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      Real Madrid’s Karim Benzema Wins Ballon d’Or

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      The Real Madrid forward won the voting after a season when Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo were nowhere in sight. Barcelona’s Alexia Putellas repeated as the women’s winner.At last, the eternal understudy has taken center stage. Karim Benzema spent much of his career as a glittering supporting act for Kaká and Cristiano Ronaldo and, more recently, Kylian Mbappé. Now, two months short of his 35th birthday, he has the trinket that marks him as a star in his own right: a Ballon d’Or.Benzema, for months regarded as the overwhelming favorite to win the 2022 edition of the award given to the world’s best soccer player, collected his prize on Monday at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. Sadio Mané, who led Senegal to victory in the Africa Cup of Nations, finished second, with Manchester City’s Kevin De Bruyne third. Benzema had described winning one as his “dream since childhood”; he has had to wait a little longer than he might have anticipated to see it come true.Here is the image you’ve all been waiting for! Karim Benzema! #ballondor with @adidasFR pic.twitter.com/TJze0Km1s6— Ballon d’Or #ballondor (@francefootball) October 17, 2022
      France Football, the magazine that has awarded the Ballon d’Or, the most illustrious individual prize in soccer since 1956, had announced that the voting for this year’s edition would be subject to what Pascal Ferré, the publication’s editor, referred to as a “little makeover” in order to retain its relevance and burnish its accuracy.Rather than offering 176 journalists from around the world a vote on the final winners, only those from the top 100 nations in FIFA’s global rankings would decide the men’s award, and the top 50 the women’s prize. (Ferré, more than a little disparagingly, said this new “elite” panel represented the “real connoisseurs” of the game.)Perhaps most significantly, the voting criteria were clarified: The magazine instructed its jurors that individual attainment over the previous season should outweigh team success, and that a player’s broader career should not be relevant at all. Ferré hoped that measure — clearly directed at what might be regarded as legacy voters for Messi and Ronaldo — would make the Ballon d’Or an “open competition, rather than a preserve.”At first glance, of course, it is possible to believe that those changes made a difference in determining the outcome. It is, after all, only the second time since 2008 that a player other than Messi or Ronaldo has been anointed as the best on the planet. (Benzema’s Real Madrid teammate Luka Modric was the other exception, in 2018.) It is the first time since 2006 that neither man has at least been on the podium. Ronaldo, after a disappointing year at Manchester United, finished 10th. Messi, last year’s winner, did not even make the shortlist.Lionel Messi after winning a record sixth Ballon d’Or award in 2019. He added a seventh last year.Christian Hartmann/ReutersAnd yet that assessment risks not only turning Benzema’s triumph into a subplot in a story of Messi and Ronaldo’s fall, but also ignoring the context for his victory. Whatever changes France Football had announced, whatever criteria it had emphasized, so remarkable was Benzema’s season that it is hard to imagine a way in which he might not have won.The blunt measures, of course, are the trophies — his fifth Champions League, another Spanish title — and the goals: 27 in La Liga, 15 in just a dozen games in Europe. Even those numbers do not, though, capture his impact. Benzema may not have been the decisive player in the Champions League final, an honor that fell to his teammate Vinícius Júnior, but he had unquestionably been the defining figure in Real’s journey to the final in Paris.It was Benzema who scored a quick-fire hat trick in the competition’s round of 16 to send Real Madrid through at the expense of Paris St.-Germain, and it was Benzema who scored another in the first leg of the quarterfinal with Chelsea. When that advantage seemed to have been wasted in the return fixture, it was Benzema who lifted Real Madrid once more, scoring the extra-time goal that sealed its place in the semifinal.Benzema won his fifth Champions League title with Real Madrid this year. Next month, he will try to help France retain the World Cup.Thomas Coex/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere, he not only scored twice in a dizzying first encounter with Manchester City, but nervelessly converted the penalty that completed yet another extraordinary Real comeback at the Santiago Bernabéu. Benzema did not win the Ballon d’Or because Messi and Ronaldo finally fell to earth. He did so because, over the last year or so, he has reached their celestial level.Even with Ferré’s changes, the Ballon d’Or remains an inherently curious phenomenon, most clearly illustrated by the absence of the best player in the summer’s women’s European Championship, England’s Keira Walsh, even from the shortlist for the women’s award, won instead by Barcelona’s injured star Alexia Putellas for the second year in a row.But Benzema’s victory is warranted, and perhaps overdue, recognition for a player who gave much of his peak career in the service of an even brighter star.Benzema joined Real Madrid in the same summer as Ronaldo, though to rather less fanfare. In his first decade at the club, the Frenchman’s role was essentially subordinate to the Portuguese; he was present in order to furnish Ronaldo with the space, and the ammunition, he required to maintain his staggering effectiveness.It was only when Ronaldo left, in the summer of 2018, that Benzema was finally able to take center stage, blossoming into the headline act that his talent had always suggested he would become. That he has had to wait so long to flourish on his own accord is a measure of the height of the bar set by Messi and Ronaldo, and of the challenge of thriving in an era marked by twin greats.Benzema’s victory, coupled with the absence from the top three of the two players who have traded this award between them for more than a decade, suggests that era is now over, although an unexpected World Cup win for either might allow them one last hurrah.It does not, though, herald the dawn of a new age. Benzema will be 35 in December. His has been a glorious autumn, but it is an autumn nonetheless. The future lies with the other names on the list, with Erling Haaland and Mbappé and Phil Foden and Vinicíus. Their time will come, and soon. For now, though, today belongs, at last, to Benzema. More

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      The Enduring Appeal of Ronaldo, Soccer’s Original Phenomenon

