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      For Carli Lloyd, Creative Tributes Abound as Retirement Approaches

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      DELRAN, N.J. — Chants of “Car-li Loyd! Car-li Loyd! Car-li Loyd!” filled Delran Community Park on Oct. 14, led primarily by the children from Delran F.C., a South Jersey youth soccer club that was Carli Lloyd’s first team.Though some of the cheering fans hadn’t been born when Lloyd scored her famous hat trick at the 2015 World Cup in Canada — all three goals coming within 16 minutes — the magic of seeing her, a hometown hero, seemed exhilarating for everyone at the park.As Lloyd, 39, approaches the end of her brilliant soccer career, which could come as early as Sunday in a National Women’s Soccer League playoff game between her Gotham F.C. and the Chicago Red Stars, the sport and its fans have found particularly personal ways to send her off with gratitude and respect.Only eight days before the gathering in Delran, Gotham F.C. hosted the Washington Spirit at a soccer stadium in Chester, Pa., instead of in its regular home, Red Bull Arena in North Jersey. The Chester stadium is not an N.W.S.L. site, but it was as close to Delran as the team could get. And in Lloyd’s farewell season, playing a tribute game near her hometown outweighed any other consideration.Red Bull Arena would be the site of another tribute game, the regular-season finale last Sunday. During warm-ups at both games, Lloyd’s teammates wore jerseys bearing her name and her No. 10.Carli Lloyd and her Gotham F.C. teammates during warmups before their game in Chester, Pa., on Oct. 6.Players from the Medford Strikers, one of Lloyd’s youth teams in New Jersey, gathered with parents outside the stadium in Chester. Some of the parents were Lloyd’s teammates years ago.Lloyd grew emotional after the tribute game in Chester, which drew many fans from her native South Jersey. On Oct. 26, Lloyd gave a tearful goodbye speech on a field in St. Paul, Minn., where she played her last match as a member of the United States Women’s National Team.“I am signing off,” she said. “You will not see me on the field, but you’d best believe that I will be around helping this game grow.”Lloyd finished with 316 caps, representing each international match she played. Only one other women’s player in the world has earned more — Kristine Lilly of the United States, who retired in 2010 with 354. Lloyd scored 134 goals in global competition, ranking third on the U.S.W.N.T. list behind Abby Wambach (184) and Mia Hamm (158), and she also collected 64 assistsLloyd went to four Olympics and four World Cups, winning twice at each tournament, and she played for a handful of professional club teams, in both the N.W.S.L. and the defunct Women’s Professional Soccer.At Lloyd’s retirement party in Delran, N.J., she chatted with with the mayor, Gary Catrambone, upper right, and it was announced that the soccer field at the park where she grew up playing would be named after her. For Lloyd’s final regular-season home game, fans filled Red Bull Arena. Living up to expectations, she smashed a header into the back of the net in the 53rd minute and received a thunderous ovation from the fans and her teammates. At her postmatch interview, an inscription on her shin pads was plainly visible: “Better Every Day,” which has long been her personal motto.At the Delran celebration, as the fireworks wound down and the final chords of John Mellencamp’s “Small Town” faded out, young players from Delran F.C. sleepily gathered their banners and posters and stumbled home on a school night, exhausted from cheering but knowing they got to see and live in the same town as one of the greatest of all time.Lloyd scored a goal on Oct. 31, in her final regular-season game, a 1-1 tie with Racing Louisville. On Sunday, Gotham will meet the Chicago Red Stars in a playoff game that could be Lloyd’s final match. More

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      From Beckham to Ronaldo: When the Solution Is the Problem

