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      Fabrizio Romano: Soccer's Prophet of the Deal

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      Fabrizio Romano has turned rumors into an industry. But is he an observer of soccer’s multibillion-dollar transfer market, or a participant in it?The quickest way to capture the extent of the influence wielded by Fabrizio Romano, a 28-year-old Italian journalist with a five o’clock shadow and an overworked iPhone, is to boil it down into a list of easily digested numbers.Currently, Romano has 6.5 million followers on Twitter, two and a half times as many as, say, Inter Milan, the team that featured in Romano’s breakthrough moment, or Bruno Fernandes, the Manchester United star who inadvertently made Romano a global phenomenon.He has 5.6 million more on Instagram, and a further 4.5 million devotees on Facebook. There are also 692,000 subscribers on YouTube and 450,000 on Twitch, the video streaming platform.Or there are at the moment, anyway. Chances are that in the gap between the writing of that paragraph and your reading it, Romano’s figures will have ticked inexorably skyward. It is January, after all, one of the biannual boom times for a journalist covering soccer’s frenetic, multibillion-dollar transfer market. Every day, Romano’s accounts will draw another few hundred fans, another few thousand even, all desperately seeking news of the players their team is or is not signing.Yet even as these social media metrics provide an immediately comprehensible, faintly intimidating snapshot of the breadth of Romano’s popularity — self-professed insiders covering the N.B.A. and the N.F.L. could make similar claims — they do not tell us much about quite how deep his impact runs.Last month, the Spanish forward Ferran Torres posted a video of himself on Twitter doing light physical work at the training facility of his hometown club, Valencia. Torres had spent Christmas in a gentle form of limbo, waiting for his former club, Manchester City, to agree to sell him to Barcelona.By Dec. 26, things had moved sufficiently that Torres wanted to let his followers know a move was imminent. “Getting ready at home … Valencia,” he wrote in a message posted alongside the video. And then, on a new line, a single phrase: “Here We Go!”Those three words were intended as the digital transfer market’s equivalent to white smoke billowing from a chimney. They have come to mean that a deal is not just close, but completed. And they are indisputably Romano’s: They are his seal of approval, his calling card, what he refers to with just a hint of regret as his catchphrase.That, more than the numbers of followers Romano has accrued, is the best gauge of his influence. Increasingly, to players, as well as fans, a transfer has not happened until it bears Romano’s imprimatur. (“Here We Go” is, in some cases, now used as a noun: Correspondents now regularly ask Romano if he is in a position to “give the here we go.”)Romano in his home office in Milan, where he records some of his TV and podcast appearances.Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesHis power is now so great that he has, not entirely intentionally, made the leap from being merely a reporter covering soccer’s transfer market to something closer to a force within it. And in doing so, he has blurred the line between journalist and influencer, observer and participant.The ScoopThe call that made Romano’s career, in his telling, came entirely out of the blue. He had started writing about soccer as a teenager in his hometown, Naples, composing stories and firing them off, free of charge, to a variety of fairly niche Italian soccer websites in the hope they might publish them.He does not quite know how an aspiring Italian agent in Barcelona got hold of his name, or his phone number. “He was working at La Masia” — the famed Barcelona academy — “and he wanted to become an agent,” Romano said in an interview last month. “He was hoping to convince two young players to let him represent them, and he asked me if I would write a profile of them.” The players were Gerard Deulofeu, a young Spanish wing, and a prodigious teenage striker named Mauro Icardi.Romano wrote the profile, the agent got the clients, and the two stayed in touch. In the summer of 2011, Romano broke the story that Icardi was leaving Barcelona for Sampdoria. He refers to it proudly as his “first news,” but its impact was limited: Icardi was an 18-year-old youth team player, after all. His arrival at a team then struggling in Italy’s second division was hardly earth-shattering.But in November 2013 the agent called again. “He said I had helped him at the start of his career, and now it was his turn to help me,” Romano said. Icardi, his source told him, had agreed to move to Inter Milan the next summer. Six months before the deal was officially announced, Romano published the news on an Inter Milan fan site.Mauro Icardi, the player who helped make Romano’s career, at Inter Milan in 2013.Luca Bruno/Associated Press“That was the time everything changed,” he said. He left Naples for Milan, and the hardscrabble world of freelance journalism for a job at Sky Sport Italia. The first story he was sent to cover was, as it happens, Icardi’s physical at Inter. “That story was part of my life.”Soccer, in general, has long had an insatiable appetite for gossip and rumors and tittle-tattle from the transfer market: In England, the nuggets of news appear in old copies of long-defunct sports newspapers dating to 1930. Nowhere is the obsession quite so deep-rooted, though, as in Italy.“You have to remember that, for a long time, we had four daily newspapers devoted to sport,” said Enrico Mentana, a television presenter, director and producer who started his career at one of them, Gazzetta dello Sport. His father, Franco, worked there; he had been a celebrated correspondent, specializing in transfers.For those newspapers, Mentana said, transfer stories were “the only way to sell copies in the summer, when there were not any games.” They were aided and abetted in turning player trading into “a spectacle” by the presidents of the country’s biggest clubs. “The owners were great industrialists, scions of great families,” he said. “For them, attracting a big star from South America, say, was a chance to show their greatness, their power, to give a gift to the people.”By the time Romano had made it to Sky Sport Italia, the doyen of the genre was Gianluca Di Marzio, the channel’s star reporter, the host of the nightly — and unexpectedly cerebral — show it broadcasts during soccer’s two transfer windows.Romano helped Di Marzio build, and fill, his personal website. In return, he learned the finer points of his craft, particularly the value of the traditional shoe-leather journalism that had long been deployed to harvest those precious hints and whispers. “For years and years, I would go every day around the city,” Romano said. “Restaurants, hotels, anywhere football people would meet.”But while the methods had endured, Romano had some intuitive sense that the landscape was changing. He quickly grasped not only that social media could serve as both an outlet and a source, but that he had an innate eye for which sort of content worked on which kind of platforms.“For example, I used Instagram initially as a personal thing,” he said. “I would post a picture of a nice sunset, a good dinner. But all the time, in the replies, people would ask me about transfers. Nobody was interested in my life. I’m not a star. I am a journalist, and a journalist is an intermediary.”His most significant insight, though, was that there was no reason to be hidebound by borders. With his replies swelled by interest from fans around the world, asking for updates on teams in England, France and Spain, as well as Italy, he started to seek stories away from home.To Romano, the great leap into the global soccer conversation came in 2020. Fernandes, a talented Portuguese midfielder, had spent most of the previous summer being linked with a move to Manchester United; Romano consistently played it down. A few months later, though, the club made its move, and when Romano bestowed his customary “here we go” on the deal, the reaction was “huge.”He does not claim to have had that story first: It had, after all, been bubbling for months, and had been extensively reported in the weeks before it was completed. In his eyes, though, speed is not where true value lies in a social media world, and particularly in that portion of it devoted to soccer’s chaotic, contradictory and often chimerical transfer market.What followers want more than anything, he said, is to know that what they are reading is true. That is what he tries to provide. “I do not have a deadline to meet or a paper to sell,” he said. “I write things when they are ready.”Two players in Romano’s rumor mill this month: Fiorentina striker Dusan Vlahovic ….Massimo Paolone/LaPresse, via Associated Press… and Mohamed Salah, whose future at Liverpool is suddenly anything but clear.Lindsey Parnaby/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn part, his expanding influence — he has added five million social media followers in the past 18 months alone — can be attributed to his work ethic. When Romano is not submitting transfer stories to The Guardian or Sky Sport, he is uploading them to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, or he is talking about them on his podcast or his Twitch channel or in his latest role, accepted last year, with CBS Sports. He discusses them with one of the suite of club-specific podcasts he finds time to grace with his presence as a guest, or replies to his followers directly on social media. There is talk of a book, too. During transfer windows, he said, he regularly does not go to bed until 5 a.m.Whether it is dedication to his trade or dedication to his brand, or neither — Romano has a puppyish delight in talking about his passion — it has worked. Often, now, the reach of the clubs and the player actually involved in any given transfer is dwarfed by that of the person reporting it.The Fine LineLast summer, as the Spanish team Valencia closed in on a deal to sign Marcos André, a Brazilian striker who had spent the previous season playing for its La Liga rival Real Valladolid, the club’s marketing and communications arm, VCF Media, was commissioned with finding an unexpected, impactful way to announce it.A transfer, after all, is a chance for a club to attract attention, to win a few eyeballs and perhaps gain a few new fans in what is now a global battle for engagement. Valencia is not just competing with domestic rivals like Villarreal or Sevilla for that audience, but teams from Italy and Germany and England, too.The problem, as far as the club could tell, was that there was nothing new about the club’s interest in signing Marcos André. There had been a run of stories hinting at the move for weeks. To reach the broadest audience possible with its confirmation, VCF Media decided to do something a little different.Once the paperwork on the deal had been completed, and the player had successfully passed his physical, the club contacted Romano and, with the blessing of Borja Couce, Marcos André’s agent, asked if he might like to be a part of the announcement. He agreed, and filmed a short video to tease the deal. It concluded, of course, with his catchphrase.The logic, for Valencia, was simple. Romano has 6.5 million Twitter followers. The club has 1.3 million. In VCF Media’s eyes, he was a “tremendous influencer in the world of football, a shortcut to a global audience,” as a club representative put it. Romano was the point at which “sport and entertainment” converged.Since then, others have followed suit. Romano, a confessed fan of Watford, the on-again, off-again Premier League team, featured alongside a host of players in the video to launch the club’s new jersey last summer.This month, Romano has featured in videos for both Germany’s Augsburg and Major League Soccer’s Toronto F.C., announcing the signings of Ricardo Pepi, the U.S. forward, and the Italian playmaker Lorenzo Insigne. Sportfive, the marketing agency based in New York that arranged the Augsburg announcement, did not respond to a request for comment as to whether Romano had been paid.Those appearances are testament to Romano’s hybrid status. Ordinarily, European clubs prefer to keep journalists of all stripes at arm’s length; the locker-room access traditionally offered by America’s major leagues is anathema. They guard their transfer plans with particular secrecy, fearing that a mistimed leak could jeopardize a deal months in the making.Romano with the jersey of the one club that he, perhaps surprisingly, places above the rest: Watford. Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesRomano, though, has been embraced by every player in the market. Official club social media accounts reference his catchphrase. He enjoys regular interactions with owners and agents — a few days ago, Mohamed Salah’s agent, Ramy Abbas, told Romano, unprompted, that he was “a little bored these days,” an apparent reference to the stalemate over the Liverpool forward’s new contract — and even players themselves.That renown is professionally useful, of course. Romano’s fame has opened doors. “I remember a sporting director called me last January,” Romano said. “I had always talked about him a lot, and just like that, he called. He said he wanted to know the boy who seemed to know everything.” Romano was, briefly, just a little star-struck.But those relationships come with a risk, too. The same influence that makes Romano valuable to clubs looking to gain access to his followers also makes him vulnerable to those looking to exploit his reputation for reliability.The global transfer market is a $6 billion industry. Deals can be worth millions in commissions alone, but they are fragile, unpredictable things. And one word, from someone like Romano, can make or break them.There is a danger, he knows, in people giving him “their vision of the truth.”“But then I do not have a show that needs to be filled or a headline that has to be written,” he said. He can wait until “the right moment” for all concerned. “A journalist does not need to be the enemy,” as he put it.That is how he sees himself, even now, even with all of that impact and all of that reach. He rejects the term “influencer,” but he crossed that particular Rubicon some time ago. It is a fine line, though, the one that runs between observer and participant, between inside and out. He has now crossed it. Even he will not be able to say, not with any certainty, where he goes from here. More

