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    The President, the Soccer Hooligans and an Underworld ‘House of Horrors’

    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmOn a Saturday night in early March 2021, Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vucic, appeared on live television, seated at a long wooden table and flanked by the country’s prime minister and interior minister. Vucic said he had an important announcement to make about the arrest of an underworld gang responsible for multiple murders. The interior minister warned viewers to move their children away from the TV. A series of images flashed on the screen behind him: a severed head, a headless body, a torso. Vucic spoke slowly, often pausing and staring ponderously at the table in front of him, his 6-foot-6-inch frame hunched slightly. He praised the police and intelligence agents who investigated the gang; they had narrowly escaped being killed themselves, he said.It was a shocking presentation, even in a country like Serbia, where many adults have painful memories of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and their atrocities. But the news conference was only the beginning of a campaign of gruesome revelations. In the weeks after the arrest in February, new details began leaking into the press. The gang was said to have lured its victims to a “house of horrors” in a Belgrade suburb, where they were tortured, dismembered, fed through an industrial meat grinder and sometimes dumped in the Danube.The story captivated Serbs, and not just because of the gory images. The leader of the gang was a burly soccer hooligan and cocaine trafficker named Veljko Belivuk, nicknamed the Trouble, already a well-known figure in Belgrade. He had been accused previously of murder and a string of other serious crimes, but never did much time in jail. He was rumored to have cozy relations with the Serbian police and intelligence services. He and his men had been photographed in the company of powerful people, including the president’s son, Danilo Vucic.After the news conference, Belivuk offered his side of the story at a closed-door court hearing. He said his gang had been organized “for the needs and by the order of Aleksandar Vucic,” according to court transcripts. He described some of the backdoor jobs the gang claimed to have done for the government, like intimidating political rivals and stopping fans from chanting against Vucic at soccer games — a valuable service in a country where the stadium can make or break a president. Belivuk warned that if Vucic “continues his proceedings against me,” he would have much more to say.Vucic angrily disputed any connection to the killers. But he seemed to take the Belivuk case personally, sometimes suggesting that it was a conspiracy against him. In one bizarre television interview a few months after the arrests, he claimed that Belivuk’s men had made their victims into “human kebabs” and sent them to Belivuk’s boss, Radoje Zvicer. Looking into the camera and addressing Zvicer, who is still at large, Vucic laid down a challenge. “I invite him to kill me,” he said. “I have no problem with that, because it is better to be turned into mincemeat than to let these bastards rule Serbia.”A soccer match at Partizan Stadium. The influence of hooligans extends beyond Serbia’s arenas and into criminal gangs and even politics.Jehad Nga for The New York TimesAs the trial approached, facts began leaking out about the longstanding ties between the gang and various members of Vucic’s administration, who appear to have monitored, assisted and protected it. Belivuk came to seem, at times, like the president’s dark twin, a man who embodies the criminal underside of a state that has grown steadily more autocratic over the past decade. Vucic, who has been president since 2017 and has a lock on the country’s ruling party, has long said that he wants to lead his country — still among the poorest in Europe — toward greater prosperity and membership in the European Union. At the same time, he has hollowed out many of Serbia’s democratic institutions, and Mafia-style gangs often appear to operate with impunity.The Belivuk affair, in other words, is not just a noirish tale about beheadings and cocaine. The gangsterism that has thrived under Vucic, alongside Serbia’s periodic threats to “protect” ethnic Serbs elsewhere in the region, could eventually unravel the settlement that restored peace to the Balkans in 1995. The Europeans are keenly aware of this, as is Vladimir Putin, who has fresh reasons to divide and distract them. The Kremlin has a long history of supporting Serbian nationalists as beleaguered fellow Slavs and more motive than ever — thanks to the Ukraine war — to stir up trouble in the Balkans.But the risks for Europe run deeper than that: Vucic’s brand of ethnic chauvinism and demagogy echoes that of his ally Putin, and the spread of illiberal democracy — already gathering strength in parts of the continent — poses an equal, perhaps more ominous threat. The Belivuk case has opened a window into a grim possible future, one in which Vucic undermines the European project from within, building a state where democracy is a facade and criminal gangs are used to spread fear. That would be unsettling enough on its own. It also happens to be the same tactic used by the men who tipped the Balkans into a catastrophic war three decades ago.By the time Belivuk made his first public courtroom appearance last October, he had already gained a macabre kind of celebrity, his rise and fall chronicled in an endless series of tabloid scoops. He was led into the room in handcuffs, wearing a white polo shirt and jeans. His face was soft and rounded, almost cherubic, with big blank eyes. Despite his size — he is a big man with a massive upper torso — he looked oddly like an oversize baby, as if a lifetime of violence had made no impression on him. He and about 30 other defendants, mostly beefy men with tattoos and shaved heads, looked strangely relaxed, grinning and chatting and tossing a few casual insults at one another. Perhaps they expected this trial to end the way most of their previous ones had, with procedural errors, faulty evidence and early release.After a few formalities, a prosecutor took the stand to read the indictment. When he described how Belivuk and his lieutenant hit a victim “in the neck with an ax and cut off his head,” the man in question yawned and looked at the ceiling. Some of his fellow defendants dozed off.The arrest of Veljko Belivuk, the leader of a Partizan fan group. The authorities say Belivuk and his group used a bunker at the team’s stadium to hide money and drugs and torture enemies.Stefan StojanovicWhen Belivuk took the stand, he clutched the lectern with both hands and got straight to the point. His gang, he said, was a state project from the start. He recited some of the services it had provided and even described a meeting he claimed to have had with Vucic at a private house in Belgrade, giving the street address and apartment number and the name of the owner. They only met there once, he added, “because, as the boss put it, if someone saw us or filmed us, it wouldn’t be good for him.”Vucic promptly denied the accusations and even offered to discuss them with investigators and submit to a lie-detector test. Legally, he is not likely to suffer from the trial. No senior officials have been indicted, and very few have even been questioned. The importance of the Belivuk case lies elsewhere. It has forced all of Serbia to face the abundant circumstantial evidence that Vucic has allowed gangsters to become a virtual arm of the state. The support Belivuk and his cronies received from the police and interior ministry over the past decade has been amply documented in court testimony, phone intercepts and photographs. The suggestion that all this might have happened without Vucic’s knowledge elicits laughter in Belgrade. Before Vucic was president, he was prime minister, and a decade ago he reorganized Serbia’s security services. He now exercises near-total control over almost every aspect of public life. From Parliament to the courts to the police to business, Vucic is treated with fawning deference; Serbs cross him at their peril. In fact, the arrest of Belivuk and his gang may be one of the few key decisions of recent years that Vucic did not control.The bulk of the evidence in the case comes from a team of European police officials who stumbled onto it by accident. They spent two years trying to decrypt a phone messaging app called Sky-ECC, which was a favored tool of cocaine traffickers in the container ports of Northern Europe. When they finally cracked the code, they discovered much more than a local cocaine ring. With at least 70,000 users, Sky turned out to be a virtual Rosetta Stone to the globalized world of organized crime, with graphic messages and photographs flickering across the ether in a dizzying array of languages and dialects. “It’s as if you were standing outside a house in the dark, and now you’ve gone inside and turned the lights on,” one official from Europol, the law-enforcement arm of the European Union, told me.Sky was not the first app to be accused by law enforcement of catering to drug lords. But it was the most popular and the most brazen. The company, founded by a Vancouver tech entrepreneur in 2010, boasted that its four-layered encryption was unbreakable; it ultimately made hundreds of millions of dollars before its executives were indicted in 2021.Much of the Sky evidence turned out to be from the Balkans, and especially Serbia. Passing that data on was “very sensitive,” I was told by a French interior-ministry official, because of concerns that it might be leaked. Although the Serbian police did ultimately arrest Belivuk and his gang, they appear to have done so reluctantly. Days before his arrest, he and his top lieutenant were allowed to leave the country for neighboring Montenegro, another hub for drug trafficking. Montenegrin authorities said they foiled an attempt to murder them; a Montenegrin prosecutor told local media that “certain security structures” in Serbia were behind the plot, which may have been conceived to avoid the messiness of a trial.Gang killings are rife in Serbia. Mara Halabrin Melikova lost her son, whose portrait hangs in her Belgrade apartment, in a killing that remains unsolved.Jehad Nga for The New York TimesDuring Vucic’s nine years in power, Serbian soccer hooligans — and the criminal gangs that overlap with them — have been enmeshed in the region’s volatile ethnic politics and helped spur Serbian uprisings in other Balkan countries. Some of them profess loyalty to Russia. Some Serbs have joined the paramilitary Wagner group, which has its own history of hiring criminals and has posted Serbian-language recruitment videos for the war in Ukraine. Though Vucic rebuked the group, Serbia remains a kind of fault line between Russia and the West. All this puts Vucic in a position of remarkable power. In a crisis, he could decide whether the Balkan region will settle toward peace or relapse into violence.The most visible risks today are centered on Kosovo, the country to Serbia’s south that is ethnically Albanian but contains pockets that are majority Serb, especially in the north. Serbia’s leaders remain deeply unhappy about Kosovo’s breakaway from Serbia following the 1990s Yugoslav wars and refuse to recognize its independence, which was established internationally in 2008. The scenario that keeps Western European leaders up at night goes something like this: Vucic, citing a threat to the Serbian minority, sends troops over the border and annexes northern Kosovo. Serbs elsewhere in the region then flee their homes or demand more border changes. This could spell the end of the Dayton Accords, the pact brokered by the U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke, which ended the worst of the fighting in 1995 and redrew the map of the former Yugoslavia. It might trigger another war. Even without violence, the collapse of the Dayton order would bolster the politics of ethnic solidarity and autocracy throughout the Balkans.Another scenario involves Vucic’s concealing his irredentist intentions until after Serbia has been admitted to the E.U. This Trojan horse script has gained credence partly because of Hungary’s illiberal prime minister Viktor Orban, a close ally of Vucic’s who has lobbied zealously for Serbia’s admission. He appears to be hoping that Vucic could help Hungary, a member since 2004, steer the European club in a more populist and less democratic direction.For all these reasons, the Belivuk case has been a sensitive one for reporters. I was told before I came to Serbia that my calls would be monitored, that I would be followed, possibly even stopped and interrogated. The Serbian journalists who gave me these warnings have themselves been routinely harassed and threatened by both criminals and the B.I.A., the Serbian domestic intelligence agency.The gray zone between the state and the mafias in Serbia is real. It is also surrounded by outer walls of rumor and paranoia that make a reporter’s job more difficult. I must have spoken to a dozen Serbs whose sons or husbands or children were killed under murky circumstances. Most of them had no idea who the killers were, but they had elaborate stories to tell about corrupt officials, drug barons, arms deals and incriminating photographs. Some had hired private detectives. All of them seemed convinced that the truth was being deliberately kept from them. Yet some of the people I spoke to were clearly hiding things from me. I spent an hour talking to one widow whose husband was among the butchered bodies in the photographs that accompanied the Belivuk gang indictment. She was tall and severe-looking, with long black hair. Her story was poignant, but when I started asking about her husband’s criminal background — he had done prison time for his role in a notorious gang of Balkan jewel thieves — her answers turned