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      The Brazilian striker’s lasting power lies not so much in a deep trove of highlight clips, but in what he showed was possible.It is not, by any means, Ronaldo’s most significant goal. That title, by virtue of the status of the stage on which it occurred, must go to his second in the 2002 World Cup final, the one that steered with geometric precision past Oliver Kahn to restore Brazil to the pinnacle of global soccer and to crown his personal journey to redemption.Nor is it his most beautiful. It is not, for example, the equal of the thunderbolt that completed his hat-trick at Old Trafford in 2003; or the elastic double shimmy that left Luca Marchegiani, the Lazio goalkeeper, clawing at air in the 1998 UEFA Cup final; or the blend of drive and delicacy that allowed him to barge through the entire Valencia defense in 1996.In mitigation, the list of great Ronaldo goals is an unusually packed field, best illustrated by the fact that none of those already mentioned are regarded as Ronaldo’s masterpiece, either. That honor, instead, goes to the moment when he sprinted from the halfway line, the ball at his command and the entire Compostela team in his wake, during that year at Barcelona when it seemed he could do almost anything.El martes volverá @Ronaldo al Camp Nou, ahora como presidente del Valladolid.🔝⚽ ¿Es este su mejor gol con el Barça?HILO👇👇👇 pic.twitter.com/VdI98YMoWo— FC Barcelona (@FCBarcelona_es) October 26, 2019
      That may be the goal that best explains the enduring appeal of the player who, in recent years, has come to be known variously as the “Brazilian Ronaldo,” the “original Ronaldo,” or even, particularly in Italy, as “Ronaldo Fenomeno.”The goal truly worth remembering is a fairly typical sort of a strike. In the second half of a UEFA Cup match between his Inter Milan team and Spartak Moscow, on a bitterly cold afternoon in April 1998, Ronaldo picks up the ball from a Luigi Sartor throw-in, bounces off one challenge, exchanges passes with Iván Zamorano, slips through three more defenders, and slots his shot into a corner of the goal. He wheels away, arms outstretched, crucifix bouncing on his chest.To the modern eye, the backdrop the goal is set against is extraordinary. Most of the Spartak Moscow players appear to be wearing wool gardening gloves. In one corner of the stadium, there is a detachment from the Red Army, complete with what looks like an armored personnel carrier.But it is the field that is the star of the show. The parts that do not look as if they have been recently plowed are filled not with grass but sand: huge expanses of it, giving the playing surface the same aesthetic appeal of a particularly lurid tie-dye shirt. The few flashes of green, the straggling survivors of the Moscow winter, were later alleged to have been painted, rather than grown.Fields like that do not exist in European soccer anymore, certainly not in the semifinals of major competitions. (Spartak’s white uniforms, in the footage, are spattered with mud, which is quite jarring; there is, when you think about it, very little mud in elite soccer these days.) The setting places the occasion firmly in the sport’s past. That he can navigate it so easily, though, makes Ronaldo look like an emissary from the future.Ronaldo at Real Madrid, one of the places where, for a time, there was seemingly no stopping him.ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty ImagesDecades, as the author Chuck Klosterman notes in “The Nineties,” his treatise on the 20th century’s final act, do not run along strictly temporal lines; they are, in his view, related instead to perception. In Klosterman’s telling, the 1970s started at Altamont, in 1969, and the 1980s drew to a close with the fall of the Berlin Wall, a couple of months before that decade’s scheduled end.Soccer is no different. Its 1990s begin as early as 1986, with the Hand of God, and end 12 years later, when Ronaldo — the heir to Diego Maradona as the greatest player in the game — fails to arrive at the World Cup final with Brazil, the exact reasons for which remain contested, even now, almost a quarter of a century later.In the last couple of years, the sport has started to nurse something of a fixation on that period, what might be termed its early modern age. It has manifested in a slew of jerseys, all of them drawing inspiration from that era’s designs; in a slate of books charting the rise of the Premier League, in particular; and, increasingly, in documentaries, a trend encapsulated earlier this year by Netflix’s examination of Luis Figo’s move from Barcelona to Real Madrid, and now by “The Phenomenon,” a DAZN Original focused on Ronaldo that is set to be released this month.That appeal cannot be explained solely by the fact that making sports documentaries is substantially cheaper, but no less likely to command an audience, than buying live media rights. Nor is it purely an example of what should be referred to as Freeman’s Law: the theory, posited by the journalist and author Hadley Freeman, that popular culture exists on a 30-year loop, as children grow up, take control of the creative industries, and decide that everyone else has to relive an ersatz version of their youth.Getty ImagesThere is, instead, something deeper at play. Klosterman characterizes our view of the 1990s as a “good time that happened long ago, though not as long ago as it seems.” Many of its cultural touchstones — “The Simpsons,” “Friends,” the German pop sensation Haddaway — remain so familiar as to feel almost (but not quite) current, while much of its reality seems impossibly distant. People did not have the internet in the 1990s. They bought CDs.That same effect applies to soccer. Ronaldo and his peers are current in a way that Maradona, say, is not; they featured in video games and had their own special boot deals and struggled to escape the paparazzi.But we were not nearly so exposed to those stars as we are their successors. The 1990s, Klosterman writes, “were a decade in which it was possible to watch absolutely everything, and then never see it again.”Watching Ronaldo play even on television was a relatively rare occurrence, certainly before the waning days of his career. His every appearance was not broadcast around the world. His iconic goals were not played on a loop, endlessly, from the moment they hit the net. There is a fuzziness, a mystery, to him — and to the age in which he played — that subsequent generations do not possess. There are, still, unanswered questions.They are important ones, too, because it is in soccer’s long 1990s that we see the roots of the game as we experience it today. It was not just the era in which soccer fully fused with celebrity for the first time, when the final vestiges of isolationism and national identity were abandoned, when transfer fees and salaries spiraled out of control, when what had been sport became entertainment.It was also, in a sporting context, when the ideas that would shape the game’s future took hold. Some of that was administrative — the change in the backpass law, for example, had to happen for pressing to come into being — and some of it was philosophical, as the thinking of Johan Cruyff leached down to Pep Guardiola, among others.But at least part of it was embodied by Ronaldo. As his former teammate Christian Vieri puts it in “The Phenomenon,” soccer had “never seen a player like” Ronaldo when he first emerged: a player of the finest, most refined technique, but one who also possessed a startling burst of speed, a ferocious shot, and a rippling, brutish power. Ronaldo was a forward line all by himself.In time, he would become the prototype for the modern forward, and in the process he would end the sport’s decades-old assumption that strikers had to play in pairs. On that field of mud and sand, as he bounces off one defender and then bursts past another, Ronaldo looks like a player from the future because that is what he was. To understand him, and the impact he had, is to understand a little better the game as we know it today.The Two Sides of Kylian MbappéNeymar, left, and Kylian Mbappé, now starring in a Paris soap opera.Gonzalo Fuentes/ReutersThe word was sufficiently incendiary that its impact was not dulled by the haze of anonymity. Scarcely five months since he paraded around the field at the Parc des Princes, his future committed to Paris St.-Germain, Kylian Mbappé had decided he had to get out. And he had done so because, the unattributed quotes ran, he felt “betrayed.”Hearing that, particularly in a week that included a crucial Champions League game and a Ligue 1 meeting with P.S.G.’s resurgent rival, Marseille, it was impossible not to assume that the club had committed some stark transgression.Maybe it had not paid Mbappé. Maybe it had forced him to train with the reserve team, the second string, the no-hopers. Maybe it had mistreated some of those players whom he considered close friends. All of those might be considered grounds for such an accusation.As it turned out, though, Mbappé’s complaints are rather less severe. He does not like having to play as a sole No. 9 — the role invented by Ronaldo — rather than in a pair. He wanted his club to sign a central defender last summer. He had hoped that Neymar, once his close friend but now, for reasons that remain somewhat opaque, his rival, might have been sent to another club.No matter how sincerely Mbappé feels he has been misled, none of these quite add up to betrayal. P.S.G. spent the summer trying to sign a striker and a defender but could not land its primary targets. It tried to move Neymar, too, but failed to persuade a suitor to take on his salary. The transfer market can be complicated, even for clubs (like P.S.G.) with effectively unlimited resources. That may be a disappointment. It is not treachery.That Mbappé is reported to have taken it as such — and, particularly, that he finds having to play a position marginally different from his preferred one so galling — reflects far worse on him than it does on P.S.G.Mbappé, 23, has not only always been presented as a modest, mature sort of a character, levelheaded and prudent, that is precisely how he has come across. Mbappé is driven, ambitious, of course, but he is also humble and hard-working. He learned English and Spanish as a teenager to help him settle in should his career ever take him abroad. He has always seemed like the sort of superstar you could take home to meet your parents.Increasingly, though, the portrait painted by his actions is far less flattering. If the conditions P.S.G. reportedly accepted to keep him from the grip of Real Madrid hinted at a player overreaching, his discontent at having to subsume his preferences for the good of the team compounds that impression.Mbappé is, of course, the standout talent of his generation (Erling Haaland, 22, notwithstanding). He has decided he simply must leave P.S.G. as early as January. There should, then, be a glut of clubs on high alert, all of them clasping and clawing for his signature. And, most likely, there will be. But they will do so knowing that he comes with a bright, angry red flag. Signing Mbappé brings you one of the world’s finest players, it would seem, but only if you do everything his way.CorrespondenceA useful reminder from Derek Cairns — in reference to the suggestion that perhaps all-star games between leagues is not such a terrible thought — that there is no such thing as a new idea in soccer: There are just old ideas, repurposed, refashioned, and attached to some sort of NFT promotion.“There was once an official series of matches between the Scottish league, the English league and, if memory serves, the Italian league,” he wrote. “I have a feeling that I recall a match between the Scottish and English leagues which had Denis Law playing in white.”I don’t remember these, and so cannot vouch for Derek’s memory — there is a possibility that this was just some sort of Denis Law-infused nightmare — but there were, as we have mentioned previously, plenty of all-star equivalents as late as the 1980s. It is strange that soccer has gotten more, not less, resistant to change since then.And I could not finish this week without addressing a request from Juliet Lancey, who is in something of a bind. Not only is she dating someone who “eats, sleeps and breathes soccer,” which I know from personal experience is not a great start to a relationship, but someone who is obsessed with a particularly miserable part of the sport’s grand cornucopia: the ongoing misadventures of Aston Villa.“You would think if my boyfriend actually cared about me he would have chosen a team that didn’t leave me in the gut-wrenching throws of frustration every Sunday,” she wrote, and she’s right: I do think that. “But nope, Aston Villa it is.”What if Aston Villa’s problem is the manager tasked with identifying, and fixing, it?Craig Brough/ReutersAt this point, I assumed Juliet was asking me how to extract herself from this — for future reference, the sentence “Peter Withe’s goal was a fluke” should do it — but if anything, she is seeking to enmesh herself further in this entirely self-inflicted morass.“I have gone in circles about why exactly a team filled with talented players like Villa cannot seem to just win some freaking games,” she wrote. “I guess my question is, in short, what is wrong with Aston Villa?”It is a good question. As Juliet points out, Villa’s squad is hardly a bad one. (It is also not a cheap one.) Losing Diego Carlos to injury so early in the season was a blow, but of far greater concern than results — Villa has not lost since August — are the performances. Villa might not be a Champions League contender, but its resources are no worse than, say, Newcastle’s, and there is no earthly reason the club should be behind Fulham and Bournemouth in the table.That, sadly, leaves one culprit. Steven Gerrard may or may not be a good manager, but it strikes me that he has failed to identify — and therefore to express — a clear vision of what he wants his Villa team to be. Villa is a disparate patchwork of talented players, rather than a cogent whole. What tends to happen, in such circumstances, is that teams can get it together every now and again, but that consistency proves elusive.I hope that helps, Juliet. But also there is a very strong possibility, sadly, that this is just Villa being Villa. Don’t hold it against your partner too much. He is suffering, too. More

