Olympiacos known as it the Match for Peace. On April 9 final 12 months, a bit greater than a month after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Greek membership staged a pleasant with Shakhtar Donetsk. It was a heartfelt, poignant form of event, the primary recreation Shakhtar had performed because it had fled a struggle in its homeland.
Before the sport, every of Shakhtar’s gamers emerged with Ukraine’s flag — cornfield yellow, summer time blue — draped over their shoulders. Both groups’ jerseys have been adorned with the slogan: “Stop War.” All proceeds from ticket gross sales for the sport, held at Olympiacos’s Karaiskakis stadium in Piraeus, could be used to assist help refugees from the combating. “We use football as a tool for peace,” stated Christian Karembeu, the Greek membership’s sporting director on the time.
Four days earlier, Alkinoos, a crude oil tanker crusing beneath the flag of Liberia, arrived in Rotterdam from the Russian port of Primorsk, in accordance with knowledge from the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air and analyzed by Investigate Europe and Reporters United, a Greek investigative journalism undertaking.
Quite how a lot Russian oil the vessel was carrying just isn’t recognized, solely that the ship’s capability is 109,900 deadweight tons, and that it’s operated by Capital Ship Management. So, too, is the Aristidis, an oil and chemical tanker that arrived in Teesport, in northern England, a few days later. That ship, too, had come from Primorsk.
Capital Ship Management is owned by a Greek tycoon named Evangelos Marinakis. Though he has since diversified his holdings into media and retail, Marinakis can hint his fortune to transport. That is the place he made his cash. It is in soccer, although, that he discovered fame. Marinakis is the person who turned Olympiacos into Greece’s serial champion.
Marinakis — additionally, rather more not too long ago, the proprietor of Nottingham Forest, now restored to the Premier League — has not damaged any legal guidelines, or defied any sanctions, by facilitating the stream of Russian oil world wide. The solely transgression right here, given Olympiacos’s help for Shakhtar, was that his personal and public stances didn’t match.
He just isn’t alone in that. Giannis Alafouzos, like Marinakis, has a formidable portfolio of pursuits. He owns the SKAI tv community, in addition to Katherimini, Greece’s main newspaper. Both have been fiercely important of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Alafouzos has maintained the same stance in his (comparatively few) public statements on the problem.
At the basis of his fortune, although, is Kyklades Maritime, a transport firm with a fleet of twenty-two tankers that has continued to move Russian oil within the 12 months for the reason that struggle started. Investigate Europe calculated that Kyklades vessels have “carried out 26 shipments of crude oil or oil from Russia internationally” between the beginning of the invasion and Jan. 5 this 12 months.
Alafouzos, it must be identified, additionally owns Panathinaikos, historically Olympiacos’s fiercest rival and its closest home competitor. In latest years, he has struggled to maintain up with the juggernaut that Marinakis has constructed. Olympiacos, its revenues spiraling because of its frequent involvement within the Champions League, has claimed all however 4 Greek league titles this century. Panathinaikos, in contrast, has not been topped Greek champion since 2010.
This 12 months, although, it appears to have been restored. Under the astute teaching of Ivan Jovanovic, it sits 4 factors away from its nearest rival — AEK Athens — with solely three video games left within the common season.
This weekend, although, brings its sternest problem. Olympiacos at present sits third, 5 factors again, however with a far deeper, extra illustrious squad. It can name on the likes of James Rodríguez on Saturday when the golf equipment meet in Piraeus, on the Karaiskakis. Nobody shall be describing it as a match for peace.
It is tough to seize the dimensions of conferences between Panathinaikos and Olympiacos. Perhaps one of the best ways is to notice that the sport is understood in Greece because the Derby of the Eternal Enemies, and that’s in all probability underselling it. There is a case to be made that this has lengthy been essentially the most heated rivalry in Europe.
Between them, although, Marinakis and Alafouzos have managed what actually must have been inconceivable: They have stoked it additional. Greek soccer has for many years been dominated not by its gamers and managers however by its homeowners: proud, bombastic, fabulously rich strongmen drawn from the nation’s oligarch class, drawn to the sports activities much less for the competitors or the glory and extra for the facility it could possibly bestow.
