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

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      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

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      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

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      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

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      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

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      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

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      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

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      How Arsenal Found Its Voice

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      LONDON — On the night before the biggest game of Arsenal’s season so far, the fans slipped inside the Emirates Stadium to make sure everything was in place. Their leader and a handful of friends had spent weeks drawing up their plans: raising money, contacting suppliers, brainstorming themes, designing images, cutting out stencils, spray-painting letters.Now, late on a Friday night, there was just one job left to do. They had to check that every seat in Block 25 of the stadium’s Clock End contained a flag, either red or white, for the culmination of the display.The next day, they saw their vision realized. As the players of Arsenal and Tottenham took the field at the Emirates, Block 25 was transformed. “We Came, We Saw, We Conquered,” read one banner. “North London Is Red Since 1913,” ran another, a reference to Arsenal’s controversial relocation to this part of the city — and Tottenham territory — a century ago. Hundreds of flags fluttered under a clear blue sky.The display lasted barely more than an instant, all those hours of effort expended for a single, fleeting moment, a reverie that broke as soon as the whistle blew. Its impact, though, lasted substantially longer.After the game, Arsenal’s manager, Mikel Arteta, described the atmosphere inside the Emirates that afternoon as “probably the best I’ve seen in this stadium since I’ve been involved with the club,” a relationship that covers more than a decade. His captain, Martin Odegaard, made a point of thanking the fans, too. “It was amazing to play out there,” he said.In part, of course, that can be attributed to the result: Arsenal had beaten Tottenham, and victory in the North London derby is always something to be celebrated. The context helped, too: The win ensured that Arsenal remained at the summit of the Premier League for another week, a point ahead of Manchester City heading into this weekend, when Liverpool visits the Emirates.Color and crowds are part of every stadium matchday, but at Arsenal it’s the sound that is new.But this was not an isolated case. Over the last year or so, it has not been uncommon for Arteta and his players to gush over how noisy, how passionate, how ardent the Emirates has become. Inside the club, there is a sincere belief that the raucous atmosphere is a cause, rather than a consequence, of the team’s surge in form.In a stadium long derided as among the quietest in English soccer, a crowd that had come to be seen as an advertisement for the dangers of the game’s gentrification — too posh, effectively, to push its team — has suddenly found its voice.That transformation can be traced not only to the energy and impetus provided by the group that has coalesced around a handful of founders — the Ashburton Army, inspired by the ultra faction factions common in European and South American soccer but still relatively rare in England — but to the determination of the club itself to allow them to solve a problem that dated back at least a generation.After all, the night before the biggest game of the season, as they sought to put the finishing touches on their work, someone had to let them in.Fans were never the problem at the Emirates. The atmosphere was.Ray Herlihy of RedAction, an Arsenal fan group.The blame for Arsenal’s reputation as a sedate, subdued sort of place is often placed on its departure from its longtime home at Highbury for the grand, sweeping bowl of the Emirates in 2006. Arsène Wenger, the manager who oversaw the relocation, always felt that Arsenal had “left its soul at Highbury.”It is a poetic, faintly romantic telling of history, but it may not be an accurate one. “The reputation started at Highbury,” said Ray Herlihy, founder of RedAction, a group that has been working to improve the atmosphere at Arsenal for two decades. “It was at Highbury that I got involved. That was where the Highbury Library nickname began.” All that was lost in the move, it turned out, was the rhyme.Unquestionably, the new stadium accentuated the issues. Clusters of fans who had sat together at Highbury suddenly found themselves separated. The Emirates’ design meant there was no obvious focal point where the noisiest, most fervent fans could gather. Highbury had boasted the twin poles of the Clock End and the North Bank; the Emirates had no natural equivalent.Most damaging of all was the divergence between the cost of tickets and the success of the team. The Emirates, famously, was home to the most expensive season ticket in English soccer. With younger fans priced out, the crowd started to skew older. “For a while, I think we had the highest average age of season-ticket holder,” Herlihy said. “And you’re not as animated at 65 as you might be at 25.”At the same time, Arsenal’s fortunes were waning. Wenger’s later years were marked not by title challenges but by an annual struggle simply to qualify for the Champions League, a decline that gave rise to a bitter, internecine debate over whether the Frenchman had outstayed his welcome.