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      When Saying Nothing Is Saying Something

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      Leagues and teams probably would have preferred not to take a public position on the Israel-Hamas war. That they could not avoid doing so is their own fault.By the end of last week, England’s Football Association doubtless felt that it had done the best it could, that after hours and hours of talks, it had settled on what might best be described as the least worst option.Last Friday night, England’s men’s team was playing an exhibition match against Australia. Most expected that the game would take note of the violence crackling across Israel and Gaza, commemorate the victims and acknowledge the suffering. Executives at the F.A. knew they would have to tread carefully.They had weighed the risk that a minute’s silence, soccer’s traditional manifestation of grief, might be interrupted, but they determined that having it was the appropriate thing to do. There would be black armbands. And to ward off the chance that either Israeli or Palestinian flags might appear in the crowd, they declared that all banners except for those of the competing teams would be forbidden.The most difficult decision, though, was to do with the Wembley Arch, the soaring steel beam that rises above the stadium.The Wembley Arch has become the way in which English soccer expresses its opinions. It was illuminated in the French tricolor in 2015, to show solidarity after the Paris terror attacks, and in Ukraine’s yellow and blue after that country was invaded by Russia last year. It has been used to mark the death of Pelé, to demonstrate admiration for Britain’s National Health Service and to show support for the L.G.B.T.Q. Pride campaign.John Mann, the British government’s antisemitism czar, assumed the F.A. would do the same for Israel. But, aware of the political sensitivity of such a gesture, he had suggested that the blue and white of the Jewish prayer shawl, rather than the Israeli flag, might act as a compromise.His suggestion was not adopted. It is hard to know, for certain, precisely why that was, but it seems a fair assumption that the F.A. believed it would be interpreted as taking a side at a time when civilians in Gaza were suffering, and dying, too. As fans starting streaming into the game, the arch stood dark.On this subject, more than most, saying nothing is interpreted in itself as saying something. The F.A.’s perceived inaction was met with fury. Rabbi Alex Goldberg, the chairman of the F.A.’s Faith in Football Task Force, resigned in protest. Eventually, the organization’s chief executive, Mark Bullingham, admitted that the decision had “caused hurt in the Jewish community.”Mann was rather less circumspect. “The Football Association,” he said, “looks hopelessly out of its depth.”England’s players before last week’s friendly against Australia.Naomi Baker/Getty ImagesThere is, of course, a very obvious reason for that. The issue of Israel and Palestine is the most intractable geopolitical problem of the modern age. Its complexity and its delicacy have perplexed diplomats, politicians, theorists and thinkers for more than half a century.For all that the F.A. employs plenty of sharp, bright minds, it is not a government. It does not have a department that deals with statehood. It exists, at least in part, to work out whom Mansfield will play in the cup, and to administer fines to part-time players who get yellow cards on Sunday mornings. It is not so much that it is out of its depth on geopolitics. It is that it occupies a wholly different pool.The F.A. is not alone, of course, in having struggled to calibrate its response to the devastation in Israel and Gaza over the last two weeks. The Premier League, too, has been accused of ducking the issue, of falling back on empty gestures and words picked clean of any meaning.The world’s most popular domestic league and the 20 clubs it comprises released almost verbatim statements last week, stating that they were “shocked and saddened by the escalating crisis” and condemning “the horrific and brutal acts of violence against innocent civilians.” They will, this weekend, wear black armbands and observe silences, too.Manor Solomon, the league’s only Israeli player, found that insufficient. The statement, he said in an interview on Israeli television, was “vanilla,” an attempt to say something while saying nothing. Erez Halfon, the chairman of the Israeli Professional Football Leagues, wrote to his Premier League counterpart, Richard Masters, to express his disappointment at what he perceived as an equivocal response from English soccer.At this point, it is worth pivoting away from the relative merits of these perspectives — the only thing less worthwhile than soccer teams commenting on a war is soccer writers doing it — and asking, instead, quite how the sport found itself in this situation.It is difficult not at least to acknowledge the faint absurdity of it all. The death toll from the conflict has already stretched beyond 5,000. Around a million people have been displaced. Many more have been deprived of water, gas and electricity. Quite why there should be so much energy expended on what English soccer thinks of it all is not clear.Armbands and moments of silence have been criticized as insufficient, an effort to signal something without saying anything.Henry Nicholls/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut then perhaps the F.A. and the Premier League only have themselves to blame. Officially, both relentlessly self-define as apolitical. Such is soccer’s official sense of self: It is a force for unity, for joy, for bringing people together, not to divide and to pontificate and to judge.Obviously, that position has always been a bit of a stretch. Soccer indulges in plenty of politics. It has just conveniently decided that things are only political if it disagrees with them.And so the political symbolism of the poppy, for example, is ignored completely. The Premier League’s stance on ownership — that everything is fine as long as you are not a convicted criminal, essentially — is presented as a form of neutrality, rather than an ideological acceptance of Thatcherite economics and a tacit embrace of some of the most brutal governments in the world.In recent years, though, another of the sport’s defining traits — a self-importance that bleeds into pomposity — has made its stance even more tenuous. There was a point, not all that long ago, when it was relatively rare to witness a minute’s silence at a soccer game in England.If a beloved player or manager died, a club might identify a moment’s reflection as suitable tribute. Occasionally, the sport would come together to commemorate a soccer-specific disaster — the Munich air crash, or the tragedies at Hillsborough, Heysel, Bradford and Ibrox — or, by governmental edict, to honor the death of a member of the royal family.Slowly but surely, that has shifted. This year alone, there have been minutes’ silences for the victims of earthquakes in Turkey, Syria and Morocco and the flooding in Libya, as well as for the death of John Motson, a longtime BBC commentator. They are now so frequent, in fact, that some clubs are reported to have complained privately of “grief fatigue.”It is hard to argue that any of those instances were unworthy of remembrance — it is no great suffering, after all, to stay quiet for 60 seconds — but piece by piece they have helped to feed a sense that soccer must say something, must do something. That part of its role is to act as an arbiter of significance, a national barometer of sorrow.The conclusion of that, of course, was always going to be what happened over the last two weeks: the game’s being expected to make a statement about an issue that is inherently divisive, one in which both doing something and doing nothing could only be interpreted as political. It is tempting to say that, to some extent, English soccer brought this on itself.But it is not wholly true. That at a time of international crisis lawmakers have seemingly spent so much time focusing on soccer’s response is not simply a matter of political expedience — it being much easier to criticize someone else’s response than to think about one’s own actions — but a measure of the role the game plays in national life.Britain is an increasingly secular place: Only 6 percent of the country regards itself as actively Christian, and while (roughly) a quarter of the four million or so Muslims in Britain attend mosque, that still equates to only 1.5 percent of the population. The nation’s politics are, like everywhere else, a mess of tribalism and division. Very few national institutions could reasonably claim to offer a snapshot of the British public.Except, of course, for soccer. More than a million people attend soccer games across the country every weekend. Several million more watch on television, and still more do so internationally. The clubs themselves are seen not as transactional franchises but, with a naïve romanticism, as trusted civic institutions.It is in its soccer stadiums, more than anywhere else, that Britain can both see and project itself. It is there that people can, or at least feel like they can, make themselves heard. It is as good a gauge as any as to the country’s feelings, its mood, its priorities. It is where it speaks, and where it is seen to speak, whether it says something or nothing at all.Free Hit for BrazilNeymar will be out for months with a knee injury.Andres Cuenca/ReutersFor Brazil, the last couple of weeks started badly and then grew steadily worse. First, the country’s national team was held to a draw on home turf by Venezuela, traditionally one of South America’s afterthoughts. Several players, in the immediate aftermath, suggested they had been struggling to adapt to the methods employed by their new coach, Fernando Diniz.A few days later, Brazil traveled to Montevideo to face rather more daunting opposition: Uruguay, now under the tutelage of soccer’s foremost philosopher-purist, Marcelo Bielsa. The hosts won, 2-0.Neymar, still his country’s brightest star, left the field in tears just before halftime. Tests have subsequently confirmed that he tore the anterior cruciate ligament and the meniscus in his left knee. He could be absent for as much as a year. He described it as one of “the worst” moments in his career.That is the bad news. The good news is that, in contrast to the personal impact on Neymar, the consequences for Brazil will be vanishingly small.South America’s qualifying process for the World Cup has long been one of the most compelling, most exacting contests in global soccer. The pool is far smaller, and the reward far closer, than in Europe, Africa or Asia — 10 teams going for four automatic spots — but what it has lacked in variety it has always made up for in intensity.There might, after all, be two overwhelming favorites to qualify in every cycle — Brazil and Argentina — but their progress is rarely smooth and never straightforward. It is not just that a pack of as many as six teams lies in wait, more than capable of capitalizing on any misstep, but that the very geography of the tournament presents a challenge.Bolivia plays many of its home games 12,000 feet above sea level. Ecuador, which tends to play at an altitude of 9,000 feet, has lost just one competitive game on home soil this decade. Qualifying for the World Cup, for any South American nation, has always been climbing a mountain.Not so much these days, though. The World Cup’s expansion means that six South American teams will qualify automatically to play in the United States, Canada and Mexico in 2026. A seventh will be routed through the intercontinental playoffs. South American qualifying, for so long such a high-wire act, now operates with a colossal safety net. Brazil has had a bad start, yes, but in all likelihood it will mean little or nothing in a couple of years’ time. It is going to have to try a lot harder than this not to qualify for the World Cup.CorrespondenceJames Warren and Diane Kravif both came away from last week’s newsletter, on Ian Graham’s attempts to help soccer learn more about itself, feeling shortchanged. The idea sounds all well and good, they both wrote, but it was distinctly lacking on concrete examples.“What kind of data did Dr. Graham analyze and how did the team apply his analyses to improve Liverpool’s performance and outcomes?” Diane asked. James was thinking along similar lines: “Might you at some point give an example or two of how Graham helped Liverpool improve? What do they, and others, have data on regarding their teams, and how is that used to attempt to improve performance?”This is quite a complex thing to explain quickly, which is why it was omitted last week. So strap yourselves in: Graham’s view — shared by most people in what everyone now calls “the space” — is that data is still most effective in recruitment. Adding the right player to a team, he and others argue, can have a much more pronounced, and faster, impact than using complex algorithms to fine-tune tactics.That data (in Liverpool’s case; other teams will focus on other things) can essentially be boiled down to whether every decision made by an individual player makes it more, or less, likely that that player’s team will score a goal.That is established by using both event data — passes, shots, actual things that happen, measured in detail sufficiently granular that it includes not only where a pass was played, but at what height and speed — and so-called tracking data, which examines where players move when they are not in possession of the ball. The metrics that soccer favors — such as expected goals (the quality of shots a team or player has) and expected assists (the quality of chances they create) — all flow from that model.That is not to say, though, that clubs like Liverpool have not used the information they possess to try to change the way their teams play. Liverpool has spent a long time working out how a team might best be spread across the field in order to dominate space, both in and out of possession. A lot of other work has been done, across the game, on what sort of offensive maneuvers are most likely to lead to shots on goal.In fact, that may well be where data has made its most obvious contribution to the way the game is played. There has, over the last decade, been a steady decrease in the number of shots teams take from long distance, a reduction that tracks quite neatly with the rise of analytics. A long-range effort is, by definition, a low-percentage chance. The data discourages such shots, and so teams, increasingly, do too.This newsletter would not be complete, though, without at least some airy, left-field challenge to an unchallenged convention. So thanks to Jeff Cadman for obliging.“Do we still need the offside rule?” he asked. “Would goal-hanging still occur in the modern game? It is hard to see any of the top teams changing their style or formation to have one player constantly standing next to the opposing goalkeeper.”This is a great question, and one I will admit to having previously contemplated. My conclusion was that Jeff’s thesis is basically right, but that soccer operates according to the law of unintended consequences: Nobody, when soccer decided to abolish the back pass to the goalkeeper, foresaw the rise of the high press. My guess is that abolishing offside would lead teams to defend deeper regardless, but I am also prepared to accept that my guess might be wrong. More