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      Reshaping a team to suit a single player comes with a heavy cost: The thrills fade, and the problems remain.Not once, in two decades, had David Beckham heard the moment. He had witnessed it at the time, of course. More than that, in fact: He had summoned it and created it and lived it. He had, presumably, watched the moment more than once in the intervening years, too. But it was not until a couple weeks ago that he sat down and listened to it.The moment he did was — obviously — captured for posterity, a social media post as meta as they come: a man recording his own reaction to a recording of himself.As Beckham listens, he has a look of fierce concentration on his face, mixed with just a little genuine concern, as if he really does not know how it all ends. The audio plays in the background, an echo of his past: the last couple minutes of the BBC radio commentary of England’s meeting with Greece on the road to the 2002 World Cup.David Beckham listens to the commentary from his iconic England goal vs. Greece for the first time.His reaction says it all 🤩 pic.twitter.com/TYu7lRNWjJ— ESPN UK (@ESPNUK) October 6, 2021
      Twenty years later, the game ranks among England’s most iconic. Sven-Goran Eriksson’s team, the still-gleaming golden generation, needs a point from its final match, at Old Trafford, to qualify. But — drama! — Greece takes a first-half lead. Teddy Sheringham, by then a veteran, ties the score in the second half, only for the Greeks to retake the lead. The clock ticks. The crowd frets.And then, more than two minutes into injury time, England wins a free kick. The ball sits in that liminal zone: just close enough to goal for a shot to be worthwhile, but too far out for it to be the obvious play. Beckham stands over it, his head shaven and his shorts billowing.He glances up, and then back down at the ball, only one thing on his mind. Pulses raise. He rushes toward it, his arm acting as a counterweight as he whips his right foot around the ball. It arcs and streams toward the corner of the goal. Antonios Nikopolidis, the Greece goalkeeper, flies hopelessly toward it. Old Trafford inhales, and erupts.David Beckham against Greece in 2001.Darren Staples/ReutersIn the popular imagination, that game represents Beckham’s finest moment in an England jersey, the ultimate atonement for his sins three years earlier, when he was vilified after his country’s early exit from the World Cup in France. It was not just the last-minute goal, salvation at the death, but the performance that preceded it. Beckham was, nominally, playing on the right wing but he was not hidebound by such simple things as formations or instructions.Instead, he was everywhere: breaking up play, instigating attacks, setting the tempo, dictating the rhythm. He played as if he was trying to live up to some Platonic ideal of an English captain: refusing to be cowed, unwilling to countenance a lost cause, the Charge of the Light Brigade and the Blitz Spirit distilled into a diamond ear-stud and a pair of Predators.Scott Murray, the author and journalist, once suggested that the most significant player in the history of English soccer was a fictional one: Roy Race, the blue-eyed, blond-haired star of a series of long-running comic books.Each of his adventures followed a similar trajectory: Race’s team, Melchester Rovers, would be struggling in a game — because of malevolent opponents or a helicopter crash or terrorists or whatever — until Race, the unassuming but impossibly gifted hero, produced some devastating run or some booming shot to deliver victory, at the last, from the maw of defeat.Murray’s thesis was that Race imprinted on young readers’ minds the idea that soccer was, at heart, an individual sport, its outcome decided not by system or style or even collective competence but by individual will. The sport was, in effect, an embodiment of Carlyle’s Great Man theory of history: what happened was not subject to a miasma of colliding forces, but shaped by the mind and body of single, outstanding individuals.Race’s legacy, then, means England has always had a particular weakness for players who seem to grab games by the scruff of the neck, to bend events to their liking: Bryan Robson, Manchester United’s Captain Marvel of the 1980s, or Steven Gerrard, Liverpool’s Captain Fantastic 20 years later.Steve Gerrard in Liverpool: countless memories, multiple murals, no Premier League titles.Phil Noble/ReutersThat Gerrard, in particular, shone brightest when folded into a system that accentuated his abilities is never really mentioned. Nor is the fact that what may have been the lowest moment of Gerrard’s career — Liverpool’s defeat by Chelsea in 2014, effectively costing the team, and its icon, a Premier League title — was a direct result of his belief in heroes.Gerrard, that day, offered a glimpse of what happens when Roy Race exists in flesh and blood, rather than on the page: an endless round of hopeful, hopeless shots, each one more desperate than the last. Liverpool, so brutally effective that season, was suddenly blunted by its own captain’s conviction that salvation was a one-man job.Beckham’s performance against Greece stands in contrast to that, an example of the potency of the Raceian approach. His decisive intervention at the last moment, that picture-postcard free kick, seemed plucked straight out of the Melchester back catalog. Here was England’s soccer history being shaped, live on television, by a Great Man.There is, though, an alternative reading of that game, one that at least one elite manager privately endorses. Beckham’s positional indiscipline fundamentally undermined England’s balance. By abdicating his specific role, Beckham undermined his own team. He played well that day, but as a function of that, the rest of the side did not — and could not.It is a hypothetical, of course, but it is entirely possible that England might not have needed Beckham to score a last-minute free kick to rescue a point if he had not felt so compelled to be the captain, to be the hero. He may, in fact, have simply delivered England from a problem of his own making.That example is worth contemplating when assessing Beckham’s immediate — and current — successor as Manchester United’s No. 7.That Cristiano Ronaldo is one of the greatest players ever is not in question. That he has, since returning to England, scored a raft of crucial goals for Manchester United is indisputable. He scored the late goal that beat Villarreal in a Champions League group stage match. He scored the late goal that beat Atalanta in another one. Just this week, he repeated the trick against the latter, his 90th-minute strike salvaging a point for United in Bergamo, Italy.Ronaldo has, then, been cast as the solution to United’s problems, a plaster that covers his team’s many flaws. And that interpretation is, by pretty much any measure, correct.But it does not necessarily contradict the idea that Ronaldo’s presence diminishes other aspects of United’s play as the side heads into Saturday’s Manchester derby. As a former teammate at Juventus, Giorgio Chiellini, has said, when you have Ronaldo on your team it is impossible “not to play to him.”Cristiano Ronaldo keeps scoring goals. But is that all Manchester United needs?Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat means reshaping the attack to suit Ronaldo’s needs. It means not being able to press from the front, which means not being able to play a high defensive line, which means allowing your opponent more space in which to play and, most likely, more chances to score.United might not need to score quite so many late goals if it could play another system effectively. It might be the case that Ronaldo is solving problems that are, to some extent, a consequence of his presence, or at least the fact that his coach, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, has not yet hit upon a system that masks his flaws while highlighting his strengths.It is, of course, a measure of Ronaldo’s talent that he can still deliver his little miracles so reliably, just as it was a testament to Beckham’s brilliance that his free kick swept beyond Nikopolidis, and carried England to the World Cup. There was a wry smile as Beckham heard the last of the commentary, 20 years on, just the hint of a twinkle in his eye.What was not mentioned was what happened next: England made it to the quarterfinals, only to be beaten by a Brazil team stocked by impossibly talented individuals — Ronaldo, Rivaldo, Ronaldinho and the rest — but coached by Luiz Felipe Scolari, the ultimate pragmatist, a manager who always put the system first. Only in comic books are games won by individuals. In real life, sometimes the solution and the problem are one and the same.The Only Place to BeAntonio Conte delivered just what Tottenham wanted in his debut: a win.Julian Finney/Getty ImagesFor two years, maybe a little more, Tottenham Hotspur has made nothing but poor choices. Firing Mauricio Pochettino, the coach who had not only established the club as a regular presence in the Champions League but who had taken a team constructed at a fraction of the cost of some of Europe’s heavy-hitters all the way to the final, was a poor choice.Still, every club makes mistakes. A smart replacement might have at least mitigated the damage. Instead, Tottenham appointed José Mourinho, that recidivist fire-starter, compounding the error.Firing Mourinho, back in the spring, could have been the point at which Spurs restored course, throwing a veil over a failed experiment and shifting back into the light. Except that the club dispensed with him in the week of a cup final — one that it lost — without the faintest idea of who might replace him.In the end, Spurs appointed Nuno Espírito Santo. He was, by most estimates, the sixth choice for the job, and he lasted only a little more than three months. This week, Spurs replaced him with Antonio Conte, a serial winner of championships with Juventus, Chelsea and Inter Milan, and without question the finest out-of-work coach in the world.There is something slightly off-kilter about this, as if it runs vaguely against some sort of natural law. Tottenham has done almost nothing right for two years. It has fallen at a rate that should not, really, be possible in a game as stratified as elite soccer, going from a Champions League final to the Europa Conference League — like the Europa League, but without the veneer of purpose — and the no-man’s land of the Premier League’s midtable. And yet, in Conte, Tottenham has not a punishment but a reward. It has failed so much it gets to win.And yet the appointment, in a sense, was inevitable. Spurs might not, on the surface, look extremely appealing to a coach of Conte’s caliber, but consider the alternatives. The jobs at Paris St.-Germain, Bayern Munich, Chelsea, Manchester City and Liverpool are taken. Manchester United remains stubbornly wedded to being coached by a DVD of the 1999 Champions League final. Barcelona and Real Madrid have no money.Below them, there are a host of other clubs — Sevilla, Borussia Dortmund, Marseille and all the rest — who have either history or ambition or both, but none of them have the resources to match the team in ninth place in the Premier League. Tottenham, simply by virtue of being roughly the sixth-biggest team in England, is the most appealing proposition available to one of the finest managers on the planet: not because the club has done anything to deserve that status, but simply because of where it plays, and who it plays against.Red FlagThe Dutch referee Danny Makkelie sent a message with a red card on Wednesday.Dylan Martinez/ReutersThere was a nonchalance to Felipe that was hard, deep down, not to admire. His Atlético Madrid team was by 2-0 down at Anfield, with 10 minutes or so left until halftime. Sadio Mané was midway inside Liverpool’s half, the ball at his feet, starting to break forward with no little menace.Felipe could have sprinted to keep up with him. He could have drawn deep, heavy breaths and done all he could to stay on Mané’s heels, or at least made sure he was back in time to help out as Liverpool’s attack completed its crescendo. Or he could simply, without giving the impression of thinking too much about it, kicked Mané on the back of his calf, sending him tumbling to the grass, stopping the move at its inception.Felipe chose option B. Pretty much every player in his situation would have done the same. The so-called tactical foul is a fairly standard element of the game. Almost every elite team has at least one player employed, at least in part, because they are more than willing to use foul means, as well as fair, to stop a counterattack. Fernandinho does it for Manchester City. Fabinho does it for Liverpool. Sergio Busquets has done it for more than a decade.Ordinarily, the only punishment is a free kick. Occasionally, for flagrant examples, a yellow card might be flourished. Quite why, at Anfield, the Dutch referee Danny Makkelie went one step farther and sent off Felipe is not entirely clear. Diego Simeone, the Atlético coach, said the official told him it was because he “stamped” on Mané. Others argued the decision may have been related to Felipe’s obvious dissent after the foul.Either way, it may prove a useful precedent. I have never found the cynical side of the game off-putting. Dark arts, well-mastered, are arts nonetheless. But soccer is a spectacle, first and foremost, and it is hard not to think that spectacle might be improved if the truly blatant tactical foul was removed from the equation.It has happened before: The professional foul, now more generally referred to as Denial of a Goal-Scoring Opportunity — DOGSO, in the jargon — was only incorporated into the Laws of the Game in the early 1980s. That applied to instances when a player was through on goal, only to be deliberately brought down by an opponent. There is no reason it could not be extended to the rest of the field. The rules can change if doing so makes the game better. And if, as in this case, they might better reflect the spirit of the sport.CorrespondenceAn entirely valid criticism of last week’s piece on coaches from Pablo Medina Uribe, who points out something that should have been addressed. “Is Marcelo Gallardo really trapped?” he wrote. “As you said, River Plate is one of the biggest teams in the world. Certain teams in Europe might have and pay more money, but is that enough to consider going there a step up?”This is slightly tricky, because Pablo is right: River Plate is a far, far “bigger” club — whatever that means — in terms of history than quite a few of the teams now considered Europe’s elite. It would be admirable, and understandable, if Gallardo regarded River as the ultimate destination.But at the same time, coaches, generally, want to work with the best players, and those players are now clustered in Europe. Perhaps we can agree on this: Gallardo should be being offered these jobs. It’s up to him whether he takes them.Felipe Gaete noticed a name that should have been mentioned, too. “Manuel Pellegrini’s career path is quite similar from the one you say Gallardo must follow: started in his native Chile with not much ‘success,’ champion in Ecuador, in Argentina, put Villarreal on the map, until he got the job at Real Madrid only to be dismissed after one season because they opted for someone who played a double role: manager and showman,” he wrote. “Isn’t that a reason why the managers you mention don’t get the big step up? Because they wouldn’t produce headlines? Is it only down to the C.V. or also for marketing? Since managers don’t sell shirts, they might be expected to sell papers.”That is a very good point, I think. Club executives are easily impressed by a figure who gets major media play, and as a rule — as far as Europe is concerned — that discounts anyone who works anywhere else.The newsletter favorite Fernando Gama was also moved to write, explaining why Gallardo would be especially well-qualified for a move to Europe. “No one faces more pressure than the big clubs in South America: Visits from ultras, violence, a schizophrenic journalism that is only result-driven (well, this may be everywhere), the irrational ire of fans,” he wrote. “I don’t say these are good things. But they exist. At a crazy level.“The stakes may be different, especially in terms of money, but the pressure in South America is much more than the pressure in Europe. I’m pretty sure Gallardo is well-prepared. The two things that have made it harder for him to make the leap are his salary — he is very well-paid — and whether players will believe in him: European players also believe the gap with South America has always been insurmountable.” More

