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      Manchester United’s Perfect Feedback Loop

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      Title contender, crisis club or cash cow? What you see in United depends, largely, on what you want to see.Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was in the mood to play the hits. Manchester United’s most ardent fans, he said, were “the best in the world.” The players who had the privilege to wear the team’s colors were the “luckiest” on the planet. And, of course, there was the inevitable nod to history, to the club’s “habit” of clawing victory from the maw of defeat.Solskjaer was glowing, and with good reason. United had just given Atalanta a two-goal head start in the Champions League and recovered to win regardless. Cristiano Ronaldo had delivered, yet again. United had been at the bottom of its group at halftime, flirting with elimination, but now it sat comfortably at the top. The fans sang Solskjaer’s name as he gave his postmatch television interviews.Once he had signed off, the British broadcast feed cut back to the studio. The mood, there, was starkly different. Paul Scholes, the former Manchester United midfielder appearing as one of the guests, was not feeling particularly stirred. “That first half worried me,” he said. His voice was stern, his look grave. United faces Liverpool on Sunday. Scholes felt storm clouds gathering.As he spoke, footage played of United’s rousing winner. Ronaldo’s header arrowed into the corner of the goal. “Imagine Jürgen Klopp watching that,” Scholes intoned. Ronaldo tore off in celebration, another stitch woven into the fabric of his legend. “He’ll be rubbing his hands together.” Old Trafford was melting into delirium. “Play like that against Liverpool, and see what happens.”In that contrast lies the very essence of the modern Manchester United, a club where what the eyes see and what the ears hear do not always — or even often — match up. It has been like this almost since the start of Solskjaer’s reign, three years ago, this ability to jumble the senses, to be everything and nothing, to be progress and stasis, promise and despair, success and failure all at the same time. United has become soccer team as Rorschach test: What you see in the spreading ink blot in front of you depends, largely, on what you want to see.The main complaint from Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s critics is that he doesn’t always appear to know what he’s doing with his team.Carl Recine/Action Images Via ReutersIn many ways, of course, that is probably less than ideal. As a general rule, the teams that win trophies are not the ones that radically divide opinion, or the ones whose performances oscillate wildly both within and between games, or the ones who never seem to be more than a couple of defeats from full-blown crisis. League titles, in particular, go to the strong and the steady, the clear and the convincing.And that, of course, is what is supposed to be Manchester United’s priority. That is what Scholes believes is the club’s rightful place, the cornerstone of soccer’s natural order: There can be true harmony and balance in all things only if, at the end of May, Manchester United is crowned the best team in the Premier League.But that is not, of course, Manchester United’s only priority. It is — and this will read as criticism only if you want to read it as criticism — concerned with not only being the best team in England, but being the biggest club, too. That might, in a certain light, feel like little more than semantics. It is not.In a sporting sense, United’s tendency to act as a sort of fuel cell for an apparently inexhaustible debate is very obviously a drawback, a reasonably damning indictment of Solskjaer’s reign in and of itself. Manchester City, Chelsea and Liverpool are not subject to such wild swings in popular perception. Their exact places in England’s pecking order might be disputed, but that they belong at the very summit is not.The sporting sense, though, is not the whole picture. It is easy to chide United every three months, when its leading executives use their quarterly call with investors to primp and preen over their social media engagement figures. It is simple to see this as yet more proof of how capitalism and/or technology has corrupted the game, how out of line United’s priorities are, how confused its leaders have become about whether their job is to win titles or accrue followers on Instagram.If United’s main business is soccer, mythology and commercial revenue aren’t far behind.Phil Noble/ReutersThe truth is a little of both. It is an awkward coexistence, but clubs are both sports teams and businesses. Those numbers are not brought up as a transparent bid to distract private equity managers from poor performance on the field. They are brought up because the private equity managers probably care about them as much as — or even more than — they care about whether United won or lost last weekend. Those numbers matter.And from that point of view, it is hard to conceive of any strategy better than this version of Manchester United, with all of its inconsistencies and contradictions, each one open to every interpretation imaginable. It is the gift that keeps on giving, a virtuous circle, the highest attainable form of sport as content machine. Presumably by accident, rather than design, Manchester United finds itself in the Platonic ideal of an engagement sweet spot.It is perfect: The presence of so many enormously talented players means that the team is never bad, not in any real sense. It is never going to be out of contention for a place in the Champions League, and so it is never going to be in real danger of missing out on the vital revenue streams offered by European soccer.Most of the time, the team will win: occasionally convincingly, occasionally fortunately, occasionally despite all available evidence suggesting that it really should not have. But, crucially, it will not win all of the time. Winning all of the time is what fans want, of course, but it is not, in truth, a particularly compelling story. If a team wins all of the time, there is not much to say. Look at Bayern Munich, or Paris St.-Germain, or even Manchester City. They win, again and again, and the world shrugs.Not Manchester United, though. Sometimes, United will lose. It will never lose often enough to be in genuine peril of finishing, say, ninth — the extraordinary players will see to that, remember — but sometimes having those players is not enough. Sometimes the opposition will have a better system, or United will be less than the sum of its parts, and so sometimes United will lose.No matter what happens, though, there will be something to talk about. Regardless of whether the dice fall for United in any particular game, it will be compelling. The team can be whatever you want it to be: a side building momentum, or one threatening to malfunction. Occasionally, as Scholes proved, it can be both of those things at the same time. The pictures can say one thing, and the words another.Cristiano Ronaldo papered over some more of United’s problems this week.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockIt leaves every game fraught with meaning. Every single fixture could be the start of something or the end, the day that the club rises to indisputable glory or sinks into unabashed crisis. There will always be something to say, a position to take, an opinion to air. And that means there is always something to sell, because there is always something to watch or something to hear or something to read or something to click. It means Manchester United is always there, front and center, pumping tons and tons of content out into the atmosphere.This weekend, it is entirely feasible that Manchester United will beat Liverpool. Or lose to Liverpool. Or draw with Liverpool. There will be a result, but that is not the same as a conclusion. Not one that lasts, anyway, not one that holds beyond the next game, or the game after that. There never will be, not with these owners, not with this team, not with this manager. Manchester United will just keep on as it is, forever near and forever distant, soccer’s most reliable source of engagement, a club caught in its own perfect feedback loop.No Good Guys HereNewcastle asked its fans this week to stop wearing robes to matches “if they would not ordinarily wear such attire.”Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThis is not something that will be said regularly, in the months and years to come, but it was just about possible to have a little sympathy for Newcastle United’s new ownership group this week. Not for the defeat against Tottenham, of course. Not for firing Manager Steve Bruce. Not even for having to issue a statement urging the club’s fans to stop dressing up in thobes and kaffiyehs because it is, you know, offensive.No, the one aspect that made it just about possible to see the Saudi-backed consortium’s point of view was the decision by the rest of the Premier League to place a temporary stay on related party transactions: that is, deals in which companies linked to a club’s owner suddenly and entirely coincidentally decide they want to spend vast sums of money sponsoring the owner’s team.Some 18 of Newcastle’s Premier League colleagues/rivals backed the motion, with a view to implementing some sort of permanent restriction on the practice in the future. Manchester City abstained from the vote, presumably aware that backing it would be, well, hypocrisy of the highest order.Newcastle’s immediate response was to threaten legal action against the Premier League. This is not uncomplicated, of course, because it is — when you think about it — basically an admission that getting a load of Saudi companies to sponsor a Saudi-backed team so as to fast-track its growth was a fundamental part of the business plan.But that is, perhaps, balanced out — in this case — by the fact that a host of Premier League teams have been doing this for years. And not just Manchester City, the world’s foremost billboard for Etisalat. There is Leicester City, too, with its home, the King Power Stadium. It is curious that Everton’s training ground is sponsored by USM: What benefit a Russian mining giant gets from having its name splashed on a club’s changing rooms is anyone’s guess, but it is apparently worthwhile.This, you see, is the problem with the Premier League’s cynical decision to avoid anything approaching morality as long as the money keeps on flowing. It is an appealing approach, because it absolves the league of having to make any tricky, subjective decisions. Until, that is, something so craven comes along that everyone else’s cravenness pales in comparison. Opting out is not a tenable position in the long run. It is time that English soccer learned that.Enough, Gianni. Enough.Gianni Infantino: a man with a (very bad) plan.Harold Cunningham/Agence France-Presse, via Fifa/Afp Via Getty ImagesIn a way, you have to admire Gianni Infantino. By now, those occupying what we might call soccer’s Blue Sky executive level have conjured so many risibly absurd ideas in such rapid succession that we should be inured to it. They should not be able to plumb new depths of stupidity. Those wells should have been tapped long ago.Credit, then, to Infantino for boldly going lower than anyone else had thus far dared to go. A World Cup every two years, it turns out, is just entry-level stuff. The real galaxy brain idea was decreeing, as he did to various European federations this week, that teams would not be allowed to compete in consecutive tournaments if, and when, the competition goes biennial.That’s right. Infantino, the president of FIFA, the most powerful person in the game, the man responsible for safeguarding the biggest sport on the planet, has considered taking the World Cup and splitting it in two, so that it is not, in fact, a World Cup at all. Infantino appears to think that if you cut a golden goose in half, there is a chance you might get two golden geese.And yet there is reason to be thankful, too. Infantino might not quite have worked out King Solomon’s gambit, but in doing so he has, at least, exposed the fact that FIFA’s plan to double the number of World Cups is crumbling.The powerful European and South American confederations staunchly oppose it. So do the European Union and the International Olympic Committee. FIFPro, the players’ union, is against it. There is a reason for this. It is a bad idea.CorrespondenceA man, a medal and a lesson. Read on for his story.Lisi Niesner/ReutersSoccer, it turns out, is not the only sport with something of an aversion to celebrating second place. “There is the N.H.L.,” wrote David Sullivan. “No second-place trophies or medals, and a similar tradition/superstition that any team award less than the Stanley Cup itself is to be spurned.“The league now awards the Presidents’ Trophy to the team with the best regular season record, but there are documented cases of players looking down, looking away, acting awkward, refusing to acknowledge or touch the trophy they won, and skating away as quickly as possible.”There are, at least, trophies handed out for winning divisional titles, something that was pointed out to me while “researching” — it looks a lot like asking the most recent American I have corresponded with — last week’s column. You can win, in a way, multiple times in most of North America’s major leagues, so even the teams that lose finals can reflect on the fact that they are winners.But there can be no question whatsoever about the most poignant and uplifting email of the week, and possibly ever. I don’t want to edit it too much, even for length, because it deserves your full attention.“I’m 22, and won two silver and one bronze medal at the Tokyo Paralympic Games,” wrote Jaryd Clifford. “My silvers came in the 5000m (on the hottest running day of my life — “feels like 43 degrees and 85 percent humidity”) and the marathon (I spewed my guts up for the last 12 kilometers*).[*NOTE: I have left this phrase in to prove that Jaryd is Australian. It may be the most Australian phrase imaginable.]“I was defending world champion in the 5000m and world-record holder in the marathon. I learned that disappointment can coexist with pride, particularly when you know you gave it everything. I’m disappointed I couldn’t win that gold medal, but I’m proud that I never gave up and that I gave it everything I had.Jaryd Clifford of Australia collapsed after finishing second in a Paralympic marathon in Tokyo.Eugene Hoshiko/Associated Press“What more can you do? Sometimes you’re just beaten by a better opponent on that day. For me, the silver represents the journey I’ve been on from my early teens to now, all the blood, sweat and tears. It also motivates me to one day turn it into gold. My teammate, Scott Reardon, told me as I sat in an ice bath after the 5000m that “sometimes it takes silver to win gold.” In 2012, he won silver/lost gold by 0.03 seconds in the 100m. In 2016, he won gold, he says, because of the lessons he learned from his silver.”That last sentence is a far better encapsulation of what I was trying to express than I managed in a thousand words or so, as it happens. (I’ll be adding Jaryd to the list of people who aren’t allowed to email too often, for fear of showing me up.) You can either see it as losing gold, or you can see it as winning silver. The latter seems far healthier to me and, more important, to Jaryd. More