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      Everton Sale Stalls Amid New Questions About 777 Partners

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      The U.S. firm bidding for the Premier League club, 777 Partners, has failed to provide required information to a British regulator.The proposed sale of the Premier League soccer team Everton F.C. to a Miami-based holding company has stalled because the firm, 777 Partners, has failed to provide audited financial statements to a British government regulator that must approve the deal.The regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, delivered its request to 777 Partners this month, according to multiple people with direct knowledge of the approval process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. If the company does not provide the requested financials or an acceptable explanation, its proposed takeover of Everton — a deal involving hundreds of millions of dollars in assumed debt and a coveted place in the world’s richest soccer league — could fall apart.The missing documents are the most significant complication to date in the effort by 777 Partners to add Everton to the collection of high-profile but financially troubled teams it has acquired over the past two years.A failure to close the deal could have severe consequences for the financial viability of Everton, a founding member of the Premier League saddled with the ongoing costs of a half-built new stadium, more than $500 million in debt and a projected annual loss of about $100 million. Everton’s finances are so dire that the club requires monthly infusions of millions of dollars, most recently a multimillion-dollar loan from 777 Partners, to keep operating.“Out of respect for the process, 777 Partners will not be commenting on the ongoing regulatory approval process for its proposed acquisition of Everton F.C.,” the company said in a statement.Everton’s current owner, Farhad Moshiri, on Monday dismissed concerns of any holdup or the suitability of 777 Partners as custodian of Everton. “They are highly professional and deliver exactly when they say they will, and I look forward to them achieving all their regulatory approvals and proceeding to completion on the timetable we set,” he told Sky Sports News.When it announced in September that it had reached a deal for a controlling interest in Everton, 777 Partners said it hoped to complete its takeover by the end of the year. That timeline now seems questionable.For the sale to be approved, 777 Partners must convince not only the Financial Conduct Authority but also the Premier League and England’s Football Association that it would be what they classify as a “fit and proper” steward of the 145-year-old club.But according to multiple people familiar with the process and a review of documents related to it, those bodies are unsatisfied with the financial statements that have been provided. In particular, they are uneasy about the failure of 777 Partners to provide up-to-date audited financial records for a holding company whose subsidiaries include not only well-known soccer teams in Belgium, Brazil, Germany and France but also investments in structured finance, insurance, media and airplane leasing.Wearing caps, Steven Pasko, left, and Josh Wander, the owners of 777 Partners, attended an Everton match last month. Peter Byrne/PA Images, via Getty ImagesThe audited records are not the only hurdle to approval of an Everton sale. The authorities are also asking the firm, run by its owners, Josh Wander and Steve Pasko, to provide details of the source of the funds behind the acquisition.The questions mirror concerns that the Belgian soccer authorities raised last year as they considered whether to grant a license to another one of the company’s teams, Standard Liège. In those discussions, 777 Partners told the Belgian soccer federation’s licensing committee that it could not provide the firm’s most recently audited accounts — a routine requirement in any assessment of the suitability and solidity of the businesses financing teams in the country’s top league.Eventually, the prospect of tossing one of Belgian soccer’s biggest teams out of the league was deemed unacceptable by the committee, and a compromise was found. Now, 777 Partners finds itself in the same position, and the clock is ticking again.While 777 Partners is focusing on completing its purchase of Everton, current and former employees have questioned its own viability. The company, which has rapidly expanded since it was founded in 2015, continues to miss routine payments to businesses, vendors and partners, including brokers that acted on some of the soccer deals, four people familiar with 777’s operations said.One person said the firm, which Mr. Wander recently claimed had 3,000 employees, has missed payroll on at least two occasions. Current and former employees have also reported that bonus payments, a major component of some executives’ compensation, have gone unpaid.777 Partners said Tuesday that “all contractually guaranteed bonuses have been paid,” but acknowledged a different incident this year in which it failed to pay the electric bill for its headquarters, an oversight that a spokesman attributed to a miscommunication.Should 777 Partners provide a fuller picture of its finances to British regulators, they most likely will find that most of 777’s soccer adventures have been funded by a single company, A-Cap. A longtime lender to 777 Partners, A-Cap has the largest exposure to many of 777’s businesses, including the soccer investments.A unit of A-Cap, for example, funded most of a loan of at least $25 million to Everton after the deal to buy the team was announced, two people familiar with the matter said. At 777 Partners, the reliance on money from A-Cap — loans now totaling at least $1 billion — has grown so large that 777 Partners is required to regularly update A-Cap executives about continuing business plans, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.The relationship between the firms is so enmeshed that last year 777 Partners provided A-Cap with a $9 million loan to acquire a beachfront apartment in one of Miami’s wealthiest neighborhoods. Officials from 777 Partners declined to comment on the arrangement. A-Cap did not respond to an email seeking details of its relationship with 777 Partners.The questions about 777 Partners’s finances and its soccer ambitions have not appeared to affect its figurehead, Mr. Wander. He was recently elected to the board of European Club Association, an influential grouping of European soccer’s top teams.That board seat was highlighted in a prospectus produced by 777 Partners to raise even more capital for its soccer business. The group hopes to raise about $250 million by the end of the year to help finance its purchase of Everton, which, without a new owner or fresh capital, risks bankruptcy. More

