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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

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      In the Premier League, There’s No Looking Back

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      England’s clubs are plowing ahead with their holiday schedule. But amid questions about Omicron and fairness, do they really have a choice?And so on we roll, heads down and teeth gritted, grimly determined to reach the other side, wherever and whenever that might be found. The Premier League had planned to stage a full suite of games on Boxing Day, but as you read this sentence, its best hope is still just to get through as many of them as it can. In midweek, it will try to do it all again, and then, after ringing in the New Year, once more for good measure.That is the plan, anyway. Nobody truly believes it will play out like that. Last weekend, the division lost more than half its schedule to Covid outbreaks. At least one more match, Chelsea’s visit to Wolves, took place despite a request from Chelsea to postpone it because of a rising case count. On Thursday, it lost two more.The chances that every single one of the 30 top-flight games stuffed into England’s holiday season would be completed were always slim. There will be more contagion, more positive tests, more players self-isolating, more games canceled at short notice, more fans left suddenly adrift in unfamiliar town centers, facing an empty afternoon and a long journey home.But as far as the league and its constituent clubs could see, there was no other choice. When they sat down virtually on Monday to discuss how — and if — to proceed, they had three options. One was to play on. One was to reduce the workload from three games in a week to two. The other was to shut down, indefinitely, until the Omicron surge abates.Instinctively, it is easy to assume that the Premier League has done what it always does: followed the money. Boxing Day — and the rest of what is contractually known as “the busy festive period” — is in many ways the centerpiece of English soccer’s calendar. It functions as a test of nerve as much as a test of strength; it is when contenders separate themselves from also-rans, when the outline of the season’s conclusion begins to be mapped out.The Premier League race may hinge on health as much as much as on form.Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockAnd while it is a tradition England cherishes and its rivals envy — the Premier League’s success is the reason that Italy’s Serie A, in recent years, has toyed with the idea of playing games the day after Christmas — it is also lucrative broadcasting.Not just because there is a captive audience at home, waiting to be sold things in commercial breaks, but because much of the rest of life — even in times less strange and unnerving than this — is on hold. The Premier League, soccer as a whole, gets to be just where it likes to be: front and center, the only show in town. Ultimately, it was never going to vacate that slot, not voluntarily.But that reading is, in truth, a little unfair. Neither of the available alternatives could be considered a right answer. Shutting down indefinitely — an idea that attracted no advocates in that virtual meeting — might feel like the moral choice, but it is not something that has been asked of any other industry. It also raises the question of how, precisely, you start again.There was more support for easing the burden, for allowing each club to postpone one of its three fixtures. Liverpool, among others, spoke in favor of that in private, just as its manager, Jürgen Klopp, has done in public. A couple of days later, the Liverpool captain, Jordan Henderson, made the valid point that nobody seems to have thought about asking the players what they want to do.The counterargument, though, was not without its merits. The Premier League is already facing a severe backlog of games — both Tottenham and Burnley have played three games fewer than some of their rivals — and there is a distinct shortage of space to fit them back in. Adding another whole round of games to that would create a logistical headache.The Champions League fate of West Ham, and of Tottenham, could be decided by the results of several rescheduled Spurs games next year.David Klein/ReutersOf course, to some extent this is the Premier League engaging in its favorite pastime: kicking the can down the road. This is an organization, we should not forget, that was beset by factionalism and fury over what to do with one season interrupted by a pandemic but did not think it worth it, in the aftermath, to draw up a protocol about what to do should another season be interrupted by the exact same pandemic. Thinking ahead is not, if we are honest, a strong suit.Deciding to play on does not preclude more postponements, more games to fit in to an overstuffed calendar drawn up by a whole range of organizations apparently unable to see beyond their own immediate requirements. Further cancellations and complications are almost inevitable. The Premier League is, effectively, simply gambling that there will be fewer than 10, that this is the least bad option.That approach comes with a cost, though. One of sport’s most abiding myths is that the league table does not lie. Every team plays each other home and away and, at the end of the season, all of the fluctuations of fate — the injury crises and the rotten luck and the good fortune and the decision not to send off Harry Kane — are evened out, and a true and, crucially, fair order of merit is established.It is a pretty fantasy, but it is a fantasy nonetheless. A league season is not inherently fair. It is simply unfair in a way that we, as a soccer culture, are prepared to tolerate.It is not, for example, entirely fair that Watford was able to play Newcastle United at home at a time when Newcastle’s squad was a ragtag bunch of journeymen. Three of Newcastle’s direct rivals for relegation — Leeds, Burnley and Norwich — have to play Newcastle at home after it has had a chance to inject $200 million into its team in the January transfer window. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that the vagaries of the fixture schedule may determine which of those teams goes down.It is not entirely fair that teams can fire an underperforming manager at any point in the season — in a way not possible with players — giving their subsequent opponents a more challenging encounter than their previous ones, or that some teams get more rest between games than others.That is not to complain; these are trivial inequities, especially when compared with things like the vast financial chasm that exists between teams in the same league. It is simply to point out that no league season can be truly, unwaveringly, incontestably fair, and that it is something we can all accept.Just like fans, Pep Guardiola and his players now face Covid-19 checks at the stadium door.Lee Smith/Action Images Via ReutersThe problem with the Premier League’s decision to push through as best it can, commanding that any and every club with enough uninfected players to fill a team and the requisite number of substitutes must play on, canceling some games but continuing with others, is that it adds an extra — and perhaps excessive — level of competitive distortion.Tottenham, without question, will suffer for having to make up the three games it lost to its Covid outbreak. There will be busy weeks in the spring, and fatigue may weigh heavy. But will it suffer more than — say — Chelsea, which had to play on despite the fact that its manager, Thomas Tuchel, made it very plain that he felt he did not have enough players?Does Tottenham not now have a better chance of winning those games than it would otherwise? And what would a team like Leeds make of that, given that it has a far longer list of absentees but has had to endure simply because they had not — at least until Thursday — been missing because of Covid?It is easy, at this point, to say that the teams at the summit of the Premier League all have enough players to cope, and indeed they do. There is no reason to feel sorry for the poor little rich boys. But what if it happens at the other end of the table? What if Burnley must play through, but Norwich gets to reset? What if it proves the difference between survival and relegation? What if it costs people their jobs? Not the players, but the support staff whose income is dependent on continued access to the wealth of the Premier League?There is, again, no correct answer here, though there are other solutions available. Perhaps clubs should be made to play on — unless they cannot guarantee the health and safety of the opposing team — with whatever group of players they can cobble together? That is the usual sporting punishment for missing players, as Leeds is busy discovering.Or perhaps, as is the case elsewhere, they should be punished for failing to fulfill their fixtures, for not adhering to the coronavirus protocols well enough? Maybe each team that cannot complete a game should just suffer a 3-0 defeat? And yet that, too, is hardly an advertisement for fairness.And so the Premier League has done the only thing it can think of: to hit and hope, to assume that when it emerges from the thick fog of winter there will be something on the other side. What shape it will take, what difference it will have made and what damage it might have done are questions that can wait for later. Until then, it will do what it has always done, plowing on regardless, into the current.CorrespondenceLet’s start with a suggestion from Jeffrey Hoffman as to how to keep UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, from making a huge mess of pulling some balls out of a pot. “Go back to a straight knockout tournament. No seeding. No country protections. No nothing. If Paris St.-Germain plays Manchester City in the first round, so be it. Win or go home.”Now this is, it has to be said, quite a popular idea with — let’s put this diplomatically — a certain demographic: those over 45. It is not, though, one I agree with. Randomness is a welcome addition to the Champions League, but too much randomness is not. It makes sense to try to funnel the best teams toward the final rounds. It just doesn’t make any sense to filter them once they are there.Lionel Messi and Paris St.