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      At Wrexham and Elsewhere, the Soccer Is Just a Story Line

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      In a steady stream of documentary series, more and more clubs are turning themselves into content. But where does spectacle end and sport begin?LONDON — The cameras were rolling even before the actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney could be sure there would be anything to film.Last November, Reynolds and McElhenney were waiting anxiously to discover if their bid to buy Wrexham, a Welsh club marooned in the fifth tier of English soccer, would survive a vote from the Supporters’ Trust, the fans’ group that had rescued the team from bankruptcy and run it on a threadbare budget for years.The actors had reason to be confident: When they had presented their ideas to the Trust in a video call, the reaction had been positive. Still, as they waited for the call that would inform them of the result of the vote, they did not know if it would be good or bad news, and that put them in something of a bind.McElhenney had concocted the idea of buying a soccer team after inhaling both seasons of “Sunderland ’Til I Die,” the successful Netflix series that detailed the fleeting ups and frequent downs of another faded club rooted in postindustrial Britain. “He told me: ‘We should do this. We should buy a club and make a documentary,’” said Humphrey Ker, one of McElhenney’s writers and the person who had recommended the Sunderland series to him.If the Wrexham trust rejected the actors’ ownership bid, their plan would be up in smoke; after all, with no club, there would be no documentary. But for the documentary to work, it had to follow their adventure in soccer from the very start. So as they waited for the phone to ring, McElhenney and Reynolds had to decide, effectively, which came first: the content or the club?Wrexham is not the only place wrestling with that question. Soccer has long provided fertile ground for film and television, but the rise of streaming platforms — with their insatiable appetites and generous wallets and breakthrough series involving entirely fictional teams — has triggered a deluge of productions.Some, like Amazon’s “All or Nothing” documentary series, have tried to draw on the inbuilt appeal of some of the world’s biggest clubs, embedding multiple camera crews over the course of a season with teams like Manchester City, Tottenham and Juventus.Amazon’s “All or Nothing” series has followed several top clubs, with their permission.Amazon PrimeManchester City, Tottenham and Juventus have opened their doors to the series already.Amazon PrimeOthers have eschewed the editorial control — and considerable fees — the game’s superpowers demand in favor of a more authentic aesthetic embodied by “Sunderland ’Til I Die,” in which the club is less the subject of the documentary and more a backdrop against which a human story plays out.But there is one crucial difference between many of those projects and their forerunner. In Sunderland, the producers were mere observers of the club. At Wrexham, and elsewhere, they are something more: They are actors in the drama.“Soccer clubs are the best content investments in the world,” said Matt Rizzetta, the chairman of the creative agency North Six Group and, since 2020, the principal owner of Campobasso, a team in Italy’s third tier. “They stand for a set of values, and they automatically connect with people in a way that almost nothing else can match.”Rizzetta said his decision to invest in soccer was driven by his heart — it was a “lifelong dream” to own a team, he said, particularly one based close to the part of Italy where his grandparents had grown up — but his thinking behind buying Campobasso, in particular, was governed by his head.“We looked at around 20 teams, all in that area,” he said. Campobasso stood out. It had once reached the second division, but had found far more snakes than ladders in recent years. It is based in Molise, a region that often complains it is overlooked by the rest of the country: Molise Non Esiste, as the self-deprecating local slogan puts it: Molise doesn’t exist.That suited Rizzetta perfectly. His strategy was centered on “content, storytelling, marketing and media,” he said. “Being a club owner now is different to the 1980s and 1990s. Provincial teams, in particular, need new revenue streams to reinvest in the product, and content is one of the most underutilized channels.”To remedy that, Rizzetta’s North Six Group signed a deal with Italian Football TV, a YouTube channel, for a documentary series that would follow Campobasso on its (eventually successful) attempt at winning its first promotion in decades.“It was a story that needed to be told, this team from a part of the country that has been forgotten,” Rizzetta said. That obscurity, to some extent, helped make the project viable. “It was a small, sleepy club,” he said. “It had the feel of a start-up. We kind of had a blank slate. There was nothing we could do that would be wrong.”Not every group of supporters, though, welcomes that kind of approach. This summer, it was announced that Peter Crouch, the former England striker, would be joining the board of Dulwich Hamlet, a team based in a well-heeled enclave in south London where he made a handful of appearances in the early stages of his career.The move was not motivated purely by altruism: Crouch’s experiences, it emerged a few days later, would form the basis of a documentary bankrolled by Discovery+. According to several people involved with the project, the network had explicitly conceived the idea as a chance to create its own version of “Sunderland ’Til I Die.”“Sunderland ’Til I Die” has served as a model for a host of documentary producers.NetflixThe idea has “received a mixed response,” said Alex Crane, a former chairman of the Dulwich Hamlet Supporters’ Trust. “Some fans are genuinely excited,” Crane wrote in a WhatsApp message. “Others are very skeptical, and are querying what the club gets out of it.”Certainly, the apparent theme of the documentary — that Dulwich faces a “bleak future” and Crouch has parachuted in to save it — has not been universally accepted. The Brixton Buzz, a community news outlet, suggested, with some profanity, that the “TV narrative” had been concocted purely for the sake of the series.That trap — contorting themselves to become a more marketable pitch — is one Rizzetta is adamant clubs must avoid. In September, North Six Group added Ascoli — in Italy’s second division — to its stable of teams. It appealed to the club’s former owner, Rizzetta said, as a “strategic operator” that could reproduce its Campobasso success on a larger scale. Among the first things the new owners did was sign an exclusive deal with Italian Football TV.“Content is still a big part of our strategy,” Rizzetta said. “But it will have to be done in a different way. Ascoli has a different message, brand and story. It is sacred to its community.”Reynolds and McElhenney have been equally explicit about their plans. “The documentary is a huge part” of the project, McElhenney said on the actors’ first visit to Wrexham in October. “We feel that is the best way to really do a deep dive into the community. You can televise the games, but if you’re not following the story of the players and the story of the community, ultimately nobody is really going to care.”Wrexham is already feeling the benefits of its sprinkling of Hollywood stardust. A raft of impressive signings arrived over the summer to strengthen the team. There has been investment, too, in the club’s infrastructure.“The stadium is being remodeled,” said Spencer Harris, a club director before the takeover. “The first team’s training facility is much better. The club are building for long-term success. It feels sustainable.”Some of that new money has come from ticket sales — crowds are up this season — and some from a spike in the sale of replica jerseys. By October, Wrexham had sold more than 8,000 — almost as many as it would ordinarily ship in a good year — with the Christmas rush still to come.But perhaps most significantly — and lucratively — the jerseys themselves are a little different. The away shirt is green and gray, McElhenney’s tribute to his hometown Philadelphia Eagles. Ifor Williams Trailers, formerly the club’s principal sponsor, has been replaced by the more recognizable insignia of TikTok. Expedia’s logo stretches across the shoulders.Though the team’s first game of the season was televised nationally in Britain, it is not the audiences that tune in to BT Sport to watch the National League that coaxed brands of that stature to invest in Wrexham. Far more appealing was the prospect of being front and center on prime-time television.In May, Reynolds and McElhenney announced — in the wry style that has characterized their ownership so far — that they had sold two seasons of their documentary, “Welcome to Wrexham,” to FX. It will include the moment they received the call to confirm that their bid to buy the club had been approved by the fans. It was all captured on film. The content, it turned out, was inseparable from the club. More

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      Former FIFA Officials Face Fraud Charges Over Secret Payment

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      Sepp Blatter is accused of breaking Swiss law in approving a $2 million payment from soccer’s governing body to a onetime ally, Michel Platini.More than six years after their ouster amid a mushrooming soccer corruption scandal, the former FIFA president Sepp Blatter and a one-time ally were indicted on fraud charges on Tuesday by the authorities in Switzerland, who accused the men of arranging a secret $2 million payment.The office of Switzerland’s attorney general accused Blatter of unlawfully arranging the $2 million payment in 2011 to Michel Platini, who was then the head of European soccer’s governing body, UEFA. The criminal charges follow a yearslong investigation into the payment, which came to light in the aftermath of a sprawling United States Department of Justice indictment that revealed corrupt practices at FIFA dating back at least two decades.The investigation resulted in the arrest and conviction of dozens of powerful officials and marketing executives on charges that included racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy. Blatter was not charged at the time, even as the scandal brought down most of FIFA’s top leadership.The $2 million payment to Platini came as Blatter faced a challenge for the FIFA presidency from a Gulf billionaire. Blatter and Platini both maintain the money was related to work that Platini, the captain of France’s 1984 European championship-winning team, did for Blatter after he was elected FIFA president for the first time in 1998.Both Blatter and Platini already have been sanctioned for the payment by FIFA’s own disciplinary system, though their original bans were later reduced on appeal.Blatter and Platini were accused by the Swiss authorities on Tuesday of criminal of fraud, criminal mismanagement and forgery. Prosecutors said their investigation found the payment to Platini was made “without a legal basis.”“This payment damaged FIFA’s assets and unlawfully enriched Platini,” the statement said.The Swiss indictment against Blatter, 85, comes as the former soccer leader battles ill health. He has been hospitalized several times since being forced out of his leadership post.The Swiss attorney general’s statement announcing the charges did not say when a trial would be held. Blatter said he was optimistic about clearing his name, using a statement to repeat his claim that the payment was based on a verbal contract with Platini and that it had been delayed because of financial constraints at FIFA at the time it was agreed.“The operation was correct as a late-wage payment,” Blatter said. A spokesman for Platini did not immediately reply to a request for comment. More

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      At Elite Teams, a Shrinking Vision of What a Coach Looks Like

