Stadiums and Arenas

Subterms

    More stories

    • 63 Shares149 Views

      in Soccer

      How Arsenal Found Its Voice

      by

      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

    • 150 Shares159 Views

      in Soccer

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

      by

      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

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Soccer

      Fans Focus on Police After More Than 100 Die at Indonesian Soccer Match

      by

      Witnesses said officers fired tear gas indiscriminately into the stands, causing a stampede that led to at least 125 deaths.MALANG, Indonesia — It was supposed to be a joyous occasion for fans of Arema F.C., the most beloved soccer team in the city of Malang, Indonesia.Tens of thousands of young people — who call themselves “Aremania” — had packed the Kanjuruhan Stadium on Saturday night, hoping to watch their team beat Persebaya Surabaya, a club it had defeated for 23 years running.But Arema lost, 3-2, and angry fans began rushing the field. What unfolded next became one of the deadliest sports stadium disasters in history: Police officers began shooting tear gas canisters into the crowd and beating fans with batons, witnesses said, and in a rush to flee the stadium fans piled up against narrow exits, crushing each other. At least 125 people were reported dead as of Sunday night.“I’m still thinking: ‘Did all this really happen?’” said Felix Mustikasakti Afoan Tumbaz, a 23-year-old fan whose right leg was injured when a tear-gas canister landed on him. “How could such a tragedy occur and kill so many people?”The disaster has focused attention on the use of tear gas by the local police in such a tightly packed stadium. On Twitter, one of the top trending topics in Indonesia was “National Police Chief,” with many Indonesians calling for his removal. A spokesman for the national police said that in addition to the huge death toll, there were reports that at least 300 people had been injured.Police officers fired tear gas during a soccer match at Kanjuruhan Stadium in Malang, East Java, Indonesia, on Saturday.Yudha Prabowo/Associated PressViolent, often deadly rivalries between major teams are common in Indonesia. Some teams even have fan clubs with so-called commanders, who lead large groups of supporters. Flares are often thrown onto the field, and riot police are a regular presence at many matches. Since the 1990s, dozens of fans have been killed in soccer-related violence.But Indonesia has never before seen a sports stadium disaster on this scale. Saturday’s tragedy appeared to be a perfect storm of everything that could go wrong at a soccer match.Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, has asked the police chief for a thorough investigation into the cause of the incident. In a televised speech to the nation, he said he had also ordered the minister of youth and sports and the chairman of Indonesia’s football association to evaluate security at soccer matches.“I regret that this tragedy occurred,” Mr. Joko said. “And I hope this is the last football tragedy in the country.”The police defended their use of tear gas, which they said was necessary to subdue aggrieved fans. East Java’s police chief, Inspector General Nico Afinta, said the gas was deployed “because there was anarchy.” He said the fans “were about to attack the officers and had damaged the cars.”But witnesses dispute Mr. Afinta’s account, saying that police officers fired tear gas indiscriminately into the stands, causing a stampede and many people to suffocate. Videos circulating on Twitter showed fans scaling a fence as they tried to flee the clouds of tear gas. Other videos showed security forces with shields and batons kicking and hitting fans who had rushed onto the field.Officers with a damaged police vehicle after the deadly events at Kanjuruhan Stadium on Saturday.Yudha Prabowo/Associated PressThe stadium was over capacity. Mahfud MD, Indonesia’s coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs, said that the local football committee had printed 42,000 tickets, more than the stadium’s 38,000 seats. Mr. Afinto, the East Java police chief, said there were 40,000 people inside the stadium.The police came armed with tear gas, even though its use at games is prohibited by FIFA, soccer’s global governing body. Owen West, a senior lecturer on policing at the Edge Hill University in Britain, said the use of crowd control munitions and full riot gear “becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy” because officers’ “tactical assumptions are all initiated around a sense of losing control.”