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      Mourinho, Benítez and the Endless Pursuit of the Past

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      Why do two elite managers persist with a trophy-less, and seemingly joyless, slog toward a past they probably will never reclaim?In the sudden flood of spare time he had after departing Manchester United, José Mourinho filmed a commercial for a bookmaker. A couple of years and a couple of jobs on, it is still running on British television. It still works, after all. Mourinho is still a household name in Britain. The ad’s central concept holds up.Mourinho’s acting might be just a little hammy — as you might expect — but it is quite deft, too. Looking as tanned and healthy and relaxed as we all did in 2019, he earnestly walks viewers through what it takes to be “special.” The joke is that he should know: He is the Special One, after all. Get it?He plays it all, though, with a wink and a smirk. The tone is entirely self-deprecating. Mourinho variously pokes fun at his vanity, his boastfulness, his penchant for chicanery. He willingly, happily satirizes the cartoonish villainy that has, for 20 years, made him possibly the most compelling manager of his generation.It is worth noting, though, quite how dated so many of the references are. One of the gags is about him getting into a laundry cart, a nod to an incident that happened before the invention of the iPhone. There is another involving a piece of topiary shaped to look like three raised fingers, a gesture he first adopted before “Game of Thrones” had aired on television.Indeed, the commercial’s prime conceit, the idea of Mourinho as the Special One, predates the existence of YouTube by almost a year. That particular schtick comes from a time when it was still called The Facebook, Netflix was a mail-order DVD rental company, and DVDs were things that people wanted. It is a struggle to describe it as current.That all of the jokes still landed, that they were all immediately comprehensible to their intended audience, is testament both to Mourinho’s enduring relevance and to the spell he has long cast over English soccer, which has long been and possibly always will be hopelessly in love with him. England has never really been able to move on from him.And nor, it would seem, has Mourinho. He is, increasingly, a manager in the same way the Rolling Stones are a live band. They have become, in some way, a tribute act to themselves. Nobody has any real interest in hearing their new material. The only appeal, now, lies in playing the hits.Mourinho’s identity was always as a winner. Then he stopped winning.Alberto Lingria/ReutersMourinho, for his part, keeps on doing just that. A couple of weeks ago, as he chewed over his Roma’s team’s engrossing defeat to Juventus — squandering a 3-1 lead to lose by a single goal — he claimed, variously, that his players were too nice, too weak, too afflicted by some sort of deep-seated psychological complex that he simply could not solve. Everyone, it turned out, was to blame except him.It was not the first time he had delved into his back catalog in his six months in Rome. After a humiliating 6-1 defeat to Bodo/Glimt, he claimed that the Norwegian champion had “better players” than Roma, despite operating on a fraction of the budget. He has squabbled with referees. He has highlighted the shortcomings of his squad after almost every defeat.And defeat has come more regularly than he would like. Mourinho’s tenure has not quite been a failure by the club’s standards: Roma sits seventh in Serie A, still at least theoretically in the race for a Champions League slot, roughly where it might have been expected to be. By Mourinho’s standard, though, it has been beyond deflating.Winning is not just central to Mourinho’s reputation, it is the cornerstone of his identity. For two decades, he has earned some of the most illustrious posts in soccer — Chelsea, Inter Milan, Real Madrid, Manchester United — not for the way in which his teams play but for the way his games end. Mourinho is a winner. He might be an acquired taste, but he gets results.It is tempting to wonder if, perhaps, the reason he has seemed so much more fractious in recent years, that the warming charm that always used to balance out the lurking snarl has all but disappeared from view, is because he has lost that sense of himself. He is a winner who no longer wins.Mourinho’s Roma is clinging to hopes of a Champions League place next season.Andrew Medichini/Associated PressHis last few seasons have served as a case study in decline. First, he celebrated finishing second with Manchester United, something a younger, more bellicose Mourinho would never have done. Then he took on the job of rebuilding Tottenham, but seemed to lack the patience and indulgence and gentle touch such a project required. It turned sour, fast. Choosing outcome over process, it turned out, is not a viable approach when that outcome is not predicated by economics.And now he finds himself at Roma, a fine and historic and weighty club, but hardly in a position to meet his ambitions. Roma, after all, is not Real Madrid. It is not capable of winning every game, of delivering the trophies and the glory that Mourinho craves, the ones that affirm his status and burnish his legend.The question that lingers, then, is why? What does Mourinho get out of this? He does not seem to elicit any joy from it: He looks far happier in that three-year-old ad than he has in his day job for some time. Is it greed, then? Perhaps, but then elite managers are paid handsomely to win, and then paid off equally handsomely if they do not. Mourinho has earned enough, in salary and in compensation, to buy all the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs he could ever want and never need.It may, then, be the status: not that of a winner, but that of a manager. Roma, like Tottenham, may be a second-tier post, but it remains prestigious and powerful and high profile. It means Mourinho can still command a crowd, a stadium, a room; it means, most importantly, that he is still what he has always been: a manager.Mourinho with Rafael Benítez in better days, which for both men is the past.Nigel Roddis/EPA, via ShutterstockPerhaps he, like his old nemesis, Rafael Benítez, simply cannot countenance the idea of not working. Certainly, it is hard to understand why else Benítez would have chosen, last summer, to sacrifice the lingering affection in which Liverpool’s fans held him to take charge of Everton, his former team’s bitter city rival.It cannot have been because Everton had an upwardly mobile air: The club has employed five managers in as many years, possesses the disjointed squad to prove it, and was turned down by at least one contender for the post last summer because the club looked so chaotic from the outside.It was operating under severe strictures in the transfer market after years of wild spending. Its expectations far outstripped its opportunities. Benítez’s background, meanwhile, made it obvious that the atmosphere would turn toxic at the first hint of trouble, and he would be fired. In many ways, it was remarkable that the inevitable denouement to an unhappy marriage of convenience did not come until last week.Benítez will have known all of that, and yet he took the job anyway, and for precisely the same reasons