cold and monosyllabic. I had the feeling that she could have told me a much more interesting story if she hadn’t been worried about the consequences of her husband’s complicity and perhaps of her own.Vucic is not responsible for this morass of fear and endemic criminality. It is almost part of the scenery in the Balkans, so much so that the region’s very name has been used for centuries by outsiders as a kind of shorthand for ethnic hatred and violence — “a stage set for exotic thrillers of corruption, quick killing and easy crime,” as the historian Mark Mazower has written. But Vucic has the demagogue’s gift for breathing new life into demeaning stereotypes. He has made brilliant use of Serbia’s mafia problem, creating an environment in which the blurred line between organized crime and the state plays to his advantage.The south stand at Partizan Stadium in Belgrade is almost exclusively populated by football hooligans and is notorious for the violence that often breaks out.Jehad Nga for The New York TimesIt is no accident that both Vucic and Belivuk got their start in soccer fan groups. Perhaps more than anywhere else, soccer stadiums in Serbia are venues for power in its rawest form, a recruiting pool for militias and criminals alike. Stadiums were the crucible of the ethnic nationalism that destroyed Yugoslavia, and those violent emotions shaped Vucic and his contemporaries. Even today, approaching an arena on a game night can feel like walking into a lightning storm. Police officers line the boulevards, and as you get closer, there are teams of militarized police with body armor and shields. Fans sometimes chant slurs that recall those used during the ethnic-cleansing campaigns of the 1990s. Team loyalties take on an almost religious intensity. The chief executive of Red Star Belgrade, the most popular team in Serbia, famously said that Red Star is “not just a football team, it is an ideology, a philosophy and a national symbol. The Red Star is the guardian of Serbian identity and the Orthodox faith.”Dead football fans gaze out from painted murals all over Belgrade, alongside plaques, statues and other memorials that bear witness to their status as a kind of vox populi. Hooligans were among the first to go off to war in the early 1990s, and it was hooligans who provided the muscle in the movement to bring down the nationalist strongman Slobodan Milosevic a decade later. Ever since, Serbian politicians have feared the stadium and have tried to keep the hooligans on their side.Talking to Serbian hooligans is not easy. Some are dangerous. Most of the ones I met were taciturn and wary, no doubt in part because of the Belivuk case. After two weeks of searching, a Serbian colleague helped me find what I was looking for: a man who had grown up alongside Vucic in the stadium, and who was willing and able to talk about their common origins. He was a 46-year-old who still refers to himself as a hooligan, though he has a wife and children and rarely gets into brawls anymore. We met in a bar far from his neighborhood, so he wouldn’t be recognized. He spoke on condition that I not identify him, so I will refer to him as B., his first initial. He has a compact body and a shaved head, and as he walked across the bar his gaze was so direct and fearless that I had a feeling he was charging me. We sat down and ordered beers. He talked fast in English, lapsing occasionally into Serbian when he couldn’t find the right word.B. told me that the stadium was a rare zone of freedom and anonymity in Yugoslavia’s tightly controlled Communist state. It was also a place where, by the late 1980s, you could see the country disintegrating day by day. Young men began forming gangs and bringing baseball bats to games, aping street gang members in the 1979 American film “The Warriors.” The older hooligans told B. and his friends to find a similar group of young men supporting the other main Belgrade team, Partizan, and challenge them to fights “to see who is brave and who is not.” This pipeline is still in place, other Belgrade hooligans told me, and sometimes initiates must “bleed” another member to rise up the ranks before being given “missions.” These may include committing crimes or just beating up a particular rival.B. is a Red Star supporter who has been deeply involved in the Belgrade football scene for decades.Jehad Nga for The New York TimesAll the young hooligans on the north stand were budding nationalists, B. said, including Vucic. Among the chants was “Serbia, not Yugoslavia.” After a game in 1988, B. said, he and his group heard about a clash between Serbs and ethnic Albanians. They went “to hunt” for Albanians in Belgrade after a game, hoping to smash up some stores and teach the Albanians a lesson. They ended up in a street fight. “President Vucic was in that also,” B. said. “And I must tell you, I don’t like him now, but he was brave, brave in the fight.” (Vucic’s spokespeople did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)Vucic has said he was in the stands during a legendary 1990 soccer brawl that has sometimes been described as the true beginning of the Balkan wars. It happened during a match between the Red Star and Dinamo Zagreb teams, and it quickly devolved into a melee that overran the entire stadium. Fans on both sides were clearly primed for a battle: Stones had been stockpiled in the stadium, ready to be thrown. Decades later, Serbian media published blurry photos of the match in which a lanky young man, identified as Vucic, is visible in the crowd.By 1990, the violence was veering out of control. There were thousands of young vandals looking for trouble, and, B. said, somebody needed “to calm down that group, because Slobodan Milosevic was afraid of them.”So Milosevic, who was Yugoslavia’s president at the time, selected a leader for the hooligans. This was the first time a political leader entered into such a relationship, and it set a precedent that Vucic would later follow. Milosevic’s man went by the name Arkan. He had a boyish face with a brittle smile that concealed a propensity for violent rages. Something about him commanded respect. Arkan was a storied figure of the Serbian underworld, who made his name with a series of daring bank robberies and prison escapes across Europe in the 1970s and ’80s. He would go on to become one of the most brutal war criminals of the following decade. Photographs of his paramilitary group, the Tigers, helped turn Western opinion decisively against Serbia. In one of them, a Serbian militiaman can be seen kicking the head of a dying Bosnian woman.“So Arkan collects our leaders, he gave them good salary for everybody to be quiet,” B. said. “And he said: ‘Don’t fight with him. We must fight for Serbia now. It’s going to be war.’”If the soccer stadium shaped Vucic’s character, the war was where he learned politics. Fresh out of law school in 1991, he apprenticed himself to a far-right Serbian politician named Vojislav Seselj. It was in that same year that Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence, triggering the intermittent and brutal conflicts that would shatter Yugoslavia into statelets. Seselj, a proponent of ethnic cleansing, was a useful foil for Milosevic, who could point to him as proof that some Serbs were even more extreme than he was. Seselj’s Radical Party recruited a militia that became notorious for its rampages in Serbia, Bosnia and eastern Croatia, where they robbed, tortured, killed and expelled non-Serbian civilians. Seselj once said his men would use rusty spoons to scoop out the eyes of their enemies, though he later claimed this was black humor. He was ultimately indicted and convicted of crimes against humanity by the United Nation’s war-crimes court in The Hague.Vucic was an enthusiastic backer of Seselj’s party, and he soon became the youngest member of Serbia’s Parliament. In 1995, days after the massacre of nearly 8,000 Bosnian Muslims around Srebrenica, Vucic gave a speech in which he declared, “If you bomb us, if you kill one Serb, we will kill a hundred Muslims.” In the decades since then, Vucic has never fully apologized for crimes carried out in Serbia’s name or for his rhetoric. He has treated some convicted war criminals like heroes on their release from prisons abroad.In 1998, Vucic became information minister under Milosevic, his first position of real power. He presided over a landmark crackdown on the press, levying huge fines on organizations that criticized the government. It was the start of a preoccupation with the media that would help define Vucic’s political career.But if Milosevic and his deputy succeeded in taming the press, they were losing their hold over the stadium. Many soccer hooligans had fought in the wars, and when they came home, “they felt they could be arbiters of national identity,” I was told by Ivan Dordevic, an anthropologist at the Institute of Ethnography in Belgrade who wrote his dissertation on soccer and nationalism in the Balkans. B., my hooligan contact, put it a little differently. At the stadium, “a new generation came, and they didn’t give a [expletive]” about Arkan’s riches or his glamorous pop-star wife, Ceca, he said. They decided they had also had enough of Milosevic, who had brought Serbia to economic ruin and pariah status in Europe. At stadiums, soccer fans chanted, “Kill yourself, Slobodan!” The hooligans linked up with the political opposition and began serving as informal security during protests.The big moment came on Oct. 5, 2000, when a week of street protests culminated in the storming of the Serbian Parliament, with hooligans leading the way. Milosevic resigned the following night, and for a brief moment, Serbians were ecstatic. In recognition of the role they played in his overthrow, some hooligans had their criminal records cleared by the victorious Democratic Opposition coalition. “Nothing in police, nothing in courts,” B. said. “We’re free. We’re like angels. Clean slate.” The euphoria soon faded. Serbia’s economy was a wreck, and the European Union was not about to bail out a country widely seen as a den of unrepentant war criminals.For Vucic, the fall of Milosevic meant a moment of profound uncertainty about his own political future. Years later, he gave a strange interview that hints at his feelings of anger and thwarted ambition. “I was sitting at home and seeing it as a tragedy for the Serbian people,” he said. “Then I went outside, some junkies attacked me, so I had to beat them.” He thrashed them both and knocked them out, he said. But somehow these mysterious assailants got up and came at him again, and he thrashed them a second time. “I went back home,” Vucic said, “and I knew, of course, that Serbia was in for years of collapse and destruction.”For centuries, Serbia’s national identity has been shaped by feelings of loss and wounded pride. Serbia came under Ottoman rule not long after a legendary battle in 1389, a date you see spray-painted on walls all over the country. It did not fully regain its independence for almost 500 years. Those feelings were reawakened during the 1990s, when many Serbs believed they were unfairly portrayed as the villains of a complex civil war. They also deeply resented the American-led NATO bombing campaign in 1999 that forced the Serbian military out of Kosovo after it was accused of ethnic cleansing and murder. That expulsion allowed Kosovo, once considered a Serbian heartland, to become independent, another blow for the Serbs.Smoke rising over Novi Sad, in Serbia, after NATO airstrikes in 1999.Jaroslav Pap, Associated PressVucic and his Radical Party became standard bearers for their country’s accumulated rancor. In 2007, Vucic led a group of protesters in support of Ratko Mladic, the military commander sometimes called the Butcher of the Balkans. A year later, when the Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic was arrested, Vucic was back in the streets, getting roughed up by the police.But the wind was shifting. In 2008, public-opinion research showed that most members of Vucic’s own party wanted Serbia to join the European Union. Vucic helped found a new bloc, the Serbian Progressive Party. Critics derided it as the same old party with a different look. Nonetheless, four years after its founding, Vucic’s coalition won a plurality of seats in Parliament. His party had deftly played to the middle of Serbian politics, promising prosperity, cleaner government and E.U. membership even as it catered to right-wing anger over Kosovo and other perceived wrongs. Vucic was too junior to become prime minister, but he gained control over the party. He was also given authority over all arms of the security services. He replaced the major department heads with loyalists.Vucic soon began styling himself as a warrior against corruption. He ordered a series of splashy arrests, and the media took to calling him “Serbia’s Eliot Ness.” While some were legitimate targets, more than 100 of those arrested were officials of the Democratic Party that had just been ousted in the elections. Critics deplored the move as political score-settling. But the anti-corruption campaign was popular with the public and especially with the Progressive Party’s membership, which skewed to older and less educated Serbs. The party’s ratings shot up. People wanted something to blame, and Vucic had given it to them.Among the criminals that Vucic proudly boasted of having put behind bars was Darko Saric, the Balkan region’s most powerful drug lord. Saric, the “King of Cocaine,” ran a global smuggling network and was indicted in absentia after a yearslong investigation that included the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Vucic, who had just won the 2014 parliamentary election and was set to become the country’s new prime minister, called the arrest a triumph for Serbian law enforcement. Saric, who had returned to Serbia voluntarily and surrendered to the police, had a different perspective. The chief judge in the case told me that he asked Saric in court why he chose to give