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      Will British-Born Players Help Jamaica Achieve Soccer Greatness?

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      Jamaica recruited a crop of British-based players to bolster its World Cup qualifying campaign. The question now: Can it quickly mold them into a team?LONDON — Sometimes, the best explanation is the simplest one. Last month, in the aftermath of Jamaica’s heavy home defeat to Panama — a result that left the Caribbean country winless and, at that stage, pointless in World Cup qualifying — the finger of blame shifted quickly from the team’s coach, Theodore Whitmore, to his boss, Michael Ricketts.As president of the Jamaican Football Federation, Ricketts had spent much of the previous year trying to overhaul Whitmore’s squad in a bid to supercharge Jamaica’s attempts to reach its first World Cup in a quarter century.In March, he revealed a long list of British-born players of Jamaican heritage who, he said, were in the process of switching their international allegiance to the country of their parents’ or grandparents’ birth, immediately — in theory — boosting Jamaica’s chances of making it through the arduous slog of qualification.His targets were ambitious. The most eye-catching name was Michail Antonio, the West Ham forward who had, relatively late in his career, emerged as one of the most effective strikers in the Premier League. But beyond him lay a slew of equally familiar faces.Southampton’s Nathan Redmond, the Everton teammates Mason Holgate and Demarai Gray and Newcastle’s Isaac Hayden were all applying for Jamaican passports, Ricketts said. So too were Ethan Pinnock and Ivan Toney, of Brentford, and Max Aarons of Norwich City, some of the brightest talents in the second-tier Championship, and Kemar Roofe, a forward for the Scottish champion, Rangers.By the time the Panama game arrived, a host of the recruits who had accepted Ricketts’s overtures were in the team. Pinnock and Liam Moore started in central defense. Roofe and Daniel Johnson, of Preston, played in midfield. Antonio made his debut up front, alongside Bobby Decordova-Reid of Fulham.It did not end well. A few days earlier, without the vast majority of his reinforcements, Whitmore’s team had come within a few minutes of claiming a commendable point on the road in Mexico. Against Panama, though, Jamaica collapsed to a 3-0 defeat.From the outside, the suspicion was that Ricketts was at fault. It was suggested on television that he had destabilized the team by instructing Whitmore to make room for the new arrivals. “I must dispel that totally,” Ricketts said at the time. He called it “absolute rubbish,” and insisted that Whitmore would back him up. “All the J.F.F. did was make contact with the players, and provide the opportunity for the players to represent the country,” he said.Roofe, for one, has spent some time ruminating on that defeat. “It left a sour taste in the mouth,” he said. His conclusion, though, was not quite as intriguing as a dark conspiracy about outside interference. The problem, in his mind, was time. Or, rather, the lack of it.Along with the vast majority of the new additions to Jamaica’s squad, Roofe had been prevented from joining his teammates in Mexico. The country was at the time on the British government’s coronavirus so-called red list, meaning anyone who traveled there would have to spend 10 days in quarantine on their return to Britain.To circumvent that, it was decided that most of the British-based players would skip the game and head instead to Jamaica. As Whitmore and his squad were preparing to face Mexico, Roofe and a half dozen others were being greeted by representatives of the J.F.F. in Kingston and undergoing their mandatory Covid tests.Kemar Roofe, left, said he and his new Jamaica teammates had troubling meshing in their first game together, a World Cup qualifier against Panama in September.Collin Reid/Associated Press“It was a strange experience,” Roofe said. “The actual squad was in Mexico, so the rest of us flew to Jamaica, met the staff, got a couple of training sessions under our belts. It was good to meet the other players, but it meant when the rest of the team came back, it was a bit rushed.”Roofe and the others introduced themselves, had a single training session — focusing, he said, on “a bit of shape and set pieces” — and then, the next day, went out to play Jamaica’s first home game on a road that, the country hopes, will end in Qatar late next year.“That is the hardest thing in football, having to adapt quickly,” Roofe said. “You’re playing in a team you don’t know, in a style you don’t know, with a manager and players you haven’t met before, and you have to hit the ground running. You can get lucky, and everything just click, but normally it takes a few games.”Ideally, the first of those would have come almost immediately after the Panama defeat, but Roofe and the rest of the squad’s British-based contingent did not have chance: Costa Rica, Jamaica’s next opponent, was also on the red list. Only one player contracted to an English team, in fact — Anthony Grant, of third-tier Swindon Town — started in San José, where Jamaica earned a 1-1 draw.Grant’s case is a little different from many of his new teammates. “I’ve been waiting for the call for years,” he said. “I’d always wanted to play for Jamaica. My grandmother came from there, and went back when she retired. I go every year. I just didn’t really know how you went about it.”Now 34, after more than a decade establishing himself as a steady but unspectacular presence in England’s lower tiers, he had become a little fatalistic about his international hopes. “I’ve had a good career,” he said. “If this came along, I just saw it as a bonus.”He was not mentioned as a potential recruit by Ricketts, but earlier this year he received a message from the J.F.F. through Twitter. His first call-up was the Mexico game. He missed the humiliation against Panama, but impressed against Costa Rica.The divergence in those results has made Jamaica — which entered Thursday’s game against the United States at the bottom of the region’s eight-team table — difficult to assess. There have, so far, been two Jamaicas: the team bolstered by high-profile players from Europe, which as of Thursday had lost its only game to date, and the one without reinforcements, which emerged from its two engagements with a single point but an abundance of credit.How Jamaica’s qualifying campaign unfurls from here — and how much of a challenge it poses to its forthcoming opponents, the United States and Canada — will depend on how easy it is to forge a coherent whole from those twin strands.Aston Villa’s Leon Bailey is among the British-based players who will miss Jamaica’s current round of qualifiers.Chandan Khanna/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat challenge has been made more complex by the absence of several of Jamaica’s recently-minted internationals from this week’s fixtures: Pinnock, Moore and Daniel Johnson are all missing through injury, as is Leon Bailey, the Aston Villa forward. Grant will sit out the game against the U.S. because of an issue with his visa. And, most notably, Antonio decided against traveling for this round of games after consulting with his club, West Ham.“It’s tricky if you are not getting a clean run at it,” Roofe said. “You might only need one training session to feel like you belong, but it takes longer to jell fully as a team, to know the intricacies of the players you are playing with.”There is only one way to solve that particular issue, of course, the same problem that Roofe identified at the root of the defeat to Panama: time. Both Grant and Roofe said they were confident that the Jamaica team that undertakes these three games will be more cogent than the one that played the previous three. And both feel that the longer World Cup qualifying runs, the more dangerous Jamaica will be. The question, of course, is whether there is enough time to make that count. More