that convinced Mourinho to sign on at Roma and at Tottenham. It is not just a need to manage — their work long since having fused with their identity — but the pursuit of the one victory they now, truly, cherish: vindication.Benítez, who won the Champions League with Liverpool, was always an odd pick across town at Everton.Lindsey Parnaby/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImageThey are driven on by a furious refusal to relinquish their primacy, by an avowed belief that they will be proved right in the end, by a conviction that they will have the last laugh. The game may change — the tactics and the training methods and the tools used, the data and the nutrition and the sports science — but it is striking how managers do not.Benítez remains wedded to the core approach that brought him his halcyon days at Liverpool and, before that, Valencia. Mourinho has seen how damaging it can be to hang his players out to dry in public, at United and Tottenham and Roma, but he keeps on doing it anyway, because that is what worked back before YouTube.As they age, managers become avatars for the systems they once merely adopted. They become one and the same as the approach they are seen to represent. They become set in their ways in a literal sense: They want not only to win, but to win in the way that they once did, as if to demonstrate that they were right all along, that the game has not moved on from them. It has happened to Benítez and to Mourinho, just as it once happened to Arsène Wenger.And so they keep moving, keep trying, keep working, taking jobs that bring them no joy in the vain hope that, one day, the innate superiority of who they are, of what they stand for, will be clear once again. And in doing so, they grow ever more calcified in their own ideas, their own pasts, unable to accept or admit that all those things that made them special were quite a long time ago.Narrow HorizonsThomas Tuchel, who led Chelsea to the Champions League title, won FIFA’s coach of the year award on Monday. Like every winner before him, he coaches a big European club.Harold Cunningham/Agence France-Presse, via Pool/Afp Via Getty ImagesNot once, in more than 30 years, has a player based outside Europe won FIFA’s men’s world player of the year award, no matter which guise it has taken at the time. None has, in fact, even come close.Martín Palermo did not make the top three after inspiring Boca Juniors to both the Copa Libertadores and a club world championship in 2000. Nor did Neymar, despite his youthful brilliance sweeping Santos to South American glory in 2011. By 2019, when Gabriel Barbosa won that year’s edition of the tournament for Flamengo by scoring twice in the dying minutes, nobody would even have considered voting for him.And, as unfortunate as it is, there is a logic to that. It is hard to dispute that, for at least 20 of those 30 years, the best players in the world have been in Europe. They have not all been Europeans, of course — Brazilians have won the FIFA award five times, and Lionel Messi has a collection of them — but they have all played in one of Europe’s major leagues. That, after all, is where the strongest teams are. It is where a player’s talent is tested most exhaustively.(The geography of the women’s award has been more varied: It has been won by players based in the United States, Australia, Japan and, for a stretch a little more than a decade ago, basically wherever Marta happened to be playing. That the last couple of years have been dominated by Europe perhaps says something about the shifting balance of power in the women’s game.)What is less simple to understand is why that same Eurocentrism should be applied to managers, both in the men’s and women’s categories. No manager of a men’s team outside Europe has finished in the top three since FIFA started handing out the prize in 2016. (Jill Ellis, the former coach of the United States’ women’s team, and her former counterpart with Japan, Asako Takakura, have both taken a podium place in the women’s voting.)This year, the omissions were especially egregious. FIFA’s own rules state that the prize should be judged on a coach’s performance between October 2020 and October 2021. In that time, Pitso Mosimane, Al Ahly’s South African coach, won the African Champions League. Twice. Abel Ferreira of Brazil’s Palmeiras won one Copa Libertadores and was well on the way to picking up a second in the same calendar year. Neither was even nominated.The logic that can be applied to the players’ awards does not hold with managers. It does not automatically follow that the manager who has won the biggest trophy has performed better than all of their peers. Management, after all, is about making the most of the resources available to you. It is about exceeding expectations in your own personal context.It is why, for example, it is possible to make a case that David Moyes’s taking West Ham into the Champions League would be a more impressive achievement than Pep Guardiola’s winning the title with Manchester City. Or why Chris Wilder leading Sheffield United to seventh in the Premier League was a better feat of management than Jürgen Klopp’s making Liverpool the league’s champion.And it is why there is no reason that neither Mosimane nor Ferreira were officially recognized for their remarkable success over the last 12 months or so. They were overlooked, instead, because soccer, on some structural level, has bought into the bright lights and the ostentatious self-importance of Europe. And in doing so, it sells itself short.CorrespondenceJosé Luis Chilavert. omitted last week but never forgotten.Matthias Schrader/Picture-Alliance/DPA via AP ImagesThe easiest way to handle the main theme of my inbox this week is to list all the people — Mark Brill, Bob Shay, Christopher Dum, Alex McMillan — who sent emails that contained the words “José Luis Chilavert” and “Rogério Ceni” in response to last week’s newsletter on Manchester City’s flirtation with having Éderson take its penalties.The readers are quite right, too: There have been a handful of famous penalty- and free-kick-taking goalkeepers, particularly in South America. As Christoph von Teichman mentioned, it has happened in Europe, too. “Hans Jörg Butt, a Bundesliga goalkeeper, scored 26 goals from the spot for three different teams (Hamburg, Bayer Leverkusen and Bayern), as well as one for each of these teams in Champions League games, curiously all against Juventus,” he wrote.As a man who considers himself an insufferable know-it-all, the fact that none of them were mentioned is a heavy blow to my self-esteem. Still, I think, the point holds: Pep Guardiola has wrought a drastic shift in English soccer’s conception of what is acceptable if we are open to an idea that always used to seem like something of a carnival trick.Firmer ground was provided by Will Allen, who asked a deceptively tricky question. “Why is an odd number of substitutions sacrosanct,” he asked. He’s right, too: The debate is either for a return to three or an increase to five. “How about everyone has four?” I don’t know, is the short answer. I mean, yes. Obviously. They should just have four. That’s a fair compromise, isn’t it? It is. So why does it seem morally and spiritually wrong? More

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      FIFA's Best? Pitso Mosimane Doesn't Fit the Model