“It is incredibly, incredibly dangerous to use a dispersal tactic such as tear gas in this case,” said Mr. West. “I’m guessing it was used without any thought of where thousands of people might go to.”One fan, Joshua Nade, said that after the match ended, two or three angry fans came down from the stands and were seen shouting at the players. Police officers entered to turn the fans back, drawing more people onto the field. Some scuffling between the police and fans prompted officers to fire the first bursts of tear gas around 10:30 p.m. local time.Then at 11 p.m., the security forces suddenly started firing tear gas at a steady clip into the stands, said Mr. Joshua, who like many Javanese does not use a family name. That prompted hundreds of people to rush to the exits. Officers continued firing tear gas for an hour, according to Mr. Joshua.Soccer fans carrying an injured man away from the stadium.Yudha Prabowo/Associated PressOutside the stadium, hundreds of angry fans clashed with the police. Some of the exits were sealed off, ostensibly to keep fans from flooding the stadium. But that trapped thousands of people inside.To get out, Mr. Joshua said, some people had to scale fences more than 15 feet high, clambering over other panicked spectators. Mr. Joshua said the police stood by and did nothing to help the hundreds of people who had fainted from the tear gas.In a statement, Indonesia’s Legal Aid Foundation said “the excessive use of force through the use of tear gas and inappropriate crowd control was the cause of the large number of fatalities.”“If there wasn’t tear gas, there wouldn’t be such a riot,” said Suci Rahayu, a photographer who was in the stadium.Soccer violence has long been a problem for Indonesia, and police officers are usually on guard to contend with unruly fans. The last time tear gas was used in a deadly way by the police during a soccer match was also during an Arema F.C. game in 2018. One person died and 214 people were injured.A relative of a victim sitting outside a hospital in Malang, East Java, on Sunday.Juni Kriswanto/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSaturday’s death toll put it among the worst sports casualty counts in history, including a riot in Peru in 1964 that left more than 300 dead, and in Hillsborough, England, in which an F.A. Cup semifinal between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest in Sheffield resulted in the deaths of 97 soccer fans.Mr. Tumbaz said around 11:45 p.m., a tear-gas canister landed on his right leg, burning his calf and foot. He showed photographs of his injuries to The New York Times.When the firing stopped, he said he helped medical workers carry to the exits more than 10 people who had fainted. He checked to see if they were still alive, and their heartbeats were faint but still present. Then he went to look for his friends in the parking lot.When he returned, the bodies of the unconscious people had turned dark.“I still remember all their faces,” said Mr. Tumbaz. “I hear them asking for help in my head.”In Malang on Sunday night, hundreds of Arema fans held a vigil for the dead. They wore black at Stadium Gajayana, where Arema won its first title. Many of them sang hymns to remember those who had died.The survivors say they are still traumatized.Arema football club supporters prayed during a vigil outside the Kanjuruhan Stadium Sunday night.Willy Kurniawan/ReutersBambang Siswanto, the father of 19-year-old Gilang Putra Yuliazah, said his son and his nephew had gone to the game with three other boys. His 17-year-old nephew did not make it out alive and his son, he said, is already struggling with survivor’s guilt.“He totally went into shock,” said Mr. Bambang, speaking at a hospital in Malang, where his son was admitted. “He looked OK when I found him, but as soon as he saw his cousin’s body, that’s when it hit him. He went blank. You talk to him and there’s no response.”Gilang’s mother, Etri, who goes by one name, said she had told her son not to go to the match. But her son is a die-hard Arema fan and has loved soccer since he was little.“I will never let him watch a soccer match anymore,” Etri said. “I am terrified.”Mr. Bambang echoed his wife’s sentiments. “Yes, we won’t allow him to go to a soccer match,” he said. “Too cruel. The police are too cruel.”Muktita Suhartono More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Soccer

