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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

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      At Ajax, the Future Is Always Now

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      Ajax sold the bulk of its Champions League-ready squad over the summer and never looked back. It can’t afford to.THE HAGUE, the Netherlands — As a rule, Arco Gnocchi regards himself as too old to buy a replica jersey with his favorite Ajax player’s name emblazoned across the back. Such displays of hero worship, he feels, are not entirely becoming of a person ticking through their early 40s. “Generally,” he said, “it’s for kids.”This summer, though, for the first time in roughly a decade, Gnocchi made an exception. The jersey he bought for the new season bears the No. 9 and, above it, the surname of Brian Brobbey, Ajax’s bullish, bustling 20-year-old forward. Brobbey struck him as the perfect choice. “He exemplifies everything Ajax embodies at the moment,” he said.That includes the fact that, in a couple of years at most, Gnocchi expects Brobbey to render his jersey obsolete. Brobbey has already left Ajax once — as a teenager, for an unhappy spell at the German club RB Leipzig — and, if things go to plan, he will leave again soon enough. “He is massively talented,” Gnocchi said. “He’ll be gone by the time he’s 23.”That is how business has worked at Ajax for as long as anyone can remember. It has long been a place players come from, perhaps the most prolific, reliable, high-caliber talent factory in world soccer. Ajax has seen Johan Cruyff and Marco van Basten and Dennis Bergkamp and Wesley Sneijder and Frenkie de Jong and countless others come. And, for half a century, it has watched them all go, too.In that sense, this summer was no different. The transfer window began with Edwin van der Sar, the club’s former goalkeeper who is now its chief executive, fondly bidding farewell to the goalkeeper André Onana — who departed for Inter Milan — and the right back Noussair Mazraoui, who was destined for Bayern Munich. He did not even seem especially fazed by the prospective loss of Ryan Gravenberch, a gifted 20-year-old midfielder, who soon followed Mazraoui to Munich. “He has a wish to leave,” van der Sar said.His serenity was no surprise. Ajax does not operate under any illusions. It expects players to leave. It budgets for it, plans for it and to some extent relies on it. “It’s a steppingstone team,” said Gnocchi, host of the “Pak Schaal” podcast, the most popular Ajax podcast in the Netherlands. “That can be difficult to accept, but if we’re a steppingstone team, at least we’re the best steppingstone team.”By the end of August, though, the mood among the club’s hierarchy had shifted. The departures had not stopped with Mazraoui, Onana and Gravenberch. Sébastien Haller, the focal point of Ajax’s forward line, had gone to Borussia Dortmund. The defender Perr Schuurs had joined Torino in Italy. Nicolàs Tagliafico, the long-serving left back, had left for Lyon.Ronald Wittek/EPA, via ShutterstockMatteo Bazzi/EPA, via ShutterstockRyan Gravenberch, top left, and Noussair Mazraoui went to Bayern Munich, and goalkeeper André Onana now backstops Inter Milan. Antony’s move to Manchester United, though, extracted a higher price.Shaun Botterill/Getty ImagesThe two that hurt, though, were Antony — a vibrant, virtuoso Brazilian wing — and Lisandro Martínez, a gritty, combative Argentine defender, an undoubted fan favorite. “He’s the sort of player who plays with his teeth bared,” said Marcel Stephan, a writer who has been watching Ajax since the late 1970s. Both Antony and Martínez ended up at Manchester United, where they were reunited with the other significant figure Ajax had lost this summer: Coach Erik ten Hag.They were not, it is safe to say, sent on their way with the club’s best wishes. Antony had to refused to train to force his move — and even then, Ajax held out sufficiently to force United to pay $101 million for his signature — while Martínez reportedly confronted the sporting director Gerry Hamstra over the club’s perceived unwillingness to let him leave.Even as Antony’s departure loomed, ten Hag’s replacement as coach, Alfred Schreuder, had already made clear that he felt there had been too much change. “We’ve already let a lot of players go,” he said as he faced up to the prospect of losing the Brazilian. “We want to keep a strong squad. New players have arrived, and we have told them what our plans are.”The solace, for the club, is obvious. Ajax’s annual budget stands in the region of $170 million. The sales of Martínez and Antony alone generated around $150 million. That money allowed Ajax not only to break the Dutch transfer record to sign Steven Bergwijn from Tottenham, but to afford a wage bill that far outstrips any of its domestic rivals. That financial advantage has helped Ajax win every Eredivisie title that was awarded since 2019.Every Ajax squad is a calculated mix of past, present and future. The current version opened its Champions League campaign with a 4-0 win over Rangers last week. On Tuesday, it will visit