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      The World Cup Is a Feeling, One That Money Can’t Buy

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      The tournament is, at heart, a feeling, and FIFA and Qatar may be forgetting that no amount of spending is a substitute.The good news is that it’s a yes from the gigantic, fire-breathing spider. It is hard, after all, to imagine a World Cup without its finest tradition: 50 tons of decommissioned crane arranged into the shape of a monstrous arachnid, pumped full of highly flammable fuel and then stocked with hopefully less flammable D.J.s.The spider will form the centerpiece of one of the cultural highlights of this fall’s World Cup in Qatar: a monthlong electronic music festival called the Arcadia Spectacular, staged just south of Doha and boasting what the promotional material calls an “electrifying atmosphere, extraordinary sculpted stages and the most immersive shows on earth.”The idea has been modeled, fairly transparently, on England’s Glastonbury Festival — the spider itself has been a regular feature there for a decade — and, though it was only announced at a relatively late stage in preparations for the World Cup, organizers expect it to draw some 200,000 fans. Each and every one of them should be warned: They will, it turns out, be “mesmerized late into the night.”The spider, though, will not be alone, which presumably can be a problem when you are a nightmarish metallic behemoth.The World Cup’s newest entrant: the Glastonbury Festival’s fire-breathing, laser-shooting spider.Dylan Martinez/ReutersThe Arcadia Spectacular is not the only music festival to be tacked on to Qatar 2022. There will be another at Al Wakrah, hosted by a company called MDLBEAST: you can tell it will be cutting-edge, because it’s in block capital letters and also has done away with some of its vowels, the most old-fashioned type of letter.Those events, though, form only a part of the entertainment tapestry on offer to fans over the course of the tournament. There is Al Maha Island, with its ice-skating rink, its circus and its theme park; Lusail, the first-ever city built for a World Cup, where the central boulevard will feature “vehicle parades” and futuristic light shows; the Doha Corniche, four miles of roving street performers and “carnival atmosphere”; and, of course, the beach clubs, the fan park and, around every stadium for every game, the catchily named “Last Mile Cultural Activation.”Qatar, in other words, has been as good as its word: It promised it would put on a show, and it has delivered. No expense has been spared. No stone has been left unturned. Its plans for what might be termed the tournament experience are grand, and ambitious, and spectacular.It is just a shame that they are not, in any way, reflective of what fans want or need, and that they so betray such a fundamental misunderstanding — on the part of both the local organizers and, more damningly, FIFA itself — of what it is that makes a World Cup special.It is not the soccer that makes the World Cup, not really. There are times that the games are breathtaking and nail-biting and heartbreaking, of course, when what happens on the field is etched on to the collective memory like a bright, lasting tattoo or an aching scar. But more often it is something more ethereal. The World Cup, at heart, is a feeling.Read More on the 2022 World CupLavish Spending: No expense has been spared in putting on a show in Qatar. But the tournament is a feeling that money can’t buy, our soccer correspondent writes.A New Flash Point: An effort by European soccer federations to highlight gay rights with rainbow armbands during the World Cup could force a collision between FIFA rules and social campaigns.United States: The American men’s soccer team has cycled through strikers during the qualifying period. It needs to settle on one before heading to Qatar.Brazil: As the team begins its quest for a sixth World Cup, it appears to have the resources needed to succeed — though Neymar still shoulders much of the load.The most memorable thing about Russia, four years ago, for example, was not the French team that emerged victorious. It was not the Croatia side that carried a nation of five million to the cusp of ultimate glory. It was not even the sight of Germany, the reigning champion, crashing out in the group stage, or the baffling self-immolation of Spain.No, what made Russia 2018 — particularly now, given all that has happened, given how unreal that month in the sun now feels — was Nikolskaya, the street in central Moscow that became a hub for fans from all over the world, full of flags and bunting and song. It was the sight of thousands upon thousands of Peruvians on the streets of Saransk, a red sash across their hearts. It was the sense that, even in a vast land of steppe and mountain and forest, you were never more than six feet from a Colombian.The glittering lights and teeming crowds on Nikolskaya Street helped bring Russia’s World Cup to life. Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA, via ShutterstockThat joy, that sense of togetherness, does not just touch those in attendance. It spreads like a smile to the many, many more watching at home. It provides not only the soundtrack to the games but the backdrop, too. It turns stadiums from sterile bowls into something filled with life. It takes a mere soccer tournament and turns it into an event. It cannot be forced. It cannot be commanded into an existence. It has to gestate, develop, ferment.There are many reasons to criticize the idea of a World Cup in Qatar. First and foremost, there are the ongoing concerns about human rights, the queasy amorality of a tournament built by and on indentured labor. There is the troubling uncertainty, too, over quite how welcome gay fans might be, over whether this truly will be a tournament for everyone.But though it pales in significance to those issues, it is worth pausing to consider what sort of World Cup this might be, too, because it is there that it is possible to glimpse most clearly not only who Qatar — and particularly FIFA — thinks the world’s biggest sporting event is for, but what it is.It was in August, three months before the tournament was scheduled to start, that Qatar announced the Arcadia Spectacular, complete with its horrifying steel tarantula. It seemed odd to unveil such a major addition to the slate at such short notice, but there has been a distinctly last-minute air to much of the World Cup. It is as if all of the effort, all of the energy, was poured into securing the tournament and building the stadiums, so that only at the last moment did anyone wonder about all the people who might turn up to watch.Nowhere is that clearer than in the accommodations that are supposed to house the million or so fans expected to attend in November and December. Even now, less than two months out, not all of the lodging being prepared for the tournament is available to book, for the very good reason that not all of it is ready.And then there is the cost. The tournament’s organizers insist that Qatar has a “comfortable inventory for fans”: there will, they say, be “up to” 130,000 rooms to house fans every night of the tournament. There is “something to suit everyone,” too, with options ranging from hotels to villas and apartments and on to cruise ships, luxury tents, simple cabins and even camper vans. The cheapest option is “as low as $80 per room per night,” a spokesman for the Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy said.Luxury hotels like the one that will host Mexico’s team are out of reach for most fans.Karim Jaafar/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhile that is true, it is not quite clear what that $80 buys you. Several organizations representing fan interests harbor significant doubts about what sort of facilities will be on offer in the cabin parks. It is not yet clear, one representative said, if those staying in the parks will be able to watch games on television, or quite how they would access food and water. (The Supreme Committee insists that there will be food trucks at each of the sites.)Nor is it entirely obvious quite what proportion of the available accommodation could be counted as “suitable for the budget-conscious traveler,” as the website of the Qatar Accommodation Agency, the central portal for booking rooms in Qatar during the tournament, puts it. (The Supreme Committee did not disclose, when asked, what percentage of the available rooms in Qatar for the tournament might be considered relatively low-cost.)There are, currently, apartments available for $102 per person, per night, for certain dates, though they come with a warning that availability is running low. Miss out on them and the price creeps up quickly. Other options start at $300 a night. A luxury tent goes for more than $400. A berth on a cruise ship starts at around $500. Hotels can stretch into the thousands of dollars for a single night.It is not unusual, of course, for prices to soar during a major event. Just as they might at the Champions League final, say, or at the Super Bowl, fans expect to be gouged to some extent when they choose — and it is important to remember that it is a choice — to attend. The price of flights goes up almost instantaneously. A premium is added to hotel rooms. Private renters spot an opportunity. There is nothing quite like sports for a grand celebration of capitalism at its most rapacious.But while that problem is certainly not unique to Qatar, it is inarguably more pronounced. South Africa and Brazil and Russia could draw on an existing network of cheap hostels and midrange hotels, as well as private homes available on Airbnb.Their prices spiked, too, of course, and the photos — from bitter personal experience — did not always tally with the reality, but it was possible to attend all of those tournaments on a relative budget. The more adventurous could hire a van, or pitch a tent, or squeeze into a hotel room with far more friends than is advisable.None of those options are available in Qatar. The existing hotel infrastructure is almost exclusively luxury. Many of the hotels that have been built for the tournament, bafflingly, are the same. The few hostels seem to be booked up. Belatedly, the authorities have permitted Qatari residents to rent out their homes privately, but doing so at the last minute does not exactly scream “low cost.”A suite inside Al Thumama Stadium is built for a certain class of World Cup fan.Mohammed Dabbous/ReutersThis is the World Cup as Qatar envisages it, and seemingly as FIFA does, too: a premium product, a lifestyle experience that can be acquired at a certain price point, a playground for the corporate class, the itinerant rich, the luxury traveler. It is an event designed by consultants, for consultants, the sort of place in which a gigantic, fire-breathing spider is hired to disguise in spectacle the absence of sensation.And this World Cup will, sadly, be poorer for it. A carnival atmosphere is not something that can be commanded into existence. It is not possible to take all of the stages and sets and logistics of Glastonbury and simply recreate them somewhere else, just as it is not possible to take the organic, authentic melting of thousands of fans from around the world and replace it with a series of “cultural events” and “sponsor activations.”What makes the World Cup, what always makes the World Cup, are the people. Not the ones on the field, not even the ones in the stands, but the ones who come just to be there, just to sample it, to add color and sound and joy.It is hard not to worry that many of those fans will have been priced out of Qatar, or excluded by virtue of not being allowed into the country without a ticket for a game, and that with them the feeling will change, turning the tournament into an ersatz version of itself, a tribute to all the things money can buy — up to an including a flame-throwing spider — and all of the things that it cannot.CorrespondenceSpeaking of all the things that money can buy, Thomas Stratford has been wondering about Graham Potter. “If the main reason for introducing the transfer window in European soccer was to provide greater stability for clubs, what’s the rationale for excluding managers from a similar system?” Thomas asks.There is, as we all know, only one thing worse than a bandwagon-jumper, and that is a bandwagon-jumper who then claims not only to have built the bandwagon, but invented the concept of motion. So I would hope that you would believe me when I say that this is something I have advocated for a while: There absolutely should be only one window in the season in which you can change managers.Man in the news: Graham Potter of Chelsea.David Klein/ReutersAnd, seeing as we’re on a roll, Shawn Donnelly is here with another fine suggestion: “With so many Premier League teams paying huge money for Brazilian players, why don’t Premier League teams simply buy a Brazilian team and use it as a farm team for their club?”They’re starting, Shawn. Manchester City is about to add a Brazilian club to its ever-expanding network of clubs, and I believe a couple of the investors at Crystal Palace are looking to do the same. It makes perfect sense not only for Brazilian players, but as a way to get a head start across all of South America.And a final question from Erin Koch. “The commissioner of the N.W.S.L. was interviewed at halftime of the attendance-record breaking San Diego Wave v. Angel City match, and she very strongly emphasized her league’s independence as a differentiator and advantage compared to the W.S.L. in England. Is independence realistically likely to be an advantage? Wouldn’t it be better to have the financial backing of some of the world’s biggest clubs?”Angel City and San Diego broke the N.W.S.L. attendance record last week by drawing a crowd of more than 32,000.Denis Poroy/Getty ImagesThis is a key question, and one that I’ll devote a full column to in due course, but my instinct is: no. Having a major (men’s) team bankrolling an operation offers an obvious short-term advantage, clearly. But my worry for the women’s game in Europe has long been that as long as it is attached to the men’s game, it will always be second priority. The N.W.S.L.’s model is healthier long-term, I think, at least in principle. More

