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      Real Madrid Secures $380 Million From Sixth Street

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      The Spanish soccer giant has agreed to a joint venture with the investment firm Sixth Street in which profits from the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium will be shared.Real Madrid, the European soccer behemoth, closed a deal in which the investment firm Sixth Street, based in the United States, will pay about $380 million for a 30 percent stake in the team’s stadium operations.The announcement Thursday came amid growing optimism among executives that Real Madrid, a 13-time European champion, could complete a deal to sign Kylian Mbappé, one of the most sought after players in world soccer, as a free agent on a contract that could make him the highest-paid athlete in Real’s history.Under the terms of the contract, Real, which strolled to a 35th Spanish championship this month, would have no restrictions on how it spends its money. Capturing Mbappé would be a coup for Real, which has been chasing him since failing to persuade his current club, Paris St.-Germain, to accept as much as $200 million for him during last summer’s postseason.The deal between Real and Sixth Street also includes Legends, an American sports event management and hospitality company that is partly owned by Sixth Street. The partnership will last for 20 years and be run through a joint venture that will contain all of Real’s in-stadium income, with the exception of season-ticket sales.The investment is the latest part of Real’s attempts to grow new revenue streams from its celebrated stadium, which is undergoing a $1 billion retrofit, after which games will be played on a retractable field.“The transformation of the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium will be a turning point in the history of Real Madrid,” Real’s president, Florentino Pérez, said in a statement. “This agreement strengthens the club’s goal of continuing to significantly increase the stadium’s revenues from both sporting and other types of events.”While Real remains the dominant player in Spanish soccer and will compete in the Champions League final once more next week, it has been facing pressure to keep up with changing forces in the global soccer landscape. Despite generating more wealth year over year than practically any other soccer team, Real has struggled to compete for the best talent with clubs backed by deep-pocketed Arab states and billionaires. Turning the Bernabéu into what club officials have likened to a version of Madison Square Garden may help it maintain its muscle in the marketplace.The agreement also bears some hallmarks of the one Spain’s domestic league, La Liga, signed with another investment fund, CVC Capital Partners, that Real rejected and is suing against. CVC agreed to part with more than $2 billion in return for almost 10 percent of the league’s broadcast income for 50 years, a price that Real — and the league’s other best-supported team, Barcelona, as well as member-owned Athletic Club from Bilbao — thought was too steep.Real officials have pointed out that unlike that deal, the arrangement with Sixth Street, which also owns a portion of the N.B.A.’s San Antonio Spurs, is limited to the investment fund’s sharing in profits, not revenue, from the venture.“Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu is hallowed ground in the world of football, and we are honored to be joining this partnership to invest in the innovative, long-term strategic vision that has guided the club’s consistent success over its storied history,” said Alan Waxman, a founding partner and the chief executive of Sixth Street.Real benefited from the pandemic by moving to its training stadium at a time when supporters were barred from attending public events. It returned to the arena this season even though construction work continues. The stadium’s refurbishment is expected to be completed in time for the start of the 2023-24 season.The team’s finances are largely under control even though the stadium debt is almost $1 billion. Servicing costs about $40 million a year. The cash infusion from Sixth Street will mean the club’s short-term debt will be wiped out and replaced with $260 million available to spend.Those finances could allow Real to add reinforcements should it manage to secure Mbappé. The striker said recently that he was close to announcing his plans for next season. P.S.G., his current club, has offered him a contract extension worth far more than the offer from Real. But Mbappé has made several comments indicating his desire to play in Madrid, a destination and team that have been magnets for the game’s best talent. More

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      FIFA Picks First Women Referees for Men’s World Cup