himself up. Saric, the judge recalled, replied that he felt safer in Serbia under the new Vucic-led government.Like Vucic, Belivuk was shaped by the war in Bosnia, though he was much too young to play any role in it. One morning in the late winter of 1995, when the war was at its height, an explosion tore through the Belivuk family home in Belgrade, killing three. The forensic inspector at the scene that day was a man named Caslav Ristic, already a veteran at his job. When I met him in Belgrade, he was a retiree of 63 with a ruddy face, thinning white hair and a gruff manner. He had brought yellowing newspaper clippings about the explosion, along with his own Polaroid photos from the crime scene.Belivuk’s father, Ristic told me, was a veteran who brought weapons home from the war; he was keeping two grenades in a kitchen drawer. He had been depressed, and after arguing with his wife, he walked off and triggered both grenades, apparently intending only to kill himself. His wife and mother-in-law were collateral damage. Afterward, the 9-year-old Belivuk “had to go through the hallway, past the dead bodies, to the neighbor’s house,” Ristic said. (The only visible injuries he had were some cuts.) Ristic told me it was an unusual case, but only because the father had killed himself with two grenades. “Usually they just used one,” he said.Belivuk grew up and became a bouncer in Belgrade nightclubs, acquiring a rap sheet full of petty crimes. In the early 2000s, Serbia was struggling with the toxic legacy of Milosevic, who had empowered a criminal class as a means of evading the wartime sanctions placed on Serbia’s economy. At the top end, mobsters colluded with the country’s intelligence chiefs to protect their cash flow. They were so powerful that in 2003 they killed the country’s reformist prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, who had threatened a crackdown. At the bottom end were thugs like Belivuk, foot soldiers in the rising cocaine trade.Belivuk might have remained a small-time thug had his life not intersected with the rise of Aleksandar Vucic. Around 2012, as Vucic was gaining control over the country’s security agencies, a new group of hooligans appeared in Belgrade’s Partizan Stadium, and Belivuk was asked to join. Most soccer loyalties are lifelong in Serbia, but the leaders of the new group were mainly made up of people with no prior connection to Partizan. The group’s name, the Janissaries, was a sly acknowledgment of this fact: The Janissaries were an elite Ottoman military force made up mostly of boys taken from their Christian families and molded into ruthless killers for the Ottoman state. Where earlier hooligans had informal and haphazard support from the police, mostly for drug sales, this new group’s ties to the state were direct and political. Its first leader’s name would later appear in the handwritten notes of a law-enforcement official alongside the label “state project,” in evidence uncovered by Serbian investigative reporters.Belivuk and his new boss — a fellow hooligan called Aleksandar Stankovic, known as the Mute — soon began working closely with their patrons in the interior ministry. The relationship was exposed in a series of photographs and text exchanges that surfaced in a lawsuit years later. In one of the exchanges, Belivuk stressed his fealty, and an interior ministry official texted him back: “She knows. The boss knows. The big boss knows.” The texts don’t detail who he was talking about, but the minister’s immediate superior was a woman. Vucic was then the prime minister and security chief.Belivuk would later claim in court that the Janissaries helped pull off a brazen demolition in downtown Belgrade that made way for a waterfront project that one of Vucic’s allies brokered with the leader of the United Arab Emirates. That case, in which dozens of masked men used bulldozers to destroy a street full of buildings that were in the way of the project, remains unsolved.Curiously, the Janissaries also appear to have helped ensure the safety of gay-pride parades for Vucic. It was a little out of character for the hooligans, a flamboyantly homophobic crowd who had turned the occasion into a bloody melee in years past. But Vucic apparently felt that the violence was becoming an obstacle for Serbia’s application to join the E.U. According to B., who was not himself present, Vucic organized a closed-door meeting with a group of hooligan leaders, holding up a thick packet of case files and promising them that any prior criminal charges against them would be suspended if they kept the peace during gay-pride events. The parades went smoothly after that.I wasn’t able to confirm that Vucic ever held such a meeting. (Vucic rarely gives foreign-media interviews, and his spokespeople did not respond to my requests for one.) But Stankovic — Belivuk’s boss — does appear to have had his cases suspended. When he became leader of the gang, he had already been sentenced to five years in prison for drug trafficking and illegal weapons possession. In the following years, the sentence was deferred a dozen times on phony medical claims, using doctors’ forms that later turned out to be falsified, according to documents unearthed by Vreme, a Belgrade weekly.Soon afterward, Vucic was asked during an interview if he planned to do something about the rise in hooligan violence. He replied that he lacked the power to do so, because there was no “general social consensus” on the issue. It was quintessential Vucic: part dog-whistle, part provocation and soon forgotten amid Serbia’s constant swirl of real and manufactured crises.President Vucic at a session of the National Security Council. He has tried to win Serbia’s entry to the European Union while also maintaining hard-line nationalist positions.Srdjan IlicAs he consolidated power, Vucic steadily reshaped Serbia into an autocracy. In 2019, the nonprofit Freedom House downgraded Serbia in its annual assessment of democracies from free to partly free, citing the politicization of the judiciary and other institutions and elections fraught with bullying and bribes. Yet Serbia’s application to join the E.U. has rolled blithely along, as if the bureaucrats in Brussels haven’t noticed that Vucic is moving in the wrong direction.One important lever of power for Vucic is the media. He has used the state telecommunications company to buy up local TV stations, and his allies run a triad of media organizations that shamelessly follow the Progressive Party line and give plentiful airtime to Vucic himself. These include a TV network called Pink that specializes in glitzy talk shows and reality TV. But the most shameless is Informer, a scandal sheet that features hatchet jobs and images of buxom women.In early 2017, Vucic announced that he would run for president. The campaign that followed was rife with accusations of voter intimidation, with some public employees saying they were pressured to support the ruling party, according to a report by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Media coverage was dominated by the party’s organs, which smeared Vucic’s rivals. He received 120 times the coverage of the two leading opposition candidates combined, according to Birodi, an independent research group.Vucic won the presidency by a sizable margin. With his party dominating Parliament, he now controlled every branch of government and was able to pick his successor as prime minister, a move that earned comparisons to Putin, who in 2008 placed Dmitri Medvedev in the president’s chair to provide a mirage of democratic order in Russia. During Vucic’s inauguration ceremony, hooligans, including a member of the Janissaries, helped to rough up and remove protesters. Vucic’s governing style was becoming more openly authoritarian, with sycophantic public displays of loyalty by his allies.At the same time, Vucic grew more open in his courtship of the authoritarian leaders of Russia, Hungary and China. Despite all these signs of slippage, European leaders continued to greet him warmly, doling out investments and giving no indication that Serbia’s E.U. application was in any danger. (In 2020, the E.U. donated about 300 million euros to Serbia and accounted for 62 percent of Serbia’s trade.) The reason was no secret: Kosovo’s status is still unresolved. The Europeans were pinning their hopes on Vucic to oversee a settlement. “He is very powerful, someone who can deliver on things if he wants to,” one German diplomat told me. “He could be the one to deliver substantial progress on Kosovo.”Vucic sent reassuring signals to the Europeans, but he had other messages for his conservative base and for the Serbian nationalists he supports in Bosnia, Kosovo and Montenegro. (He shares this defiant language with Putin, who has repeatedly affirmed his opposition to Kosovo’s independence.) These messages are often delivered by Aleksandar Vulin, the interior minister, who regularly complains that ethnic Serbs in other Balkan countries are being mistreated. Vulin and other nationalists drop hints that their true goal is a Greater Serbia — the same dream that helped lead the Balkans into war in 1991.The gangs have their role to play in these political charades. Northern Kosovo, with its mostly Serb population, is nominally under the control of the national government in Pristina. In reality, it is dominated by organized crime groups that are widely seen as allies of Vucic’s party and have been accused by the U.S. Treasury Department of conspiring with Serbian security officials in smuggling rackets. That gives Vucic an important lever to dial regional tensions up or down. But as tools of state, mobsters can be unreliable.The first sign of real trouble in the Vucic administration’s relationship with the hooligans came on the night of Oct. 13, 2016. Belivuk had just left his Belgrade gym alongside his boss, Stankovic, when a team of assassins sped past in a black Audi and opened fire with Kalashnikovs. As Belivuk cowered behind a car, the gunmen sped away, leaving Stankovic dead. The crime scene was soon swarming with police, according to a meticulously documented story published last fall in Vreme. One of the officers, on the phone with his boss, shouted, “Who’s Belivuk?” When Belivuk responded, the officer said, apparently referring to his superior, “She told you to go back to the hide-out.” The gang had a new leader.The site where Aleksandar Stanković was murdered in 2016.Jehad Nga for The New York TimesThe murder may have been related to Stankovic’s role as a “state project.” According to the Vreme report, Stankovic, who had been driving around in an armored Audi outfitted with a police radio, was receiving cocaine shipments at lower prices than other gangsters, and they were angry. But the broader lesson of the Stankovic murder was that the Belivuk gang had become embroiled in an increasingly violent war among the region’s drug clans. The cocaine trade was more profitable than ever, with Latin American cartels turning their eyes to the growing European market. Although much of Europe’s cocaine arrives via container ports in Northern Europe, the Balkan route was becoming more important, and much of it was focused on Montenegro, Serbia’s southern neighbor. Montenegro is tiny — the population is just over 600,000 — but it has certain features that make it well suited to the trade, including a long Adriatic coastline. Like Sicily, it is poor and dominated by clans with a reputation for lawlessness. And it has a history of smuggling, a practice abetted by the government during the civil wars of the 1990s.The gang war started after the fall of Darko Saric, the drug lord whose arrest Vucic announced with such ceremony in 2014. Saric had built a narcotics base in Kotor, a gorgeous medieval port town on the Montenegrin coast that is a UNESCO World Heritage site. A group of Kotor traffickers inherited his mantle and then split into rival clans over a 200-kilogram shipment of cocaine. The war quickly turned deadly, with tit-for-tat assassinations taking place in Serbia and Montenegro. The warring clans, Kavac and Skaljar, had built ties to police and intelligence agencies across the Balkans, which were being drawn into the violence.Stankovic’s murder was seen in Belgrade as a sign that the war of the clans was getting out of hand. On the morning after Stankovic’s death, the Serbian interior minister at the time, Nebojsa Stefanovic, held a news conference to announce that enough was enough: It was time to crack down on the mafia. As it happened, things were about to get much worse.One of Belivuk’s first acts as boss was to change his gang’s name to the Principi. In an interview with a Belgrade weekly — the only one he is known to have given — he said it was because he acted “from principles.” He did not say what those principles were. The name carried another tacit association: Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian Serb nationalist who set off the First World War by killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 and who is still widely considered a hero among Serbs for his brave stand against the Austro-Hungarian empire.Belivuk made bigger headlines a few months later, when he and his top lieutenant, Marko Milikjovic, known as the Butcher, were accused of gunning down a man in central Belgrade. The victim was a martial-arts expert who worked security at a Belgrade nightclub on one of the riverfront rafts. On his favorite outlet, Pink TV, President Vucic explained that this man was targeted “because he prevented some of Belivuk’s and Milikjovic’s people from taking over the rafts. When you come to the bunker at the stadium, you get a gram of drugs for 50 euros, and then it spreads throughout Serbia, they sell it on the raft for 70. That price only goes up. And that’s why this man was killed.” Hearing that, Belivuk might easily have imagined that his state support had dried up. Instead, a familiar pattern reasserted itself. The DNA evidence implicating Belivuk mysteriously disappeared, and he and his deputy