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      Neymar Is Still a Singular Star, but He Has More Help on Brazil

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      As Brazil begins its quest for a sixth World Cup, the team’s resources run deep — though Neymar still shoulders much of the load.LE HAVRE, France — As the announcer at the Stade Océane cycled through Brazil’s team on Friday, before the squad dismantled Ghana, 3-0, a murmur of appreciation greeted each familiar, stellar name. Alisson was granted gentle applause. Thiago Silva earned a respectful, admiring cheer. Raphinha drew a sizzle of anticipation.And then, leaving just a hint of a dramatic pause, the announcer came to Neymar.There were, perhaps, mitigating circumstances. The 30-year-old Neymar was, after all, on home turf, or something very close to it. Le Havre, a sleepy port town on the Normandy coast, sits just a couple of hours northwest of Paris. The stands were dotted not just with jerseys in Brazil’s bright canary yellow but with the rich, deep blue of his Paris St.-Germain club team, too.But still, the contrast in his reception and those of his teammates felt telling. Brazil’s squad shimmers with stars. Alisson may be the finest goalkeeper on the planet. Thiago Silva is probably the best defender of his generation. Casemiro was part of the most dominant midfield in modern history.Even among their number, though, Neymar stands out. Their fame is not comparable to his, not really; the excitement he engenders, the adoration he receives and the wonder he instills are of a different order of magnitude. It was Neymar who was picked out on the big screen, again and again, during warm-ups. It was Neymar who had to sing his national anthem with a camera no more than six inches from his face. In a team full of headline acts, he remains the undisputed main event, the leading character, the center of gravity.For now, at least. As the roar that had met Neymar’s name subsided, the announcer still had one player left to introduce. “Numéro vingt,” he said — “Vinicius Junior.” The cheer that followed was not quite so loud as Neymar’s. It did not last quite as long. But the difference was not so stark as might have been expected.Read More on the 2022 World CupA New Start Date: A last-minute request for the tournament to begin a day earlier was only the latest bit of uncertainty to surround soccer’s showcase event.Chile’s Failed Bid: The country’s soccer federation had argued Ecuador should be ejected from the tournament to the benefit of the Chilean team. FIFA disagreed.Golden Sunset: This year’s World Cup will most likely be the last for stars like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo — a profound watershed for soccer.Senegalese Pride: Aliou Cissé, one of the best soccer coaches in Africa, has given Senegal a new sense of patriotism. Next up: the World Cup.With two months to go before the World Cup, Tite, the Brazil coach, would not have it any other way. It has been 20 years since Brazil was declared champion of the world; miss out again in Qatar, and the wait for a sixth crown will match the lacuna between the third and fourth.More troublingly still, in the past four tournaments, it has not really gone close: beaten comfortably by the French in 2006, the Dutch in 2010 and the Belgians in Russia four years ago. The team made the semifinals on home soil in 2014, of course, but the less said about how that particular story ended, from a Brazilian point of view, the better.That defeat, though, highlighted the problem that has beset Brazil for the past decade. Neymar was missing with an injury as Germany etched a scar on the national psyche in the Maracana in 2014 (joined on the sidelines, not insignificantly, by Thiago Silva). In his absence, Brazil seemed bereft, adrift, unable to conceive of how to win the game without its leading man, the player to whom the team, as much as the country, was in thrall.He was present in Russia, but he was subdued, his legs weary and his inspiration dulled, easily corralled by Belgium in the stifling heat. Still, though, Brazil continued to look to him, to hope that he might somehow lift himself, and carry them with him. If he could not, they did not seem to know who might.This time around, things should be different. Vinicius, a few months on from scoring the winning goal in a Champions League final, is surging, European soccer’s breakout star. His teammates and his nation have rallied around him in the aftermath of the racist abuse he has received in Spain for having the temerity to celebrate his goals; several fans had made their way to the Stade Océane to urge him to keep dancing.He is not alone. Brazil’s attacking resources run so deep that Tite did not even have to call up Gabriel Jésus and Gabriel Martinelli, Arsenal’s forwards, for his squad; he could afford to introduce Rodrygo, Vinicius’s Real Madrid teammate, with just a couple of minutes to go. Roberto Firmino did not even make it off the bench. For what may be the first time in his international career, Neymar does not need to feel that everything hinges on him.Perhaps his performance, then, can be explained by a newfound sense of freedom. Perhaps he is playing unfettered by the suffocating pressure that he has carried for so long. Perhaps, on what may be the strongest team that Brazil has boasted since 2002 — a team, certainly, more than capable of ending the country’s wait — he feels more comfortable, more capable of expressing himself.Whatever the reason, his display against Ghana was that of a man neither willing nor ready to vacate center stage. It would have been enough that he created two of Brazil’s three goals, both of them finished off by Richarlíson — Marquinhos scored the other, a thunderous header from a corner — but that was the reward for, rather than the total of, everything he did.Neymar, it is fair to say, looks different this season. He has now registered 11 goals and 10 assists in 12 games for club and country, a streak of form that makes it feel somehow deeply strange that roughly two months ago, not only did P.S.G. appear willing to sell him, but nobody seemed desperately keen to buy the most expensive player in the sport’s history.The raw numbers, as ever, are merely an illustration. There has been a sharpness, a poise and, perhaps most encouraging of all, an invention to Neymar over the past couple of months. Tite has said that he is “flying,” his “speed and execution in perfection sync.” Even Thierry Henry, habitually unimpressed, feels he has “come to tell everyone: Don’t forget me.”Against Ghana, it was there in his delivery, whip-smart and inch-perfect. It was there in the moments he sped up, feinting and shifting his weight and accelerating away from his opponents. And, most of all, it was there in the moments he slowed down. More than once, he found himself with the ball at his feet, in the penalty area, and he seemed to stop, to pause, before picking the right pass, the perfect pass, the one that carved Ghana open.That has always been Neymar’s gift: picking his moments. As the World Cup hovers into view, as that sixth star starts to exert a gravity on Brazil, he seems to have done it again. More

