other crimes as part of what prosecutors called “endemic” bribery and money laundering in the sport. Burzaco, who pleaded guilty in 2015 for his own role in the scandal, also testified at that trial.In the current case, the government’s focus has pivoted away from the officials who ran soccer at the time to the media rights deals that are the financial lifeblood of the game.Two of the current defendants, Hernán López and Carlos Martínez, served as executives at Fox International Channels, which controlled rights to two of South America’s most popular tournaments, the Copa Libertadores and the Copa Sudamericana. Prosecutors have for years maintained that those rights were acquired for far below market value thanks to millions of dollars in bribes paid annually to the continent’s top soccer officials, a scheme organized by Burzaco with, prosecutors contend, the full knowledge of López and Martínez.The third defendant in the current trial, Full Play Group, is an Argentine sports marketing firm that prosecutors said used bribes and other back-room deals to win commercial rights to friendly matches, World Cup qualifiers and South America’s continental championship, the Copa América.Fox Corporation, which broadcast the recent World Cup in Qatar and holds the rights to the 2026 tournament in North America, existed under a different corporate name and structure when the bribes took place and is not on trial in Brooklyn. When allegations about Fox’s potential involvement in corrupt acts emerged during the first trial, the company denied any knowledge, calling any suggestion to the contrary “emphatically false.”It has continued to distance itself from the bribery, and the former Fox executives, this week. “This case involves a legacy business that has no connection to the new Fox Corporation,” a company spokesman said this week. The spokesman noted that Fox International Channels, the subsidiary accused of involvement in bribes, and many other units that were part of a company then known as 21st Century Fox, were sold in 2019. Attorneys for the three defendants have declined to comment on the current case, as did a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York.Burzaco, who was indicted and pleaded guilty to racketeering and other charges in 2015, is the Justice Department’s star witness. A former banker who admitted to paying at least $160 million in bribes over a 15-year period, he took the stand Wednesday and is expected to testify well into next week. To date, the government has called only one other witness, a FIFA representative who testified briefly about the governance structure of global soccer, as well as the codes of ethics that the sport’s officials pledge to respect.So far, this trial has been lacking in some of the headline-grabbing fireworks that characterized the 2017 edition, when, for example, a former Argentine public official committed suicide by throwing himself in front of a train only hours after being described as a bribe recipient in court, and Burzaco said that Qatar had bribed three South American officials to ensure it would host the 2022 World Cup.On Thursday, the government’s lead prosecutor, Kaitlin T. Farrell, began asking Burzaco about how Qatar managed to acquire those rights despite its obvious problems with climate and infrastructure. But after defense attorneys objected, Judge Pamela K. Chen shut down that testimony, ruling that it was not relevant because none of the defendants are accused of being involved in the World Cup hosting decision.A courtroom sketch showing Alejandro Burzaco, left. He testified Friday that a former FIFA official, Julio Grondona, shown on a board at right, helped tip Fox officials on how much to bid for the broadcast rights to the World Cup.Elizabeth Williams/Associated PressInstead, Farrell has focused on the long and tortured relationship between the Argentine firm Burzaco led, Torneos y Competencias, and the Fox unit with which it had entered into a joint venture to control soccer rights. What started as bribes to a handful of South American soccer officials had, by 2011, expanded to nearly a dozen men who threatened to cancel lucrative contracts for the popular Copa Libertadores and Copa Sudamericana tournaments — which had been sold for far under market value — if they did not receive their annual bribes.In 2010, Burzaco said, he told López about the bribes at a beachside hotel in Florida, where both men had traveled to watch the Super Bowl. Burzaco testified that he told López a second time during a meeting in Fox’s corporate headquarters in midtown Manhattan later that year. In 2012, after Martínez took over the unit’s Latin American operations, Burzaco said he filled him in on the bribes over coffee at a Dean & DeLuca cafe in Rockefeller Center.One of the primary recipients of bribes was Grondona, who at the time served as a FIFA vice president, the chairman of the soccer body’s finance committee and the president of the Argentine soccer association. According to Burzaco’s testimony, when FIFA in October 2011 opened bidding for the English language rights to the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, López reached out to him to tell him Fox planned to bid. López, Burzaco said, then asked him to reach out to Grondona “to let him know that any help would be welcome.”Burzaco, eager to help his primary commercial partner, which helped keep Torneos solvent by hiring it to produce sports content throughout Latin America, did as he was asked. Grondona, he recalled, said he would do what he could but that it would be difficult because FIFA was under intense scrutiny in the wake of its controversial votes a year earlier awarding World Cups to Russia (in 2018) and Qatar. Regardless, Grondona soon relayed the news that the rights were as good as Fox’s.