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      La Liga Chief Javier Tebas Takes His Feud With PSG President to Court

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      A multimillion-dollar dispute between the Spanish league and its Qatari broadcast partner, beIN Media Group, is the latest flare-up in the battle between two of the most powerful men in soccer.For months, it seemed, the feud between the leader of Spain’s top soccer league and the president of the Qatar-owned French team Paris St.-Germain has played out noisily, and in public.Javier Tebas, the outspoken president of La Liga, would regularly criticize Paris St.-Germain and its Qatari leaders, accusing them of flagrantly breaking European soccer’s financial rules. And occasionally, the P.S.G. president, Nasser al-Khelaifi, would respond to Tebas with his own accusations, questioning the health of Spanish soccer, or trade barbs with him in the news media and in speeches.The more high-stakes fight, it turns out, was taking place behind the scenes.This week, after almost two months of wrangling, Tebas and La Liga secured a court order to freeze tens of millions of dollars of the assets of beIN Media Group, the Qatar-owned broadcast network headed by al-Khelaifi, in a dispute over unpaid broadcast-rights payments.BeIN, one of the most prolific spenders on broadcast rights in the world, owns the rights to La Liga matches in swaths of Asia and the Middle East as well as some key European markets. But according to a court document reviewed by The New York Times, the network had so far failed to pay more than 50 million euros it owed the Spanish league for this season’s games.In the 11-page order, the court said it had frozen the assets because of the risk that the funds would be repatriated to Qatar.BeIN Media Group learned about the case, and the order freezing its assets, from a New York Times reporter. “Our reputation is founded on decades of significant investment, best-in-class broadcasting, long-term and trusted relationships with rights-holders, and a track record of payment,” the company said in a statement.The beIN spokesman said 10 million euros of the debt had been repaid on Oct. 5. But the company said it would not discuss its private, contractual discussions with La Liga or any rights-holder, adding, “That is not how business should be conducted, certainly not by professional and dignified institutions.”The outstanding debt represents only a fraction of the money beIN Media Group has paid over the years to La Liga, with industry estimates suggesting the total amount contracted between the league and the network to be as much as $1.5 billion since 2018.Delays in payments to sports organizations are not uncommon, either, with broadcasters often known to negotiate payment plans with their partners. What is uncommon is the lengths La Liga has gone to ensure it receives the money it says it is owed. BeIN continues to broadcast La Liga games across its networks.The case is certain to bring renewed focus on the influence in soccer of Qatar, which in addition to hosting next month’s World Cup also plays a leading role in European soccer through its free-spending ownership of P.S.G., the dominant force in French soccer, and beIN, which has paid out billions of dollars to acquire the broadcast rights to some of soccer’s top competitions.But it also will shine a spotlight on the influence of al-Khelaifi, whose simultaneous roles as the chairman of P.S.G. and beIN Media Group and as a board member of European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, have made him one of the most influential figures in the sport.Al-Khelaifi has for years emphatically denied the accusation that he wields too much power given his various roles; he has said that in the past, he sought legal advice whenever such conflicts have arisen and that he regularly recuses himself from meetings in which his various roles could clash.Qatar’s beIN Media Group is a prolific buyer and broadcaster of European soccer matches.Olya Morvan for The New York TimesTebas told The New York Times that beIN has been delaying payments since last year, and he rejected the network’s claim that it was facing financial challenges, saying, “I don’t believe them.”Instead, Tebas suggested, the broadcaster is attempting to renegotiate its deals with La Liga, which cover territories stretching from France to the Middle East and Asia to New Zealand.But Tebas also suggested there was another motive for the missed payments: He said they were an effort to pressure him to relent in his criticisms of al-Khelaifi. In June, for example, Tebas filed a complaint with UEFA in which he accused P.S.G. and Manchester City, another team backed by a Gulf state, of being in “continuous breach” of the organization’s financial regulations.“He knows exactly what he is doing,” Tebas said of al-Khelaifi. “He’s trying to get to the point where clubs will tell the president of the league we prefer to get the money and have you talk less.”BeIN made its disdain for Tebas clear in its response. “If we ran our operations reacting to certain executive’s comments on others within the sports industry, we wouldn’t be in business,” the company said.Much of Tebas’s fury about P.S.G., and al-Khelaifi, stems from the French club’s ability to lure star players from La Liga, spending that he contends has unfairly altered the game’s economics. In 2017, P.S.G. broke the world transfer record when it paid 222 million euros, at the time more than double the highest amount previously paid for a player, to acquire the Brazilian star Neymar from Barcelona. It also managed to lure Lionel Messi to Paris in 2021 after Barcelona could not afford to renew his contract. And earlier this year, P.S.G. paid the French star Kylian Mbappé a signing-on fee of more than $100 million to reject the overtures of Real Madrid.While other soccer leagues and executives have privately expressed concerns about the spending by state-owned teams, Tebas has been by far the most outspoken. “People in football are cowards,” Tebas said Wednesday, explaining why others have not been as outspoken as he has about the market-altering influence of teams like P.S.G. and Manchester City. “Football executives always want to make sure they have good relations and eat well instead of stepping outside their comfort zone.”Al-Khelaifi has had little use for Tebas’s critiques; in June, he said he would not take lessons from Tebas, suggesting what the Spaniard had to say was not relevant.For UEFA, the running dispute between two of its most prominent voices is proving to be awkward because both Tebas and al-Khelaifi are members of its executive board. The latest court fight will do little to lower the temperature, and it is not over.The ruling freezing beIN’s assets, according to the document, is only a temporary measure; the court will hold a full hearing on the merits of the case, but the timetable is unclear. More

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      From Equal Pay to Ending Abuse, Soccer’s Fight for Fairness Spreads

