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      Money to Burn: Lessons From the Premier League’s Transfer Window

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      English teams awash in cash broke records for players and prices this summer, proving again that they operate on a plane apart from their rivals.To take just one snapshot from just one day in a whole summer of indulgence and excess, there was a point, last week, during which all of these things were happening at the same time:There were representatives of West Ham United pressing $58 million into the grateful palms of Lyon in exchange for Lucas Paqueta, a mercurial Brazilian playmaker. Their counterparts from Newcastle were offering Real Sociedad $72 million for the Swedish striker Alexander Isak.Chelsea’s self-appointed sporting director, Todd Boehly, meanwhile, had given up on his brief pursuit of the Manchester United captain, Harry Maguire, and was instead buffeting Leicester City with bids for Wesley Fofana. United, in turn, was peppering Ajax with offers for Antony, yet another Brazilian wing, working their way toward an unmoving asking price in what appeared to be increments of $10 million.This is what the Premier League does every year, of course: Every summer, and most winters, its clubs descend on Europe, the cash from infinitely spiraling television deals burning a hole in their pockets, and proceed to hose an entire continent with money. They swamp it, they flood it, they drown it with their wealth.And then, at the end of August, they go home, armed with a few more Brazilian playmakers and Swedish strikers, ready to play the games that will earn the money for them to do it all over again in a few months.The Swedish striker Alexander Isak scored in his Newcastle debut after joining from Spain’s Real Sociedad.Phil Noble/ReutersThe ritual, the great ceremonial spending of broadcasters’ money, is not just familiar — an annual tradition that has long since lost its power to shock, the figures involved now so inflated and improbable that they seem to mean almost nothing at all — but, in England at least, actively celebrated.The amount the Premier League’s clubs have spent is, without fail, heralded as a triumph by a variety of not entirely neutral onlookers: accountancy firms for whom the rude health of English soccer is a central plank of their business; the broadcasters who have, at heart, paid for it all; the league itself. The total sum is used as a proxy measure for power, a gauge for how big and strong English soccer has grown and, by extension, how weak and small everyone else must be.This summer has brought even more flexing than normal. The figures have been even more eye-watering than usual. By the time the transfer window closed on Thursday evening, the Premier League’s teams had burned their way through $2.3 billion, gross, in the space of just a couple of months.That is a record, of course, and not by a little: The previous high-water mark was almost $600 million lower. To suggest, too, that it is more than all the money spent by the rest of Europe’s so-called Big Five leagues — Italy, Spain, Germany, France — combined does not quite capture the full picture. Chelsea spent more money this summer than any English club has spent previously. Nottingham Forest signed more players than any English club has ever signed in a single window. Nine teams spent more than £100 million. English teams spent three times as much as their nearest challengers. It has been a wild and unrestrained festival of consumption.And yet, while that speaks volumes for the financial power the Premier League now wields over all of its competitors on the continent, the image it has created is not of a competition bristling with strength, but rather of one addled with desperation, filled by clubs consumed by fear, and so suffused by riches that it has, in some quarters at least, apparently divested itself of thought.There are clubs, of course, that have acquitted themselves well in the transfer market: Manchester City, say, surgically picking off Erling Haaland and Kalvin Phillips and then, at last moment, spying an opportunity to sign Manuel Akanji from Borussia Dortmund for a reduced fee and taking it. Or Crystal Palace, judiciously adding only a couple of new faces who might help its young, intriguing squad develop. Or Brighton, selling high and buying cheap and getting better in the process.But for the most part, there has been a wantonness to the spending: Chelsea, spraying money at almost anyone it could think of to sign any player who might be available, the club’s new owners apparently so confident of the rising tide of broadcast rights and merchandise deals that they are willing to write off a couple of hundred million here or there.Or Manchester United, who tried to cut a deal with Ajax for Antony but, when that didn’t work, simply paid what it had long regarded as an inflated asking price anyway, without so much as blinking. Or Fulham, signing the 34-year-old Willian on the final day of the window for, well, for some reason.Some of those signings will, of course, prove to be wise, worthwhile investments. Perhaps Antony will provide Manchester United with the balance its attack has lacked. Maybe the 20 players Forest has acquired — no, that is not a stray zero — will help it remain in the top flight. Chelsea may be improved by the presence of Raheem Sterling, Kalidou Koulibaly and the rest.The now former Ajax wing Antony, definitely not displaying his asking price to Manchester United.Maurice Van Steen/EPA, via ShutterstockThe broader impression, though, has not been of clubs smartly addressing their shortcomings, gradually tending to their needs. It has, instead, been of a reckless mercantile zeal, of acquisition for its own sake, of a gross hedonism at a time when the country which the Premier League takes as its host is in the grip of soaring energy prices and rampant inflation and wondering whether it will be able to afford to get through the winter. The Premier League’s clubs are not just inured to that, they stand as a direct contrast to it. It is almost as if they have internalized the idea that spending is, indeed, a measure of strength, a virtue in and of itself.Many of the deals, certainly, possess a transience, a fleetingness, an inherent futility. They offer an immediate reassurance, a jolt of excitement, a dose of adrenaline, but the suspicion is that, as the season plays out, the urgency to sign them — the clauses met and the demands accepted — will seem a little rash. Did Chelsea really need Marc Cucurella? Is Lucas Paqueta notably better than what was already available at West Ham? Had Manchester United not spent quite a lot of money on a winger last summer, too?On one level, it does not matter, of course. The Premier