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      Pressing World Cup Question for U.S.: Who’ll Score the Goals?

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      An American team that cycled through strikers during the qualifying period needs to settle on one before heading to Qatar. The good news is some of the options are hitting their stride.COLOGNE, Germany — Evaluating any soccer player, with all the multifaceted layers of performance, all the twists and turns of action on the field, poses a complicated challenge. Yet the game’s strikers are so frequently reduced to a kind of rudimentary binary:Are they scoring goals or not?As the United States men’s soccer team gathered this week to train and play their final two exhibition matches before the World Cup begins in November, the state of the team’s strikers — the internal competition, the ongoing uncertainty over whom the team could call upon in two months — highlighted the broader anxiety and excitement of the current moment in world soccer.There are, everyone realizes, precious few moments left to impress coaches. After a game Friday against Japan in Düsseldorf, Germany, the United States will face Saudi Arabia on Tuesday night in Spain. After that, the next time the team will be together in the same city will be in Qatar, only days before its World Cup opener on Nov. 21 against Wales.For the American strikers, that means this final camp represents one last chance to claim a starting job that has effectively been up for grabs for more than a year. Josh Sargent got the first chance. Then came Jordan Pefok. Ricardo Pepi got a long look after an early scoring burst in qualifying, but as the tournament wound on others cycled in, too. Jesus Ferreira. Gyasi Zardes. Pepi again.Ricardo Pepi, center, with Jesus Ferreira before a World Cup qualifier in March. Both have been given a chance in the No. 9 role.Moises Castillo/Associated PressThe concern is that no one forward has risen above the rest to claim the No. 9 role wholly as his own. Less than a year ago, the problem was that no American striker seemed to be playing particularly well for his club. The problem now may be a more welcome one: Essentially all the contenders for the job seem in recent weeks to have found something close to their top form.Sargent, for example, already has six goals for his English club, Norwich City. Pepi recently scored his first after a loan to a club in the Dutch Eredivisie. Pefok’s Union Berlin is, surprisingly, leading the Bundesliga. But scoring for the United States, as all of them know, has proved considerably more difficult to replicate, at least up front: Of the 18 goals scored by the Americans in their 14 qualifying games, only four came from a forward playing a traditional striker’s role.Coach Gregg Berhalter has identified at least a half dozen strikers ahead of his final roster selection — a group that includes Ferreira, Pefok, Pepi, Sargent, Brandon Vazquez and Haji Wright — and is expected to whittle the list down to three. Given the heated nature of the positional battles — and the stakes of securing, or missing out on, a World Cup place — Berhalter said on Thursday that he had noticed some understandable nerves and anxiety within the team as a whole in the early days of training.“There’s a slight hint of it — it’s not something palpable that you can feel — but you see a couple guys are tight in some exercises,” Berhalter said. The coaching staff has tried, perhaps in vain, to put everyone at ease, he said. “The message is, ‘Go do your thing, and let the chips fall where they may.’”Josh Sargent, center, has six goals for Norwich City this season.Wolfgang Rattay/ReutersJordan Pefok, who is not in camp, has helped Union Berlin into first place in the Bundesliga.Hendrik Schmidt/DPA, via Associated PressThe goals that did come from strikers in qualifying were not shared widely. Pepi tallied three in over two games in September and October but then faded out of the picture after struggling following a January transfer. Ferreira scored in the second-to-last game of the qualifying tournament, a 5-1 rout of Panama.Read More on the 2022 World CupA New Start Date: A last-minute request for the tournament to begin a day earlier was only the latest bit of uncertainty to surround soccer’s showcase event.Chile’s Failed Bid: The country’s soccer federation had argued Ecuador should be ejected from the tournament to the benefit of the Chilean team. FIFA disagreed.Golden Sunset: This year’s World Cup will most likely be the last for stars like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo — a profound watershed for soccer.Senegalese Pride: Aliou Cissé, one of the best soccer coaches in Africa, has given Senegal a new sense of patriotism. Next up: the World Cup.Ferreira, 21, who had a four-goal performance in a match this June, has been perhaps the steadiest, if not the most spectacular, performer of late.In an interview this week, he opened up about the pressure of competition for spots and how his past struggles on the field had affected his mental health. The spotlight of playing around the penalty area seems to make strikers most susceptible to armchair psychoanalysis. But the singular nature of the job’s expectations can weigh on a player as well.“I’ve always had a problem with my mood,” Ferreira said. “When some things don’t go my way on the field or I mess up, I kind of tend to shut down, and I knew that from the beginning.”But Ferreira has thrived this year, scoring 18 goals in 31 matches for F.C. Dallas in M.L.S. He attributed that recent run of good form in part to his work with a sports psychologist who has helped him focus on positive aspects of his game and not let himself get overly focused on goals — or the absence of them.The ebb and flow of form highlighted by Ferreira could be plainly observed in Sargent, too. When the Americans began the final round of their World Cup qualifying campaign last year, Sargent seemed to be Berhalter’s preferred striker. He started two of the team’s first three games in September, but he failed to make an impact and was not a factor for the rest of the qualifying tournament.At the time, Sargent was playing out of position for a Norwich City team tumbling toward relegation from the Premier League. This season, in the second-tier Championship, Sargent has found his groove with six goals in 10 games.“My confidence is at an all-time high at the moment,” Sargent said. “I’m just trying to keep that momentum going as long as possible and keep scoring goals.”Berhalter had struggled to get a read on Sargent, 22, during his last club season. His team was struggling, and he was often playing in a wider and more defensive role as it was overwhelmed by better rivals. In recent weeks, he has been returned to the No. 9 position that both he and the American staff preferred for him, and the goals have returned.Berhalter said he was pleased to see him experience a personal resurgence, pointing out the refinement of late in Sargent’s movement off the ball and the contact and placement of his shots.“As a coaching staff, we felt for him,” Berhalter said. “We were watching these games, and we felt bad. It’s not nice to have to watch that.” He added, “Now he’s gotten these chances, these opportunities, and he’s producing.”When Sargent failed to produce early in qualifying, it was Pepi who took advantage, briefly claiming the position. But he soon began to struggle, too, while trying to find his footing after leaving M.L.S. for Germany. Last week, Pepi, 19, scored for Groningen of the Dutch league to end a personal 30-game scoreless drought.“I’m happy he’s back in his goal-scoring form,” Ferreira said of Pepi.Coach Gregg Berhalter’s job gets much easier with a reliable scorer up front.Martin Meissner/Associated PressHow will the roster be finalized? A player’s wider body of work matters. But for strikers, more than anyone, current form — measured most plainly, but not exclusively, in goals — seems to carry a significant amount of weight.“All I could say to them is that, you know, perform the best you can with your clubs, keep trying to score goals, and we’ll evaluate it, and we’ll try to get it right to help the team,” Berhalter said. “We may not get it right. You know, that’s part of it also. We may make mistakes.”Any focus on club form could keep the door open for Pefok, Vasquez and Wright, who were not invited to this camp. In the end, though, whoever emerges on the final roster in November, and whoever gets the call for the World Cup opener against Wales, will have endured a crucible of internal competition.“We’re a brotherhood, we’re a family, but we’re also here to compete,” said midfielder Weston McKennie, one of the players whose place at the World Cup feels assured. “It’s a dog-eat-dog world. You can be friends off the field, but when it comes to on the field, you’re going for my position, I’m going for your position.” More