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      Can This Man Make Soccer Smarter?

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      Ian Graham helped transform Liverpool from a faded giant into soccer’s most cutting-edge club. Now he wants to do the same for everyone else.Ian Graham does not make for an especially likely revolutionary. He has a distinctly academic air: genial, whip-smart, just a touch crumpled. He is not a natural salesman. He does not particularly enjoy giving interviews. Roughly once every 10 minutes, he allows a mischievous, outré sense of humor to get the better of him. He feels this makes appearing on any broadcast medium something of a risk.It is hard to deny, though, that he is a resoundingly successful insurgent. Twenty years ago, he was among the first to explore the idea that soccer might be able to understand itself better by examining the vast reams of data produced by every single player in every single game. He did not so much pioneer the field of soccer analytics as help to conjure it into existence.Then, over the course of a decade at Liverpool, he acted as proof of concept. From scratch, he built a data department that came to be regarded as one of the most sophisticated in the sport. His systems, his methods and his insights turned a club that had long been a drifting, fading giant into a beacon of innovation.There are two ways to gauge his influence. The simplest is soccer’s default: the weighing of silver and gold. In his time at Liverpool, the club was crowned champion of England — for the first time in 30 years — Europe and the world. It made the Champions League final, the sport’s biggest game, three times in five seasons.But a better measure, perhaps, is the wake he left rather than the trail he blazed. When he joined Liverpool in 2012, the fact that an elite team might employ an actual scientist — he holds a doctorate in polymer physics, but deploys his honorific only as a joke — was seen as either outlandish or absurd.Soccer had long been resistant to outsiders, those who had not established their bona fides within the sport as players or coaches. Insiders regarded academics with particular contempt. The sport still viewed itself as too dynamic, too fluid, too poetic to be reduced to the mundanity of numbers. The idea of a data department was still something of a novelty in itself.Liverpool’s victory parade after it won the Champions League in 2019. Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBy the time Graham left Liverpool earlier this year, however, it was closer to a necessity. It is widely accepted that any club serious about competing in the continent’s major leagues should consult data when signing new players and assessing performances.Almost every major team in Europe has a data department, increasingly including someone with a scientific background. Graham would be forgiven, perhaps, for thinking that the revolution he helped to instigate was complete. As far as he is concerned, though, it has barely begun.GravityThere are, in Graham’s mind, two reasons that soccer is more complex than theoretical physics. The first is that “hard science” — his term — has the benefit of being bound by a set of unassailable rules. The laws of physics are nonnegotiable. Particles behave in predictable ways. That is not the case in soccer. “In physics, you do not have to take into account that gravity works slightly differently in Germany,” he said.The second is that elite sports do not provide the “huge luxury” of controlled experimentation. European soccer does not operate in sterile laboratory conditions. There is no opportunity to formulate, test and modify a hypothesis. “It’s very emotional, very reactive,” Graham said. Fans and executives alike demand instant gratification.The long-term future extends, at most, six weeks or so. To Christmas at the latest. The one thing nobody in soccer has, as a rule, is time.He attributes much of his success at Liverpool to the fact that he did. This was, he said, the key ingredient in the “special sauce” the club developed. “The first thing I said to the owners was that they shouldn’t expect to hear from me for six months,” he said. “That’s how long it would take to build all the structures we needed. Every time there was something more pressing, we were able to hire someone else to do it.”That few — if any — other teams have that privilege limits soccer’s ability to make the most of the great advances made in analytics in recent years. Even Brighton and Brentford, the two English clubs that now function as Liverpool’s heirs at the cutting edge, with their fairy-tale ascensions to the Premier League powered by data, must keep pace with a field evolving at breakneck speed.Brighton and Brentford have used their own data-driven improvements to punch above their weight in the Premier League.Justin Setterfield/Getty Images“If you look at what people are doing outside the sport, people who have the time to try things out, it’s often a lot more advanced,” Graham said. “The tools available, the technology, the data are all a lot better now. If you were to start building a system today, you’d have a much higher baseline. Inside a club, you have to stop developing at a certain level. There’s so much day-to-day work that there’s no time for research.”That is not the only limiting factor. Clubs operate in distinct silos: The work they do on data is largely proprietary. That teams should not share knowledge or disseminate best practices makes perfect sense on a sporting level. But not only is it antithetical on a scientific one, it serves to diminish the scale of data’s potential impact.Teams that did not have the foresight to be early adopters are, Graham estimates, “10 years behind” the likes of Liverpool, Brighton and Brentford today. Those who had the appetite but not the resources are locked out, too. “The teams who could benefit the most from it often can’t afford to do it, or at least do it properly,” he said.It has been almost a year, now, since the 45-year-old informed Liverpool that his role there had reached “a natural end.” Working for the club he had supported as a child was his “dream job,” he said, but he felt as if he had achieved all that he could. He knew that, at least in a professional environment, he would not be able to start from scratch again.When the news of his impending departure got out, he quickly received a flurry of offers from other teams, all hoping he could do for them what he had done for Liverpool. Graham did not find the prospect appealing. The systems he had designed for Liverpool were now the club’s intellectual property; he did not particularly want to build something for someone else. “I felt like I’d done it,” he said. “It would have been crazy to work for just one club again.”Instead, he set his sights on helping soccer as a whole to become just a little bit smarter.Known UnknownsOver the past couple of months, Graham has met with a succession of owners, and prospective owners, of soccer teams. They are — largely, though not exclusively — extremely wealthy Americans, often executives from private equity and venture capital firms, all of them keen to acquire the services of Ludonautics, the firm he established after leaving Liverpool, for the clubs they have bought or the clubs they hope to buy.The appeal is obvious. In a sport chronically lacking in time, Ludonautics has the feel of a shortcut. Graham’s résumé is compelling. So, too, is that of Michael Edwards, the feted, publicity-averse sporting director who worked with him at Liverpool and who is now engaged by the company as a “sporting consultant.”A year after it won the Champions League, Liverpool claimed its first English championship in 30 years.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe pitch, though, is not that they can repeat the success they had at Liverpool; it is that they can expand upon it. Graham no longer has to work according to the strictures and demands of an individual team. He can, instead, use the full gamut of modern technology at his disposal to build something new, something better, and to drive the sport’s next great leap forward.In time, he said, that may even allow him to attain what he regards as the “holy grail” of analytics: assessing the actual significance of a manager. “That’s very complicated,” he said. “It tends to be conflated with who has the best players, the best team. There are a lot of second-order effects. It’s very hard to know exactly how good any manager is, and what sort of impact they have on results.”What has struck him most in his recent meetings is how little soccer still knows about itself. It is not just that complex things — how much of a team’s performance can be attributed to luck, how much it is spending for each point it has acquired — remain a mystery. The simplest building blocks often do, too.Most pressing is that, in many cases, teams do not know what should be regarded as success. Ludonautics has seen sale prospectuses for teams in which the values of the squads are little more than finger-in-the-air estimates. That, Graham said, represents more than just a little sales sleight of hand; it has a tangible and detrimental effect.“In terms of performance, they often do not have a systematic way of knowing who they are and where they are,” he said. “They do not have a sense of the underlying strength of the team. Without that, how do you know where you should be finishing? How do you know if coming fifth is good or bad? And how do you hold people accountable?”As far as he is concerned, that is in the sport’s interest as a whole: The more teams that know the simple things as well as the complex ones, the better the sport becomes. “There’s a quote from John Keats about Isaac Newton using the prism to explain the colors of a rainbow,” Graham said. “But knowing why it happens doesn’t make a rainbow any less beautiful.” More