were both acquitted (though they did serve some jail time before the verdict).Another sign of Belivuk’s untouchability was the appearance of a guest in the soccer stands: Danilo Vucic, the president’s oldest son. Photographs of Danilo with his arms around members of the Belivuk gang appeared in Belgrade’s independent media, prompting the president to lash out in fury and accuse reporters of unfairly targeting his family. Vucic has repeatedly said that his son, who works in a wine shop, is a private citizen with no official position. But Danilo appears to play an ambiguously political role. Two years ago, he publicly welcomed a Serbian war criminal after he had served his time in Croatia, and, according to Serbian media reports, handed him $30,000 in cash, along with the keys to a Belgrade apartment and a car. The origin of this largess has not been explained. (Vucic’s spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment.) Danilo has also been photographed standing with the leader of the People’s Patrol, a far-right nationalist group that stages anti-immigration protests and recently threatened to cross the border in defense of ethnic Serbs living in Kosovo.In Serbia, the stadium can make or break a president.Jehad Nga for The New York TimesBy 2019, Belivuk and his gang had established a bunker inside Partizan stadium where they tortured victims and stored drugs and weapons. They had bigger things on their minds than soccer: The war between the two Montenegrin cocaine factions was upending organized crime across the region. “Most significant organized criminal groups have decided to join one of these two rival criminal groups,” was the conclusion of a Serbian intelligence document, cited in an investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an international consortium, in May 2020.It wasn’t just criminals driving the clan war. Some Serbian and Montenegrin police and intelligence agencies had sided with the Kavac clan, according to the information from the reporting project. (The police in both countries deny any connection with the gangs.) The assassinations started in the streets of Belgrade and Podgorica but soon spread to Spain, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Greece. Several Balkan reporters who have monitored the clan war told me that the current body count is more than 70.The Belivuk gang was becoming more visible beyond Serbia’s borders. In 2019, the Spanish Coast Guard seized 800 kilograms of cocaine on a ship coming from South America. The drugs were worth 50 million euros. Although there is no evidence that the three Serbian sailors on the boat were directly linked to the Belivuk gang, many of the cocaine packages bore the image of Gavrilo Princip, the gang’s signature.There is little doubt that Belivuk and his gang are in prison because Europol cracked the code on Sky-ECC, exposing the group’s incriminating texts and photographs. What remains unclear is what the Serbian authorities knew and what they intended to do about it. The Europol officials I met with in The Hague were cagey about how and when they communicated with Serbia regarding the Sky data. Officially, the intercepts were handed over after Belivuk’s arrest, and those intercepts formed the basis of the indictment. But Europol (or one of its partners) appears to have tipped off the Serbs several months earlier. Serbia’s former interior minister, Nebojsa Stefanovic, said as much, asserting that the arrest was made possible by Sky intercepts. And in October 2020 Vucic, during a rambling statement about gang violence, said he had been hearing about gruesome crimes for weeks, then added cryptically, “And don’t let the whole town tell us about how someone cut someone’s head off via Skype.”That comment got the attention of Stevan Dojcinovic, one of Serbia’s foremost investigative reporters. Dojcinovic is a founder of the Crime and Corruption Reporting Network and has been writing about the Belivuk gang and its ties to the state since 2016. He has been the target of many threats and attacks in the Vucic-allied media, which have labeled him, among other things, a terrorist, a spy, a mobster, a drug addict, a traitor and a sadomasochist. Dojcinovic is a small man with a sensitive, foxlike face and a nose ring. He and his staff work out of a Belgrade office so tiny and full of documents that walking into it is like entering an overstuffed closet. Dojcinovic told me that he believes Vucic’s comment about beheadings (he apparently confused Sky with Skype) may have been a final warning to the gang. “The Belivuk gang had been useful to the state, but they were getting out of control, getting too violent,” Dojcinovic said. “Also they were being watched from outside, the Europeans had informed the Serbian police about the Sky intercepts.”If Dojcinovic is right, the Serbian authorities had not decided what to do about Belivuk and his gang as late as October 2020. They were definitely concerned, because court documents show that the Serbian police started surveilling the gang in early August, six months before the arrests. But it seems they were not concerned enough to stop the gang from torturing and killing people.Thanks to the Sky-ECC messages uncovered by Europol, we now have an appallingly precise record of what happened to some of the men who started disappearing in Belgrade in 2019. The Belivuk gang developed a murder routine and refined it, with dozens of henchmen playing different roles. Sometimes they tempted the victim with drug or gun deals; in one case they tricked a rival into believing an associate had captured Belivuk and he could now kill him. The Sky text messages often provide a minute-by-minute trail of the crimes.One of the men they targeted was a 33-year-old rival hooligan leader named Goran Velickovic. He was a prominent, well-liked figure at Partizan Stadium. He was married to his childhood sweetheart and had two small children and a job with his cousin fixing windows. In photographs, he has ruddy cheeks, cheerful brown eyes and a massive chest, with a tattoo visible on his thickly muscled right forearm that says “The Young Boys,” the name of his fan group.Velickovic knew all about the stadium and its rivalries. What troubled him, his widow, Jelena, told me, was the role the police played. “The thing that really worried us, there were police who were there to provide assistance to rival groups,” Jelena said. “If you’re part of such a group, it gives you unimaginable power. And if you’re against that group, you cannot protect yourself.”In early August 2020, Goran went out to meet a friend and never came back. It would be months before Jelena knew for certain what happened. Only when she saw the Sky evidence from the indictment did she understand: Goran had been lured out of Belgrade by a man he trusted to a dirt road alongside a deserted wheat field. The Belivuk gang ambushed him, tied him up and drove him to their slaughterhouse, even as Jelena was feeding the babies and making dinner for her husband.Jelena Velickovic’s husband, Goran, was one of the alleged murder victims of a gang currently on trial in Belgrade.Jehad Nga for The New York TimesThe gang had prepared a torture chamber in a hidden room accessed via the garage. There were handcuffs and straps, along with blades, hot irons and disposable work clothes. The meat grinder stood at one end. Before every murder, gang members laid out fresh plastic sheeting on the floor and walls.According to the indictment, they brought Goran inside the room and interrogated him, forcing him to unlock his phone and go through his contacts. They pulled off his fingernails with pliers, beat him, and finished him off by beheading him with an ax. They carved an insult onto Goran’s back with a knife, took some photographs and sent them to contacts on his phone. One photo went with a text: “See honey? Mexico in the middle of Belgrade.”The gang’s leaders, the Sky intercepts reveal, often reveled in torture. During another murder a few weeks later, Belivuk and his right-hand man called in on their Sky phones from Montenegro (where they were carrying out three other killings) to encourage their henchmen in Belgrade to give “102 percent of yourself” to the torture of the latest victim. The Sky transcripts show that they asked the phone to be put close to the victim so that they could curse him and tell him they were planning to kill his father and brother and “everything you’ve ever known and loved.” Later, Belivuk texted again, asking one of his subordinates to describe the torture at length and “don’t skip those juicy details for me.”After each victim was dead, the men followed the same ritual. They used axes and knives to cut the body into small chunks, then fed them through the meat grinder, gathering the remains in bags which they upended into the Danube. They burned the bags, along with all the victim’s clothes and belongings. They also destroyed the bloodied plastic sheeting and cleaned the meat grinder with acid and bleach. But that was not the end of it. In almost every case, prosecutors say, they texted the victim’s family members, often pretending to be him, and found ways to extract money, drugs and cars.Jelena Velickovic told me that until the day she found out what happened to her husband — by seeing photographs of his mangled body on a Serbian TV show — she found it hard to believe that Belivuk was responsible.“He was almost a friend,” she said. “I met him lots of times at the stadium. My husband, too.” Years earlier, when she took her first child to the stadium for a game, it was Belivuk who congratulated her. And, in keeping with Serbian custom, he even gave her money for the baby, a gift of 50 euros. “He was nice at the time,” she said. “I could never imagine that a guy who gave us gifts for our child, that this guy could kill my husband.”Jelena is a small woman with large, dark eyes, round features and a look of resigned melancholy. Tattoos cover her arms, including a recent one that says in Serbian, “The pain I feel today will be my power tomorrow.”Jelena’s lawyer, sitting with us, told me she believed Belivuk and his men weren’t born monsters. It took the government to make that happen. “Belivuk was a victim of unrealistic expectations,” she said. “He had illusions of grandeur. He and his friends became victims themselves. Someone fed them delusions.”A meat grinder in a hide-out that gang members used to dispose of the bodies of murder victims.Photograph from the Serbian Ministry of InteriorIn the two years since the Belivuk gang was arrested, Vucic has repeatedly said the case marked a decisive break with the past. “We will clean the state institutions of all their collaborators,” he declared at the first news conference after the arrests. He later told a group of journalists: “This is important for us, but also for ordinary citizens. Restaurant and bar owners will not have to worry about someone coming and wanting to racketeer them and then they are afraid to report it to the police because they don’t know if someone in the police is well connected to these killers.” It was a message calculated to appeal to Serbs who were troubled by what they heard about the Belivuk case. It may also have been aimed at the European Union, which will not admit Serbia to the club until it gets more serious about the rule of law.There were a number of reasons to doubt the president’s promise. He has said similar things in the past, and Belivuk is widely viewed in Serbia as the latest in a long series of useful thugs, as replaceable as Aleksandar Stankovic before him. The bigger reason is that the Serbian authorities continue to be cozy with drug dealers and gangs. One of the more sensational recent examples was the discovery of a sprawling marijuana farm 30 miles outside Belgrade that, according to prosecutors, was being protected by police and military officers. The farm, designed to produce highly concentrated forms of cannabis, appears to have been Europe’s largest.And Vucic’s relationship with outlaws goes beyond Serbia. In 2018, a Kosovo businessman who is accused by the U.S. TreasuryDepartment of large-scale drug and weapons trafficking was charged in the murder of a politician there. Vucic defended him, calling him “a man who defends the Serbian people and the hearths of northern Kosovo.” Paradoxically, Vucic’s influence in northern Kosovo is part of the reason the European Union sees him as a valuable partner. He demonstrated that power late last year during a border crisis that briefly threatened to tip into open conflict.The confrontation heated up, perhaps not coincidentally, during a European Union summit meeting in December at which Vucic reaffirmed his refusal to participate in the E.U.’s sanctions on Russia. Ethnic Serbs in northern Kosovo barricaded the roads, blocking the movements of the Kosovan authorities. Protesters gathered on the Serbian side of the border, including members of the People’s Patrol, the Serbian nationalist organization that has documented ties to Russia’s paramilitary Wagner group. Belgrade sent its own troops to the border, threatening to step in and defend the Serbs of Kosovo. Vucic then held a meeting with a group of Kosovan Serbs, and the crisis came to an end. Needless to say, the border fracas got the attention of the European Union. In mid-March, the leaders of Serbia and Kosovo tentatively agreed to an E.U.