“There had been years of the Wenger Out campaign,” said Remy Marsh, a founder of the Ashburton Army (though he has, he said, subsequently “stepped away” from the group.) “There was an undeniable toxicity.” Much of it was captured, every week, by the cameras of Arsenal Fan TV, full of furious rants and factional squabbles. “It ruined a whole generation,” Marsh said.By the end of the last decade, pretty much everyone agreed that the atmosphere at the Emirates was in dire need of repair. One described it as “flat.” Herlihy admitted the club’s games “struggled” to generate much noise. Marsh called it “lackluster.”“The chants were lacking,” Marsh said. “There wasn’t much variation. It had become a stigma for the club.”Arsenal, it turned out, was harboring much the same thought.The Ashburton Army, at the outset, was hardly a heavyweight organization. It was an attempt to bring elements of the ultra spirit to Arsenal — the big tifo displays, the pyrotechnics; “they were always singing, always supporting,” one of the group’s leaders said, “and I didn’t see why we couldn’t have that here” — but it was based around a single group chat. The Army, then, had barely more than a dozen members.That was enough, though, to catch the club’s eye. Arsenal was not unique among Premier League clubs in trying to solve the riddle presented by the league’s global appeal: how to maintain an atmosphere when its stadium was, increasingly, filled by corporate guests and day-tripping tourists there to sample the experience, rather than contribute to it.Its solution may offer a blueprint to other teams with precisely the same problem. “We encourage our staff to listen informally to fans,” said Vinai Venkatesham, Arsenal’s chief executive.When Marsh emailed the club to outline what the group hoped to achieve, they were invited to meet with the fan liaison team. The Ashburton Army wanted to remain independent, but the club was happy not only to tolerate them, but to help.Flags placed by the Ashburton Army before the Tottenham match.A band playing the fans out after the home team’s 3-1 win.That resolve was only strengthened, Venkatesham said, by the coronavirus pandemic. “We had 62 games without fans,” he said. “It gave us perspective and time to evaluate ourselves, to ask if we were listening enough, if the fans felt like they were at the center of every decision.”The sight of the Emirates “standing silent” for a year, he said, reinforced the idea that “fans were not just an ingredient for football, they were the ingredient.” We want fans to feel close and connected to the club,” Venkatesham said. “The Emirates Stadium is the epicenter for that, and from there it spreads out across the globe.”Herlihy, a veteran of Arsenal’s fan outreach programs, had long felt the club paid lip service to the idea of listening to their views. “They talked a good game,” he said. “But there was no real engagement.”That changed, Herlihy said, after the onset of the pandemic and the controversy over Arsenal’s involvement in the short-lived European Super League. “You know what they say: The streets don’t forget,” he said. “After that, there was a real change of tone. They engaged properly with these issues.”The effects of that have been many and varied. The club has, at the instigation of the players, embraced the work of Louis Dunford, a local songwriter; one of his songs, known as “North London Forever,” has become a sort of unofficial Arsenal anthem, played before the start of every game at the Emirates. “It happened organically,” said Venkatesham. “None of it can be forced.”Arsenal officials think the increasingly raucous atmosphere at the Emirates is a cause, rather than a consequence, of the team’s surge in form. Arsenal leads the Premier League heading into a weekend visit from Liverpool. Other changes have been small, barely perceptible — the club has made it easier for fans to sell tickets for games they cannot attend, and has warned that season-ticket holders who regularly leave their seats empty will be stripped of their rights to them — but have contributed, Herlihy said, to a sense that fans are being heard.None more so than the Ashburton Army. When fans returned to stadiums, the club helped to move its growing ranks — now comprising a couple of hundred members — en masse. “When we started, we were sitting at the back of a block,” one of the group’s leaders said. “That made it hard for the noise to travel.” Their new slot, in what has been known since 2010 as the stadium’s Clock End, is at the very front. The acoustics there, they say, are much better.“We try and support fan groups however we can,” Venkatesham said. The banner RedAction unfurled at the North London derby — spanning the width of the stadium — had, for example, been financed by the club. Arsenal does not have the same relationship with the Ashburton Army, but it does, he said, “give them access to the stadium so they can set up before games.”After two decades of trying, the approach seems to have worked. Nobody is under any illusions: It helps, of course, that Arteta has put together not just a bright, young team, stocked with homegrown players, but a winning one, too. But just as they have driven the atmosphere at the Emirates, so the atmosphere has driven them.“The Ashburton Army have shown the rest of the stadium how it should be done,” Herlihy said. His seat, at the opposite end of the stadium, affords him a perfect view of the group in action: 90 minutes of “noise and movement,” every single one of them dressed not in club colors, but in the black uniform of any self-respecting ultra.“They’re doing what we all did years ago, and what we thought you couldn’t do any more,” he said. “They’re going to the football with their mates, and they’re having fun. And it’s more fun to have fun at football.” More