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      The success of the U.S. women’s soccer team on the field and at the negotiating table has been a model for players elsewhere. In other countries, those battles are heating up.LONDON — There is always something to shoulder, the world’s best women’s soccer players know. Second-class facilities. Failed leadership. The persistent fight for equal opportunities. The glacial battle for equal pay.Just last week, a comprehensive report revealing systemic abuse across American women’s soccer left players devastated, but not surprised.“It’s really sad to say, but in a way, I think we’re used to having to deal with one thing or another,” United States forward Megan Rapinoe said of the report’s findings before her team played England on Friday. “It seems to bring us closer.”It is that sense of collective struggle that has repeatedly galvanized the United States women’s team in its battles with U.S. Soccer. It’s also what has made them leaders to colleagues and rivals around the world, players and teams with their own struggles, their own priorities, their own goals on and off the field.England’s players, for example, said this week that they would use their next match to raise awareness of a campaign for girls to have equal access to soccer at school. In Spain, the team that will take the field against the United States on Tuesday will be without 15 key players who have been exiled for demanding that their federation engage with concerns about the team’s coach.And in Canada, the women’s team — the biggest regional rival to the U.S. and a leading contender to win next summer’s Women’s World Cup — has drawn a line in the sand with its federation, saying it will not accept any new contract that does not guarantee equal pay between men and women.“A lot of it has to do with respect and being seen and valued for what we’re providing to our federations,” the United States captain Becky Sauerbrunn said in a recent interview about her team’s equal pay campaign. “We’re doing the same work that the men are doing. We’re playing on the same pitch. We’re traveling and training and playing games, usually the same amount, if not more. Why would they get paid more than us?”In Washington last month, Sauerbrunn sat at a table alongside several teammates after a match and signed the equal pay deal. It was, for her, a moment worth savoring.“What’s so frustrating for us sometimes,” she said of that moment of triumph and celebration, “is that we feel like this should have been given so long ago.”It is an issue that a growing number of federations are continuing to work to address, either through proactive agreements or after pressure from their players. Since 2017, when Norway’s federation became the first to announce an equal pay agreement between its national teams, a host of nations have followed suit, including federations in New Zealand, Brazil, Australia, England, Ireland and — just this summer — Spain and the Netherlands.Still, nearly all of those deals shade the definition of equal pay by offering men’s and women’s players equal match bonuses but only equivalent percentages of the vastly different prize money on offer from FIFA at competitions like the World Cup. The prize pool for the men’s tournament in Qatar next month will be $440 million — multiples more than what will be available to women at their next championship.The new U.S. Soccer agreement is different: The American teams will be paid the same, dollar for dollar, for competing for their country because they have agreed to pool their World Cup prize money. Over the lifetime of the deal, that is expected to shift millions of dollars that would have gone to the men in previous years to the members of the women’s team.Players in other nations still have far to go. But they have been taking notes.In June, the Canadian women rebelled against their federation — just over a year before the next World Cup — over the cause of equal pay. “The women’s national team does not view equal FIFA percentages as between our respective teams as equal pay,” said its players in an open letter in which the team indicated its ambition to follow in the footsteps of the U.S. women’s team.The team, the Canadian players said, “will not accept an agreement that does not guarantee equal pay.”That spirit of equal reward, and equal opportunity, is spreading.“The younger generation now will believe that they all should be having the same opportunities, and they all should be having the same chances,” said Vivianne Miedema, the Arsenal and Netherlands star, who worked with her federation and alongside her Dutch teammates to achieve their equal pay deal.“It’s not just a money thing,” Miedema added. “It’s a movement that’s been created. I just don’t really think women and men should be treated in a different way.”In Spain, a dispute involving a group of 15 national team players is about more day-to-day concerns. They have refused to play for their country until their federation addresses the methods and management of their coach, Jorge Vilda, whom some members of the team want removed.The Spanish federation responded by not only refusing to engage with the complaints but also exiling the 15 players who went public with their demands. Instead, the federation will field an understrength squad in Tuesday’s high-profile friendly against the United States, one of Spain’s most important opportunities to test itself against a World Cup rival before the tournament next summer.“If 15 of the best players in the world wanted to share feedback I’d respect them enough as people and players to take their concerns seriously,” Sauerbrunn wrote on Twitter.The Spain team that will face the United States on Tuesday will have a different look after more than a dozen players were dropped after raising concerns about the coach, Jorge Vilda, at top.Juanjo Martin/EPA, via ShutterstockRapinoe echoed that sense of solidarity, saying, “It’s uncomfortable to know the just general level of disrespect for women’s teams and women’s players around the world.”That is why, for Miedema and other top players, the fight isn’t only about pay. Resources are just as important, from the fields teams play on to equal access to equipment and medical personnel to the quality of coaching.“One of the most important things that we’ve been continuously fighting for over the last couple of years is that we’ve got the same facilities, we’ve got the same opportunities, starting at a young age,” Miedema said. “Because that’s how the level of women’s soccer will increase.”But alongside progress in the women’s game — record attendances, unprecedented television ratings, record salaries and rising transfer fees — the scathing inequalities players continue to face were being laid bare. The abuse scandal, documented in excruciating detail in a report by the former Justice Department official Sally Q. Yates last week, was just the latest example.Miedema, in an interview before the Yates report was published, suggested oversight was just as important as pay and other working conditions. But the issue of the huge gap in prize money was too big, and too widespread, she said, to be left to individual federations to resolve.“I think that’s something that needs to be led by FIFA and UEFA,” she said, a reference to European soccer’s governing body.Lise Klaveness, the president of Norway’s soccer federation, has committed her federation to that kind of top-down equality. But she also has urged UEFA and FIFA to make a similar commitment.“Soccer is the biggest sport in the world and in Norway,” said Klaveness, a former national team player. “We’re everywhere, in every schoolyard, everywhere. So, it’s very important for us to look at ourselves as something that meets all girls and all boys, and that you should feel the same value.”Sauerbrunn’s advice to other teams, including the Spanish side she and her teammates will face on Tuesday? Keep fighting. Keep asking. Keep trying.“When you’re negotiating, sometimes you’re going to have to be creative, you’re going to have to persevere because you’re going to hear ‘no’ a lot,” she said. “We had to keep making ground slowly.“But you’re never going to get anywhere if you don’t ask. And I would definitely say that the collective voice is so much stronger than just a few individuals.” More

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      England Beats U.S. Women’s Soccer Team, Ending a Win Streak