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      Everton, 777 and the Business of Premier League Soccer

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      777 Partners had been scooping up big-name soccer teams for two years when it bid for Everton. Doubts about its finances could kill the deal.The acquisitions came so quickly that it was hard to keep up. An agreement to buy the oldest soccer team in Italy. An investment in one of the most popular teams in Brazil. Stakes in well-known clubs in Belgium and France, Germany and Australia.Each new deal was trumpeted by the Miami-based investment company, 777 Partners, that was hurriedly snapping them up.Then, in September, the investment group revealed its biggest deal yet: an agreement to acquire a controlling stake in Everton F.C., a founding member of the Premier League and one of the oldest soccer clubs in England.Suddenly, everyone in soccer had heard of 777 Partners. Beyond its name, though, little was known about the company. It said it had $10 billion in assets, but was so closely held that verifying that claim was difficult. Lawsuits against the firm raised concerns for potential partners. A string of unpaid bills, some as recent as this month, raised more.Now, in bidding for a place in the Premier League, 777 Partners faces something it had previously avoided: a forensic review of its holdings, its finances and its brash American co-owner, Josh Wander, who in one recent interview said he was “more serious about investing” in soccer than anyone in history.His company’s bid for control of Everton, an acquisition that would eventually require hundreds of millions of dollars in assumed debt and other obligations, is by no means a sure thing. The Premier League, England’s Football Association and an independent British government regulator, the Financial Control Authority, all must approve the proposed deal, a process that is likely to take months.What they discover could have implications not only for the future of Everton, a fallen, money-losing giant, but also for rest of the financially troubled teams in the 777 network.James Garner of Everton, left, and two teammates celebrate a goal. Nigel French/Press Association, via Associated PressThe stakes are just as high for the Premier League, which is trying to prove it can oversee its clubs’ finances amid talk of government regulation, and for an interconnected global soccer economy reliant on the simple premise that teams can and will pay their bills.None of the soccer or public agencies currently assessing 777 Partners would discuss their review or a timetable for its conclusion.Mr. Wander, the co-founder and public face of the company, declined multiple requests to be interviewed for this article, though he published a long letter to fans on Everton’s website on Saturday in which he acknowledged fans had been discomfited by media reports about the company’s businesses. But those reports, he said, were “misleading.”“The truth is far more boring than the fiction,” he wrote.“We are not asset strippers nor speculative investors. We build and hold businesses, and intend to hold the football clubs in our portfolio for a long term,” a spokesman for 777 wrote in an emailed statement. In the letter to fans, Mr. Wander wrote that he would share “player recruitment, data analytics and commercial development resources,” with the other teams in the group.More than a dozen current or former employees, club officials and others who have done business with 777, however, revealed new details and questions about the sources of its financing. The people asked not to be named because of relationships with the company.In interviews, they also shared details about unmet obligations and unpaid bills, and wondered if the company has the resources to manage a global network of clubs carrying hundreds of millions of dollars in debts and obligations.A successful takeover of Everton would bring the number of clubs in 777’s portfolio to eight. The teams in its existing stable are well known: Genoa in Italy, Hertha Berlin in Germany, Vasco da Gama in Brazil. All are different in size and ambition but shared a common theme before attracting the interest of 777: They were all in financial crisis.Mr. Wander, 42, and his co-founder Steve Pasko, a Wall Street veteran two decades his senior, would not have been seen as a typical sports team investors when they started 777 Partners in 2015. At the time, the company’s core investments were related to the world of structured settlements, an opaque industry in which recipients of long-term annuities, typically the result of compensation claims, cash them out for lump sums of immediate cash.In one recent interview, Wander, on the left, said he was “more serious about investing in soccer than anyone in history.”Luca Zennaro/EPA, via ShutterstockThe firm quickly branched out into other sectors, including low-cost airlines and litigation financing, according to Gary Chodes, who served as a board member of a 777 subsidiary until 2017. He said he parted on good terms, but that the firm he left had few profitable businesses. So he noticed when 777 started collecting soccer teams and committing to assume their sizable debts through loans and other upfront payments.“If I was to ask, ‘Is there a little bit of mystery as to how Josh would generate three quarters of a billion dollars to buy a sports team from the businesses he owns in 777?’ — I would say that’s somewhat of a mystery,” he said.In past interviews, Mr. Wander has painted a picture of a sprawling and successful business, one that manages $10 billion in assets, counts 60 subsidiaries across a range of industries: sports, insurance, aviation, media. Many of the company’s financial details are difficult to verify since the business is private and its financial structure, current and former staff members said, is closely controlled by Mr. Wander and Mr. Pasko. Last weekend, for example, it announced the sale of one of its insurance businesses without identifying the buyers or the price.The company relies on loans to operate many of its businesses, according to the current and former employees. One of the biggest lenders to 777 is A-Cap, a private company operating in the insurance and investment business, three people said. A-Cap did not respond to a request for comment. “Not all of our 60 businesses will be profitable at any one time, but the fundamental underlying business performance of the 777 Group is strong,” Mr. Wander wrote in Saturday’s letter to fans, adding the company was not a “typical private equity firm.”Yet as 777 executives have spoken of their ambition and the scale of their operations, some of the businesses they run, including their sports teams, have reported missed payments related to agreed-upon funding schedules and even routine operating expenses.In England, for example, the chairman of the British Basketball League, in which 777 owns a 45 percent share, wrote to its founders on Sept. 6 warning that the league was at risk of bankruptcy unless the firm delivered a late payment of about $1 million. Those funds eventually arrived.In Belgium, according to reporting by the soccer magazine Josimar, the lack of clarity around 777’s finances spooked Belgian soccer’s licensing officials enough that they considered refusing to allow the company to continue operating the 125-year-old club it owns, Standard Liège. Eventually a compromise was found, and the team was granted a license.A successful takeover of Everton would bring the number of clubs in 777’s portfolio to eight, including Vasco da Gama in Brazil. Buda Mendes/Getty ImagesIn Brazil, Vasco da Gama had been anxiously awaiting a scheduled payment of about $23 million due the same week as the basketball league was expecting its funds. Without the money, Vasco has been unable to make outstanding payments to its suppliers and to rival teams owed in past deals for players. When it missed some of the payments, soccer’s governing body prohibited the club from signing new players until its debts were paid.Through its spokesman, 777 said it had already delivered much of the money required in its payment schedule with Vasco. It also said it was ahead of “ahead of schedule” and “beyond our original commitment” to the British Basketball League. But to some outsiders, the repeated issues involving money suggested an exercise in financial plate-spinning rather than the kind of healthy, well-capitalized owner a Premier League team requires.Away from the soccer field, its co-founder, Mr. Wander, built an image of a risk taker with a knack for making money.One former associate, Rhonda Bentzen, recalled how Mr. Wander would request loans from colleagues at a structured settlements business he had set up with the promise of profits in a matter of days. “I did it with him a few times and he absolutely doubled the money every single time,” Ms. Bentzen said. But once, she said, she watched Mr. Wander drop about $5,000 in a Las Vegas slot machine, lose it all in less than a minute and “not bat an eye.”In the early years of his business career, Mr. Wander was shadowed by a cocaine-trafficking charge from his college days at the University of Miami. After he pleaded no contest in 2003, he spent more than a decade on probation. A spokesman for the company said his plea, and the successful completion of his probation, meant he “was not convicted of anything.”Court records reveal other details about Mr. Wander, his company and money. In 2012, the Bellagio casino sued Mr. Wander for failing to pay back a $54,500 cash advance. In March, American Express went to court seeking $324,000.89 that had been charged to a 777 Partners credit card. The spokesman for 777 said both matters were resolved. Court documents show the Bellagio repayment remained outstanding for at least six years.Just last week, a former business partner in 777’s airline business made an allegation of fraud against the company in the Court of Chancery in Delaware. The filing said the firm and a subsidiary, Phoenicia L.L.C., “are part of a web of companies 777 uses to move around money and assets to operate and conceal a sprawling fraudulent enterprise.” A 777 spokesman declined to respond to the accusation, citing a company policy not to comment on litigation.The pattern of late and delayed payments, rather than any lawsuits, raises the biggest doubts about 777’s suitability to run Everton, said Keiron Maguire, a lecturer in the management school at the University of Liverpool and a specialist in soccer finance. “It’s a red flag to a potentially more significant cash-flow issue, or incompetent management,” he said.Everton’s Goodison Park Stadium in Liverpool, England.Jon Super/Associated PressMoney is of paramount concern at Everton at the moment. The club’s current owner, Farhad Moshiri, has spent close to $1 billion on Everton since purchasing the team in 2016, and the club’s immediate financial needs are so acute that 777 has already lent the team more than 20 million pounds, or almost $25 million, just so it can continue to operate.By agreeing to take on its ballooning debts, as well as a Premier League wage bill and a half-finished stadium on the Liverpool waterfront, 777 Partners has essentially committed to injecting hundreds of millions of dollars into the club. Last weekend, they saw the job ahead first hand, taking in an Everton match from seats in the front row of the director’s box.Executives at Vasco da Gama in Brazil were watching. It had not escaped their attention that the $25 million loan that 777 Partners gave Everton last month was similar to an amount that was, at that moment, still owed to Vasco.On Thursday, a month after it was due, part of the payment arrived, with a promise that the balance would be paid on Friday morning. But it was not paid. The holdup, 777 Partners said, was a bank holiday in the United States.The missing $7 million, the company assured Vasco, would be there this week. More