-sponsored plan to normalize relations, but Vucic has refused to commit to anything in writing.A roadblock in near the northern part of an ethnically-divided town in Kosovo in 2022. Serbia’s leaders remain deeply unhappy about Kosovo’s breakaway from Serbia.Florion Goga, ReutersAlmost a decade ago, an American scholar and analyst named Daniel Serwer helped to arrange Vucic’s first public appearance in Washington, D.C. Serwer worked in the Balkans in the 1990s and he knew all about Vucic’s nationalist roots. But he was disappointed with the record of other Serbian political leaders. He told me Vucic made no promises about Kosovo, but said he would move closer to the European Union. Serwer found Vucic intelligent and serious. There was some hope, he told me, that Vucic could be a “Nixon in China” figure, capable of bringing his party’s conservative base to a fuller reconciliation with Serbia’s neighbors.Serwer told me that his attitude toward Vucic has changed radically. “Vucic is now deadly serious about the ‘Serbian world,’” he said. Those words, invoked often by Serbian nationalists, convey the idea that Serbia is entitled to dominate the lands where ethnic Serbs live, including several neighboring countries. “He had the opportunity to move in a pro-E.U. direction, and he chose not to.” Serwer speculated that Vucic has concluded the reforms required to join the E.U. would weaken his hold on power or perhaps even land him in jail. That is what happened to the former prime minister of Croatia, Ivo Sanader, who presided over most of his country’s preparations for accession only to be arrested and imprisoned on corruption charges (he remains in prison today). Sanader’s fate has become a cautionary tale for Balkan would-be reformers.The United States and the E.U. have continued to cater to Vucic, focusing their policies on economic growth and mostly ignoring his illiberalism. The Trump administration seemed especially favorable to Vucic, openly siding with him in a regional tariff dispute and forcing the collapse of a popular government in Kosovo. Trump sent an abrasive special envoy to the region, Richard Grenell, who seemed bent on brokering a Serbia-Kosovo “deal of the century” to enhance Trump’s prospects in the 2020 presidential election. (It did not happen.)Serwer and a number of other Balkan experts say that the United States and the European Union are missing an opportunity to push Vucic in a more democratic direction. “We have more leverage in the western Balkans than anywhere on earth,” I was told by Kurt Bassuener, a scholar who has written extensively on the Balkans. “And yet we’re building our policy on Vucic and people like him.” If Vucic knew he risked losing much of his Western financial and diplomatic support, Bassuener said, his calculus might change about all kinds of things, including his habit of coddling criminals and hooligans. The notion that Serbia can “balance” the West against Russia is largely a mirage, Bassuener said. Russia may be Serbia’s traditional ally, but Putin, who is struggling to rebuild his own shattered army, has little of substance to offer ordinary Serbs.One afternoon in Belgrade, I spent an hour talking to Boris Tadic, who served as Serbia’s president from 2004 until 2012, when he lost to Vucic’s party. He told me that organized crime has become so powerful in Serbia that it is difficult to know who is calling the shots. During his own time in office, he said, he was amazed to discover that the criminal gangs “had better equipment and technology than our police.” The cocaine cartels had become so lucrative that they could corrupt anyone. Tadic said he had fought the mafia with some success. Vucic, he said, had “helped put criminals in power” with the belief that he could control them. It was a dangerous gamble.“What is the final outcome of your power if you’re going to destroy the foundations of society with hooligans and criminals?” he asked. Tadic glanced uneasily around us at the hotel courtyard. “Who is running this country?” he asked. “Maybe some companions of Belivuk are sitting next to us.”Robert F. Worth is a contributing writer for the magazine and former chief of The Times’s Beirut bureau whose book on the 2011 Arab Uprisings, “A Rage for Order,” won the 2017 Lionel Gelber prize. More

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    The Lakers, Clippers and Kings, and an L.A. Court in Constant Motion

    LOS ANGELES — Jorge Mendez waited impatiently as the Los Angeles Kings’ fate hung in the balance late Friday night.Their N.H.L. first-round playoff game against the Edmonton Oilers had already gone into overtime, robbing Mendez’s crew of several precious minutes they would need to get Crypto.com Arena ready for the Clippers’ N.B.A. playoff game on Saturday afternoon. And now there was another delay. Officials were trying to determine whether a would-be game-winning goal by Kings forward Trevor Moore should count.Mendez, the venue’s assistant conversion manager, had a crew of about 20 people waiting to transform the chilly arena. They would be working all night and had to finish by 7 a.m. Saturday. They had never missed a deadline, and weren’t about to start now.“With the referees we don’t know,” Mendez said. “They could say they deny that one and it goes longer. And the more longer they go, they’re going to take more time from me.”The Kings had a playoff game Friday night, and the Clippers and Lakers hosted postseason games Saturday, creating an eventful weekend for arena workers.The goal stood and the Kings won. Fans celebrated and left the building, then Mendez’s crew got to work: The nets and glass surrounding the ice rink came down; the penalty boxes and benches were disassembled and moved; the ice was cleaned and covered by insulation so it wouldn’t melt during the next day’s basketball games; and the modules containing seats were shifted into new configurations.They finished well before 7 a.m. and Mendez drove home at 6:30 a.m. At that time of day there is little traffic, so it took him just 10 minutes. When he works overnight, he sleeps during the day, and his wife tries to stop his 9-year-old daughter from bursting into his room to ask if he wants to bike with her. But Mendez’s weekend was long from over.Like dozens of others, Mendez worked tirelessly to make sure the arena could handle its frenetic week. The busiest time came in the 36 hours after the Kings game Friday, when the building turned over from the Kings to the Clippers to the Lakers and back to the Kings. All three teams have called the arena home since 1999, when it opened as Staples Center.“My favorite part of this is when they’re done,” said Lee Zeidman, the president of Crypto.com Arena; the nearby Microsoft Theater; and the surrounding entertainment district, L.A. Live. “It’s like a puzzle. These men and women they’re the best in the business.”Mendez was back at 1 p.m., ready to flip the arena from the Clippers’ array of red, blue, black and silver to the Lakers’ purple and gold.Joe Keeler usually drives the Zamboni that maintains the ice during Kings games, but he sometimes helps transition the arena to basketball.The ice gets cleaned and covered with insulation so it does not melt during basketball games. Then the court and basketball hoops get changed in accordance with which team is playing.‘Organized chaos’Between Thursday and Monday night, Crypto.com Arena will have hosted four basketball playoff games and two hockey playoff games.“It’s chaos,” said Darryl Jackson, an event operations assistant manager for the arena. “But it’s organized. Organized chaos.” He began his career working on conversions, but now helps to make sure the baskets during basketball games and the glass during hockey games stay in good condition.Minutes after Game 4 of the first-round series between the Clippers and the Phoenix Suns finished Saturday, Loreto Verdugo backed a forklift down an aisle between the court and the first row of grandstand seats. He had just a couple of inches of space on either side of him. After years of doing this task, he wasn’t nearly as nervous as he was the first time he did it.“You don’t want to hit the floor because the floor’s the most important thing out there,” Verdugo said. “But you don’t want to hit anybody else either.”He had quietly left his home in North Hollywood at 4 a.m. (“I’m like a mouse,” he said) to be at the arena in time to begin supervising maintenance work.As soon as the Clippers’ game ended, just before 3 p.m., and all of the people had been cleared from the court, a bustle of expertly choreographed activity began. By the time the Clippers’ players began their postgame interviews, workers had bagged fans’ trash, and the player and logo banners the Clippers hang in the rafters had been rolled up to reveal the gold-colored championship banners for the Lakers and the W.N.B.A.’s Los Angeles Sparks, who have also shared the arena for much of the past two decades.The Kings won in overtime Friday against the Edmonton Oilers before the Clippers lost to the Phoenix Suns and the Lakers beat the Memphis Grizzlies.The Clippers’ court was already being uprooted from the floor, piece by interlocking piece, and loaded onto pallets that Verdugo and two other forklift drivers would pick up and deposit in a storage area that doubles as a news conference room.It was the 251st midday conversion in the history of Crypto.com Arena.About an hour after the Clippers’ game ended, their court had been replaced by the Lakers’ floor.Joe Keeler, who normally drives the Zamboni that cleans and builds the ice during hockey games, joined a group of people folding the baskets with white stanchions that the Clippers use and rolling them out to the storage area. They replaced them with the yellow-stanchioned baskets the Lakers use.“Everybody helps where they can,” said Keeler, who also helped pick up the Clippers’ floor and lay down the Lakers’.Red Clippers drapery was replaced by purple, and a purple carpet had been rolled out in the tunnel the Lakers use to go onto the court.It is a little easier when the conversion is from one basketball court to another. Doubleheaders involving the Kings are more challenging. When the building first opened, Zeidman gathered the vendors for the basketball courts, the seats and the plexiglass for hockey games and asked them how long they thought it would take to convert the hockey arena into a basketball arena. They told him at least four hours.“Unacceptable,” Zeidman said.Robbin Dedeaux, a seasoned usher, worked his section during the Clippers’ game before the changeover. The court and banners, like the Lakers and Sparks’ championship banners, are adjusted accordingly.‘How can I work here?’The first conversion for a doubleheader was an event in itself. Fans were allowed to watch from a designated area. Arena workers watched from a break room upstairs.“It was amazing,” said Juanita Williams, 57, an usher who has worked right behind the home benches during basketball games since the building opened. “To see it for the first time, we were like there’s no way they’re going to change this over in two and a half hours. It happened.”Williams started as an usher 25 years ago at the Forum in Inglewood, Calif., where the Lakers and the Kings played from 1967 to 1999. She called to find out how much Lakers season tickets cost.“I said: ‘OK, I cannot afford those tickets. So how can I work here then?’” she said.In the daytime she works from home as a buyer for a washer and dryer company that she has been with for 34 years. Her daughter briefly took a job as an usher, too, while going to cosmetology school.By Monday night, Williams will have worked in all six playoff games since Thursday.The merchandise available on arena concourses must be refreshed, too.Robbin Dedeaux, 65, will have too. He works at the top of the lower bowl in aisle 14, checking tickets and greeting customers. He is stationed right next to where the Lakers’ radio broadcasters sit.Dedeaux also started this work as a second job to get out of the list of chores his wife, Ricca Dedeaux, was always asking him to do. He started with ticket-taking in 1999 and then became an usher. He has been asked if he’d like to work down on the floor, but he thinks he might get sleepy if he got to sit down.“The fans are the best part of the job,” Dedeaux said. “You get to see them from all over the world. They come in from Italy, they come in from France, they come in from Germany. You have fun with them.”He added: “When the fans that come here from different arenas, I have fun with them. I tell them to get out.”He laughed.Dedeaux and his wife have been married for 40 years. He said she misses him during basketball and hockey season when he is working so many hours.“That’s just marriage,” Dedeaux said. “She knows I love her, she knows I love what I do. She tolerates it.”He added, “Then I make up for it.”After the Lakers game, Darryl Jackson and his crew convert the arena back into an NHL venue.‘It has to be done’Ignacio Guerra’s first job in the events world came in the early 1990s. He was a high school chemistry and biology teacher and coach, and he would park cars at the Hollywood Bowl in the summers. When Staples Center opened, Guerra worked for the contractor parking cars there, before finding a job working for the arena. Saturday was his 21st anniversary with the arena.In 2019, he took over as the head of the arena’s operations department. He is now the senior vice president of operations and engineering. He has worked hundreds of events and has two large frames in his office displaying credentials for everything from Taylor Swift concerts to N.B.A. All-Star Games.He shepherded the building through coronavirus shutdowns and the return of fans. During the shutdown, many of his workers took other jobs and didn’t come back, which meant starting over with new people at some positions.Kings and Lakers fans celebrated victories while the Clippers fell further behind in their playoff series.At least a handful of the remaining people have worked at the arena since the beginning, including the man who builds the penalty boxes for hockey games. Guerra often stands in the middle of the floor supervising all of the activity.“They’re the heart and soul of this,” Guerra said of the operations staff.He said the crew has never missed a conversion.“You can’t wait up at 7 in the morning and say, ‘Hey, sorry we couldn’t get the Laker floor down.’” Guerra said. “It has to be down, and there’s a no-fail mentality.”The Lakers played at 7 p.m. Saturday. By 10 p.m. another conversion had begun. More

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    Practical but Not Pretty. That’s Pro Tennis at Miami’s N.F.L. Stadium.