Liverpool.Piroschka Van De Wouw/ReutersThe impact on Ajax’s fans is more complex, an almost perfect distillation of all the benefits, blessings, imbalances and iniquities of modern soccer; it is, indeed, hard to think of a club that has been more exposed to the consequences of the sport’s willing obeisance to a ruthless free market.There is, of course, a sadness, an awareness that — as Gnocchi put it — Ajax’s “success is also its downfall,” a knowledge that the better it is at producing players, the more certain it is that those players will leave.There is a sense of if only, too: if only Gravenberch could have played alongside de Jong, rather than instead of him; if only Antony had stayed one more year; if only the club was not engaged in what is, inherently, a Sisyphean task. “It is always painful when a player leaves,” said Marjan Olfers, a professor of sport and law at the Free University of Amsterdam and a former member of Ajax’s supervisory board. “You cannot build a team for five years. You always have to start again.”Occasionally, perhaps increasingly, there are grumbles. “Anyone who remembers the 2000s and the 2010s is thankful for what we have now,” said Gnocchi, referring to a period when Ajax spent fortunes on mediocrities. “We’re very appreciative of good business, because we know it is possible to buy rubbish in return. But there are fans who feel the club is starting to feel more like a trading company than a soccer team.”And, certainly, there is plenty of resignation. “We’re used to it,” Stephan said. At 58, he said, after a half-century of following the team, the constant change is nothing new.Menno Pot, author of “The New Ajax,” a book that examined the club’s transformation in recent years, noted that — until relatively recently — any player leaving the club would be granted an emotional farewell. “We’d let off fireworks, fan groups would present players with presents,” he said. “We figured out a while ago there was no need. The players were going to leave. These are short-term relationships.”That, more than anything else, is what has been lost: the connection to Ajax’s role as a club that “educates young players, rather than acquires them,” as Olfers put it. Ajax fans, in general, “find it harder to identify with individual players,” she said. “It is more about the club.”Brian Brobbey: 20 years old, Amsterdam-reared and coming soon to a transfer rumor mill near you.Olaf Kraak/Agence France-Presse, via Anp/Afp Via Getty ImagesGnocchi might have gone for Brobbey on the back of his jersey, but he believes the most popular shirt in the stands at Ajax’s stadium is not that of a budding homegrown superstar but Dusan Tadic, the club’s veteran playmaker. Tadic is 33 now. He is contracted to the club until he is 36. He is that rarest of things: a safe bet.But there is also a pride in knowing that Ajax is producing, in vast quantities, a raw material that the world’s richest clubs crave. “There is a beauty to it,” Pot said. There is hope, too, in great abundance, a confidence that tomorrow will be no worse than today, and might even be better.Most crucially, there is a sense of identity. The names on the jerseys may be fleeting, but the club itself stands for something that it once feared it had lost forever. That, more than anything, gives fans something to cling on to when everything else is in permanent flux.“I think, after the Bosman ruling in 1995, Ajax went through an identity crisis,” Pot said. “We did not know how to be Ajax any more. You heard it said that we could never compete in Europe again, that winning the Champions League just was not possible. And people were mostly OK with that.“But over the last few years, they have found the answer to that question. They have figured out how to be Ajax in the modern world. We have to rebuild completely every three years, and every once in a while we get a truly great team, one that could just go all the way. And when we do, it is something that is completely our own.”Peter Dejong/Associated Press More

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      In Premier League, Crisis Is a Constant

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      Change at Chelsea. A loss at Liverpool. Chaos is part and parcel of the Premier League story line. But it doesn’t have to be that way.Chelsea managed to cycle through it all in nine hours, give or take. First, bright and early on Wednesday, came the announcement that the club’s owners had decided to dispense with the services of Manager Thomas Tuchel, after a reign encompassing a mere 19 months and one measly Champions League title.The window for shock was a relatively brief one. Chelsea had only just concluded a summer of spending unlike anything the Premier League had ever seen — two months of shock and awe and photos of Todd Boehly, the club’s co-controlling chairman and interim sporting director — most of it seemingly conducted in accordance with Tuchel’s wishes.But no matter: An explanation emerged swiftly, centered on the desire of Boehly and the rest of his consortium to change the culture at Chelsea and their belief that Tuchel was not the right figurehead for that