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      Barcelona is looking for a new manager, and Manchester United may need one soon. But the pool of coaches elite clubs hire from is getting smaller every year, and that’s a problem.Marcelo Gallardo has the sort of managerial résumé that should make him irresistible to most, if not all, of Europe’s elite clubs.He has been in his current post for seven years, long enough to prove he is no mercenary, flickering brightly and briefly before moving on elsewhere. He has demonstrated that he can cope with the deepest pressure and the loftiest expectations. He has shown that he can ride the political currents that swirl around any major club. He has learned to work on a (relative) budget.Most of all, he has won. He has won over and over again. At River Plate, Gallardo has collected a dozen major trophies as a manager. He has won two continental championships, and come within two minutes of a third. One of his predecessors at the Buenos Aires club, Ramon Díaz, has described him as the greatest coach in the team’s history.It is not hard to understand, then, why Gallardo’s name is frequently linked with Europe’s great houses — most recently with the vacancy created by Barcelona’s decision to end Ronald Koeman’s loveless 14-month tenure. That the speculation never seems to coalesce into anything, that there always seems to be a preferred candidate that is not him, requires a little further explanation.Gallardo has won a dozen trophies, and two continental titles, at River Plate.Nelson Almeida/Agence France-Presse, via Pool/Afp Via Getty ImagesSeveral of Europe’s most illustrious teams have, in recent years, appointed managers who made — by traditional metrics — little or no sense. Some of them have been successful: Zinedine Zidane, for example, won three Champions League titles in three years at Real Madrid, despite finding himself in his first coaching job.And some of them have, well, turned out a little differently. Andrea Pirlo was appointed Juventus manager around three weeks after being given his first coaching role, in charge of the club’s under-23 side. He had never taken charge of an official game. He was dismissed after a single season. Frank Lampard lasted a little longer at Chelsea. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer is still clinging on, somehow, at Manchester United.A variety of factors have gone into that trend. One, of course, is the desire — shared by almost every major team — to find and nurture its own version of Pep Guardiola. Those searches are rooted in the widespread delusion that, at every club, there is some revolutionary genius lurking somewhere in the shadows, waiting for the chance to transform the game as we know it.There is, too, a cynical calculation at play. Iconic former players have always been fast-tracked into management, aided by a belief, one that can withstand even a flood of evidence, that their talent can be passed on, and also abetted by a knowledge among executives that appointing a club legend generates instant good will and — more precious still — patience among fans.Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s popularity and pedigree as a player may be extending his run at Manchester United.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut perhaps the biggest shift is in what the superclubs regard as relevant prior experience. A track record of success in management is no longer, strictly speaking, necessary. Or, rather, a particular stripe of success is no longer regarded as valid, because what constitutes success is so difficult to measure.Instead, much more important is a knowledge of how these giant, sprawling temples of self-importance work, a sense of being comfortable within them, a feeling of belonging. It is that change that has deprived Gallardo, and many coaches like him, of a chance. And it has given the superclubs something of a problem.There was, at some point in the dim and distant past, a distinct ladder for a manager to climb. A coach would start at some lower rung on the ladder — either as an assistant or at a smaller team — and slowly prove their worth. They might win promotion to the top division, take a smaller team on a European run, turn a contender into a champion.Then, and only then, would the superclubs strike. It is the approach that took Jürgen Klopp from Mainz to Borussia Dortmund and then on to Liverpool. It is how Carlo Ancelotti went from Reggiana to Parma to Juventus and on to almost every other major team in Europe. It is how Mauricio Pochettino made it from Espanyol to Southampton to Tottenham and then, after a brief break, to Paris St.-Germain. All of them took one club to another level, and were rewarded with a step up themselves.Mauricio Pochettino’s track record with Tottenham’s stars earned him a star-studded second act at Paris St.-Germain.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThis is the mechanism that should, now, promote Gallardo. He is ready for it. He has more than proved his worth on one rung. But there is an overriding sensation that it does not quite work like that anymore, that the rules of the game have changed, and that, all of a sudden, everything he has done does not count. And it does not count because of where he has done it.All of Gallardo’s success, so far, has come in South America. He won a league championship with Nacional in Uruguay and was rewarded with a post at River Plate, one of the biggest clubs in the world by anyone’s standards, an environment as impatient and demanding and expectant as anywhere. There, he has twice delivered the Copa Libertadores.But while Europe’s major clubs have no problem appointing Argentines — several of Gallardo’s countrymen work in high-profile posts in European soccer, including Pochettino and Atlético Madrid’s Diego Simeone — they have long felt that success does not easily translate to the Old World.Occasionally, that fear has been well-placed: Carlos Bianchi turned first Vélez Sarsfield and then Boca Juniors into the finest teams in Latin America, but struggled to make an impact at Roma and then, a decade later, at Atlético. Others, like Marcelo Bielsa, have made the leap a little more easily.That skepticism, though, no longer applies just to South Americans. Europe’s superclubs increasingly see an ocean all around them. Gallardo is not the only coach who might, by now, have expected to receive the call from one of the game’s giants. He is not the only one who has built a body of work that should make him a compelling candidate.There is Erik ten Hag, the Ajax coach, who has turned his club into a powerhouse in the Netherlands and is on the verge of his second deep run in the Champions League. There is Rúben Amorim, a decade or so younger, who has already ended Sporting Lisbon’s two-decade wait for a Portuguese title. There is Marco Rose, who has risen from Red Bull Salzburg to Borussia Mönchengladbach and then Dortmund.These are the coaches Barcelona or Manchester United should be looking to appoint now. They are the coaches Real Madrid or Juventus might have approached in the summer. They are, most likely, the next big things.Instead, Barcelona is hopeful of replacing Koeman with Xavi Hernández, less for his stint at Al Sadd in the Qatar Stars League than for his emotional connection with the club. Manchester United has vowed to stand by Solskjaer; if and when it changes its mind, it is expected to go for Antonio Conte or Pochettino, persuaded by their proven success.At Barcelona, the big job is not for everyone.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBoth Barcelona and United are, at least, exhibiting more imagination than either Real Madrid or Juventus: When their positions came up a few months ago, both handed them back to managers they had already fired. Ancelotti returned to Real Madrid — taking over from Zidane, himself on his second stint — and, two years after the club declared itself ready to move on from him, Massimiliano Allegri was restored at Juventus.This is not just a lack of foresight; it is a self-inflicted inability to read meaning into a manager’s achievement. The elite clubs have believed — rightly or wrongly, but certainly logically — for some time that the only reliable guide to a manager’s suitability is previous experience at that level.That is why, for example, Eddie Howe’s success with Bournemouth was not deemed enough to get him a job at Liverpool or Arsenal. He might have proved his ability in the Premier League, but that was of secondary relevance to demonstrating an aptitude at Borussia Dortmund or Sevilla, teams that compete in the Champions League and have budgets and pressures to match.The issue is that the game has become so stratified, so quickly, that the pool of clubs deemed suitable hunting grounds has withered to almost nothing. The elite are now so vast, so powerful, that only a few teams can serve as a reasonable approximation.Dortmund’s Marco Rose is following what used to be the path to a big club. That might not be true anymore.Ina Fassbender/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesCertainly, there is nowhere outside Europe’s major leagues, which counts against Ten Hag, Amorim and Gallardo, and within those competitions there are only a handful: the Milan clubs, perhaps; probably Dortmund; possibly Lyon and Marseille.And even then, it is not entirely clear what a manager would have to do to stand out. Klopp’s star rose when he led Borussia Dortmund to the Bundesliga title in successive campaigns. Rafa Benítez shot to prominence by making Valencia champion of Spain. José Mourinho captured the imagination by winning the Champions League with F.C. Porto.The game, in 2021, has been shaped to mitigate against repeats of all of those achievements. If Rose takes Dortmund to second place behind Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga, is that success, or is it simply meeting expectations? What does it mean if Ajax wins the Eredivisie, again? Is it failure if Amorim’s Sporting is eliminated in the group phase of the Champions League, or is all of this nothing more than economic determinism? How can any of this be parsed?It leaves the elite teams in a peculiar Catch-22: They want to employ managers with the right sort of experience, but the only way those managers can get that experience is by being employed. Still, it is hard to feel too much pity for the superclubs: They are the ones, after all, who have done so much to distort soccer’s reality in their favor.Far more deserving of sympathy are the coaches, like Gallardo, who find themselves trapped by a game whose rules have shifted underneath them. He, like the others, has done all he can. He has twice conquered a continent. He has built an irresistible résumé, only to be told that he has done it all in the wrong place.Right Idea, Wrong TeamsDiego Maradona’s memory has never faded in Naples.Yara Nardi/ReutersThere could, in many ways, have been no more fitting tribute. A year after the death of Diego Maradona, two of his former clubs have announced plans to face each other for a cup in his honor. The game, between Boca Juniors and Barcelona, will be played in January. It will be staged in Riyadh.We could probably just leave it there, but to be clear: Maradona spent two seasons at Barcelona, one of them interrupted by injury, and often traced many of the demons that haunted him to his time there. He may be indelibly associated with Boca, and his love for the club is not in question — after retirement, he maintained a private box at the Bombonera — but he enjoyed only a single campaign there in his prime. By the time he returned in 1995, he was a shadow of what he had been.It is a shame that both of these teams, then, should be trying to lay claim to his legacy. Far more fitting would be a two-legged tie between the teams where he spent the bulk of his career, staged at the stadiums that now bear his name: the home of Argentinos Juniors, where he started his career, and that of Napoli, where he sealed his legend.The brands of Barcelona and Boca Juniors are much more potent than either of those clubs, of course. They are far more glamorous targets for Saudi cash in that country’s attempts to dress itself up as a sporting powerhouse rather than, you know, a repressive autocracy. But they should not be allowed to contort history to suit their own ends, to weight Maradona’s story in their favor, to erase those places where he wrote the majority of it from the record.CorrespondenceEvents, ultimately, have a habit of making fools of us all. Scarcely 48 hours after a finely crafted newsletter appeared in your inboxes, explaining how Manchester United had perfected the art of soccer-as-content, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer let his team lose by 5-0 to Liverpool, raising the possibility that the club might actually do something to get out of its content sweet spot, with the devastating consequence that last week’s column might have seemed wrongheaded.Liverpool 5, Manchester United 0. Ronaldo? Still the star of United’s drama.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesStill, let’s look for silver linings: Manchester United remains trapped by self-doubt, and so has not (yet) fired Solskjaer; defeat has proved, once again, that what is bad for Manchester United the team can be good for the exposure of Manchester United the brand; and Jim O’Mahony has paid me the compliment of thinking I am too young to remember the 1990s.“You are too young to have witnessed United’s heroic efforts saving themselves from defeat in the final minutes of a game during the 1990s,” he wrote. (I’m not.) “United of the 1990s would often play badly in the first half and then change momentum, often with a heroic substitute, and win the game. The name of one key substitute for United from that era was Solskjaer.”This is all true, of course: Manchester United long ago had a taste for the dramatic comeback. I’m not sure it happened quite as much as we think it did, though. I’m also not sure it’s something that should serve as an aspiration. Much better to have games won nice and early.George Weissman is not a man who seems to respect my need to fill a word count. “Your column boils down the incontrovertible fact that the whole should always exceed the sum of its parts, and that is rarely the case since the retirement of Alex Ferguson,” he wrote. That basically sums up Manchester United, yes. But it does not fill a newsletter.We’ll end on a more philosophical question from David DeKock, channeling his inner Charles Hughes. “On every throw-in from the penalty area sideline, teams should heave it into the danger area and see what happens,” he wrote. “Why do teams not do this every single time? Have there been studies on percentages?”For a long time, the answer to this would have been stylistic: A long throw-in was seen as unsophisticated, a little agricultural, the sort of thing that Stoke City did. Now, though, I do sense that it is changing: Brentford and Midtjylland, two of the more forward-thinking teams, treat throw-ins as David would advocate. So, too, does Liverpool, which employs a specialist throw-in coach. All three are analytically driven, which leads me to believe that they have numbers to explain their choice, though they have not (as far as I know) chosen to share them. More