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      N.W.S.L. Players Protest Abuse Scandal as League Returns to Field

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      In their first matches since confronting the accusations that have shaken their league, women’s soccer players stopped play to make a point.In North Carolina, soccer players from both teams sprinted to midfield to be part of a silent protest of the abuse scandal that has shaken their league. In Portland, Ore., the home team’s players took the field in shirts bearing the slogan “No More Silence” and demanded — and received — the suspension of a prominent team executive.And at Carli Lloyd’s homecoming game just outside Philadelphia, the retiring United States national team star set aside the celebrations of her long career to note a moment that, she said, was much bigger than herself.“This is something you cannot ignore,” Lloyd said after her Gotham F.C. team played the Washington Spirit to a scoreless draw in Chester, Pa.Wednesday night marked the first tentative steps back onto the field for the National Women’s Soccer League only days after it brought its entire operation to a halt as it confronted accusations of coaches who abused players, team executives who did not stop it, and a league that failed to protect its most valuable assets: its athletes.The Gotham-Washington game was one of three played in the league on Wednesday, the first night of action since the league canceled its entire schedule over the weekend and announced that its commissioner, Lisa Baird, had resigned.In Cary, N.C., the North Carolina Courage, whose coach was fired last week after he was accused of sexual coercion by at least two former players, beat Racing Louisville, which fired its coach in August “for cause” after a separate case of misconduct. And in Oregon, the Portland Thorns’ players released a list of demands before their game against the Houston Dash that included the immediate suspension of their own team’s general manager.In all three matches, the teams stopped play in the sixth minute and players stood arm in arm at midfield — a symbolic pause, they said, that represented the six years it took for a group of former colleagues who had filed abuse complaints to be heard. The protests brought together national team stars like Lloyd, Lindsey Horan and Crystal Dunn, dozens of lesser known pros who make up the league’s rank and file and, in Portland at least, even the match officials.For Lloyd, who acknowledged she has been adept at blocking out the crowds, the noises, the off-the-field distractions, this was a night to focus on the collective over the individual.“This is a huge wake-up call,” she said.Her statement and other brief comments by players around the league made direct references to Sinead Farrelly and Mana Shim, the two N.W.S.L. players whose searing accusations of being sexually abused by Paul Riley, who coached the North Carolina Courage to league championships in 2018 and 2019, ignited the recent reckoning in the sport.Many of soccer’s biggest and most outspoken stars, like Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan, have weighed in over the last week, and pointedly criticized the league, its officials and even their own teams for knowing about complaints and failing to protect the players.But Lloyd has long been much more reticent to speak out on social issues. So hearing her speak so candidly, and on a night arranged to celebrate her personally, underscored the shared sense of anger and solidarity roiling the N.W.S.L.Fans in Chester, Pa., and other cities showed their support for the players through signs and standing ovations.Charles Fox/The Philadelphia Inquirer, via Associated Press“This is a reset,” Lloyd said in her postgame news conference, and an opportunity “to have policies in place to vet ownership” and coaches. And after “one of the worst weeks this league has ever seen,” she added, “I’m really proud of everyone, even on the Spirit, coming out playing despite what’s been going on.”Before the game, the Gotham players and staff left a handwritten note in the locker room of the Washington Spirit. The note read, “To our friends at the Spirit. Off the field we support you. On the field let’s play. Sending our love to you.”The anger of frustration of players, though, was evident on an emotional night. During a Zoom news conference with reporters after the game, one of Lloyd’s Gotham teammates, Imani Dorsey, pounded the podium when she said: “We are grinding every single day. We just get the wind knocked out of us every single week. It’s heartbreaking. It’s devastating. We’re trying our best every day and it doesn’t feel like the league is doing that.”When asked what she thought about fans who have said they would boycott N.W.S.L. games, Dorsey said: “Any fan that I would say is feeling failed, or don’t have faith in the league, I’d say: Put your faith in the players association and the players. We want this league to be better.”Yet the tumult shows no signs of abating.On Tuesday, Washington Spirit’s chief executive, Steve Baldwin, announced that he would step down after bowing to pressure from Spirit players who criticized him for presiding over a toxic and abusive workplace under the team’s former coach, Richie Burke, who was fired last week. But the Spirit players dismissed Baldwin’s move as mere posturing, and demanded that he sell his share to one of the team’s co-owners, Y. Michele Kang.In Portland, the Thorns players demanded the immediate suspension of their general manager, Gavin Wilkinson. Wilkinson had presided over the team in 2015, when an internal investigation had substantiated claims of abuse against Riley so serious that the team dismissed him. Within months, Riley was coaching a different team in the league.Late Wednesday, the Thorns announced that Wilkinson had been placed on administrative leave. But players and fans quickly noted that his removal did not affect his similar role with the Thorns’ sister club, the Portland Timbers of Major League Soccer.The N.W.S.L. players association, meanwhile, released its own list of demands before Wednesday’s games, including investigations of every club, immediate suspensions for league and team executives accused of failing to protect players, access to previous investigative reports, and a voice in the league’s search for a new commissioner.“We are not bringing the N.W.S.L. down” in demanding action and investigations, Houston Dash defender Katie Naughton said in a brief statement after her team’s game in Portland. “We are rebuilding it into what we know it can and should be.“We believe in our bones that we can do this.” More