League’s coffers will be refilled over the course of the next few months. There is always enough money pouring in to cover any missteps. The league’s clubs always have the option of buying themselves out of trouble.But that is not to say there are no consequences. Each one of those signings represents a chance denied to a young player, one hoping to make the breakthrough, to find their way in the game.Kalidou Koulibaly, part of Chelsea’s most recent summer of splurges. Andrew Redington/Getty ImagesChelsea might have given time, this season, to Levi Colwill, a defender the club regards as one of its brightest prospects in years. Instead, he has been farmed out to Brighton, just so the club could bring in a senior left back to compete with Ben Chilwell. Liverpool could have used its mounting injury problems to blood the promising Stefan Bajcetic; instead, it moved to sign Arthur on loan from Juventus.That is the thing with soccer, the thing that the majority of clubs on the continent have to accept and that England’s teams do not seem to have noticed. There are always more footballers. They are, for all intents and purposes, an unlimited natural resource. Often, they are right there, under your nose, just waiting for an opportunity.England’s clubs rarely offer that. Others, though, do. Ajax will find another Antony soon enough. Lyon will unearth another Paqueta. The urgency, the desperation, to sign any of these players is misplaced; there will be another one next year, just as good. And when they emerge, the English clubs will be ready again, drenching the teams who have discovered them and nurtured them and helped them shine with a great fire hose of cash, thinking only about today, and never about tomorrow.Great Business. For Now.Carlos Soler, on his way from Valencia to P.S.G.Jose Jordan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesCarlos Soler was the last of them. With a few hours left of the transfer window, Paris St.-Germain confirmed it had reached a deal with Valencia to sign Soler, a 25-year-old midfielder who has quietly been one of the most impressive performers in La Liga in the last few years, for somewhere in the region of $20 million.It was typical of the business the French champion has done this summer, under the guidance of Luis Campos, the recruitment guru hired to overhaul a bloated, incoherent squad: uncharacteristically quiet, undeniably competent, surprisingly good value. P.S.G. should be careful. People might start thinking it is a serious club.As well as Soler, after all, Campos has used his contacts in Portugal, in particular, to sign Vitinha, from Porto, Lille’s Renato Sanches and, perhaps most adroitly, Napoli’s Fabian Ruiz. In doing so, he has revamped the P.S.G. midfield, and all for less than $100 million — excluding agent fees — no mean feat given the club’s reputation and the looming specter of counteroffers from the rather less parsimonious Premier League.Only one doubt remains. To accommodate Campos’s cavalry, P.S.G. has had to unmoor Leandro Paredes, Ander Herrera, Georginio Wijnaldum, Idrissa Gueye, Julian Draxler, Ángel Di Maria and Xavi Simons this summer, too. Some, like Wijnaldum, will not be missed. Others, like Draxler, required a change of air.The nature of P.S.G.’s business might have changed, then, but it remains to be seen if the nature of the club has. It is not hard to imagine at least one of the players acquired this summer being on the market again next year, a deal that looks like a bargain now cast by hindsight as an error. P.S.G. has never had a problem recruiting good players. Its issue, for the last decade, has always been working out what to do with them.CorrespondenceSpeaking of Haaland — as we will be doing frequently this season, I suspect — Shawn Donnelly has a question. “I still can’t get over how Manchester City picked him up for just 60 million euros,” he wrote. “Did Borussia Dortmund get robbed? Couldn’t they have got two or three times as much?”They could, Shawn, if only Haaland had not been in possession of a contract with a release clause written into it. All City had to do was match it, and Dortmund was powerless to hold out for a higher figure. The frustration should be tempered, though, by the fact that the release clause was the only reason Dortmund was able to get him at all. Haaland signed for the club in the first place only on the understanding that, sooner rather than later, it would let him go.Erling Haaland, already looking like a bargain.Andrew Yates/EPA, via ShutterstockThere is one other point to be made on that transfer, though: It is more than a little misleading for it to be presented as a deal worth only 60 million euros. It was, in reality, substantially higher: All of the money City saved thanks to his release clause was incorporated, instead, to the fees paid to Haaland’s representatives. That gets you close to $100 million, which is far closer to his real value.Hopefully, we can provide Matt Bilello with similar clarification. “Can you please explain the difference between a ‘cynical’ foul and a professional one?” he asked. “Commentators use them interchangeably, but it seems to me that a cynical foul is a dirty one, whereas a professional one is ‘necessary’ to prevent an advantage to an opponent.”In my understanding, this is basically right. Any common-or-garden foul can be a cynical one, but a professional foul is something very specific: bringing down an opponent to deprive them of an immediate chance to score. (In my head, a professional foul is tackling someone from behind as they charge through on goal.) More

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      AC Milan Sale: RedBird Capital Buys Team for $1.2 Billion

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      Milan, a seven-time European champion, was acquired by RedBird Capital for $1.2 billion. The investment firm has ties to both the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox.A.C. Milan, the storied Italian soccer team, is teaming up with another storied franchise: the New York Yankees.The Italian team, which last season secured its first league title in 11 years, announced Wednesday the completion of its long expected sale to a group headed by the investment firm RedBird Capital Partners that includes the Yankees. The 1.2 billion-euro ($1.2 billion) price tag represents a major payday for Elliott, the vulture fund that secured the team in 2018 after its former Chinese owners defaulted on a $300 million debt.RedBird, led by its managing partner Gerry Cardinale, has been on a spree of acquisitions, with Milan becoming just the latest sports investments made by the firm. Last year, it paid $735 million for a stake in Fenway Sports Group, owner of baseball’s Boston Red Sox and the powerhouse English soccer team Liverpool F.C.The