AEK, for instance, is owned by Dimitris Melissanidis, one other oil and transport tycoon. PAOK, within the northern metropolis of Thessaloniki, is a plaything of Ivan Savvidis, a Russian-Greek tobacco tycoon. Their golf equipment carry them a profile, present them with a constituency, and supply a base from which to advertise themselves and the pursuits of their empires.
As homeowners of the nation’s two most distinguished and in style golf equipment, although, Marinakis and Alafouzos occupy the grandest stage. The friction between them has, at instances, appeared to transcend the skilled and the industrial and into the deeply, virulently private.
Alafouzos has beforehand sued Marinakis, amongst others, in relation to a match-fixing scandal — and attendant wave of violence — wherein Marinakis was accused of involvement. He was later acquitted of all expenses, and strenuously denies the accusations, portray them as a plot to discredit his success.
In return, Alafouzos’s information media shops have greater than as soon as been accused of breaking Greece’s privateness legal guidelines in relation to Marinakis. In 2015, a gathering of the nation’s Super League groups needed to be suspended after a “violent” altercation between the 2 males, which ended with one in every of Alafouzos’s bodyguards nursing a cut up lip.
Quite how a lot any of this has to do with soccer is anybody’s guess. Olympiacos, Panathinaikos and Greek soccer as an entire are, in all probability, caught within the crossfire of one thing far larger than a mere sport. They are, as a substitute, items in a recreation wherein there isn’t any time for morals, the place any path to success is taken into account truthful recreation, the place a billionaire rivalry is performed out not simply on the sphere however in courts and ports, throughout the transport lanes and the airwaves. There, the true prize just isn’t a trophy however pure, uncontested energy.
The PlayStation President
For some time, Pablo Longoria had a nickname. As one of the best nicknames do, it caught on as a result of it labored. Longoria was younger, however he regarded even youthful. And his route into skilled soccer’s government ranks from Asturias, in northern Spain, had been unorthodox. He had honed his scouting acumen as a youngster by hours spent on numerous laptop video games. So they known as him what he was: Niño De La Play — The PlayStation Kid.
At one level, soccer would have held that outsider standing towards him. Now, although, there isn’t any longer a tightly outlined, strictly managed entry coverage to the sport’s backstage areas. Regardless of enjoying expertise, any earnest striver, compulsive observer or slick charlatan can barge within the door. All it takes is sufficient persistence, self-perception and chutzpah.
Longoria’s story suggests he has all of these in abundance. By his personal account, he arrange a web site to investigate gamers when he was 12, which is each uncommon and essentially the most 12-12 months-outdated factor possible. At 16, he wrote to golf equipment throughout Europe providing his providers. Newcastle United, one in every of three to reply, confirmed him the correct kind for finishing scouting studies.
He didn’t cease there. He acquired a job as an analyst for Recreativo de Huelva, a venerable, money-strapped workforce in Spain’s deep south. He labored for Newcastle, apparently, although it’s not clear for a way lengthy and for what goal. He constructed sufficient of a community to change into a scout for the Italian aspect Atalanta.
By the time Longoria was 34, his résumé was positively glittering. He had been the top of recruitment at Sassuolo. He had been chief scout at Juventus and sporting director of Valencia earlier than taking the latter function at Marseille. Just a little greater than two years later, he earned a promotion: In 2021, he was appointed president of what’s — traditionally — France’s greatest membership.
Beyond his expertise, Longoria didn’t have any precise {qualifications} for any of these jobs. A couple of unhealthy choices and he may need been dismissed as a self-generated fable, his lack of a enjoying profession held up as conclusive proof for his failure. The entrance to soccer could also be open to anybody, in spite of everything, however so is the exit.
That Longoria has solely risen, then, is testomony to the truth that he seems to be good at his work. Very good. At Marseille, he has recruited a mixture of dependable Ligue 1 stalwarts, ageing castoffs and promising kids, and positioned them on the service of Igor Tudor, a supervisor whose appointment was so underwhelming that he was jeered by his personal followers merely for taking the job.
But it has labored, and labored spectacularly. Marseille sits second in Ligue 1, behind the stuttering touring circus of Paris St.-Germain. P.S.G. travels to the Stade Velodrome this weekend for France’s nice gala derby. Should Marseille win — because it did towards P.S.G. within the French Cup a number of weeks in the past — it might shut the hole to solely 2 factors. Nobody makes use of Longoria’s nickname any extra. Where he got here from not appears so related. Where he’s going is rather more fascinating.