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      Major Obstacle Removed in Saudi Bid for Newcastle

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      The end of a piracy dispute involving the Premier League broadcaster beIN Sports could clear the way for a Saudi-led group to buy Newcastle United.LONDON — Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund moved closer to acquiring a Premier League soccer team after the kingdom reached an agreement that resolved the league’s biggest objection to a proposed sale of Newcastle United.A $400 million deal in which Newcastle’s owner, Mike Ashley, would cede control of the team to an ownership group led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund had been reached more than a year ago. But the sale appeared to collapse over a yearslong dispute between Saudi Arabia and beIN Media Group, the Qatar-based television network that owned the Premier League’s broadcast rights in the Middle East.Saudi Arabia had since 2017 blocked beIN from operating inside its borders amid a diplomatic dispute with Qatar, its tiny but hugely wealthy neighbor. BeIN, the Premier League and other major sports property owners later accused Saudi Arabia of hosting and operating a rogue television network that pirated billions of dollars’ worth of content that had been sold to the Qatari broadcaster.The Newcastle sale was drawn into that dispute last year when beIN officials lobbied Premier League officials and the British government not to approve the takeover. The league never had to make a decision: Facing mounting public pressure and citing “an unforeseen prolonged process,” the Saudi group withdrew its bid.In the past year, though, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and a group of their neighbors have rebuilt diplomatic and economic ties by ending a three-year blockade of Qatar and normalizing diplomatic relations.Under Premier League rules, prospective buyers of league teams are required to be vetted in order to meet a so-called fit-and-proper standard required of new owners. The group involved in the Newcastle takeover, which also includes the British businesswoman Amanda Staveley and two billionaire property-investor brothers, walked away after the league spent months deliberating over the sale.At the time, the most problematic issue for the Premier League was the proposed sale of one of its members to an entity that the league itself had accused of harming the business of an important commercial partner. With an agreement to resolve the beIN piracy dispute in place, there is nothing in the Premier League’s rules to block the sale of a team to an entity that is an arm of a nation state. Manchester City, for example, the reigning Premier League champion, is controlled by a member of the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates.Smoothing the pathway to a sale could be a separate legal issue as well. Infuriated by the collapse of his deal to sell Newcastle, Ashley in May filed a lawsuit against the Premier League, seeking millions of dollars in damages and accusing the league of blocking the sale. The Premier League was not known to have ever previously blocked a sale, and with the Saudi group’s withdrawal, it appeared not to have done so with Newcastle, despite Ashley’s claims.A Saudi takeover would be the latest infusion of sovereign Gulf money into European soccer, joining owners not only at City but also Qatar’s ownership of the French champion Paris St.-Germain. The seemingly bottomless resources of those ownership groups have since built teams that are now firmly established as among the best in Europe, and reshaped the modern soccer economy.Newcastle’s long-suffering fans have been hoping to enjoy the same rapid rise ever since news of the Saudi interest first emerged. Supporters of the club have taken to social media by the thousands to champion the sale, signed petitions and even filed legal action against the Premier League to push the takeover forward.Newcastle’s owner, Mike Ashley, second from right. He sued the Premier League last year, accusing it of blocking him from selling it.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockNewcastle narrowly missed winning the Premier League title twice in the mid-1990s but has not won a major domestic trophy since the 1955 F.A. Cup. The last of the club’s four English titles came in 1927, and the club’s more recent history has been dominated by fan opposition to Ashley, the retail tycoon who acquired the team in 2007.The Saudi-led investors had proposed spending as much as $320 million over five years to turn Newcastle into a competitive force in the Premier League and to invest in infrastructure around its stadium.While the Premier League’s glamour and global reach have long made it a magnet for the world’s superrich — team owners currently include American billionaires, a Russian oligarch, a Chinese holding company and a Gulf royal — the prospect of a Saudi state buyout has led to scrutiny never seen before.When the agreement was first announced, human rights groups and even the widow of the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi wrote to the Premier League’s chief executive, Richard Masters, to urge him to block the sale because of the involvement of the Public Investment Fund, which is led by Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.That type of criticism is likely to resurface if Saudi Arabia resurrects, and completes, its deal with Ashley.Buying into a major international soccer league with a global reach would follow similar recent forays into the sports industry by Saudi Arabia. The kingdom has for years made plans to develop its economy beyond oil, and sports and entertainment have emerged as key parts of a broad investment strategy. Millions have been spent so far on attracting boxing, golf and motor sports events to Saudi Arabia, but officials are aware that none carry the appeal of soccer.Earlier this year, the head of the country’s soccer federation called on FIFA to study the possibility of increasing the frequency of the men’s World Cup to every two years instead of every four. Saudi Arabia is working behind the scenes to win the rights to host the event. More

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      For Mediapro and French Soccer, a Crisis With Many Fathers