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      Deadly Soccer Clash in Indonesia Puts Police Tactics, and Impunity, in Spotlight

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      Experts say officers are almost never held accountable for their actions. And in a huge police budget, billions are spent on tear gas, batons and other devices deployed during protests.For years, tens of thousands of Indonesians have faced off against a police force that many say is corrupt, uses brute force to suppress crowds and is accountable to no one.In the capital, Jakarta, the police shot and killed 10 people while protesters were campaigning against President Joko Widodo’s re-election in 2019. The next year, officers beat hundreds of people across 15 provinces with batons as they protested a new law. And in the northern city of Ternate in April, officers fired tear gas at a crowd of peaceful student demonstrators, sickening three toddlers.The world caught a glimpse of those tactics on Saturday, when riot officers in the city of Malang beat soccer fans with sticks and shields and, without warning, sprayed tear gas at tens of thousands of spectators crowded in a stadium. The police force’s methods set off a stampede that culminated in the deaths of 125 people — one of the worst disasters in the history of the sport.Experts said the tragedy laid bare the systemic problems confronting the police, many of whom are poorly trained in crowd control and highly militarized. In nearly all instances, analysts say, they have never had to answer for missteps.“To me, this is absolutely a function of the failure of police reform in Indonesia,” said Jacqui Baker, a political economist at Murdoch University in Perth in Australia, who studies policing in Indonesia.For more than two decades, rights activists and the government’s ombudsman have conducted inquiries into the actions of the Indonesian police. These reports, according to Ms. Baker, have often made their way to the chief of police, but to little or no effect.Riot police beat soccer fans with sticks and shields, and fired tear gas at tens of thousands of spectators at Kanjuruhan Stadium in Malang, Indonesia, on Saturday.H Prabowo/EPA, via Shutterstock“Why do we continue to be faced with impunity?” she said. “Because there is zero political interest in really bringing about a professional police force.”After the violence on Saturday, many Indonesians took to Twitter to call for the national police chief to be fired. And, as of Monday night, close to 16,000 people had signed a petition calling for the police to stop using tear gas. The government moved quickly to quell public anger, suspending the police chief in Malang and pledging to announce the names of the suspects responsible for the tragedy within days.The police in Indonesia were never this formidable or this violent. During the three-decade rule of the dictator Suharto, it was the military that was viewed as all powerful. But after his fall in 1998, as part of a series of reforms, the government assigned responsibility for internal security to the police, giving the force enormous power.In many instances, police officers have the final say on whether a case should be prosecuted. Accepting bribes is common, analysts say. And any accusation of police misconduct is left entirely to top officials to investigate. Most of the time, rights groups say, they do not.Wirya Adiwena, deputy director of Amnesty International Indonesia, said there “almost never has been” any trial over the excessive use of police force except in 2019, when two students were killed on Sulawesi Island during protests.Protesters in Jakarta demanded a government investigation into the killing of two university students in southeast Sulawesi in 2019.Adek Berry/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOpinion polls have shown a sharp decline in public trust toward the police — dropping to 54.2 percent in August 2022 from 71.6 percent in April that year after reports emerged that a two-star police general had killed his subordinate and instructed other officers to cover it up.The lack of police accountability has coincided with a ballooning budget. This year, the national police budget stands at $7.2 trillion, more than double the figure in 2013. By share, its budget is the third-largest among all government ministries in the country, exceeding the amount given to the education and health ministries.Much of that money has been spent on tear gas, batons and gas masks. Andri Prasetiyo, a finance and policy researcher who has analyzed years of government procurement data, said that in the past decade, the national police have spent about $217.3 million to procure helmets, shields, tactical vehicles and other implements deployed during protests.The purchase of tear gas spiked in 2017 to $21.7 million, according to Mr. Andri, after Jakarta was rocked by a series of protests