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      Carli Lloyd Says She Will Retire From USWNT, and Soccer

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      Lloyd, one of her sport’s most decorated players, said she would finish her club season and then play four farewell matches with the United States.Carli Lloyd, a former world player of the year who was one of the United States women’s national team’s career leaders in goals, games and honors, announced her retirement from soccer at age 39 on Monday.Lloyd will finish the season with her National Women’s Soccer League team, Gotham F.C., and play in four exhibition games for the U.S. team in September and October before calling it a career.Lloyd played in four World Cups, winning in 2015 and 2019, and winning the golden ball as best player in 2015. She also played in four Olympics, winning gold medals in 2008 and 2012 and a bronze this summer in Tokyo.The 2015 World Cup may have been her zenith. She had a hat trick in the final, a 5-2 victory against Japan, with her third goal coming on an audacious chip from the midfield line.Lloyd scored 128 goals for the U.S. team, ranking her fourth behind Abby Wambach, Mia Hamm and Kristine Lilly, all retired. Her 312 international appearances rank her second behind Lilly.She had two goals in the bronze medal game at the Olympics earlier this month, her ninth and 10th Olympics goals, the most by an American player. She has also played for five different N.W.S.L. franchises.“Through all the goals, the trophies, the medals and the championships won, what I am most proud of is that I’ve been able to stay unapologetically me,” Lloyd said in a statement.Lloyd grew up in South Jersey and played at Rutgers. She made her national team debut at 23 and was seldom out of the team since.Other members of the women’s soccer team are weighing retirement. Midfielder Megan Rapinoe and defender Becky Sauerbrunn, who are both 36 and like Lloyd longtime fixtures of the United States team, both said in Japan that they would consider their soccer futures after the Games.Unlike some national teams in other sports, the women’s team operates in multiyear cycles rather than on a year-to-year basis, meaning players like Lloyd, Rapinoe and Sauerbrunn — and any others considering stepping away for any reason — faced the decision of most likely committing to the team through the 2023 Women’s World Cup and the 2024 Paris Olympics.For a few, that might be a bit too far. Rapinoe said she would discuss retirement with her partner, the basketball star Sue Bird, who is considering stepping away from her sport after winning her fifth gold medal at age 40. Sauerbrunn said she would go home and talk to the people closest to her before making a call about continuing her career, “to see if I still have it.”Lloyd, though, had done little to hide the fact that she was leaning toward walking away. One of the most driven and dedicated players in the team’s history, she talked freely — and with rare candor — about what might come next.After the Americans lost to Canada in the semifinals, she lingered on the field long after her teammates, seemingly unwilling to leave, and she spent the drive to the stadium for the bronze medal game staring out the window, she said, and reminiscing about the long arc of her career.Lloyd after the United States lost to Canada in the Olympic semifinal this month.Chang W. Lee/The New York Times“Obviously I’m at the tail end of my career,” she said after the United States won the bronze. “Physically I feel really good, but at some point you have to hang up the boots and live life. And I know my husband is eagerly waiting for me to switch off because it’s been 17 years of just grinding away.”She declined, then, to be more specific. She was more eager, she admitted, than she had ever been to get home from a tournament, to step back and clear her head. “First I’m going to take two or three days and sit by my pool and not move,” she said of her retirement decision. “Maybe four.”In the end, she needed only a little more than a week to make it official.“It’s always been in the back of mind at some point,” Lloyd said in her final public comments in Japan. “But I’ve always wanted to be the one to dictate that.” More

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      Manchester City Chases New Trophies With an Old Friend: Money