“Mr. López was very excited,” Burzaco recalled on the stand, saying López called it his “best accomplishment within Fox.” According to Burzaco, a number of other Fox officials, including Chase Carey, then in line to take over the company, and the Fox Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch himself all expressed delight at having acquired the prize.As for Grondona, he summoned Burzaco for a private meeting in Buenos Aires immediately after awarding the World Cup rights to Fox.“‘Look, Alejandro, I did this favor to you and Fox,’” Burzaco recalled him saying. “‘But this is the last time I do it for free.’”Grondona, who had been one of the primary targets of the Justice Department investigation, died of an aortic aneurysm in July 2014. Seven months later, FIFA announced that Fox had been awarded rights to the 2026 World Cup, too. This time, ESPN hadn’t even been allowed to bid. More

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      From Everton to Portsmouth, Ownership Isn’t the (Only) Problem

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      Wealthy owners are an easy target for fans who want to vent their anger over failing teams. But money isn’t a solution when there is no plan.Michael Eisner has not, by the standards of English soccer, been a bad owner. He has not burdened Portsmouth, the third-tier club he and his sons bought almost six years ago, with colossal, asphyxiating debt. He has not sold off its historic stadium to build apartments. Nor has he plastered it with the lurid branding of his other businesses.He is not a cowboy seeking a quick buck or a crony looking for a laundry or a rampant egotist desperate for an audience. For all that Disney World might not be subject to quite the same laws as the rest of Florida, Eisner himself is not a nation state with a reputation to enhance or some flagrant human rights violations to disguise.The 80-year-old Eisner is not even a bad owner by the troubled standards of Portsmouth, though that is, admittedly, a relatively low bar: Eisner surpassed at least one of his predecessors by being definitively, provably real. He has not run the club into the ground. He has demonstrated, for a time, at least, a genuine desire to understand both the team and the place, and a sincere warmth toward both.He has not haphazardly hired players or ruthlessly sold off anyone who displays the slightest hint of promise. He has not wheeled carelessly through managers: In six years, he has employed only three — one, John Mousinho, so fresh that he has yet to be confirmed officially — and both of the first two were rational, credible appointments.And yet, for all that, when Portsmouth faces Exeter City on Saturday at Fratton Park, its evocative and somewhat ramshackle stadium, the stands will bubble with dissatisfaction. At least one group of fans has organized a “peaceful” protest against Tornante, Eisner’s investment vehicle, accusing the former Disney executive and his co-owners of having both no ambition and no plan.Michael Eisner in 2017, when he paid about $7.8 million to buy Portsmouth and promised to revive it.Rob Stothard for The New York TimesThere is a current of mutiny running through English soccer. Last weekend, Everton fans staged a sit-in protest against the club’s board, holding aloft signs calling for the dismissals of the chairman, the chief executive and even the finance director, a man whom a reasonable proportion of Goodison Park will have had to Google to identify.Leicester City’s fans have not gone for the finance director so far, but there were murmurs of dissent against the owners during its defeat to Nottingham Forest last Saturday. There is talk of protests at Tottenham Hotspur, and it is only a few months since Leeds United fans were demanding the resignation of their club’s board.Their Portsmouth counterparts have not gone that far, not yet. Their complaints, laid out in a detailed, lucid statement released on Thursday, are distinctly reasonable. When Eisner bought the club from a fans’ consortium that had rescued it from the brink of liquidation, he outlined a plan to turn Portsmouth into a sustainable, successful club. If all the club wanted was to drift aimlessly along in League One, he said, he was not the guy.Drift, though, is precisely what has happened. Portsmouth remains exactly where Eisner found it. He has expanded the stadium