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      Barcelona Fires Manager Ronald Koeman and Casts Eye at Xavi

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      Successive defeats to Real Madrid and Rayo Vallecano convinced Barcelona to fire Koeman, its Dutch manager. Xavi Hernández is a favorite to replace him.Ronald Koeman knew even before he arrived in Barcelona that his journey as the club’s manager had ended. His team had just lost for the second time in four days, beaten by Real Madrid on Sunday and then by modest Rayo Vallecano on Wednesday. It was marooned in ninth place in La Liga. There could be, the club decided, no way back.The decision to fire Koeman was made while he and his players were still in transit. Barcelona’s president, Joan Laporta, had spent the flight back from Madrid consulting with several executives, according to Sport, the Catalan newspaper, and then informed Koeman that he had decided to end his 14-month tenure. A statement from Barcelona made the decision official a little after midnight.FC Barcelona has relieved Ronald Koeman of his duties as first team coach— FC Barcelona (@FCBarcelona) October 27, 2021
      For all the urgency of those last few hours, Koeman’s demise has been anything but swift. He led Barcelona to a disappointing — but hardly disastrous — third-place finish in his first, and only, full campaign at the club, the season salvaged somewhat by a victory in the Copa del Rey.The summer, though, brought sweeping change. Koeman had to manage the sudden departure of Lionel Messi — a seismic shift for which he was not even forewarned, let alone forearmed — and then try to build a squad to regain the Spanish title, and compete in the Champions League, while operating under considerable financial constraints.Despite the rise to prominence of a clutch of talented youngsters, including the midfielders Gavi and Pedri, and the return to fitness of another, forward Ansu Fati, Koeman had struggled to forge a cohesive unit. His summer recruits had done little to improve the team’s fortunes: Memphis Depay had flickered occasionally, but both Eric Garcia and Luuk De Jong had struggled to make a positive impact.By the end of September, the club had already lost ground in the Spanish title race, and it had twice been embarrassed in the Champions League: beaten first by Bayern Munich, 3-0, and then by Benfica. It retains some hope of qualifying for the knockout rounds in the spring after an unconvincing win against Dynamo Kyiv last week.That victory seemed to have afforded Koeman a stay of execution, but it proved, instead, a false dawn. On Sunday, Real Madrid beat Barcelona, 2-1, for its fourth successive triumph in the Clásico. Afterward, dozens of angry fans surrounded Koeman’s car as he and his wife tried to leave Camp Nou after the game.And then on Wednesday, a single goal from the veteran striker Radamel Falcao condemned Barcelona to defeat against Rayo, a humble, impoverished club from the outskirts of the Spanish capital. Whatever good will there was toward Koeman — an iconic former player for Barcelona, scorer of the goal that brought the team its first-ever Champions League title — evaporated, both inside and outside the club.Koeman was expected to visit Barcelona’s training facility in Sant Joan Despí on Thursday to say goodbye to his players; by that stage, the club hopes to have identified or, perhaps, even appointed his successor. For now, the job will go to yet another former Barcelona player, Sergi Barjuán, who was installed as the club’s caretaker manager on Thursday. Sergi had most recently been the coach of Barcelona’s B team.Though both Marcelo Gallardo, the coach of the Argentine team River Plate, and Imanol Alguacil, manager of Real Sociedad, have some support as potential permanent replacements, Laporta is thought to see another former Barcelona player, Xavi Hernández, as the standout candidate.Xavi’s managerial experience remains moderate — he has spent the last three seasons at Al Sadd, the Qatari team where he ended his playing career, and enjoyed some success — but his popular appeal is unmatched.He was not only part of the great Barcelona team that lifted three Champions League trophies in the space of six years under Pep Guardiola and then Luis Enrique, but came to be seen as the apogee of the philosophy and playing style that has underscored the club for decades. To Laporta, restoring him to his spiritual home would serve as a way of connecting Barcelona’s present to its glorious recent past. More