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      It is the first time that women, three referees and three assistant referees, were selected to officiate games at the top men’s soccer tournament, which will be held in Qatar this year.The Qatar World Cup was always going to be full of firsts: the first time it will be played in the Middle East; the first time it will be played in November and December. Now, it may also be the first men’s World Cup tournament in which a game is refereed by a woman.FIFA on Thursday named three women among the 36 referees chosen to officiate at the event and three more in the group of assistants that will run the line at the monthlong tournament. The most likely candidate among the three to get a starring role is Stéphanie Frappart of France, who has broken a number of barriers in European soccer.Frappart, who made the list alongside female referees from Rwanda and Japan, has a stellar reputation in European soccer as the first woman to referee men in the Champions League, France’s top division and World Cup qualification games. This month, she refereed the final of the men’s French Cup.Frappart was also chosen to join the officiating teams at last summer’s European Championship, but her role was limited to that of fourth official, a function on the sideline between the benches of the opposing teams.In announcing its refereeing choices, FIFA may now look to go one step further. Joining Frappart in the refereeing group are Salima Mukansanga from Rwanda and Yoshimi Yamashita from Japan. They and the other World Cup-bound officials will attend seminars in preparation for the 32-team event.Salima Mukansanga and all of the other referees selected for the pool of officials at the World Cup will be put through a rigorous physical training program.Footografiia/EPA, via Shutterstock“This concludes a long process that began several years ago with the deployment of female referees at FIFA men’s junior and senior tournaments,” said Pierluigi Collina, the chairman of the FIFA referees committee. “In this way, we clearly emphasize that it is quality that counts for us and not gender.”Read More on the World CupAmbitious Goals: FIFA has given up on a plan to hold the World Cup every two years. But its president’s plans for the future are bold.Golden Sunset: This year’s World Cup will likely be the last for stars like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo — and 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.A Controversy: A dispute over a player’s eligibility could alter the qualifying results in South America, with Chile asking for forfeits and Ecuador’s spot in Qatar.North American women have also been selected to participate in the tournament as assistant referees. Kathryn Nesbitt, a regular in Major League Soccer, is joined by Karen Díaz Medina of Mexico. Neuza Back from Brazil is also included.For FIFA, the push to include more women on and off the field has become increasingly urgent amid greater scrutiny of how it manages the sport and a growing global interest in women’s soccer. More money than ever has been invested in developing players and match officials. That, Collina said, should help make the sight, and inclusion, of female referees less of a talking point than it remains today.“I would hope that in the future, the selection of elite women’s match officials for important men’s competitions will be perceived as something normal and no longer as sensational,” he said. “They deserve to be at the FIFA World Cup because they constantly perform at a really high level, and that’s the important factor for us.”Still, the environment and focus on female officials can be exacting. Frappart faced abusive messages on social media before and after she officiated the French Cup game, which was decided after a penalty call.Frappart said before that game that she stayed away from social media and rarely read the press. “Personally, I am focused on what happens on the pitch and don’t pay attention to controversies or discussions about my performances,” she said.That the opportunity for the first female officials to take part in a World Cup is taking place in a conservative Gulf state like Qatar adds to the intrigue. Some establishments and restaurants in the tiny emirate are separated, with groups of men not allowed to enter areas designated for women or families. Stadiums, though, will be open, without such restrictions.Yoshimi Yamashita and the other female officials will be working in an emirate in which some establishments limit contact between men and women.Soe Zeya Tun/ReutersFIFA has become increasingly innovative when it comes to officiating its multibillion-dollar tournament. The last two editions of the tournament featured goal line technology. At the last one, in Russia, FIFA introduced video assistant refereeing, largely without affecting the flow of the game.VAR was also used at the last Women’s World Cup, in France, in 2019, but its use, largely because of running costs, is not yet universal in the sport. For that reason, FIFA said the teams at the controls are mainly drawn from Europe and South America.Choosing referees for the tournament was made harder by the pandemic, and that is also, in part, why FIFA made its announcements earlier than usual. “We want to work even harder with all those who have been appointed for the FIFA World Cup, monitoring them in the next months,” said Collina, a former World Cup final referee. “The message is clear: Don’t rest on your laurels, keep working hard, and prepare yourselves very seriously for the World Cup.”FIFA is also keen to ensure its officials are able to keep up with players who are fitter than ever. For that, the organization said it would provide each official with a plan to follow to arrive in Qatar in peak form. “Each match official will be carefully monitored in the next months with a final assessment on technical, physical and medical aspects to be made shortly before the World Cup,” Massimo Busacca, FIFA’s director of refereeing, said.But for all the work, all the focus, a referee’s fate could be defined by one bad call.“We can’t eliminate all mistakes, but we will do everything we can to reduce them,” Busacca said. More

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      U.S. Soccer and Players Guarantee Equal Pay in New Contracts