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      Pitso Mosimane enjoyed a better 2021 than almost any coach in world soccer. Just don’t expect FIFA, or soccer, to notice.Pitso Mosimane has done enough winning in the last year, plus change, to talk about nothing else. In November 2020, only three months after he was appointed manager of the Egyptian club Al Ahly, he won the African Champions League title. He did so by beating Zamalek, Al Ahly’s fiercest rival. The final was cast as the derby of the century. Nobody in Egypt thought it was an exaggeration.Eight months later, he repeated the trick. The calendar contracted and concentrated by the pandemic, Al Ahly returned to the Champions League final in July to face Kaizer Chiefs, the team Mosimane had supported as a child in South Africa. He won again. He was showered with golden ticker tape on the field, then presented with bouquets of roses by government grandees when he returned to Cairo.He places both trophies among his proudest moments as a manager, alongside coaching his country — he was in charge of South Africa for a couple of years after it served as host of the 2010 World Cup — and winning his first continental trophy, with the South African team Mamelodi Sundowns in 2016.And yet Mosimane does not rhapsodize about either victory quite so much as he does the one international tournament in 2021 that he did not win. Between his two triumphs, Mosimane took Al Ahly to Qatar for the Club World Cup. His team was drawn to face Bayern Munich in the semifinals. “They had beaten Barcelona, 8-2,” he said. “I was worried. That was Barcelona with Lionel Messi and Luis Suárez. If they could do that to them, what would they do to us?”He had no need to be concerned. Al Ahly lost, 2-0, but there was no embarrassment, no humiliation. A few days later, in the third-place playoff, Mosimane’s team overcame the South American champion, Palmeiras, to take bronze. “Africa got a medal,” he said. “The year before, it had not won a medal. That, to us, was success.”That it is the third place, not the string of firsts — two Champions Leagues, accompanied by two African Super Cups — that Mosimane lingers on is instructive. It is a reminder that silver and gold are not the only measure of glory in management; achievement is necessarily relative to opportunity.Mosimane said he considered Al Ahly’s third-place finish in the Club World Cup as important as any of its firsts last year.Noushad Thekkayil/EPA, via ShutterstockMosimane, by that gauge, has enjoyed a year that holds up in comparison to any of his peers. He has not, though, been granted the same recognition. When FIFA published its seven-member shortlist for its men’s coach of the year award a few weeks ago, Mosimane — who had lifted three continental honors in 2021 — was not on it.He was not the only notable omission. Abel Ferreira was not there, either, despite going one better than Mosimane and leading Palmeiras to two Copa Libertadores titles in the same calendar year. He did not make the top seven, let alone the top three. Those spots were taken by Thomas Tuchel, Pep Guardiola and Roberto Mancini.The pattern held for the women’s prize, too. Bev Priestman led Canada to an improbable Olympic gold in Tokyo, but she did not make the final cut, overlooked in favor of Lluís Cortés, Emma Hayes and Sarina Wiegman.The connection is not that all of these coaches won major honors: Cortés might have led Barcelona Femení to an emphatic treble and Hayes might have won the Women’s Super League, but Wiegman saw her Dutch team knocked out in the quarterfinals of the Olympics, then left to take charge of England. The link, instead, is that they all work in Europe.The temptation, of course, is to chalk this up to FIFA’s star-dazzled ineptitude and move along. The problem, though, is more deep-seated than that. FIFA does, of course, choose the initial shortlists of candidates for its so-called Best Awards, and it has a tendency to overlook anyone not competing in the most glamorous, most lucrative tournaments in the game.But, occasionally, one slips through. Djamel Belmadi, of Algeria, was nominated in 2019. So, too, were River Plate’s Marcelo Gallardo and Ricardo Gareca, the Argentine in charge of Peru’s national team. Lionel Scaloni, the Argentina coach, was included this year.That none went any further is not just to do with FIFA but with the array of players, coaches, fans and journalists who command a vote on the awards. It is not only the game’s governing body that is in thrall to the famous faces and the glamorous names of the major leagues of western Europe, but the game itself.“It is not only Africa” that is overlooked, Mosimane said. “It is as though it does not mean as much when you win in the competitions that do not generate the most money, that do not have the biggest audiences.”The consequences of that Eurocentrism reach far beyond one prize, one gala. Mosimane was appointed by Al Ahly, at least in part, because the club was “looking for someone who knew Africa, knew the Champions League, had beaten the teams they needed to beat.” His record was impeccable. He was, by some distance, the best man for the job.He landed in Cairo, in September 2020, to be greeted by thousands of fans at the airport; it was then, and only then, that he realized the scale of the job he had taken. “I don’t know if there is another club in the world that has to win everything like Al Ahly does,” he said. “I thought South Africans loved football. But they don’t love it as much as Egyptians do.”In the news media, though, Mosimane detected a note of skepticism. Al Ahly had employed foreign managers before, but they had all been European or South American. He was the first non-Egyptian African to be given the post. “There were people who asked whether I had the credibility to coach the biggest team in Africa and the biggest in the Middle East,” he said.It made sense to him that those doubts proved unfounded. Africa, as Mosimane pointed out, is full of European coaches. They should, really, be at a considerable advantage. Until recently, the African soccer federation, CAF, did not run a formal high-level coaching course, the equivalent of the pro license required of all European managers.Mosimane with Gianni Infantino of FIFA, which has only ever honored Europeans as world coach of the year.Karim Jaafar/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMosimane was one of the first coaches accepted for the inaugural qualification. It was supposed to take six months. Three years later, it has still not finished, only in part because of the pandemic. Meeting European coaches in competition, he said, was the equivalent of “being asked to sit the exam but not being given the books to read.” And still, African coaches still found a way to pass. “When the floors are level, when they are coaching teams with the same quality of player as us, we beat them,” he said.It is small wonder, then, that Mosimane is convinced that if he was put in charge of Barcelona or Manchester City he would “not do too badly.” He is resigned to the fact that he will never find out. If FIFA finds it easy to overlook the success of African coaches, if African clubs are wary of the abilities of African coaches, then there is little hope a team from outside Africa will offer him that sort of chance.Part of that, he is adamant, is to do with the color of his skin. He was pleased to see one of his former players, Bradley Carnell, be appointed coach of St. Louis City S.C. in Major League Soccer. He is proud to see another South African doing well. Carnell does not have a fraction of Mosimane’s experience. “So maybe I could get a job in M.L.S. then?” he said. He did not sound hopeful. Carnell, after all, is white.Europe is more distant still. He has noted the almost complete absence of Black coaches — let alone Black African coaches — in Europe’s major leagues. He has spoken with former players of the highest pedigree who feel they are denied opportunities easily afforded to their white counterparts. “That is the reality,” Mosimane said.That is not to say he does not harbor ambitions. His latest Champions League crown has earned him another tilt at the Club World Cup next month. It is the trophy that he would like to win, with Al Ahly, above all others. “There is nothing left for me to win in Africa,” he said.Once his time in Cairo ends, he would like to try his hand at international management again. The “timing” is not right for South Africa, he said, but perhaps Senegal, Nigeria, Ivory Coast or Egypt might be feasible: one of the continent’s traditional powerhouses.He would cherish the chance to coach the best players in the world in Europe, of course, but he knows soccer has imposed a ceiling between them and him. His ambitions run as high as they can, given the way the world has been constructed around him, one in which opportunity is not always contingent on achievement. More

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      An English Soccer Team's Existential Crisis: Is It Really in Wales?