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      Liverpool, V.A.R. and the Problem With Process

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      If process and hubris trump getting calls right, the system has broken down.There are very few coherent sentences in what will, in time, doubtless come to be known as the Luis Díaz Tape, a sort of Premier League equivalent to the Zapruder film. The various protagonists communicate in clipped and meaningless phrases, any clarity sacrificed on the altar of self-important brevity.The tape lasts only two minutes, and while it is not a particularly thrilling video — a group of faceless voices discussing procedure while staring at screens, advancing resolutely toward a presaged outcome — it is, by turns, tense and frustrating and never less than compelling.It is best considered, really, as a character drama. The setting is this: Díaz, the Liverpool forward, has just scored to put his team ahead against Tottenham Hotspur. The goal is ruled out, on the field, for offside. A few miles away, in a building at Stockley Park west of London, the Premier League’s Video Assistant Referee studio whirs into action.Darren England, the game’s designated V.A.R., wants to check if the goal should be allowed to stand. He commands that the footage be rewound and paused and decorated with a line. He determines that, no, Díaz had timed his run perfectly. “That’s fine, perfect,” he says to his colleagues in the video room and to Simon Hooper, the on-field official. “Check complete.”It is here that everything unravels. The goal should count, but England seems to have declared that the original call — no goal — is “perfect.” “Well done, boys; good process,” Hooper mutters. Tottenham restarts the game with a free kick. A couple of pregnant seconds pass by. Nobody seems to have noticed the non sequitur. The audience, though, knows.Luis Díaz, hero denied.Peter Cziborra/Action Images, via ReutersAt this point, the hero enters. Mo Abby is not a qualified referee; he is the technological specialist, present to operate the video equipment while the officials issue their expert judgments. “Are you happy with this?” he asks, a hint of nervousness in his voice, as if he knows he is stepping outside his role.Now, it all goes to pieces. The precise nature, the exact scale, of the error is suddenly clear to England and Dan Cook, his assistant. Another outsider, Oli Kohout — the hub operations manager, which is not a title that can be pithily explained — suggests pausing the game and allowing Hooper to correct the mistake.England is the one with the power to make that call. In the inevitable dramatization, it is at this point that the camera will focus intently on his face. His eyes will betray his panic, his fear, his dawning realization of his powerlessness. His voice, though, does not. The game has resumed. “Nothing I can do,” he says, again and again, with surprising conviction, his hubris sealing his fate.It is this that is, in truth, most troubling about the incident at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. The last week has been rife with false equivalences. When the Liverpool manager, Jürgen Klopp, suggested that the most sporting consequence of the mistake would be for the game itself to be replayed, the response was predictable. Should we replay the 1966 World Cup final? Argentina’s defeat of England in 1986? The 2019 Champions League final? That game last year where my team was on the end of a disputed, subjective call?The difference should not need to be spelled out, but since we are here: Plenty of teams have been the victims of errors no less consequential than the one that cost Liverpool last Saturday. In almost all of those cases, though, those decisions were made in good faith. The officials believed they were right. They did not press ahead in the clear, undisputed knowledge that they were wrong.There are plenty of reasons to be object to the existence, or at least the application, of V.A.R. It interrupts the rhythm of games. It diminishes the experience of watching soccer in a stadium, allowing the nature of the action to be determined remotely, by some apparently unaccountable external force. It creates and enforces an expectation of perfection that is impossible to attain and will, therefore, be a source of eternal disappointment.Liverpool’s Jürgen Klopp, offering some thoughts.Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockThe Díaz tape, though, is a perfect distillation of what may be the most significant objection to V.A.R. Darren England’s response, both plaintive and brash — “nothing I can do” — is rooted in a belief that what matters, above all, is the correct implementation of protocol. The rules, the sainted Laws, decree that once a game has restarted, it cannot be stopped. Errors are material reality. The referee’s decision is final, even when it is known to be wrong.This is indicative of what V.A.R. has done to soccer. Recently retired officials have a cloying tendency to lionize the days when they could apply what is known, euphemistically, as “game management.” Generally, this means referring to players by their nicknames, indulging in a false and unreciprocated chumminess, and allowing the more famous participants in a game rather more leeway than their lesser colleagues.Such an approach is, of course, flawed, but it is perhaps preferable to the technologically induced alternative, which is a world in which any form of discretion has been almost entirely removed. Quite how much soccer has shifted to allow itself to be adjudicated from afar is overlooked worryingly frequently.The most obvious example of this is handball, the definition of which seems to change with the seasons. The motivation behind this is not an attempt to hew closer to the spirit of the game, but to make it possible for a decision to be made on a screen.There are others, though. The shifting thresholds for red and yellow cards and the shrinking border between reckless and malicious are both inspired by the need to make an objective decision, one that does not rely on any human allowance for context or intent.This is the atmosphere in which referees now function, one in which they are not there to apply the rules as they see fit, but in which the rules are unyielding and inflexible and do not brook any interpretation. It is a world in which what matters is not whether anything makes any sense, but in which protocol — officious and unapologetic and blind — is king.This search for absolutism has led, ironically, to a sense of greater arbitrariness. That, in the aftermath of the Díaz incident, almost every club could pick out a litany of its own injustices in the recent past was designed to illustrate that Liverpool’s response was somehow excessive or self-pitying. Instead, it highlighted more than anything how fractured fans’ belief in the fair implementation of the Laws of the Game — always portentously capitalized — has become.Nobody is quite sure what the rules are anymore, because they have a tendency to change so often. This week, this is a handball and the referees are clamping down on time-wasting or players who demand yellow cards, and next week they are not.Decisions are imposed without adequate explanation by an officiating body that has issued 14 formal apologies since the start of last season but seems still, for some reason, convinced of its infallibility. The letter of the law is applied rigorously, but the spirit of it has been lost almost entirely. And the feeling that follows is the same as that which can be detected in the Luis Díaz tape: a sense of unmitigated frustration, of wild confusion, of total powerlessness. There is nothing Darren England can do, and in that he is no different from the rest of us.The 2030 World Cup Will Be Held … EverywhereTomas Cuesta/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is to Gianni Infantino’s credit, really, that he resisted the temptation to announce the location of the 2030 World Cup in the style of Oprah Winfrey giving out cars. Spain: You get a World Cup. Portugal: You get a World Cup. Morocco, Uruguay, Argentina and, for reasons that will have to be explained later, Paraguay: You can all have a World Cup, too.The FIFA president will insist that this plan is perfectly sensible. Admirable, even. Hosting the tournament across three continents, Infantino explained on Wednesday, sends a message of “peace, tolerance and inclusion.” It means spreading the financial burden of a 48-team tournament, and by consequence sharing the joy.There is even just a hint of romance. South America has long believed it would be fitting if the World Cup’s centenary edition took place back where it all began: in Uruguay, the host of the 1930 tournament, and Argentina, the losing finalist.It had looked for some time, though, as if that might be impossible. Even with their resources pooled, the South American bidders did not possess the infrastructure — specifically the stadiums — to meet FIFA’s exacting requirements.Infantino’s solution — handing the tournament’s opening three fixtures to Montevideo, Buenos Aires and Asunción and then shifting the rest of the tournament to the Pillars of Hercules — will doubtless be sold as an ingenious compromise. That this plan effectively clears the path for the 2034 tournament to go to Asia, and to Saudi Arabia, is obviously just a coincidence.At this stage, all of this is still just an idea. The plan still has to be ratified by a vote of all 211 FIFA members next year. That it has been suggested at all, though, makes the organization’s ecological attitude abundantly clear. The 2022 World Cup might have been the single most environmentally damaging event ever staged. The 2026 edition is being held across a whole continent. The likelihood is that 2030 will take place across three.That may be the most consequential objection, but there is something less tangible to be mourned here, too. Elite sports may now be a televisual event, dislocated and remote, but it is the connection to a place that lifts a World Cup into something beyond mere content to be consumed.It is a chance for a country to go on hiatus, to revel in itself, to spend a month being swept away. That was true of Russia in 2018 and of Australia and New Zealand this year. It was that sense of proximity, the feel of a global carnival, that illuminated Qatar, far more than the stadiums. Spreading the World Cup around does not diffuse that. It dilutes it. Sure, everyone gets a little piece of it, but that does not have the same effect. Not at all. More