by a couple of thousand seats, but not enough to make a difference to its budget. There has been similarly scant progress on its youth system. Essentially, the fan coalition would like Tornante to explain how it plans to fulfill its own promises.Portsmouth fans at an F.A. Cup match at Tottenham this month. Their glimpse of the Premier League’s heights was brief.David Klein/ReutersThe circumstances at all of these clubs might be bespoke, but the pattern of dissatisfaction illustrates a broader truth.It is possible (and for a long time served as orthodoxy) to see soccer as a contest between players: the ideas they conjure, the moments of inspiration they experience, the instincts they follow, the mistakes they make. In this reading, it is a game, essentially, of physical and mental skill.It is also possible, though, to view it more as a test of strategy: the key figures, in this interpretation, are not the players but the coaches, the gurus and the visionaries and the ideologues who determine and refine the style and the approach and the tactics. The players, in much modern analysis, are treated essentially as automatons, carrying out their assigned tasks by rote, little more than pixels on a screen.Increasingly, though, it feels as if neither of those analyses encapsulates what English soccer, in particular, has become. The coaches and the players a club employs all exist downstream of the figure whose beneficence and engagement determines its horizons. The cutthroat, hyper-capitalist environment that the Premier League has engendered has turned soccer, effectively, into an owners’ game.That a team’s fate is tied, irrevocably, to its economic outlook is no great insight: The richest teams, after all, can attract the finest coaches, who in turn find themselves given a chance to work with the best players. (Whether it should be this way is an entirely different question, of course.)But paper wealth, alone, is not enough. It is, in fact, meaningless unless it is accompanied by a plan. Everton, its recent recruitment history a monument to waste, stands as the most potent example of that. But Leicester, Tottenham and even Portsmouth, in their own way, are suffering from the same affliction. Their owners all presumably have a destination in mind. None of them seem to know, precisely, how they want to get there.Jason Cairnduff/Action Images, via ReutersEverton fans, top, staged a protest last week demanding the ouster of the club’s leadership. Discontented Manchester United fans may soon get their wish: The Glazer family is exploring a sale of the team.Ed Sykes/Action Images, via ReutersGiven that the two biggest clubs in English soccer — Manchester United and Liverpool — are currently searching for new investors, the discontent at Goodison Park and Fratton Park and elsewhere is worth contemplating.It would be easy to assume that the best owner for either United or Liverpool would be whichever suitor has the most zeros in their bank account. It would be equally easy to suggest that the only contenders to be avoided are those who trail either debt or ethical doubt in their wake. (Alas, those in category A are almost certain to feature in category B.)That is, though, just the start. As much as it is the financial primacy of a prospective owner that tends to fire fans’ imagination most quickly and most vividly, it is more often how they choose to use it that separates those who are welcomed with open arms from those who are greeted with pointed fingers.At Portsmouth, Michael Eisner has not been a bad owner. He has not done anything wrong, in particular. It is just that, in the eyes of the fans, he has not done the things that he promised he would, and now they fear that, somewhere in the middle of six years of stasis, he has lost interest.When Portsmouth’s fans ceded control of the club, they did so on the understanding that this was the surest way to take their team out of League One, back on the way to the Premier League. That it has not done so is not, in all likelihood, solely down to Eisner. Perhaps the players have underperformed, too. Perhaps the managers have not delivered on their potential. But it is an owners’ game, now, and that means everyone knows who to blame.No ExcuseSara Björk Gunnarsdottir fought her club, the perennial French champion Lyon, after it refused to pay her when she was pregnant.Pool photo by Clive BrunskillIt is hard to know which detail in Sara Björk Gunnarsdottir’s account of how her club, the fabled Lyon’s women’s team, treated her during her pregnancy is most damning. It is probably the one where the team did not pay her. Or it might be the one in which she was threatened with ostracism if she chose to chase that unpaid salary all the way to FIFA.Or, perhaps, it was the moment in which Gunnarsdottir, the Iceland captain, was told that under no circumstances would she, a breastfeeding mother, be allowed to bring her infant son with her to away games. What if he cried, as babies famously do, on the bus or the plane, thus disturbing the rest of the squad?Gunnarsdottir’s story has, in some way, a happy