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      U.S. Rallies to Beat Costa Rica in World Cup Qualifier

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      Sergiño Dest scored one goal and set up another as the United States regained its stride with a dominant performance in World Cup qualifying.COLUMBUS, Ohio — A spectator at a United States men’s soccer game could have a reasonably enjoyable time simply watching Sergiño Dest as he goes about the business of playing right back.The 20-year-old Dest’s execution of simple acts on a soccer field — running around, trapping a ball, fiddling with it at his feet, directing it to teammates — oozes style. He has a bottomless tool kit of tricks. He has a marionettist’s control of the ball — and sometimes he has crazy ideas of what to do with it.For all his skills, the question about Dest — raised by coaches for both the national team and his club, Barcelona — has been if he could assemble all of these gifts and tools and express them consistently as effective performances, if he could avoid mental lapses and maintain his concentration on the field, if he could change games by himself.For one supremely entertaining night, Dest did just that, scoring a brilliant game-tying goal, coolly creating the winner and generally delighting the crowd to help lead the United States to a 2-1 comeback win over Costa Rica in a World Cup qualifying match on Wednesday night in Columbus, Ohio.Upon being substituted in the second half, Dest made one last enchanting gesture: Exiting the field on the far sideline, he took his time strolling around the perimeter of the playing area, waving his arms to rile up the crowd as the game continued behind him. When he got to the sideline near the benches, he high-fived every fan he could, and a few security guards, with a huge smile on his face.The fans indulged him the whole way with boisterous cheers.“I love the fans,” said Dest, who grew up in Holland. “I was trying to get them hyped up for the other players. We can feel that the fans have our backs, so hopefully they will continue like that.”The welcoming environs and a sellout crowd of 20,165 seemed to invigorate the entire United States team, which was looking to bounce back from a spiritless 1-0 loss in Panama on Sunday.The team has come to view Columbus as a sort of unofficial national home because of the reliably big and supportive crowds it tends to draw here, and because it has been the site of a pattern of positive results: Out of 10 previous World Cup qualifiers in Columbus since 2000, the U.S. had won seven entering Wednesday.The fans — their voices amplified in the stadium by a cozy seating arrangement and partial roof — were still working through a theatrical, slow-build “U-S-A!” chant, timed each game for the opening whistle, when Costa Rica jumped to a stunning lead.Flitting toward the U.S. goal in the first minute, Costa Rica defender Keysher Fuller leapt in the air to meet a cross with his right foot. Though the contact was not clean, the ball skipped erratically off the grass, through a small crowd, and into the net past U.S. goalkeeper Zack Steffen, who had stood frozen on the line because of the creeping threat of Costa Rica forward Jonathan Moya in the box. Steffen immediately ran to the sideline to argue that Moya had been offside, but it appeared that Dest, who had been drawn across the end line, away from the play, had kept the Costa Rican attackers onside.“I think my initial thought was, here we go,” Gregg Berhalter, the U.S. coach, said. “We got to respond. It was early enough in the game that if we stayed calm and stuck to the game plan, I thought we’d be OK.”Dest would redeem himself in spectacular fashion in the 25th minute. Receiving the ball on the right wing, he dribbled menacingly toward the box, caressing the ball with his right foot, before cutting it quickly to his left and lashing a shot with his weaker foot into the upper left corner of the goal.“It’s a really important goal, and it was a really nice goal, so it’s an amazing feeling,” said Dest, who added that he thought his shoes were untied when he scored. “I was so happy.”The flight of the ball into the net triggered an eruption of noise from the home crowd and sent Dest sprinting to the sideline, where he was mobbed by his teammates and coaches.“It’s almost like the sky’s the limit for him,” Berhalter said of Dest. “He can be as good as he wants to be. You saw today with his attacking play. It’s unreal.”As much as the goal itself, Berhalter might have been delighted by the buildup to it, a sweeping 13-pass move involving nine American players that started in the midfield, swung back to Steffen in goal, charged down the left side of the field and ended on the right. Before Dest’s shot went in, the U.S. had gone 428 minutes without a first-half goal.Sergiño Dest scored the first goal for the United States after an early mistake put his team in a hole.Emilee Chinn/Getty ImagesA few days ago, Berhalter had joked with reporters that they were likely tired of hearing him use the word “verticality,” a reference to a direct-approach tactical concept that he had invoked repeatedly in a string of news conferences.Imagine how often the players had heard it. The U.S. has looked lackluster in attack at times over the past two months, but the concept seemed to resonate on Wednesday night. Dest’s goal highlighted one of the best halves of attacking play from the Americans in recent memory, one that exhibited all the offensive tenets Berhalter had been preaching, publicly and behind closed doors, for weeks: persistent and purposeful movement without the ball, quick interchanges, a general sense of urgency pushing toward, and behind, an opponent’s back line.The go-ahead goal came in the 66th minute. A misplay by a Costa Rican defender left the ball bobbling to the feet of Dest, who collected it, looked up at his surroundings, and skimmed a perfectly weighted pass into the path of Timothy Weah, who belted it toward the goal.The play was later ruled an own goal by the Costa Rica goalkeeper, Leonel Moreira, but Weah celebrated it as his own, sprinting to embrace a pocket of fans in the corner.Dest joined him there, getting pats on the head from the fans, reveling in a performance where he put all his tantalizing skills to devastating use. More

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      FIFA Without FIFA? EA Sports Weighs Reboot of Showcase Game