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      Rainbow Armbands Are Flash Point for Qatar World Cup

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      An effort by European soccer federations to highlight gay rights could force a collision between FIFA rules and social campaigns.LONDON — FIFA and World Cup organizers came under pressure on Wednesday from a group of European soccer federations who said they planned to have their captains wear armbands with a rainbow heart design as part of an anti-discrimination campaign during international matches and at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.The group of European soccer federations, which includes the World Cup contenders England, Germany and France, joined forces on Wednesday in announcing their intention to have their captains wear the armbands, which feature a so-called One Love design that is similar in design — but not identical — to the well-known Pride flag that serves as a symbol for the gay rights movement.One Love ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜In a statement against discrimination and for diversity, @Manuel_Neuer will wear a special captain’s armband for our upcoming Nations League games and during the World Cup in Qatar ©️ pic.twitter.com/fiORl1Nu0t— Germany (@DFB_Team_EN) September 21, 2022
      The Dutch soccer federation, which has played a leading role in the campaign, said eight European teams that have qualified for Qatar would take part, and that two others would wear the armbands in coming national team matches in a European competition, the Nations League. The group of national federations includes the teams of Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Wales, Sweden and Switzerland.The announcement is the latest front in a rift between soccer governing bodies and nations competing in Qatar who have faced sustained pressure from fans, human rights groups and others to take a stand against the Gulf country’s laws against homosexuality and the treatment of the hundreds of thousands of foreign laborers who helped the tiny emirate prepare for the Middle East’s first World Cup.Read More on the 2022 World CupA New Start Date: A last-minute request for the tournament to begin a day earlier was only the latest bit of uncertainty to surround soccer’s showcase event.Chile’s Failed Bid: The country’s soccer federation had argued Ecuador should be ejected from the tournament to the benefit of the Chilean team. FIFA disagreed.Golden Sunset: This year’s World Cup will most likely be the last for stars like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo — a profound watershed for soccer.Senegalese Pride: Aliou Cissé, one of the best soccer coaches in Africa, has given Senegal a new sense of patriotism. Next up: the World Cup.The armbands have not yet been approved by soccer’s governing body, FIFA, which has strict rules on how teams can be dressed at the World Cup, and on the insertion of politics and social issues onto the field of play. The decision by the federations to apply public pressure highlights the fine line that competing teams — as well as FIFA and its sponsors — are trying to navigate in balancing the demands of their fans and human rights groups while not upsetting Qatar, a conservative Muslim nation and the tournament’s host.“Wearing the armband together on behalf of our teams will send a clear message when the world is watching,” the England captain Harry Kane said in a statement.The armbands’ design, while using rainbow colors, stops short of matching the more common Pride flag. Qatari officials have long said that all fans are welcome at the monthlong tournament in November and December, but security officials there also have warned supporters not to travel with the rainbow flag for their own safety, and it remains unclear how same-sex couples will be treated when it comes to policing and accommodations.For FIFA, the armbands are merely the latest lightning rod for a tournament that has stirred controversy and disquiet since Qatar was first awarded hosting rights in December 2010. Earlier this week, the Polish captain Robert Lewandowski, the reigning FIFA player of the year, accepted an armband in the colors of Ukraine’s flag from the Ukrainian soccer great Andriy Shevchenko that he said he would carry with him to Qatar.Poland was among the European nations that said they would not play against Russia after its invasion of Ukraine in February. FIFA eventually banned Russia from playing international soccer, a decision that led to its elimination from the World Cup qualification playoffs.FIFA managed to fend off an appeal of the ban from Russia by arguing that it could not organize the World Cup if a large number of teams refused to play the country. The same strength-in-numbers rationale may have been behind the decision by the group of Europeans nations to have their captains wear the rainbow armbands.“Football is there for everyone and our sport must stand up for the people across the world who face discrimination and exclusion,” said Germany goalkeeper Manuel Neuer, who captains his national team. “I am proud to be sending out this message with my colleagues from the other national teams. Every single voice counts.”England’s soccer federation also announced that it would be lobbying to strengthen migrant-worker rights in Qatar, and expressed its support for compensation to be paid for any injuries and deaths during the construction phase of the World Cup. That desire stopped short of an effort from several human rights groups who are urging FIFA to create a $440 million compensation fund for workers.Felix Jakens, an official with Amnesty International in Britain, said English soccer officials should specifically push for a “fund for abused workers and the families of those who’ve died to make the World Cup happen.”Human rights groups have claimed that more than 6,000 workers have died in construction projects related to the World Cup. Qatari World Cup officials have put that number at three, limiting their responsibility to those who died specifically building stadiums for the event. More