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      FIFA Will Host 2030 World Cup on Three Continents

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      Soccer’s biggest event will celebrate its centenary by placing games in South America, Europe and Africa. The decision could pave the way for Saudi Arabia to host in 2034.Soccer’s World Cup will be staged in six countries on three continents in its centenary edition in 2030, an unexpected and complex alteration to its traditional format that was approved on Wednesday in a meeting of FIFA’s governing council.In the unusual arrangement, three South American countries — Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay — each will host a single opening match on home soil and then join the rest of the field for the remainder of the tournament, which will take place in Spain, Portugal and Morocco.The six countries had initially joined forces regionally in separate bids for the hosting rights to the 100th anniversary World Cup, a globe-stopping, monthlong soccer festival that produces billions of dollars in revenue for FIFA every four years.The offer from the South American nations had long been considered an outsider, however, to the three-nation bid from Spain, Portugal and Morocco, which was officially declared the sole bidder for 2030 on Wednesday. But under the new arrangement to recognize the tournament’s centenary, each nation will get to take a turn as a host.“In 2030, the FIFA World Cup will unite three continents and six countries, inviting the entire world to join in the celebration of the beautiful game, the centenary and the FIFA World Cup itself,” FIFA said in a statement after the meeting.“The FIFA Council unanimously agreed that the sole candidacy will be the combined bid of Morocco, Portugal, and Spain, which will host the event in 2030 and qualify automatically.”In sharing the 2030 tournament among three continents, FIFA also significantly narrowed the field of nations eligible to bid for the 2034 event. That opened the door for Saudi Arabia, a nation that has made no secret of wanting to host, to win the rights when that host is selected next year.The first World Cup was held in 1930 in Uruguay, when the championship was a compact, 13-team affair held over two-and-a-half weeks in a single city, the Uruguayan capital, Montevideo. It has since grown to be one of the most valuable and most watched sporting events in the world, a financial juggernaut that FIFA projects will produce record revenues of at least $11 billion for its current four-year cycle, almost double what it earned in the last one.The complexity and size of the World Cup has grown steadily in recent decades, with the next edition — in 2026 — expanded by 12 teams to 48 in total, making it the largest in history. That size, and FIFA’s exacting requirements for bidding countries and stadiums, mean that few nations are now capable of staging the event alone.The 2026 tournament will take place mostly in the United States, but games also will be staged in Mexico and Canada — the first time the tournament will be played in three countries. The complexities of holding that event have yet to be worked out, and officials are still grappling with a wide range of complications, ranging from visa-free travel for spectators to taxation.Speculation that FIFA was preparing to make a surprise announcement was tipped by the South American soccer head Alejandro Dominguez, a FIFA vice president, who took to social media as the meeting was taking place to post a video of himself dancing, suggesting in Spanish “something global is coming for all football fans.”Dominguez then broke the news in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, before FIFA had a chance to make its announcement.“We believed in big,” Dominguez wrote in Spanish. “The 2030 Centennial World Cup begins where it all began.”Taking the tournament to all six countries allows FIFA and its president, Gianni Infantino, to avert some difficult political choices, and could allow Infantino to deliver the next tournament to a reliable ally. In FIFA’s statement announcing the plans for 2030, it said that only teams from Asia and Oceania could bid in 2034 — creating an opportunity for one of his closest backers, Saudi Arabia, to secure a tournament, and a global stage, that it covets.Within an hour of FIFA’s announcement, the Saudi press agency had published a statement from the kingdom’s powerful crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, expressing his country’s interest in hosting in 2034, and the president of the Asian soccer confederation had thrown his support behind the effort, declaring “the entire Asian football family will stand united in support of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s momentous initiative.”FIFA said that bidding for the 2034 World Cup would conclude with a vote at a meeting of its 211 member nations next year, short-circuiting a process that had been expected to conclude in 2027 or 2028. The shorter timeline reduces the time for other nations considering bidding for the tournament to put together coherent plans.Infantino, elected to FIFA’s top position in 2016, will now have the chance to leave his imprint on least two more World Cups, include the 2034 event, which will take place after his final term in office is supposed to have ended.His legacy already includes major changes to the World Cup, with 48 teams, resulting in a change in the competition’s format, as well as clearing the way for more than two countries to co-host. Infantino had wanted to stage the World Cup biennially, but that effort ended amid bitter opposition from European soccer officials as well as top clubs and fans.Fans groups were quick to oppose the plans for the multicontinent 2030 World Cup on Wednesday.“FIFA continues its cycle of destruction against the greatest tournament on earth,” one umbrella group called Football Supporters Europe posted on X. “Horrendous for supporters, disregards the environment and rolls the red carpet out to a host for 2034 with an appalling human rights record. It’s the end of the World Cup as we know it.”The 2030 championship will now start with an opening ceremony at the Estadio Centenario in Uruguay, the site of the 1930 final, and stadiums in Buenos Aires and Asunción, Paraguay.The three nations and their opponents would have to travel to Spain, Portugal or Morocco to continue with the rest of the tournament. More