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      When Jaume Roures and Mediapro walked away from a billion-dollar TV contract, Ligue 1 teams felt the squeeze. But he says they have a bigger problem.Sitting alone on a long table inside a committee room deep inside France’s national assembly, the Spanish businessman tried to explain why things had gone wrong, so very wrong.The businessman, Jaume Roures, the founder of a sprawling media company, was the latest figure — and perhaps the most significant — to be quizzed by lawmakers looking to understand why professional soccer in France had been brought to the edge of economic catastrophe by the collapse of a broadcasting contract. The deal, hailed as a financial game-changer when it was signed in 2018, was sold as one that would drastically shift the prospects of France’s top teams, moving them closer to their rivals in Spain and Italy, and perhaps even those in England’s Premier League, the world’s dominant domestic championship.Instead, the $1 billion contract with Mediapro, Roures’s Chinese-backed company, collapsed shortly after it had come into force in 2020. Roures suspended payments, calling for a renegotiation in light of the financial impact of the coronavirus pandemic. The league disagreed, and Roures, unable to agree to new terms, pulled the plug and left France, a country where he once sought sanctuary after fighting against the dictatorship in his native Spain.The impact of the failure — for Roures and his company, for club executives and for French soccer — continues to be felt.Clubs that not so long ago were consumed by giddy thoughts of being able to compete with some of Europe’s best are now consumed with darker worries about how they are going to survive. Clubs offloaded young stars and reliable veterans in the summer transfer market where they could, sometimes for fees below market value as the market itself cratered, to cover for gaps on troubled balance sheets. And an auction this year to select Mediapro’s replacement as the league’s broadcaster ended with Amazon agreeing to pay less than a third of what Roures and Mediapro had once promised.At his hearing in September, the bald and bespectacled Roures looked more like a college professor than a media mogul. Looking down at a sheaf of papers laid out in front of him in Room 6242 of the Palais Bourbon, he began by delivering a meandering soliloquy in Spanish-accented French that touched upon several factors for why, in his view, things unraveled so spectacularly. He was still speaking in a monotone when one of the lawmakers, Cédric Roussel, intervened.“You give the impression that it was everybody else’s fault except Mediapro’s,” Roussel, sitting on a raised dais he shared with other members of the committee, said.Many in France remain furious over Roures’s exit, over how he shuttered a new channel set up to broadcast games, over how he could walk away from his commitments while paying only 100 million euros in compensation and over how his businesses have started to rebound from the pandemic while the futures of French clubs remain shrouded in doubt and uncertainty. “We could have a delayed catastrophe,” said Pierre Maes, a consultant and the author of “Le Business des Droits TV du Foot,” a book on the soccer rights market.Midfielder Eduardo Camavinga was one of the best prospects to leave Ligue 1 over the summer.Jean-Francois Monier/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesCamavinga, 18, was one of France’s best young prospects at Rennes. Now he plays for Real Madrid.Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesRoures, in an interview with The New York Times shortly before his audience with lawmakers, doubled down on his belief that his plan would have worked had the pandemic not changed everything. For it to work, though, Mediapro’s new channel, Telefoot, would have needed to attract three million subscribers, far more than the reported 300,000 it had managed to lure by the time of its collapse.Looking back at how things unfolded, Roures says now, it was the French league that erred in not renegotiating with him. He contends that his new offer — about 580 million euros, or about $675 million — was double the amount the league managed to extract from Amazon; that the government’s failure to tackle piracy also contributed to Mediapro’s hasty exit; and that Canal Plus, France’s top pay-TV operator, tried to abuse its dominant position.That stance may explain why he was unable to negotiate his contract with the league in the fall of 2020. Roures, said a team owner who also sits on the French league’s board, “lost all credibility, and no one wanted to hear about him.”A spokesman for the league did not respond to a request for comment.Meanwhile, Roures, who rose to prominence at the turn of the century when he secured domestic rights to the Spanish giants Barcelona and Real Madrid, lamented the price he had paid. “There has been significant reputational damage for us,” he said in the interview from Mediapro’s headquarters in Barcelona, Spain.Asked if any part of his foray into French soccer kept him up at night, he said no: “I sleep like a baby.”While in his interview Roures attempted to provide various explanations for what happened, he declined to point fingers directly at France’s clubs or its league. But he suggested his new view from the sideline offered him a glimpse of the structural problem that he suggested could leave the French league perpetually in the shadow of its rivals: Teams there, Roures said, are far too reliant on player trading to balance their books.“I would say it’s the only major European league where the role of transfers is fundamental, and that’s a major weakness,” he said. The higher television incomes he had promised, he said, would have allowed clubs, at least in theory, to keep their top stars for at least a little longer.Paris St.-Germain, which this summer added Lionel Messi, left, to a lineup that already boasted Kylian Mbappé and Neymar, is the one French club that seems impervious to economic crisis.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesYet even amid the crisis, and the red ink splashed across balance sheets from Lille to Marseille, the French league has suddenly found itself more marketable than at any other point in its history. That is because of the presence of Paris St.-Germain, a team largely shielded from the financial turmoil that has engulfed its domestic rivals by the wealth of its owner, the government of Qatar, and strengthened by the summer signing of Lionel Messi.But Messi mania is not likely to be as profitable for the league as much as it will be for Amazon, which secured its cut price contract before the Argentine’s arrival.His arrival in France came shortly after that, and other contracts are locked in. “Amazon has got very lucky,” Roures said. “But the international rights for the championship have been sold up until 2025, and I don’t think it’s going to represent any greater income for the French league.” More

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      Cristiano Ronaldo Is Back and So Is Manchester United

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      A star returns with two goals in a resounding victory, restoring a sense of confidence to a club accustomed to sure things.MANCHESTER, England — And just like that, everything was exactly as it used to be, as if nothing had ever changed, as if he had never been away. Cristiano Ronaldo had scored, again. Manchester United was winning, again. The fans were exulting, again. He was home, at last, and so were they.For successive generations of Manchester United fans, Old Trafford was a place of certainty. The vast majority drawn here on Saturday afternoon lived through those days: of crushing dominance and Fergie Time, when a ticket came with a guarantee of satisfaction and seasons ended, reliably, with smiles and glory. Those not quite old enough to remember — a cohort a little larger than the club might like — have been reared on the stories, taught that such was the natural order.Over the last eight years, though, that surety has ebbed away. Most of the managers tasked with emulating Alex Ferguson have had moments of promise, however fleeting they proved eventually. Louis van Gaal and José Mourinho delivered trophies, though not the ones the club craves. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, the incumbent, has restored spirit, and belief.But none has quite been able to make Old Trafford, Manchester United at Old Trafford, feel indomitable again. Even in the midst of their highs, when things seemed to be going well and momentum was building, there was a palpable fragility, as if only the finest membrane separated triumph from disaster. There were too many missteps, too many stumbles, too many days when Burnley or Crystal Palace or Sheffield United turned up here and won. Too often, the guarantee was broken.The restoration of Ronaldo erases that at a stroke. There has been a distinct giddiness around Manchester United, ever since those whirlwind 24 hours at the end of August — the frantic calls from former teammates; the decisive intervention of Ferguson, his erstwhile manager and ongoing mentor — when he agreed to return.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockJon Super/Associated PressThere were 22 players on the field, but most fans had come only to see one.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe delirium, at times, has carried with it just a hint of gratitude, as if an institution as grand as United somehow counts itself lucky that Ronaldo has agreed to grace it with his presence.The club has devoted its social media feeds almost exclusively to Ronaldo, and has boasted incorrigibly of the sort of numbers he is capable of generating: 700,000 more Twitter mentions than Lionel Messi’s move to Paris St.-Germain, for a start. It hastily redesigned the giant mural that adorns Old Trafford so that he might be at its center. It rearranged its squad — selling Daniel James, asking Edinson Cavani to change his jersey number — so that Ronaldo might wear the No. 7 on his back again.Perhaps conscious that Ronaldo does not like to have his status questioned — one of his former managers at Real Madrid was once censured by the club for suggesting that Ronaldo was merely among the greatest players of all time — anyone and everyone connected to United has been careful to insist that title is objectively and scientifically his, and not merely a matter of opinion.Before Saturday’s game against Newcastle, Solskjaer suggested that Ronaldo would be the one who ensured high standards among the rest of the squad, that there could be no slacking with him present, something that sounds an awful lot like it should really be a key part of the manager’s job description. On Friday night, before his debut, it was Ronaldo who addressed the team.Ronaldo started against Newcastle in his return to Old Trafford. By halftime, he was already on the scoresheet.Phil Noble/ReutersSome of that, of course, can be attributed to the sheer scale of Ronaldo’s stardom, one that he has earned in an era and a culture in which individuals, increasingly, are the brightest lights of all. He has more followers on Instagram than any other person on the planet. He has more followers, in fact, than any single soccer team.He inspires among a portion of his fan base a loyalty that is sincere and ferocious in equal measure: one that not only brooks no debate about his sporting status, but reacts with fury to any mention of the rape accusation that prompted a self-described feminist group to fly a plane over Old Trafford on Saturday urging fans to “believe Kathryn Mayorga,” the woman who leveled the accusation. Prosecutors in Nevada said in 2019 that Ronaldo would not face charges related to the allegation, though a civil case is ongoing.To United, though, Ronaldo is more than just an idol. He is a link to a glorious past, too, one in which the world was organized much more to the club’s liking, when it was the unquestioned force in English soccer and, at times, the pre-eminent club in Europe, rather than one of two superpowers in its own city.And, most of all, he is a reminder of their old certainty. The 36-year-old Ronaldo has built his career on his inevitability. No matter how dire the circumstance or how stacked the odds or how incoherent the logic, Ronaldo would score and his team would win. His raw numbers — the goals scored and the trophies won and the records broken — do more than just illustrate his greatness. They prove his relentlessness.That is why it is futile to try to impose any sort of sporting rationale on his return. It does not matter that he does not really fit into Solskjaer’s tactical scheme or particularly address the flaws that remain in this team.Ronaldo’s return strengthened a roster already bulging with star power and skill, even if he may not be a perfect fit.Phil Noble/ReutersWhat matters is that, after United had struggled for 45 minutes to break down an obdurate Newcastle team, Ronaldo appeared to tap in the opening goal. What matters is that, after Newcastle had tied the score, Ronaldo peeled off into enough space to pick up a pass from Luke Shaw, burst into the box, and rattle a shot straight through Freddie Woodman, the Newcastle goalkeeper. What matters is that Ronaldo, on his own, makes Old Trafford certain again.With only a few minutes left of his debut, with the game settled — Bruno Fernandes and Jesse Lingard had added a little gloss to the score line — and the sun shining, the Stretford End, home to United’s most ardent fans, started to taunt the traveling Newcastle support. “You’ve only come to see Ronaldo,” they sang.An hour or so after the final whistle, when much of the rest of the stadium had emptied, many of them remained in their places. The post-match media interviews were taking place on the side of the field, just in front of them. Nemanja Matic and Fernandes and Shaw and Solskjaer had all come out to face the cameras, but they were still not satisfied. “We want Ronaldo,” the fans chanted, again and again, until at last he appeared, with a shy grin and a coy wave. They were still here to see him, too, the man who had made this feel like home. More

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      Park Ji-Sung, Former Manchester United Player, Condemns Racist Fan Song

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      Park Ji-Sung, who played soccer with the team from 2005 to 2012, said a song stereotyping Koreans was “very uncomfortable to me.”Park Ji-Sung, a fan-favorite former player for Manchester United, asked the soccer club’s fans on Sunday to stop singing a song in his honor that includes the racist stereotype that Koreans eat dog meat.As a decorated midfielder for the team from 2005 to 2012, Park earned the adoration of the team’s fans, who bestowed upon him a common honor in the soccer world: a song or chant, often performed in the stadium, with lyrics intended to praise him.But the reference to dog meat was “very uncomfortable to me,” even though he was proud that fans made a song for him and he understood they did not intend to offend or hurt him, he said on an official team podcast released on Sunday.He thought he had to accept it, he said, having come to Britain from South Korea as a young player who was unfamiliar with the culture. But he heard fans sing the song again in August when Hwang Hee-chan, a South Korean, made his debut for the Wolverhampton Wanderers in a game against Manchester United.“I should probably speak out more loud this time,” Park said on the podcast. Even if fans didn’t mean any offense, he said, “I have to educate for the fans to stop that word, which is these days usually a racial insult to the Korean people.”Manchester United said in a statement that it “fully supports Ji-sung’s comments and urges fans to respect his wishes.”References to dog meat have long been used as an attack on Koreans overseas, a stereotype rooted in the country’s longstanding battle over the ongoing, but diminishing, practice of raising dogs for human consumption. Most Koreans do not eat dog meat now; a September 2020 survey by Nielsen found that 84 percent of Koreans either have never eaten it or do not intend to do so in the future.The culture has “changed enormously” over the decades and even more rapidly in recent years, said Lola Webber, a director of campaigns to end dog meat consumption for Humane Society International. Most younger Koreans are appalled by the thought, she said, though some older Koreans still seek out the meat at specialized restaurants.“It is not part of mainstream culture by any means in South Korea,” she said. “It hasn’t been for a very long time, but especially in the last few years, there’s been a very vocal opposition.”Last week, President Moon Jae-in of South Korea suggested banning the consumption of dog meat, recognizing it as an international embarrassment.The world’s top soccer clubs have consistently wrestled with racist behavior by some of their fans. In 2017, Romelu Lukaku, who is Black, asked Manchester United fans to stop singing a song for him that contained a racial stereotype. Some fans refused, following the song with a new one: “We’re Man United, we’ll sing what we want.” More