shift. Quite what form that new culture will take, and quite why the 49-year-old Tuchel could not be part of it, has not been adequately explained, at least not yet.Still, there was no time for questions. Graham Potter, the impressive coach of Brighton, had been installed as favorite to succeed Tuchel by lunchtime on Wednesday. Chelsea had been in touch with his current employer by dinner. He had “verbally agreed” to take the job — as opposed to agreeing by interpretive dance, presumably — by the time darkness fell.Welcome to the Thunderdome, Graham Potter. Rui Vieira/Associated PressAnd just like that, Chelsea’s crisis — one that had been difficult to discern, from the outside, before Tuchel was dismissed, and one that seemed to be entirely of its own making — had come and gone. Just like nature, though, soccer abhors a vacuum.So it was fortunate, in many ways, that by 8:46 p.m. Italian time, Liverpool had stepped forward to produce arguably the worst Champions League performance of Jürgen Klopp’s tenure. Within 45 seconds of kickoff in Naples, Napoli had broken Liverpool’s holographic back line and hit the post. It went, it is fair to say, downhill from there.By the time the game ended, Liverpool had officially occupied the chaos space so recently vacated by Chelsea. Klopp, the coach who guided the club to two trophies — and a Champions League final — barely four months ago, was asked in his news media conference after the game if he was worried about being fired.Even by the standards of the Premier League, this was pretty good going: not just one major team in crisis, but two, and both of them on the same day. It is only a couple of weeks since Manchester United was afforded that status, a consequence of Erik ten Hag’s losing his first two games as coach, but that already seems to belong to the dim and distant past. Ten Hag’s stock is soaring: He has collected two more points than Tuchel, and three more than Klopp.Napoli 4, Liverpool 1: a single defeat, or an existential crisis?Ciro De Luca/ReutersIt is not ridiculous, of course, to suggest that both Chelsea and Liverpool have disappointed a little this season. Both have stuttered, in the Premier League and the Champions League alike. Both have seemed to be less than the sum of their parts. Both are not meeting the standard they set for themselves.Analyzing and interrogating why that might be is a legitimate exercise. Tuchel had seemed a little frostier, a little more downbeat than habitual in recent weeks; he seemed to chastise his team on a fortnightly basis in what proved to be the last couple of months of his tenure at Stamford Bridge. Rarely, if ever, did he indicate that he knew quite what was wrong, or how to fix it.That is the challenge facing Klopp, too. Liverpool, ordinarily so dogged and so fearsome, has looked distinctly fatigued through the opening weeks of the season. It has stirred itself only in patches, succumbing for vast periods of most of its games to a form of stagnant ennui, as if the players were running on fumes after six exacting years under Klopp.In those circumstances, it is in the nature of the world’s biggest teams that the scrutiny should be intense. That, in essence, is the bargain. Chelsea, like Liverpool and Manchester United, has been complicit in creating a sporting ecosystem in which it is expected to win all of its games, in which almost any defeat is unacceptable. The pressure, the hyperbole, when it comes, is the flip side of the bargain.And yet it was difficult not to be struck by the speed with which crisis descended. Liverpool was humbled in Naples, it is true, but it was still only the second defeat of the club’s season, and only its fourth of the calendar year. Chelsea had stumbled against Leeds and Southampton, but it is only five points adrift of Arsenal, the Premier League leader. It would be a stretch to suggest that, for either team, all is lost.Part of that rush to judgment can be attributed — point your fingers here — to the news media, to the breathless coverage of the major powers of the Premier League, to the desperate need to fill the bottomless digital maw, to the talking-point culture that has slowly consumed soccer (and then everything else) in the past two decades.Marcus Rashford and United beat first-place Arsenal on Sunday. Problems solved?Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPartly, too, it is because these clubs expect the best and have paid handsomely for it. Chelsea invested $300 million on players this summer and happily would have spent more if possible. Liverpool spends more on the salaries of its current squad than all but three or four teams in the world, one of which is Manchester United. Those fortunes are paid out, essentially, to ward off things like teething problems and dips in form. That, again, is the deal.And, partly, it is because of the game that these superclubs have created: one in which the default assumption, now, is that the team that claims the Premier League title will do so with an almost impossible points tally, in a league in which Manchester City continues to roll on, seemingly unstoppable, Erling Haaland trampling opponents