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      Welcome to Wrexham: It’s the Future

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      Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds seem sincere about their investment, emotionally and financially, in a Welsh soccer team. But they are not mere observers in its story.The first thing, and likely the most important thing, is that Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney seem to be sincere. It is hard to be absolutely certain, of course: They are both actors, after all, and a 45-minute Zoom meeting is, on balance, probably not the ideal format in which to take the measure of someone’s soul.If their enthusiasm and affection for Wrexham, the down-at-the-heels Welsh soccer team they bought two years ago — and the community that it calls home — is an act, though, then it is a convincing one. McElhenney watches Wrexham’s games these days, while “pacing back and forth, unable to sit still,” he said. “There is nothing quite like the anxiety soccer produces.”If anything, he has got off lightly compared to Reynolds. McElhenney is a lifelong Philadelphia Eagles fan, a blessing and a curse that served to inoculate him — to some extent — against the ravages of fandom even as he fell quickly, “deeply and madly in love” with Wrexham.Reynolds, on the other hand, was pure, unsullied, defenseless. He had nurtured something of a soft spot for the Vancouver Canucks and Whitecaps, his hometown hockey and soccer teams, but admitted he would be stretching it to identify as a fan.At first, he wondered if he was resistant to the sensation. He caught only half of Wrexham’s first few games after his and McElhenney’s takeover was completed in February 2021. He was, by his own admission, “pretty passive.” It did not last. When it hit him, it hit him hard.“It is a horrible, cyclical, prophetic hellscape that never ceases or ebbs,” he said, a sentence that suggests he has come to fully understand the appeal of soccer. “I love every second, but it’s torment in equal measure. Every second is pure agony. It’s a new experience for me. I am in awe of people who have survived in that culture their whole lives.”Wrexham’s battle for promotion was more than a TV story line to its fans.Lewis Storey/Getty ImagesNeither McElhenney nor Reynolds had quite anticipated the extent of the emotional impact when, late in 2020, the former approached the latter with a proposal. McElhenney had spent a considerable portion of lockdown watching sports documentaries: the acclaimed “Sunderland ’Til I Die,” for one, and more significantly an HBO series on Diego Maradona. He decided he wanted to add his own production to the canon, and he wanted Reynolds — an acquaintance, rather than a friend, at that stage — to help bankroll it.The result, “Welcome To Wrexham,” is heartwarming and funny and appealing, but it is also difficult to categorize. At one point, Reynolds describes it — perhaps as a slip of the tongue — as a “reality show,” but that feels reductive. So, too, does the faintly euphemistic term “structured reality,” a genre most recently characterized by Netflix’s glossy “Selling Sunset.”But nor is it, strictly speaking, a documentary, not in the traditional sense, not in the way that “Sunderland ’Til I Die” was a documentary. There is a long-held rule among wildlife photographers and documentarians that they are present to observe, rather than intervene. Even David Attenborough hews to the mantra that “tragedy is part of life.” To prevent it, he said, would be “to distort the truth.”“Welcome To Wrexham,” by contrast, is inherently interventionist. Wrexham had been drifting, hopeless and forlorn, in English soccer’s fifth tier for more than a decade when it was bought, out of the blue, by two Hollywood stars. Reynolds and McElhenney are not simply telling a story. They are shaping it, too.That is exemplified, most clearly, by what appears to be an innocuous jump cut halfway through the show’s second episode. All of a sudden, the viewer is at home with Paul Rutherford, Wrexham’s locally born veteran midfielder. With more than a hint of pride, Rutherford shows off all the work he and his wife, Gemma, have done to their home: They put in the staircase, lowered the ceilings, installed a downstairs bathroom.It turns out the house is about to get a little busier. The couple already have two boys; a third is on the way. Rutherford is currently building the baby’s crib. Later, he is shown playing soccer with his oldest son. He carries him home on his shoulders. It is heartwarming, touching and deeply ominous.Anyone who has seen a nature documentary in which a young giraffe becomes separated from the herd, or a horror movie in which a teenager experiences a power failure, or an installment of “Match of the Day” in which a player is shown picking up an innocuous early yellow card, knows the cue. Something bad is about to happen.The bad, in this case, comes in Wrexham’s last game of the season, a few months after the takeover. The team needs to win to make the playoffs. Rutherford, introduced as a substitute, is sent off for a reckless challenge. He is shown in the changing room, his chest heaving, urging his teammates to win without him. They do not. Wrexham is held to a draw. Its season is over. A caption appears. Rutherford’s contract expired the next day. He was released. He was the giraffe.“I love every second, but it’s torment in equal measure,” Reynolds said of watching Wrexham, and fandom more generally. “Every second is pure agony.”Andrew Boyers/Action Images Via ReutersSuch is the cold reality of soccer, of course, a sport that has no appetite for sentiment and — at the level Wrexham occupies — no money for it, either. Countless players suffer the same fate as Rutherford every season, victims of the game’s unapologetic mercilessness. His story, apart perhaps from the circumstances of his farewell, is not especially remarkable.Reynolds and McElhenney are clear that, while they are ultimately responsible for it, they did not make that call. Personnel decisions are left to those on the ground at Wrexham, those who know the sport far better than they do. Nobody is hired or fired because it makes good drama; their commitment, Reynolds said, is simply to do the best by Wrexham as an entity.Sometimes, sadly, that means individuals have to be cast as collateral. They take no pleasure in that. “It is a terrible feeling,” Reynolds said. “You don’t want to mess with people’s livelihoods. It’s genuinely awful. It feels mercenary, but it’s also part of our responsibility to the club.”It is impossible not to feel, though, that their very presence placed a thumb on the scale. Of course, Rutherford — and the other players who were cut — might have been released by a different ownership group. Reynolds and McElhenney’s vision and ambition, though, made it certain. They are not simply telling the story. They are writing it, too.McElhenney, certainly, is aware of the irony. Sports are compelling, he said, because they are “uncontrived,” authentic. “Any piece of scripted content has been contrived and created and manipulated to make you feel a certain way,” he said. “The masters can do that to great effect; they can make you feel like you’re not being manipulated, but that is the intent. There is no manipulation in sports. What is happening is what is happening.”By documenting that, though, they are necessarily adding a layer of manipulation. Any documentary, McElhenney said, has to take a “point of view,” to tease out a narrative thread from thousands of unhelpfully unstructured and often inchoate real-life moments for viewers to consume.“There is no manipulation in sports,” McElhenney said. “What is happening is what is happening.”Patrick Mcelhenney/FX, via Associated Press“Sports are kind of meaningless to me unless I know what is at stake for someone,” Reynolds said. “What a player overcame to be there. What a club means to a community. If I think about the movies that made an impression on me, is ‘Field Of Dreams’ a movie about baseball? Not really. It’s a movie about a father and son trying to connect. That context is what pulls you in.”It is a tension that more and more clubs will confront as the lines between sport and story blur ever further. There are ever more documentaries in production — Amazon’s “All Or Nothing” series will follow the German national team at this year’s World Cup — as soccer embraces the same logic as Formula 1 did with “Drive To Survive”: What happens on the field is not the only thing that can be harnessed to drive interest and, as a result, revenue.At heart, of course, what Reynolds and McElhenney have done with Wrexham is an inherently benign form of ownership, certainly by soccer’s standards. They have not saddled the club with debt. They are not using it to try to whitewash the image of a repressive state. They have given a club, and a town, reason to believe, and all for the price of a couple of camera crews.Their ownership does not, they insist, hinge on “Welcome To Wrexham” being a success. They are in it “for the long haul,” Reynolds said, whether the audience is or not. They have, of course, already affected the story of the team, and quite possibly the town. But they are not mere observers. They are in the story, too, and so the team, and the town, have done exactly the same to them.There but for the Grace of ToddPerhaps, Todd Boehly will reflect, a brightly-lit stage at a high-profile business conference is not the place to start spit-balling ideas.That, it seemed fairly clear, is all Boehly, Chelsea’s increasingly fascinating new owner, was doing when he brought up the notion of a Premier League all-star game this week at the SALT Conference in New York.His remark was not, in any reasonable reading, a “proposal.” It was a top-of-the-head sort of a suggestion, a back-of-the-envelope example. There was no PowerPoint presentation. He had not run the numbers. He was not submitting it to a vote. He was simply discussing ways in which English soccer — famously impoverished — might seek to generate yet more precious revenue, and an all-star game was the first thought that came to mind.None of that seemed to dampen the immediate storm of criticism generated by Boehly’s indulgence in some momentary blue-skying. Nobody, at any point, seemed inclined to treat it as nothing more than an idea. And why should they? It was far more fun to take it very seriously indeed.There were, after all, so many reactions available. Some of them were valid, since it is not, deep down, a very good idea. Dressing it up as a way to pump more money into the rest of the soccer pyramid was almost as transparent as it was cynical. As Jürgen Klopp said, there is player welfare to consider. As the Daily Telegraph’s Sam Wallace pointed out, it does not work on a practical level: the desires of the English are not the only factor in determining soccer’s calendar, a sentiment Bayern Munich’s fans clearly share.The most frequent reaction, though, was also the most ferocious. To many, Boehly’s suggestion was nothing less than an outrage, a betrayal of English soccer’s history, a misreading of its nature, an irruption of its purity. To Gary Neville, it was further proof that American investment into the Premier League represents a “clear and present danger” to English soccer.There were many ways to react to this outpouring of scorn, too. You might ask whether Neville was quite so upset by all of the money pouring into the Premier League from American broadcasters, or whether he was so troubled by Boehly’s shock-and-awe spending spree on Chelsea’s squad this summer.Or you might point out that an all-star game is certainly no more of an imposition than the Community Shield, and much less of one than the Premier League Asia Trophy and the Florida Cup. Best of all, you might suggest that Neville should be old enough to remember the various exhibition games between invitational teams in the 1980s. They weren’t called all-star games, of course, but that is precisely what they were. Boehly’s idea is, it turns out, neither American nor new.Mostly, though, it was hard not to notice the many layers of irony present in both the statement and the backlash.It is, certainly, one of the curiosities of soccer’s era of international investment that so many billionaires seem to think the most popular sport in the world, the one they have had to pay a fortune to buy into, just isn’t good enough at making money.It is another that they are so often accused of misunderstanding the sport. Boehly, like everyone else, has been attracted to soccer because it has spent the last three decades in a relentless, fervent and frequently amoral pursuit of profit. His idea might not have been a good one, but it is perfectly in line with the nature of the business he has bought into.CorrespondenceA wonderful way to start the week, thanks to Nona Cleland. “Would you be kind enough to explain the meaning of the corner flag photo?” she asks, in reference to a caption from last week.I would be delighted, Nona: clubs tend to use a stock photo of a limp, mournful corner flag, emblazoned with their crests, when they release a statement imparting bad news, most frequently the firing of a manager. I don’t quite know how it started — though I am, I admit, tempted to find out — but it is now a fairly reliable visual clue that a crisis has reached its inevitable conclusion.Oh no: Who got fired?Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockThere has also been a bit of a backlash to Tom Karsay’s suggestion that fans might object more to big-money acquisitions if they remembered the money funding them came, ultimately, from their own pockets. “Quite the opposite, when the alternative is our money going into the owners’ pockets and staying there,” wrote John Nielsen-Gammon.Brian Marx, meanwhile, pointed out that fans “choose to consume top league club soccer, it is not forced upon us. Also, for the fans of any specific team, the signing of a difference-making player, expensive or otherwise, is always another chance to allow those rays of hope to stream in the window.”And we can finish with a question, one that will make no sense to those of you who skipped last week’s newsletter, from Rich Johnson. “Which Premier League manager do you believe would have the most success at interpretive dance?” he wrote. This would, I think, be an intensely competitive field. Most managers, after all, essentially spend whole games performing elaborate dance routines. Antonio Conte’s body language is powerfully expressive, but it’s hard to see past Pep Guardiola, who often has the air of a man performing a complex choreography. More