      Riots at Indonesian Soccer Match Leave Several Fans Dead

      by

      After the home team lost, fans rushed the field and were confronted by security officers, who used tear gas that left many struggling to breathe.SYDNEY, Australia — Several people were killed Saturday night after a professional soccer match in Malang, Indonesia, led to riots at the stadium and tear gas being fired into tightly packed crowds by the police, according to league officials and local news reports.The match between Arema FC and Persebaya Surabaya took place at the Kanjuruhan Stadium. After Arema lost 3-2 on its home field, dozens of fans rushed the field.The Times of Indonesia reported that security officers tried to keep the crowd at bay by hitting and kicking supporters. As fights broke out, the authorities fired bursts of tear gas onto the field and into the stands. One video from the scene showed fans running away from clouds of tear gas on the field. Local news outlets said thousands of fans struggled to breathe and several eventually fainted.League officials said the riots caused several deaths, but it was not immediately clear how many. Initial reports from the stadium estimated that there had been dozens of deaths, but that could not be independently confirmed.The league immediately suspended play for at least a week.“We are concerned and deeply regret this incident,” said Akhmad Hadian Lukita, president director of PT Liga Indonesia Baru, known as LIB. “We share our condolences and hopefully this will be a valuable lesson for all of us.”Soccer violence has long been a problem for Indonesia. Violent, often deadly rivalries between major teams are common. Some teams even have fan clubs with so-called commanders, who lead armies of supporters to matches across Indonesia. Flares are often thrown on the field and riot police are a regular presence at many matches.Since the 1990s, dozens of fans have been killed in soccer-related violence. After Saturday’s match, those numbers will grow once again. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Soccer

      In Qatar’s World Cup Summer, the Mercury Rises and the Clock Ticks

      by

      DOHA, Qatar — The sun comes up before 5 a.m. and immediately puts the entire city on convection bake. By lunchtime, the temperature has finished its methodical climb up the scale, from unusual through uncomfortable to unbearable and then, finally, to unhealthy. The wind off the bay offers no relief; in June in Doha, even the summer breeze blows hot.This was to be the summer the World Cup came to Qatar, an idea that seems as preposterous now as it did a dozen years ago, when the tiny Gulf country, let’s just say, acquired the hosting rights to soccer’s biggest championship. FIFA’s own evaluators had labeled a summer World Cup in the Gulf as “high risk,” and a single morning’s walk this week confirmed that assessment. Still, for years, Qatari organizers promised to deliver what they had proposed, whatever FIFA asked: new stadiums, new hotels, new cooling technologies, a new frontier for soccer.Organizers, of course, eventually came to their senses, or at least to that one sense that lets humans differentiate hot from sun’s anvil hot, and in 2015 moved the tournament to the winter. The past week, though, offered a glimpse of what might have been.Peru fans seeking shelter from the sun in the Souk Waqif, top, and a rare sight on the streets of Msheireb in midday: humans.Over eight days, Qatar hosted three intercontinental playoff games that determined the final two teams in the field for this year’s World Cup: Australia and Costa Rica. Like so many of the marquee events hosted in Doha in recent years, the matches were a chance for Qatar to test-drive its facilities, its infrastructure and its tolerance for all the disparate guests.How did that glimpse into the future look this week? Both reassuring and incomplete, depending on one’s perspective.Five months from the World Cup’s opening match, Qatar appears to have gotten the big things right. Seven of the eight air-conditioned stadiums built or refurbished for the World Cup have hosted matches, and the largest (and last) will have its first test events in the