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      Landmark labor agreements with members of the men’s and women’s national teams will include higher paychecks and shared World Cup prize money.As the women’s soccer stars stared at their laptop screens Monday night and the new labor deal was explained to them, the numbers just kept climbing. A few thousand dollars here. Tens of thousands of dollars there. Pretty soon, the figures had crossed into the millions.What they added up to, the players all knew, was something many of them had chased for most of their careers: equal pay.That reality arrived Wednesday in landmark contracts with the U.S. Soccer Federation that will guarantee, for the first time, that soccer players representing the United States men’s and women’s national teams will receive the same pay when competing in international matches and competitions.In addition to equal rates of pay for individual matches, the deals include a provision, believed to be the first of its kind, through which the teams will pool the unequal prize money payments U.S. Soccer receives from FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, for their participation in the quadrennial World Cup. Starting with the 2022 men’s tournament and the 2023 Women’s World Cup, that money will be shared equally among the members of both teams.“No other country has ever done this,” U.S. Soccer’s president, Cindy Cone, said of the deal to equalize World Cup payments. “I think everyone should be really proud of what we’ve accomplished here. It really, truly, is historic.”U.S. Soccer’s president, Cindy Parlow Cone, a former national team player who helped guide the national teams to a deal, with President Biden at an Equal Pay Day event in March.Nicholas Kamm/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe agreements were reached just over six years after a group of stars from the World Cup-winning U.S. women’s national team began a campaign to overcome what they said was years of wage discrimination by U.S. Soccer against its female players. The players argued that they had been paid less than their male counterparts for decades even as they won world championships and Olympic gold medals.The fight over per diems and paychecks eventually morphed into a federal lawsuit in which the women accused U.S. Soccer of “institutionalized gender discrimination.” While the women lost in federal court in 2020, when a judge ruled against their core claims, they eventually won their equal pay victory at the negotiating table, with a final assist from the men’s team.It was the men’s team’s players, in fact, who opened a pathway to a deal late last year when they privately agreed to share some of the millions of dollars in World Cup bonus money that they have traditionally received by pooling it with the smaller payments the women receive from their own championship.That split could see the two teams pool, and share, $20 million or more as soon as next year. That will be in addition to match payments that are expected to average $450,000 a year — and double that, or more, in years when World Cup bonus money is added.For the women’s team’s players, Wednesday’s agreements were as much a relief as a triumph. Becky Sauerbrunn, one of the five players who signed the original complaint in 2016, admitted, “It’s hard to get so, so excited about something we should have had all along.”Through the years, as the sides battled in courtrooms and negotiating sessions, the dispute produced sometimes caustic — and personal — disagreements about personal privacy, workplace equality and basic fairness, and drew support (and second-guessing) from a disparate chorus of presidential candidates, star athletes and Hollywood celebrities — not all of them supportive of the women’s campaign for pay equity.The difference in compensation for men and women has been one of the most contentious issues in soccer in recent years, particularly after the American women won consecutive World Cup championships, in 2015 and 2019, and the men failed to qualify for the 2018 tournament. Over the years, the women’s team, which includes some of the world’s most recognizable athletes, had escalated and amplified its fight in court filings, news media interviews and on the sport’s grandest stages.The dispute had always been a complex issue, with differing contracts, unequal prize money and other financial quirks muddying the distinctions in pay between the men’s and women’s teams and complicating the ability of national governing bodies like U.S. Soccer to resolve the differences.Yet the federation ultimately committed to a fairer system. To achieve it, U.S. Soccer will distribute millions of extra dollars to its best players through a complicated calculus of increased match bonuses, pooled prize money and new revenue-sharing agreements. These agreements will give each team a slice of the tens of millions of dollars in commercial revenues that U.S. Soccer receives each year from sponsors, broadcasters and other partners.The U.S. women’s soccer team amplified its equal pay message on the way to winning the 2019 Women’s World Cup.Calla Kessler for The New York TimesLabor peace will be expensive: U.S. Soccer has committed to single-game payments for most matches of $18,000 per player for games won, and as much as $24,000 per game for wins at certain major tournaments — cementing the status of the U.S. men and women as two of the highest-paid national teams in the world. And the federation will surrender to the men and women on those teams 90 percent of the money it receives from FIFA for sending teams to the next two World Cups.The split of prize money, then, is a notable concession by the American men, who have previously been awarded the bulk of those multimillion-dollar payments by U.S. Soccer, and a potential seven-figure windfall for the women. The 24 teams at the 2019 Women’s World Cup in France, for example, competed for a prize pool of $30 million; the 32 men’s teams that will compete in Qatar in November will split $450 million.Timeline: U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team’s Fight for Equal PayCard 1 of 11A six-year legal battle. More

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      P.S.G.’s Idrissa Gueye Refuses to Wear Rainbow Jersey, Missing Match

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      Idrissa Gueye faced criticism after he missed a game rather than wear a shirt designed to support an anti-homophobia initiative. He missed the same game last year.Idrissa Gueye traveled south to Montpellier with his Paris St. Germain teammates for the team’s league game on Saturday but wound up watching it from the stands. Gueye was not injured, his coach said after P.S.G.’s victory: He “had to leave the team for personal reasons.”Those personal reasons, a team source confirmed Monday, were that Gueye had refused to join his teammates in wearing a special jersey featuring rainbow-colored numbers created to highlight discrimination before Tuesday’s global events marking the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia. The jerseys were part of a coordinated leaguewide effort.📸 Messi 🌈#17mai 🏳️‍🌈⚽️ #JouonsLaCollectif pic.twitter.com/zrcrvDqf1b— Ligue 1 English (@Ligue1_ENG) May 14, 2022
      Gueye has not commented on his absence, but French news media reports, which were first to report the reason for Gueye’s missing the game on Saturday, quickly noted that he had also missed the same awareness-raising fixture last season. Last season’s absence was attributed to a stomach issue, but this year P.S.G.’s coach, Mauricio Pochettino, said Gueye did not have any health issues.Activist groups were quick to denounce Gueye’s decision to decline to wear the jersey. Rouge Direct, a group that fights homophobia in sports, called on the French league, P.S.G. and Gueye to “explain themselves” and suggested Gueye should be punished for his actions.For P.S.G. the issue of support for gay rights and ant-homophobia efforts is a particularly sensitive one. The team is owned by the Qatari state through its sovereign wealth fund, and Qatar itself has come under scrutiny amid concerns from the gay community about their safety when the World Cup takes place in the Gulf country later this year. Homosexuality is against the law in Qatar, as it is in other countries in the Gulf, but World Cup organizers have insisted that all fans would be welcome during the tournament.Same-sex acts are also illegal in Gueye’s native Senegal, where ultraconservative groups have burned rainbow flags during public protests against homosexuality.P.S.G. has not commented on Gueye beyond the comments made by Pochettino after Sunday’s game.The club’s senior officials are currently in Qatar, according to a team representative, and it is unclear what measures, if any, will be taken against Gueye, whose contract with P.S.G. expires at the end of next month.P.S.G. is by far the biggest team in France and attracts outsize interest, at home and abroad, because of its star-studded roster, which this year produced the club’s eighth French championship in the past 10 years. On Saturday at Montpellier, two of its star forwards — Kylian Mbappé and Lionel Messi — both scored goals, helping to highlight the specially commissioned jersey they wore on social media and beyond.According to the team source with knowledge of P.S.G.’s internal conversations over the weekend, club officials had told Gueye that the team was committed to the campaign and that he had no option but wear the same jersey as the rest of his teammates if he wanted to play. When Gueye decided he would not, he was sent to the stands for the game, according to a person with knowledge with the incident. More