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      French Women’s Player Charged in Attack on Teammate

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      Aminata Diallo was detained and then released last year after her Paris St.-Germain teammate was beaten by masked men. On Friday, the police charged her with aggravated assault.A former Paris St.-Germain women’s soccer player was charged with aggravated assault on Friday as part of the investigation into a violent attack on one of her teammates last year by masked men wielding a metal bar.The player, Aminata Diallo, was taken into custody early Friday morning. Later in the day, she was charged in what the prosecutor in the case said was a planned and premeditated attack on her P.S.G. teammate at the time Kheira Hamraoui. Diallo, according to the prosecutor’s statement, has been temporarily placed in prison pending further talks with the investigating judge. The prosecutor has called for her to face pretrial detention, meaning she would remain in prison while she awaits further developments in the case.The attack on Hamraoui became headline news in France and beyond last year because of the nature of the assault and the subsequent detention of Diallo. The cinematic story line — masked men wielding a metal bar on a dark street, reports of marital infidelity and unsubstantiated reports that a battle for playing time had factored in the attack — has led filmmakers to approach both women about collaborating on projects.But the incident also convulsed both the P.S.G. team and the French national team, on which both women had played, and it even led to the breakup of the marriage of a celebrated former French men’s player, Eric Abidal. Abidal’s wife, Hayet Abidal, filed for divorce last year, claiming that her husband had admitted to an extramarital affair with Hamraoui.Prosecutors said three men had acknowledged being at the scene and that a fourth had admitted striking Hamraoui. All four men, the prosecutor’s statement said, implicated Diallo as organizing the attack on her orders, and they contended the plot was an effort to take Hamraoui’s place on the P.S.G. team.Those details bear striking similarities to the notorious attack perpetrated on the Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan in 1994. Kerrigan was attacked at that year’s United States championships in a plot orchestrated by the ex-husband of a rival skater, Tonya Harding. Kerrigan was assaulted after a practice session by a man who hit her repeatedly in the legs with a police baton.Diallo has maintained her innocence from the start, and she was released without charges after 36 hours in her first detention last year. Neither she nor her lawyer made any public comments on Friday.The attack on Hamraoui followed a team dinner last November at an upscale restaurant in a park on the outskirts of Paris. Diallo had offered Hamraoui a ride home but, after dropping off a third teammate at her home, their journey was interrupted when two men emerged in front of the club-issued car that Diallo was driving, opened the passenger door and dragged Hamraoui out. One of the men then began beating Hamraoui with a metal bar, focusing on her legs and leaving her cut and bruised. Diallo told the police that she was pinned to the steering wheel by another man while the attack took place.A week after the attack, Diallo was arrested, and she was kept in police custody for 36 hours. The Versailles prosecutor’s office confirmed at the time that an acquaintance of Diallo’s, a man in Lyon who had been in jail on unrelated charges, had been questioned and then released.Kheira Hamraoui in a game with France in February. She has not played for P.S.G. this season.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe incident has wrecked the careers of both women. Diallo, 27, retired from professional soccer this summer after her contract with P.S.G. expired. Hamraoui, 32, remains under contract at P.S.G., but she is in a dispute with the club about her treatment after having not been selected to play by the team’s current management.Both players were left off the France squad that competed in this summer’s European women’s championship in England.Diallo’s lawyer, Mourad Battikh, did not reply to a request for comment on Friday. Earlier this week, however, after several men were arrested in connection with the attack, Battikh had said that there was no link between them and Diallo. “Aminata is innocent and has claimed her innocence since the beginning,” he said. More