underfoot, and everyone else knows that losing any ground at all now means spending the season treading water, waiting for a chance to start again. There is a fragility, a desperation, an awareness that there is no room for error.It is difficult, though, to believe that any of this is healthy: not for the players and coaches commanded to maintain almost superhuman standards or risk being branded failures and not for the fans, always awaiting the moment the gloom descends.Most of all, it is not in the best interests of the game as a whole, which increasingly seems to exist on a bloodthirsty knife-edge, eagerly awaiting its next victim, the next chance to cry crisis, to dissemble its latest false idol, knowing full well that it will not have to wait very long at all.The Romance BusinessCeltic Park on Tuesday.Andy Buchanan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFor an hour, Celtic Park was the stage of one of the great Champions League nights. It bubbled and simmered and, as Real Madrid struggled to contain Celtic’s delicately cultivated spirit of adventure, it boiled and roared. Callum McGregor hit the post, and for a moment the noise was such that even the reigning European champion struggled to regain its composure.The Champions League would be diminished beyond recognition without these occasions, of course. There is something visceral, something compelling about the precise sound generated inside one of Europe’s great stadiums — Celtic Park and Ibrox in Glasgow, Napoli’s Stadio Diego Armando Maradona, the Velodrome in Marseille — when one of the continent’s self-appointed elites rolls into town.It is important to note, though, that the root of all the son et lumiere that makes those nights so special is an inequality so deeply entrenched that it can make Celtic — one of the world’s great clubs — feel like an impossible underdog, as if it were a part-time outfit made up of cobblers and dental hygienists on an unexpected cup run.It is an inequality that has, to a large extent, been created and intensified by the Champions League itself, as it funnels more and more money to fewer and fewer clubs. As stirring, as emotive as those games can be, they come with a grim irony, too: At least part of the appeal of the Champions League can be traced to its ability to take the consequences of imbalance and turn it into spectacle.How to Solve a Problem Like the Premier LeagueToni Kroos, at least, is not worried.“The television money has been significantly higher in England for years,” Kroos, a Real Madrid midfielder, said this week, when asked about the yawning chasm between the spending of the Premier League’s clubs and everyone else. “It hasn’t resulted in English teams’ winning everything.” Europe’s three club competitions last season, as he pointed out, were won by teams that were conspicuously not English.Kroos is as articulate and thoughtful a player as they come — although he does harbor a worrying admiration for the music of Robbie Williams, a personal stain that cannot be disregarded — but his interpretation on this matter is a little glib. The contrast between the financial strength of the Premier League and the fragility of its rivals is a cause for concern.It is something, though, that can be addressed, should UEFA find the will or the conviction to do so. There is nothing it can do, of course, about the amount of money that flows into the Premier League, either from television networks or from external investors, be they private equity firms or nation states.But it can regulate the way that money can be spent. It has already imposed limits on the number of players a club can send out on loan. It could also increase the number of locally reared players each team must name in its squad or the number of players under a certain age. It could investigate the idea of regionalized leagues, too, to help decrease the competitive imbalance.It should, though, do something. Because the alternative is that the major clubs of continental Europe will determine that the only solution — the only way to try to keep pace — is to cut UEFA, and their national leagues, out of the equation altogether.CorrespondenceAs the adage has it, if there is one thing journalists like talking about — apart from other journalists, behind their backs — it is journalism itself. The craft. The art. The mission. The diminished expense accounts. Thanks, then, to Tim Lott for affording me the opportunity to clear my throat.“Reading all the coverage of Chelsea, I’m struck by the narrative that (I suppose) Todd Boehly and his folks are selling,” he wrote. “There are certain themes common in all stories: Thomas Tuchel’s detachment behind the scenes, a minor spat over Cristiano Ronaldo, so many attackers wanting out.“This has got me wondering about the sausage-making: How does everyone end up with mostly the same story? And why hasn’t anyone been able to report it beforehand?”The universal symbol of a club in crisis: the corner flag photo.Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockTim is right: There are times at which various lines are pushed by various interested parties, all of them effectively competing to make their version of the truth the one that takes hold (but none of them, for the most part, are actually willing to put their name to it). The journalist’s job, on those occasions, is to pick through the morass, to find the common themes, to try to work out what is most cogent.Tuchel’s dismissal is a little different. The reason most of the reporting covers similar ground this time is because — as far as my own investigation could gather — that is, largely, what happened. That it might have been reported earlier is a valid point, but there is a tendency, in soccer as in so much else, to reverse-engineer explanations, to determine cause only when consequence is clear.We had an anonymous question, too, on one of the finer points of transfer reporting. “You mention that Erling Haaland’s true cost was approximately $100 million,” the Mystery Correspondent wrote. “Does this mean the published fees are regularly less than the actual cost?”The answer to this is: kind of. As a rule, the fee that is reported has always been the amount the buying club pays the selling club. Increasingly, though, that convention seems inadequate, not just because salary is often the bulk of the cost to the purchaser, but because — as the Haaland deal illustrates nicely — a cheaper price can mean a higher cut goes to the agent(s). It is, perhaps, time to discuss transfers in terms of their total cost, rather than simply focusing on one aspect.A great point, meanwhile, from Tom Karsay. “Maybe it should be pointed out that the money Manchester United [and everyone else] spent doesn’t come from owners’ pockets,” he wrote. “It comes from the advertising revenues of the television networks, which comes from our labor, the sweat of our brows. Maybe fans, keeping that in mind, would be less likely to cheer new acquisitions.” More

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      The Problem With Chelsea (Hint: It May Not Be the Manager)

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      Six days after spending more in a single transfer window than any club in history, Chelsea’s new owners fired the team’s coach, Thomas Tuchel. Now what?The caveat, right from the start, was experience. The consortium, fronted by Todd Boehly and bankrolled by the private equity firm Clearlake, had the money. That much was plain. They had, after all, paid $2.8 billion to buy Chelsea in a frantic, opaque auction, making it the most expensive acquisition in the history of sports.They had expertise in the business, too, or some form of it: Neither Boehly nor Mark Walter, a comparatively late addition to the ownership group, was a sporting neophyte. Both own a slice of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and that investment, in recent years, has proved a relatively adroit one.No, the only thing that could be held against the new owners, the only thing that gave Chelsea’s fans pause for thought as they considered what a post-Roman Abramovich future might bring, was that none of them — Boehly, Clearlake, Walter or Hansjorg Wyss, the octogenarian Swiss billionaire who had brought the group together — knew the first thing about English soccer.Three months in, those doubts have been overcome. Scarcely 100 days have elapsed since the group took official control of Chelsea. In that time, it lavished more than $300 million on new signings — more than any club had ever spent in a single transfer window — and then, with the ink still drying on the last couple of contracts, decided to fire its manager only a half-dozen games into the season.If they carry on like this, Chelsea’s new owners will fit into the Premier League’s hyperbolic soap opera just fine.Todd Boehly and his partners have been remaking Chelsea all summer. Change has not been cheap.David Cliff/Associated PressFrom the outside, Chelsea’s decision to part company with Thomas Tuchel in the early hours of Wednesday felt distinctly, comfortingly familiar. The team had lost the previous evening in its opening Champions League engagement against Dinamo Zagreb. That defeat came on the back of a stuttering start to the Premier League campaign that has left Chelsea in sixth, just 5 points behind first-place Arsenal but already smarting from losses to Leeds United and Southampton.This was, then, the new Chelsea behaving precisely as the old Chelsea always had, with a short-termism so ruthless it almost qualified as proud. Spending an unimaginable sum of money to furnish a manager with the team he desired only to dismiss the manager at the first hint of trouble? Roman would be proud.Internally, the picture was a little more nuanced. Tuchel’s brief reign — he was in place for only 19 months — had hit its peak early, in the uncanny valley of lockdown soccer, when he took a team that had been struggling to qualify for the Champions League under his predecessor, Frank Lampard, and turned it into the champion of Europe in four months. Rarely, if ever, has a coach had such an immediate, spectacular effect.The 49-year-old Tuchel, though, failed to build on that starburst. He was presented, a year ago, with the $111 million signing of Romelu Lukaku, theoretically the player