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      New Heights and Old Grudges as Turkey Crowns Its Champion

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      Trabzonspor claimed the title almost two weeks ago. Its team, and its fans, aren’t done celebrating.Asked why her team’s next home game on Sunday is being played in Istanbul instead of in its usual setting, the official from the Turkish club Trabzonspor said the turf at the team’s Senol Günes Stadium had been damaged after — in her words — “some people got on the field in our last match.”Her description was entirely accurate, and yet her words did not quite do justice to the significance and scale of what took place on the field, and beyond, on April 30 in Trabzon. The wait for a Turkish championship, nearly four decades in total (or far less, depending on who is doing the counting), was too much for some to contain themselves.Hundreds of fans stormed the field even before the final whistle of Trabzonspor’s Turkish Super League game with Antalyaspor. Hundreds became thousands soon after that, when Trabzonspor officially secured the point it needed to ensure it would become Turkish champion for the first time since 1984.Players were engulfed by the crush. Delirious fans lifted others on their shoulders or lit flares. Soon, smoke shrouded the arena, where barely a patch of turf was visible. Outside, the crowd was even bigger, the referee’s whistle seemingly the cue for pretty much all of Trabzon’s 800,000 or so residents to flood the streets of this city 600 miles north east of Istanbul to participate in a celebration — images of which were beamed around the world — late into the night.And that outpouring came even before the official celebration and the trophy presentation. That will come on Saturday, when a delegation from the Turkish soccer federation will travel to Trabzon, an ancient city on the south coast of the Black Sea, to deliver a title that had, for so long, seemed as if it would never materialize. There were near misses, late-season implosions, and then a bitter, decade-long and still unresolved pursuit for a championship that Trabzonspor continues to claim but which remains, to this day, in the trophy cabinet of its bitter rival Fenerbahce even though the Istanbul team was found to have been at the center of a match-fixing scandal that year.Trabzonspor’s players clinched the title with three games left in the season.Str/EPA, via ShutterstockFor Trabzonspor, getting its hands on the championship trophy at last will bring some sort of closure for a team that has for long cast itself as an outsider, and a victim of the power wielded by the three Istanbul clubs — Besiktas, Fenerbahce and Galatasary — that have long dominated Turkish soccer.“It became almost an expectation they would get close and then pretty much guarantee it would all fall to pieces,” said Emre Sarigul, a co-founder of Turkish Football, the largest English-language website solely devoted to Turkish soccer. “The fans felt they are cursed and everyone was conspiring against them.”Sometimes the tensions have boiled over, not in wild celebration but in angst and anger. Like the time in 2015 when club officials — incensed at the award of a late penalty kick against Trabzonspor — locked a referee inside the stadium for hours and refused to release him. It required the intervention of Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to free him.Trabzon, its much loved soccer club and those who follow it have long considered themselves a community apart from the dominant teams of Istanbul, where the three giants have combined to win 57 of Turkey’s 66 national championships. That has fostered not only a type of siege mentality but also frequent bouts of bad blood.The pitch invasion after Trabzonspor’s title was secure left the field invisible, and the air filled with smoke.Str/EPA, via ShutterstockThe fiercest enmity has been reserved toward Fenerbahce, a domestic powerhouse whose influence spreads well beyond the soccer field. Games between the teams have frequently been marred by crowd disturbances — to be fair, not uncommon events at the top of Turkish soccer — but the relationship plumbed new depths in 2015 when a bus carrying the Fenerbahce team came under attack as it traversed a steep mountain road on its way to the Trabzon airport after a game nearby. Shots were fired through its windshield, wounding the driver.He survived, and the bus did not, thankfully, plunge off a mountain — but the attackers have never been identified, and in the febrile conspiracy- world inhabited by Turkish soccer, blame for the incident continues to center on the intensity of the soccer rivalry.Time has not softened the ill feelings. As Trabzonspor basks in continued citywide celebrations, the sense of bitterness among many of the millions of followers of Fenerbahce appears almost as strong. That much was abundantly clear in a news conference given by Fenerbahce’s president, Ali Koc, in the aftermath of Trabzonspor’s triumph. Koc railed against the new Turkish champion, saying it had benefited from curious refereeing appointments (claims that seem to be made by all Turkish teams about all of their opponents all of the time). He then claimed the team’s decision to relocate its final home game to Istanbul was an act of provocation; mocked Trabzonspor’s claim on the controversial 2011 championship; and even resurrected the bus shooting, which he argued is still commemorated by Trabzonspor fans, including on a banner at a match this season. “While the incident in 2015 is engraved in our memories,” Koc said, “we will not accept them making a mockery by reflecting it on a banner.”Fenerbahce will probably finish second to Trabzonspor. But it isn’t going quietly.Murad Sezer/ReutersBesting Fenerbache, which is second in the league table, undoubtedly has made this year’s title sweeter for Trabzonspor. The team has a significant following in Istanbul, Turkey’s economic powerhouse, which has only grown larger as Trabzon’s own population has declined. But the ardor of the support for the local team remains as strong as ever. That was clear in the celebrations, which have continued for more than a week with gatherings, concerts and rallies. And not only in Turkey: While not of the scale of the mayhem that ensued back home, impromptu celebrations also took place in cities as far away as Berlin, Munich and London.