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      The U.S. and England can be expected to enter next year’s World Cup as favorite and challenger. Friday’s friendly was a chance to establish which team would occupy which role.LONDON — For now, at least, Vlatko Andonovski remains unbowed. Just a few minutes after watching his United States team defeated, 2-1, for the first time in more than a year, he was happily casting his mind forward to next summer’s World Cup final.The best measure of his confidence was not his insistence that he would not mind running into England there — it was that his working assumption was that his side’s presence is not far off certain.He was not, though, the only one whose mind was wandering. The mind of Sarina Wiegman, the England coach, was doing it, too.“You do not win a World Cup in October,” she said. “It is not July yet. But it is really good to have this moment now, in our preparation for it. It is good to have a test against the United States, because they have won so many things for years and years. It was very good to see where we are. We showed to ourselves that we can do it.”Strictly speaking, of course, there was nothing riding on this meeting of the longstanding world champion and the recently crowned European champion at Wembley Stadium. There was no glittering prize for victory, no lasting pain for defeat.It was, instead, intended as a showpiece and a showcase: a chance for England, fresh from winning its maiden international honor, to enjoy a celebratory homecoming and an opportunity for the United States to stretch its legs on European soil. Though neither set of players would have wished it, it became a chance, too, to display solidarity in the aftermath of the Yates Report, which detailed systemic abuse of players in women’s soccer in the United States.Meaning, though, is established by consensus. And, deep down, both sides knew that the idea that this was a friendly, an exhibition, was a lie. It is the United States and England, after all, who have “stretched clear” of the pack, as Megan Rapinoe put it, and who stand as the two undisputed powerhouses of women’s soccer. It is the United States and England who can be expected to go into next year’s World Cup as favorite and challenger. Wembley was the chance to establish which team would occupy which role.It is too simplistic, though, to say that England’s victory establishes its primacy. That it is the more settled, the more cogent of the two at this stage — still 10 months out from the finals — is a fair assessment; that it is the beneficiary of a swelling momentum, built during its golden summer and nourished by overcoming the United States, the sport’s historical hegemon, is not in doubt.For considerable stretches of the game, England looked every inch the coming force: crisper, slicker, more inventive in possession than its visitor, more capable of controlling and varying the speed of the game, more ruthless on the counterattack, more purposeful in its press. It deserved its early lead, secured through Lauren Hemp, and it deserved to wrestle it back, too. Georgia Stanway atoned for gifting Sophia Smith an equalizer by converting a penalty soon after.Andonovski’s counterargument, though, would be no less compelling. Nobody would pretend this has been an easy week for any of his players, regardless of their professionalism, their determination to focus on the game or the old and flawed cliché that the game itself, the sport around which an entire rotten industry has been built, can provide solace and sanctuary and momentary escape. They have all been forced to confront others’ trauma and relive their own.Trinity Rodman had an exquisitely crafted goal ruled out after a video-assistant-referee check.Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated PressEven had they been able to focus as they would have wished — as they deserved to — they could reasonably point out that their squad was not at full strength. Alex Morgan, Mallory Pugh and Sam Mewis were among those absent. Andonovski, too, is still finessing the incorporation of a new generation of talent, led by the likes of Smith and Trinity Rodman. This team is a work in progress, and its construction is not scheduled to be finished until Sydney next year.And yet, despite all of that, it only lost to the European champion — the very best the rest of the world has to offer, on home turf and backed by a highly partisan crowd — by the finest of margins.Rodman had an exquisitely crafted goal ruled out for the sort of cruel, infinitesimal offside that is enough to turn anyone against the very concept of technology. Rapinoe was denied the chance to convert a late penalty, to extend a win streak that had grown to 13 games, by a rather more obvious intervention by the video assistant referee.More significantly still, Smith was the outstanding player on the field — other than, perhaps, the fearless Keira Walsh — a constant source of terror to England’s back line. Andonovski might have no objections to seeing England in the World Cup final next year; the English, you suspect, would rather not run into Smith again any time soon.That both Andonovski and Wiegman felt comfortable enough to bring up the World Cup — to dispense with the bromide that this was just a friendly, just an exhibition, almost as soon as the final whistle had gone — can be traced, perhaps, to the fact that both would have seen enough in this game to confirm their beliefs.England knows now that it can beat the United States, that it can meet the sport’s gold standard; the United States, in turn, can feel that at full strength things might have been very different. Both can make it mean what they want it to mean.And that consensus can hold, now, for a few more months, right up until they meet again, on a stage still grander than this one, when there will be something at stake, when the pretense can be safely abandoned, and when there are prizes for the victors and pain for the defeated. Wiegman is right, of course: The World Cup is not concluded in October. But both she and Andonovski, as their minds wandered, saw Wembley as the moment that it started. More

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      The Yates Report Isn’t the End. It’s Just the Start.