-Germain are 13 points clear at the top of the Ligue 1 table, the largest Christmas gap in any of Europe’s top five leagues.Christophe Ena/Associated PressBrion Fox, meanwhile, picks up on the idea that there are too many penalties. “There are too many penalties,” he said, “because there are too many fouls. We have so many, they have their own lingo: professional fouls, tactical, strategic, lazy, aggressive, late. Players are criticized for not being tough enough to foul. Some players seem to be on the field solely to provoke fouls. Others, to satisfy the desire of those who seek to provoke. The lack of flow of the game, with the constant starts and stops, is why I prefer the women’s game.”To round this out, maybe there are too many fouls because there are too many things that are considered fouls? Maybe if we decided that some things weren’t really fouls, we could concentrate on eliminating the ones that definitely are? (Statistically, Brion is right: There are fewer fouls in women’s soccer. In England, for example, it’s currently 17.5 per game in the Women’s Super League and 20.2 in the Premier League. So the difference is not vast, but I’d agree it’s probably noticeable.)And because it’s Christmas, we will finish with these gifts to you: two absolutely perfect emails from the inbox this week. First, a prime example of the sort of correspondence I love — questioning and imaginative and beautifully put — from Connor Murphy:“What is the optimal shape of the penalty area? That it’s currently a rectangle seems likely to be nothing more than historical accident, a consequence of our infatuation with right angles. Is a foul just outside of the top of the box and right in the center of the goal more deserving of a penalty kick than one occurring on a goal line corner of the box?”(Great question, don’t know, maybe the shape of a partially deflated hot-air balloon?)The penalty area at Villa Park, still a rectangle. For now.Molly Darlington/Action Images Via ReutersAnd then there was this mildly confessional missive from Dan Portnoy. “My son and I, both low-level referees, jumped out of our seats on the Antonio Rüdiger foul. We’ve been saying for years that players on the edge of the box, heading away from the goal, don’t deserve a penalty, even though they do deserve something.“We’ve called for a referee judgment call as to whether a foul in the box deserves a penalty, or, as an alternative, a free kick from anywhere outside the box that the offended team chooses. When I’m refereeing and a foul happens near the edge of the box, I often award a free kick, not a penalty, declaring that it happened just outside the box (please don’t tell anyone).”Don’t worry, Dan, I won’t.That’s all for this week, and for next week, too, when we take our one newsletter break of the year. If you can’t wait two weeks to be heard, get in touch at askrory@nytimes.com with any hints, tips, complaints or ideas. Twitter can perform much the same function, of course. We’re looking back on the year for the Set Piece Menu podcast this week, first for good, and then for bad. The good episode is heartwarming. The bad one is more fun.For those of you who celebrate, have a great Christmas. For those that don’t, enjoy the fact that everything is a little quieter than normal. More

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      In Premier League, Fear and Falsehoods Fill Vaccination Gap

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      The report spread like wildfire. Premier League players shared the link among their peers. Some passed it to their family members and closest confidantes. A handful were sufficiently troubled by what it seemed to suggest that they presented it to their clubs’ in-house medical teams, seeking advice.It had been produced by a website that says it tracks the number of “young athletes who had major medical issues in 2021 after receiving one or more Covid vaccines.” The report claimed to list 19 “athletes” — mostly in the United States — who it said had experienced heart attacks after being inoculated. Some of the attacks, the site noted ominously, had been fatal.Almost immediately, the doctors and others spotted the glaring flaws in the research. One of the examples cited was Hank Aaron, the Hall of Fame baseball player, who had died in January. He was 86. Another name on the list, a former N.B.A. player, had been 64. The most cursory research showed that many of the younger athletes, too, had documented, underlying conditions.But that did not matter. Nor did the fact that the report was subsequently and comprehensively debunked. It had made the soccer players question whether they should agree to be vaccinated. The damage, at least in the view of medical experts, had been done.These are not easy weeks for the Premier League, which is currently enduring a surge in virus cases, a glut of postponements — two more games were postponed on Thursday — and calls even from within its ranks to take at least a temporary pause in the season. Those troubles have placed its lagging vaccination record under fierce scrutiny, and prompted questions as to why the richest league in the world has had such trouble convincing its stars to get the shot.In one light, the league and its teams have had considerable success: The Premier League has released figures suggesting that 84 percent of its stars are on their “vaccination journey,” meaning they have had at least one of a potential three shots since becoming eligible in the spring. The remaining 16 percent, though — around 100 players — has become a cause of concern.The Premier League has said that 84 percent of its players have had at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine. But that means 16 percent have not, making the league’s vaccination an outlier in soccer, and elite sports.Peter Cziborra/Action Images, via ReutersSix of the 10 Premier League games scheduled to be played last weekend were postponed after clubs were struck by Covid outbreaks. At least one of those matches is reported to have been called off not because of a raft of positive tests, but because a number of unvaccinated players were self-isolating, as British law requires, after being identified as close contacts of a confirmed case.The lost weekend highlighted the Premier League’s struggle to keep its