    Five years ago, the Miami Open had to abandon Crandon Park on Key Biscayne for Hard Rock Stadium and its parking lot. It remains a work in progress.MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — No one really wanted to move the Miami Open 18 miles north from the idyll setting of Key Biscayne to a suburban N.F.L. stadium and its parking lot.Not tournament organizers, or players, or county officials, or longtime fans. They so loved the Key Biscayne location that they tolerated the traffic from downtown Miami across the Rickenbacker Causeway and confines so cramped at Crandon Park that players sometimes stretched and warmed up on the stadium’s concourse.Trekking across the crystal waters of Biscayne Bay made a day at those old-school grounds feel like a mini vacation to tennis Shangri-La, with the coastal breezes through the coconut palms and dense vegetation easing the South Florida humidity. For many, a tennis tournament, even one as important as the Miami Open, is less a sporting event than a novel way to experience the best of what a region has to offer, whether it is the seascapes beyond Monte Carlo Country Club, or the desert mountain views of Indian Wells, Calif.Andy Murray of Great Britain signing autographs for fans after defeating Robert Kendrick during the 2007 Sony Ericsson Open in Key Biscayne.Clive Brunskill/Getty ImagesBianca Andreescu of Canada signed autographs and posed for photos with fans after defeating the United States’s Sofia Kenin at Miami Gardens on Sunday.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesBut Crandon Park badly needed an upgrade. And while I.M.G., the sports and entertainment conglomerate that owns the tournament, was willing to spend some $50 million to renovate the main stadium, which seated roughly 13,000 spectators, and construct three new permanent stadiums with more than 10,000 seats combined, local opposition arose in the form of Bruce Matheson.Matheson’s family had donated the land for Crandon Park to Dade County in 1940 under terms that did not include private enterprise. A mediated settlement in 1992 allowed for one stadium, but he drew the line at three more, returned to court and won, preventing any expansion.With few options in South Florida, I.M.G. cut a deal with Stephen Ross, the owner of the Dolphins. He agreed to wedge a temporary tennis arena in the corner of Hard Rock Stadium each March and build a permanent grandstand, along with more than two dozen other courts, in his parking lot.Tatiana Golovin of France returning a shot to Elena Bovina of Russia during the NASDAQ-100 Open in 2005 in Key Biscayne.Ezra Shaw/Getty ImagesSpectators crowded the fence in hopes of getting an autograph while watching competitors practice during the Miami Open in Miami Gardens on Saturday.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesIt was the polar opposite of Crandon Park charm, with its bandbox stadium that felt like a tennis version of a beloved nightclub. Roger Federer was not happy.“Right now it doesn’t feel great to move away from Key Biscayne to be honest,” he said during the tournament’s final year at the beach in 2018.Five years later, Stefanos Tsitsipas, the Greek star, is among those still pining for the old neighborhood and adjusting to the new setup — a stadium-within-a-stadium for the main court, a tennis complex MacGyvered into a car park. There can be a “don’t look up” quality to it all, lest the emptiness of the football stadium or the construction for a coming F1 race come into view.“It’s one of the very few tournaments of the year that I would say is soulless,” Tsitsipas said after he lost to Karen Khachanov of Russia in the round of 16. “It has zero vibe, zero energy.”Tsitsipas, who has never made it past the quarterfinals here, said he loves Miami as a tennis destination but that he believes that tennis tournaments should take place in venues where players and fans can connect with the history of the sport. “I bet any player would still choose to be on Key Biscayne,” he said.The United States’s Coco Gauff prepared to serve while playing Russia’s Anastasia Potapova in Hard Rock Stadium on Saturday.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesFans watched as Novak Djokovic of Serbia played Andy Murray of Great Britain during the men’s final of the Sony Ericsson Open in 2009.Al Bello/Getty ImagesNot everyone. Carlos Alcaraz, the world No. 1 and defending champion, is a major fan of the new location.“A tennis court is always the same size,” Alcaraz said after beating Tommy Paul in straight sets on Tuesday. “I feel great here.”The expanded grounds and easier access to residents north and west of Miami allowed attendance to grow to a record 388,734 in 2019, 62,603 more than the Key Biscayne record. The tournament is likely to break that record this year. Joshua Ripple, I.M.G.’s senior vice president for tennis events, said the tournament is financially far more successful at the new site and can give players a workplace filled with amenities.“It used to be more about where you were going, how cool is the town, and where can me and my friends go out to eat,” he said. Now, he said, it’s about lots of practice courts, plenty of balls, good food on site, a big gym and decent transportation.Spectators walking and relaxing on the campus at the Miami Open on Saturday.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesThe general outdoor dining near the entrance of the Crandon Park Tennis Center before the Ericsson Open in 2000.Clive Brunskill/Getty ImagesAt Hard Rock, I.M.G. can sell 50 lush corporate suites instead of 25 at Key Biscayne, and the 75-acre footprint, compared with 32 acres in Crandon Park, has allowed for 100,000 square feet of pop-up retail and festival space. Mark Shapiro, the president of I.M.G.’s parent company, Endeavor Co., called it “a day party” minus the pool.James Blake, the former pro who has been the tournament’s director since 2018, said he now has more opportunities to say yes to player requests. On-site ice baths. Private massage rooms. Private suites for the top eight players and defending champions. A sprawling recovery room. Shaded seating for players and their entourages on the football field, plus corn hole and spike ball. Even shower heads high enough to accommodate N.F.L. linemen — and tall tennis players like Daniil Medvedev and Alexander Zverev.It beats filling buckets from the hotel ice machine to fill up the tub in the room long after a match. Or a player dining area without enough seats.The campus of the Miami Open at Key Biscayne in 2018.Manuel Mazzanti/NurPhoto, via Getty ImagesSpectators taking a break from the sun in the shade during the Miami Open at Hard Rock Stadium.Scott McIntyre for The New York Times“There is room to grow here,” Blake said. “It felt like if you put one more person at Crandon Park, it was going to be Armageddon.”And yet, Crandon Park still has its pull.Late Wednesday morning, Jorge Fernandez, the father of the U.S. Open finalist Leylah Fernandez, was loading up a car after a practice session with his other daughter, Bianca, who is also trying to make it as a pro, on their favorite courts at Crandon Park, a world away from the action at Hard Rock Stadium.“No comparison,” he said, when asked about the old and the new tournament sites. “You got the beach, you got the golf course, you’re close to downtown.”Inside the old Crandon Park stadium, where Federer and Rafael Nadal played their first match in 2004 (Rafa won) two middle-aged locals were having a game. Federer and Nadal they were not — and that didn’t matter one bit.Sloane Stephens of the United States on Crandon Park Beach with the Miami Open trophy in 2018, the last year the event was held in Key Biscayne.Clive Brunskill/Getty ImagesThe Stadium Court at Crandon Park Tennis Center in Key Biscayne this year.Scott McIntyre for The New York Times More

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    At Indian Wells, the Players Have a Playground of Their Own

    To protect the Indian Wells Tennis Garden, the tournament’s founder took a “get off my lawn” approach so that tennis players could always count on getting on his lawn.INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — More than $100 million has been spent building a tennis temple in the California desert with its two main stadiums, dozens of other courts, a gargantuan video wall, a courtyard full of restaurants and murals honoring past champions.But many players’ favorite spot at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden is the one place where the tournament built nothing at all.It is the player lawn: a big rectangle of natural grass just inside the west entrance that can serve as an outdoor gym, social nexus, soccer field, meditation center, makeshift television studio and children’s playground — sometimes all at the same time.“It’s funny, but I think when a lot of us are thinking about Indian Wells, it’s the lawn,” Marketa Vondrousova, a Czech star and a 2019 French Open finalist, said as she headed to the grass on Friday afternoon.The lawn, with its dramatic view of the Santa Rosa Mountains, is directly in the flow of traffic for the players: a transitional space between their restaurant and the practice courts.The player lawn is distinct because it allows fans to interact with the players, like Carlos Alcaraz, top, or Ben Shelton, above.“I love it,” said Holger Rune, the powerful Danish player already ranked in the top 10 at age 19. “I don’t know why more tournaments don’t do something like this.”It is not quite without parallel: the Miami Open, now held in cavernous Hard Rock Stadium, allows players the same sort of free rein on a stretch of the natural grass football field inside the main stadium that hosts the Dolphins.But the lawn at Indian Wells remains without peer, and what makes it so rare is that, unlike most player areas, it is in plain view of the public. Fans pile into the adjacent area known as “the corral” to chase autographs and photographs, or they fill up the bleachers and elevated walkway that form the border on two sides of the lawn.“It’s the zoo,” Marijn Bal, a leading agent and a vice president of IMG Tennis, said as he watched the fans observe player behavior and the players observe the fans.The concept was, in part, borrowed from golf, said Charlie Pasarell, a driving force behind the creation of the Indian Wells Tennis Garden.Pasarell, 79, grew up in Puerto Rico and was a leading tennis player in the 1960s and 1970s, excelling at U.C.L.A. and on tour. But he made a bigger impact as a tournament director and entrepreneur, founding and elevating the Indian Wells event with his business partner, the retired South African tennis player Ray Moore. The Tennis Garden, built on barren land at an initial cost of $77 million, opened in 2000, giving the longstanding tournament a grander setting before it was sold in 2009 to the software billionaire Larry Ellison, guaranteeing that the event would remain in the United States.Maria Sakkari of Greece, left, and Iga Swiatek of Poland worked out on the lawn.Pasarell said the tournament was one of the first to make practice sessions a happening: constructing bleachers around the practice courts.“It reminded me of when you go to a golf tournament, and you go to the driving range where you have people watching the players hit balls and they put up stands and announce the players’ names,” Pasarell said. “I always wanted to do that here, and the players loved it, although there were a few like Martina Navratilova who wanted to keep their practices private.”The lawn was an extension of the open-access philosophy, even if Pasarell acknowledged that the space was created “a little bit by accident.”“We had this area, and all of the sudden, the players started using that as a place to do their roadwork and to stretch,” he said. “One day somebody got a soccer ball and started kicking it so we put up soccer nets.”A few years after the Tennis Garden opened, it was continuing to expand, and Pasarell said there was a serious proposal to build another show court on the lawn.“I said, ‘Do not touch that grass!’” Pasarell said. “They were saying we could build a real nice clubhouse court there, and I said, ‘This is really important.’ And I was able to convince them, and so far, so good. I mean the players love that area, and it just sort of evolved into a great thing for the tournament.”The lawn has been used for competition: above all pickup soccer. Rafael Nadal scored at the 2012 tournament in a game that also included Novak Djokovic.An elevated walkway forms a border on one side of the lawn.Stefanos Tsitsipas of Greece played soccer on the lawn. Pickup games sometimes break out on the lawn.But above all, it is used for warming up for practices and matches, and to spend a few hours watching players and their increasingly large support teams come and go is to realize how the game has changed.The warm-ups are now dynamic: full of quick-fire footwork combined with hand-eye challenges. Bianca Andreescu, the Canadian who won the Indian Wells title in 2019, was balancing on one leg on Friday, leaning forward and catching a small soccer ball with one hand. Aryna Sabalenka, the imposing Belarusian who won this year’s Australian Open, was running side by side with her fitness trainer as they tossed a medicine ball to each other.Pierre Paganini, the cerebral longtime fitness coach for Roger Federer and Stan Wawrinka, popularized this approach, tailoring exercises to fit precisely with the complex demands of tennis. The emphasis was on repeating short bursts of speed and effort to mimic the rhythm of a match.During Andreescu’s warm-up, she quick-stepped through a sequence of cones that were of different colors, reacting to her coach Christophe Lambert’s call of “red” by quickly moving to the red cone.“It’s a lot more professional,” said Michael Russell, a former tour-level pro now coaching Taylor Fritz, the top-ranked American man at No. 5. “Everybody is doing dynamic warm-ups. Some might go 15 minutes. Some might go 30. But there’s a lot more preparation and bigger teams also.”Reflecting that, players often navigated the lawn in small packs, typically in groups of four.Jabeur, right, in a training session with a member of her team.“There’s the physio, the strength and conditioning coach and the coach,” Russell said. “So, you have teams of three or four people whereas before it was just the coach, and they would use the physios provided by the tournaments. But now with increased prize money, more players can have bigger teams of their own.”The added support has extended careers but also the workday. “It’s getting longer and longer,” said Thomas Johansson, the 2002 Australian Open champion who coaches Sorana Cirstea of Romania. “When I played here, if we started at 11 a.m., maybe we left the hotel at 10:20, got here at 10:35 and ran back and forth two or three times, swung my arms a little bit and then you were ready. Now, some who play at 11 are starting their warm-up at 9:30. It’s a different world now, and it’s positive because now you know how to eat, drink, train and recover, but you have to find the balance. You cannot live with your tennis 24/7 or you burn out.”But at least life on the lawn is not all about tennis. It’s a place where Ben Shelton, the rising American player and former youth quarterback, can throw a football 60 yards. A place where the Belarusian star Victoria Azarenka’s 6-year-old son Leo can run free with other players’ children or with players like his mother’s friend Ons Jabeur. A place where Vondrousova can juggle a soccer ball with her team, shrieking with mock horror when it finally strikes the ground.“Today’s record was 84,” she said on Friday, a day that she did not have a match but still chose to spend some quality time in pro tennis’s version of a public park.“Thank God we didn’t build on it,” Pasarell said.Leylah Fernandez of Canada played soccer during last year’s competition. More

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    How Qatar Keeps Its World Cup Stadiums Cool Enough for Everyone

    A mechanical engineer at Qatar University used giant tanks of cold water to create a cooling system in one of the hottest places on the planet.DOHA, Qatar — Saud Ghani knows cool.In his air-conditioned Porsche, he pulled up to a shady spot at Qatar University. He entered one of the many laboratories in the engineering department where he studies thermal dynamics — mainly, how to keep people comfortable in a warming world.Even his title is cool: professor and chair of air conditioning.The university’s campus was empty because the semester had been suspended for the World Cup. The temperature outside was about 90 degrees Fahrenheit. The indoor labs were noticeably chilly.This was the quiet epicenter of what became a global story of audacity. This is where Ghani and his associates oversaw the design of systems that dared to air-condition the eight outdoor World Cup stadiums in and around Doha, one of the world’s hottest big cities.“People think, oh, you have too much money and you’re just pumping cold air,” Ghani said. “That is not it at all. But what can you do? If people want to criticize from the sideline, I think that’s an oversight. But if they want to learn, they are 100 percent welcome here.”So Ghani set off on a private tour.He wanted to show the scaled replicas of each stadium, most of them tweaked during the design stages — at Ghani’s behest and to the architects’ chagrin — to better keep out hot air. He wanted to show the garage-sized wind tunnel and smoke and laser lights used to examine how air would circulate through each design. He wanted to show the miniature model of bleachers, with little hollow humans made on a 3-D printer and steadily injected with warm water — at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit — to simulate body temperatures, and where infrared cameras could tell which of the fake people were too warm or too cool.“I want people to feel neutral,” Ghani said. “I don’t want them to feel cold. I don’t want them to feel warm. It’s about perception. It’s not just temperature. But how do they feel?”This Goldilocksian pursuit raised plenty of questions. Not the least of them are two big ones:Did this man, in these labs and at this World Cup, just alter the future of stadium design in a warming world?Could open-air stadiums that keep athletes and spectators comfortable at room temperature, no matter the heat of the day, exist?Ghani shrugged off the first one. He said yes to the second.A City Humming With CoolSaud Ghani, center, explaining the cooling system to visiting journalists in June. Ghani has said he wants people to feel “neutral,” neither warm nor cold.Tasneem Alsultan for The New York TimesGhani, 52, is from Sudan and got his doctorate in mechanical engineering at the University of Nottingham in England. Married with three children, he came to teach at Qatar University in 2009, just as the country was preparing its long-shot bid for the World Cup.One day he got a call from Qatar’s highest levels: Can you design a system that keeps people cool, even in an outdoor stadium, even in Doha, even in the summer? The bid’s success, or failure, might rest on it.Sure, Ghani said.In 2010, Qatar won the right to host this year’s tournament, for reasons that have to do with corruption more than thermal dynamics.In 2015, acknowledging that scorching temperatures, in and out of stadiums, could be both miserable and dangerous, FIFA moved the competition from its traditional summer dates to late fall. The change may have made Ghani’s mission easier, with daytime temperatures in the 80s and 90s instead of 110 or higher, but he insisted that it did not matter.These eight stadiums of various sizes and designs were not just for the World Cup. One will be dismantled, but seven will be used, year-round: for big events, for club teams, for university athletics, maybe even as part of a bid for the Olympics. (Such promises for everyday uses can go unfulfilled, as the ghost venues of past Games attest.)In Qatar, the heat for nine months of the year is almost unbearable, Ghani said. And it is not going to get better.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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    Pouring Through a Crisis: How Budweiser Salvaged Its World Cup

    Taken by surprise by Qatar’s decision to ban beer at stadiums, the company remade its marketing strategy in real time.DOHA, Qatar — The theme at the luxury W hotel in central Doha is beer. Budweiser beer. The walls are festooned with Budweiser labels. “Budweiser” is painted in enormous script along the check-in desk. There’s a “Budweiser Player of the Match” corner, where armchair soccer stars can take selfies while hoisting a fake trophy against a Budweiser background. Bathed in red and white, the place has the feel of a giant beer can.Budweiser, which has been the official beer sponsor of the World Cup for the last 36 years, remade the hotel into what it called “a home away from home experience” in anticipation of the 2022 tournament. That was before the moment, two days before the opening match, when Qatar’s government threw Budweiser’s carefully crafted (and quite expensive) beer-selling plans into disarray by suddenly forbidding the sale of alcohol in or around the tournament stadiums during the event.The dismaying nature of the situation — the abrupt contravention of a plan years in the making, the 11th-hour dismantling of the elaborate Budweiser tents at the matches, the financial and related consequences for a longtime tournament sponsor, the public nature of it all — was aptly articulated at the time by Budweiser itself.“Well, this is awkward,” the company wrote in a tweet — which it then promptly deleted, both illustrating and compounding its point.But, like the ghostly tweet, preserved forever in screenshots marked with “lol”s, Budweiser remains a presence at the World Cup, albeit in a watered-down way.Certain fan zones were among the limited places where fans could buy alcoholic beers.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesWhile the stadiums have been scrubbed of regular beer, they are awash in stacks of alcohol-free Budweiser Zero. Ads for the drink play on a loop on stadium screens, and refrigerators full of it sit within arm’s reach at concession stands, right next to the Coca-Cola.But given the average fan’s attitude toward the usefulness of nonalcoholic beer as a sports-experience enhancer (“Why?” asked a fan at Lusail Stadium on a recent night, when asked if he had tried one yet), the available quantities would seem to reflect wishful thinking as much as responsible drinking.At Lusail, the signs next to the Budweiser Zero duly noted that “Budweiser is proud to serve its products in compliance with the local rules and regulations.”“Proud” is one way of putting it.“I’m just glad it wasn’t us,” said a representative for another FIFA sponsor, who spoke on condition that neither she nor her company be identified, saying that she did not want to publicly criticize the Qatari government. “Qatari regulations are very strict and top-down, and it’s hard when you feel that the regulations can change so abruptly.”A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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    Stadiums as High Art in a World Cup Fantasyland

    From a desert tent to a golden bowl, the spectacular arenas Qatar has built in and around Doha showcase the majesty, and the folly, of this World Cup.AL KHOR, Qatar — It’s hard to convey how strange it is to come upon Al Bayt Stadium, an enormous stylized tent decorated with black stripes, for the first time. Designed for the World Cup as a homage to traditional nomadic dwellings, Al Bayt, the centerpiece of a manicured park 22 miles north of Doha, rises as if from nowhere and seems at once apt and incongruous, spectacular and otherworldly — an oasis in the desert, or maybe just a mirage.Completed just last year, Al Bayt is one of seven new stadiums built for the World Cup in and around Doha, the capital of Qatar. (An eighth is a spruced-up version of an old stadium.) Each is more spectacular, more unexpected than the next. Each contributes to the relentless sense of cognitive dissonance that pervades this World Cup.Qatar spent a reported $220 billion preparing for the tournament, conjuring new buildings, new neighborhoods and even an entirely new city. To be here now is to exist in a bubble of high unreality: a place in which everything is newer and better, and which exists, for the time being, only in reference to itself.On match days, it takes nearly an hour by bus to get to Al Bayt. All of the other stadiums are easily reachable on the underground metro system, or connected to it by free buses, so this has become a commuters’ World Cup, an event more reminiscent of an Olympics than previous tournaments. In Russia in 2018, for instance, some fans had to travel to Yekaterinburg, nearly 1,000 miles from Moscow, for a handful of matches. In Brazil four years earlier, the trip from Manaus to Pôrto Alegre was more than twice as far.But here you can visit all the stadiums in a single day.Education City Stadium in Al Rayyan.Julian Finney/Getty ImagesStadium 974 in Doha.Clive Mason/Getty ImagesTake the train west on the green line, for example, past the Qatar National Library (architect: Rem Koolhaas), and you find yourself in Education City, a 2,900-acre campus comprising schools, research centers and incubators. Walk a little way along the path and there is the 40,000-seat Education City Stadium, looming like a spaceship from a superior civilization whose inhabitants have a taste for bling. During the day, it changes color as the sun moves across the sky; at night, disco-style lights streak across it, fueled by thousands of diodes.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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    In LA Since the ’80s, the Clippers Are Finally Planting a Flag