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      Women’s soccer players tried to raise the alarm about abuse for years. When they say there’s more, people should listen.Somehow, at the end, Megan Rapinoe could still sound enthusiastic. She had spent the previous 20 minutes answering question after question about the “devastating” findings of the Yates Report, trying to explain how it feels to know that the sport to which you have devoted your life has permitted a culture of “systemic abuse” to fester, finding a way to put into words how painful it can be to read, in stark black and white, that which you have always known.Rapinoe had met each and every one of the questions, as she always does, with the habitual, measured candor that has become her hallmark. Not once did she intimate that she had said all she had to say. Not once did she try to change the subject, to guide the conversation onto ground less harrowing, less bleak. She was asked, again and again, to describe and to parse and to relive her trauma, and the trauma of so many of her colleagues and friends, and she did so, until there were no more questions left.Her anger — her tone pitched both to convey and control it — was clear, but so too was her fatigue. Rapinoe and her teammates have had to “shoulder a lot” over the years, as she put it. The struggle to free the sport, their sport, of both abusers and the individuals and the structures that have both harbored and nourished them is not their first battle. This team has fought for equal pay and for social justice, too. “We have a lot of experience,” Rapinoe said.At that point, for just a moment, she sounded tired. But then, almost as an afterthought, someone pointed out where she was, what was about to happen: Rapinoe was sitting inside London’s Wembley Stadium, preparing for a game on Friday night that will match the United States, the reigning world champion, against England, now officially ensconced as Europe’s premier team.Every single seat at the stadium was sold, snapped up almost as soon as they went on sale: 90,000 or so fans would be coming to watch a game that, to many, has the air of a sneak preview of next year’s World Cup final. And, in an instant, Rapinoe’s enthusiasm was clear. “I am so excited for this game,” she said. “This is a really special moment for our sport.”The U.S. captain, Becky Sauerbrunn, and several of her teammates spoke this week of the need to find joy in their sport anywhere they could. Friday’s game against England at Wembley is a start.Paul Childs/Action Images Via ReutersThe Yates Report is, in effect, more than 300 pages of tragedy: personal tragedies compounded by the tragedy of chronic institutional failure, each one of them part of a mosaic that has left an open wound, an aching scar in the heart of women’s soccer. Given some of the revelations, it would be glib in the extreme to highlight one aspect that is more upsetting, more harrowing than any other. Much of it, as Rapinoe said, is “hard to read.”But there is a particular, keening sorrow in knowing that, so often, it was the same enthusiasm that so animated Rapinoe — even as a veteran, even after all she has achieved and, most significantly, all that she has endured — that was so often weaponized by those in power to silence those trying to safeguard the game and to protect those damaging it.The teams of the N.W.S.L., the league itself and even U.S. Soccer, the Yates report found, “gave little thought or attention to basic player protections.” Instead, investigators concluded, “the focus was on keeping eight teams on the field to ensure the league’s survival.”Those reporting abuse, in other words, were either ignored or discouraged by leveraging their passion for soccer against them, while those committing it were indulged — ushered into new jobs with hearty farewells — because, it seems, of an unwillingness to rock the boat in case everyone ended up submerged. The players believed in their mission to grow women’s soccer as a sport; they had a responsibility not just to themselves, but to the sport, too. And that, too often, was used against them.The Yates Report, it is to be hoped, will explode that enforced omertà. “I think this was kind of the nail in the coffin,” as Rapinoe’s United States teammate, Crystal Dunn, put it this week.What she referred to as “accountability,” but might better be described as “overdue bloodletting,” has already begun: Merritt Paulson, the owner of the Portland Thorns, has stepped away from the team’s decision-making process. Arnim Whisler, the owner of the Chicago Red Stars, has been removed from that club’s board. Neither has, as yet, been forced to sell his team, but the writing is on the wall.“Every owner and executive and U.S. Soccer official who has repeatedly failed the players and failed to protect the players, who have hidden behind legalities and have not participated in these investigations, should be gone,” said Becky Sauerbrunn, the U.S. captain, earlier this week. Rapinoe went a little further. She did not bother with euphemism when she declared that, from this point on, neither Paulson nor Whisler fit to be involved in women’s soccer at all. She has reached the stage where she is prepared to name names.N.W.S.L. players and fans are demanding accountability, even from their own teams.via ReutersBut that does not mean either the report itself, or the handful of senior figures scorched by their sudden exposure to sunlight, represents a conclusion. Publication is not enough. The fall of Paulson and Whisler, if and when it comes, is not enough.Here, too, there is a tragedy: The “horrific” details of the Yates report are not, and should not be mistaken for, the sum total of the problem. The investigators themselves note that they received several credible accusations of sexual harassment that they could not corroborate sufficiently for inclusion. And the players themselves know there is more to find.“This is not just in the N.W.S.L,” said Lindsey Horan, the United States midfielder, now playing for the French team Lyon. “This is women’s soccer, this is women in general. We have these problems all over the world. I sit here and I’m like: It’s not done. This is all over the world. Being a player in Europe right now, I know that.”Rapinoe has the same sense. “This report has come out in our country,” she said. “But the reality is it could be any country in the world.”There is more to be done, they know. They are angry and they are disappointed and they are tired, too. “Emotionally exhausted,” Rapinoe said. But — in a sport full of athletes finding their voices — that is the thing about this team, in particular. No matter how tired they are, no matter how bleak it is, they have never lost their enthusiasm for the fight.Let’s Blue Sky ThisTodd Boehly has, it seems, started something. It is little more than a month since the Chelsea owner — unprompted and ill-advisedly — suggested that the Premier League might like to consider staging its own version of an all-star game, and the idea has already mutated into something even bigger, even more unwieldy, and even more likely to be derided on talk radio.Various unnamed Premier League executives have, according to The Times of London, floated the possibility of staging a series of showpiece games across the world between teams comprising the best players from the top flights of England, Italy, Spain and Germany — sorry, France, you don’t make the cut, apparently — in order to expand soccer’s appeal to “emerging markets.”There are several red flags here. The fact the executives are unnamed, for example. As a rule, if someone thinks they have a good idea, a real winner, they cannot wait to put their name to it. If, on the other hand, they are engaged in what might be described as a craven money grab, they tend to decide that they are “not authorized to speak on the matter.”So, too, the justification for the project. Does soccer really need to expand into emerging markets? What possible territory remains virgin to the great sports industrial complex? There are farmers in wild corners of Mongolia who will spend hours online screaming that Cristiano Ronaldo only scores penalties; seeing Sandro Tonali and Declan Rice in Shanghai will not add to their ardor for the sport.But putting that entirely understandable queasiness aside — and parking, just for a moment, the valid complaint that elite players do too much soccer-playing as it is — we must consider the unlikely possibility that this is, in fact, quite a good idea. Particularly, say, if these fixtures replaced preseason tours, and if the money they generated was weighted so that the smaller teams in each league got rather more of it.That does not mean it is not a craven money grab, of course. It is very obviously a craven money grab. If something is being suggested by a major soccer team, it goes without saying that it is because they think they have spotted an untapped revenue stream. But that does not mean it is necessarily devoid of merit.The Context of RecordsErling Haaland makes scoring look easy. It’s not.Lindsey Parnaby/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesErling Haaland’s first goal on Tuesday night took him past Edin Dzeko and Mario Gomez. His second, not quite half an hour later, lifted him above Rivaldo and Luis Suárez. The Manchester City striker has now scored as many times in the Champions League as Ryan Giggs did. In 15.17 percent of the time.The speed with which Haaland — at age 22 — is rising up the list of the competition’s all-time goal scorers is blistering. He needs six more to overtake not just Wayne Rooney and Kaka and Samuel Eto’o, but Gerd Müller. There is no reason to believe, at his current rate of progress, that he will not have done that by the end of this season’s group phase.A decent run in the knockout stage should see him break into the top 20. Given that he has now scored 19 goals in only 12 games since joining City, that may not be the limit of his ambitions. He is a young man going places extremely fast.As breathtaking and as stirring as his achievements are, it is necessary to place them within just a small piece of context. Over the last decade or so, as Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have broken almost every record available to them, each landmark has been greeted as proof of their wondrous talent. That, of course, is only right. The same applies to Haaland.But it is also the case that all of them are products, to some extent, of their eras. Messi and Ronaldo were playing, at the peak of their careers, for teams that had far greater financial resources than the vast majority of teams they faced until the latter stages of the Champions League. The competition was far more unbalanced, far less equal, than it had been even 10 or 15 years earlier.The same, once again, applies to Haaland, both at Manchester City and — to some extent — in his last stop at Borussia Dortmund. He is playing, for the most part, against teams that are hopelessly overmatched, in a way that the likes of Filippo Inzaghi, Ruud van Nistelrooy and Raúl Gonzalez, all above him in the list, were not.That does not diminish Haaland’s talent. Nor does it devalue his goals, or discredit his achievements. But it is important to remember, in an era in which records seem to fall with dread frequency, that they do so because the game is set up now to make them more attainable than ever for the precious few to have them in their grasp.CorrespondenceA curious question to open this week, from Lloyd Mallison. Curious not because it is bad — it is not; it’s a good question — but curious because it’s strange what catches each of our eyes. “Do you have any insight into the rehabilitation of Saúl at Atlético Madrid?” Lloyd asked. “After his pretty limp time at Chelsea, I didn’t expect to see him back starting again so soon.”I have no particular insight, sadly, other than to suggest that it is a welcome reminder of this column’s motto: There is no such thing as a bad (professional) soccer player. There are only players in the wrong systems, or working with the wrong coaches, or in the wrong context. Chelsea was not right for Saúl. That doesn’t mean Saúl cannot be right somewhere else.We had a couple of emails on the travails of Juventus, too, which act as a neat couplet. Joseph Blanco sent in some perceptive thoughts on the dangers of what we have come to call “philosophy,” pointing out that the game is “turning a generation of players into robots.” He is, in that sense, what we might call an Allegrista.Massimiliano Allegri, calmly pondering the merits of philosophy vs. culture.Massimo Pinca/ReutersHe disagrees, though, that Massimiliano Allegri’s anti-philosophy approach can be equated to Juventus’s scatter-gun approach to team-building. “I don’t think it’s fair to say the struggles of the team are the same as the organization’s shortcomings,” he wrote.That dovetails neatly with this observation from Tory Amorello: “I couldn’t help but think about how it would feel if you exchanged the word philosophy for culture. I think the way that managers talk about philosophy is somewhat limited to announcing a defined style of play. Take that concept away from the field, and it’s called culture.”That, perhaps, sums up the bind Juventus finds itself in far more succinctly than I managed: It is not a failing of philosophy, but of broader culture. I shall take that, repeat it on various broadcast media and do my level best, Tory, not to present it as entirely my own work. More

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      How Arsenal Found Its Voice