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      The League of Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan Deserves Respect

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      Players in the National Women’s Soccer League are demanding the respect all female athletes deserve but rarely get. When will we stop treating women in sports as second-class citizens?That question needs pondering, once again, in light of the horrifying stories of male coaches accused of abusing and harassing players in the National Women’s Soccer League.It turns out that the premier league for women’s soccer in the United States — where stars from the World Cup-winning national team like Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan play — treats the legions of less-renowned players like pawns in a male-controlled game of exploitation and moneymaking.Rather than a celebration of female empowerment, revelations in recent days show the league as yet another example of the low regard society holds for female athletes. And in this case, it appears the athletes tolerated and suffered abuse because they feared complaining would doom the only U.S. league they have.“Burn it all down,” Rapinoe said in a tweet.She’s right.This league needs an overhaul in leadership. The change has already begun with the resignation of its commissioner, Lisa Baird. And there is hope that a new generation of female athletes — coming up in this age of reckoning and bold energy among the marginalized, connected to one another and to the world by social media — will not remain quiet.They are no longer afraid of the consequences, no longer shy about speaking truth to power.They have as a North Star the many female gymnasts — including one of the most powerful stars in sports, Simone Biles — who have shown that coming forward and speaking up can bring about change. Doing so can even send perpetrators who once would have continued lurking in the shadows off to prison.This was a turbulent, searingly painful week for women’s sports, but it also pointed the way to the future.Women’s pro soccer players will not continue to accept the status quo.No more tolerating coaches like Richie Burke, the former manager of the Washington Spirit, who unleashed a “torrent of threats, criticism and personal insults” on his players, according to The Washington Post.No more condoning men like Christy Holly, the Racing Louisville coach, fired in August amid a swirl of accusations about the toxic environment he had fostered.No more space for the likes of Farid Benstiti, former coach of the Seattle area’s OL Reign, who we now know was forced to leave after abusive comments.In an investigation published this week by The Athletic, current and former players accused North Carolina Courage manager Paul Riley of emotionally abusing players and coercing them into sex. Though he denied the allegations, Riley was fired by the Courage.The league’s players aren’t buying his denials. They are also disgusted with how the league was less than forthright about the behavior of these coaches. This weekend’s games were canceled when the players rose in unison, demanding reform.“Men, protecting men, who are abusing women,” wrote Rapinoe, the biggest American star in women’s soccer and one of the league’s few household names. “I’ll say it again, men, protecting men, who are ABUSING WOMEN. Burn it all down.”This statement needs some context. Baird, the N.W.S.L. commissioner, resigned on Friday after it became clear that she had done more to protect the men who run the league than the women who put it all on the line in competition.Sometimes it’s not just men protecting men. Sometimes it’s power protecting power.We all know who has the real clout — who stands at the top of the hierarchy. In the N.W.S.L., a vast majority of the team owners who own controlling stakes are men, as are a vast majority of the team executives and coaches.As is true in the rest of society, the sports world rests firmly on a simple, troubling dynamic: Outside of a few exceptions, professional tennis being one, women in sports take a back seat to their male counterparts.They receive far less media coverage, far less corporate backing, and far less love and respect from fans.The W.N.B.A. playoffs are on, full of great story lines and stunning play. As my recent column showed, good luck finding a jersey from your favorite breakout star.And good luck, as well, to the women’s teams who are crisscrossing the country on commercial airlines, scrambling to find flights where they do not have to cram their tired bodies into middle seats.The players in major American men’s sports almost always fly on chartered jets. Female professionals almost never do.The N.W.S.L. is far from a well-established league. Outside of a few cities, particularly Portland, Oregon, where Riley coached for years, its teams struggle for acceptance. The league’s nationally televised 2021 championship game is slated to take place in Portland on Nov. 20, and set to start at 9 a.m. local time. Before one of the biggest games of their lives, the players vying for the title will be waking up in the morning darkness and warming up on a cold field as the sun begins to rise.It isn’t easy to make inroads in the public consciousness in a culture set up so completely to favor men.Still, the N.W.S.L. has lasted longer and forged deeper roots than any American women’s professional soccer league ever has. The league is powerful because of what it represents: a future in which women are taken seriously and treated with full respect.Female athletes are boldly standing up for that kind of transformative change. But this week proves that their battle to be treated equally is far from over. In many ways, it is just beginning. 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      N.W.S.L. Cancels Schedule Amid Coaching Abuse Scandal

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      Under pressure for its handling of accusations that multiple coaches abused players, the top U.S. women’s league called off five games set for this weekend.The National Women’s Soccer League on Friday canceled five matches scheduled for this weekend as the league struggled to respond to a widening misconduct scandal in which several coaches were accused of abusing players, and the league faced charges that it had done little to protect its athletes.The league announced the match cancellations in a brief statement that noted “the gravity of the events of the last week” had made it impossible to ask its teams to play.“We have made this decision in collaboration with our players association and this pause will be the first step as we collectively work to transform the culture of this league, something that is long overdue,” Lisa Baird, the league’s commissioner, said in a statement.The NWSL announces an update regarding this weekend’s matches Details ⤵— National Women’s Soccer League (@NWSL) October 1, 2021