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      Manchester City’s winning formula has delivered trophies. But to win the Champions League, it may need to make a few expensive changes.All these years on, it is hard to identify the exact straw that broke the camel’s back. Perhaps it was the night when Carlos Tévez, in the thick of a Champions League game against Bayern Munich, seemed to refuse to come on as a substitute. Maybe it was the evening Mario Balotelli spent setting off fireworks in, and setting fire to, his own bathroom.Ideally, really, as a way of illustrating the mounting absurdity of it all, it would be what became known as the Birthday Cake Incident: the time that Manchester City either did or did not buy Yaya Touré a birthday cake, but most definitely did not buy him a Bugatti, a decision that prompted Touré’s agent at the time to declare that one of the club’s greatest ever players wanted to leave.Most likely, of course, the last straw was all of them and none of them. It was their weight, taken together, the apparently endless stream of minor problems blown out of proportion, that persuaded City — at some indistinct point, six or seven years ago — that buying the biggest and the brightest stars was more trouble than it was worth. That the club would, instead, take a different tack.Where that led was cast, most clearly, when Pep Guardiola’s team encountered, and overcame, Paris St.-Germain in last season’s Champions League semifinals. City and P.S.G. are often presented as two sides of the same coin, the twin vanguard of soccer’s new order: both soaringly ambitious, both unimaginably wealthy, both bankrolled by private individuals who are definitely not acting with the backing of Gulf states.For all that they have in common, though, their approaches have been starkly different. Their squads for those two games in the spring made that abundantly clear. In the second leg, as P.S.G. searched in vain for a way back, Mauricio Pochettino had to throw on the on-loan Moise Kean, the unheralded Mitchel Bakker and the unremarkable Colin Dagba.In recent years, City has generally had a star and a spare at every position.Carl Recine/ReutersAs Guardiola looked to see the game out, he could introduce Raheem Sterling, Sergio Agüero and Gabriel Jésus. That left Aymeric Laporte, Rodri, Ferran Torres and João Cancelo all waiting on the bench. P.S.G. might have had the greater star power — even before its signing of Lionel Messi this week — in Neymar and Kylian Mbappé, but its resources seemed much shallower than City’s.Where P.S.G. had concentrated its wealth on acquiring a handful of superstars, City had spent the previous few years gathering a squad of unrivaled and unprecedented depth.City was not shy of big names, of course — including Kevin De Bruyne, Agüero and Riyad Mahrez — but only a handful, like Raheem Sterling, might have been considered major stars before they arrived at the club. There was no sense of a divide between the headline acts and the supporting cast. Instead, City’s team seemed to have two $70 million players for every outfield position.The policy that built Guardiola’s squad had been instituted painstakingly, deliberately, with the club investing substantially more time and energy than before on making sure it was recruiting players who were humble, hard-working and unlikely to cause any reputational damage on or off the field. There had been quite enough drama in the years of Tévez, Balotelli and Emmanuel Adebayor.A decade ago, City’s stars sometimes offered more headlines than goals.Kerim Okten/European Pressphoto AgencyCity took great pride in its approach, regularly defending itself against accusations that it had spent its way to success by pointing out that most of its rivals had more expensive acquisitions within their ranks: Manchester United had spent more on Paul Pogba, Liverpool more on Virgil Van Dijk and Chelsea more on Kepa Arrizabalaga than City had on its (then) record signing, the defender Rúben Dias. In some cases, quite a lot more.Besides, the approach worked. The Champions League title might continue to elude City — like P.S.G., it has played, and lost, one final in the competition it desires to win above all others since its reinvention — but City now stands as the pre-eminent Premier League team of its era; champion in three of the last four seasons, five times in the last decade, and a favorite to add to that tally this year.Last season, as City marched to the domestic league title, Guardiola regularly rotated as many as half a dozen players in and out of his team every few days. His side retained a freshness, an energy, that nobody else — not even in the money-soaked, recession-resistant heights in which City operates — could match. City’s success is rooted not in the brilliance of its strongest player, but in the competence of its weakest.And yet, this summer, all that has changed. City has already broken the British transfer record to sign Jack Grealish from Aston Villa. It remains quietly confident of having the chance to do so again: It would cost, most likely, $200 million or so to pry Harry Kane, the England captain, from Tottenham, but City appears prepared to do it. It will, alas, no longer be possible for the club to claim that its spending power is no greater than anyone else’s.Is Harry Kane the final item in City’s shopping cart this summer?Pool photo by Shaun BotterillQuite what has prompted this significant, and costly, sea change in approach appears — on the surface — to be obvious. City is desperate to win the Champions League. It came closer than ever last season, strangely acquiescent in defeat in the final against Chelsea, and its executives and its manager are united in their desire to take that one last step.City has been richer than Croesus for 13 years; its patience is wearing thin. Guardiola has not won the trophy that means the most to him since 2011, when he was at Barcelona; so is his. Grealish was, by some measures, the most dangerous player in the Premier League last season, and second in Europe only to Messi. Kane is among the world’s finest strikers, a position where City, following Agüero’s departure, is noticeably light. There is no mystery here: This is a club pursuing the exact two players it thinks it needs to achieve its mission.And yet a couple of questions linger. Grealish is a brilliant player, imaginative and courageous and tirelessly inventive, but he has never played in the Champions League. He cannot, then, be a surefire guarantee of success in it. Kane has made a final, of course, but he is both more expensive and substantially more difficult to extract from his current club than, say, Romelu Lukaku proved to be.Grealish and Kane would, doubtless, make Manchester City even better than it already was. Whether they make it $300 million better, though, is a more taxing question. Whether City had to spend quite that much for a similar effect is a more compelling one. That both questions can be posed suggests that it is not inconceivable that there are other, off-field considerations at play.It may be, for example, that City feels it needs just a little more star power, not only to help it over the line both in England — where Guardiola has said it will take a haul of 90 points or more to win the title once more — and in Europe, but also to increase its commercial reach. Kane is the captain of England. Grealish, this summer during Euro 2020, became his country’s darling. City has learned to its cost, previously, that headline names can mean headline trouble; perhaps, as soccer continues its gradual lurch from competitive sport to content farm, that is not quite so unappealing.City’s first outing, the Community Shield against Leicester, produced a defeat. Don’t expect too many more.Pool photo by Tim KeetonA squad devoid of fixed reference points — big names who demand inclusion in specific positions — is ideal, of course, for Guardiola; his Platonic ideal of a team is 10 midfielders, interchanging