Yankees are not the only eye-catching name now attached to A.C. Milan. Media reports said the basketball star LeBron James, who owns a stake in F.S.G., and the rapper Drake would also own a minority stake of A.C. Milan.For the Italian team and its supporters, the sale will mark another chapter in its efforts to return to the top of European soccer after a decade of decline marked by financial crisis and poor performance. Last year, Milan, a seven-time European champion, qualified for the elite Champions League for the first time since 2014.Elliott seized the team in 2018 and set about repairing A.C. Milan’s balance sheet, which was one of the most distressed in all of sports. In 2020, the team had losses of nearly $200 million, with that figure halved a year later as the owners slashed payroll costs by moving out underperforming aging stars and replacing them with younger — and cheaper — alternatives.The changes paid dividends last year with a surprise run to the Italian championship, a success that positioned the team to be sold at what is most likely the upper end of its market value.“Our vision for Milan is clear: We will support our talented players, coaches and staff to deliver success on the pitch and allow our fans to share in the extraordinary experiences of this historic club,” said Cardinale, adding the owners would seek to leverage their sports and media assets to maintain “Milan’s place at the summit of European and world football.”Milan’s fan base has been energized by the team’s recent improvement. Last year, they qualified for the Champions League for the first time since 2014. Massimo Paolone/LaPresse, via Associated PressMilan’s sale is the latest high profile sale of a European sports team to American investors. It follows the 2.5 billion pound ($3 billion) purchase of Chelsea Football Club, the most ever paid for a team in any sport, by a group led by California-based private equity firm Clearlake.For Elliott, the sale means a tremendous amount of profit from an investment that started out as a $300 million loan to allow a little known Chinese businessman to buy the club from its longtime previous owner, the former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, in 2017. About a year later, it ended up in control of one of the world’s most well-known sports brands for an amount — despite all of Milan’s problems — that was below its market value.The club poached Ivan Gazidis, a former vice commissioner of Major League Soccer, from Arsenal in the Premier League to run the club and gradually began to move up the standings under Coach Stefano Pioli. A second-place finish in 2021 was followed by a title triumph secured by a victory on the last day of the 2021-22 season.“When Elliott acquired A.C. Milan in 2018, we inherited a club with a tremendous history but with serious financial problems and a mediocre sporting performance. Our plan was simple: to create financial stability, and to return A.C. Milan to where it belongs in European football,” Gordon Singer, Elliott’s managing partner, said in June when an agreement with RedBird was first announced.Now that the deal has been completed, RedBird will most likely need to reassure European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, that it will comply with rules barring one investor from owning a significant share in two teams playing in its competition. Milan and Liverpool will both play in this season’s Champions League but have not been drawn to play in the same opening groups. They could meet in the knockout phase. RedBird also owns the French soccer team Toulouse.Milan has made a solid start to the new season, unbeaten after four rounds of the new Italian season, relying on much of the same roster it used to win the title last year, spending just $50 million on new talent, about half the amount spent by the league’s richest team, Juventus.While Milan is savoring success again, its long-term future is unclear, with significant investment required to build a new stadium. The team currently leases the San Siro stadium it shares with city rival Inter from the local government and is planning to build a new facility that it will co-own with Inter. Progress has been halting, highlighting the difficulty team owners have in building new facilities in Italy, where most top-division soccer teams continue to play in aging public-owned arenas.Milan’s financial firepower is also lagging behind Europe’s top teams, particularly the biggest teams in England, where revenue — particularly television income — is considerably higher than in any other major soccer league. RedBird is co-owner of the Yankee Entertainment Sports Network, the most-watched regional sports network in the United States, and will look to tap that relationship to find new growth, Cardinale said.“We are very pleased to continue our partnership with them and will look to explore opportunities together to broaden our fan reach and expand commercial opportunities that are only available to franchises that operate at the highest levels of sports globally,” he said.The investment in Milan is not the Yankees’ first foray into international soccer. In 2001, the team signed a joint-venture agreement with Manchester United, which failed to yield the returns that either side expected, resulting in the deal being quietly shelved. It is currently a minority owner in Major League Soccer’s New York City F.C., which is controlled by United’s crosstown rival Manchester City.The takeover by RedBird comes just a year after the collapse of an effort by a group of 12 European clubs — including Milan — to set up a breakaway European super league. Though that endeavor embarrassingly collapsed within 48 hours, the factors that led to its creation remain as relevant today, including the untrammeled spending power of teams owned by wealthy Gulf nations. Owners of the most well-supported teams continue to demand a greater, and reliable, share of European soccer’s television revenue, irrespective of performance.With English teams pulling further and further ahead of rivals elsewhere, it is unlikely that the status quo will not be challenged again. 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      How an Afghan Soccer Player Escaped the Taliban and Began a New Life

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      What the Champions League Is Lacking