vaccination figures on par with the rest of Europe’s major domestic competitions, and other top sports leagues around the world.Serie A, the Italian top flight, has vaccinated 98 percent of its players. In France, the figure stands at 95 percent, and in Germany 94 percent — numbers on par with the N.F.L., N.B.A. and N.H.L. in North America. Spain’s soccer authorities reported that, taking into account both vaccination and naturally-acquired immunity, 97 percent of players were fully covered. The comparison with England, then, is stark: In the Premier League, only 77 percent of players have had two vaccinations.Establishing the reason for that divergence is not straightforward. The New York Times spoke with an array of players, advisers, executives, officials and medical staff members, most on condition of anonymity because they are not permitted to discuss private health matters. Those interviews painted a complex, inchoate portrait of why vaccine hesitancy has been allowed to become so embedded in the richest soccer league in the world.“It’s tough to say there is one thing,” said Maheta Molango, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, Britain’s players’ union. “It really is on a case-by-case basis.”Concern about possible side effects has, certainly, become widespread. A spate of recent, high-profile incidents involving players enduring heart problems while on the field — including Christian Eriksen, the Denmark midfielder who collapsed at last summer’s European Championship, and Sergio Agüero, the Barcelona striker who just retired — has fueled suspicion of the vaccines among some players.For athletes sensitive about anything they put into their bodies, even the debunked claims can still seem persuasive.Craig Brough/ReutersSome medical staff at clubs contend the suspicion has been encouraged by a handful of retired players — including the former England midfielder Matt Le Tissier and Trevor Sinclair, once of Manchester City and West Ham — who have publicly identified on-field incidents as a possible consequence of vaccination. That Eriksen had not been vaccinated when he collapsed on a field during the Euros in June has made little difference.But incidents involving others are far from the only source of skepticism. According to reporting by The Times, several players have expressed concern that the vaccine might reduce their sperm count, and a number of doctors revealed they had faced questions about links to decreased virility particularly after the musician Nicki Minaj tweeted that a family friend had suffered “swollen testicles” as a result of the vaccine. (Both theories are unfounded.)Molango suggested that some players may have “concerns around religion,” too. Earlier this year, the P.F.A. and the Premier League arranged for Jonathan Van Tam, England’s deputy chief medical officer — who has regularly used soccer-themed metaphors during his public statements — to address the captains of the league’s 20 clubs in a bid to encourage more players to be vaccinated.During the meeting, he was asked if it was true the vaccines contained alcohol — a concern for Muslim players. He confirmed that the Pfizer-BioNTech shot was alcohol-free, but acknowledged that others could contain trace amounts. But the amounts were so minuscule, he told the captains, that “there was probably more alcohol in the bread you ate this morning.”Others have “questions around the credibility” of those encouraging them to be vaccinated, Molango said. Some players have noted, too, that it was deemed safe for them to return to work last year, before the vaccines had been developed, and that they did not appreciate now being told to be vaccinated in order to keep on playing.In some cases, that has crystallized into something more implacable: an ideological refusal to have the shot. Most players, though, are more hesitant than opposed, team employees said — inclined to think that as healthy young men, they will not suffer even if they contract the virus, and therefore do not need to take whatever risk there may or may not be in a vaccine. Their bodies are their livelihoods, after all, and many have told medical staff members at their clubs that they would not take anything that is not irrefutably safe.And yet that does not fully explain why players in the Premier League — the overwhelming majority of whom are not British, let alone English — should be more resistant than their peers in other major leagues.While the proportion of Premier League players vaccinated is broadly similar to the number of people in their age group to have been inoculated in England, elite soccer is hardly a representative sample. It is, after all, gleefully international. The more apt parallel, then, may be with Serie A and La Liga and the others, where the mix of professionals is almost as global as it is in the Premier League, and where vaccination rates are far higher.The Premier League contends it has done as much as it reasonably can do to persuade its players to accept the inoculations. Van Tam not only addressed the captains of the league’s clubs but also released a video, highlighting the importance of vaccination and dispelling myths, to reinforce the message. He has visited teams in person. Other clubs, struggling to persuade their holdouts to be vaccinated, have been offered visits from experts eager to answer questions and allay fears.The clubs, too, have “played their part,” as Molango put it. Many have invited medical teams into their training facilities to make it as easy as possible for players to get a shot. At