positions at will. Both Grealish and Kane are more versatile than is perhaps realized, but their cost — if the latter joins the former — dictates that Guardiola must build around their strengths, at least to some extent, rather than deploying them as transferable cogs in his machine.That, too, offers a glimpse of another possible rationale for their arrival. Guardiola has regularly complained that his players do not win all of the individual awards for which they might be considered contenders. That they do not is rather less to do with some insidious campaign against his club among the news media and more centered on the fact that no star, at City, shines quite so brightly as the manager.No matter how many games De Bruyne dominates, no matter how many positions Sterling masters, no matter how many goals Ilkay Gundogan suddenly and inexplicably scores, their success is always subsumed by Guardiola’s; their brilliance always sits downstream from his. (Guardiola, and his entourage, are not displeased with this.)City’s squad had been built in Guardiola’s image. In many ways, the club has been shaping itself to suit his needs ever since its first title victory. That has proved devastatingly effective, but it also carries with it a distant cost: At some point, when he goes, a squad of players acquired by him, crafted by him and loyal to him will have to adapt to life without him.Not so, of course, Grealish or Kane. Both would, doubtless, thrive under Guardiola. More important, both — ready-made, plug and play stars — would continue to thrive after he is gone. That may not be next summer, or even the summer after that, but it will come at some point in the span of their contracts.They are both, first and foremost, signings for today: proof that this is a club desperate, urgent in its intent to thrive in the immediate. But their cost, their age and their profile suggest that they are something else, too: evidence that City is thinking not only about how to win even more under Guardiola, but how to keep winning once the brightest star it has ever known has gone.Game OnBayern Munich and its new manager, Julian Nagelsmann, open the Bundesliga season on Friday.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesStrictly speaking, this is not the weekend when soccer is back, since soccer never really went away. The early rounds of the Champions League were being played during the European Championship. The Gold Cup carried on until late July. And it is only a week since the French season started, right as the Brazilian men and the Canadian women won gold medals at the Olympics.But this is the weekend when the major European (men’s) leagues kick off, and thus this is officially The Weekend When Soccer Is Back. With fans, too: full stadiums in England, increasingly full ones in Spain and Italy, half-full ones (mostly, for now) in Germany. Soccer’s ghost era, with any luck, is nearing its end.The prospect of noise, color and life is not the only reason to greet the new season. The Bundesliga has a suite of managers in new roles, led by Julian Nagelsmann at Bayern Munich and Marco Rose at Borussia Dortmund. In Spain, the demise of Real Madrid and Barcelona may yet open the door for Sevilla to join the title chase. Juventus has a crown to regain in Italy.Erik Lamela will strengthen a Sevilla team with title hopes in La Liga.Cristina Quicler/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is England, though, where all of the ingredients are in place for a vintage campaign (after what was, if we are all completely honest, a fairly dull one last time around). Manchester City will start as the title favorite as it seeks to retain its championship, but Chelsea — bolstered by Romelu Lukaku, and buoyed by its status as European champion — carries considerable menace, too. So does Manchester United, newly embroidered by Raphaël Varane and Jadon Sancho.Better still, there is a pack of clubs gearing up to try to close the gap on the league’s great powers, a group containing not just the obvious names — the likes of Tottenham and Arsenal — but a smartly improved Leicester, a revamped Aston Villa, an engaging Leeds United and, possibly, Rafael Benítez’s Everton, a team that will, whatever happens, be one of the most compelling stories of the year. For those back in the stands, for those still afar, there is plenty to savor.P.S.G. Has Already WonLionel Messi was greeted by the masses in Paris on Wednesday.Yves Herman/ReutersThere were thousands of fans outside the Parc des Princes, clutching flags and burning flares and waiting for a glimpse, however fleeting, of the man who had made their dreams come true. There were hundreds more outside Paris St.-Germain’s shop in the center of the French capital, patiently waiting for their chance to get a jersey emblazoned with a name they never thought they would see.In a sense, of course, the story of Lionel Messi and P.S.G. is only just beginning: The club, as its president, Nasser al-Khelaifi rather oddly said at the news conference held to unveil the greatest player of all time, has “won nothing yet.” Still, nice to know that he doesn’t think that stream of French titles mean a vast amount, either.But in a way, too, it is over. The point of signing Messi, for P.S.G., is not what comes after: It is not the games he plays or the trophies he wins. It was the theater of the day itself: the crowd at the airport, the congregation at the stadium, the countless news crews, the endless content.No victory — perhaps with the one exception of the Champions League, but not necessarily — will attract quite so much attention, will compel as many eyeballs, will engender in fans the same feelings of excitement and awe as the piece of performance theater that captivated the planet over the course of last weekend. A transfer is not a means to an end, any more. It is the end in itself.CorrespondenceIt would appear that Brendan O’Connor has been gifted with just a touch of clairvoyance. “Why did Harry Kane sign a six-year contract? There is obviously huge benefit for Spurs in tying down their star player for six years in his prime,” he wrote. “But what’s in it for the player? He has no bargaining power or leverage in trying to engineer a move away.”I can’t give a definitive answer, sadly, but my reasonably educated guess would be that his reasoning was a blend of security — as a rule, players assume that longer contracts are safer and therefore better — and belief, three years ago, that he could fulfill his ambitions at Tottenham. The club, then, was coming off the back of two seasons of genuinely contending for the Premier League title, remember; a year later, it would make the Champions League final.As a rule, though, contracts of that length are likely to become less and less common, particularly for the game’s best and brightest: partly because the financial commitment for the clubs is too onerous, and partly because players (and their agents) know that the way to maximize earning potential is to keep transfer fees comparatively low. Players need leverage. Kane may yet come to stand as a warning of what happens when they do not have it.And, from Gavin MacPhee, an excellent theory on what it is that makes Lionel Messi so special. “Messi just about passes the test as coming from the Latin American street soccer development school. Yet he just happened to move [to Barcelona] at the point where the industrialization of player development by Western European countries was really starting to kick into gear. Messi is unique as a combination of the two great development environments.”That just about holds water to me, Gavin. So I suppose the question, now, is whether that blueprint can be repeated? Not to the same level as Messi, of course — his talent is what truly differentiates him — but can European teams use South America as a forge of very young talent, or (and better) can South American teams become as adept at polishing players as their counterparts across the Atlantic? More