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      LONDON — On the night before the biggest game of Arsenal’s season so far, the fans slipped inside the Emirates Stadium to make sure everything was in place. Their leader and a handful of friends had spent weeks drawing up their plans: raising money, contacting suppliers, brainstorming themes, designing images, cutting out stencils, spray-painting letters.Now, late on a Friday night, there was just one job left to do. They had to check that every seat in Block 25 of the stadium’s Clock End contained a flag, either red or white, for the culmination of the display.The next day, they saw their vision realized. As the players of Arsenal and Tottenham took the field at the Emirates, Block 25 was transformed. “We Came, We Saw, We Conquered,” read one banner. “North London Is Red Since 1913,” ran another, a reference to Arsenal’s controversial relocation to this part of the city — and Tottenham territory — a century ago. Hundreds of flags fluttered under a clear blue sky.The display lasted barely more than an instant, all those hours of effort expended for a single, fleeting moment, a reverie that broke as soon as the whistle blew. Its impact, though, lasted substantially longer.After the game, Arsenal’s manager, Mikel Arteta, described the atmosphere inside the Emirates that afternoon as “probably the best I’ve seen in this stadium since I’ve been involved with the club,” a relationship that covers more than a decade. His captain, Martin Odegaard, made a point of thanking the fans, too. “It was amazing to play out there,” he said.In part, of course, that can be attributed to the result: Arsenal had beaten Tottenham, and victory in the North London derby is always something to be celebrated. The context helped, too: The win ensured that Arsenal remained at the summit of the Premier League for another week, a point ahead of Manchester City heading into this weekend, when Liverpool visits the Emirates.Color and crowds are part of every stadium matchday, but at Arsenal it’s the sound that is new.But this was not an isolated case. Over the last year or so, it has not been uncommon for Arteta and his players to gush over how noisy, how passionate, how ardent the Emirates has become. Inside the club, there is a sincere belief that the raucous atmosphere is a cause, rather than a consequence, of the team’s surge in form.In a stadium long derided as among the quietest in English soccer, a crowd that had come to be seen as an advertisement for the dangers of the game’s gentrification — too posh, effectively, to push its team — has suddenly found its voice.That transformation can be traced not only to the energy and impetus provided by the group that has coalesced around a handful of founders — the Ashburton Army, inspired by the ultra faction factions common in European and South American soccer but still relatively rare in England — but to the determination of the club itself to allow them to solve a problem that dated back at least a generation.After all, the night before the biggest game of the season, as they sought to put the finishing touches on their work, someone had to let them in.Fans were never the problem at the Emirates. The atmosphere was.Ray Herlihy of RedAction, an Arsenal fan group.The blame for Arsenal’s reputation as a sedate, subdued sort of place is often placed on its departure from its longtime home at Highbury for the grand, sweeping bowl of the Emirates in 2006. Arsène Wenger, the manager who oversaw the relocation, always felt that Arsenal had “left its soul at Highbury.”It is a poetic, faintly romantic telling of history, but it may not be an accurate one. “The reputation started at Highbury,” said Ray Herlihy, founder of RedAction, a group that has been working to improve the atmosphere at Arsenal for two decades. “It was at Highbury that I got involved. That was where the Highbury Library nickname began.” All that was lost in the move, it turned out, was the rhyme.Unquestionably, the new stadium accentuated the issues. Clusters of fans who had sat together at Highbury suddenly found themselves separated. The Emirates’ design meant there was no obvious focal point where the noisiest, most fervent fans could gather. Highbury had boasted the twin poles of the Clock End and the North Bank; the Emirates had no natural equivalent.Most damaging of all was the divergence between the cost of tickets and the success of the team. The Emirates, famously, was home to the most expensive season ticket in English soccer. With younger fans priced out, the crowd started to skew older. “For a while, I think we had the highest average age of season-ticket holder,” Herlihy said. “And you’re not as animated at 65 as you might be at 25.”At the same time, Arsenal’s fortunes were waning. Wenger’s later years were marked not by title challenges but by an annual struggle simply to qualify for the Champions League, a decline that gave rise to a bitter, internecine debate over whether the Frenchman had outstayed his welcome.“There had been years of the Wenger Out campaign,” said Remy Marsh, a founder of the Ashburton Army (though he has, he said, subsequently “stepped away” from the group.) “There was an undeniable toxicity.” Much of it was captured, every week, by the cameras of Arsenal Fan TV, full of furious rants and factional squabbles. “It ruined a whole generation,” Marsh said.By the end of the last decade, pretty much everyone agreed that the atmosphere at the Emirates was in dire need of repair. One described it as “flat.” Herlihy admitted the club’s games “struggled” to generate much noise. Marsh called it “lackluster.”“The chants were lacking,” Marsh said. “There wasn’t much variation. It had become a stigma for the club.”Arsenal, it turned out, was harboring much the same thought.The Ashburton Army, at the outset, was hardly a heavyweight organization. It was an attempt to bring elements of the ultra spirit to Arsenal — the big tifo displays, the pyrotechnics; “they were always singing, always supporting,” one of the group’s leaders said, “and I didn’t see why we couldn’t have that here” — but it was based around a single group chat. The Army, then, had barely more than a dozen members.That was enough, though, to catch the club’s eye. Arsenal was not unique among Premier League clubs in trying to solve the riddle presented by the league’s global appeal: how to maintain an atmosphere when its stadium was, increasingly, filled by corporate guests and day-tripping tourists there to sample the experience, rather than contribute to it.Its solution may offer a blueprint to other teams with precisely the same problem. “We encourage our staff to listen informally to fans,” said Vinai Venkatesham, Arsenal’s chief executive.When Marsh emailed the club to outline what the group hoped to achieve, they were invited to meet with the fan liaison team. The Ashburton Army wanted to remain independent, but the club was happy not only to tolerate them, but to help.Flags placed by the Ashburton Army before the Tottenham match.A band playing the fans out after the home team’s 3-1 win.That resolve was only strengthened, Venkatesham said, by the coronavirus pandemic. “We had 62 games without fans,” he said. “It gave us perspective and time to evaluate ourselves, to ask if we were listening enough, if the fans felt like they were at the center of every decision.”The sight of the Emirates “standing silent” for a year, he said, reinforced the idea that “fans were not just an ingredient for football, they were the ingredient.” We want fans to feel close and connected to the club,” Venkatesham said. “The Emirates Stadium is the epicenter for that, and from there it spreads out across the globe.”Herlihy, a veteran of Arsenal’s fan outreach programs, had long felt the club paid lip service to the idea of listening to their views. “They talked a good game,” he said. “But there was no real engagement.”That changed, Herlihy said, after the onset of the pandemic and the controversy over Arsenal’s involvement in the short-lived European Super League. “You know what they say: The streets don’t forget,” he said. “After that, there was a real change of tone. They engaged properly with these issues.”The effects of that have been many and varied. The club has, at the instigation of the players, embraced the work of Louis Dunford, a local songwriter; one of his songs, known as “North London Forever,” has become a sort of unofficial Arsenal anthem, played before the start of every game at the Emirates. “It happened organically,” said Venkatesham. “None of it can be forced.”Arsenal officials think the increasingly raucous atmosphere at the Emirates is a cause, rather than a consequence, of the team’s surge in form. Arsenal leads the Premier League heading into a weekend visit from Liverpool. Other changes have been small, barely perceptible — the club has made it easier for fans to sell tickets for games they cannot attend, and has warned that season-ticket holders who regularly leave their seats empty will be stripped of their rights to them — but have contributed, Herlihy said, to a sense that fans are being heard.None more so than the Ashburton Army. When fans returned to stadiums, the club helped to move its growing ranks — now comprising a couple of hundred members — en masse. “When we started, we were sitting at the back of a block,” one of the group’s leaders said. “That made it hard for the noise to travel.” Their new slot, in what has been known since 2010 as the stadium’s Clock End, is at the very front. The acoustics there, they say, are much better.“We try and support fan groups however we can,” Venkatesham said. The banner RedAction unfurled at the North London derby — spanning the width of the stadium — had, for example, been financed by the club. Arsenal does not have the same relationship with the Ashburton Army, but it does, he said, “give them access to the stadium so they can set up before games.”After two decades of trying, the approach seems to have worked. Nobody is under any illusions: It helps, of course, that Arteta has put together not just a bright, young team, stocked with homegrown players, but a winning one, too. But just as they have driven the atmosphere at the Emirates, so the atmosphere has driven them.“The Ashburton Army have shown the rest of the stadium how it should be done,” Herlihy said. His seat, at the opposite end of the stadium, affords him a perfect view of the group in action: 90 minutes of “noise and movement,” every single one of them dressed not in club colors, but in the black uniform of any self-respecting ultra.“They’re doing what we all did years ago, and what we thought you couldn’t do any more,” he said. “They’re going to the football with their mates, and they’re having fun. And it’s more fun to have fun at football.” More

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      The Portland Thorns Become the Face of a Scandal in Women’s Soccer