coming months. All but one of the arenas are reachable by one of the three gleaming new subway lines that speed under and through the capital, and work continues on office towers, apartment blocks, roads and sidewalks every day. Even with so much ready to go, though, to see Qatar this summer, so close to its big moment, is to see a place that is a work in progress rather than a completed vision.Some Peru fans from California took their own World Cup trophy to Qatar. Their team, alas, won’t be going.World Cup messages dot plazas and open spaces across Doha. Qatar bid for a summer event, but will host in the winter instead.Peru brought the most fans of any country playing this week, a raucous army more than 10,000 strong, but every morning it was possible to walk long city blocks without seeing a soul. Many residents and visitors emerged only in the evening, to sip coffees, to stroll the parks and green spaces and to wander the Souk Waqif, the capital’s rebuilt marketplace — filling its tables, disappearing into its warren of stalls and shops. But even as the locals, the Qatari families and South Asian workers, pulled out their phones to snap photos and record videos of those fans enjoying this place they probably never thought they’d visit, one couldn’t help but feel that none of them could yet be sure what November would bring.Organizers expect that more than a million fans overall will enter Qatar during the World Cup — 32 cheering sections, just like Peru’s, but neutrals, too, all of them crowding the same spaces, competing for the same hotels and cafe tables, all waving their own colors and carrying their own hopes.The stadium in Lusail, Qatar’s largest venue, is equipped with individual cooling vents under each seat.A new turf field growing under artificial light at Lusail; different blends of grass are installed depending on the season.Questions persist about where all those guests will sleep, eat, shop and drink. Cruise ships and tent camps may help with that first problem, which remains the biggest unanswered question for fans and organizers. Qatar’s decision to require those attending the World Cup to have proof of a ticket purchase to enter the country or book a hotel room could help keep the numbers down. Saudis and Emiratis who love soccer could pour across the border to bring those numbers right back up. But the tournament also is four full days shorter than its predecessors in Brazil and Russia; if it turns into a chaotic mess, then at least it will be a shorter one.There are still a few months to sort out the final details, to find the room and rent the buses and the boats, for Qatar to produce the smooth-running showpiece it promised, to flex all that shiny new soft power.The heat? That’s so low on Qatar’s list of concerns that officials and engineers now dismiss it with the wave of a hand. Anyone who has spent time in the Gulf in the winter, they will tell you, knows the mercury drops into the 80s by then, and it is cooler at night. Could that lower the temperature, literally and figuratively, in the fan zones and elsewhere? Maybe.The World Cup stadium in Lusail is decorated with collages of photographs of the workers who built it.For others, the preparations rarely stop. Outdoor work is prohibited in the heat of the summer day.On game days it won’t have to. The stadium air-conditioning systems functioned as advertised all week; on Monday, during Australia’s shootout win over Peru, blowers and vents built into the 40,000-seat Al Rayyan stadium cooled the match to a comfortable 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 Celsius), even though it was still well over 90 degrees outside the stadium’s open roof and swirling metalwork shell.In a few months, the last and most elaborate system built into the 80,000-seat showpiece stadium in Lusail, which will host 10 matches, including the final, will get its final tests. The engineer who designed it promised this week that it would work. He had, he noted with a laugh, done the calculations himself.To see Qatar this summer, so close to its big moment, is to see a work in progress rather than a completed vision. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Soccer