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      Messi, After Signing With P.S.G., Is Greeted With Cheers in Paris

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      The soccer great Lionel Messi, speaking at a news conference, said leaving Barcelona had been a “very hard moment” but he was excited to join his new club.PARIS — When Lionel Messi said goodbye to Barcelona, his home since childhood and the place he grew to become one of soccer’s greatest ever players, he was in tears.Three days later, when he was formally introduced on Wednesday by his new club, Paris St.-Germain, any tears in the crowd were expressions of joy.“It’s wonderful,” said Alexandre Marienne, 32, carrying his 8-year-old son Kamil on his shoulders. “He’s going to help us build something incredible — Paris is definitely competing with the big names now.”When Messi addressed reporters, sitting next to the club’s president, Nasser al-Khelaifi, he said leaving Barcelona was “a very hard moment” but that he was “very happy” to be in Paris.“I still want to play and I still want to win,” he said. “I want to keep growing and keep winning titles.”Messi, right, speaking alongside Paris St.-Germain’s president, Nasser Al-Khelaifi, on Wednesday.Stephane De Sakutin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt was the culmination of stunning few days, in which Barcelona’s fans and players bid farewell in shock to the club’s greatest player, while in the French capital, P.S.G.’s fans hold their breaths, many unable to fathom what was happening.Messi repeated that he didn’t want to leave the club that made him who he is, that he had done “everything to stay.” His devoted fans wanted him to stay in Barcelona. The club wanted him to stay in Barcelona.But the financial forces that drive the game were greater than either individual or collective desire. The club could not afford Messi, even after he offered to cut his salary in half.So here he was, in Paris, about to play in the French Ligue 1, where financial rules akin to those that tied Barcelona’s hands will not come into force for a few more years.“The moment I arrived here, I felt very happy,” he said.Rarely has an athlete in the modern era been so associated with a single team. Maybe Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls is the closest comparison for American sports fans.But Messi’s connection to Barcelona ran deeper: He arrived at the club when he was only 13.Messi wept during a news conference in Barcelona on Sunday.Albert Gea/ReutersSo it was a strange sight to see him holding the jersey other than one sporting the familiar colors of Barcelona.But the legions of fans who greeted him in his new home city opened their arms in an embrace that, for the moment, overshadowed the darker message his transfer sent about the sport that Messi has so dominated.They did not come to discuss the danger posed by the immense advantage a small number of superrich clubs have in buying and keeping players.They came simply to see Messi.Men and women, many with their children by their side, came from all over Paris and other French cities far and near. Some were not from France at all. But they were all bonded by Messi.They gathered at the Parc des Princes, Paris St.-Germain’s stadium, to catch a glimpse of their talisman, who arrived in the French capital on Tuesday and signed a two-year deal with the French club.Mr. Messi called the ecstatic reception “crazy,” and said he was excited to get back to the business of playing soccer with some of the best players in the world.Messi in Paris on Tuesday, after arriving to sign a contract with his new club. Sarah Meyssonnier/ReutersFor many, the signing was no surprise: P.S.G., bankrolled by the state of Qatar, was only one of handful of clubs that could afford the 34-year-old star from Argentina.Yet countless supporters could still not believe it.“It’s just crazy stuff — we were not even dreaming of it,” said Yohan Aymon, a 19-year-old P.S.G. fan and forward for F.C. Sion, a Swiss club, who drove from his native Switzerland overnight.Since Qatar became the main stakeholder of Paris St.-Germain in 2012, supporters have watched the coming of a steady stream of the world’s most expensive players.From Zlatan Ibrahimovic to Neymar, David Beckham to Kylian Mbappé, Gianluigi Buffon to Sergio Ramos, no club has signed as many stars in the past 10 years.That has drawn criticism from countless clubs, players and managers in France and abroad, who argue that the competition is now unfair and biased toward state-sponsored teams like P.S.G. or Manchester City.But none of them, it seems, compares to Messi’s arrival. Fans lined up around the stadium at dawn on Wednesday, chanting and shouting as a giant photo of the player adorned the Parc des Princes, less than a day after Messi’s face was removed from the Camp Nou in Barcelona.“He made football magic, beautiful, and he’s a winner,” P.S.G.’s president said about Messi, as he stood next to him at a news conference on Wednesday. “There’s no secret he’s the best player in the world.”Messi will earn 35 million euros a season, or about $41 million, and will wear the number 30, which he had at Barcelona from 2004 to 2006. Neymar will keep his number 10.“We are entering a new dimension,” said Mr. Marienne, who said he had moved his vacation in southern France with his family to see Messi. “P.S.G.’s possibilities seem unlimited now.” More

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      How Facebook Failed to Stem Racist Abuse of England’s Soccer Players