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      Ajax and the Fragile Business of Champions League Soccer

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      The stumbles of a famed Dutch club are a lesson in fallibility of even the best methods, and a reminder of how fast it can all go wrong at the top of the sport.All of the little things had been considered. The design was so painstaking that even the fine details seemed to possess explanatory power. The list of virtues on the wall, the way the light poured into the canteen, the communal spaces laid out according to Montessori principles. Everywhere inside the home of the Dutch soccer club Ajax, the human touches stood out.And yet, in essence, the youth academy known as De Toekomst was, and is, a factory, an industrialized production line geared for maximum efficiency. Its facilities might have been upgraded over the years, but in one guise or another it has been feeding players into Ajax’s team for decades. From there, its graduates have gone on to play for the Netherlands, to represent clubs across Europe. The clue, really, is in the name. De Toekomst means The Future.It is hard to define, accurately, quite what the academy means to Ajax. It is more than just its educational arm and its supply chain. It is not its secret weapon, because — along with its conceptual nephew in Barcelona — it may well be the most celebrated, most fabled youth system in soccer. To label it the club’s heart and soul is more poetic, but less exact, less meaningful. De Toekomst is where players receive the Ajax imprimatur. It is the club’s core, but it is also its edge.Ajax is not the only club to have a celebrated academy, of course. It is not even unique in inculcating its prospects in the tenets of a tightly defined, nonnegotiable philosophy.Ajax is different, now, not so much in how it runs its hothouse of talent but in what happens afterward, where De Toekomst sits in the club’s organizational structure, the role it plays in the business model. For most elite teams, youth systems exist somewhere on the spectrum between optional extra and unexpected bonus.At Ajax, the pipeline of young talent never stops pumping out new stars.Olaf Kraak/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe idea, of course, is that at some point they produce a player or two for the senior side. Quite when that point might come, though, is deemed to be in the lap of the gods. It is a relatively new phenomenon that teams might take into consideration the talent emerging from its academy when planning its transfer strategy.The prospects who do make it through, on the whole, tend to offer a talent that is both ready-made and irresistible. Two or three or more fallow years may pass, and millions of dollars can be invested, waiting for a Phil Foden or a Trent Alexander-Arnold or a Gavi.At Ajax, the paradigm has always been the opposite. The whole club is geared toward the obvious but revolutionary idea that there are always more soccer players. De Toekomst is expected to produce excellent ones: Some years will be more fruitful than others, of course, but whether a trickle or a flood, the flow should always be constant.In return, the club ensures that there is space for them to fill. Ajax does not just graciously stand aside to allow older players to leave for brighter lights or greener pastures or a disappointing spell at Manchester United. It all but pushes them out of the door. Donny Van de Beek must leave so that Ryan Gravenberch can flourish. Gravenberch must go in order to allow Kenneth Taylor his opportunity.In the last five years or so, Ajax seemed to have perfected the formula. No team outside Europe’s self-appointed, self-selecting aristocrats — Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, plus those backed either by a nation state or by the television bonanza on offer in the Premier League — had accommodated itself quite so well to the game’s new economic reality.Ajax produced and replaced, produced and replaced, as if De Toekomst itself was mining a bottomless seam. Every summer, ever greater profits swelled Ajax’s coffers, allowing it to invest further in those areas of its squad that the academy could not replenish.It ran the most expensive salary roll in the Netherlands. It added a string of championships. It started to compete, for the first time in two decades, with Europe’s superpowers. The club began to conceive of itself as a Dutch version of Bayern Munich, its primacy bleeding remorselessly into lasting dominance.And then, all of a sudden, it went wrong. Ajax finished third in the Eredivisie last year, missing out on a place in the Champions League. Its start to this season was even worse: After five games, it had amassed only five points, its worst opening to a campaign in 60 years.Ajax is off to a forgettable start this season.Olaf Kraak/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesLast weekend, Ajax found its nadir: With less than an hour played, the club found itself losing by 3-0 to Feyenoord, its archrival, on home turf. The team’s most demonstrative ultra group, the F Side, began to hurl flares onto the field in protest. The game was abandoned, the stadium cleared.Afterward, some fans tried to force their way back inside. Others were charged by mounted police officers. The final 40 minutes or so of the game were eventually completed on Wednesday. The Johan Cruyff Arena was empty. Ajax conceded a fourth goal almost immediately.Quite where the blame lies for the rapid unspooling of all that Ajax had built is open to conjecture. It may be related to the departures of two of the architects of the modern iteration of the club: Marc Overmars, the former sporting director, who left in disgrace, and Edwin van der Sar, the longstanding chief executive, who did not.Or perhaps the descent started in summer 2022, when the club sanctioned just a little too much change, watching as its coach, Erik Ten Hag, left for Manchester United. He took two of the team’s best players with him, at the end of a transfer window in which a half-dozen others had gone, too.Or maybe even that is one beat too far: It might simply be the case that Ajax erred by replacing Ten Hag with Alfred Schreuder, who did not see out even a season in Amsterdam. A more judicious succession plan may have allowed the club to ride out the transition and at least make it to this season’s Champions League, rather than being forced to sell another tranche of players simply to balance the accounts.The fans, though, made it plain that they had a different villain in mind. Sven Mislintat, the German sporting director brought in to retool the club’s squad — and to modernize its approach to recruitment — became a lightning rod for criticism with remarkable speed. The club, needing a sacrificial lamb after the chaos against Feyenoord, decided he was as good a candidate as any, and fired him.It seems unlikely the problem will be solved in one fell move, of course, but Mislintat always seemed a strange appointment, given just what it is that makes Ajax tick. His approach was focused on signing unheralded young players from overlooked markets — the German second division, Eastern Europe — and giving them a chance to shine.Ajax fired its German sporting director, Sven Mislintat, this week.Phil Nijhuis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn most contexts, that would be admirable. Ajax had enjoyed no little success in attracting players from Brazil (albeit not a market anyone could describe as overlooked) and Mexico in recent years. Mislintat’s mistake was forgetting that the first place Ajax should look for players is closer to home. The club’s future, after all, is always supposed to be on hand. His recruits were seen as barring the way for the next generation of graduates from De Toekomst. At that point, Ajax no longer really felt like Ajax.There are two warnings in all of this, both of them bleak, both of them with resonance far beyond Ajax. The first is that there is no such thing as a formula; no matter how certain a club’s place seems to be, no matter how assured its methods or lionized its approach, nothing is eternal.The second is that soccer is a fragile, perilous business. Building what made the club special, what made it successful, took years. Generations, really. It required not just a grand, overarching vision, but careful stewardship, delicate handling, nurture both loving and cautious. There were times when the journey was anything but smooth. There were undeniable miscalculations along the way. But Ajax had made it through, and built itself a place in a game that many felt had moved out of its reach.And then, in the space of a year — give or take — it has watched it all crumble to the ground. A couple of misjudged appointments, a handful of bad decisions, and all of a sudden it was gone. Ajax lost sight, perhaps, of what it was trying to do, of what made the whole thing work, and that was enough.Now it has to do it all again. It should not take quite so long for the club to chart its course this time, but how long that process will take is anyone’s guess. Inside Ajax, though, they will surely know that everything will begin wherever everything always begins. The priority will be to make sure the production line keeps firing. That is where Ajax will find its tomorrow. The clue really is in the name.CorrespondenceIt is important, I think, for news organizations to listen to their audience, particularly at a time when misinformation — the slightly unnecessary euphemism for “lying” — has such a dissembling effect on public discourse. And the message we have received from our audience, this week, has been loud and clear: You feel this newsletter should be about ice cream.“I am a loyal reader of the newsletter,” an email from John begins, fairly ominously. It sounds as if there is a “but” coming. Oh yes: “But your comments on ice cream have provided me with an impulse to write some correspondence. Having not yet seen your full list, I am struck by your choice of La Carraia in Florence as a top spot: for me, the best gelateria in that neighborhood is Sbrino.”(Kindly, John has also directed me to Cesare, in Reggio Calabria, a place that he in no way controversially has christened “the best” gelateria in Italy.)Ray Judoaitis, on the other hand, is a purist: Ice cream does not need to be ranked, he believes, because ice cream is good in its very essence. “Ranking ice cream shops may be futile, as I have rarely had a bad one. Therefore access and amount become significant. To that end, I recommend Café Maioli in Florence.”And over on whatever Twitter is called now, Georg Baumann wanted to alert me to the existence of Duo — Sicilian Ice Cream in Berlin; he believes it might prove to be worthy of inclusion. This, of course, is the point of the Ice Cream List: It is not, and can never be, definitive. You have to keep eating ice cream in order to make it as comprehensive, and as current, as possible. It is probably best thought of as a quest, except with more salted caramel than normal. More