ending: Last year, a tribunal ruled that Lyon was required to pay her every cent she was owed; she has since left the club and has resumed her elite career at Juventus; her son, Ragnar, is 15 months, which means he is old enough to marvel at the world but too young to offer a constant stream of opinions on everything.More than anything, though, her experience is a reminder — as Gunnarsdottir herself has said — that there is still much to be done on the “culture” of women’s soccer; or, more precisely, on how soccer sees and treats the women who play it professionally.There are plenty of times when the breakneck speed at which women’s soccer has grown in recent years provides a mitigating circumstance for structural shortcomings, when it is possible to feel some sympathy for those having to build the plane while at 30,000 feet. Gunnarsdottir’s case is not one of them. This one, ultimately, is pretty basic.Parting ShotIt will come as no surprise that Andrea Agnelli’s ideas on soccer dovetail with Andrea Agnelli’s interests.Massimo Pinca/ReutersAndrea Agnelli is, ultimately, correct. “European soccer needs a new system,” he said this week, in a speech marking his departure as the chairman of Juventus. Without it, he said, the landscape of the game will shift so that “a single, dominant league will, within a few years, attract all the talent,” thereby “completely marginalizing the others.”It is not hard to discern what he is talking about — the hegemony of the Premier League — and it is even harder to deny its accuracy. Chelsea alone has spent more this January than the clubs of the Bundesliga, La Liga and Serie A combined. Bournemouth, an English minnow but an apex predator on the continent, is busy acquiring reinforcements at $25 million a pop from teams in France. The Premier League is, slowly and loudly, eating the competition.What is — what has always been — so frustrating with Agnelli, though, are the bits he does not say, the bits he does not see.The Premier League’s supremacy is not some accident of fate. Yes, it has two inbuilt advantages that give it a head-start: It is conducted entirely in English, and it was the first league to design itself as a television product. But its competitors could still mimic at least some of its appeal: the sleek, modern backdrop; the glossy marketing; the sense of competition.That they have not is not despite Agnelli and those like him but because of them. When he talks about a new system, he does not mean finding a way to help Italian clubs build new stadiums, or develop young talent, or adopt cost controls to bring competitive balance. He is not investigating innovative ways to build new audiences, or more equitably share television revenue, so that Serie A’s Bournemouths might grow, too.No, what Agnelli means is that he wants to change the rules of the game so that Juventus is given more money, more protection, and everyone else can go and rot. Agnelli is not, in fact, worried about marginalization in the slightest. If anything, he is all for it, just so long as he is the one doing the marginalizing.CorrespondenceThere was, as George Sundell pointed out, an omission from my list of recommendations for Ellen Johnson, who wrote seeking a guidebook for her new soccer fandom: the Women’s World Cup in July and August. “Ellen might get a thrill viewing how magnificently the teams can play in that contest,” George wrote.No arguments here, of course — the World Cup was excluded only because it is still six months away — and this edition should be even more compelling than normal, given that the European teams, in particular, (seem to) have closed the gap so substantially on the United States.Mallory Swanson (formerly Pugh) ran out with a new name but some old tricks in the United States’ friendly win over New Zealand this week.Hagen Hopkins/Getty ImagesDavid Theiler, meanwhile, has an idea to improve that old correspondence section stalwart: the offside law. It is a relatively simple one, too: Why not thicken the line used by the video assistant referee to adjudicate if a player is offside? “It would allow a more generous interpretation,” he wrote. “A wider range makes it easier to see what is well offside.”The problems with offside are now so many and varied, David, that I’m not sure any one measure would solve them all, but this would be a good place to start. I believe that the Dutch, ever the forward-thinkers, have already run at least one trial with a substantially thicker line to see if it makes any difference.And Bruce Munro has something to get off his chest as regards celebrating goals. Lavish celebrations — players sprinting off, tearing their jerseys from their shoulders, sliding on their knees and so forth — have become “routine,” he wrote, “and I don’t remember that to have always been the case. Is it because of television? Where is the proportion? Is there any sense of foolishness if the scorer’s team goes on to lose the game?”As a rule, I’m happy to let people celebrate as they wish, but this is a subject that intrigues me, too. It may well be that it is playing up to the cameras, though I wonder if it is better thought of as a learned behavior: Players celebrate goals that way because that is what players celebrating goals looks like.It is striking, certainly, when someone goes against the grain, as Crystal Palace’s Michael Olise did this week. Perhaps his (rumored) policy would appeal to Bruce: He only celebrates goals that either put his team in the lead, or extend its advantage. Otherwise, he walks impassive back to the center circle, ready to resume. More