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      In May 2019, Facebook asked the organizing bodies of English soccer to its London offices off Regent’s Park. On the agenda: what to do about the growing racist abuse on the social network against Black soccer players.At the meeting, Facebook gave representatives from four of England’s main soccer organizations — the Football Association, the Premier League, the English Football League and the Professional Footballers’ Association — what they felt was a brushoff, two people with knowledge of the conversation said. Company executives told the group that they had many issues to deal with, including content about terrorism and child sex abuse.A few months later, Facebook provided soccer representatives with an athlete safety guide, including directions on how players could shield themselves from bigotry using its tools. The message was clear: It was up to the players and the clubs to protect themselves online.The interactions were the start of what became a more than two-year campaign by English soccer to pressure Facebook and other social media companies to rein in online hate speech against their players. Soccer officials have since met numerous times with the platforms, sent an open letter calling for change and organized social media boycotts. Facebook’s employees have joined in, demanding that it to do more to stop the harassment.The pressure intensified after the European Championship last month, when three of England’s Black players were subjected to torrents of racial epithets on social media for missing penalty kicks in the final game’s decisive shootout. Prince William condemned the hate, and the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, threatened regulation and fines for companies that continued to permit racist abuse. Inside Facebook, the incident was escalated to a “Site Event 1,” the equivalent of a companywide five-alarm fire.Jadon Sancho, who missed a penalty kick during England’s loss in the European Championship final last month, was embraced by the team’s manager, Gareth Southgate.Pool photo by Laurence GriffithsYet as the Premier League, England’s top division, opens its season on Friday, soccer officials said that the social media companies — especially Facebook, the largest — hadn’t taken the issue seriously enough and that players were again steeling themselves for online hate.“Football is a growing global market that includes clubs, brands, sponsors and fans who are all tired of the obvious lack of desire from the tech giants to develop in-platform solutions for the issues we are dealing with daily,” said Simone Pound, head of equality, diversity and inclusion for the Professional Footballers’ Association, the players’ union.The impasse with English soccer is another instance of Facebook’s failing to solve speech problems on its platform, even after it was made aware of the level of abuse. While Facebook has introduced some measures to mitigate the harassment, soccer officials said they were insufficient.Social media companies aren’t doing enough “because the pain hasn’t become enough for them,” said Sanjay Bhandari, the chair of Kick It Out, an organization that supports equality in soccer.This season, Facebook is trying again. Its Instagram photo-sharing app rolled out new features on Wednesday to make racist material harder to view, according to a blog post. Among them, one will let users hide potentially harassing comments and messages from accounts that either don’t follow or recently followed them.“The unfortunate reality is that tackling racism on social media, much like tackling racism in society, is complex,” Karina Newton, Instagram’s global head of public policy, said in a statement. “We’ve made important strides, many of which have been driven by our discussions with groups being targeted with abuse, like the U.K. football community.”But Facebook executives also privately acknowledge that racist speech against English soccer players is likely to continue. “No one thing will fix this challenge overnight,” Steve Hatch, Facebook’s director for Britain and Ireland, wrote last month in an internal note that The Times reviewed.Some players appear resigned to the abuse. Four days after the European Championship final, Bukayo Saka, 19, one of the Black players who missed penalty kicks for England, posted on Twitter and Instagram that the “powerful platforms are not doing enough to stop these messages” and called it a “sad reality.”Around the same time, Facebook employees continued to report hateful comments to their employer on Mr. Saka’s posts in an effort to get them taken down. One that was reported — an Instagram comment that read, “Bro stay in Africa” — apparently did not violate the platform’s rules, according to the automated moderation system. It stayed up.#EnoughMuch of the racist abuse in English soccer has been directed at Black superstars in the Premier League, such as Raheem Sterling and Marcus Rashford. About 30 percent of players in the Premier League are Black, Mr. Bhandari said.Over time, these players have been harassed at soccer stadiums and on Facebook, where users are asked to provide their real names, and on Instagram and Twitter, which allows users to be anonymous. In April 2019, fed up with the behavior, some players and two former captains of the national team, David Beckham and Wayne Rooney, took part in a 24-hour social media boycott, posting red badges on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook with the hashtag #Enough.A month later, English soccer officials held their first meeting with Facebook — and came away disappointed. Facebook said that “feedback from the meeting was taken on board and influenced further policy, product and enforcement efforts.”Tensions ratcheted up last year after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. When the Premier League restarted in June 2020 after a 100-day coronavirus hiatus, athletes from all 20 clubs began each match by taking a knee. Players continued the symbolic act last season and said they would also kneel this season.That has stoked more online abuse. In January, Mr. Rashford used Twitter to call out “humanity and social media at its worst” for the bigoted messages he had received. Two of his Manchester United teammates, who are also Black, were targeted on Instagram with monkey emojis — which are meant to dehumanize — after a loss.Inside Facebook, employees took note of the surge in racist speech. In one internal forum meant