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      The end of a long and profitable relationship with soccer’s governing body would mean renaming one of the most popular video games of all time.It is one of the longest and most profitable relationships in sports. Nearly three decades after soccer’s global governing body licensed its name to a California video game maker looking to expand its offerings, the FIFA series that was born out of that partnership has become not so much a game as a cultural phenomenon.To millions of people around the world, the letters FIFA now represent not actual soccer but instead a one-word shorthand for the hugely popular video game series that has become a fixture in the lives of players as diverse as Premier League pros, casual fans and even gamers with no other relationship to the sport.Sales of the game, which releases an updated edition every year, have surpassed $20 billion over the past two decades for its California-based maker, Electronic Arts. But FIFA has cashed in as well: Its licensing agreement has grown to become the organization’s single-most valuable commercial agreement, now worth about $150 million per year.And now all of that money is at risk.At least two years of talks about renewing the contract that allows Electronic Arts, through its EA Sports division, to use the organization’s name have hit the wall, according to multiple people close to the negotiations. The possibility of a permanent break after next year’s World Cup in Qatar — when the current 10-year agreement ends — was made explicit in a letter released last week by Cam Weber, the executive president and general manager of EA Sports.In it, Weber raised the unthinkable: FIFA without FIFA.“As we look ahead,” Weber wrote in discussing the future of the series, “we’re also exploring the idea of renaming our global EA Sports football games.”The core of the dispute is financial. FIFA is seeking more than double what it currently receives from EA Sports, according to people with knowledge of the talks, a figure that would increase its payout from the series to more than $1 billion for each four-year World Cup cycle.The dispute is not just about money, though. The talks have also stalled because FIFA and EA cannot agree what the gamer’s exclusive rights should include.FIFA would prefer to limit EA’s exclusivity to the narrow parameters around use in a soccer game, most likely in an effort to seek new revenue streams for the rights it would retain. EA Sports, meanwhile, contends the company should be allowed to explore other ventures within its FIFA video game ecosystem, including highlights of actual games, arena video game tournaments and digital products like NFTs.A decision is likely by the end of the year, but EA officials are already planning for a post-FIFA future. Earlier this month, the company registered two trademarks, one in the European Union and the other in Britain, for the phrase EA Sports F.C.Both FIFA and EA Sports declined to comment publicly on the talks. But the dispute has surprised industry watchers, including Peter Moore, who held senior roles at Electronic Arts for a decade before leaving in 2017 to become the chief executive of the Premier League team Liverpool. Moore is now a senior executive at Unity Technologies, a video game software company.“I don’t recall them ever putting out a statement saying we’re in negotiations on a renewal of the license,” Moore said in a telephone interview. “That’s clearly sending a little bit of a signal.”Part of EA’s calculation is that — even if it is forced to rebrand one of the most popular video franchises of all time — it is unlikely any competitor can challenge its market dominance. EA’s position has grown to almost complete control over the soccer gaming industry thanks to more than 300 other similar licensing agreements with organizations like UEFA, which runs the Champions League, and domestic leagues and competitions around the world. Those deals allow EA to use the names and likeness of players, world-famous club teams and prominent leagues in its game. (On Tuesday, EA renewed one such deal with FIFPro, the global players union.)A break with FIFA would not affect EA Sports or the experience of its game significantly, since the company also owns licenses for clubs like Liverpool and Chelsea through separate agreements.EA SportsBecause its license with FIFA grants EA Sports only the use of the organization’s name and logo and the rights to the World Cup, a monthlong championship that takes place every four years, the game maker appears to have concluded that losing the relationship would not be the kind of existential threat that it might face if it were to lose the licenses to another hugely popular sports franchise, Madden N.F.L.Unlike the FIFA series, the N.F.L. video game is predicated on only two key licenses, one with the National Football League and another with the league’s players’ union.The vast number of other licenses that EA Sports holds in soccer means that even if it were forced to rename its FIFA series, gamers brought up on a diet of digital soccer would notice little change when it came to the playing experience.Still, any rupture would have consequences. The FIFA franchise is immensely profitable, said Gareth Sutcliffe, a senior analyst specializing in the video games sector at Enders Analysis, because EA Sports is able to make little more than cosmetic changes to its game most years and still enjoy millions of sales with the release of each new edition.The game’s profitability has grown through innovations like player packs, similar to trading cards, that require users to spend money within the game as they seek to build the best rosters. Piers Harding-Rolls, a gaming industry analyst at Ampere Analysis, estimated the in-game feature known as Ultimate Team was worth as much as $1.2 billion to EA last year.It is this new economy that EA is looking toward as part of its growth strategy. It is also the kind of feature that FIFA would prefer to wall off, and perhaps sell in lucrative — and separate — deals.For FIFA, a break with EA Sports, and the loss of its nine-figure licensing payments, could threaten some of the innovations proposed by FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino. He is seeking to raise as much as $2 billion, for example, to finance a new expanded World Cup for clubs. At the same time, he is trying to persuade members to back his plan to increase the frequency of the World Cup to every two years.To find those new revenues, FIFA officials have studied the possibility of selling licenses to video games and digital products that are not soccer-related. A partnership with another company like Epic Games, the maker of the hit Fortnite franchise, for example, would broaden FIFA’s reach but dilute the exclusivity for which EA pays a premium. That, according to former gaming industry insiders like Moore, could be why his former company is considering walking away.“I’m going say, ‘Wait a second: We have literally spent hundreds of millions of dollars building this and you’re telling me that Epic Games can come in and get a license to the name that we have built and that we have put front and center and that has become synonymous with games?’” Moore said. “Then, yeah, I’m negotiating and I’m fighting that.” More

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      Premier League Vote Targets Saudi Spending at Newcastle

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      The Premier League imposed a moratorium on sponsorships linked to investors only days after a Saudi-led group took control of one of its teams.Fearing that the arrival of another deep-pocketed ownership group from the Gulf might soon put even their own billionaire owners at a competitive disadvantage, Premier League teams voted Monday to restrict — for a short time at least — the new Saudi Arabian owners of Newcastle United from injecting some of their vast wealth into their newly acquired soccer team.The decision, reached at an emergency meeting of the league’s clubs, imposed a moratorium on teams’ signing sponsorship deals with brands or companies linked to their investors. The temporary rule change — to be in place for less than a month while a permanent one is considered — is not specific to Newcastle but is a clear sign of the worry among Premier League teams that a group led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund could soon remake the economic and competitive state of the league.The clubs are concerned that Newcastle, now backed by resources of one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, will quickly be able to buy its way to success in a manner similar to Manchester City, the Premier League team bought in 2008 by the brother of the ruler of Abu Dhabi. Manchester City financed its rise from mid-table strugglers to perennial champions partly through a series of sponsorship deals with companies tied to the United Arab Emirates.Those deals, with partners like Etihad Airways and Abu Dhabi’s department of culture and tourism, are the subject of an ongoing dispute about possible violations of Premier League cost-control regulations.The degree of concern among Newcastle’s rivals was clear when it came to voting on the new regulation on Monday: 18 teams voted for the temporary ban, with only Newcastle opposed to it. Manchester City, after consulting with its lawyers, abstained.With the moratorium in place, the Premier League has now asked for feedback from its teams while it considers introducing a permanent rule outlawing so-called related party sponsorships, or at least a requirement that such deals be vetted for fair-market value by industry experts.Manchester City is not the only team in the Premier League with sponsors linked to its investors; under its previous owner, Mike Ashley, Newcastle plastered its stadium, St. James’s Park, in advertising for his discount sportswear company.But the timing of Monday’s emergency meeting left little doubt about its focus: It came one day after Newcastle played its first game under its new ownership, and after home fans rose as one before kickoff to cheer the team’s new Saudi chairman.The takeover of Newcastle had been delayed for more than a year but finally got the go ahead after the Premier League said the P.I.F. provided “legally binding assurances that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will not control Newcastle Football Club.”The Premier League has declined to provide details of those assurances. The chairman of the multibillion-dollar fund is Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and its de facto ruler, and Newcastle’s new chairman, Yasir al-Rumayyan, is the governor of the P.I.F. and the chairman of Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company.“Newcastle fans will love it but for the rest of us it just means there is a new superpower in Newcastle — we cannot avoid that,” Liverpool’s German manager, Jürgen Klopp, said last week when asked about the possible effect of an infusion of Saudi investment into one club. “Money cannot buy everything but over time they will have enough money to make a few wrong decisions, then make the right decisions, and then they will be where they want to be in the long term.”Team owners have privately fumed over the Premier League’s handling of the takeover, complaining that they were not informed about the progress of the sale until the transfer of ownership was announced on Oct. 7. Rival teams are also concerned, given the Premier League’s insistence that the P.I.F. is now viewed as separate from the Saudi state, that any sponsors from the kingdom not directly affiliated to the fund will not be barred regardless of the new rules.One version of a working document reviewed by The New York Times stated that “entities controlled by the same government” that had a stake in a Premier League team could not become a sponsor of that club. The Premier League declined to comment, and it has not made any public comment on the Newcastle sale beyond its news release announcing that the deal had been completed.The Premier League has struggled in the past, however, to enforce its cost-control regulations. An investigation into whether Manchester City breached the league’s financial regulations has now stretched into its third year with little sign that a resolution is near. City filed a series of legal motions that slowed the process, drawing a rebuke earlier this year from a senior judge who wrote, “It is surprising, and a matter of legitimate public concern, that so little progress has been made after two and a half years — during which, it may be noted, the club has twice been crowned as Premier League champions.”The type of financial regulations now being discussed by the Premier League are similar to rules that a group of 12 leading European teams had sought to include this spring in the failed effort to create a European Super League.Several of the clubs involved in the Super League planning, including Barcelona, Real Madrid, Manchester United and Liverpool, had expressed concerns about their ability to compete financially with teams — notably City and Qatar-backed Paris St.-Germain — who could draw upon seemingly bottomless resources from outside of the game. “Club revenue must be obtained on an arm’s length basis,” one of the regulations in the Super League plans stated. Teams that broke those regulations faced permanent expulsion from the competition.Some of those same cost-control ideas, though, are now on the table at the Premier League, which will soon face outside scrutiny of its operations as well. Britain’s government this spring appointed a lawmaker, Tracey Crouch, to review soccer governance. Crouch has suggested that she will recommend the appointment of an independent regulator for the sport. More