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      Chile Loses Appeal Seeking Ecuador’s Place in World Cup

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      A FIFA panel reaffirmed an earlier decision dismissing Chile’s claim that its rival fielded an ineligible player. Chile plans one last appeal.Chile failed Friday in its latest attempt to have its South American rival Ecuador thrown out of soccer’s World Cup, another setback in a high-stakes campaign that threatened to alter the field for the sport’s showcase championship only two months before the tournament’s opening match.An appeals committee at soccer’s governing body, FIFA, rejected Chile’s newest claim, agreeing with an earlier decision by a disciplinary panel to reject the contention that Ecuador had fielded an ineligible player in several qualification matches. The FIFA appeals panel provided few details on how it reached its decision, though it said the fact that the player, Byron Castillo, holds permanent Ecuadorean citizenship as justification for siding with the original verdict in the case.Chile contends that Castillo, a 23-year-old defender, was not only born in Colombia but also that he is three years older than stated on the documents used to identify him as Ecuadorean.Chilean officials said they would make one final attempt to overturn the decision, and strip Ecuador of its place in the tournament, by appealing to the final arbiter of sports disputes, the Lausanne-based Court of Arbitration for Sport.The fight over the eligibility of Castillo, who plays professionally in Mexico, has for months generated uncertainty over Ecuador’s place at the World Cup, which opens in November. One of four qualifiers from South America, Ecuador is scheduled to face host Qatar in the tournament’s opening game on Nov. 20.Chile, which filed the appeal that also required Peru’s federation to make a submission, has for weeks fought a public battle to denounce Ecuador and Castillo. Under FIFA rules, fielding an ineligible player could result in a forfeit of any match in which that player took part.Read More on the 2022 World CupLavish Spending: No expense has been spared in putting on a show in Qatar. But the tournament is a feeling that money can’t buy, our soccer correspondent writes.A New Flash Point: An effort by European soccer federations to highlight gay rights with rainbow armbands during the World Cup could force a collision between FIFA rules and social campaigns.United States: The American men’s soccer team has cycled through strikers during the qualifying period. It needs to settle on one before heading to Qatar.Brazil: As the team begins its quest for a sixth World Cup, it appears to have the resources needed to succeed — though Neymar still shoulders much of the load.Ecuador finished fourth in South America’s qualifying competition, claiming one of the continent’s four automatic places in the World Cup. But Chile had demanded that Ecuador forfeit the eight qualification games in which Castillo appeared, and that its opponents in those matches be granted three points per game. That outcome, Chilean officials had calculated, would rearrange the qualifying results in South America and lift Chile into fourth place, and into the World Cup, at Ecuador’s expense.To support its claim that Castillo should not have been allowed to play for Ecuador, Chilean officials scoured public records and social media posts and hired media consultants in Europe to keep attention focused on its case, and its claims. Chile’s federation, meanwhile, sent to FIFA registry documents, including birth certificates and other evidence — even paperwork that, it said, proved where and when Castillo was baptized.Only days before the appeal hearing, Chilean officials also secured an audio recording from a 2018 investigation in which Castillo appeared; in it, the player seemed to confirm details of his early life in Colombia. That recording was then published by news media.A FIFA disciplinary committee had rejected the claims against Castillo and Ecuador in June, but the organization’s rules allowed Chile to make its case anew to an appeals body. The hearing took place via video conference on Thursday but Castillo did not take part even though he had been required to join.“The footballing world heard a player who helped Ecuador qualify for the FIFA World Cup admit he was born in Colombia and that he gained an Ecuadorean passport using false information,” said Jorge Yungue, the general secretary of the Chilean soccer federation. “No wonder he refused to participate.”“What does it say about appeal committee that, confronted with all this, still they fail to act?” he added in a statement that confirmed Chile’s intention to go to CAS.Castillo’s background has been shrouded in questions for several years. A wider investigation into player registrations in Ecuador looked into hundreds of cases and resulted in punishments for at least 75 youth players found to have falsified records. Wary of a mistake that might jeopardize Ecuador’s World Cup hopes this year, officials from its national soccer federation had held off on selecting Castillo for the senior national team until this year.Two years ago, in fact, the president of a special investigation commission convened by the federation appeared to suggest Castillo was Colombian, something that Chilean officials said they had substantiated. Ecuador’s federation finally selected Castillo for the national team after his nationality was recognized and formalized by judicial bodies in that country.For FIFA, the lingering case has been an additional burden as it grapples with ongoing concerns about the preparedness for Qatar to stage the World Cup. It got an assist from Ecuador in August, when the country’s soccer federation agreed to a request that its game be moved a day earlier so that Qatar could play in the tournament opener on a day free of other matches. More

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      The Hollywood Merger That Could Reshape Soccer’s Transfer Market