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      Chas Sumner has heard the quiz question in all its forms. There was the one that asked: “Which club has an international border running along the halfway line of its stadium?” Or this one: “Which soccer team gets changed in one country but plays in another?” Or: “Where can you take a corner in England, but score a goal in Wales?”The answer to all three, Sumner knew, was Chester F.C., a one-time stalwart of English soccer’s professional divisions but currently residing in its sixth tier. For 30 years, Chester, the team he served as official historian, had played at a stadium that straddled the largely nominal line separating England from Wales.Not that it seemed especially important to anyone. The stadium’s location was nothing more than a minor claim to fame and occasional inconvenience: two countries sometimes meant paperwork for two local authorities. Other than that, Sumner said, “nobody even knew exactly where the border was.”Welcome to Wales.Carl Recine/Action Images Via ReutersAnd to England.Carl Recine/Action Images Via ReutersThat held true until last Friday, when Chester F.C. suddenly discovered it was occupying contested territory. Summoned to a meeting with both local councils — Flintshire, in Wales, and Cheshire West, in England — and North Wales Police, Chester’s executives were presented with a letter accusing them of breaking Welsh coronavirus protocols.Chester had played twice at home over the New Year period, attracting crowds of more than 2,000 fans. That was in line with the rules in England, where lawmakers have stopped short of imposing new restrictions on public gatherings even as the Omicron variant has taken hold, but it contravened the laws in Wales, where the government introduced more stringent regulations on Dec. 26 that limited crowds at outdoor events to no more than 50 people.Chester did not believe those changes applied in its case. “It is an English club that plays in a stadium that covers both England and Wales,” said Andrew Morris, Chester’s volunteer chairman. “We play in the English league, we’re registered to the English Football Association, the land the stadium is built on is owned by an English council. We’re subject to English governance and English policing.” More

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      Cameroon's Goalkeeper André Onana Just Wants to Play

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      Cameroon’s 25-year-old goalkeeper has already had his career interrupted twice by bans. Now he’s back, and eager to move on.For a goalkeeper of Andre Onana’s experience, the passage of play midway through the first half of Cameroon’s Africa Cup of Nations opener should have been routine.Instead, it was anything but. Not once but twice, Onana misjudged the flight of the ball as it was crossed from one side of the field to the other. The second flap at thin air allowed Burkina Faso to take the lead, and left Onana with his head in the turf, acutely aware of his role in the chaos.Cameroon would eventually rally, score twice and win to provide relief to the millions of fans who expect them to challenge for the tournament’s championship. Onana, too, would rally, eventually playing to the reputation of a man widely regarded as one of Africa’s best goalkeepers. But his rustiness could be explained by something everyone in Yaoundé’s Paul Biya Stadium knew:For the better part of a year, Onana has hardly played soccer at all.In October 2020, Onana failed a routine drug test after it revealed traces of a banned masking agent. He claimed, and investigators agreed, that it had all been an error: He was found to have mistakenly ingested the drug after confusing his wife’s medication for his own after complaining of a headache.Rules are rules, though, and Onana was banished. For seven months, he was not allowed to even set foot inside a soccer stadium, let alone train with his teammates at his club team, the Dutch champion Ajax. And even when his ban was reduced last fall, and his drug exile ended, a new professional one began. Ajax, it seemed, had moved on while its goalkeeper was gone.A blunder by Onana allowed Burkina Faso to take an early lead against Cameroon in the teams’ Africa Cup of Nations opener on Sunday.Mohamed Abd El Ghany/ReutersSo for Onana, 25, this month’s Africa Cup of Nations championship is a rare opportunity to remind people of the player he was, and who he is: the skilled goalkeeper who helped Ajax win two Dutch league titles; the last line of defense for a team that came seconds from reaching the Champions League final in 2019; the anchor of a national squad hoping to regain a continental title on home soil.That Onana can showcase his skills in his home country in the city he grew up in is making it all the more special.“I was talking with my brother, and I said that I think I will know the whole stadium because we live close by,” Onana, 25, said in an interview on the eve of the tournament.Many of Onana’s earliest memories, in fact, involve soccer. Playing in the streets for hours with friends. Walking to the national stadium to sit in the sun watching the national team. His first heroes were African, he said, stars like Patrick Mbomba or Joseph-Désiré Job who could bring the crowd to its feet just by returning for matches at the national stadium that sat a mere 20 minutes from Onana’s front door.The national team was everything to Onana in those days. Cameroon had been one of the first African teams to become a fixture at the World Cup, and even as generations of players turned over, its matchdays offered a source of joy, and pride. Attending games, Onana said, was often an all-day affair.“We were there five hours before the game just to watch 90 minutes,” he said. “And those 90 minutes could affect your week, your month. It was amazing that time to be honest.”Onana’s journey to the national team can be traced to a pickup game before he turned 10. After spending most of the game tearing around the field in midfield or in attack, his preferred positions, Onana was told it was his turn in goal. He excelled, repelling shots that wowed his friends and also an older brother, who told him, “André, I think this is your best position.”Within months he was named as the best goalkeeper at a tournament run by an academy set up by the Cameroon striker Samuel Eto’o. His performance earned him a trial, and eventually a move, to Eto’o’s academy in Douala, about four hours from home. There, his performances caught the eye of scouts from F.C. Barcelona.Onana moved to Barcelona’s famed academy shortly after he turned 13. He quickly embraced his new surroundings, but three years into his new adventure, it all came to an abrupt stop. FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, announced that Barcelona had breached its regulations on registering minors by signing Onana and other players from outside Europe. Onana, 16 at the time, was told he could not represent Barcelona until he was 18.While the club jettisoned most of the foreign-born players subject to the rule, Onana’s promise was so high that he was persuaded to remain in the academy, where he was allowed to continue practicing every day but not to play in official games. The hiatus from competition took its toll. “You can train as much as you like but in the end you train to play,” Onana said. “And if you don’t, it affects you mentally and physically.”By the time Onana turned 18, and was again eligible to play, Barcelona had signed Marc-André ter Stegen, a promising German goalkeeper, and Claudio Bravo, who had just helped Chile win the Copa América. Onana knew, he said, his future lay elsewhere.He decided to try his luck in the Netherlands, and within a year he had established himself as Ajax’s No. 1 goalkeeper. He was only 19.The timing could not have been better. Ajax, like Barcelona, had a passion for homegrown talent, and the talents that had just started to come into its first team turned out to be its best in a generation. And the ball skills Onana had honed at Barcelona were a perfect fit for his Ajax’s style.Success quickly followed, as did strong performances against richer clubs in European competitions like the Champions League. By the summer of 2020, some of those teams had started to circle, offering Ajax millions for its young goalkeeper. Ajax declined to sell, confident the price for Onana, and its other young stars, would continue to rise.And then, just as it had a few years earlier, it all stopped for Onana when his drug test came back positive. Onana appealed the one-year ban he was given, and European soccer’s governing body accepted his explanation.But under soccer’s regulations, he was still responsible, and so the punishment, reduced to seven months, meant that starting in February 2021 Onana was effectively ostracized from soccer. When his Ajax teammates lifted the trophy that spring to celebrate a title to which he had contributed, he wasn’t allowed to enter the stadium to watch.He had, by then, made peace with his banishment. It was not, after all, his first. But Ajax officials, including the chief executive Edwin van der Sar, a former star goalkeeper, still worried about how Onana would manage the sporting and psychological toll of his time away.Onana has appeared in only two games for Ajax since returning from his most recent ban. He said he planned to leave the club after the season.Maurice Van Steen/EPA, via Shutterstock“When I left the club, I said to Edwin, ‘This is nothing, I’m already used to it,’” Onana said. “He was like, ‘André, how?’ I told him I was banned for two years. So this is just one year. I’ve got this.”To preserve his career, Onana assembled a team of seven specialists and moved to Spain, where he took training sessions every day in Salou, a beach town not far from Barcelona, to stay fit for the day his ban ended.But because he has refused to sign a new contract in the interim, Ajax used Onana sparingly, starting him only twice since he became eligible to play again in November. “I think my time is over in Ajax already,” he said. “I’ve done my best for this club. But in the end I’m not the one who decides who plays or not.”He expects to move on this summer, to another club, another league, another country. A switch to the Italian champion Inter Milan as a free agent for next season is all but agreed.For now, though, Onana is back in Cameroon, back where it all started, back on the field, back with a team that counts on him.The Indomitable Lions face Ethiopia on Thursday in the second game of their quest for an African championship. Onana sees no reason that he will not be playing. More