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      Saudi Arabia, Newcastle and Soccer’s Worship of Money

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      The sale of a Premier League team symbolizes a sport’s unashamed devotion to wealth above all else.One single sentence, printed in block capitals, emblazoned on a laminated banner, captured it all: all of the pain and resentment and angst and fury of all those years spent under the turgid, wearying, bleak years of Mike Ashley’s ownership of Newcastle United, that decade and a half when the club’s owner seemed to take pleasure, after a while, in draining his own fans of spirit, and pleasure, and hope.The sentence on the banner made its first appearance nearly seven years ago, at what turned out to be just the halfway point of Ashley’s tenure. It was a reference to that dispiriting habit his club had developed of spurning England’s two domestic cups — the two trophies the club had even the slimmest chance of winning — so much that, often, the team looked as if it was trying to get knocked out early on purpose.It had been prepared for precisely one of those occasions. Newcastle was away at Leicester in the F.A. Cup in January 2015. Or a team playing as Newcastle was, anyway: As ever in the cups, Newcastle had sent out a weakened side, a selection of reserves and fringe players and supporting acts. The headliners had been held back in order to attend to the real business of finishing 15th in the Premier League.Newcastle, as the fans who had traveled to watch their team would have expected, duly lost. It was the very predictability that they were protesting, during the game, when they unfurled the banner.“We do not demand a team that wins,” it read, “we demand a club that tries.”A refrain, born in frustration, became a rallying cry.David Klein/ReutersThe slogan has become a familiar one, as pithy and compelling a summation of everything that Newcastle had been reduced to under Ashley. The banner itself has made occasional appearances over the years, too, as protests have flashed and mutiny has simmered.It was back again, on Thursday evening, for what may prove to be its last hurrah. The circumstances, this time, were a little different: It was carried around not as a rallying cry for an uprising, but as a standard of a battle that had been won. Ashley, at last, was gone, and thousands of Newcastle fans had made their way to St. James’s Park, their shining castle on the hill, to celebrate.Few, if any, of their fellow fans would begrudge them that. Something of a myth has been allowed to take hold, over the last few years, about Newcastle’s fans. They have developed a reputation for being equal parts demanding and delusional, for believing their club uniquely deserving of a restoration to a place of prominence in English soccer’s firmament that it never, really, occupied in the first place.The reality is almost exactly the opposite. All Newcastle’s fans have ever really asked for is a team that is mildly entertaining to watch, and a bit of effort from those charged with running the club. The banner made that perfectly clear. Ashley’s affront was not failing to win; it was robbing them of the hope that they might.That represents the ultimate betrayal of ownership to all fans, and though their estimations of their own suffering have long been hugely overstated — Newcastle’s ordeal of permanent irrelevance in the Premier League is not quite of the same order as that of Bury, a club that no longer exists, or that of the countless Football League teams to have brushed liquidation in recent years — there has been an abundance of sympathy to their plight. Only at Sunderland, Newcastle’s neighbor and bitter rival, might anyone regret the departure of Ashley, and the end of Newcastle’s nightmare.Any owner not named Mike Ashley would have found support in Newcastle.Lindsey Parnaby/EPA, via ShutterstockBut that was not the only thing the crowd had gathered to celebrate on Thursday. There was glee, too, at the start of what appears to be a dream. It is not just that Newcastle has been freed from Ashley, it is that it has been liberated by the sort of owner who seems to promise a club that tries and a team that wins.Newcastle is now the richest club in soccer, backed by the unimaginable wealth of the Public Investment Fund, the investment vehicle of Saudi Arabia but absolutely not — and apologies if this makes no sense — in any way linked to the Saudi state, even though Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s crown prince and de facto ruler, is the chairman of the P.I.F., and even though it describes itself as a “sovereign” wealth fund, which rather gives away where its money comes from.It was that distinction that persuaded the Premier League to wave the deal through. When it held up the Saudi-led takeover last year, the league had not, it turned out, been worried that Saudi Arabia was pirating its content through a rogue television broadcaster, or that it had banned BeIN Sports, one of league’s key network partners, from operating in its territory, or even about the kingdom’s jailing of women’s rights activists or the persecution of dissidents or the chemical castration of gay people or the brutal, unrelenting war in Yemen or the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.No, the Premier League just needed to be reassured that the Mohammed bin Salman who runs Saudi Arabia would not interfere with the decisions of the Mohammed bin Salman who runs Saudi Arabia’s sovereign investment fund.Once the league had those promises, the P.I.F. was free to acquire 80 percent of one of the league’s member clubs and to begin to think about how to take on Manchester City, a club definitely not owned by Abu Dhabi, in the Premier League and Paris St.-Germain, a club totally separate from the Qatari state, in the Champions League.And a handful of Newcastle fans were free to gather outside St. James’s Park in thobes and headdresses, waving the Saudi flag, inscribed with the shahada, while singing that their club had, at last, been returned to them.This, of course, is the point of the whole thing. Saudi Arabia, and its crown prince in particular, is obsessed with its image. It is why it runs troll farms in Riyadh dedicated to swarming anyone who dares to criticize the regime online. It is why it does not tolerate dissent. It is why Jamal Khashoggi was killed and dismembered, according to United States intelligence, by a hit squad acting on the orders of Salman, the man who runs the country and the one who is the chairman of the fund that now owns a Premier League soccer team.There are plenty of Newcastle fans who are uneasy about that connection, about the fact that it is now possible to write a sentence in which the murder of a journalist and Newcastle United both feature.But there are plenty more — a supporters’ trust survey last year found that almost 97 percent were in favor of the Saudi takeover — who are willing to turn a blind eye to that ethical dilemma, to assert that their new owner is no worse than Manchester City’s, or to point out that Liverpool is sponsored by a bank that has been accused of laundering the profits of drug cartels, or to suggest that since Britain is happy to sell arms to the Saudis, it might as well sell its soccer teams, to claim that when everything is rotten there is nothing to do but succumb to putrefaction.Many Newcastle fans accused the Premier League of blocking the sale of the club to a Saudi-led group.Scott Heppell/ReutersAnd there are others still — the ones in the thobes, the ones with the Saudi flag in their social media avatars, the ones who have issued scrawls of abuse to Khashoggi’s widow for daring to challenge the morality of the takeover — who are perfectly happy to embrace it, to do precisely what the Saudis want them to do.The P.I.F. has not bought Newcastle because it loves soccer, or England’s northeast, or the beach at Tynemouth or the leafy streets of Gosforth or the grand Georgian facades of Gray Street.It has bought Newcastle to diversify its economy, to enmesh strategic allegiances in sport and culture, to rehabilitate its image, to make people think of Saudi Arabia and soccer before they think of Saudi Arabia and starving children in Yemen. The fact that it gets a free vanguard of vitriolic advocates on social media — just as Abu Dhabi has managed at Manchester City — is a bonus.Newcastle United, and those fans, are being used, just as City is being used and just as P.S.G. is being used and Chelsea is being used, just as soccer as a whole is being used and, in the process, corrupted. And yes, those fans are complicit in it. But they are not the only ones to blame.So, too, are the authorities that have allowed this to happen, time and time again: the Premier League, with the “ownership neutral” stance that it wears with such pride, and the Football Association and UEFA and FIFA and all the rest of them, the bodies that are supposed to protect and cherish the sport but have instead sold it off to the highest bidder.And so, too, are the rest of us: the journalists and the commentators and the observers and the fans, everyone who has reveled in the conspicuous consumption of transfer deadline day, anyone who has ever taken the Deloitte Money League as a sign of the sport’s health, rather than a damning indictment of its venality, its naked, unashamed worship of money.Gulf riches transformed Manchester City into a championship team. Newcastle fans will be hoping the same will happen at their club.Pool photo by Dave Thompson/EPA, via ShutterstockA year or so after Newcastle’s fans unfurled that banner, Everton was playing away at Aston Villa. Their club had just been taken over, too, this time by Farhad Moshiri, a British-Iranian businessman with a personal fortune of impossible vastness. They, too, could not believe their luck. “We’re rich,” they sang that night, over and over again, a profanity wedged between those two words.There is a warning in there, of course — five years later, Everton is roughly where it used to be in the Premier League table, but about $500 million in transfer fees worse off — but the story does not require a particularly deep reading. For 30 years, the Premier League has lionized wealth — as a means to an end, and now, after a while, as an end in itself.The natural, logical, unavoidable conclusion of that culture is Newcastle fans gathering outside St. James’s Park in traditional Saudi dress. The only way for clubs to compete, the only way for owners to restore hope in its purest form, is money. And it is Saudi Arabia that has the most money.It is money that has distorted soccer to such an extent that all dreams but one are now dead. There is no hope of a team’s breaking through thanks to a particularly gifted crop of youngsters who emerge from its academy. There is precious little belief that an inspirational manager, with a keen eye for talent, will be enough to challenge the petroclubs for league titles and European trophies.The only thing that can do that, the only dream that survives, is that your club will, somehow, one day wake up with more money than everyone else. That, in effect, is what happened to Newcastle on Thursday: the sudden, jolting realization that its wildest fantasy had come true; not just that its purgatory was over, but that its paradise had arrived.It is easy to point at those fans and say that they are the problem — that it is their willingness to pay any price for success that means that yet another club that prides itself as a community institution is now in the hands of an owner who is willing to use it for selfish ends; that they are apparently ready to service the needs of the murderous regime that is seeking to deploy soccer to launder its image.But they are not the problem; they are the consequence of the problem. They are the end point of an era and a culture obsessed with acquisition, that believes ambition can be measured only in millions of dollars, that cherishes those who spend and castigates those who do not, that has welcomed money, whatever its provenance, as an objective good, and never questioned, not once, what that money might want to do, what its purpose might be.This is the answer. This is where that path leads — to a place where the only hope that fans have is money, where dreams are built on money, and where there is no such thing as a price too high to pay.CorrespondenceMore examples this week of countries that field multiple national teams, courtesy of Sean O’Brien. “It’s basically just a list of former colonies that are now dependent or unincorporated territories — mostly in the Caribbean,” Sean wrote, mentioning American Samoa and Puerto Rico, Aruba and Curaçao.The United Kingdom features again here: Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat and Bermuda all field their own national teams. I stand wholeheartedly corrected, by both Sean and Joe Chihade, who wrote along similar lines, but mentioned Gibraltar as well. This is going to get uncomfortably political, isn’t it? And I only feel entitled to do jokes about Britain.Alphonso Davies and Canada earned a 1-1 draw at Mexico in a World Cup qualifier on Thursday, a lift to the Canadians’ campaign to qualify for the finals for the first time since 1986.Jose Mendez/EPA, via ShutterstockYusuke Toyoda, meanwhile, wonders whether we are making enough effort to pronounce players’ names, citing the estimable Derek Rae. “This seems to plague Brazilian and Portuguese players the most (I remember being surprised that Ronaldinho is pronounced more like ‘Hu-now-jee-new’),” Yusuke wrote. “My question is, how hard would it be to fix this? If the Premier League goes to the trouble of creating a starting XI video for every player, couldn’t they also have each player say his name?”That is, I believe, the case: I have several friends — including a couple on Set Piece Menu — who work as commentators and are extremely pious about the accuracy of their pronunciations. The Premier League asks each and every player, every season, how they wish to be mentioned, and then sends a phonetic pronunciation to every broadcaster.Of course, that does not mean they always get it right. Commentary is an extremely difficult skill to master, and there are moments when they may slip. My personal belief — and I say this as someone with a name that lots and lots of people, all over the world, find entirely baffling — is that as long as you make an effort, then that should be enough.That, perhaps, is a view rooted in privilege, but I would imagine most people, like me, when they hear someone have a good go at a name that does not come naturally — it’s the double R, in my case: I tend to get Roly, Lolly, Lori and, of course, that old standby Roy* — are content to know that someone is showing them the respect of trying, and willing to go along with whatever works best. I’ve certainly never known a player to complain about it, as long as an attempt is made in good faith.[*The other day, someone tried to get my attention by calling me “Greg.” Eventually, I had to respond, and I felt intimidated by how awkward it would be to correct them, so I didn’t say anything. I then immediately texted my wife to say that, from now on, for the sake of good manners, should we ever find ourselves together with that person, she should refer to me as Greg so as to spare that person’s blushes. I don’t know why I’m phrasing this so carefully. The person is clearly not a reader.] More