“Pretty much everyone in the city and the Trabzon region by and large supports Trabzonspor — it has become their identity,” said Sarigul, adding that those who have left in search of opportunities remain connected to the place that will always be home. They even have a phrase for the feeling: “Everywhere is Trabzon to us.”On Saturday, after decades of waiting, after decades of suffering, those fans — wherever they may be — will all get another chance to celebrate. Again.Yasin Akgul/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Super League HangoverIt has been just over a year since European soccer was almost torn apart by a group of top clubs and their (quickly abandoned) plans for the Super League. The group of 12 founders were branded the dirty dozen by Aleksander Ceferin, the UEFA president, for their effort to create a closed league that would have generated huge wealth for them at the expense of the hundreds of small- and medium-sized clubs that make up the continent’s soccer pyramid. When their plot collapsed almost the moment it was exposed to the light, though, Ceferin and the other leaders of European soccer were presented with the space they needed to follow through on their strong rhetoric about resetting the balance of power in the sport.This week we found out just what the post-Super League world will look like, and in many ways it doesn’t look much different to the status quo: The biggest clubs — and those that have caught up to them thanks to the wealth of their owners — are likely to remain just as dominant in the decade ahead.This week’s UEFA congress produced the rarest of soccer moments: Gianni Infantino and Aleksander Ceferin together. And smiling. Christian Bruna/EPA, via ShutterstockAt a meeting in sun-dappled Vienna this week, the framework for the future of the Champions League was finally approved. And after months of wrangling, the structure of what will be a redesigned 36-team competition starting in 2024 looks much the same as it did when it was first proposed in the days before the Super League teams — led by, among others, this season’s finalists Real Madrid and Liverpool — tried their failed putsch.Under pressure from the biggest leagues, who complained of too many matches, the number of group stage games was reduced to eight from a proposed 10. And in the other notable change, two of the extra four places in the event will not now go to clubs with historically strong track records in European competition but who failed to qualify on merit.What does it all mean? Well, since the extra places have been earmarked for the leagues with the best record in Europe the previous season, that most likely means even more Champions League spots for teams from the biggest, richest and most powerful league of them all: the Premier League. It’s also a reminder that for all their fighting and sniping and suing, UEFA and the dirty dozen need one another more than they care to admit. It is the big clubs, after all, who drive the billion-dollar television contracts, the multimillion-dollar sponsorship deals, the big ratings for all those midweek classics in UEFA’s showcase competition.But it also suggests European soccer leaders have blown their big chance, and maybe their best chance in years, to recalibrate European soccer in ways that would give more teams more chances to stand on level ground with the biggest and richest clubs, and break up what looks like a stratifying elite.Soccer’s Agent ProblemMino Raiola’s final deal was a doozy.Valery Hache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOn its face, Manchester City’s signing of Erling Haaland looked to be a bargain: The release clause City paid in Haaland’s Dortmund contract (reportedly 60 million euros, or just over $62.5 million) was probably less than half his value on a truly open market, and well within the means of what is arguably the richest team in the world.But look a little closer at the associated costs of the deal, and things suddenly become a lot murkier, and a lot more expensive. According to multiple news reports, City also paid fees to intermediaries involved in the deal, including an eight-figure payout to Haaland’s father for acting as a middleman, and about $40 million to the player’s agent, Mino Raiola. Those totals were comparable to the fee for Haaland himself. And City still has to pay Haaland, of course. The total price tag, when all the checks clear, should be well north of $250 million.Soccer has an agent problem. But FIFA, the world’s governing body, has been moving to resolve it. The announcement of Haaland’s move to Manchester came as FIFA appeared set to finally adopt major revisions to its regulations on agents, changes that were in many ways prompted by disclosures that Raiola, who died earlier this month as the pursuit of Haaland neared its endgame, received almost half the then world-record fee of $108 million that Manchester United paid Juventus in 2017 to acquire one of his other clients, Paul Pogba.What impact would the FIFA regulations have had on the Haaland deal? For starters, Haaland’s father would not have been able to receive a fee (at least officially), since the new rules allow for commissions to be paid only to licensed representatives. But the rules changes go far beyond that. Currently an agent can represent all three sides in a deal — player, buying team and selling club — and collect a piece of the deal from each. Under the new rules, that would no longer be permitted. Caps on commissions are also part of the revised regulations, and would top out at closer to 10 percent than the nearly 50 percent Raiola and others have pocketed in the past.The changes still would have allowed the agents to collect about $20 million in a deal as rich as Haaland’s — far less than the actual sums, but still a healthy return, and more than the $3 million the clubs that trained Haaland in his youth can expect. FIFA’s training compensation is capped at 5 percent.Of course, that’s if the reforms ever come into force. A group of agents is threatening legal action to block them.A Question for the AmbassadorPerhaps only a sporting icon with the star power of Lionel Messi could pull off the neat trick of providing his services to not one but two Gulf states without attracting the type of criticism routinely heaped on others who do the same.Having signed for Qatar-owned Paris St.-Germain last summer, Messi has now agreed to serve as an ambassador for Saudi Arabia. This week, he was welcomed by the kingdom’s minister of tourism, and within hours he had shared a sponsored post showing him relaxing on a boat in the Red Sea with his 326 million followers on Instagram. #VisitSaudi, read the hashtag.In doing so, Messi became the latest sports figure to accept the huge checks being doled out by Saudi Arabia’s leaders as part of a global push to change perceptions of the country, a process many have labeled sportswashing. But it also put Messi, not known for offering his views on matters of geopolitical importance, in quite the uncomfortable spot. Another one of the soccer star’s ambassadorial posts is with UNICEF, the United Nations-backed fund that provides humanitarian aid for children, which in March reported that at least 10,000 Yemeni children have been killed or injured since the start of the war launched by a Saudi coalition in 2015.Rory’s Back Next WeekThat’s all for this week, when Rory will return from a brief vacation and wrest back control of the newsletter. Until then, get in touch at askrory@nytimes.com with hints, tips, complaints or to share your favorite Turkish soccer conspiracies (5,000 words or less on those emails, please).Have a great weekend. More