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      Ole Gunnar Solskjaer Is Target of Taunts but Not Alone in Blame

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      A thrashing by Liverpool showed that problems with Manchester United extend well beyond Solskjaer, the team’s manager.MANCHESTER, England — Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s name was still ringing around Old Trafford. It was not, though, coming from the corner of the Stretford End, which contains Manchester United’s most fervent, most vocal fans. Those fans stood silent, fuming, as their nightmare unfurled in front of them.Instead, it was the Liverpool fans, corralled at the other end of the stadium, the afternoon’s events taking them from delight to ecstasy and then all the way to something approaching delirium, offering the hymns in his praise on Sunday. Humiliation on the field is one thing. It is the mockery off it that may prove too much for Manchester United to endure.Until now, Solskjaer has always commanded the loyalty of United’s fans. No matter how many false dawns his team has endured over the last three years, no matter how frustrating it has been to watch a side that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to assemble veer between triumph and disaster, often in the same game, no matter how unclear his vision for the club has been, they have stood by him.Manchester United’s manager, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, was mocked by Liverpool’s delighted fans during and after the rout.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockHe was, after all, a hero for the club as a player; his love for Manchester United has never been in question. His reverence for United’s traditions might, at times, come across as a touch sentimental, but it is doubtless sincere. After the mercenary years of José Mourinho and Louis van Gaal, when the well-being of the club came a distant second to the burnishing of their legacies, he has been a welcome palliative.But there is, necessarily, a limit to sentimentality. There is no reason, in particular, to believe that Sunday’s 5-0 thrashing by Liverpool will prove a watershed for the club’s hierarchy: Solskjaer’s iteration of Manchester United has ricocheted almost constantly between hope and despair, and the club has never shown anything but blind faith in him.5th minute Naby Keita’s opening goal was the perfect start for Liverpool on Sunday.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images13th minute Diogo Jota doubles the lead, stunning the Old Trafford crowd into silence.Michael Regan/Getty ImagesThe fans, too, did not aim their fire in his direction. There were no chants demanding his ouster, no public manifestations of dissent. Equally significantly, though, there were no defiant expressions of support, as there have been in previous low moments. This, perhaps, might have been the day that something significant shifted.It would be difficult to overstate the scale of United’s collapse. How best to express it? That Liverpool did not play particularly well in the first half, giving the ball away cheaply in midfield and inviting pressure reasonably frequently, but still made it to the break with a four-goal lead?Or that midway through the second half the streets outside the stadium were full of fans seeking sanctuary from what was unfolding inside, more and more bolting for the exits as the game wore on and the suffering worsened? Or that Jürgen Klopp’s team was so dominant that it spent the last half-hour, after Mohamed Salah had scored his third goal, and his team’s fifth, toying with United, its rival and peer, playing with all the intensity of a warm-down training session?38th minute Mohamed Salah’s first goal was just a sign of things to come.Phil Noble/Reuters45th minute + 5 Salah’s second, Liverpool’s fourth, came just before halftime.Michael Regan/Getty ImagesOr, perhaps, it would be the fury and the frustration that should have seen Cristiano Ronaldo sent off for lashing out at Liverpool’s Curtis Jones at the end of the first half, and eventually did see Paul Pogba — only a few minutes after his introduction as a substitute — dismissed for a wild, reckless challenge on Naby Keita.Both were, as much as anything, an expression of United’s absolute impotence, an abdication of control rooted in the embarrassment being inflicted on Solskjaer’s players. They were powerless to match Liverpool. They were unable to stop Keita, Salah and Roberto Firmino, in particular, cutting through them at will. They had lost the game, and so they lost their cool.It was Solskjaer who had to bear the brunt of that, of course. It was Solskjaer who had to stand there, on the touchline, his head ever so slightly bowed, as Liverpool’s fans crowed and taunted and, with a cruel and obvious irony, invoked his name.It was Solskjaer who had to answer the questions at the end, who had to conjure whatever explanation he could, who had to give an instant, taped deposition for what will be, largely, an inquest into his own continued viability. And it is Solskjaer who will be dismissed, in some quarters, as nothing but a frontman for the great Manchester United tribute act, a sort of glorified mascot for a club whose business model is based on milking former glories.That is the way it is, the way it has always been, but it should not disguise the fact that he is not solely to blame. The core difference between United and Liverpool is not just in the quality of their coaches — Solskjaer, granted his job on the basis of his playing career, and Klopp, who earned his because of what he had achieved as a coach — but in the coherence of their structures.50th minute Thousands of United fans were already on their way out when Salah scored his third.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images60th minute United’s day managed to get worse when Paul Pogba was sent off for a two-footed tackle on Keita.Michael Regan/Getty ImagesPogba started on the bench here because there is, in effect, no system available to Solskjaer that enables him to get the best out of the galaxy of stars at his disposal. Playing a way that suits Pogba means negating Bruno Fernandes or dropping Marcus Rashford or sidelining Mason Greenwood.The club signed Cristiano Ronaldo this summer — get the band back together for the last, ever, world tour — partly out of romance, partly out of cynicism, partly because it was worried he was going to join Manchester City and partly, of course, because he is one of the greatest of all time. But it did so with no real idea of how he would fit into the team, with no regard for the fact that it meant effectively stalling Jadon Sancho’s Manchester United career before it had begun.These are not things Liverpool does. They are not, for that matter, things that Manchester City or Chelsea do. It is Solskjaer’s fault that he cannot get the best out of these players, that he sent out a team so woefully overmatched against Liverpool, but it is not his fault that his resources are so uneven, their shapes just not quite dovetailing with each other.That was of little or no solace as he stood on the touchline, the scoreboard emblazoned with the proof of his humiliation, Liverpool’s fans singing his praises. It was hard, in fact, not to feel sorry for Solskjaer at that moment, and that may be the most worrying thing of all. It is one thing to be beaten, to be criticized. It is quite another to be where he is now, the butt of the joke. A manager can recover from many things. Being a punchline is not one of them.Michael Regan/Getty Images More