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      Europe’s richest competition offers the best of what soccer can deliver. But the World Cup still has something it can’t match.PARIS — There will be stories, of course. There are always stories. The Champions League delivers them so frequently and so reliably that it is impossible to dismiss the nagging suspicion that all of this might just be scripted, the product of some complex simulation being run from a secret lair in Nyon.Robert Lewandowski, clad in the blue and red of Barcelona, will return to Bayern Munich, only a few weeks after forcing his exit. Manchester City’s visit to Borussia Dortmund will see Erling Haaland standing once more before its Yellow Wall, that great force of nature no longer at his back but marshaled in his face.And there will be scenes, too. Real Madrid, the reigning and apparently perennial European champion, will walk out at Celtic Park and wince at the roar of a place that impressed Lionel Messi so much that he keeps a Celtic jersey at home as a memento, an atmosphere described by Xavi Hernández as “incomparable,” an arena where the host’s winning so much as a corner generated a noise that made Antonio Conte think “the stadium was falling down.”That is what the Champions League does best, after all. Like its great contemporary, the Premier League, the competition is as much an iconographical phenomenon as a sporting one. Even in those years — not so long ago, even now — when its product was more noted for its caution, its risk aversion, its brutalist cynicism, its appeal endured because of the way it was packaged.The searing lights, the swelling music and the packed stands across Europe all serve as immediately comprehensible prompts to observers and participants alike. They denote that what is unfolding is the pinnacle of the sport, the only thing that matters, the indisputable main event.Real Madrid, last year’s champion, and Manchester City are back where both feel they belong.Juanjo Martin/EPA, via ShutterstockAnd yet, for the first time in three decades, that may not be true this year. This season’s Champions League will be a staccato one. The first two months of the tournament will bring a great rush of fixtures, six rounds of games played in nine breathless weeks, the only breather coming in the form of an unwelcome and, on some level, somewhat greedy international break.Then the competition that has spent 30 years establishing itself as the unquestioned and unrivaled summit of the game — the place where the sport’s cutting edge is sharpened, where new ideas bubble and sizzle, where players put their talent to the ultimate test — will be suspended in uneasy hibernation, put begrudgingly on hold from November until February.Reluctantly, the Champions League — and the constellation of Europe’s great clubs who have come to regard it as their objective and birthright — will cede the limelight to the World Cup: five prime weeks in the middle of the season handed over to international soccer, that anachronism of a bygone age, glossy club soccer’s unwelcome, ugly cousin.There is no shortage of reasons for club soccer to resent this intrusion: the financial ramifications of losing those weeks of television real estate; the potential risk of injury to players paid not by their national associations but by the clubs; the sense that the engine of the sport is being forced to stall so that the hood can be polished.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.But greater than all those, perhaps, is the unhappy reminder that, while the Champions League is the most glamorous and most exclusive club competition on the planet, it is only the most glamorous and most exclusive club competition on the planet. The qualifier — “club” — tells a story of its own. For all the money, for all the power, for all the stories and the scenes, the World Cup is still the biggest show in town.It is worth pausing to reflect on why that might be; after all, it does not fit neatly with what we assume modern consumers — sorry, fans — want from sports. As discussed in this space a couple of weeks ago, audiences are drawn to soccer games by two factors in particular: the familiarity of the brands — sorry, teams — involved, and the stakes for which they are playing.The World Cup, like the Champions League, delivers both in spades. There is no brand recognition quite like being a nation state, with your own seat at the United Nations and history of governmental corruption and fully equipped army, obviously. And there is no tournament quite so doused in risk as the World Cup, in which one misstep can waste four years’ work.In every other aspect, though, the World Cup comes up short. It cannot match the Champions League for prize money, or for star power — Haaland, like Mohamed Salah and the noted nation state of Italy, will be absent from Qatar — or, most crucial, for quality. The Champions League, now, is where the finest soccer in the world is played. The World Cup, by contrast, is pockmarked by flaws.That is unavoidable, of course. If Manchester City lacks a striker, it can go out and buy the best one it can find. Spain, as it has helpfully proved over the last several years, does not have that luxury. Like everyone else, it has to make do and mend. Its coach does not have the opportunity of endless training sessions to hone a system that might accentuate the team’s strengths and disguise its weaknesses; a few days is all that is available.And yet, still, the World Cup possesses the quality of a Black Hole; it draws in the light from even the brightest stars around it. The first phase of the Champions League, like the early rounds of domestic soccer, will have the feel of an appetizer, for fans and players. Games will be played with an awareness that nobody wants to miss the main course.Qatar, where World Cup grass and World Cup anticipation are growing.Mustafa Abumunes/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat, perhaps, suggests the World Cup has something that the Champions League does not. That could be rarity: the fact that even the finest players might get only three shots at going to a World Cup when they can reasonably expect a dozen or so tilts at the Champions League trophy. It could be the jeopardy that is, for now, threaded into its structure. It could be good, old-fashioned patriotic fervor.Or it might be mystery. It may be the flaws themselves that make the World Cup so appealing. It could be that the tournament’s appeal is linked to the fact that Spain could turn up and win it or be eliminated in the group stage; that France, despite the quantity of its quality, could be eliminated on penalties by Switzerland; that South Korea can beat Germany and still not qualify for the knockout rounds.The Champions League has, over the years, lost all of that uncertainty. Every year, it feels more like a parade of the inevitable. There will be stories and there will be scenes this season, as there are every season, but they will be rooted in the same inequality that means it is already possible to be pretty certain of the identity of at least a dozen or so of the teams that will make the round of 16.The same cannot be said of the World Cup. None of the teams are perfect — none of them can be — and so the playing field is more level. The teams that do benefit from a disparity of resources do not have the safety net of five more group games, or a second leg, or the prospect of the transfer market.It is the flaws of the teams in the World Cup that make its appeal unrivaled. It is the uncertainty that they bring that make it the main event. It is the unpredictability that generates what the Champions League lacks, and what it might like to consider trying to capture once more.The Death of the Group of DeathThe Champions League groups for 2022-23.Emrah Gurel/Associated PressThere are, now, two types of Champions League groups. One features two heavy favorites, two teams whose seasons will be defined by how deep they can advance into the competition — Paris St.