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      Fox Sports Could Be Focus of FIFA Trial in Brooklyn

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

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      At Juventus, a Strange Season Takes Another Turn

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      A rough start to the season has been forgotten in Italy amid an unlikely title chase and a date with Napoli.The start of Juventus’s season was miserable. A raft of injuries ravaged the club’s squad. The team’s results, in those first few weeks, were flecked with disappointment. Barely a month into the campaign, Manager Massimiliano Allegri was having to smooth over the impact of an interview in which he had suggested “something was missing” from his side, alienating several of his players.Things did not improve. By early October, with Juventus seemingly adrift in the Serie A title race and on the brink of a humiliating elimination from the Champions League, Allegri received the public backing of Andrea Agnelli, the club’s president. That is rarely a good sign. When it is prefaced by an admission that the team should be “ashamed” of its performance, it is significantly worse.As it turned out, though, that was not the nadir. Far from it, in fact. At the end of November, Agnelli — together with the rest of the Juventus board — had resigned his position, seemingly as a consequence of an 18-month investigation by Italian prosecutors into financial irregularities related to the team’s activity in the transfer market. (The club denied wrongdoing.)The Juventus president, Andrea Agnelli, right, and the rest of the club’s board resigned en masse in November.Alessandro Di Marco/EPA, via ShutterstockThe next day, UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, announced that it was opening an investigation into whether it had been misled by the club, too, raising the specter of a possible sporting punishment being levied against one of Europe’s grandest teams on top of a possible judicial one.Then, a couple of weeks later, the European Court of Justice issued a nonbinding ruling that — essentially — declared UEFA’s role as an apparent monopoly did not breach European law. The decision effectively quashed the legal basis for a European Super League, the project that Juventus, which registered a loss of $273 million last year, had identified as its way out of financial crisis.In the space of four months, almost everything that could have gone wrong for Juventus, on and off the field, had gone wrong. The team was in disarray. The club had been shaken to its core. Its light, for so long the brightest in Italy, was blinking and fading, obscured by despair and disappointment.On Friday, Allegri’s team travels south to face Napoli, a side that looked at one point like it might run away with the Serie A title this season. Napoli was, until last week, the last unbeaten team in any of Europe’s major leagues. In Victor Osimhen and Khvicha Kvaratshkelia, it possesses arguably the most devastating attack in European soccer.But should Juventus win, it would cut Napoli’s lead at the top to only 4 points. It would be the ninth consecutive victory for Allegri’s team. In the previous eight, Juventus has not conceded a goal. Win in Naples, and the most miserable season Juventus could have imagined would, all of a sudden, glisten with anticipated glory.Massimiliano Allegri’s Juventus has posted eight straight wins, and eight straight shutouts, in Serie A.John Sibley/Action Images, via ReutersQuite how Allegri has effected that upswing is something of a mystery. Juventus has not suddenly started playing well; cautious and obdurate, it remains something of an anomaly in the modern Serie A, now probably the most attack-minded league in Europe.Of the eight wins that have swept Allegri’s team into Napoli’s slipstream, five have finished 1-0. Juventus required an injury-time goal to beat Cremonese last week; Danilo scored in the 86th minute to secure victory against Udinese on Saturday. Antonio Cassano, the firebrand former striker turned pundit, insisted that Juventus did not “deserve” to win that game.Nor has Allegri benefited from the sudden return to fitness of a phalanx of major stars. Ángel Di María, now a World Cup champion, has returned to the side, and Federico Chiesa is slowly recovering from long-term injury. But Paul Pogba, Leonardo Bonucci and Dusan Vlahovic are all still missing, and Juventus’s resources are hardly any deeper now than they were three months ago.In their absence, of course, Allegri has had to trust more in youth than