Liverpool, Jürgen Klopp has been an outspoken advocate of the “moral” imperative to be vaccinated. Leeds United officials have made vaccination a nonnegotiable part of a player’s duty to his teammates, and at other teams players have embraced vaccinations after being shaken by the experiences of teammates who tested positive, or the effect that Covid-related deaths have had on friends and colleagues.Other clubs, though, have been accused of being too light a touch, of not offering enough guidance to players early on, of giving the illusion that there was no real urgency. That, critics say, created a space in which misinformation could flourish. One Premier League team initially encouraged players to be vaccinated on their own time. When that did not receive much response, executives dropped the hint again. It was only after a few weeks that the club, realizing it had hit a wall, took the step of inviting a vaccination team to the training facility.Clubs’ approaches, though, are starting to shift. This summer, a number of transfer deals included clauses written into player contracts stating that vaccination was mandatory. Agents expect that to become the norm over the next few months: Klopp, like Aston Villa’s Steven Gerrard and Arsenal’s Mikel Arteta, has made it clear that his club would prefer not to sign unvaccinated players.Internal measures are growing more strict, too. At least one Premier League club no longer permits unvaccinated players to dine with their teammates, and requires them to change into their training gear either before arriving or in their car, instead of in the dressing room. The Premier League is now considering adapting its protocols to make similar precautions more widespread.The hope, among those charged with keeping the players safe, is that a more active, more draconian stance will prove decisive among all but a few ardent holdouts. Until then, all the league can do is try to counteract the misinformation, change all the minds it can, and hope that the games can go on. More

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      Premier League Buckles In Amid Covid Surge

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      Familiar fears return as the pandemic’s shadow returns to soccer, to sports, to everything.That familiar feeling, the one we hoped we had left long behind, is swelling once again. There is a precariousness in the air, a sense that everything is hanging by a thread, that the next step might be the one over the edge. March 2020 seems a world away, a lifetime ago, but we are here again.In parts of Germany and in the Netherlands, the ghost games are back, those afternoons that offer an eerie simulacrum of sport’s emotion. When Feyenoord and Ajax meet for the most ferocious game of their seasons this weekend at De Kuip — one of Europe’s most intimidating, most evocative grounds — the stands will be empty, silent. The voices of the players will carry out of the stadium, into the still air.In England, the games are starting to fall like flies. Tottenham’s trip to Brighton was first, last weekend, after an outbreak of Covid-19 among Spurs players. Then Manchester United had to close its training facility, and its meeting with Brentford was postponed. Burnley’s game against Watford and another Spurs match, with Leicester, soon followed.This weekend, half of the scheduled games are already off, the result of ongoing outbreaks at Brentford and Watford and Norwich and Leicester. That is at the time of writing; it hardly requires some great leap of imagination to think others might follow. Liverpool was missing three players during its win against Newcastle on Thursday, all of them isolating after returning “suspected positive” tests. These are “at the time of writing” days.It is that, more than anything, which has brought memories of the madness of March flooding back. Then, it was only one positive test, one suspended game, that brought the league to a halt. Now, as the cases rise and the fixtures fall, it is hard, at times, to see how it can play out with any other conclusion.Half the Premier League’s weekend games had been postponed as of Thursday.Jon Super/Associated PressNow, as then, the Premier League is adamant it will bulldoze its way through. The product, the content, cannot be stopped. There have been calls for a pause, for an entire round of games to be postponed so as to “break the chain” of infection that has taken root at clubs, as the Brentford manager, Thomas Frank, put it on Thursday. “The path we are on, I am not sure how long we can stay on it for,” Graham Potter, his counterpart at Brighton, said.The league intends to find out. “It is the league’s intention to continue its current fixture schedule where safely possible,” it said in a statement. Clubs have been instructed to restore the hygiene protocols they developed to allow soccer to restart last year. Players have been encouraged to limit their social interactions.League officials will follow government guidance on whether games should be played behind closed doors; it is most certainly not going to make that decision unless it has absolutely no choice. This is the same language, the same stalemate, the same bullishness that sustained the league in March 2020, as it convinced itself that it was different, it was special, it was protected. It lasted right up until reality dawned, and the spell was broken.There is no mystery why the Premier League should take that stance once more. There is no real logic behind a “circuit breaker” of a hiatus, not for a week. The Omicron