for flagging negative press to the communications department, one employee started cataloging articles about English soccer players who had been abused on Facebook’s platforms. By February, the list had grown to about 20 different news clips in a single month, according to a company document seen by The Times.Marcus Rashford kneeling in support of the Black Lives Matter movement before a Manchester United match in March.Pool photo by Peter PowellEnglish soccer organizations continued meeting with Facebook. This year, organizers also brought Twitter into the conversations, forming what became known as the Online Hate Working Group.But soccer officials grew frustrated at the lack of progress, they said. There was no indication that Facebook’s and Twitter’s top leaders were aware of the abuse, said Edleen John, who heads international relations and corporate affairs for the Football Association, England’s governing body for the sport. She and others began discussing writing an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, the chief executives of Facebook and Twitter.“Why don’t we try to communicate and get meetings with individuals right at the top of the organization and see if that will make change?” Ms. John said in an interview, explaining the thinking.In February, the chief executives of the Premier League, the Football Association and other groups published a 580-word letter to Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Dorsey accusing them of “inaction” against racial abuse. They demanded that the companies block racist and discriminatory content before it was sent or posted. They also pushed for user identity verification so offenders could be rooted out.But, Ms. John said, “we didn’t get a response” from Mr. Zuckerberg or Mr. Dorsey. In April, English soccer organizations, players and brands held a four-day boycott of social media.Twitter, which declined to comment, said in a blog post about racism on Tuesday that it had been “appalled by those who targeted players from the England football team with racist abuse following the Euro 2020 Final.”Messages of support adorning a mural of Mr. Rashford that was defaced after Italy defeated England for the European championship.Lindsey Parnaby/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAt Facebook, members of the policy team, which sets the rules around what content stays up or comes down, pushed back against the demands from soccer officials, three people with knowledge of the conversations said.They argued that terms or symbols used for racist abuse — such as a monkey emoji — could have different meanings depending on the context and should not be banned completely. Identity verification could also undermine anonymity on Instagram and create new problems for users, they argued.In April, Facebook announced a privacy setting called Hidden Words to automatically filter out messages and comments containing offensive words, phrases and emojis. Those comments cannot then be easily seen by the account user and will be hidden from those who follow the account. A month later, Instagram also began a test that allowed a slice of its users in the United States, South Africa, Brazil, Australia and Britain to flag “racist language or activity,” according to documents reviewed by The Times.The test generated hundreds of reports. One internal spreadsheet outlining the results included a tab titled “Dehumanization_Monkey/Primate.” It had more than 30 examples of comments using bigoted terms and emojis of monkeys, gorillas and bananas in connection with Black people.‘The Onus Is on Them’In the hours after England lost the European Championship final to Italy on July 11, racist comments against the players who missed penalty kicks — Mr. Saka, Mr. Rashford and Jadon Sancho — escalated. That set off a “site event” at Facebook, eventually triggering the kind of emergency associated with a major system outage of the site.Facebook employees rushed to internal forums to say they had reported monkey emojis or other degrading stereotypes. Some workers asked if they could volunteer to help sort through content or moderate comments for high-profile accounts.“We get this stream of utter bile every match, and it’s even worse when someone black misses,” one employee wrote on an internal forum.Gianluigi Donnarumma of Italy stopping Mr. Sancho’s penalty kick. England missed three of five penalty kicks, giving Italy the victory after play ended with the score tied.Laurence Griffiths/Getty ImagesBut the employees’ reports of racist speech were often met with automated messages saying the posts did not violate the company’s guidelines. Executives also provided talking points to employees that said Facebook had worked “swiftly to remove comments and accounts directing abuse at England’s footballers.”In one internal comment, Jerry Newman, Facebook’s director of sports partnerships for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, reminded workers that the company had introduced the Hidden Words feature so users could filter out offensive words or symbols. It was the players’ responsibility to use the feature, he wrote.“Ultimately the onus is on them to go into Instagram and input which emojis/words they don’t want to feature,” Mr. Newman said. Other Facebook executives said monkey emojis were not typically used negatively. If the company filtered certain terms out for everyone, they added, people might miss important messages.Adam Mosseri, Instagram’s chief executive, later said the platform could have done better, tweeting in response to a BBC reporter that the app “mistakenly” marked some of the racist comments as “benign.”Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, told the BBC that the app had “mistakenly” marked some racist comments as “benign.”Ricky Rhodes for The New York TimesBut Facebook also defended itself in a blog post. The company said it had removed 25 million pieces of hate content in the first three months of the year, while Instagram took down 6.3 million pieces, or 93 percent before a user reported it.Kelly Hogarth, who helps manage Mr. Rashford’s off-field activities, said he had no plans to leave social media, which serves as an important channel to fans. Still, she questioned how much of the burden should be on athletes to monitor abuse.“At what point does responsibility come off the player?” she wondered. She added, “I wouldn’t be under any illusions we will be in exactly the same place, having exactly the same conversation next season.” More