State of the Union
Union Berlin was imagined to have fallen away by now. Ragtag tales have a tendency, in spite of everything, to have a comparatively temporary shelf life. Unlikely groups rise to the highest of the desk within the early weeks of the season, because the superpowers are nonetheless limbering up. They are flooded with reward for his or her spirit and their tenacity and their derring-do, after which they slip away with good grace and glad reminiscences of their time within the highlight.
Union, it might seem, has not been handed that individual copy of the script. The Bundesliga is roughly two thirds of the best way by means of its season, and Union — the final word underdog, actually — remains to be there, battling with Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich, Union’s opponent this weekend, on the high of the desk.
The probability stays, in fact, that within the white warmth of the ultimate stretch, Bayern (or probably Dortmund, which moved on high — quickly — with a victory Saturday) can have the gamers, the legs and the sources to go away the others behind, however the longer it goes on, the extra of a boon it’s for the league as an entire.
The Bundesliga has at all times insisted that Bayern’s dominance is an efficient factor, not a foul one, irrespective of how counterintuitive that sounds and the way fallacious it very clearly is. But the mere chance of Union’s staying the course has energized the competitors.
There is not any such factor as romance in any main league now, probably not. Competition, within the truest sense, is an phantasm. There is a hegemony, an unmoving hierarchy, in each nook of Europe. But sustaining that phantasm is in itself fairly vital. It doesn’t matter, in the long term, if Union can stave off gravity. What issues is that, for fairly a while, it has regarded as if it’d.
Correspondence
As ever, this article seeks to strike a stability between the pragmatic and the philosophical. Joe Light’s query belongs very a lot to the primary class. “I’ve become fan of Wrexham since watching ‘Welcome To Wrexham,’” he wrote, clearly unaware of my shut private friendship with Ryan Reynolds, to whom I really helpful a museum in York.
“I’m intrigued by the long throw-ins by Ben Tozer, which have the effect of a corner and often lead to scoring chances. Why don’t more clubs utilize this strategy?”
The reply to this query, Joe, is widespread decency. Well, a notion of widespread decency. Long throws have been a well-known method within the heyday of what I believe we will all agree was the true lovely recreation — burly Englishmen booting balls so far as potential on mud-stained fields, their turf not a lot mowed as plowed — within the Nineteen Eighties and Nineteen Nineties.
After that, the thought grew to become a bit bit stigmatized. It has had one thing of a renaissance not too long ago, although, because of the information-inflected, marginal good points philosophy of groups like Brentford, the Danish aspect Midtjylland and the Real Madrid subsidiary Liverpool. Ben Tozer could also be a harbinger of the longer term.
Richard Lesser’s query is equally pragmatic. “Why are Champions League knockout games scheduled at the same time?” he asks. “It makes no sense from a television fan’s perspective. Even if you record one game and watch the other, you still have to cloister yourself from hearing the other result.”
There will, I think, be sensible causes for this — kicking off one recreation earlier or later would impression match-going followers, in spite of everything — however I’d agree it appears a bit outdated. It shouldn’t be past human creativeness for the video games to be staggered by an hour or so, no less than.
Ken Bariahtaris, however, is considering weightier issues: “The beauty of soccer at this level is the narrow margins. Goals, fundamentally, are hard to come by. Skill, technique, money to build a side all matter, but tactics, effort, a magical moment or two can overcome disadvantages. Over a season, the aggregate talent rises. But we all love the possibility of a single game or tie making the difference.” Scarcity, in different phrases, is soccer’s secret ingredient.
And some extent from Walid Neaz that already has been added, even earlier than you learn this, to my record of potential topics. “We’re witnessing some of the best ever players for their respective nations in terms of appearances and goals: Neymar breaking Pelé’s record, Messi and Ronaldo setting all time-greatest marks, the likes of Luis Suárez for Uruguay, Robert Lewandowski for Poland, Romelu Lukaku for Belgium, Olivier Giroud for France. Is this truly the generation where we’re seeing players reach the highest heights, or is it helped by playing more games and competitions than ever before?”
My kneejerk, scorching-take response is that the latter is definitely a considerable issue. Cristiano Ronaldo has scored loads of objectives for Portugal. Nobody is denying that. Nobody is devaluing his achievement. But it does appear to be most of them got here towards Luxembourg, doesn’t it?
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