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      In Newcastle, Songs Drown Out the Hard Questions

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      As long-suffering fans cheered the arrival of Saudi riches at their club, talk of the new owners’ plans and the current team’s flaws took the day off.NEWCASTLE, England — In the shadow of St. James’s Park, a man in a flowing white thobe was standing on a chair outside Shearer’s bar, conducting a swaying choir. It cycled through all the newest numbers in Newcastle United’s songbook: the one about being richer than Manchester City, the one questioning the identity of Paris St.-Germain, the one that just goes: “Saudi Mags.”As their voices resounded along Strawberry Place, gathering strength as more picked up the tune, a group of men in kaffiyehs approached. One had a Saudi flag draped over his shoulders. Another was carrying two portraits: one of King Salman, the head of the Saudi royal family, and one of Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s crown prince and de facto ruler.Instantly, the songs blended tunelessly into a cheer: It was assumed — though never actually established — that the man with the portrait was an actual Saudi, rather than a local, cosplay version. Members of the chorus wanted a handshake, a photograph. Some mimed bowing down in thanks. And then, plastic pints of lager in hand, they resumed the singing, louder and more jubilant than before.This was, in one sense, the day it all became real. Newcastle’s takeover by a consortium dominated by the Public Investment Fund — the sovereign wealth fund of the Saudi state, of which Mohammed bin Salman is chairman — is more than a week old, but, until Sunday, it remained something that existed only in the abstract.It was a news release. It was a stage-managed video of the financier Amanda Staveley and her husband, Mehrdad Ghodoussi, two minority partners in the deal who had been appointed — or appointed themselves — as its public faces, awkwardly meeting the players at the club’s training facility. It was something that had happened on paper and in the papers, but not yet in the flesh.Only with the first game of the new era could that change. Not because Newcastle, suddenly, would be a particularly good team: The players would still be limited, the squad fragile, the manager still unpopular, the standings still more than a little ominous after a 3-2 defeat to Tottenham. It would change because Staveley, Ghodoussi and, in particular, Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of the P.I.F. and Newcastle’s new chairman, would be in attendance at St. James’s Park. Only then would this new future, the one that the club’s fans have been awaiting for more than a decade, slip from the realm of the theoretical into something tangible.Callum Wilson got Newcastle off to a flying start by scoring in the second minute.Scott Heppell/ReutersNewcastle’s new Saudi chairman, Yasir al-Rumayyan, lower left, sat with the minority owner Amanda Staveley, right.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockBuoyant before the match, they and the crowd were soon watching Tottenham attackers slice through their team.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockThat is soccer’s great skill, of course, its ability to bend and twist and adjust to any new reality. There is no story line too outlandish to be folded into its sweeping, infinite script, no limit to the willing suspension of disbelief, no line in the sand, no beyond the pale.The biggest club in the world imploding because of its own hubris? Write it up. A yearslong plot to change the face of the sport that is destroyed in 48 hours? Just a regular Tuesday. One of the world’s largest investment funds buying a club that employs Joelinton so as to burnish the image of a repressive autocracy? Fine, why not?There is an adaptability that comes with having no moral compass. Not only can soccer tolerate almost any twist, no matter how improbable, it can also do so in a matter of hours, turning what might once have been unthinkable into the way things have always been in the space of a 90-minute game. How else could nation states use the Premier League as a proxy stage for their geopolitical strategies.And yet at St. James’s Park on Sunday afternoon, even as reality bit, it was impossible to escape the strangeness of the whole scene. There were the children, outside, with their homemade headdresses. There were the teenagers with the Saudi flag cast across their shoulders. There were the men in robes, adulation for their new owners in the form of cultural appropriation.Then, strangest of all, as Newcastle’s longest-standing and longest-suffering fans in the Gallowgate End unfurled a banner of defiance — quoting the local singer Jimmy Nail and his description of this city as a “mighty town” — the stadium’s public-address system cut in and asked the stadium to give a “warm Geordie welcome” to al-Rumayyan.As one, the fans rose and turned to face the directors’ box, cheering and applauding for 20, 30 seconds. Newcastle has always romanticized its heroes, perhaps more than most: It is a club that carries the memories of Jackie Milburn and Kevin Keegan and Alan Shearer on its lips at all times.There is a banner, slung from a railing in the stadium’s East Stand, that features a quotation from and an image of another of those heroes: Bobby Robson, a beloved former manager. A club, it runs, “is the noise, it’s the passion, the feeling of belonging.”That is exactly what Saudi Arabia has bought with Newcastle. It is exactly why it has bought Newcastle: so that its emissary might get the sort of reception Shearer or Keegan might get barely a week into his association with the club.There was, in the end, only one element that remained reassuringly familiar: the game itself. Newcastle took the lead after not quite two minutes, St. James’s Park melting into outright mayhem, before slowly, surely, fading from view.Tottenham took control of the match, and silenced the crowd, with three first-half goals.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockTottenham Hotspur, supposed to be here as nothing but guests at its host’s party, scored three times in a first half delayed after a fan collapsed in the stadium’s East Stand. The players had to summon assistance from Newcastle’s medical staff when it became clear the situation was serious. The fan was transferred to a hospital, it was announced.There was little mood for jubilation after that. The stadium fell quiet, almost contemplative, rousing itself only to demand the manager, Steve Bruce, be fired immediately. There are limits, it would appear, even to Newcastle’s sentimentality. This was Bruce’s 1,000th game as a manager. He is from Newcastle, and supported the team as a child.On Sunday, his Magpies were jeered off the field. That has happened a lot around here, over the last few years. It is that which the fans are hoping to escape; it is the new ownership group’s ability to deliver a different sort of future that persuaded some to don fancy dress, and many more to choose to turn a blind eye to why, exactly, Saudi Arabia might want to buy a Premier League soccer team. They are happy to be Saudi Mags, now, to tolerate any amount of strangeness in the hope of a richer, better reality. More

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      Soccer’s Problem With Silver Medals