    Superstar players have chosen the oft-overlooked team, whose deep-pocketed owner is betting big — with his own money — that fans will choose it, too.LOS ANGELES — Steve Ballmer, the owner of the N.B.A.’s Clippers, is known for being a wacky guy. He sits courtside at home games and punches at the air wildly, leaping from his seat, dancing and shouting.He is intense.He once said he wanted to put spikes in the seats at the Clippers’ next arena to keep fans up and cheering. But he swears it was just a joke.What he really wants, and won’t get, is for the seats to vibrate.“Haptic feedback,” he said. “You know, BRRR.”If Ballmer had it his way, the whole city would buzz with excitement about the Clippers, the perennially unloved and underachieving little brother to the Lakers. He is spending his considerable energy, and billions of his fortune, to carve out real space for the Clippers in a crowded Los Angeles sports market.“What does it take to succeed when you’re behind?” Ballmer, 66, said. “Well, it takes a while. You have to be patient. It takes a while to capture people’s loyalties. You have to be successful. You got to build a good product, which means we have to have good teams out there year in and year out. Got to win championships.”He added: “I have to live a long and full life so we can get there.”The Lakers have spent decades establishing their identity as one of the N.B.A.’s glamour franchises. They are the team of Showtime, of championships, of the league’s biggest stars, like Magic Johnson, Kobe Bryant and LeBron James. Hollywood’s elite come to their games to see the show and to be seen.The Clippers have struggled to define themselves, but since Ballmer bought the team in 2014 its reputation has started to change.Stars like Kawhi Leonard and Paul George have chosen to join the Clippers. The team is preparing to leave Crypto.com Arena, which it shares with the Lakers and other teams in downtown Los Angeles, for a glittering new arena 11 miles away in Inglewood in 2024. The once-dominant Lakers have made the playoffs just twice since Ballmer bought the Clippers, creating an opportunity for the Clippers to gain ground among local men’s basketball fans.They have a tough history to overcome.The Clippers owner Steve Ballmer has become known for his constant presence on the sidelines, though usually not like this: He’s often one of the most rowdy fans in the building.Ringo H.W. Chiu/Associated PressThe Clippers made only four playoff appearances between 1984-85, when they moved to Los Angeles from San Diego, and 2010-11, the season before they traded for the All-Star point guard Chris Paul. The Lakers won eight championships during that period.“The Clippers always been looked at as the other team,” said Paul Pierce, the Hall of Fame player who grew up in Inglewood and spent the final two years of his 19-year N.B.A. career with the Clippers.There were moments when the Clippers flashed into the imagination of the basketball world. In the early 2000s, a group of young players — Darius Miles, Lamar Odom and Quentin Richardson among them — earned fans’ adoration with their fun personalities and the playing style of an ultra-talented pickup team. But the Clippers made the playoffs only once in the first decade of the century.“The Clippers never really had a place, you know what I mean?” said Baron Davis, 43, a retired two-time All-Star guard who grew up in Los Angeles and played for U.C.L.A. “And I knew when I signed with the Clippers, my goals in three years, four years, we wanted to make it another destination in L.A.”They did not become serious contenders until they traded with New Orleans for Paul in December 2011 and ushered in the so-called Lob City era, named for the way Paul would connect with the high-flying forward Blake Griffin for thrilling dunks to punctuate fast breaks.That period coincided with a downturn for the Lakers, opening the door for some fans, particularly younger ones, to choose the Clippers.“The Lakers sucked when I first started watching basketball,” Charlie Muir, a high school senior, said at a recent Clippers game. He added: “I saw the Clippers. They had, like, Chris Paul, Blake Griffin. It was Lob City era so it was really exciting to watch.”The teams that included Paul and Griffin had their best shot at winning a championship in 2014, but fell short and had to deal with a scandal. During the playoffs that season, TMZ published audio of the team owner Donald Sterling making racist remarks about Black people.Blake Griffin, left, and Chris Paul, not shown, brought the Clippers into the so-called Lob City era in the early 2010s as they often connected for alley oops.Chris Carlson/Associated PressBallmer’s son called him within two days of that story breaking.“Dad, that team’s going to be for sale,” Ballmer recalled his son saying. “You need to buy it.”Ballmer, a basketball fanatic who is a former chief executive of Microsoft, lived in Seattle and had grown up in Detroit, so he wasn’t familiar with the dynamics of having two major teams from the same league in the same city.“The notion that, like, somebody you run into on the street might be against your team, to me, that was like, whoa, zany,” Ballmer said.For years, Loyola Marymount University published the results of an annual survey that asked Los Angeles County residents which sports team with Los Angeles in its name was their favorite. In 2014, when there were eight such teams, 6.7 percent of respondents chose the Clippers, significantly less than the Lakers (42.9 percent) and Major League Baseball’s Dodgers (33.8 percent) but still more than the five other teams.By 2021, the Lakers and Clippers had become less favored and the N.F.L.’s Rams, which re-entered the market in 2016 after two decades away, had picked up 6 percent of the vote. There are nine professional men’s teams that have Los Angeles in their name, a W.N.B.A. team, a National Women’s Soccer League team and two colleges with major sports programs — U.C.L.A. and Southern California — that all compete for attention.The Lakers have been bad more often than not over the past decade, but they won a championship — their 17th — in 2020, giving fans a reason to celebrate.Brandon Bell/Getty ImagesThe Clippers, Lakers and Kings have shared an arena since 1999, when Staples Center — which was renamed Crypto.com Arena last year — opened in downtown Los Angeles. The W.N.B.A.’s Sparks joined them in 2001. The Clippers have third priority, so they have to build their schedule around the Lakers and Kings. They cover the Lakers’ championship banners with their own signage during home games. There are 10 statues in the plaza in front of the arena: six honoring Laker greats, three featuring Kings and one of the boxer Oscar De La Hoya. Los Angeles is the only city in the United States where multiple pairs of teams in the same sports share buildings.“I think anyone, to some degree, that is not the Lakers or Dodgers, there’s a challenger status that is a little bit unique,” said Kevin Demoff, the Rams’ chief operating officer.After 21 seasons in St. Louis, the Rams returned to Los Angeles in 2016. They won the Super Bowl in the 2021 season, in Inglewood at SoFi Stadium, which they share with the Chargers.“Winning is the cover charge to getting people to appreciate you, especially if you’re in that challenger status,” Demoff said. But he added: “This is not a city where one championship can change your fortunes for a long time. That is just what’s expected.”Except for the Clippers, Chargers and the N.W.S.L. team Angel City F.C., which played its first season this year, all of the major professional sports teams in the Los Angeles market have won at least one championship.Thilo Kunkel, an associate professor at Temple University who studies sports branding, said it is possible, and necessary, for a team to build a brand independent of winning championships. He pointed to London, which has more than a dozen professional soccer teams, many of which have robust fan bases even when they are struggling.“Winning a championship is really putting all eggs in one basket, and that’s a basket everyone else wants as well,” Kunkel said. “A strategic way to build a brand community is creating a vision — who we are, what we stand for.”Both Kunkel and Demoff said the Clippers’ move to their own arena will be important to that end.“They’ve done a really nice job of finding their own lane in the sports brand world in Los Angeles, and now they can fully lean into that rather than having to take down signage from one game in 12 hours and put up something,” Demoff said.Ballmer’s financial commitment to differentiating the Clippers applies on and off the court. The team said it spent $10 million resurfacing 350 basketball courts in community parks around Los Angeles, and others in Inglewood, Moreno Valley (Leonard’s hometown) and Palmdale (George’s hometown). Ballmer spent $2 billion to buy the team, and he is financing the new arena, the $2 billion Intuit Dome.As the Clippers studied seating options for the new arena, they built more than 20 sets of small-scale grandstands, and Ballmer sat in all of them. In downtown Los Angeles at the Intuit Dome Experience Center, which includes sample suites and seating options, visitors can test the seats with haptic feedback (not spikes) that the team ultimately decided were too jarring. Ballmer’s goal is personalization: Clippers fans will even have some control over the temperature in their sections.To help amplify the crowd noise and create the kind of supporters section that is common in soccer stadiums, one side of the arena will have what Ballmer calls the “Wall of Sound”: 4,700 seats lined up without breaks for stairs or aisles.He has consulted his players and coaches about what to include in their new practice courts and locker rooms.Ballmer speaks during a groundbreaking ceremony for the Clippers’ new arena, the Intuit Dome, in September 2021.Ringo H.W. Chiu/Associated PressThe players, of course, are the key to the whole revitalization.There was a time when it would have been unthinkable that superstars would choose the Clippers. Paul, after all, arrived via trade, and the team drafted Griffin No. 1 overall in 2009. But both Leonard and George spurned overtures from the Lakers and have settled in with the Clippers.“People like Kawhi because he’s soft-spoken — he don’t speak,” said Darrell Bailey, the superfan better known as Clipper Darrell. He added that he loved Leonard’s attitude. “At the end of the day, Kawhi comes and does his job.”The Clippers have kept a talented supporting cast around their stars, giving them the second-highest payroll in the N.B.A. For Ballmer, that could mean a big luxury tax bill, the financial penalty for the league’s biggest spenders.“I’ll pay it,” he said with a little sigh and shrug. In September, Forbes estimated his net worth to be $83 billion.“I’ve been extremely blessed financially,” Ballmer said. “Am I kind of an open checkbook where, you know, nothing’s too big? I don’t know. No one’s tested me on that. But I’m willing to spend.”Darrell Bailey, a superfan better known as Clipper Darrell, has followed the team since the early 1990s.Morgan Lieberman for The New York TimesBailey’s custom Clippers car.Morgan Lieberman for The New York TimesThe Clippers said they had seen a return on Ballmer’s investment. They hired three sports and consumer research agencies to study their fan base and found that it had more than tripled between 2014 and 2021. The Clippers said ticket sales and sponsorship revenue had also increased during that time.“You’ve finally got an owner that cares,” Pierce said.Before the season, Ballmer was asked if he was excited that the Clippers seemed to be healthy. He clapped his hands and the sound boomed as though a large balloon had just popped. Then he grinned and stuck out his tongue, lifting both feet off the ground as he rubbed his hands together.“Ohhh, yes, I am!” he said. “Yes, I am!”But Leonard, who missed last season with a knee injury, has played in just six of the team’s 25 games this year because of injuries. George recently missed seven straight games with his injuries. The Clippers are 14-11 — better than the Lakers but below reasonable hopes for a team with such big-name stars.While they are not resting all of their brand-building hopes on winning championships, they know how important on-court success is. Lest they forget, there are constant reminders of the championship expectations for Los Angeles sports teams. Some have won quickly after joining the fray, while the Clippers have yet to win a title in nearly four decades in Los Angeles.On Nov. 12, members of Los Angeles F.C., an expansion soccer team that played its first game in 2018, visited the Clippers. They brought along a prop that Ballmer posed with: the M.L.S. Cup trophy — their first — they had won a week before.Sopan Deb More