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      How Haaland’s Advisers Worked the System on the Way to Man City

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      A carefully crafted strategy for a young striker’s career paid off handsomely for him and his agents. But will everyone get what they want out of the deal?A few days before last summer’s transfer window drew to a close, a handful of Manchester City’s most senior executives gathered in a conference room at the club’s sprawling campus to pick through what had gone right, and what had gone wrong, over the previous couple of months.Though City, the Premier League champion, had succeeded in persuading Aston Villa to relinquish Jack Grealish, the impish playmaker who had emerged as England’s breakout star during the European Championship — making him the most expensive player in English history in the process — it had failed to land its other priority target, the Tottenham striker Harry Kane.What had always been a complex, fraught pursuit had descended, instead, into a squabble over who was to blame. Kane had, at one point, refused to train with Tottenham, the club he supported as a child, in the hope of forcing Spurs’ hand, but his act of brinkmanship failed. Tottenham claimed City had failed to present an offer that might act as a starting point for negotiation.That afternoon, City’s executives reflected on their strategy, contemplated why a deal had not materialized and considered how they would proceed. As the meeting wound up and his colleagues stood to leave, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, the club’s chairman, made one final remark. It amounted to only two words, an ambition and an instruction. “Erling Haaland,” he said.A little more than nine months later, that objective has been achieved. On Tuesday afternoon, City confirmed it had reached an “agreement in principle” with Haaland’s current club, the German side Borussia Dortmund, to acquire the striker, one of the two most coveted forwards in world soccer this summer — the scorer of 85 goals in 88 games for Dortmund, and regarded alongside Kylian Mbappé as one of the twin standard-bearers for soccer’s first post-Messi, post-Ronaldo generation.In reality, of course, it had not taken nine months to strike any sort of agreement with Dortmund. Haaland’s contract contained a buyout clause, somewhere in the region of $75 million, that gave Dortmund little to no say over where he might play next season. All City, all anyone, had to do was to inform Dortmund of an intention to pay it. Haaland’s employer was in no position to haggle.The Manchester City chairman, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, with the club’s chief executive, Ferran Soriano.Phil Noble/ReutersFar more convoluted was the process of persuading Haaland that City was the correct next step in his meticulously planned career. Haaland, 21, might have an emotional bond to the club: His father, Alfie, played for City at the turn of the century, and though his son has no memory of his time in Manchester, he told the Times in 2019 that he has some affection for all his former teams.But, as City would have known, there has been precious little room for romance in Erling Haaland’s inexorable rise. Every stage of his journey has been mapped out with surgical — possibly cynical — precision by his twin sherpas: his longstanding representative, Mino Raiola, the divisive Dutch-Italian agent who died last month; and his father.When Haaland left Norway as a teenager, he rejected the overtures of the English and German teams pursuing him in favor of Austria’s Red Bull Salzburg, home to both a reliable production line of talent for Europe’s major leagues and the prospect of matches in the Champions League. When he left Salzburg, it was not for England but for Dortmund, a club with a track record of developing and selling players and a willingness to set a reasonable buyout clause.That meant, of course, that not only was Haaland recession-proof — $75 million is, by modern standards, pretty good value for a player who appears to have been designed and engineered to score as many goals as possible — but that, when the inevitable auction started, the bar would not be who could pay Dortmund the most, but who could put together the most attractive package for the player and his advisers.The agent Mino Raiola helped draw up Haaland’s carefully planned career path. Raiola died last month, only weeks before Haaland’s move to City was arranged.Valery Hache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTo ensure the best possible outcome, Raiola and Alfie Haaland traveled around to Europe’s superclubs, stoking interest and fanning flames. There were visits to Real Madrid and Barcelona. There were eyelashes fluttered in the vague direction of Chelsea and Manchester United. There was even, for a time, a flirtation with Bayern Munich.That, of course, was their job. It is exactly what Raiola, in particular, was paid to do. He did it with startling effectiveness: not only because current estimates suggest the deal, in total, will be worth somewhere north of $200 million, once Haaland’s salary and sundry fees to agents are taken into account, but because in the course of doing so he may have invented a whole new paradigm for how agents shape their players’ careers.Received wisdom, in soccer, has always had it that players should — to be blunt — always take the money, the big break, as soon as they can. It takes only one injury, after all, to explode the finest-laid plans; one summer’s passion may be an afterthought by the next. Clubs are fickle, and everything has an expiration date.Raiola overturned that for Haaland, preferring instead a policy of delayed gratification. He did not chase the eye-watering transfer fee — as he had done, perhaps, for another of his clients, Paul Pogba — but rather built his client’s appeal a little more slowly, gradually ensuring he was in a position not only to make the leap to one of Europe’s elite teams, but to do so in a way that favored the player (and his representatives) rather than the club that happened to own his contract at that point.City’s offer is the reward. It is not a move without its caveats: Manager Pep Guardiola has worked with some of the finest strikers of the modern era, but not always successfully. He has spent six years painstakingly fine-tuning his system at City, only to have to refit it completely to suit Haaland. Sometimes, though, soccer is a startlingly simple game. A player who scores lots of goals joining a team that creates lots of chances should really have only one outcome.Pep Guardiola has conquered England, but not Europe, with his Manchester City teams.Carl Recine/Action Images Via ReutersWhether it is the final reward, though, is a different matter. At roughly the same time City was preparing its announcement, Mbappé was busy being pictured having lunch in Madrid. His contract at Paris St.-Germain expires in a few weeks and despite an impossibly large offer to stay, he seems set to move to Real Madrid this summer. The financing of that deal will, most likely, dwarf what City has offered Haaland.This is the logical next step in the model that Raiola and the Haaland family has pioneered. It is a reflection of soccer’s financial reality. There is no price point at which City, or P.S.G., feel compelled to sell a player. That leaves only one option: running down a contract and stepping out on to the free market.That is the challenge that awaits City, somewhere down the line. It has won out, this time, by convincing Haaland — its first true, plug-and-play superstar, someone who will be thought of but never referred to as a franchise player — this was his best next step. The question, for a player whose career has been planned out so coolly, so ruthlessly, is whether it is also his last one. More