      40,000 Fake Tickets at the Champions League Final? Actually, It Was 2,589.

      by

      The French authorities blamed tens of thousands of counterfeit tickets for the chaos before Saturday’s Champions League final. The official count was far lower.One of the main claims pushed by French officials to explain the chaotic crowd scenes that created a dangerous crush of fans outside last weekend’s Champions League final near Paris has been that tens of thousands of people arrived at the match bearing fake tickets.France’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, has claimed as many as 70 percent of tickets presented at the Stade de France in St.-Denis were fake. He told a news conference Monday that the “root cause” of the chaos was roughly 30,000 to 40,000 English fans bearing counterfeit tickets — or no tickets — who jammed the entrances.But according to official numbers reviewed by The New York Times, the exact number of fake tickets intercepted by stewards manning the entrance gates was far lower: 2,589, to be exact.That figure is almost three times the usual number of forgeries at the Champions League final, a game widely considered to be European soccer’s equivalent of the Super Bowl, but significantly lower than the figure used by Darmanin, who had as of Wednesday not provided details of the source of his estimate.Darmanin and France’s sports minister, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, who has made similar claims about fake tickets, have faced growing criticism over the handling of the game. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, on Wednesday called for “full transparency” in an investigation of the match-day scenes and their causes. At an appearance in front of a committee of the French senate later Wednesday, Darmanin admitted, “Clearly things could have been organized better.”“It is evident,” he added, “that this celebration of sport was ruined.”France’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, faced testy questioning from lawmakers on Wednesday.Geoffroy Van Der Hasselt/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn what became a testy appearance in front of the committee, Darmanin and Oudéa-Castéra came under sustained pressure over the organizational failures. In response, they largely repeated the language that has enraged Liverpool, its fans and members of the British government.At one point, Oudéa-Castéra told lawmakers that Liverpool supporters carried a “very specific risk” in the view of the French authorities, without elaborating what she meant.Darmanin, meanwhile, insisted the counterfeit ticket numbers were of an unprecedented scale, claiming at one point there were so many that stadium security guards thought their tools to validate them were faulty.The hearing lasted longer than an hour, ending with little clarity and a doubling down by the officials on their previous claims, again without evidence to support their conclusions.That prompted one lawmaker to ask: “Since Saturday, we have blamed Liverpool fans and the club, striking workers and locals for the chaos. What allows you to make these declarations without a thorough investigation?”Not all attendees had the same experience at the final. While most of Real Madrid’s fans arrived with electronic tickets, Liverpool requested paper ones for its official allocation of 23,000 tickets. Those tickets came embedded with two main security features: one that needed to be confirmed with a chemical pen and a second that was a laser engraving of the Champions League trophy.Those holding tickets without the two security features were to be denied access by stewards at an initial checkpoint far from the stadium’s bar code readers. But that system collapsed under a deluge of fans: To relieve the growing crush of people, officials abandoned those first checks and allowed the crowds to move closer to the stadium.The debacle has led to chorus of criticism of the security at the match, in which Real Madrid defeated Liverpool, 1-0, to claim its record 14th European title. Liverpool police who attended in supporting roles labeled the situation outside the gates “shocking.” The club, its fans and a European supporters group all called for investigations even as the game was underway. And in the days since, British government officials have demanded answers from their French counterparts and European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, for the treatment of thousands of Liverpool supporters.Thousands of fans were trapped for hours in tight crowds before the final, causing a delay to the match’s kickoff. Thomas Coex/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSupporters faced multiple issues, including dangerous crushes, after being corralled into narrow spaces, and the final was delayed more than 30 minutes as the French riot police used tear gas and pepper spray on fans after appearing to lose control of the situation. At the same time, hundreds of local youths tried to force their way into the stadium, either through the turnstiles or by climbing over security fences. Officials estimated as many as 4,000 ticketless people may have succeeded.Part of the explanation into why Liverpool supporters found themselves trapped in such a small space has now turned to transportation problems on the day of the game, including a strike by workers that affected one of the major rail links to the stadium.UEFA and local officials have compared travel data from Saturday’s game to figures from the French Cup final held at the Stade de France on May 7. They found that one of the stations closest to the Stade de France had four times as many fans travel through its gates Saturday than had used the station during the French Cup final. That, they believe, contributed to the dangerous bottleneck of supporters.It may be months before a complete picture of what occurred at the stadium emerges. On Tuesday, UEFA, reeling from chaotic scenes at last year’s European Championship final in London as well as the recent Europa League final in Seville, Spain, appointed a former education minister of Portugal, Tiago Brandão Rodrigues, to lead an independent inquiry into the failures around the Champions League final.The claims made by the French government’s representatives, though, continue to infuriate Liverpool and its ownership. The club’s chairman, Tom Werner, said as much in a caustic letter to Oudéa-Castéra, the French sports minister.He wrote, he said, “out of utter disbelief that a minister of the French government, a position of enormous responsibility and influence, could make a series of unproven pronouncements on a matter of such significance before a proper, formal, independent investigation process has even taken place.”He decried the “loose data and unverified assertions” presented to reporters Monday before an investigation had taken place.“The fact that your public position went against this objective is a concern in itself,” he added. “That you did so without any recourse to ourselves or our supporters is an even greater one. All voices should count in this process, and they should count equally and fairly.”As well as assailing Oudéa-Castéra for her claims, Werner also demanded a public apology. By late Tuesday, Oudéa-Castéra’s tone — though not her claims about fake tickets — had changed.“The issue of the false tickets does not change this: Liverpool is one of the greatest clubs ever,” she wrote on Twitter. “And on Saturday there were supporters with valid tickets that spent a terrible evening or were not able to watch the game. We are sorry for that.”Liverpool continues to be inundated with video evidence shot on cellphones by its supporters. The images, many of which have also been uploaded to social media, are sometimes harrowing, showing children and older fans dealing with the effects of tear gas fired — sometimes indiscriminately — by the riot police.Fans of Real Madrid faced similar problems on their side of the stadium. Since the final, several supporters have come forward to say they were attacked or robbed on their way in and out of the stadium.Amando Sánchez, 51, who traveled to Paris in a group of 14, mainly family members, said his 87-year-old father and an older brother missed the game as a result of chaos at the entry gates. Another brother, Sánchez said, fought off an effort to steal his ticket as he prepared to present it at a stadium turnstile.“Really no one was in charge,” Sánchez said in an interview Wednesday. More