      Two head coaches accused of abusive behavior were fired this week alone, a third was dismissed for unspecified misconduct in August, and a fourth was allowed to leave his club amid player complaints about the way he spoke to and about players. The coach who was fired on Thursday, Paul Riley, who coached the North Carolina Courage to league championships in 2018 and 2019, was accused of coercing one of his former players into a sexual relationship.The cancellations of this weekend’s matches were driven by pressure from the union representing the league’s players and public outrage from stars like Megan Rapinoe, Alex Morgan and dozens of other players, who vented their anger about their league to their large social media followings on Thursday.On Thursday morning, the players’ union made a number of demands of the N.W.S.L. that it said had to be addressed by noon Eastern on Friday. Those included that the league begin an independent investigation into Riley; suspend any team or league staff member who had violated the league’s anti-harassment policy or failed to report a violation of it; and explain how Riley had been rehired in the league after being investigated for abusive conduct in 2015. The players’ union said in a statement, that it asked the league on Thursday night to cancel this weekend’s games. The statement acknowledged the fans who would be affected by the cancellations, and added: “As players, we hope that those who read this statement will hear that it is ok to not be ok. It is ok to take space to process, to feel, and to take care of yourself.”Much of the attention paid to women’s soccer in the United States is focused on those who play for the national team and win World Cups, a group of players that includes — in Rapinoe, Morgan, Carli Lloyd and others — some of the most famous women’s athletes in the world. But the N.W.S.L. is mostly made up of their lesser-known club colleagues, players barely eking out a living playing soccer, and the precarity of their situation has made abuse difficult to tackle, players have said.It also complicated any collective action the players wanted to undertake. Members of the women’s national team who play in the N.W.S.L. are not paid by their individual clubs, but by the United States Soccer Federation, and are therefore subject to the collective bargaining agreement signed with U.S. Soccer. According to that agreement, players may not engage in any strike or work stoppage, a clause that would also pertain to their employment in the N.W.S.L.But the players never needed to initiate a formal work stoppage once the league, belatedly recognizing the urgency of the crisis, canceled the games instead.The scandal had been growing for weeks. One N.W.S.L. team fired its coach at the end of August “for cause,” and another dismissed its coach earlier this week after an investigation into his treatment of his players. The incident that led to Friday’s announcement came Thursday morning, when The Athletic published an article that included allegations that Riley coerced a player into having sex with him; forced two players to kiss and then sent them unsolicited sexual pictures; and yelled at and belittled players.The Athletic also reported Riley was let go from his head coaching job with the Portland Thorns, arguably the league’s most popular team, in 2015 in part because of violations of team policy but then did nothing to warn players when another team quickly rehired him.Riley denied most of the allegations to The Athletic and did not respond to a request for comment from The New York Times. Hours after the accusations against him were published on Thursday morning, he was fired.The players’ anger had been growing. On Tuesday, the N.W.S.L. concluded an investigation into another team, the Washington Spirit. The league did not publish a detailed report of its findings but it announced that the Spirit’s coach, Richie Burke, had been fired and would no longer be allowed to work in the N.W.S.L.Only weeks earlier, a third coach, Christy Holly, the head coach for Racing Louisville, was fired for cause, and Alyse LaHue, the Gotham F.C. general manager, was fired for an unspecified violation of league policy. Holly has not spoken publicly about his firing, and LaHue’s lawyer has denied that she violated any league policies.And in a conference call held with media Friday morning Bill Predmore, a minority owner and chief executive of O.L. Reign, the Seattle-area team that employs Rapinoe, discussed his hiring of Farid Benstiti, who had served as the team’s head coach until he resigned early this summer. According to the Washington Post, a formal complaint of verbal abuse was made about Benstiti, who had a history of making inappropriate comments in a previous coaching job. Predmore said he had asked Bensiti to resign after he was “told of the inappropriate comments by a player.”“The decision to hire Farid was mine and I accept responsibility for that and I think in hindsight I got it wrong,” Predmore said. “How people wish to hold me accountable, I don’t think it’s for me to decide.”In the announcement canceling the games, and as she faced pressure to leave or be removed from her post, Baird offered her own apology. “This week, and much of this season, has been incredibly traumatic for our players and staff,” she said, “and I take full responsibility for the role I have played.” More

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      Cherish the Feel-Good Stories. They Won’t Last.

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      Enjoy the underdogs now, because money will restore Europe’s usual order soon enough.By Wednesday night, the humiliation was complete. In the space of 24 hours, the two teams that had for so long regarded themselves as the pinnacle of modern soccer — the greatest clubs in the world, the inevitable destinations of the game’s best and brightest, the rightful possessors of its biggest trophies — had been humbled, one after the other.First, Real Madrid had not only lost at home, it had lost at home to a team making its first appearance in the group stages of the Champions League, a team from the poorest country in Europe, a team from a place that does not, in many ways, actually exist. Carlo Ancelotti’s team now sits second in its group, three points behind Sheriff Tiraspol.They might have laughed at that in Barcelona, welcoming the chance to take a little respite from their own troubles by delighting in the demise of their rival. The schadenfreude would not have lasted long.The next night, Ronald Koeman’s team fell behind within three minutes against Benfica — the sort of team that Barcelona, in the days of its pomp and glory, would have swatted aside without appearing to break sweat — and went on to lose, 3-0. Barcelona’s record in the Champions League, a competition the club traditionally hopes to win, now reads played two, lost two, scored none, conceded six.This is as low as Real Madrid and Barcelona, the twin, repelling poles of the clásico, have been in a generation. Between them, they have won 7 of the last 13 editions of the Champions League. Now, there is a growing possibility that at least one of them will not even survive to the knockout stages of the tournament in the spring.Koeman’s job hangs by a thread. La Liga has, in effect, placed Barcelona in financial handcuffs. Real Madrid’s debts are colossal, too, a thunderstorm rolling in from the horizon. Both clubs have lost touch already with the teams they once regarded as subordinates — the Premier League’s elite, Bayern Munich, Paris St.