he — like all Italian coaches — would ideally like. That has allowed the midfielder Fabio Miretti, still only 19 but now an Italian international, to blossom into the standard-bearer of the club’s next generation. The sense of freshness, as well as the injection of energy, has helped.Juventus has had a glimpse of its future in midfielder Fabio Miretti, 19.Pedro Nunes/ReutersIt is tempting, though, to wonder if there is something else at play. It is striking, in modern soccer, when players can count on millions of literal followers and managers are habitually presented as possessors of rare and precious gifts, quite to what extent everyone involved believes the world is aligned against them.Seeding and curating what is generally known as a siege mentality is almost every manager’s basic play, their immediate reflex. Pep Guardiola does it, at unfathomably wealthy Manchester City. Jürgen Klopp does it, after five years of gushing praise for his Liverpool teams. Both Real Madrid and Barcelona fervently believe they suffer so the other can thrive.But while the specific content is often laughable, the fact that so many managers — and players and executives and fans — adopt this mentality is significant. There must, in some fashion, be a power in convincing players that it is them against the world, that everyone is out to get them, that they are the underdog, fighting the good fight. They must believe it, at least in part because they want to believe it.And so, perhaps, Juventus’s many months of weakness have metamorphosed into a strength. All of the criticism, all of the crisis, has helped bond Allegri’s players to one another and to their coach. It has helped them buy into the reactive, gnarled way he wants them to play, to act, to be. It has helped them scrabble and claw their way out of misery and into the light. Things could not, really, have got any worse for Juventus. And it is at that point, perhaps, that you realize they are going to get better.A Modern GreatGareth Bale was quite good at getting the last word.Manu Fernandez/Associated PressA few years ago, at the height of Gareth Bale’s cold war with Real Madrid, someone with a connection to the club and an ax to grind suggested that the Welshman had never really tried to establish a bond with his teammates.The evidence, beyond an alleged unwillingness to improve his Spanish and the longstanding accusation that he spent all of his spare time on the golf course, was that he had — on more than one occasion — failed to attend a team-building dinner with the rest of the squad. To the rest of Madrid’s players, the story went, it had felt like a deliberate snub.There was, though, an alternative explanation, offered by another Real Madrid player who had made the same call as Bale (though, curiously, did not attract so much censure). The dinner in question, it turned out, had been scheduled on Spanish time: appetizers at 11 p.m., a main course arriving around midnight, thinking about a dessert after one in the morning, that sort of thing. A couple of the club’s northern European players, including Bale, had decided that was far too late for food, and so given the event a miss.Even now, it is not entirely clear quite why such sourness infused Bale’s last few years in Madrid. The disconnect between player and club always seemed somehow small and petty, as if the problem was not a difference of vision or ambition but, more than anything, a lack of communication and understanding.Its impact, though, is indisputable. Bale’s sudden retirement this week, six months before the expiration of his contract at Los Angeles F.C., brought a flood of tributes and testaments to what has been, by any measure, a gleaming career.At the club level, Bale has won five Champions League titles, three Liga championships, a Copa del Rey, and an M.L.S. Cup. His most meaningful legacy, though, may have been with Wales. More than anyone else, he ended the country’s long wait to compete in a major tournament (the 2016 European Championship) and its even longer wait to return to the World Cup.For all that, though, it has long felt as if Bale receded from the front rank of major stars some time ago. Some of that, of course, can be attributed to age and injury — his powers had waned, no question — but his rumbling ostracism from Real Madrid’s team played a part, too.Over the years, as we have grown used to Bale’s absence, we have internalized the idea that no true great could ever be so dispensable. The argument has been made, in recent days, that Bale never quite fulfilled his talent. But while the working is sound, the conclusion is wrong. Bale’s career stands up in comparison to (almost) anyone. It is not that he did not give enough to the game. It is that the game did not think enough of him.Money Can’t Buy HappinessJoão Félix has joined Chelsea on loan for the remainder of the season. He was red-carded an hour into his debut on Thursday.Alastair Grant/Associated PressBoth of these things are true: At the start of the summer, Chelsea had a squad that consisted largely of players who had — only a year earlier — been crowned champions of Europe. Since then, the club has spent something in the region of $380 million on reinforcements.And yet, glancing through its squad, it is hard not to have questions. Two questions, in particular. The first is: “On what?” The second is: “Really?”It is not that Chelsea has bought bad players. It has, of course, spent a little injudiciously at times: Kalidou Koulibaly may, it turns out, have been past his prime, and Wesley Fofana’s injury record might, harshly, have been seen as a red flag. And it has, occasionally, paid over market value, most notably for fullback Marc Cucurella.The problem is not just that Chelsea has bought players who are not significant upgrades on what it already had. It is that it has bought them with no apparent strategy beyond the idea that more is better. João Félix, a relatively low-risk loan deal completed this week, embodies the issue: a fine player, but one that does not address any particular shortfall.Getting the best out of him will entail inhibiting — either in time or space — Kai Havertz, or Raheem Sterling, or Mason Mount, or some combination of the three. Will Félix make Chelsea better? Possibly. Will he assuage the most pressing flaws in Graham Potter’s team? Probably not. And that, really, is the central question: How can a team go through so much (expensive) change, and yet seem to get absolutely nowhere?CorrespondenceWill Clark-Shim has, it could be said, been reading this newsletter for too long. “I believe we have reached that time of year when you muse on the F.A. Cup and whether it has outlived its day,” he noted, immediately forcing me to change what I was going to write about this week. “Isn’t the better question why there is still a second English and Welsh tournament cluttering the schedule?”This, of course, refers to the venerable Carabao Cup, English soccer’s long-lasting optional extra. There is, certainly, some merit to the idea of abolishing a tournament that was only invented (in the 1960s) so that clubs could make money from newfangled floodlights. The rebuttal, though, is no less valid.Dan Burn, left, and Newcastle are enjoying the Carabao Cup quite a bit. They will face Southampton in the semifinals.Lee Smith/Action Images, via ReutersIt has two central pillars: the valuable funds the tournament generates for the lower tiers of English domestic soccer, and the opportunity for glory it provides second-tier teams in the Premier League. This week, after all, Newcastle, Southampton and Nottingham Forest have all made the semifinals. At least one will be in the final. It hardly seems the time to diminish the competition’s significance.And we had a perfect New Year email from Ellen Johnson. “Since the Brooklyn Dodgers went westward, I’ve not been interested in sports,” she wrote. “That changed with the World Cup. At 82, I’m a believer now. So what’s next? Which teams are worth following?”Well, first of all: Welcome on board. I give it three weeks before you’re railing against the perceived iniquities of V.A.R. There should be plenty, over the next six months, to meet your needs, as Europe’s major domestic competitions wind their way to the finish and the Champions League — home of the biggest game in soccer outside of the World Cup final — coalesces into its annual mayhem.What’s worth following? Whether Arsenal, without a title in 18 years, can cling on in the Premier League, Freiburg’s unlikely bid for a top-four finish in Germany, and Paris St.-Germain’s star-studded assault on the Champions League.The best teams to watch, though, are not always the obvious ones. Brighton comes with a guarantee of entertainment in the Premier League. Benfica is a compelling outsider in the Champions League. And it is this newsletter’s avowed belief that the only event that could come close to the frenzy of the World Cup, the story that could yet define this season, would be Napoli winning its first Italian title in 34 years. More

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      Women’s Soccer Bans Ex-Coaches and Fines Teams After Misconduct Report

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      Findings released in December revealed a number of issues throughout the league, including several instances of sexual and emotional abuse.The National Women’s Soccer League on Monday permanently banned four former coaches, suspended other league officials, and fined several teams, following a report last month that detailed alleged abuse and misconduct across the league.Paul Riley, a former North Carolina Courage coach; Rory Dames, a former Chicago Red Stars coach; Richie Burke, a former Washington Spirit coach; and Christy Holly, a former Racing Louisville F.C. coach, were permanently banned from the league for alleged misconduct ranging from inappropriate comments to, in the case of Holly, groping a player.The Red Stars were fined $1.5 million, and Portland Thorns F.C. were fined $1 million for failure to properly act on allegations of misconduct.Craig Harrington, the former Utah Royal F.C. coach, and Alyse LaHue, the former general manager of Gotham F.C., each received two-year suspensions from the league. Harrington was found to have “made inappropriate sexual and objectifying comments,” and LaHue was found to have sent players inappropriate messages, the N.W.S.L. report said.The league said in a statement on Monday that the sweeping disciplinary actions were based on a 128-page report released in December. The report, a joint effort organized by the N.W.S.L. and its players’ union, revealed a number of disturbing problems throughout the league, including instances of sexual abuse, unwanted sexual advances, emotional abuse, racist remarks, and retaliation against players who complained about how they were treated.