    • 175 Shares179 Views

      in Soccer

      As A.C. Milan and Inter Return to Top, San Siro May Be Coming Down

      by

      As he watched the soccer game playing out on television, the Milanese writer and actor Gianfelice Facchetti felt an emotional tug that he thought might be leading him toward his next book.It was during Italy’s first coronavirus lockdown, and Facchetti’s favorite team, Inter Milan, had been forced to play its matches behind closed doors. The decision left its longtime home, the 80,000-seat Giuseppe Meazza Stadium, more commonly known as the San Siro, devoid of atmosphere, and amid the silence Facchetti’s mind began to drift.He thought back not only to fond memories and tense moments in the arena where his father, Giacinto, had represented Inter and Italy but also to news stories that had been circulating for months describing plans by the teams that share the nearly century-old stadium, Inter and A.C. Milan, to abandon the stadium or, worse, demolish it.The San Siro’s contrast of cylindrical towers and long red trusses has admirers among fans and architects alike.Camilla Ferrari for The New York Times“I was thinking, when I started to write: If you want to destroy this place, this special place, it would be helpful to know the history,” Facchetti said.The book that sprang from that first impulse, “Once Upon a Time in San Siro,” was part history and part coping mechanism, Facchetti admits. He and many Inter fans, like those who support Milan, are still coming to terms with the fact that their “seconda casa,” or “second home,” could one day be no more.On the list of sins that stir the emotions of soccer fans, assaults on tradition surely rank near the top, particularly when maximizing revenue is seen as the motivation. Even minor changes, such as a new shirt design or an alteration of a club crest, can be like grabbing soccer’s third rail. For the same reasons, stadiums hold a special place in the minds of many supporters, serving as a physical embodiment of a lifetime of sporting experiences. A club’s decision to replace one, then, can bring not only monumental costs but also howls of protest.Yet replace them they do.From 2010 to 2020, 153 new stadiums were built across Europe, at a reported cost of more than $20 billion. Madrid got one. So did Stockholm and St. Petersburg. London opened two.Only 1 percent of this investment was made in Italy, though. Most professional teams’ stadiums in the country are both antiquated and publicly owned — only two have opened this century. And a new generation of deep-pocketed foreign owners with American tech, finance and retail fortunes are eager to create new revenue streams that they feel their clubs need to compete with richer rivals in England and elsewhere.Luciano owns a truck selling Inter and A.C. Milan merchandise. The latter held off its city rival to claim the Serie A title on Sunday.Camilla Ferrari for The New York TimesChange, though, is not as simple as drawing up plans and digging a stadium-size hole. When Milan and Inter announced their intention to build a new stadium more than three years ago, the subtext was that the San Siro — one of the largest stadiums in Europe and the site of four European Cup finals and matches in two World Cups — was no longer fit for its job in an age of luxury suites and corporate hospitality. Ever since, a debate about the arena’s future has split not only the teams’ wealthy owners and longtime fans but also politicians, preservationists and architects.“Italy is like an open-air museum: We have a lot of heritage,” said Massimo Roj, a Milanese architect and Inter fan who put forward one of the proposed designs for a new stadium in Milan. “We have to think that the San Siro is an old building. Your memory now is there, but, in 10 years time, we’ll be in another stadium, called San Siro again.”The first iteration of the San Siro opened in 1926 and was revolutionary for Italy because it was English in design, featuring four independent stands that sat square to the playing surface and no running track. It was expanded after the 1934 World Cup and again in the 1950s after Inter became a co-tenant.The most recent alteration came before Italy hosted the 1990 World Cup, when the architects Giancarlo Ragazzi and Enrico Hoffer and the engineer Leo Finzi added what became the stadium’s trademark: 11 cylindrical towers with helical ramps that allowed spectators to reach a new third tier. A roof made of red trusses was placed on top, its lines an angular — and to devotees, iconic — contrast to the circular forms that supported them.Yet in the decades after, the need for further refurbishments became increasingly apparent, fans said, as the Italian industrialists who once bankrolled the Milanese clubs sold their teams and Russian billionaires and Persian Gulf petrodollars rewrote the economics of elite European soccer.Many clubs in Serie A, arguably the world’s richest and most attractive league in the 1990s, now face growing debts and unsustainable budgets. Inter, for example, had to break up last season’s title-winning side just to meet its payroll.