-Germain — disappearing into the distance. Their auras have been shattered and their ambitions winnowed. Their era, by almost every available metric, should be over.Yet Real Madrid is currently top of La Liga. And Barcelona, diminished and dispirited, buffeted by crisis at every turn, has a game in hand. If it wins it, it will be only two points behind its old rival. The team that has twice been embarrassed in Europe has not lost a domestic game this season.The early weeks of a campaign are the time for the willing suspension of disbelief. The conditions, after all, are right. The sample size is still small. The vagaries of the schedule wield an outsize influence. Injury and fatigue have not yet started to have an impact on resources. It is in the opening bars of autumn that the game’s chorus line gets its chance to shine.Neil Maupay and Brighton narrowly missed a chance to move into first place in the Premier League.Matt Dunham/Associated PressThere are, at first glance, plenty of those stories around Europe at the moment. Last Monday, before thoughts turned to the week’s Champions League engagements, Brighton had the opportunity to go top of England’s top flight for the first time in the club’s history. It missed out, but a 95th-minute equalizer from its striker, Neal Maupay, meant that Graham Potter’s team has taken 13 points from its opening six games, as many as Chelsea, Manchester City and Manchester United.An unheralded Lens, improbably, lies second in the nascent table in France. Real Sociedad is second in Spain, and has not lost a game since the opening day of the season. Mainz and Freiburg are (for now) in contention for European spots in the Bundesliga; so is F.C. Köln, usually little more than a synonym for chaos.In Scotland, both Edinburgh teams, Hibernian and newly-promoted Hearts, are keeping pace with a stuttering Rangers at the top of the table. Celtic is struggling so badly that it is below even Dundee United. In the Netherlands, Willem II, from the provincial city of Tilburg, beat PSV Eindhoven last weekend to move into second place.In the Women’s Super League, both Tottenham and Aston Villa have started encouragingly. In Spain, Real Sociedad’s women have matched Atlético Madrid and Barcelona point for point so far.Tottenham’s women are, for the moment, above more pedigreed rivals in the Women’s Super League table.Andrew Boyers/Action Images Via ReutersNone of these dreams will last, of course. As the season wears on, the decisive factor is — more often than not — the depth of a team’s resources rather than the heights of its ability. In the year that Leicester City won the Premier League, the great exception that proves the rule, it was notable how little Claudio Ranieri, the coach, needed to change his lineup.Most weeks, almost uniformly, the core of his team was available. A story that, in hindsight, looks like destiny might have had a very different ending had Jamie Vardy pulled a hamstring, or N’Golo Kanté been the unfortunate victim of a mistimed tackle.Most teams, of course, have to endure those injuries, and when they do so, their ambitions suddenly shrink. It is the elite, the teams made fat by years of Champions League revenues and lavish commercial sponsorships, that can afford to carry squads capable of absorbing those blows without any noticeable dip in performance. As winter sets in, cold economic reality bites.That moment seems to come earlier every season. All of the uplifting stories of unexpected, early success warrant a second look. Willem II, for example, might be second in the Eredivisie, but it is probably significant that the team at the summit, Ajax, has scored 30 goals and conceded one in its first seven games. Willem II is second, but it is second by quite a long way.Real Sociedad’s men’s and women’s teams are both punching above their weight so far.Vincent West/ReutersThe same is true in France, where P.S.G. already has a healthy lead over Lens — nine points after eight games, and that after two months in which Lionel Messi has barely featured domestically — and in Germany, where Bayern has scored almost three times as many goals as third-place Wolfsburg. Barcelona’s women’s team, the reigning European champion, has scored 26 goals in four games. It has conceded none.The top four spots in the Premier League, too, have been occupied almost since the start of the campaign by the four teams expected to finish there in May. Juventus started the Serie A season abysmally, failing to win any of its first four games; Napoli, by contrast, has clicked almost immediately.And yet the most compelling parallel has not been last season, when Juventus limped to fourth, but a few campaigns prior, when the club started almost as poorly, and then won 26 out of 28 games to collect yet another title convincingly.Most troubling of all, of course, is Spain, where Real Madrid and Barcelona have diminished at startling, alarming speed, and yet remain out of the reach of all but two — Atlético Madrid and, at a pinch, Sevilla — of their supposed peers.There is a reason for that. Even with its finances ravaged, Barcelona can afford to maintain a squad that few others could countenance, the upshot of decades of unequal distribution of the country’s television revenue. This is the ultimate vindication of a risible, self-interested approach: between them, Barcelona and Real Madrid have stifled La Liga of competitive integrity so effectively that their floor is still above almost everyone else’s ceiling.Barcelona may have its problems, but it also has players like Ansu Fati.Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe same is true of P.S.G. and the Premier League’s Big Four and Bayern Munich, and it is true of Ajax in the Netherlands and Club Brugge in Belgium and countless other teams in countless other leagues. Only in the rarest circumstances would any of the unexpected contenders, currently sitting in positions of unaccustomed prominence, actually be able to turn their early heat into genuine light. But that is not the point.Whether Real Sociedad, in the end, wins the league this season is secondary to the idea that Real Sociedad — and by extension every other team outside the established elite — can believe that, in certain circumstances, it could win the league.That hope, naïve and unrequited as it might be, is crucial, particularly in an era of such yawning financial disparity. It is vital that teams believe in possibility, in the chance that the elite might stumble, that they might be able to profit, that the stars might align. That it is no longer possible, not really, to sustain that delusion suggests something important has been lost, and it may not come back.Courage and CowardiceSinead Farrelly came forward twice, at least. In 2015, she reported the inappropriate behavior — and that, given the scale and the nature of the allegations, is putting it lightly — of her coach, Paul Riley, to her team, the Portland Thorns. Earlier this year, an email chain made public by Alex Morgan on Thursday made clear, she made the same complaint direct to the National Women’s Soccer League’s leadership.And twice, nobody seemed particularly interested in hearing what Farrelly had to say.That this week she then came forward again, along with a former teammate, Mana Shim, demonstrated her conviction, her perseverance, her fury. That she did so publicly underlines her courage.That she had no other choice but to do so, though, reflects appallingly on the cowardice of the authorities whose job it is to the protect the players who stock their teams, who grace their league, who generate their product.Riley left the Thorns after that initial investigation, but had another job in the N.W.S.L. a few months later. Thanks to Morgan, we know that Lisa Baird, the league’s commissioner, effectively dismissed Farrelly’s second complaint, made in April, without indicating she would be investigating further.Only when the league’s hand was forced, when Farrelly and Shim had held it to account by telling their stories to The Athletic, was any action taken. Within hours, Riley was fired from his post coaching the North Carolina Courage. It was the second such dismissal in the N.W.S.L. in a matter of days, and the third for misconduct in a matter of weeks.There are two stories here. One is, although rooted in darkness, inherently uplifting: that the bravery of these women might make the N.W.S.L. a safer place for their colleagues and successors.The other has a very different moral: that the league itself, so conscious of its own fragility — perhaps overly — chose to sweep all those red flags under the carpet rather than look after its players’ well-being.