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      As two behemoths join forces against boutique agencies in the fight for control and commissions, some fear profits could come before players.LONDON — Everything about the deal seemed to connote vastness. Most obviously, there were the figures: The merger created a company with a combined value of an estimated $5 billion. There was the language, too. A “landmark,” according to Variety. “Seismic,” The Los Angeles Business Journal said.In this case, though, time is the best way to gauge scale. It was in September last year when word filtered out of Los Angeles that two of the world’s biggest talent agencies, Creative Artists Agency and ICM Partners, had decided to join forces, but it was not until June that the union was given the green light.The nine-month delay could be attributed to antitrust investigators combing through the deal, trying to establish whether the unified agency would wield too much power. The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission reportedly cast an eye over the prospective merger.The central concern was the potential impact on Hollywood from having two of its most influential agencies become one market-dominating behemoth, and what that might mean for the industry. The Screen Actors Guild, for one, expressed concerns that its members might be “disadvantaged” by the deal.At no point did anyone feel the need to mention soccer. It is there, though, where the deal’s impact might be felt most keenly.Both CAA and ICM have, in the last three years, expanded into soccer. In 2019, CAA acquired Base Soccer, one of Britain’s biggest sports agencies, with more than 300 professional clients. A year later, ICM completed a deal to buy the even-bigger Stellar Group, in what was thought to be the most expensive acquisition in the company’s history.For years, Base and Stellar have been powerhouses — Stellar, the largest agency in the sport, represents more than 800 clients — but they have also been rivals, and not always cordial ones. But as soon as the Justice Department signed off on CAA’s acquisition of ICM, they became teammates.That has ramifications, of course, for the firms, the agents who staff them and the players whom they call clients — including stars like Gareth Bale, Jack Grealish and Eduardo Camavinga. But the scale of the combined venture may also have a profound effect on the delicate power balance in the fraught, lucrative player trading business which acts as the financial engine for the most popular sport in the world.Poetic LicenseErkut Sogut, an experienced agent, has written a novel about the sometimes sordid industry in which he works.Gualter Fatia/Getty ImagesThere is one element of Erkut Sogut’s debut novel that, he admits, belongs squarely in the realm of fantasy. Soccer is not, he wants to emphasize, actually controlled by a cabal of superagents who will resort to anything — sabotage, match-fixing, kidnapping, murder — to keep the game and its riches in their vise.Everything else, he maintains, is real. More than that, in fact: The plot of his book, “Deadline,” a thriller set against the backdrop of soccer’s transfer market, is drawn from firsthand experience. Sogut has spent 15 years as an agent, and he is best known for his longstanding association with Mesut Özil, the onetime Arsenal, Real Madrid and Germany playmaker. It is a world, he said, that does not demand a great deal of poetic license.The portrait of the industry he paints is not a flattering one. His characters are, by and large, hucksters and vultures, charlatans and sharks, operating in a sport rife with corruption and addled with cronyism. It is, though, intrinsically familiar: Soccer has grown accustomed to the depiction of agents as puppet masters in sharp suits and designer sunglasses, wielding ultimate influence over the fates of players and teams.That image, though, the one that suffuses Sogut’s novel, does not quite capture the reality of the industry as it stands now. The likes of Jorge Mendes — consigliere to Cristiano Ronaldo and José Mourinho — may be cast as rainmakers possessed of sufficient clout to bend the whole market to their will, but they increasingly seem like the exception, rather than the rule. The world of agents is in convulsion, soccer’s latest battleground between new money and old hands.Though FIFA’s controversial decision, in 2015, to deregulate the industry opened the doors to any family member or friend who wanted to sign up to represent a player — a move that turned a chaotic and irrevocably murky world into a “complete free-for-all,” as one agent put it — the most significant new entrants in recent years have not been cowboy operators hoping to make a quick buck but established corporations panning for new fortunes.That market now includes not only CAA — which first entered soccer by handling the commercial deals of Mendes’s stable of stars — and ICM, but also the California-based sports agency Wasserman. The latter established a beachhead in English soccer in 2006, but has expanded rapidly in the last two years, acquiring another British agency, Key Sports, and the Spanish firm Top Value, as well as opening a German office.The appeal is no mystery. According to FIFA, agents and intermediaries made more than $500 million in commissions last year alone. In 117 deals, those paydays ran to more than $1 million. Even that seems like small change in comparison to, say, the deal that sent Erling Haaland to Manchester City this summer: His representatives are reported to have earned somewhere in the region of $40 million simply for delivering his signature.Those sorts of figures are difficult to resist. “Football is the No. 1 sport in the world,” said Jonathan Barnett, a co-founder of Stellar. “If you want to be a major sports agency, you have to be involved.”The deal that sent Erling Haaland to Manchester City paid off handsomely for him and his representatives.Craig Brough/ReutersThe Benefits of ScalePlenty of people have offered to buy Andy Evans’s business in the last few years. There have been inquiries from other soccer agencies and from firms that have never worked in soccer. There have been talks with several companies in Britain and at least one from the United States. None of the approaches, in Evans’s view, have felt quite right.Sometimes the finances have not added up. Sometimes Evans has not been sold on exactly what a new owner had planned for World in Motion, the agency he founded a quarter century ago. Mostly, though, he has not been inclined to sell at all. “I’ve been running it for a long time,” Evans said. “I’m not especially inclined to not run it.”The client list he has established is an impressive one — it includes Aaron Ramsdale, the Arsenal goalkeeper, and the England defender Conor Coady — but Evans has never had any desire to operate at the sort of scale of Base and Stellar. That was a conscious choice: He has long believed there was an advantage in being a David.He is conscious, though, that the arrival of the corporations, and in particular the merger between CAA and ICM, could start to alter that equation.Whenever he pitches a prospective client, Evans finds that the first question is always the same. “It is always, ‘Who else do you represent?’” he said. “Players want to know that more than anything else. They know that if you don’t know anyone, you can’t get anything done. People just wouldn’t pick up the phone.”That gives the monolith that has emerged from the union of CAA and ICM — and, as a result, between Base and Stellar — an almost unassailable advantage. Neither firm expects to lose any soccer agents as a result of the merger; the intention is to grow the client list rather than shrink it. The answer to the question “Who else do you represent?” might as well be “everyone.”“It has been a huge advantage in terms of commercial, marketing, organization,” Barnett said earlier this year, before the merger had been approved by the Justice Department, but he was adamant that even becoming part of ICM had been “fantastic” for both his staff and his clients. The impact of joining forces with CAA could be only greater still.Heavy LiftingMichael Yormark in 2013. He joined Roc Nation a year later.Omar Vega/Invision/APMichael Yormark, with his cut-glass jaw and his close-cropped hair, does not seem the sort to be easily intimidated. A veteran agent, he has spent the last six years steering the expansion of Jay-Z’s Roc Nation label into international sports, painstakingly building out a roster of clients that started, by accident, with Jérôme Boateng and has since grown to include the Belgian star Romelu Lukaku and the Chelsea defender Reece James.Yormark might then have been expected to greet the prospect of a colossal new rival on his turf with something sandwiched between reluctance and dread. Instead, in an interview at Roc’s London headquarters, he seemed genuinely enthusiastic. “That deal is great for us,” he said.His logic is straightforward. Roc Nation’s pitch to prospective clients is based on what Yormark described as a “360-degree service,” one that focuses as much, or more, on meeting their aspirations away from the field than on negotiating new contracts or arranging money-spinning transfers. The label keeps its client list small by design.“The heavy lifting is in helping build a brand, a platform, whatever they want to do,” Yormark said. That is not possible, his company contends, with a client list numbering in the hundreds. “It would be hard to do what we do with 150 clients,” said Alan Redmond, Roc Nation’s head of football. “It would be impossible if we had 400.”Inside CAA, those concerns are airily dismissed. Executives believe that the company’s scale belies its flexibility. The example often cited is the N.B.A. player Zion Williamson of the New Orleans Pelicans.Williamson, when selecting his representation, made clear that he wanted a “boutique” feel, precisely the kind of treatment that Roc Nation has made its hallmark. To win his signature, CAA pivoted. Williamson and his family, one CAA executive said, have two points of contact at the agency, no more. The fact that those representatives are merely a tiny part of a giant company is hidden from view.There are others, though, who worry that the type of representation players might receive is far from the most significant consequence of the merger.While the arrival of corporations — with shareholders and workplace cultures and public images to worry about — may hint at an encroaching professionalization in what has traditionally been the kind of lawless industry Sogut’s novel depicts, it also exposes players to the possibility that their futures will be determined by a greater need to bolster a parent company’s bottom line.“If you have an agent who is under pressure to move you early because it is the best thing for the agency, it can compromise a career,” as one veteran agent put it.That has always been a risk for players, of course. They have always been vulnerable to their careers being shaped by their agents’ interests outweighing their own. It is that tension that makes the world of agency such a rich, compelling setting for a thriller, for example. There have always been sharks in the water. The only thing that has changed is the size of the fish. More