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      For Africa Cup of Nations, Embrace the Unknown

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      The Africa Cup of Nations probably will be decided by players who earn their livings in Europe. But the best of the tournament lies in its surprises.It was the No. 8 who first caught the eye. He was tall, languid, just on the border between rangy and ungainly. It was not the way he moved, so much, but the way he did not. In the middle of all the bustle and hurry, he was unusually still. He did not sprint. He did not dash. He did not even run, not really. He strolled. He meandered. He moseyed.He was playing in midfield, but he did not look much like a central midfielder. There are, in modern soccer, precisely three acceptable profiles of central midfielder: slight and inventive; dynamic and industrious; physically imposing.The No. 8 was none of them. He towered over almost everyone who drew close, but he was slender, almost fragile. In another world, he might have been a mercurial playmaker who refused to leave his local team — Robin Friday or Tomás Carlovich — but, while his technique was flawless, his energy was not especially chaotic, particularly magical.But the No. 8 was, in theory, the team’s defensive linchpin. And yet he did not throw himself into tackles or busily chase down opponents. He played simple, unwaveringly accurate passes, and then he stood all but still, waiting for the game to come back his way.To an eye raised on watching European soccer, with its blend of tactical influences and its faintly South American inflection, the initial assumption was that he was not following instructions. But he was. Or, at least, he seemed to be. He was there to occupy space, to act as a fixed point, an anchor. He did it well. It worked, too.His name was Asrat Megersa, and he was, in 2013, a 25-year-old playing in midfield for Ethiopia in its first Africa Cup of Nations in three decades. The team’s first game was a match with the reigning champion, Zambia, in the South African city of Mbombela.Ethiopia midfielder Asrat Megersa, right, against Zambia in 2013.Manus van Dyk/Gallo Images/Getty ImagesOn the surface, Ethiopia stood little chance. Zambia could call on a sprinkling of players with experience in Europe. It had a coach, Hervé Renard, of international repute. Ethiopia did not. All but three members of its squad played in their homeland, for teams like Dedebit and Saint George and Ethiopian Coffee.And yet that was not how the game played out. In the bright summer sun, Zambia found Ethiopia entirely confounding. Megersa and his teammates did unexpected, unorthodox things. Their style was not recognizable, and often, neither were their intentions. They made choices they were not supposed to make.It seemed to unsettle the Zambians. An uncertainty, a doubt crept into their play. Zambia took a delicate lead. Megersa kept standing still, kept passing the ball, kept occupying space. Ethiopia struck back, then held on for a draw. In the stands, the fans who had made the long journey from Johannesburg on packed buses, out to the fringes of the Kruger National Park, blew happily, incessantly on their vuvuzelas.Ethiopia’s fortunes changed swiftly after that. A few days later, Burkina Faso held its nerve, and beat Megersa and his team, 4-0. Defeat to Nigeria in the final group game in Rustenberg meant Ethiopia was eliminated. But that day against Zambia left a lasting impression; eight years on, I can still remember the name of Asrat Megersa.It endures, I think, because it is so rare, in modern soccer, to see something truly different. Special happens all the time; Lionel Messi is beamed into our homes every week. But different is precious. Good ideas travel quickly in elite soccer. Best practice spreads rapidly. Some small advancement made in Argentina one week will have made landfall in Europe the next.The result is not homogeneity, not exactly, but a narrow spectrum of variety. Players fit specific, familiar molds. Teams pass or teams press. They play deep or they play high. There are those who absorb pressure and those who apply it and those who do a little of both. Some do it well and some do it badly, but they are all trying to do the same things.Mohamed Salah is among the dozens of European stars called in to bolster African teams.Amr Abdallah Dalsh/ReutersThat will be true of this year’s Cup of Nations, too. Most of the 24 teams gathered in Cameroon for this year’s tournament, which opens with two games on Sunday, will know that their hopes rest, to no small extent, on how the stars they have called back from Europe perform over the next month.If Algeria is to retain its title, Manchester City’s Riyad Mahrez will be a central part of it. Egypt will invest much of its faith in Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah. The backbone of Nigeria’s team plays in the Premier League. Morocco will lean heavily on Youssef En-Nesyri of Sevilla. Senegal, the paper favorite, can call on Edouard Mendy and Kalidou Koulibaly and Idrissa Gueye and Sadio Mané.But they are just the headline acts. Their supporting casts have largely been drawn from Europe, too. Every member of Senegal’s squad plays in Europe. Cameroon has called up 22 players who do. It is not limited to the continent’s traditional powerhouses, either. Guinea has 22 players from European teams. Cape Verde has 21. Burkina Faso can call on 18.That is testament, of course, both to soccer’s rampant and to some extent rapacious global reach and to the development of the sport in Africa; the talent has never been spread quite so broadly across the continent as it is now. There are 10 teams, perhaps, who have arrived in Cameroon with a realistic hope of emerging victorious.Algeria won the Cup of Nations in 2019.Suhaib Salem/ReutersBut that intercontinental connection brings with it, too, a risk of losing something valuable. Soccer has long been a common language, the game the world plays, but as it has grown more global it has started to lose its accents. Style and taste no longer shift across borders; everything is subsumed by the Platonic ideal of soccer as preached by the Champions League and the Premier League. An orthodoxy has taken hold: Soccer has become the game the world plays the same way.The Cup of Nations, though, retains just a couple of pockets of resistance. That was what made Megersa, and Ethiopia, special. This was his interpretation, their interpretation, of the game, the game as they wanted to play, not the game as they had been told it was played.Perhaps the same will be true, this year, of Sudan — with only two players drawn from abroad — or Malawi, with just two squad members called up from Europe. Or perhaps it will be true, once more, of Ethiopia. None of its players have come from Europe this time around, either. That diminishes the team’s chances of winning the tournament, of course, but it also makes it a much more enticing prospect.The only sadness is that Megersa is not in the squad. He is 34, now, still playing in his homeland, the place where he played the game as Ethiopia played it, a uniquely bright and joyous memory.Ignorance Is BlissThe first drips of poison came on Tuesday morning, as Manchester United was still absorbing the previous night’s defeat to Wolves into its bloodstream. Apparently, the club’s players were unimpressed by Ralf Rangnick, the bespectacled 63-year-old German coach who replaced Ole Gunnar Solskjaer a couple of months ago.By Wednesday, it was emerging that one or two of the players had not even heard of Rangnick before he was appointed; despite being professional athletes with many cars and houses, they had been forced to Google him to find out who he was, had been required to spend time on Wikipedia with the general public to work out his background. Drip, drip.By Thursday, it was a flood. Chris Armas, the former New York Red Bulls coach hired as Rangnick’s assistant, had yet to teach United’s coterie of international stars how to — and there is a little paraphrasing here, but not too much — play soccer while in possession of the ball, and they were troubled that perhaps he did not know how to do it.There’s still trouble at United? Everyone blame the new guys.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesRangnick, meanwhile, was reported to be aloof and cold and also making them train at night, or at least in the dark — it is winter in the north of England; it is never anything but dark — and they did not like that at all. He lacked charisma, the whispers went. He lacked authority. He had fallen out with leading figures in the changing room. He had not impressed them in training. Drip, drip, drip.Whether any and all of these complaints — all of them let slip to various journalists on condition of anonymity — are true is, unfortunately, of secondary importance. What matters far more is the fact of their existence, the sad reality that at least a portion of United’s players are already doing what they can to ensure that the finger of blame for any future failure is pointed squarely at the coach who has been there for a few weeks, and not the players who have been there for several years.Those drips are what happens when something in a club — any club, not just Manchester United — has turned, when the atmosphere is toxic, when the strands of accountability and mutual support and collective responsibility that in ordinary times bind a squad and a staff together have snapped. That is always the rule: It is not the content of these pernicious leaks that matter, but the fact of them.Quite how United will proceed from this point is not entirely clear. Ed Woodward, the executive vice chairman, announced on Friday that he is leaving at the end of the month. He will be replaced by Richard Arnold, the club’s managing director. Rangnick has six more months before moving on to become a consultant. There will be a new manager, a new regime. The damage done by those drips, though, suggests that may only be the start of the upheaval.Learning LessonsJoan Laporta knows the safest position at Barcelona: right next to the club’s newest signing.Alejandro Garcia/EPA, via ShutterstockThere is, strangely, an answer to how Barcelona — in debt just a few months ago to the tune of $1 billion, as you may remember, and so concerned by the scale of their financial breakdown that they wanted to join a European Super League — could afford, right at the start of the month, to pay Manchester City $60 million or so to sign Ferran Torres.It is not an especially satisfactory answer, admittedly, encompassing as it does a loan from Goldman Sachs, some creative accounting, the sale of some players who have not yet actually been sold, and an odd loophole in Spanish soccer’s financial regulations that nobody had mentioned until Barcelona decided it wanted to pay Manchester City $60 million or so to sign Ferran Torres.But, still, it is an answer. Far more mystifying was the reaction of the Barcelona president Joan Laporta, a man who has spent much of the last year delivering tremulous warnings about the club’s dire finances, to the completion of the deal. “Everyone else should prepare themselves because we are back,” he said. “We continue to be a reference in the market.”This is a man, it should not need pointing out, who said those words at a time when his club could not officially register its new signing because of its ongoing financial difficulties.That Laporta should be feeling a little bullish is understandable: Torres is an astute signing at what is, by modern standards, a startlingly low fee. Laporta is in an elected position, too, and it is never too early to start campaigning.Indeed, in one sense, it is to be hoped that it is little more than hot air, that his refusal to dismiss the idea of signing Erling Haaland in the summer is little more than pride and defiance.The alternative, after all, is much more troubling: that rather than rebuild the team organically around the richly-talented cadre of teenagers it has produced over the last 12 months, Laporta is prepared to mortgage the club’s future once more, all in some quixotic pursuit of immediate success in a game now dominated by teams backed by nation states.Barcelona has been down that road before, and not long ago. It has only been a few months since it stood on the very edge of complete financial meltdown, after all. It is still only just starting to deal with the consequences. Barcelona does not need to be back, not in that sense, not for some time.CorrespondenceThis is the problem with having a little time off. You unwind, you relax, you allow your mind to drift, and then all of a sudden you’re back at work and none of it makes any sense at all. For example, why is Manuel Buchwald emailing me about the shape of the penalty area?“The logical alternative to the rectangular penalty box is the semicircular one, as is used in most other sports,” he wrote. “Field hockey, handball, lacrosse, basketball and ice hockey. In the latter case it’s the area protecting the goalie.” That is a valid point and would work at least as a basis for a new shape of penalty area in soccer, but why tell me?Not all penalties are equal.Kai Pfaffenbach/ReutersThe fact that Will Clark-Shim has also been in touch to complain about the “increased frequency of penalties in the game” jogs a memory. We were talking about something to do with penalties, weren’t we? “The game thrives on open and active play, honest industry, and clever coordination,” he wrote. “Increased penalties seem the result of incidental handballs, manufactured contact, and tedious reviews. They result in unexciting goals.”That’s a good point, too: Not all goals are created equal, and getting more goals through having more penalties is not necessarily a unilaterally positive thing. There is definitely a theme developing, because Bob Rogers has mentioned penalties, too. He is a (self-professed) “low-level referee,” and he would like to confess to calling fouls as outside the box even if they have occurred inside it, “when that is the fair value of the foul.”Ah, yes, that was it. We were discussing whether there are now too many penalties, and whether there might, perhaps, be a way of better distinguishing between fouls that warrant that level of punishment and fouls that just happen to take place in a fairly arbitrary area of the field. It always takes me a while to get up to speed, that’s all. More