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      It was notable when Spain’s players kept their runner-up awards after losing a final. It shouldn’t be.In all the photographs, there is one constant. In some of the images, Spain’s players stare at the ground, disconsolate, chewing over their loss to France in the final of the Nations League. In others, they give interviews, lead-faced and faintly forlorn. In one, Luis Enrique, their coach, offers respectful applause for his team’s conquerors.But in all of them, Spain’s players have thin, navy blue ribbons draped around their necks. Each of the players had walked to the raised platform hastily constructed on the field after Sunday’s final at San Siro in Milan. Each of them had taken the medal offered to him. And each of them had carefully placed it around his neck.That should not, of course, be especially noteworthy. In most sports, the athlete or the team that finishes second sees its silver medal as a source of pride. Occasionally, it might be with eyes glazed with tears. Sometimes, it is through gritted teeth. Often, it is with a lingering air of regret, a sense of what might have been. And it always takes the pain a little while to subside. Second — close, but no cigar — can hurt most of all.Ferran Torres and Spain lost to France in Milan, 2-1.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut only in soccer are silver medals treated as if they burn. Players and coaches frequently give the impression that they would rather not touch them at all. Last summer, the majority of England’s players made a point of refusing to wear the medals they had earned for finishing second in the European Championship.A few weeks earlier, most of their counterparts at both Manchester City and Manchester United had conspicuously refused to don the tokens they had received after losing the Champions League and Europa League finals. José Mourinho has made a habit of disposing of any reminder he might have that he ever lost a major final.This is, at a rough guess, a phenomenon that manifests very rarely outside soccer. The beaten finalist at a tennis major does not make a point, in front of the watching world, of handing whatever prize he or she has been awarded to a fan. Olympians do not regularly refuse to stand on the podium without their silver or bronze medals around their necks, nor do they hurl them into the crowd on their way out of the stadium/pool/velodrome/whatever the place where the horse disco takes place is called.In fact, the scorn for silver medals is not even a feature of all soccer. In 2019, the Netherlands players who had just lost the Women’s World Cup final to the United States kept their medals. Many emerged from their locker room to speak to the news media, eyes still a little raw, with the bittersweet spoils of their wondrous, uplifting summer draped around their necks.Even for teams used to winning it all, bronze can feel better than nothing.Andre Penner/Associated PressMen’s soccer, though, seems to have embraced the idea that second is just first last and turned it into a dogma. Perhaps that is because of the message it sends: The act itself is, without question, somewhat performative, a little piece of theater, a flourish for the fans to demonstrate that nothing less than total victory will do.Or perhaps it is because of the absolutism that drives so many of the defining characters in the men’s game. Plenty of the sport’s most successful managers have made a point of telling their players that they should not savor even their winners’ medals. Alex Ferguson, like Brian Clough and Bill Shankly before him, used to tell his squads that they should forget winning a league or a cup almost immediately, that it was to serve only as a springboard for further success. Soccer has long been consumed by a desire for dominion so intense that it is, when looked at in the cold light of day, just a little deranged.And as much as Mourinho is too often, too easily blamed for all of modern soccer’s ills, it would not be desperately difficult to trace a line from some of his more public rejections of anything short of gold to a wider embrace of the practice, to believe that once he had made it clear that silver was not acceptable to him, it made it almost inevitable that others would follow. A coach who cherished second, after all, would seem somehow callow in comparison.For José Mourinho, only finishing first will do.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockWhy it came about, though, is perhaps less significant than what it implies.It is curious how unrelated strands of loose narrative can coalesce. Last week, there was a minor commotion over Norwich City, the team rooted to the foot of the Premier League. A former player had wondered if Norwich added a vast amount to the league, what with the club’s insistence on being stable and sensible and cautious, all traits that act as synonyms for “boring” in the hyperbolic soap opera of England’s top flight. A couple of days later, Newcastle was bought by Saudi Arabia. Oh, no, sorry: by the sovereign investment fund of Saudi Arabia. The two are not linked. No, really.Newcastle’s fans greeted the club’s new owners as its saviors. Their appeal lay not only in detaching Mike Ashley, the hated former proprietor, from the club, but in the promise of what the new owners might do: Lavish money on the team, propel it toward the summit of the Premier League, fulfill all of the ambitions and the dreams of the long-suffering — for a given value of suffering — fan base.The juxtaposition of the two was curious. It was Newcastle, a team now owned for nonsporting purposes by what is most definitely not the financial arm of a nation state, that was portrayed as living some sort of fantasy. It was Norwich, a team which is run with a long-term plan, a clear vision and no little affection, that was having to justify its existence in the Premier League.These are, of course, the wrong way around. Norwich should be held up as the aspirational model — in conception, if not in results — rather than Newcastle. But then this is a sport that disdains silver medals. It is not an industry, an ecosystem, that is adept at gauging comparative success, at understanding that there is not only one winner, and lots and lots of losers, but that lots of teams can win or lose depending on their own horizons. It is not a place that fully grasps the idea that the journey matters — give or take — as much as the destination.It may well have been easier for Spain to take some small pleasure in the mementos the team was handed in Milan because of the circumstances in which they had been attained: in the final of the Nations League, a tournament that is just a step above an exhibition tournament. All athletes are competitive, but it is unlikely that Luis Enrique and his squad were experiencing the same sort of sorrow as England’s players at Wembley this summer.But even so, perhaps it hints at a subtle shift in the landscape, away from the brutal, zero-sum belief that victory can take only one form and that everything else is therefore necessarily failure, abject and shameful. Sometimes, coming in second is an achievement in itself. Grasping that, you sense, might make the sport just a little healthier, just a little happier, as a whole.Memory Plays Tricks on YouLionel Messi was, perhaps, trying to save his friend’s feelings. He has known Sergio Agüero for years, and so, when Agüero asked why he had never won a Ballon d’Or, Messi picked his path delicately. He did not, for example, say, “You have not won it because I exist, and so does Cristiano Ronaldo.” Instead, he was a little more diplomatic. You win the Ballon d’Or if you win the Champions League, Messi told Agüero, according to the latter. His failure was linked to that of his team.By Messi’s logic — and Messi knows a thing or two about winning the Ballon d’Or — that leaves only one winner this year. Four members of last season’s Chelsea team have been nominated, but only one of them won the European Championship, too. This should, by extension, be Jorginho’s year. (The women’s honor could go to any of the five