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      Erling Haaland and Manchester City Near a Deal

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      City, which is nearing its fourth Premier League title in five years, confirmed that it had reached an agreement with Dortmund to acquire the 21-year-old striker.Manchester City has won the race to sign striker Erling Haaland, confirming Tuesday that it had reached an agreement to make the 21-year-old Norwegian goal-scoring machine the latest addition to a star-studded roster that is on the cusp of winning its fourth Premier League title in five years.“Manchester City can confirm that we have reached an agreement in principle with Borussia Dortmund for the transfer of striker Erling Haaland to the Club on 1st July 2022,” the team said in a curt statement on Tuesday. The club said it only needed to resolve contract terms with Haaland to make the deal official.Haaland’s departure this summer from Dortmund, the German team where he has spent the past two and a half seasons, had been widely expected. City outbid (or outmaneuvered) potential suitors like Real Madrid and Bayern Munich for Haaland, one of the world’s most sought-after young forwards.City and its rivals had been facing a June deadline to activate the release clause in Haaland’s Dortmund contract — said to be worth as much as 75 million euros, or just under $80 million. It still needs to agree to contract terms with Haaland, whose new salary is expected to make him one of the dozen or so highest-paid players in the world.Those figures are not an issue for Manchester City, which is bankrolled by the billionaire brother of the ruler of the United Arab Emirates and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to assemble one of the world’s most-talented squads. But the numbers most likely put Haaland out of reach of other teams, including Barcelona, which is mired in a financial crisis that led it to lose Lionel Messi for free last summer, and Bayern Munich, whose sporting director said recently that adding Haaland “doesn’t make any sense” for the perennial German champions since the team already employs a world-class striker in Robert Lewandowski.Closing the deal for Haaland this week will allow him to say farewell to Dortmund’s fans in the club’s final game of the season on Saturday, at home to Hertha Berlin.City currently leads Liverpool in the Premier League title race by 3 points with three games remaining, but it surely entered the chase for Haaland with an eye on finally winning the Champions League. The trophy has been the goal of City’s leadership for more than a decade; the club finally reached the final for the first time last season, losing to its London rival Chelsea, and then returned to the semifinals this season before being eliminated stunningly by Real Madrid last week.A prolific scorer who possesses a fearsome mix of size, speed and skill, Haaland, who turns 22 in July, has been ticketed for global stardom since his teens. The son of the former Premier League midfielder Alfie Haaland, Erling Haaland made his debut for his boyhood club, Norway’s Bryne FK, as a 15-year-old, and joined Molde a year later, signed by the former Manchester United star Ole Gunner Solskjaer, who was Molde’s manager at the time.Haaland made his first splash at Molde in Norway, where he scored his first professional goals as a 16-year-old.Svein Ove Ekornesvag/EPA, via ShutterstockBy 2018, he was at Red Bull Salzburg in Austria, where he scored 17 league goals in his only season and added eight more in his first five appearances in the Champions League. Dortmund scooped him up less than a year later, and he hit the ground running by scoring a hat trick in 23 minutes in his debut.Haaland has 61 goals in 65 Bundesliga games for Dortmund, and 15 more in three Champions League campaigns.Once the deal is completed, he would join Manchester City almost 22 years to the month after his father did the same. Alfie Haaland signed with City in June 2000, only weeks before Erling was born, but retired in 2003 after several injury-marred seasons in Manchester and one infamous foul at the hands of Manchester United’s Roy Keane.Rory Smith contributed reporting. More