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      Daniel Sturridge Ordered to Pay $30,000 to Man Who Returned His Dog

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      Daniel Sturridge lost his Pomeranian in a 2019 break-in. A man who returned the dog sued for breach of contract after Mr. Sturridge reneged on a promised reward, according to court records.Daniel Sturridge, an English soccer star, has been ordered to pay $30,000 to a Los Angeles man who found the player’s missing dog in 2019 and who went to court to recoup a reward he said he had been denied for the Pomeranian’s return.After announcing that his Los Angeles home had been broken into, Mr. Sturridge said in a video at the time that he would “pay whatever” to get his missing dog back, offering “20 Gs, 30 Gs, whatever” as a reward without specifying the currency.Shortly after that video was posted, Foster Washington of Los Angeles found the dog, Lucci, and returned him to Mr. Sturridge, according to court records. But Mr. Washington, 30, said he had never been paid, and in March, he filed a lawsuit for breach of contract.On Tuesday, Judge Curtis A. Kin of the Los Angeles County Superior Court issued a default judgment, awarding $30,000 in damages to Mr. Washington.Mr. Sturridge, a former England international star who played for Liverpool and Chelsea and is now a striker for the Australian team Perth Glory, said on Twitter on Saturday that “other people are trying to benefit for their own personal gain” and related a story different from Mr. Washington’s about how the dog had been recovered.“Just to let you know the truth on xmas!” Mr. Sturridge said on Twitter. “I met a young boy who found my dog and paid him a reward, which he was delighted with as was I to get my dog back because he was stolen.”Mr. Sturridge and his representatives did not immediately respond to emails on Saturday. Direct messages sent to an Instagram account for Lucci, which has more than 34,000 followers, were not returned.It all started in July 2019, after Mr. Sturridge’s home was broken into and he discovered that Lucci was missing.“I want my dog back,” he said in a video, adding: “How can you break into a house in L.A. and take somebody’s dog? Are you crazy?”Mr. Washington, who earns $14 an hour as a security guard and has three children, said he had been walking home when he and his best friend’s son saw a dog near 88th Street and South Central Avenue. The boy’s family could not afford to have a pet, so Mr. Washington said he had decided to take the dog home.A few hours later, a friend told Mr. Washington that Mr. Sturridge was searching for a dog that looked similar to the one he had taken in.“He was like, ‘Hey, dude, that dog’s famous,’” Mr. Washington said on Saturday. “And I’m like, ‘What?’” He said he had no idea who Mr. Sturridge was at the time.That day, Mr. Washington posted a photo of the dog on Twitter and asked Mr. Sturridge if it was Lucci.Mr. Washington then contacted Kimberly Cheng from the Los Angeles news station KTLA. Mr. Washington said she had connected him with Mr. Sturridge’s representatives. Ms. Cheng did not respond to a request seeking comment on Saturday.The dog had a small tattoo of numbers on his stomach, Mr. Washington said. Mr. Sturridge asked Mr. Washington over the phone to identify the mark to make sure it was indeed Lucci, Mr. Washington said.They agreed to meet, and when Mr. Sturridge retrieved the dog, he thanked Mr. Washington.“I’m like, ‘Hey, dude, what’s up with the reward?’” Mr. Washington said. “He said, ‘There is no reward.’”Mr. Washington tried to contact Mr. Sturridge, who joined Liverpool in 2013 on a contract reported to be worth about 12 million pounds (nearly $20 million at the time), and his representatives numerous times for weeks but to no avail. Mr. Washington said his phone number and social media accounts were being blocked.It was not immediately clear whether anyone was arrested in connection with the break-in or the theft of Lucci, who was described in court papers as a rare Pomeranian worth an estimated £4,000, or roughly $5,300. The Los Angeles police did not respond to messages on Saturday.Mr. Washington went to the police, who “concluded that he was not one of the thieves, or related to the burglary crime in any way,” the lawsuit said. “Mr. Washington has never been implicated in any wrongdoing.”The lawsuit added that Mr. Washington “did not receive the benefit of his bargain for supplying the dog safely and in good health.”Mr. Washington said he had received direct messages online from people calling him selfish for wanting to get paid, but during the pandemic, as he struggled financially, he decided to file the lawsuit.“I don’t see how I’m a bad guy by expecting him to honor this reward,” he said, adding: “Thirty thousand dollars is a lot of money. For anybody, that’s a life-changing amount of money.” More