variant is tearing through England, through the world. It will not take a break for the festive period, burn itself out by the time the Boxing Day fixtures come. These cases might clear up, but more would follow.And besides, the Premier League — like all leagues in all sports globally — know that stopping is one thing and that starting again is quite another. Choosing the moment to return would be fraught with difficulty, with allegations of ethical failures, with questions of moral decency. Modern soccer’s business model is based on meeting endless demand with bottomless supply.How long will scenes like this continue in England and elsewhere?Vickie Flores/EPA, via ShutterstockStopping is not an option, especially not now, not with English soccer’s great pride and joy, its hectic schedule over Christmas and New Year, on the horizon. This is the Premier League’s calling card, the week when — with Britain at home, at a loose end, itching for something to do and something to watch — it takes center stage. Losing those TV slots, having to repay that lost advertising, is unfathomable.So the Premier League will rumble on, the issue of when all these games will be played kicked down the road, each and every game laced with an added frisson of uncertainty, not just around the result but over whether it will happen at all.Perhaps that is the right thing. Soccer has proved — to its credit, ultimately — that it can play on through the white heat of a pandemic, even if it is a pale, shallow, deracinated version of itself. There is no reason to believe it cannot do so again. The games that are lost can always be made up.Or perhaps it is not. Perhaps this obstinacy, this money-driven self-regard, is putting the health of players and staff members and, while stadiums remain as full as a government Christmas party, fans in danger. Perhaps sensible minds would look at a fixture list pockmarked with absences and suggest that a few weeks off would not do any harm. The games that are lost, after all, can always be made up.In Germany, stadium restrictions have reduced crowd sizes again. But the games go on.Martin Meissner/Associated PressIt is — and this is a rare sentiment to express to a sports league — a difficult, unenviable line to tread. Nobody wants a raft of cancellations and postponements, a season ruptured by uncertainty. Nobody wants a break, an indefinite pause. Nobody wants teams to be battling outbreaks or players, coaches and staff to be getting sick.That is the most familiar feeling of all: the knowledge that, whatever comes next, there is no right answer, no clear way forward, that it will all be infinitely more fragile than it might appear on the surface, that it might all disappear in an instant, that it might never — or for so long that it might be never — feel the way it did, the way it should, again.That sensation, of everything hanging by a thread, is not some dim echo of March 2020. It is familiar because it has been with us ever since, below the surface, a dull ache that we cannot quite shift. It has not come rushing back. It just never left. It has become how we live, ever since we went tumbling over the edge.Spot the DifferenceEasy does it for Jorginho. Again.David Klein/ReutersThe danger of nostalgia is it tricks you into believing there is a right way for things to be, rather than just a way things were. Milk should come in bottles. Children should stare open-mouthed at a television screen, not open-mouthed at YouTube. The F.A. Cup should mean something.We should not, then, fall into that trap when asking if there are, now, too many penalties in soccer. The raw facts of the matter are straightforward: There are more penalties than there used to be. In the first decade or so of the Premier League, somewhere between 60 and 70 spot kicks were awarded each season.Since 2006, that number has been drifting in the general direction of upward: into the 80s, the 90s and then, last season, to 124. That is a significant change: There are now almost twice as many as there used to be; or, to put it into context, a penalty is now awarded roughly once every three games, rather than once every six.Whether that is good, bad or indifferent depends, really, on taste. It is certainly not necessarily the case that 60 penalties a season is the right number. To younger viewers, it would seem far too few. To much older ones, it probably seemed too many. There is, in reality, no Goldilocks number, no sweet spot, no objective truth.What we can say, with some certainty, is that such a steep increase in the number of penalties means that the game itself is now recognizably different. The frequency with which penalties are awarded means that players have changed the way they behave in the penalty area. Teams attack in such a way as to make a penalty more likely. Defenders find themselves constricted as to how they might do their jobs. All of these changes, needless to say, benefit the teams that attack the most.The deception of nostalgia means that it is difficult to say, with any certainty, that something must be done about the rise in penalties. Perhaps the game is better this way, not worse. But it does seem that, at least in some cases, the punishment no longer fits the crime.To give an example: Mateusz Klich definitely fouled Antonio Rüdiger in the final few minutes of Leeds’s defeat at Chelsea last week. He swiped right through him, aiming for the ball but finding only a leg. Rüdiger, as players are currently incentivized to do, collapsed like a lovelorn teenager, and gleefully watched as Jorginho earned