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      Chelsea F.C. Says It Will Sell to Boehly’s U.S.-Led Group

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      Chelsea, the Premier League soccer team whose sale was forced after the Russian oligarch who bankrolled its success was placed under crippling sanctions, will be bought by a consortium led by Todd Boehly, an American billionaire who is a part-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, the club said on Saturday.The price of 2.5 billion pounds, or $3.1 billion, would be the most ever paid for a team in any sport. The sale, one of the more unusual in modern sports history, still requires the approval of the British government, which imposed the sanctions on the club’s owner, Roman Abramovich, and froze his assets, including Chelsea, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.In a statement posted on its website early Saturday, Chelsea said the proceeds from the sale would be placed into a frozen British bank account, with the intention that all of the funds will eventually go to charitable causes, as Abramovich has promised.In addition to the sale price, Chelsea said, Boehly’s group had pledged to invest 1.75 billion pounds in the club, some of it for much-needed stadium renovations.Boehly’s group is being backed by the American investment firm Clearlake and also includes Hansjorg Wyss, a Swiss businessman, and Mark Walter, an American financier who serves as a co-owner and the chairman of the Dodgers.The decision capped two tumultuous months for Chelsea, its fans and Abramovich, who said on March 2 that he had reluctantly agreed to part with the team, just as Britain’s government was moving to impose restrictions on his fortune and his businesses.The sale process was accelerated once the government formally froze Abramovich’s assets, part of a wider set of sanctions imposed on a group of wealthy Russians with ties to Moscow after the war in Ukraine began. The government has called Abramovich a close ally of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin.Roman Abramovich has owned Chelsea since 2003.John Sibley/ReutersChelsea has been in a kind of limbo ever since, operating under a special license issued by the government, which comes with strict conditions that have severely affected its business. The team is currently unable to buy or sell players in the summer transfer market, nor can it sell tickets or merchandise to its supporters. Its spending has been severely restricted, affecting everything from the team’s travel to the printing and sale of programs.The restrictions, meant to ensure that no money flows to Abramovich, will only be lifted once the sale is completed.Chelsea, led by Thomas Tuchel, the German coach who secured the Champions League title within months of taking over at Stamford Bridge last year, has endured on-field difficulties as it tries to navigate its new reality. The results have been mixed: While Tuchel’s team currently is in third place in the Premier League, it was eliminated from the lucrative Champions League last month. Several players with expiring contracts have announced that they will leave at the end of the season, and until the sale is completed, Tuchel and the club have no way to replace them.Boehly’s group was given a week to close the deal after being chosen last week as the preferred bidder by the New York-based advisory firm Raine Group and Chelsea’s board members.The sale was nearing a conclusion last week when it seemed to be upended, after one of Britain’s richest men, Jim Ratcliffe, announced a bid that mirrored the offer from Boehly’s consortium, after the deadline had passed. On Wednesday, Ratcliffe, who had emphasized his British credentials when making his offer, said Raine had dismissed his bid but vowed to keep fighting to secure the team.Chelsea’s price tag compares with the £1.8 billion valuation ($2.3 billion) for its London rival Arsenal, in 2018, after its American benefactor, the businessman Stan Kroenke, became the sole owner of the club by buying out the 30 percent stake of another now-sanctioned Russian oligarch, Alisher Usmanov, for more than $700 million. Unlike Chelsea, Arsenal has a modern stadium and its finances have been stable.Britain’s Treasury will have to issue a separate license for the sale to go through, with specific clauses that include a requirement that none of the sale proceeds go to Abramovich.The buyers and Raine have discussed the possibility of the proceeds going to victims of the war in Ukraine, an idea that Abramovich raised when he said he would waive an enormous debt owed to him by the club. But it is unclear how such a transfer would work.Todd Boehly, the American who leads the group that has reached an agreement to buy Chelsea, was at the club’s match against Wolves on Saturday.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAbramovich invested nearly $2 billion of his personal funds during his 19-year tenure as owner, during which he covered losses of about $1 million a week as he recruited some of the best players in the world. The strategy was expensive but successful: Chelsea enjoyed the most successful period in its history, becoming a serial contender for domestic and international honors and winning five Premier League and two European Cups.If Boehly’s deal to buy the team goes through with the required approvals from the government and the Premier League, which also has to give its blessing to the sale, his group will have to figure out a way to maintain that successes while paring losses associated with the on-field success and also committing hundreds of millions of dollars to renovating Chelsea’s aging Stamford Bridge stadium, which with a capacity of just over 40,000 is far smaller than the arenas that play host to the Premier League’s biggest teams.Russia-Ukraine War: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 4Russia’s punishment of Finland. More