-Germain and Juventus, for example — and two comparative makeweights, in the form of Benfica, say, and Maccabi Haifa.These groups are something of a tease. The way UEFA draws the groups means that the eye is drawn to those first two names. P.S.G. and Juventus, you think: a clash of the titans. There will be genuine jeopardy here. This sensation lasts as long as it takes the observer to remember that two teams qualify from each pool, and so the games between the two resident superpowers may, in fact, mean nothing at all.The second sort of group is more interesting. Thanks to the quirks of the seeding system, these feature just one putative contender — Liverpool, despite its early-season form, or Chelsea, say — and three relatively evenly matched opponents: Ajax, Napoli and Rangers, or A.C. Milan, Red Bull Salzburg and (at a push) Dinamo Zagreb.Welcome to the big stage (for now), Viktoria Plzen.Martin Divisek/EPA, via ShutterstockIn this scenario, too, the superpower invariably makes it through — that is the nature of the modern Champions League, in which we all spend an awful lot of time making sure that the thing that always happens will, in fact, happen again — but it is generally with a lower points total and a degree of gratitude that their rivals all managed to beat each other.The sole exception to this rule of two groups comes on those occasions when there is a third kind: when one team in a group is notably weaker than all three of its opponents. That dubious honor, this year, falls to Viktoria Plzen, the Czech champion, drawn to face Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Inter Milan.There are eight groups in this year’s Champions League. This is the only one that does not fit the pattern. This is the only one that is not wholly predictable, that might just about be described as a Group of Death, and even that is only because it is impossible to be entirely sure how secure in itself this new vision of Barcelona might be. In ordinary years, even a club as famous as Inter would find itself succumbing to the inevitable, and European soccer would be facing up to the prospect of a fall without any jeopardy at all.CorrespondenceThanks to Jon Gilbert, first of all, for performing that most valuable of services: holding me to account for my attempt last week to hold Gary Neville to account.“Neville was railing against Glazer parsimony,” Jon wrote. “But that was nothing to do with buying players. Neville was apoplectic at the complete lack of investment in club infrastructure. He was hugely upset about the state of Old Trafford, now a leaky rust bucket. The club lacks a leading training facility, the lack of a sporting director has stifled progress and a soccer-competent leadership team is desperately needed.”The last couple of points were, I think, raised by last week’s newsletter, but I’ll concede the former: Neville was speaking more broadly than simply complaining that United should lavish more money in the transfer market. The decline of Old Trafford, in fact, is a pretty handy metaphor for the club as a whole: It still draws the crowds and rakes in the cash, but it is trading on memory.Manchester United beat Liverpool on Monday, righting its ship for a day.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA question, too, from Phil Friedman, soliciting an expansion to the suggestion that some revised version of the European Super League makes more sense for other teams from the continent than it does for the denizens of the Premier League. “Not sure I understand this thought,” Phil noted, which indicates a failure on my part to communicate with sufficient clarity.My logic — which may, caveat emptor, be faulty — is that the Premier League’s supremacy is now ensconced; its broadcasting income will continue to spiral, and so its teams essentially have no need to seek a more glamorous competition elsewhere. Indeed, you could argue that the Premier League will become a sort of de facto Super League anyway, with every other domestic competition in Europe feeding into it.For the elites of Germany, Spain, Italy and France (and potentially others) the only conceivable challenge to that hegemony is to join forces. A league not just boasting Bayern Munich, Barcelona, Paris St.-Germain and Juventus but also drawing on the combined populations of the countries they call home would, I suspect, be able to generate revenues that can match those on offer in England, allowing those clubs to gain access to the fortunes they so evidently believe they deserve.That is certainly not to say its advent would be welcome, of course. Regional leagues are an idea I can get behind; losing the variety offered by each domestic tournament would be a shame. It is just that, from my vantage point, it has a certain inevitability about it, even allowing for the fatal flaw in any proposed Super League: the fact that someone would have to finish bottom. More

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      Champions League Holds Its Draw