who could catapult Chelsea to a first Premier League title since 2017. It did not quite work out like that. Lukaku was allowed to leave the club this summer on loan.Though Tuchel steered the team to two domestic cup finals in his first full campaign — losing both on penalties against Liverpool — and handled with poise and dignity the geopolitical storm that engulfed the club in the wake of the British government’s decision to sanction Abramovich, Chelsea’s season petered out, with the German’s side eventually finishing 19 points behind Manchester City.Tuchel in better days. Last year.Susana Vera/Pool Via ReutersThat malaise had not gone unnoticed by the club’s newly installed hierarchy. Nor had Tuchel’s demeanor over the summer, which grew more detached, more disaffected with every passing week.In July, he bemoaned that his players’ “level of commitment, physically and mentally,” was insufficient. By August, he described them as “not tough enough.” On Tuesday, after losing in Zagreb, that had metastasized into admitting that “everything was missing” from his team’s performance.Those public complaints betrayed a growing unease in private. Tuchel had come to be known at Chelsea as a gregarious, warm, affable sort — at a club with plenty of managers to compare him to, he fared well — but a number of players felt he had become more truculent, more distant in recent months, particularly with those he did not consider his most reliable lieutenants.Boehly and Behdad Eghbali, the co-founder of Clearlake, noticed the same thing. As they attempted to retool the squad this summer, they had sought Tuchel’s counsel frequently, asking the manager — in the absence of a technical director — to direct them to his preferred targets.That was not a role that Tuchel relished particularly; he was far happier to be left alone to coach. As the transfer window gathered pace, Boehly and Eghbali found that Tuchel had a tendency to prove difficult to contact at critical junctures. Whatever relationship they had been able to establish in their few weeks working together began to fracture and fray.Kalidou Koulibaly and the rest of Chelsea’s players, new and old, opened the Champions League with a loss on Tuesday.Antonio Bronic/ReutersAs the relatively curt statement released by the club to announce his departure suggested, Boehly and Eghbali did not feel they had acted rashly. They had, instead, reached the decision to part company with Tuchel even before defeat in Zagreb. The travails of the early part of the season were supporting evidence for their conclusion, rather than the thrust of their case.For all the mitigating circumstances, though — and while the owners have been swift to identify Graham Potter, the intelligent, affable and talented Brighton manager, as Tuchel’s likely replacement — it does feel as if his dismissal fits a pattern.Boehly has taken on the role of interim sporting director with vigor and determination. Those at the club have been stunned by his work ethic, and he has made an effort to establish a rapport with many of the game’s most influential agents, inviting some of them to watch games from his box at the club’s stadium.In some cases, that has borne fruit. Chelsea spent a lot of money this summer, but it spent much of it well. Wesley Fofana may have been expensive, but he is also one of the most promising defenders in world soccer. Raheem Sterling has for years been one of the Premier League’s most devastating attacking players.The deals that did not come off tell a story too, though. There was the offer for Romeo Lavia, a player who had made just a handful of appearances for Southampton since moving from Manchester City in July; Chelsea offered to pay at least double what he had cost in August.Then there was an attempt to sign Edson Álvarez, a Mexican midfielder at the Dutch club Ajax, which bubbled to the surface as the transfer window was closing. The approach came so late, in fact, that Ajax was able to use it as proof that Chelsea was not spending to any plan, but rather for the sake of it — an argument that worked sufficiently well for Álvarez to decide to remain in Amsterdam.As they reached the (entirely artificial) watershed of their 100th day in charge of the club, Boehly and Eghbali reportedly spent considerable time contemplating the sort of culture they wanted to establish at Chelsea.They wanted to shift away from the urgency and the uncertainty of the Abramovich years and build something more sustainable, they decided, and they felt that Tuchel was not the right sort of figure to oversee that change. He was better suited, they determined, to the old ways, when nothing lasted forever, and Chelsea’s manager lived each day as if it could be the last.And yet here we are: Six games into the season, six days after the end of the transfer window, Chelsea has fired its manager on the back of a few poor performances and because of rumblings of discontent among the playing squad. Perhaps this will be the last hurrah of the old Chelsea, the final break with the past. Or perhaps a culture, once embedded, is not an easy thing to change, no matter how much money and ambition you have. More