“Players from marginalized backgrounds, or with the least job security, were often targets of misconduct,” the report said. “At the same time, these players faced the greatest barriers to speaking out about or obtaining redress for what they experienced.”Jessica Berman, the league’s commissioner, said in a statement that the “corrective action” announced on Monday was “appropriate and necessary.”“The league will continue to prioritize implementing and enhancing the policies, programs and systems that put the health and safety of our players first,” Berman said. “These changes will require leadership, accountability, funding and a willingness to embrace this new way of conducting business.”Last month’s report is similar to another released in October, from an investigation led by Sally Q. Yates, a former deputy attorney general, that detailed “systemic” verbal abuse and sexual misconduct by women’s soccer coaches and found that officials in the United States Soccer Federation, the National Women’s Soccer League and throughout American soccer had failed to act over the years on complaints from players.Holly, while coaching Louisville, groped one of his players and sent her inappropriate text messages, according to the investigations. On one occasion, Holly invited a player to his home to watch video of a game, but instead masturbated in front of her and showed her pornography, the investigations found.The investigations also found that Riley, who was fired from the North Carolina Courage in 2021, used his position to try to coerce at least three players into sexual relationships. One player said Riley made sexual advances toward her on several occasions, according to the reports.Dames, who resigned from the Chicago Red Stars in 2021, was accused by the women’s soccer star Christen Press of “verbal and emotional abuse,” the N.W.S.L. report said. The investigation led by Yates also found that he had created a “sexualized team environment” at a Chicago youth club that “crossed the line to sexual relationships in multiple cases, though those relationships may have begun after the age of consent.”The N.W.S.L. report said that several players credibly reported that Burke “verbally and emotionally abused players,” and “used racial slurs, made racially insensitive and offensive jokes.”Riley, Dames, Burke, Holly, Harrington and the Portland Thorns did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday.Kelly Hoffman, a lawyer for LaHue, said in an email on Monday night that “Ms. LaHue continues to deny the allegations made against her. Notwithstanding the issues presented in her case, she supports the N.W.S.L. in its efforts towards corrective action.”A spokesman for the Chicago Red Stars said in an email on Monday night that the team was aware of the disciplinary action and that it was “working with the league in a cooperative manner to satisfy the fine.”The investigations led by the N.W.S.L. and Yates highlighted reports in 2021 by The Athletic and The Washington Post that described accusations of sexual and verbal abuse against coaches in the women’s league. Those reports led to public protests by players and the resignations or firings of league executives. Weeks after the reports of alleged sexual and verbal abuse, five coaches in the league were linked to the allegations.As part of Monday’s disciplinary actions, four others teams — OL Reign, Gotham F.C., Racing Louisville F.C. and North Carolina Courage — were fined amounts ranging from $50,000 to $200,000 for failure to act on allegations of misconduct.Six other league officials were told that any future employment with the league would depend on taking part in a training, “acknowledging wrongdoing and accepting personal responsibility for inappropriate conduct” and “demonstrating a sincere commitment to correcting behavior.”Two of the six officials were Vera Pauw, a former coach of the Houston Dash, and Farid Benstiti, a former coach of the OL Reign. The N.W.S.L. report said Pauw and Benstiti, “shamed players for their weight.”In a statement after the N.W.S.L. report was released in December, Pauw said she wanted to “refute every allegation” made against her in the report. Benstiti could not immediately be reached for comment on Monday night.April Rubin More

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      Opening the Post-World Cup Mailbag

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