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      Outside Hotlines for Athletes Are a Sign of Strained Trust in Sports

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      From women’s soccer to college sports, athletes have lost faith in leagues and organizations handling abuse and other complaints.As revelation after devastating revelation emerged last month about soccer executives ignoring reports of male coaches sexually abusing or harassing female players, the National Women’s Soccer League Players Association hired an outside company to provide an anonymous online platform for athletes to report abuse and other concerns.Three days later, the N.W.S.L. rolled its own anonymous hotline, set up by a different company, to also allow anyone with knowledge of any misconduct to report issues anonymously.Then four days after that, the league’s franchise in the state of Washington, OL Reign, made its own agreement — with the same company that the league hired — to report misconduct and policy violations at the club level.While the flurry of activity stemmed from the gravest crisis to hit the top professional women’s soccer league in North America, the decisions to rely on anonymous third-party hotlines were not made in a vacuum.In the last few years, the companies that specialize in third-party hotlines have seen a surge in deals with sports organizations of many types, including the N.F.L. Players Association, P.G.A. of America, U.F.C. Gym, U.S.A. Gymnastics and a slew of university athletic programs. The latest deal, reached on Monday, was with the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.The platforms, while empowering athletes, staffers or anyone connected with a sport to lodge a complaint, have also become emblematic of a deepening loss of faith in the informal and sometimes clubby methods that coaches and leagues have deployed to address allegations of misconduct.Athletes, advocates and the companies themselves caution that these efforts depend on the willingness of the sports entities to take complaints seriously. They also stress that the victim of an assault should always go first to the police and law enforcement agencies.But given the disillusionment over how institutions have ignored or covered up rampant abuse, doping and other issues, they are not surprised by the push to establish a record, especially when a complaint may not rise to the level of a crime or may need more review.“We tell people, we’re not for 911 emergencies — this is for reporting unethical and unsafe behavior, and not for reporting laws that have been broken,” said Raymond Dunkle, the president of Red Flag Reporting in Akron, Ohio, whose sports clients include baseball and basketball youth and adult leagues and, because of a more recent controversy, jiu-jitsu gyms. “The idea is to empower people to speak up, anonymously, if they see anything unsafe. You can very sincerely say my door is open but people sometimes sincerely fear management.”Fans held up signs supporting athletes at a game between the Red Bulls and Inter Miami on Oct. 9 in Harrison, N.J.Dennis Schneidler/USA Today Sports, via ReutersThe trend in sports mirrors what has happened in the corporate world since the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which strengthened corporate governance and established a hotline reporting option for employees, said Thomas O’Keefe, the president and chief executive of Syntrio. O’Keefe’s company owns Lighthouse Services, a compliance training and reporting hotline company based near Philadelphia that was hired recently by the N.W.S.L. players’ union.This is how these online platforms generally work: Say an athlete has a complaint or a concern. The athlete would use a mobile device or computer to report the issue anonymously, and upload any documentation. The platform would automatically send the complaint to several people — never just one — like a human resources manager, general counsel and financial officer. The athlete, still anonymously, would be able to correspond with one of those recipients designated by the company, who could provide guidance or more information until the matter is resolved or at least recorded.“There’s a hierarchy of people in any organization that can see the report and subsequent follow-up,” O”Keefe said. “There is no way for people to change it or edit it.”For sports entities, the annual cost can range from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. The N.W.S.L. players’ union, for instance, is paying about $50 a month, said Meghann Burke, its executive director.Burke said the association, a new affiliate of the AFL-CIO, had initially asked the league to include an anonymous third-party hotline in its anti-harassment policy, adopted earlier this year, because of “the lack of trust the players have in the league handling these complaints.”But the league demurred, so she said she “literally started Googling anonymous hotline options” before getting assurances from associates about Lighthouse.Now, just two weeks after finalizing the deal with Lighthouse, Burke is receiving reports, and already seeing patterns.“It’s not a panacea, but it’s certainly one tool in the toolbox,” Burke said.The hotline certainly got the attention of the league’s powers. Within a week, both the N.W.S.L. and the OL Reign had announced separate deals with Real Response, a company in Charlotte.“We understand that we must undertake a significant systemic and cultural transformation to address the issues required to become the type of league that N.W.S.L. players and their fans deserve and regain the trust of both,” the league said in a news release.Even though having multiple hotlines for players may seem redundant, some issues — like financial abuses, business practices, or health concerns — may be more germane to a specific level, such as a club, according to the companies.Real Response was founded in 2015 by David Chadwick, a former college basketball player at Rice and Valparaiso. When his Rice team was reeling from allegations of racist behavior by its athletic director, he struggled to figure out who and what to believe. There was no obvious way, he said, for an athlete to immediately raise questions or get feedback from the administration on issues such as drugs, hazing, inappropriate relationships or mental health.“We can’t wait for those end-of-year surveys; we need a mechanism in real time,” he said.Real Response now works with more than 100 college athletic departments, with recent additions including Syracuse, Wichita State and Tulane. The company also has been hired by the N.F.L.P.A., U.S.A. Gymnastics and USADA.Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a lawyer and former Olympic swimming champion, cautioned that while she supported the concept, “the question is whether any third-party hotlines are given the authority to do the investigation, whether members of the sports organization are required to be cooperative, and whether their findings are to be recognized and enforced by the sport organization.”Jocelyne Lamoureux-Davidson, a decorated and recently retired hockey player who has frequently challenged USA Hockey, the national governing body of the sport, on gender equity issues, said if her sport’s fledgling professional leagues ever embraced these hotlines, there could be potential benefits — if done right.“It’s a right step in the right direction, but there are too many people in positions of influence and power that don’t do the right thing,” said Lamoureux-Davidson, who, with her twin and fellow three-time Olympian, Monique Lamoureux-Morando, now has a foundation to support disadvantaged children. “Each pro league, all the N.G.B.s, they all have policies and procedures, but what’s the execution? How well does it protect the athlete? Sometimes it’s not policies but the personnel.” More