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      The Portland Thorns were once the pride of U.S. women’s soccer. But after a report said the club shielded a disgraced coach and thwarted an abuse investigation, even the players are demanding a housecleaning.Everybody knew Paul Riley was a problem.The first tangible sign came after the 2014 season, when players on the women’s soccer team he coached, the Portland Thorns, complained about his behavior in an anonymous survey.“We got used to being called dumb, stupid, slow, idiotic, retarded,” one player wrote. Another said, “Being subject to verbal abuse and sexism shouldn’t exist in this league by any coach.”The comments were distributed to executives throughout the National Women’s Soccer League and the United States Soccer Federation, which effectively ran the N.W.S.L. at the time. No one did anything about them, according to a withering report on abuse in women’s soccer. Riley did not respond to messages asking for comment when the report was released on Monday.The indifference of Sunil Gulati, who was the president of U.S. Soccer, demonstrates how the soccer world thought of the Thorns. Gulati told investigators that while the surveys contained important feedback, he did not remember reading the comments from Thorns players.Why not? He suspected, he told investigators, “that he overlooked them because he assumed Portland was squared away.”The report — conducted by Sally Q. Yates, the former deputy U.S. attorney general, at the behest of U.S. Soccer — issued a clarion call for dramatic change throughout women’s soccer, from the professional ranks down to the youth game, and within every organization that oversees the sport.But nowhere is that call louder than in the place that calls itself Soccer City USA, where the Thorns seemingly embody both the best and worst of women’s soccer in America.Becky Sauerbrunn suggested this week that the Thorns’ owner and others should be forced out of the N.W.S.L.Andy Lyons/Getty ImagesMerritt Paulson, the owner of the Thorns, said on Tuesday that he was temporarily “stepping away” from the team’s decision making, as would two other Thorns executives. But Paulson gave no indication that he planned to sell the team, even as one of his most team’s popular players, the defender Becky Sauerbrunn, called for him and others to be forced from the league.“You have failed in your stewardship,” Sauerbrunn said in a conference call with reporters. “And it’s my opinion that every owner and executive and U.S. Soccer official who has repeatedly failed the players, and failed to protect the players, who have hidden behind legalities, and who have not participated fully in these investigations, should be gone.”The N.W.S.L. has been on precarious financial footing since its founding a decade ago, but the Thorns had for years been viewed as a beacon of what women’s professional sports in the United States could be. In the same season in which players reported that Riley called them dumb, the team set a record by drawing more than 19,000 fans to a game. Some of the world’s best players competed for the Thorns in front of the league’s most rabid supporters, and others, including national team stars like Sauerbrunn, Lindsey Horan and Crystal Dunn, found ways to join the team. The Thorns won two league championships, and went to the playoffs almost every season.And while some N.W.S.L. teams were run on shoestring budgets, with players provided substandard housing and inadequate training facilities, the Thorns always presented themselves as a first-class operation, professional in every sense of the word.As his two Oregon teams — Paulson also owns a men’s team, the Portland Timbers of Major League Soccer — won games and titles and packed Providence Park, Paulson cultivated a reputation as a fan- and media-friendly populist, the kind of owner who would banter on Twitter and shake hands on game day. That image, and his team’s commercial and on-field successes, made him a serious player in American soccer — and one with powerful supporters.The responses of Merritt Paulson and the Thorns to investigations into abuse are also under the microscope.Diego Diaz/Icon Sportswire, via Getty ImagesEven after some revelations about the Thorns’s inaction with Riley, and after the Timbers were fined by M.L.S. for failing to disclose accusations of domestic violence against a player, Paulson was praised by Don Garber, the commissioner of M.L.S. and a U.S. Soccer board member.“I have enormous faith and confidence in Merritt Paulson, who’s built from scratch one of the great sports teams, in any sport, in our country, if not throughout North America,” Garber said in February. “I know that he’s very passionate about his teams, both the Portland Timbers and the Portland Thorns, and is going to cooperate in anything that is being reviewed.”Garber and the M.L.S. did not respond to a request for comment.That faith and confidence may be shattered by allegations that the Thorns ignored complaints of sexual and verbal abuse against Riley, covered for him despite firing him for his behavior and encouraged his moves to new teams, and then worked to thwart Yates’s investigators.For a year, Thorns fans have been torn about how to straddle the line between supporting the players on a team run by people they believe are failing them, with some still attending games but boycotting merchandise and concessions stands, and others simply not going.“Many friends and volunteering colleagues stopped attending games long ago,” said Rachel Greenough, 39, who is a member of the Rose City Riveters, a Thorns supporters group that has called for Paulson to sell. “They felt like they could not be in that stadium because it felt like an emotional burden they didn’t want to take on, or they didn’t want to give money to the organization. I totally understand that.”The team’s inaction over player complaints about Riley, and the steps several Thorns executives — including Paulson — took to help him find another N.W.S.L. job, cannot be blamed on ignorance. As the report makes clear, the team knew everything.The Thorns, in fact, dismissed Riley after the 2015 season, days after a player, Meleana Shim, made a formal complaint to the team that Riley had sexually harassed her, presided over a toxic workplace and coerced her and another player to kiss in front of him.That decision was made, however, only after years of complaints. Riley’s sexual misconduct was an “open secret” by then — known by players, a coach, an owner and an assistant general manager for another team, according to the report. Players complained in surveys. The Thorns’ athletic trainer told her superiors that Riley went against medical recommendations and endangered players. Riley also had multiple sexual relationships with players throughout his career as a coach.Altogether, the report painted a picture of a coach who crossed every line imaginable and whose conduct was reported to those in charge, and yet his contract was only terminated after his team missed the playoffs for the first time. The Thorns then actively assisted Riley with getting another job in the N.W.S.L., with the Western New York Flash.The Thorns did not say publicly that Riley’s contract had been terminated after a formal complaint and a human resources investigation that substantiated many of the complaints. They publicly wished him well. When a Flash executive spoke to Gavin Wilkinson, then the Thorns general manager, Wilkinson told him Riley was “put in a bad position by the player” and that Wilkinson “would hire him in a heartbeat.” Reached by phone, Wilkinson declined to comment.Riley speaking to the media after a Thorns practice in 2014.Randy L. Rasmussen/The Oregonian, via Associated PressRiley coached six more seasons on the strength of that recommendation.In the year since the stories of Shim and Sinead Farrelly, a former Thorns player who said she was coerced into a sexual relationship with Riley, were made public, leading to his firing by the North Carolina Courage, immense scrutiny has been focused on the Thorns front office.Besides endorsing Riley, Wilkinson jokingly called a player a demeaning name and was critical of another’s sexuality, according to what players told investigators. Wilkinson denied both claims, but he was placed on administrative leave by the Thorns last October. Three months later he was reinstated.This summer The Oregonian reported on “an atmosphere of disrespect and intimidation toward women” at the Thorns cultivated by Mike Golub, the team president. Cindy Parlow Cone, the president of U.S. Soccer and a former national team player, told investigators that while she was coaching the Thorns in 2013, Golub asked her, “What’s on your bucket list besides sleeping with me?”When Cone informed Paulson, the Thorns owner, about the incident months later, he told Cone that he wished she had told him about it when it occurred. According to Paulson, Golub is currently undergoing “remediation” and was not allowed to speak to investigators for the report. Golub did not respond to messages seeking comment.Both Golub and Wilkinson were “relieved of their duties” by the Thorns on Wednesday. The responses by Paulson and the Thorns to investigations into abuse are also under the microscope. Last year Paulson pledged transparency and to cooperate with any and all investigations. But according to the Yates report, he and the team did anything but that.“The Portland Thorns interfered with our access to relevant witnesses and raised specious legal arguments in an attempt to impede our use of relevant documents,” the report said.There could be more revelations to come, as a joint investigation into abuse by the N.W.S.L. and its players’ association is expected to be completed this year. The Thorns could win their third championship later this month, but some players, at least, would not see it simply as another success by the sport’s best-run team.“The jerseys that we’re wearing — it’s hard to be happy in them,” said Dunn on Wednesday. “It’s hard to find joy in wearing it.”Andrew Das More