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      Manchester City will face Borussia Dortmund, from whom it bought the star striker Erling Haaland.Real Madrid, the defending champion and winner of five of the last 10 Champions Leagues, will face RB Leipzig, Shakhtar Donetsk and Celtic in this year’s competition after the draw was held in Istanbul on Thursday evening.With the top two from each of the eight groups advancing to the round-of-16 knockout stage, most of the biggest teams in Europe seemed to be in strong position to advance. (The third-place teams drop into the second-tier Europa League; fourth-place teams are eliminated.)Big-spending Paris St.-Germain, with Neymar, Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappé, will continue its quest for a first Champions League title against Juventus, Benfica and Maccabi Haifa. While most of the field is made up of familiar names who return to the competition year after year, Maccabi Haifa of Israel is returning to the group stage for the first time since 2009-10.Manchester City, another big-spending team that is a favorite despite its lack of previous titles, will face Borussia Dortmund, from whom they bought the star striker Erling Haaland in June, along with Sevilla and F.C. Copenhagen.Barcelona is still spending plenty of cash despite its financial woes. One of the stars it signed over the summer was Robert Lewandowski, a striker for the perennial German champion Bayern Munich. Those teams will meet in the Champions League, in a group with Inter Milan and Viktoria Plzen.As for the three remaining English teams, they all look to have good chances to advance. Liverpool, last season’s runner-up, will face Ajax, Napoli and Rangers. The two big Glasgow teams, Celtic and Rangers, are in the group stage together for the first time since 2007.Chelsea will take on AC Milan, with Zlatan Ibrahimovic still seeking a first Champions League title in the twilight of his career, plus Red Bull Salzburg and Dinamo Zagreb.And Spurs will face Eintracht Frankfurt, Sporting Lisbon and Marseille.The final group, which many pundits saw as the weakest one, consists of Porto, Atlético Madrid, Bayer Leverkusen and Club Brugge.One wrinkle for Shakhtar Donetsk of Ukraine is that it is scheduled to play its home games in Poland because of the ongoing war. (Russian teams have been banned from European competition entirely.)The group stage will run on a compressed schedule from Sept. 6 to Nov. 2, covering nine weeks rather than the usual 13 or so because of the World Cup in Qatar in late November.The Champions League Final will be played on June 10 in Istanbul, which was to have hosted the 2020 and then the 2021 final, but lost both because of the coronavirus. More

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      P.S.G. President’s Roles Raise Conflict-of-Interest Concerns

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      When the Paris St.-Germain president avoided punishment in a UEFA investigation, some worried that his power and his friendships were producing special treatment.It had been an electric night of Champions League soccer at Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu stadium, with Real Madrid coming from behind to eliminate Paris St.-Germain. The game in March had been billed as a showdown of soccer’s new money against European aristocracy, and Real Madrid, representing the old guard, had triumphed. But only just.Now that it was over, though, the Paris St.-Germain president, Nasser al-Khelaifi, was furious. And almost as soon as the referee blew his whistle, al-Khelaifi was moving.He and the P.S.G. sporting director, Leonardo, headed straight for the changing rooms used by the referee Danny Makkelie and the match officials. It is not uncommon for members of the losing side to express their frustration over a defeat, or to seek answers. But Makkelie, a highly experienced official from the Netherlands, felt what happened in the tunnel area in Madrid went beyond all acceptable bounds.After the match, Makkelie wrote in a report reviewed by The New York Times, al-Khelaifi and Leonardo “showed aggressive behavior and tried to enter the dressing room of the referee.” Even after Makkelie asked them to leave, he wrote, al-Khelaifi and Leonardo “blocked the door.” The president, he wrote, then “deliberately hit the flag of one of the assistants, breaking it.”The events created a crisis for European soccer’s governing body, UEFA. Al-Khelaifi is one of the most powerful men in the European game, an executive whose multiple roles — including a place on UEFA’s top board and a post as chairman of a media company that funnels hundreds of millions of dollars into European soccer through broadcast deals — have long aroused conflict-of-interest concerns.What happened next has only increased those worries among administrators and rivals. Within 24 hours of the incident, UEFA announced that it had opened a disciplinary investigation. And then it went silent.Weeks passed. Then months. Other incidents that had taken place at UEFA matches held after the game between Real Madrid and P.S.G. were investigated and adjudicated. But UEFA’s investigation into al-Khelaifi — who in addition to his role at P.S.G., one of Europe’s richest clubs, is also the chairman of beIN Media Group, the Qatar-based company that is one of UEFA’s biggest partners — dragged on.Only in June, after the European soccer season had finished, after much of the attention on the incident had faded, did UEFA quietly publish a short paragraph. It appeared on Page 5 of a six-page document listing outcomes of recent disciplinary cases: UEFA said it would ban Leonardo — who had since left P.S.G. — for one game for violating “the basic rules of decent conduct.”Curiously, there was no mention of al-Khelaifi, who according to the referee’s report had engaged in behavior that was worse. UEFA declined to provide details of its investigation, or why al-Khelaifi had avoided punishment. It said the delay could be explained, too: It had simply prioritized investigations involving teams still competing in its competitions. P.S.G. declined to comment.The referee Danny Makkelie with Lionel Messi of P.S.G. during a Champions League game in March. Makkelie accused top P.S.G. officials of aggressive behavior after the match.Javier Soriano/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesVeterans of disciplinary matters inside the organization, though, were not surprised in the outcome. Alex Phillips, a UEFA executive for almost two decades, most recently served as its head of governance and compliance until leaving the organization in 2019. He told The Times that the timing of the resolution alone felt intentional. “They would have waited to find a quiet time to bury it and hope people would have forgotten and it would blow over,” Phillips said.He suggested that UEFA’s disciplinary mechanism has been undermined in recent years. “The so-called independent judicial bodies are in reality far from independent, instead now being used as a power tool to ensure specific outcomes,” Phillips said. “We would tell the public that they are independent decisions when they really are not.”The al-Khelaifi case comes at a particularly sensitive time for UEFA. The European Court of Justice will rule next year after a group of clubs questioned UEFA’s role as a regulator and competition organizer. If it loses, its hegemony over how European soccer’s multibillion-dollar business can be organized, and by whom, may come under severe threat.The case of the tunnel fracas in Madrid is also not the first time P.S.G. has achieved a favorable outcome after being investigated by UEFA. In 2018, the club faced the possibility of being excluded from at least a season of Champions League soccer after being found to have