the European champions a narrow win.Chelsea’s Antonio Rudiger, right, tumbling under the challenge of Leeds United’s Mateusz Klich. But was it a penalty?David Klein/ReutersThe problem is the foul took place on the edge of the box. Rüdiger, a central defender, had his back to goal. He was not about to score. And yet the consequence of Klich’s poor judgment was that Chelsea had a penalty. The data suggests that a penalty is worth 0.85 of a goal. They are converted 85 percent of the time. More, now that Jorginho doesn’t just roll them down the middle.The reward, in other words, is disproportionate. Fortunately, there are ways to do something about that. Penalties do not have to be reserved for fouls in a particular area of the field; they could be deployed to punish something else: serious foul play, for example, or the denial of a goal-scoring opportunity.That might avert the problem of penalties being not only a frequent feature, but to some extent the defining point of the game. Change does not have to be bad. The danger of nostalgia, after all, is that it tricks you into believing there is a right way for things to be, rather than just a way things were.A Draw Without BordersThis task does not have to be difficult. Really, it doesn’t.Uefa/Handout Via ReutersWhile we are busy changing things, one further suggestion. The chaos of the draw for the last 16 of the Champions League on Monday might have been thoroughly enjoyable — who among us, after all, has not secretly wanted there to be a problem with one of these absurdly prolonged affairs for years? — but at its root was an issue of UEFA’s own making.According to UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, the error involving whether Manchester United could play Atlético Madrid that meant the whole thing had to be redone came down to a glitch with the “external software” that dictates which teams might face each other.Now, you might well point out that the amount of software required to tell three people how to pull a ball out of a pot should be no more complicated than that found in a long-forgotten Tamagotchi, but that is not quite right. UEFA insists on having an open draw that is not, in fact, open — teams cannot play opponents they faced in the group stage or rivals from the same country — and that makes the whole thing unnecessarily complicated.It makes some sense to keep teams that have already met in the competition apart. It does not make sense to maintain what UEFA calls “country protection” for a single round of games: It is abolished, after all, for the quarterfinals. Like away goals, it is a hangover from a different era, from the days when there were just a couple of teams from the same league.That is not the case any more. The vast majority of the teams in the knockout rounds come from Europe’s five major leagues (though well done to Portugal and the Netherlands for providing three this time around, including one quarterfinalist). Keeping them apart in the round of 16 does little but distort the draw, and marginally increase the chance that two domestic rivals will meet in the final.As Monday proved, it is in UEFA’s interests to abolish this carveout. Without country protection, there would be no need for an external software provider. UEFA could simply get some people to pick some balls out of a pot. And that, surely, is not beyond their wit. Surely.CorrespondenceRory, left, fielding readers’ responses to last week’s newsletter.Octavio Passos/Getty ImagesAs ever, last week’s newsletter managed to leave a trail of aggrieved dissent trailing in its wake. It is of some solace to me, at least, that my infractions were many and varied.Sebastian Royo, for example, quite rightly pointed out that Porto’s meeting with Atlético Madrid was “a tough game, and both teams were at fault” for the crackling tension that ensued. He also felt that the performance of the referee was, as they say, suboptimal. “To address that gamesmanship, you need good referees, and this one did not meet the standards.”I agree with Sebastian to a point. Porto most definitely was not merely an innocent bystander as the game boiled over, though I should stress that Atlético is such a repeat offender that you have to assume, eventually, that it is a deliberate strategy. As for the referee not being up to scratch: the fault for a burning building lies with the person who strikes the match, not with the firefighter who cannot extinguish it.Sarah de la Motte, meanwhile, feels I was too dismissive of the Bundesliga. “I’m a longtime Manchester United fan, and my husband a lifelong Bayern Munich fan,” she wrote. “We watch a huge deal of both the Premier League and the Bundesliga. As much as I hate to admit it, the Bundesliga is better: technically, for entertainment value, for competitiveness. There is less haphazard defending, uncertain pressing and rushed passing all around.”This is a subject that fascinates me. My instinct has long been that, in general, the top four or five leagues are all basically the same: One might be marginally stronger than another for a fleeting moment, but the differences are so slight as to be imperceptible. I feel — and fear — that is starting to change.For now, that the Bundesliga is more competitive is incontrovertible. Technically, as discussed last week, that may not be especially relevant. Whether it’s more entertaining depends, I suspect, on your emotional involvement. I would suggest, though, that there is definitely more haphazard defending in Germany than in England. That is in part what makes the Bundesliga fun. More