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      The Premier League's Wealth Is Influencing Title Races Abroad

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      The outsize wealth of England’s clubs increasingly allows their owners to play a direct role in deciding the champions of other leagues.That first meeting told Alex Muzio all he needed to know. Not long after he and his business partner, the gambling tycoon Tony Bloom, bought Royale Union Saint-Gilloise, a Belgian soccer team, Muzio sat down with the club’s coach. He wanted to discuss potential recruits.Muzio had never been a soccer player. He had never been a scout. He had spent his career working for Bloom’s Starlizard consultancy, the firm many consider to be the largest betting syndicate in Britain.Starlizard’s business model is using data to find an edge. It has information on tens of thousands of players from across the world. Its bespoke algorithms are designed to trawl through it and spot opportunities first, then talent. Starlizard’s plan in team ownership was to do the same. Bloom already owned a team in England: The club he has always supported, Brighton, has been transformed into a mainstay of the Premier League by Bloom’s money and methods. But he and Muzio wanted to see what else their “I.P.” could achieve. “We wanted,” Muzio said, “to win a title.”By May 2018, when Bloom completed his purchase of Union, Muzio was itching to get started. The club, which last celebrated a title in the years between world wars, was at the time mired in the second tier of Belgian soccer. It was staffed largely by volunteers. Its training facility in the suburbs of Brussels did not have showers. Muzio still cannot say with certainty that there was a toilet.Realizing they could compete but not contend in England, Brighton’s owners sought a laboratory for their methods at Union. “We wanted to win a title,” the club’s chairman said.Kristof Van Accom/Belga Mag/Sipa via Associated PressHe did not intend for it to stay that way. The first step was to be promoted to Belgium’s top division within three years, and to do that, Muzio knew, the squad needed to be revamped. He presented the club’s experienced manager, Marc Grosjean, with a list of potential signings, all of them selected and assessed by Starlizard’s data.Grosjean was not impressed. He used an expletive to describe Muzio’s suggestions, and then offered his own alternatives. “He told me that he would much rather sign a set of Belgian players, players that he knew,” Muzio said. It did not take long to find out what Starlizard’s metrics made of them. Grosjean was gone by the end of the month, his abrupt, if mutual, departure announced as “a difference of opinion on the sporting development of the club.”“We have ways that we want to do things,” Muzio said. Resistance would only slow things down.Three years later, his ideas have been vindicated. Union met its target of being promoted last summer. A little more than halfway through this season, it will spend Christmas atop the Jupiler Pro League table, six points clear of Club Brugge. The way Belgian soccer is structured, with a traditional league schedule followed by an end-of-season playoff, means a first domestic title for Union since 1935 remains only a distant possibility. But it is a possibility, nonetheless.That, of course, would not have been possible without the arrival of Muzio, who serves as Union’s chairman, and Bloom, though the latter has no day-to-day involvement with the running of the club.It is not quite fair to describe their presence at Union as a stroke of good fortune. The team was acquired because it met the stringent criteria established at the start of the search: the right sort of club at the right sort of price in the right sort of place. The broader Brussels region, where Union has been based since 1897, is home to more than a million people and only one major team, its traditional rival Anderlecht. It was not just random chance.Union’s glorious past includes 11 first-division championships, but the most recent was won in 1935.Virginie Lefour/Belga Mag/Sipa via Associated PressMuzio, Bloom and Starlizard looked at teams in a host of leagues. Others might have had different priorities, different requirements, different ideas. It just so happened that Union fit their bill exactly, and so it was Union whose existence was transformed, a husk of a club suddenly revitalized.This is a version of a story that has played out across Europe with increasing regularity in recent years: teams either adrift in mediocrity or that had fallen on hard times uplifted, seemingly overnight, by some external force. On the surface, the clubs have little in common. Underneath, they are bound by a single thread, one that can be traced to England.That European soccer has, over the last decade or so, been shaped by the Premier League is beyond doubt. The wealth of England’s top flight has long exerted a gravitational pull on the rest of the continent. English clubs serve as the most reliable market for players, drive up prices in the transfer market and send salaries soaring. Players are acquired across Europe with one eye on future sales to England, and often purchased with money that is a downstream consequence of the Premier League’s apparently pandemic-proof broadcast deals.In recent years, though, the nature of that impact has changed. It no longer exists at one remove; instead, English clubs — or, rather, the international ownership groups behind them — have invested in overseas teams directly, giving them unfiltered influence on championships across Europe, and around the world.The reasons for that vary. Two of Union’s rivals in the Jupiler Pro League have English-inflected ownership: O.H. Leuven is owned by King Power, the Thai company that controls Leicester City, and Ostend is a part of a group of clubs belonging to Pacific Media Group, among them the French side Nancy; F.C. Den Bosch in the Netherlands; and a second-tier English team, Barnsley.While Leuven has, at times, served as something more akin to a farm team — a place to send young players to gain experience — Pacific Media Group believes its approach helps to improve performance and reduce costs across its network of teams. “We don’t need to replicate all staff in all markets,” Paul Conway, the group’s founder, told the Unofficial Partner podcast.Jaime Valdez/USA Today Sports, via ReutersLee Smith/Action Images Via ReutersCity Football Group’s mixed results: New York City F.C., champion of Major League Soccer; Manchester City, leading the Premier League; and Troyes A.C., currently facing a  relegation fight in France.Francois Nascimbeni/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOstend, Nancy, Barnsley and the rest share not only employees but knowledge. “We have a greater knowledge base than most,” Conway said of his clubs’ recruitment departments. That helps to prevent “leakage,” as he put it. “You spend lots of money on a player and then, at the end of the contract, that player walks away,” he said. “Because we have a uniform style of play as a group, we can spend our life with these players.” If one club does not require a player, in other words, a slot can be found for him elsewhere.A similar approach has helped Estoril, long a makeweight in Portugal’s top division, to compete for a spot in the Europa League after coming under the aegis of a group of teams backed by David Blitzer, the Blackstone executive who is a part of the consortium that owns the Premier League club Crystal Palace.Midtjylland, the Danish champion, shares an owner — another gambling magnate, Matthew Benham, a former colleague of Bloom’s — and a philosophy with Brentford F.C., a data-driven organization newly promoted to the Premier League.And then, of course, there are the clubs that form some of the City Football Group network, centered on Manchester City. The group’s record is, at best, mixed: Though it has enjoyed success in Major League Soccer and Australia — where New York City F.C. and Melbourne City are the reigning champions — its European ventures have been more complex.The group’s Belgian club, Lommel, remains mired at the wrong end of the second division despite a far greater budget than many of its peers, and Girona, its Spanish outpost, was demoted from La Liga in 2019 and has not returned. Troyes, the French team that City’s owners bought last year, was promoted at the first attempt, but is currently struggling against immediate relegation.Union’s relationship with Brighton is not quite so hierarchical. The depth of Starlizard’s knowledge of the game means that its methods are beyond the reach of most of its rivals — “They’re impossible for other teams to do,” Muzio said — but Muzio rejected the idea that Union is any or all of feeder, sister or partner club.“We are so independent,” he said, before referring to Bloom: “Tony is the majority owner, but he is so uninvolved at Union. He doesn’t meddle. We have the freedom to do it how we want to do it.”Much of the methodology at Brighton and Union is inevitably the same, he said, rooted in the way Starlizard has always worked, but the clubs do not share anything beyond that. So far, it has proved more than enough to have Union restored — for the time being — to the pinnacle of Belgian soccer with an expertise crafted and honed and polished in England. More