breached UEFA’s financial control regulations. But P.S.G. was spared a humiliating — and expensive — punishment after UEFA’s administration sided with the team against its own investigators.Relations between al-Khelaifi and UEFA have only strengthened since then.He emerged as UEFA’s chief partner in early 2021, when the organization successfully fought off a bid by a group of European soccer’s biggest teams to create a breakaway Super League.But had the Super League succeeded, it would have at a stroke sabotaged the Champions League — UEFA’s chief financial engine and widely considered to be the top club event in global sports.Instead of signing up, though, al-Khelaifi said P.S.G. sided with UEFA, lobbying publicly and privately to help crush the revolt. That effort has been rewarded: Al-Khelaifi was soon elevated to chairman of the influential European Club Association, an umbrella group for more than 200 top clubs that is UEFA’s joint venture partner for selling rights to the Champions League and two other club competitions — and of which beIN Sports is one of the biggest customers.“There’s a clear conflict of interest,” said Miguel Maduro, the former head of governance at global soccer’s governing body, FIFA. “That he’s president of P.S.G. might not be a conflict, because clubs must be represented at UEFA. But the fact UEFA has serious economic interests with him and vice versa gives him undue influence. No one that has economic interests in terms of dealing with UEFA should be on its board.”Phillips, the former UEFA executive, said he had once tried to prevent al-Khelaifi’s elevation to UEFA’s executive committee but found little support among his colleagues.“You’ve got a conflict-of-interest article in the statutes,” Phillips said he told staff members. “You put it in, why don’t you apply it?”UEFA’s president, Aleksander Ceferin, has long brushed aside such concerns, and he even insisted that al-Khelaifi, a Qatari who is a close confidante and occasional tennis partner of the Gulf country’s ruler, remain on its board as he fought a corruption case in Switzerland. (Al-Khelaifi was cleared in the case earlier this year.) This week, as European soccer’s top power brokers meet in Istanbul around the draw for this season’s Champions League, Ceferin and al-Khelaifi, in his role as E.C.A. head, are likely to hold bilateral talks on the future of the game.That influence has not gone unnoticed by rivals already wary of P.S.G.’s deep pockets. Another executive with a team in the Champions League this season, Joan Laporta of Barcelona, lamented in an interview with The New York Times earlier this summer that state-backed clubs like P.S.G. can offer double the amount teams like his can for players in the billion-dollar transfer market.Maduro, meanwhile, said that UEFA’s actions have “created suspicions” that P.S.G. operates under a different set of rules. He described the outcome of the 2018 financial fair play case as “incredible.”“You have the political leadership of UEFA siding with a club against its own independent body, undermining the enforcement of the rules,” he said. Most of the members of the commissions that investigated and ruled on P.S.G. in its financial compliance case have either quit or been replaced.Aleksander Ceferin, the UEFA president, has brushed aside concerns about al-Khelaifi’s multiple roles.Kai Pfaffenbach/ReutersUEFA has since appointed Sunil Gulati, the former U.S. Soccer president, to lead its financial investigatory body. Gulati and Ceferin developed a friendship when both served on FIFA’s leadership council. It is Gulati who will be the one tasked with implementing the new financial control regulations that UEFA announced earlier this year. But those rules are more flexible than the previous regulations, and they have been renamed to highlight how UEFA is no longer reliant on them to promote a level playing field in its competitions. What had been known as the Financial Fair Play system now will be known as “financial stability” regulations.“Competitiveness cannot be addressed simply by financial regulations,” Andrea Traverso, the UEFA official responsible for establishing the rules, told reporters in April.The rules seem to have arrived at an opportune time for P.S.G., which has carried on spending lavishly even as the rest of the soccer industry was being buffeted by the financial impact of the pandemic. In this summer’s transfer window alone, the club has committed about 200 million euros on players, including a record new contract to retain the star striker Kylian Mbappé.At the same time, news media reports this week said the team was among two dozen that are likely to be fined, or agree to financial settlements with UEFA, for overspending under the new financial rules. Such a punishment is unlikely to hurt a team with the resources of P.S.G. or Manchester City, another club bankrolled by Gulf billions that has repeatedly challenged — and avoided — major sanctions from UEFA.“It seems that there could be some privilege for the clubs,” Laporta said this summer. “The state clubs that are close to UEFA.” More

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      Soccer’s Return to Ukraine Is Marred by Broken Contracts and Bad Faith

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      European soccer offered support to Ukrainian teams when Russia invaded the country. Now, as rivals bargain shop in wartime, one top club says the sense of solidarity is gone.Like his fellow chief executives at soccer clubs across Europe, Sergei Palkin of the Ukrainian team Shakhtar Donetsk spent weeks this summer negotiating player trades.He and Fulham, a team newly promoted to England’s Premier League, settled on a fee of about $8 million for Manor Solomon, Shakhtar’s Israeli attacker. Then Palkin agreed to accept a payment around double that amount from Lyon, in France’s Ligue 1, for another of Shakhtar’s foreign-born stars, the 22-year-old Brazilian midfielder Tetê.The deals were a financial lifeline for Shakhtar: They would deliver a vital cash infusion to club accounts battered by war with Russia in exchange for valuable talents who, in some cases, no longer wanted to play in Ukraine.But just when the contracts for the deals, and others, were about to be signed, world soccer’s governing body, FIFA, announced that it had extended a regulation allowing foreign players under contract with Ukrainian clubs to temporarily go elsewhere without penalty. The rule — created in March as an interim measure when Ukraine’s season was suspended — would now remain in place for the entire 2022-23 season, FIFA said.And with that, both Lyon and Fulham informed Palkin that they were scrapping the multimillion-dollar deals the sides had discussed. Instead, they would take the players for nothing.