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      UEFA Opens a Door to Russia’s Return in Soccer, and Faces a Backlash

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      The angry reactions to a vote by European soccer’s governing body to partly lift its ban on Russian teams could be a preview of fights in other sports.European soccer’s governing body is facing angry criticism and open defiance from some of its member nations after a vote by its executive committee earlier this week partially lifted a blanket ban on Russian teams that was imposed after last year’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.The proposal to allow Russia’s teams to participate in qualifying for the European men’s and women’s under-17 championships that will be held next year, and for which qualifying has already begun, came as a surprise to many members of the governing body, UEFA. Its approval has reopened what many believed was a bitter but settled debate about solidarity with Ukraine.Ukraine’s national soccer federation quickly objected to the vote, arguing that allowing even Russian youth teams to return to tournaments “tolerates Russia’s aggressive policy.” Several federations, including Sweden, Norway and a group of Baltic nations, noted that the conditions that had led to the initial ban remained unchanged, and they invited punishment by saying that they would refuse to play Russian opponents under any circumstances.The tensions in soccer could be a preview of difficult discussions playing out in dozens of sports over the reintegration of Russia and its athletes into global sports ahead of next year’s Paris Olympics. And the angry reaction to the decision highlighted of the difficulty of balancing official solidarity with Ukraine — and opposition to Russian aggression in Ukraine — against the rights of athletes, even youth players, with little say in the actions of their governments.The differences at times appear irreconcilable. A bloc of Western nations, for example, continues to lobby against efforts by the International Olympic Committee to create conditions in which Russian athletes will be allowed to participate in the Paris Games as neutrals. And sports as diverse as tennis and fencing have already seen the effects of the war provoke confrontations and snubs at their competitions.On Friday, Russian athletes received more positive news when the International Paralympic Committee cleared them to compete at the Games that will take place in Paris after next year’s Summer Olympics. The committee voted to allow them to take part as neutrals, without their national emblems or flag.European soccer officials, for their part, were struggling to understand why their organization’s powerful president, Aleksander Ceferin of Slovenia, had chosen to drag their sport back into the dispute. Mr. Ceferin had repeatedly said that the blanket ban on Russian teams would remain in place “until the war ends,” they were quick to note, and the competitive concerns behind the original ban — that the refusal of teams to play Russia made tournament draws unworkable and potentially unfair — had not changed.The stage for the fight was unusual as well. Youth tournaments usually merit little attention at the leadership meetings of European soccer’s governing body, often consigned to cursory updates at the bottom of a long agenda. But this week was different.The closed-door gathering at a hotel in Cyprus was about 90 minutes old when Mr. Ceferin spoke up and put forward a motion. He asked the committee to partially lift a ban on Russian soccer teams that had been imposed after the invasion of Ukraine so that Russia’s junior teams could return to European competition.The president of European soccer’s governing body, Aleksander Ceferin, defended the vote to allow Russian teams to return to continental competitions.Daniel Cole/Associated PressMr. Ceferin left little doubt about his preference. Arguing that it was not right to punish children, he cited his own experience growing up in Slovenia during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia and referenced a United Nations charter on the rights of children before allowing others in the room to speak. While most of the officials remained silent — typical in such gatherings, where decisions are usually agreed before a formal vote — Poland’s representative, the former star player Zbigniew Boniek, offered passionate opposition.Mr. Boniek took the floor for about five minutes, pointing out that children in Ukraine, too, continued to suffer because of the war. He said that nothing had changed since the decision to bar Russia was made only days after the start of the war in February 2022.A Romanian official in the room, who did not have a vote, also spoke. He reminded the board that Russia’s war was also affecting children in other European countries. The war, he said, was forcing budget cuts on services in Romania to account for increases in military spending.The representatives from England and Wales joined Boniek in abstaining when the vote was taken, but the motion passed anyway. The repercussions began almost immediately.A handful of European soccer federations immediately said they would not play against Russian teams should they be paired against them in qualification tournaments. Sweden, whose representative at UEFA, Karl-Erik Nilsson, voted for the plan to allow Russian teams to return, went further: It said it would bar Russian players from traveling to next year’s women’s under-17 finals in Sweden should the team qualify.It is unclear what motivated UEFA’s decision to open the door to Russia’s return. Mr. Ceferin’s initiative was not widely shared with officials within the organization before the vote, something that typically happens so the organization can game out the implications of a decision, and the practical consequences are significant: The qualifying draws for both the men’s and women’s under-17 championships were made without Russia, and men’s teams have already begun playing matches. Women’s qualifying begins next week.If the decision is not reversed, UEFA now faces the specter of having to take disciplinary action against countries who refuse to play against Russian opponents. Still, its president was unmoved.Ukrainian boys at a damaged stadium in Irpin. Poland’s representative at the UEFA meeting pointed out that children in Ukraine continued to suffer because of the war.Nicole Tung for The New York Times“By banning children from our competitions, we not only fail to recognize and uphold a fundamental right for their holistic development but we directly discriminate against them,” Mr. Ceferin said in comments published by UEFA after the vote. “By providing opportunities to play and compete with their peers from all over Europe, we are investing in what we hope will be a brighter and more capable future generation and a better tomorrow.”Ukraine’s soccer federation said the return of Russian teams to competitions “in the midst of hostilities conducted by the Russian Federation against Ukraine is groundless and such that it tolerates Russia’s aggressive policy.”Its unequivocal refusal to play Russian opposition was matched by a group of European federations that included the Baltic nations, England, Wales, Norway and Denmark, whose president, like his Swedish counterpart, is a close ally of Mr. Ceferin and did not speak out to oppose Russia’s return during the vote in Cyprus.The ban against Russia’s senior teams will continue until the end of the war, Mr. Ceferin said, reiterating a position he made clear following a charity soccer game in Slovenia earlier this month. At the time, Serbian media quoted the UEFA president as saying “Ask Putin” when he was asked when the ban would be lifted.For now, that question is the least of UEFA’s problems. First it has to hurriedly devise a calendar that will allow Russian teams to enter events that have already begun, keep them away from opponents who are refusing to play them, and do it all even as the list of potential opponents could diminish as more national federations consider whether to heed Ukraine’s call to refuse to play. More