nominees from the all-conquering Barcelona team that won the Champions League, but Alexia Putellas, as captain, seems the consensus pick.)It is interesting to consider how that will look in hindsight. A particular rabbit hole opened up on Twitter this week in which fans debated the merits of the 2003 winner of the award: Juventus midfielder Pavel Nedved. (Quite what spawns these hellmouths of unreason, and quite what draws you in, remains a mystery to me, but no matter.) Nedved was, it was decreed, undeserving, particularly in a year in which Thierry Henry had scored 32 goals in 56 games for Arsenal.Pavel Nedved, in his prime, was a worthy winner.Carlo Ferraro/European Pressphoto AgencyThat parallel is irrelevant, of course — Nedved was a midfielder, not a forward, so was not really employed to match Henry’s numbers — and it leaves out the context: Nedved pulled Juventus to the Champions League final and won Serie A. That season, Henry’s brilliance did not earn Arsenal a trophy.It was not a shock, at the time, that Henry had not won it; if there was any player who had a greater claim than Nedved — regarded as one of the finest players of his generation — it was Andriy Shevchenko, the A.C. Milan striker who scored the winning penalty to claim the Champions League.That it seems unusual now is, of course, testament to the cultural primacy of the Premier League; to Henry’s more enduring greatness, in comparison to Nedved’s; and, perhaps, to the nature of how we remember. Assessing individual contributions to team sports can be difficult — where Messi and Ronaldo are not involved, certainly — and so what lasts, as time passes and memories fade, are the numbers. And yet the numbers, as Agüero and Henry can testify, do not tell the whole story.Long Road, Short JourneyThe picture, now, is starting to drift into focus. We have the first two confirmed qualifiers for next year’s World Cup; predictable but sincere congratulations to Germany, which always qualifies easily, and a respectful raise of the eyebrow to a Denmark team that, it would appear, is now invincible. The rest of the field, meanwhile, is starting to take shape.In Asia, it is hard to imagine that Saudi Arabia — four games, four wins — will not qualify. In South America, Brazil and Argentina can almost be taken as a given, but the identity of the two countries that will join them as direct qualifiers is much more intriguing. In North America, just a glimmer of a gap has opened up between Mexico, the United States and Canada and everyone else.In Europe, there is a confected air to the fretting over whether France, Belgium and England will not qualify — they all will; stop worrying — but several of the other favorites face moderately stressful Novembers: Portugal, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands are by no means guaranteed automatic slots.That leaves Africa — where the structure of qualifying makes the whole process unsatisfactorily arbitrary, but undeniably dramatic — and Oceania, where barely more than a year out from the tournament, qualifying has not even started.It has already been pushed back twice because of the logistical challenges presented by the coronavirus pandemic; the latest plan is to stage a qualifying tournament in Qatar next spring, though what format that will take — and whether clubs will release players to compete in it — has yet to be settled.New Zealand, the regional heavyweight, had not played a game in almost two years before a pair of friendly victories against Bahrain and Curaçao in this international window. Quite how Danny Hay, the country’s coach, is supposed to forge a team capable not only of seeing off the rest of Oceania but then winning a playoff against a team from another confederation, scheduled for June next year, is not entirely clear. Hay has not lost hope. The last window’s friendlies, he said, were the “start of the road to the World Cup” for his team. Given the circumstances, it is hard to believe that is a road that will end in Qatar.CorrespondenceThe traditional mix of the serious and the trivial in the emails this week, as this newsletter is careful to curate its shades of light and dark. We had dozens of communiqués regarding Newcastle United’s new ownership, including one from Bob Lovinger, who wondered if “England is worse than other countries when it comes to the characters bankrolling its sports teams?”Worse — as it applies to the moral worth of ownership groups — is a value judgment, and not one that it would be fair to make. But in one sense, the word most definitely applies to England: The Premier League, in particular, has always made it clear that it is “ownership neutral,” and has taken great pride in it.The league basically does not care who invests in its clubs, as long as they haven’t committed any particularly obvious recent crimes and have pockets bulging with money. That does not strike me as the best policy if you are even vaguely concerned about safeguarding what are — and what we are told are — precious social institutions.In Newcastle, any new owner was good enough. A deep-pocketed one was better.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesK.L. enticed me, meanwhile, with an articulate and perceptive opening statement on the “vital idea that sport is less about actually winning than creating an infrastructure that allows hope to flourish, no matter how improbable silverware might be. You may be creating a fiction, but if it is a fiction your fans can believe in, you’ve done your job.”But K.L. lost me, just a touch, with the assertion that followed, regarding Newcastle’s abrogation of ambition under Mike Ashley. “Finishing 15th in the Premier League is objectively more important than winning England’s domestic cups, if the alternative to not finishing 15th is getting relegated.”That is indisputable, of course, and it was very much the logic adopted by Ashley, but it has always struck me as a false parallel. There is no conclusive proof, as far as I am aware, of teams that take the domestic cups seriously being relegated more frequently. There is not even a compelling body of proof that it necessarily makes the difference between finishing 15th and 16th.And an intriguing point from Paul Bauer: “I suspect the Premier League was going to find a way around the controversy of Saudi ownership, thinking if they did not allow it, the Saudis would likely go to other leagues with their money.”This idea has been raised elsewhere, not least by one of the lawyers involved with the takeover, but I’m not sure it is reflective of how the Premier League thinks. The major leagues in the United States seem — at least from the outside — to think strategically and collectively much more naturally, and much more frequently, than the major soccer leagues of Europe. Plenty of the Premier League’s members have an unfortunate tendency to conflate the best interests of the league and their own best interests.That was the serious stuff; the trivial comes in the form of the many enquiries as to the correct pronunciation of my name. It’s Roar-Ee — spelling it that way might actually be better — but just get as close as you can.There were a couple of suggestions that perhaps this was not the best parallel — my name is apparently reasonably common, though I’m not sure children in Leeds in the 1980s saw it that way — and that using it was indicative of my own privilege. First off: It wasn’t necessarily a serious example. But, having thought about it, I’m not sure I buy the idea of privilege on this one.Some names are hard for some people to say. That is universal; it cuts across creed and color and nationality and everything else. And I would have thought that accepting that is also universal. We should all make an effort, of course; I take great pride in putting my accents in the right places. But we should also make an effort to understand if people sometimes fall short.The final word, this week, goes to Joe Bellavance. “I was prepared to fall out of my chair, laughing, when you signed off as ‘Greg,’” he wrote, reminding us all of another universal truth: that the best jokes are the ones you forget to make. More