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      Messi's Arrival in Paris Reflects a Troubling Time in Soccer

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      He could not stay where he wanted; few teams could afford him. Even one of the best players of all time was not able to resist the economic forces that carry the game along.In those frantic, final hours in April, before a cabal of owners of Europe’s grandest clubs unveiled their plan for a breakaway superleague to an unsuspecting and unwelcoming world, a schism emerged in their ranks.One faction, driven by Andrea Agnelli, chairman of Juventus, and Florentino Pérez, president of Real Madrid, wanted to go public as quickly as possible. Agnelli, in particular, was feeling the personal pressure of acting, in effect, as a double agent. Everything, they said, was ready; or at least as ready as it needed to be.Another group, centered on the American ownership groups that control England’s traditional giants, counseled caution. The plans still had to be finessed. There was still debate, for example, on how many spots might be handed over to teams that had qualified for the competition. They felt it better to wait until summer.If the first group had not won the day — if the whole project had not exploded into existence and collapsed in ignominy in 48 tumultuous hours — this would have been the week, after the Olympics but before the new season began, when they presented their self-serving, elitist vision of soccer’s future.That the Super League fell apart, of course, was a blessed relief. That this week has, instead, been given over to a dystopian illustration of where, exactly, soccer stands suggests that no great solace should be found in its failure.On Thursday, Manchester City broke the British transfer record — paying Aston Villa $138 million for Jack Grealish — for what may not be the last time this summer. The club remains hopeful of adding Harry Kane, talisman of Tottenham and captain of England, for a fee that could rise as high as $200 million.And then, of course, dwarfing everything else, it emerged that Lionel Messi would be leaving — would have to leave — F.C. Barcelona. Under La Liga’s rules, the club’s finances are such that it could not physically, fiscally, register the greatest player of all time for the coming season. It had no choice but to let him go. He had no choice but to leave.Everything that has played out since has felt so shocking as to be surreal, but so predictable as to be inevitable.There was the tear-stained news conference, in which Messi revealed he had volunteered to accept a 50 percent pay cut to stay at the club he has called home since he was 13, where he scored 672 goals in 778 games, where he broke every record there was to break, won everything there was to win and forged a legend that may never be matched.As soon as that was over, there came the first wisps of smoke from Paris, suggesting the identity of Messi’s new home. Paris St.-Germain was, apparently, crunching the numbers. Messi had been in touch with Neymar, his old compadre, to talk things through. He had called Mauricio Pochettino, the manager, to get an idea of how it might work. P.S.G. was in touch with Jorge, his agent and father.Then, on Tuesday, it happened. Everything was agreed upon: a salary worth $41 million a year, basic, over two years, with an option for a third. As his image was stripped from Camp Nou, a hole appearing between the vast posters of Gerard Piqué and Antoine Griezmann, Messi and his wife, Antonela Roccuzzo, boarded a plane in Barcelona, all packed and ready to go.Messi and his wife, Antonela Roccuzzo, on their way to Paris on Tuesday.Instagram/Antonelaroccuzzo/Via ReutersJorge Messi assured reporters at the airport that the deal was done. P.S.G. teased it with a tweet. Messi landed at Le Bourget airport, near Paris, wearing that shy smile and a T-shirt reading: “Ici, C’est Paris.”This was not a journey many had ever envisaged him making. But he had no other choice; or, rather, the player for whom anything has always been possible, for once, had only a narrow suite of options.There is a portrait of modern soccer in that restricted choice, and it is a stark one. Lionel Messi, the best of all time, does not have true agency over where he plays his final few years. Even he was not able to resist the economic forces that carry the game along.He could not stay where he wanted to stay, at Barcelona, because the club has walked, headlong, into financial ruin. A mixture of the incompetence of its executives and the hubris of the institution is largely responsible for that, but not wholly.The club has spent vastly and poorly in recent years, of course. It has squandered the legacy that Messi had done so much to construct. But it has done so in a context in which it was asked and expected to compete with clubs backed not just by oligarchs and billionaires but by whole nation states, their ambitions unchecked and their spending unrestricted.The coronavirus pandemic accelerated the onset of calamity, and so Barcelona was no longer in a position where it could keep even a player who wanted to stay. When it came time for him to leave, he found a landscape in which only a handful of clubs — nine at most — could offer the prospect of allowing him to compete for another Champions League trophy. They had long since left everybody else behind, relegated them to second-class status.And of those, only three could even come close to taking on a salary as deservedly gargantuan as his. He should not be begrudged a desire to be paid his worth. He is the finest exponent of his art in history. It would be churlish to demand that he should do it on the cheap, as though it is his duty to entertain us. It could only have been Chelsea or Manchester City or Paris.To some — and not just those who hold P.S.G. close to their hearts — that will be an appetizing prospect: a chance to see Messi not just reunited with Neymar, but aligned for the first time with Kylian Mbappé, who many assume will eventually take his crown as the best, and with his old enemy Sergio Ramos, too.That it will be captivating is not in doubt. And doubtless profitable: The jerseys will fly off the shelves; the sponsorships will roll in; the TV ratings will rise, too, perhaps lifting all of French soccer with it. It may well be successful, on the field; it will doubtless be good to watch. But that is no measure. So, too, is the sinking of a ship.Paris Saint-Germain supporters waited for Messi to arrive at Le Bourget airport, north of Paris, on Tuesday. Francois Mori/Associated PressThat the architects of the Super League arrived, in April, at the wrong answer is not in doubt. The vision of soccer’s future that they put forward was one that benefited them and left everyone else, in effect, to burn.But the question that prompted it was the right one. The vast majority of those dozen teams knew that the game in its current form was not sustainable. The costs were too high, the risks too great. The arms race that they were locked into led only to destruction. They recognized the need for change, even if their desperation and self-interest meant they could not identify what form that change should take.They worried that they could not compete with the power and the wealth of the two or three clubs that are not subject to the same rules as everybody else. They felt that the playing field was no longer level. They believed that, sooner or later, first the players and then the trophies would coalesce around P.S.G., Chelsea and Manchester City.It was sooner, as it turns out. P.S.G. has signed Messi. City may commit more than $300 million on just two players in a matter of weeks, as the rest of the game comes to terms with the impact of the pandemic. Chelsea has spent $140 million on a striker, too. This is the week when all their fears, all their dire predictions, have come to pass.There should be no sympathy, of course. Those same clubs did not care at all about competitive balance while the imbalances suited them. Nothing has damaged the chances of meaningful change more than their abortive attempt to corral as much of the game’s wealth as possible to their own ends.But they are not the only ones to lose in this situation. In April, in those whirlwind 48 hours, it felt like soccer avoided a grim vision of its future. As Messi touched down on the ground near Paris on Tuesday, as the surreal and the inevitable collided, it was hard to ignore the feeling that it had merely traded it for another. More

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      Lionel Messi Leaves Barcelona for PSG