“They say we should keep quiet because there might not be a league,” Thorns defender Meghan Klingenberg wrote after the allegations surfaced Thursday. “We should take low pay, otherwise there’s no league. Don’t talk about the crappy hotels, the bus fires, the unsafe fields, the substandard medical care.”The players of the N.W.S.L. — as all professional athletes do — make considerable sacrifices to play the sport they love. Doubtless, they make more than most, in order to help the women’s game to grow, and to thrive. But these sacrifices, let alone what Farrelly and Shim endured, are too high a price to pay. Talking about these issues is not what places the league in jeopardy. The danger lies in permitting them to exist in the first place.Sorry, Not SorryBruno Fernandes apologized for missing a penalty. But did he need to be sorry?Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockBruno Fernandes’s penalty was, it goes without saying, really quite a bad one. Impressively bad, almost, particularly for a player who has always seemed so unruffled by the stress and the strain of taking a penalty.For once, though, it appeared to get to him. Perhaps it was the circumstance — a chance to avert a chastening home defeat to Aston Villa — or perhaps it was the context: The presence of Cristiano Ronaldo at Manchester United these days means Fernandes has no room for error. As soon as he missed one penalty, he would have known he would not get the next one.Whatever the reason, though, and however bad the penalty, there was absolutely no reason for him to feel compelled to issue a lengthy apology to his fans and teammates a few hours later, just as there had been no reason whatsoever for Jesse Lingard to plead for clemency in public after his error condemned United to defeat against Young Boys of Bern a couple of weeks ago.Players do not have to apologize for making mistakes. They do not even have to apologize for playing badly. That is not the covenant between fan and athlete. All we can rightfully expect is that they try, that they commit, that they do their best. We have no right to demand that they succeed. It is the point of sport that sometimes, effort goes unrewarded.The question that arises from the fact that both Lingard and Fernandes felt compelled to do so is not — as it was represented, in some quarters — whether players have become too reliant on agencies to run their social media accounts. It is, instead, why those advisers might suggest a pre-emptive apology is necessary.The answer to that, of course, is the same as the explanation for why players engage agencies to handle Twitter and Instagram in the first place: Fernandes and Lingard, and the people curating their online presences, will have known that their missteps would be a vector for untold, untrammeled abuse. They apologized to try to staunch the flow. The problem there is not the apology itself, it is the abuse that necessitates it. That is the issue soccer has to address: not that players are apologizing, but that they feel the need to do so.CorrespondenceIniquities or inequities? Sometimes it’s hard to say.Paul Ratje/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesEagle-eyed as ever, there were several of you — not least Thomas Alpert and Brendan Greer — who wondered whether the mention of modern soccer’s “iniquities” was a typo; perhaps, those of little faith asked, I meant “inequities,” instead?It’s healthy for us all to admit to mistakes, sometimes. Was it a typo? No. I meant to type iniquities. Did I realize iniquities and inequities were different words? Also no. Still, now that I have been educated, I can say with some confidence that they both probably apply to 21st century soccer.Alex McMillan noted another lapse: “You did seem to get sidetracked in answering the question about whether any country, other than the U.K., fields multiple national teams.” Fortunately, Alex is a little more focused. As well as the People’s Republic of China, two of the country’s Special Administrative Regions — Hong Kong and Macau — field teams, as does the Republic of China, better known as Taiwan, but competing under the name Chinese Taipei.“Practically speaking,” Alex wrote, “in this case you have one country with four identities in and of itself.”Aaron Stern and Darren Wood, meanwhile, queried the decision to focus last week’s column on Marcos Alonso. “The admissions about Alonso’s conduct made it difficult to return to the piece about his technical ability and role at Chelsea with the same amount of interest,” Darren wrote.“What I found odd, unsettling, was the way your piece made concessions to conduct that some might judge as sufficient to exclude Alonso from analysis, then returned to its prior analysis of his sporting ability. Is the premise that players’ conduct and character might not exclude them from the efforts and attentions of both writer and reader, if their athletic skill merits it? How egregious must their conduct and character become before we exclude them from any type of analysis?”This is not a question that has a simple answer, and it would be an insult to your intelligence to present one. All I can do, I think, is to walk you through my thought process, while making no claim that my thought process is objectively correct, or that there is such a thing, in these instances, as objectively correct.The logic of last week’s column was that Alonso is an interesting case study as a player: not just a curiously exact specialist, but a player whose fortunes have ebbed and flowed quite dramatically, depending on the identity and the attitude of his coach. Given that Chelsea’s meeting with Manchester City was the most significant game of last weekend, it felt a fitting time to explore the nuances of his situation.It would, I agree, be irresponsible not to mention the broader context, both in light of his conviction in 2011 and his more recent decision not to take the knee. Doing that while maintaining a coherent thread is a difficult balancing act — and it is entirely possible that I did not pull it off — but I would hope, at least, that it made clear the piece was not attempting to cast Alonso as a straightforward, sympathetic hero.The broader issue, of course, is whether Alonso should be considered worthy of coverage at all. That is a judgment call — and as such, you are free to disagree with it — but my conclusion was that, as long as a distinct line is drawn between the individual and the athlete, objective coverage is both possible and reasonable. Singling Alonso out for praise on some sort of moral level would be one thing; assessing him as a player is another. That may not be the right answer — there may not be a right answer — but I hope it, at least, answers the question. More