“In terms of revenues, we have, both Milan and Inter, revenues of around 35 to 40 million euros a year” — roughly $37 million to $42 million — “from the stadium, while our competitors are about €100 million,” the chairman of Milan, Paolo Scaroni, said in an interview. The San Siro reflected in the window of a tram that stops outside. Plans for a new San Siro nearby, and the destruction of the current one, have divided Milan.Camilla Ferrari for The New York TimesThe teams say they initially considered changes to the current San Siro but quickly concluded logistical issues and delays would be too much to overcome. What they have proposed instead is a 60,000-seat arena to be built next door. Once it is constructed, the current San Siro will come down and make way for public space that may include elements of its iconic towers and ramps, according to the designs by Populous, the American architecture firm whose proposal was chosen.“I think these buildings are containers, and therefore the old buildings have such emotion attached to them that the idea that some of it can remain, if it can be there as a marker of history of what was before, is quite a nice idea,” said Chris Lee, a managing director of Populous. “One has to be careful about trying to transfer too much of that, literally, into new buildings, where it can easily tip into the pastiche of trying to recreate a building.”Opposition is to be expected, Lee said. In Milan, it has emerged in various forms.Milan’s mayor, Beppe Sala, while generally supportive of the project, has warned both clubs that the city-owned San Siro would remain until at least 2026, when it is expected to host the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics.A different group, the Si Meazza committee, has taken a hard-line approach, challenging the mere idea of the demolition of the San Siro, which its most prominent voices — lawyers, concert promoters and former politicians — described as a symbol of Milan known around the world, a stage on which Diego Maradona, Bob Dylan and Beyoncé have performed. Other critics pointed to the ecological impact of tearing down a stadium and highlighted renderings that they argued proved the job could be done for half the cost while saving the original arena.Some fear, though, the die may have been cast: A future without the San Siro received the tacit approval of Italy’s heritage authority in 2020 when it raised no objections to the stadium’s demolition. In November, the project was declared in the public interest (with certain conditions) by city officials.A month later, the clubs chose the Populous design: It features a stadium enveloped by a steel-and-glass galleria, reminiscent of the famed luxury-shopping district in the center of Milan, as the centerpiece of an expansive park on the site.But the legal fight over building any of it may not be over.The stadium has hosted two World Cup and four European Cup finals. Camilla Ferrari for The New York TimesThe next steps for the clubs will be to put their proposals to the public; that is expected to happen this summer. Municipality decisions can be appealed, and other bureaucratic hurdles can take months to resolve, said Scaroni, the Milan chairman. Aware of those potential delays, the clubs have said that they are also considering a Plan B: a site elsewhere in Milan.“More than three years, we are still debating about our master plan,” said Alessandro Antonello, the Inter chief executive. “Unfortunately, yes, we started with a very exciting energy three years ago, and now, after three years, we are still waiting for some answers from the municipality. So, now, for us, the main priority is to build a new stadium, whatever the location.”For opponents like Facchetti, though, the delays are just one more hopeful sign their beloved San Siro might yet be saved. Another good omen, he said, came this spring: His publisher has approved a second printing of his book.“It’s a sign,” Facchetti said. “People still want to speak about the San Siro and its destiny.” More