“They just talk about the football family,” Palkin said. “But in real life there is no football family.”The Shakhtar chief executive Sergei Palkin.Bradley Secker for The New York TimesA Lyon spokesman said the club disputed Palkin’s recounting of events, but declined to provide details. Fulham declined to comment.Both teams abided by the rules, but the incidents — and others — have left Palkin frustrated and angry. In July, Shakhtar announced plans to sue FIFA for $50 million — the value, it says, of deals that vaporized when the rule allowing players to break their Ukrainian contracts was extended.The situation is a far cry from the widespread messages of solidarity with Ukraine from soccer’s leaders and rival teams in the days and weeks after Russia’s invasion began in February. Instead, Palkin says he has been left with a distaste for the way some in the soccer community have treated Ukrainian clubs like Shakhtar. Shows of support and kind words have been replaced by broken promises and the poaching of players and youth prospects, all of it, in his view, driven by the oil that lubricates the industry: money.The State of the WarZaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant: After United Nations inspectors visited the Russian-controlled facility last week amid continuing shelling and fears of a looming nuclear catastrophe, the organization released a report calling for Russia and Ukraine to halt all military activity around the complex.Europe’s Energy Crisis: European leaders are pushing through economic relief packages to soften the blow of soaring costs tied to the war. In Germany, officials are trying a range of measures to alleviate the crisis, including extending the lives of two of the country’s last nuclear reactors.Russia’s Military Expansion: Though President Vladimir V. Putin ordered a sharp increase in the size of Russia’s armed forces, he seems reluctant to declare a draft. Here is why.Relying on Old Tech: Russia’s new cruise missiles and attack helicopters appear to contain low-tech components, analysts found, undercutting Moscow’s narrative of a rebuilt military that rivals its Western adversaries.Lyon, for example, recently offered to pay Shakhtar 3 million euros, or about $3.01 million, for the permanent transfer of Tetê, Palkin said — less than one-fifth of what Shakhtar believed it had agreed on as a fee for him earlier this summer. Palkin turned down the offer.“It’s ridiculous,” he said. “It’s peanuts. It’s not respectful from FIFA or the clubs.”FIFA said its position of allowing foreign players under contract with Ukrainian teams to play elsewhere temporarily is better than the alternative: players’ unilaterally breaking their contracts. But while there appears to be no sign that the war is ending, there is now also little likelihood that many of the players will ever return to their Ukrainian clubs.When Shakhtar takes the field on Tuesday for its first game on Ukrainian soil since last December — part of the long-delayed restart of the country’s top league — very little will be the same beyond the team’s familiar burnt orange colors. For the first time in two decades, a team known for stocking its roster with imported stars will be almost exclusively Ukrainian. There will be no fans at the stadium in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital and Shakhtar’s latest temporary home, for the match against Metalist 1925. And the players from both teams will have gone through drills of what to do in the event they hear the air raid siren while they are on the field.Nothing is normal, Palkin admitted, but for the sake of Ukrainian soccer, the games must be played. If the season does not start, he said, some soccer clubs in the country would probably fold.Two clubs are already gone from the 16-team league: F.C. Mariupol and Desna Chernihiv, which both announced they their withdrawals ahead of this season. Chernihiv, near the border with Belarus, has been battered by Russian forces, and Mariupol, a southern port city, is now under Russian control. The city, besieged for weeks, has been described by the United Nations as the “deadliest place in Ukraine.”Even in other cities, though, signs of war will be hard to avoid. Palkin said the threat of a Russian attack on matches cannot be discounted.“They can target anything in Ukraine,” he said of the Russian military and its allies in the war. Shakhtar will play its games in Kyiv and Lviv, the city where, at the start of the war, the club helped pay to convert the soccer stadium it had been using into a shelter for refugees.Families living inside the Arena Lviv, which will host some of Shakhtar’s matches when Ukraine’s top soccer league opens its delayed season this week.Mauricio Lima for The New York TimesShakhtar also will play in Europe’s top club competition, the Champions League, but those games will be held in Warsaw because European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, has barred Ukraine from hosting international games as a safety precaution.Shakhtar officials had proposed playing the Ukrainian league games outside the country, too. But the government overruled the idea, deciding that live games, even in empty stadiums and in the comparatively safer western part of the country, would serve as an important prong of the propaganda war.“Ukrainian sports and the will to win on all fronts cannot be stopped!” Ukraine’s sports minister, Vadym Gutzeit, wrote on his Facebook page last week. His post, heralding the return of the Ukrainian Premier League, outlined a list of protocols that must be followed at each game, including evacuation plans, fixed shelters no more than 500 meters, or about 1,640 feet, from each stadium, and a script for stadium announcers in the event that air raid sirens sound: “Attention! Air alarm! We ask everyone to follow us to the shelter!”While Gutzeit’s post highlighted the extraordinary conditions in which soccer will return to Ukraine, it also underlined why many players were not eager to return and take part.Palkin said about 10 players from Shakhtar’s under-19 team had refused to return to Ukraine, where a youth league is also being organized. “I understand them,” he said. “I can’t guarantee they will be safe.” More

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      The Women Who Finally Got Their Chance to Play Soccer

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      Many players, particularly those in divisions for athletes over 60, are discovering the sport anew after growing up in a world before Title IX, the landmark gender equality legislation that opened doors to athletics for women and girls.

      Before Title IX’s passage in 1972, and in the years immediately after, girls’ sports were mostly limited to gym classes or playing on boys’ teams, if they were even allowed. More