involving tens of thousands of Indonesians who demanded that the city’s first Chinese Christian governor in decades be jailed for blasphemy.Experts on policing say that 2019 was a turning point in the police force’s use of tear gas. In May of that year, officers clashed with demonstrators as protests over the presidential election devolved into violence, resulting in deaths, some of them involving teenagers.Rivanlee Anandar, the deputy coordinator of the rights watchdog the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence, says that there has been no “follow-up and investigation” into the deaths. He has visited the families of five victims and says that an autopsy had been performed in only one case, and that family has not learned the results.“We don’t know who the perpetrators are until today,” he said.The national police force budget has swelled to $7.2 trillion. Much of which has been spent on tactical gear such as tear gas, batons and gas masks.Ulet Ifansasti/Getty ImagesThe prevalent use of tear gas by the police has transcended geography. When faced with mass demonstrations, officers from Jakarta to Kalimantan have consistently reached for the chemical to subdue protesters. The budget for tear gas munitions, which had dropped after the 2017 allocation, soared again in 2020 to $14.8 million, a sixfold increase from the previous year, Mr. Andri said.That year, the police deployed tear gas in crowds protesting against coronavirus measures. Later in 2020, they used it again to disperse throngs demonstrating against a sweeping new law that slashed protections for workers and the environment. Amnesty International Indonesia said it had documented at least 411 victims of excessive police force in 15 provinces during those protests.“It’s become more of a pattern now,” said Sana Jaffrey, the director of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict in Jakarta.Ms. Jaffrey says that the police budget over the years has been allocated to quell many recent demonstrations, but that “the nuts and bolts and the daily grass-roots work of the police has been ignored.”In January this year, the national police spent almost $3.3 million to buy batons specifically for officers in the East Java Province, the location of Malang, according to Mr. Andri.In anticipation of violence at soccer matches, many police officers turn up decked out in helmets, vests and shields, and armed with batons. Some fan clubs have commanders who engage in physical training to prepare for fights. Several teams arrive at matches in armored personnel carriers.Still, experts said they were shocked at the police force’s chaotic response at the stadium on Saturday, given that soccer violence is common in the country — with frequent brawls between fans of rival clubs — and that the police should have a playbook for any unrest.Lighting candles during a vigil on Sunday for the victims outside the soccer stadium in Malang, Indonesia.Ulet Ifansasti/Getty ImagesIn 2018, riot police fired tear gas in the Kanjuruhan Stadium in Malang to quell violence during a match with the home team, Arema. A 16-year-old boy died days later. There were no reports of whether there was an investigation into his death or how the police had handled the riots.Now, the authorities plan to investigate what went wrong on Saturday, when thousands of supporters gathered in Malang to see Arema host Persebaya Surabaya. After Arema suffered a surprising defeat, 3-2, some fans ran onto the field. The police then unleashed a wave of violence and fired tear gas, witnesses said.The chief security minister said that officers suspected of wrongful violence at the stadium would face criminal charges.On Sunday, the police chief of East Java, Inspector General Nico Afinta, said that the police had taken actions that were in accordance with their procedures. He said that tear gas had been deployed “because there was anarchy,” and that fans “were about to attack the officers and had damaged the cars.”In a sign that the Malang Police Department had tried to anticipate the violence, it asked organizers to move the match to 3:30 p.m. “for security considerations,” according to a letter that was circulated online and whose contents were confirmed by the East Java Province police with The New York Times. An earlier time slot, the thinking went, would make the event more family-friendly. But the police request was rejected. The organizers could not immediately be reached for comment on Monday.Many rights activists say that to improve law enforcement tactics, they have consistently made these recommendations to the police: Do not immediately reach for the tear gas; do not swing batons at people on first instinct; understand how to control crowds; de-escalate conflict.“The standard operating procedure should not be that the police jumps from zero to 100,” said Mr. Wirya, of Amnesty International Indonesia.Dera Menra Sijabat More