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Soccer

      Real Madrid Secures $380 Million From Sixth Street

      by

      The Spanish soccer giant has agreed to a joint venture with the investment firm Sixth Street in which profits from the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium will be shared.Real Madrid, the European soccer behemoth, closed a deal in which the investment firm Sixth Street, based in the United States, will pay about $380 million for a 30 percent stake in the team’s stadium operations.The announcement Thursday came amid growing optimism among executives that Real Madrid, a 13-time European champion, could complete a deal to sign Kylian Mbappé, one of the most sought after players in world soccer, as a free agent on a contract that could make him the highest-paid athlete in Real’s history.Under the terms of the contract, Real, which strolled to a 35th Spanish championship this month, would have no restrictions on how it spends its money. Capturing Mbappé would be a coup for Real, which has been chasing him since failing to persuade his current club, Paris St.-Germain, to accept as much as $200 million for him during last summer’s postseason.The deal between Real and Sixth Street also includes Legends, an American sports event management and hospitality company that is partly owned by Sixth Street. The partnership will last for 20 years and be run through a joint venture that will contain all of Real’s in-stadium income, with the exception of season-ticket sales.The investment is the latest part of Real’s attempts to grow new revenue streams from its celebrated stadium, which is undergoing a $1 billion retrofit, after which games will be played on a retractable field.“The transformation of the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium will be a turning point in the history of Real Madrid,” Real’s president, Florentino Pérez, said in a statement. “This agreement strengthens the club’s goal of continuing to significantly increase the stadium’s revenues from both sporting and other types of events.”While Real remains the dominant player in Spanish soccer and will compete in the Champions League final once more next week, it has been facing pressure to keep up with changing forces in the global soccer landscape. Despite generating more wealth year over year than practically any other soccer team, Real has struggled to compete for the best talent with clubs backed by deep-pocketed Arab states and billionaires. Turning the Bernabéu into what club officials have likened to a version of Madison Square Garden may help it maintain its muscle in the marketplace.The agreement also bears some hallmarks of the one Spain’s domestic league, La Liga, signed with another investment fund, CVC Capital Partners, that Real rejected and is suing against. CVC agreed to part with more than $2 billion in return for almost 10 percent of the league’s broadcast income for 50 years, a price that Real — and the league’s other best-supported team, Barcelona, as well as member-owned Athletic Club from Bilbao — thought was too steep.Real officials have pointed out that unlike that deal, the arrangement with Sixth Street, which also owns a portion of the N.B.A.’s San Antonio Spurs, is limited to the investment fund’s sharing in profits, not revenue, from the venture.“Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu is hallowed ground in the world of football, and we are honored to be joining this partnership to invest in the innovative, long-term strategic vision that has guided the club’s consistent success over its storied history,” said Alan Waxman, a founding partner and the chief executive of Sixth Street.Real benefited from the pandemic by moving to its training stadium at a time when supporters were barred from attending public events. It returned to the arena this season even though construction work continues. The stadium’s refurbishment is expected to be completed in time for the start of the 2023-24 season.The team’s finances are largely under control even though the stadium debt is almost $1 billion. Servicing costs about $40 million a year. The cash infusion from Sixth Street will mean the club’s short-term debt will be wiped out and replaced with $260 million available to spend.Those finances could allow Real to add reinforcements should it manage to secure Mbappé. The striker said recently that he was close to announcing his plans for next season. P.S.G., his current club, has offered him a contract extension worth far more than the offer from Real. But Mbappé has made several comments indicating his desire to play in Madrid, a destination and team that have been magnets for the game’s best talent. More