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      Leaving Barcelona, Messi is set to join P.S.G. on a two-year contract that highlights the growing gap between soccer’s rich and its superrich.Paris St.-Germain, the French soccer powerhouse bankrolled by the state of Qatar, has agreed to a two-year contract with Lionel Messi.The agreement, which comes days after Messi bid a tearful farewell to F.C. Barcelona, the club where he had spent his entire professional career, concluded a brief and exclusive bidding war for Messi and reunited him with his former Barcelona teammate Neymar on one of the most expensive and talented attacking teams in soccer history.The deal also highlighted how Gulf riches have so altered modern soccer’s economics that even some of the world’s biggest, richest and best-supported teams are now no match for state-sponsored teams in the arms race to acquire the most elite players.Messi’s signing was confirmed by a team official with knowledge of the agreement and in a video posted to the club’s social media account. Messi flew from Barcelona to Paris-Le Bourget airport on Tuesday afternoon, emerging to wave to the fans who had gathered there to welcome him while wearing a shirt with the P.S.G. slogan “Ici C’est Paris.”P.S.G. has called a news conference for Wednesday morning to introduce Messi.Messi’s new contract is for two years plus a third option year, according to the official. It will pay him about $35 million a season, an enormous amount but only a fraction of what he was earning at Barcelona.Almost from the moment F.C. Barcelona announced last week that financial obstacles meant the club and Messi would not be able to continue their trophy-laden, two-decade association, Messi’s destination was in many ways a question of which of two Gulf-royalty-backed teams he would choose.Would it be Manchester City, owned by a brother of the ruler of the United Arab Emirates, one of the few clubs willing and able to spend freely in the era of the coronavirus pandemic? Or would it be P.S.G., the star-laden French champion financed by Qatar, a club that, like City, appears immune from a financial crisis that has shaken the global soccer economy?City tried to sign Messi a year ago, when he first suggested he might leave Barcelona, the only professional team he has played for, but he later recommitted to the Spanish club even as he criticized the way it was being run.A free agent after his contract expired in June, Messi had been unable to close a new deal with Barcelona because of a financial crisis that meant the numbers simply could not add up.To re-sign Messi, the greatest player in club history, Barcelona would have had to shed more than $200 million from its payroll to meet stringent requirements set by the Spanish league. It could not. Certainly not in a way that, according to Barcelona’s new president, Joan Laporta, would not imperil the future of a club mired in debt and expecting losses of almost 500 million euros in the next year.In a news conference on Sunday, Messi broke down in tears as he confirmed what the club had announced last week: that Barcelona’s current financial crisis and the Spanish league’s cost-control rules made it impossible for him to sign a new contract. Yet even as he said goodbye, Messi seemed to be trying to soften the blow of his departure, for fans, for the club and also, it appeared, for himself.“I did everything I could,” Messi said. “From my side, I did everything to stay. That is what I wanted.”Lionel Messi, 34, had been a Barcelona player since joining its academy as a 13-year-old.Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut a player reportedly earning about $132 million a year in salary and bonuses cannot move just anywhere.He may be 34, but Messi’s performance levels appear to be undimmed by age. Just this summer, he was the player of the tournament, the top scorer and the assists leader as he led Argentina to the Copa América, its first national team title in almost three decades.P.S.G. will add him to an attack that includes two of the best forwards in the game — Kylian Mbappé, the jet-heeled French star, and Neymar, the Brazilian who was once Messi’s teammate at Barcelona.With Messi in its star-studded ranks — and even if Mbappé is sold, possibly to Real Madrid, to recoup some of the cost — P.S.G. will once again take aim at the Champions League, the biggest prize in club soccer but a tournament that, despite P.S.G.’s billions of dollars in spending, it has failed to win. Messi has won the competition four times with Barcelona.Unlike Barcelona, though, P.S.G. is still trying to write its history. And it is doing that by spending money. A lot of money.It signed Mbappé and Neymar for the highest fees in soccer history and then surrounded them with even more high-priced and high-earning talent lured from rivals around Europe. Messi, for example, is joining a team that this summer added the Italian goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma, the Netherlands midfielder Georginio Wijnaldum and the Real Madrid captain Sergio Ramos. All three, like Messi, were out of contract.It is unclear just how P.S.G. will justify the addition of those salaries, and Messi’s, under European soccer’s cost-control rules. But like Manchester City, which broke the British transfer record this summer by signing Aston Villa’s Jack Grealish for 100 million pounds ($139 million), the club appears to be free of domestic or regional rules on spending.Both P.S.G. and City have been investigated by European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, for breaching financial regulations, but each has managed to avoid significant penalties by successfully appealing cases to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Its hand strengthened by those successes, P.S.G.’s influence in the corridors of power has only grown.Its president, Nasser al-Khelaifi, now sits on UEFA’s board and serves as president of the influential European Club Association, the umbrella body for more than 200 top-division teams across Europe. He is also the most senior official at BeIN Media Group, the Qatar-based broadcast network that is the largest buyer of UEFA broadcast rights.For Barcelona, on the other hand, the sight of Messi’s wearing a different team’s colors — something unthinkable as recently as six weeks ago — will be the bitterest sign of how powerless even Europe’s biggest clubs can be in a marketplace dominated by nation states with deep pockets and big dreams.Rory Smith contributed reporting. More

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      Lionel Messi Will Not Return to Barcelona

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      The soccer superstar will leave the only club he has played with since he was 13. The team officially announced his departure.Lionel Messi will not return to F.C. Barcelona, the club announced on Thursday.Messi, 34, who has been with the club since he was 13, was expected to sign a new contract with Barcelona on Thursday, but amid reports of a breakdown in negotiations, the team said he would not be returning.“Despite F.C. Barcelona and Lionel Messi having reached an agreement and the clear intention of both parties to sign a new contract today, this cannot happen because of financial and structural obstacles (Spanish Liga regulations),” the team said in a statement on its website.LATEST NEWS | Leo #Messi will not continue with FC Barcelona— FC Barcelona (@FCBarcelona) August 5, 2021
      Various issues between Messi and Barcelona have percolated for months, if not years, but it was the team’s decision to let the player’s contract expire at the end of June that precipitated this result.La Liga rules limit each club’s spending to a percentage of club revenue, and league officials had repeatedly said they would not weaken their rules to accommodate Barcelona, which was far over that limit.Barcelona was told it would need to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in obligations before it would be allowed to register any new players, including Messi, for next season. (Barcelona’s decision to allow Messi’s contract to run out means he was registered as a new signing, instead of a renewal, which might have been easier.)The club has spent lavishly in recent years. Messi’s most recent four-year deal, if he met every clause and condition, was worth almost $675 million. With the pandemic resulting in a drastic reduction in revenues, the club’s spending became untenable.In July it was reported that the player and the team had found a way for him to stay, with a five-year extension, but the conditions put forth by La Liga were not able to be met.The club’s statement concluded by wishing Messi well: “Barça would like to wholeheartedly thank the player for his contribution to the growth of the institution and wish him the best in his personal and professional life.”This is a developing story. Check back for updates. More

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      USWNT Falls to Canada, Ending Frustrating Olympic Trip

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      A second-half penalty kick sends Canada to the gold medal game, and leaves the U.S. seeking the bronze, and answers.KASHIMA, Japan — The referee’s whistle had barely finished chirping when the Canadian players sprinted to the middle of the field and unleashed an explosion of exaltation that echoed around an otherwise silent stadium. More