Sheeran aids Ipswich transfer pre-Taylor Swift gig​​

Football clubs worldwide have been paid $125 million in money owed to them from transfers of their former players, FIFA said on Wednesday, with money routed via its finance house in Paris, and there’s a backlog of another almost $200 million.

A further $31.7 million has been agreed but not yet sent.

The payments are being allocated to more than 5,000 grassroots and professional clubs by the FIFA Clearing House.

FIFA published an update on two years of work by the clearing house, which started in November 2022 to bring more transparency to the often murky multi-billion dollar transfer industry. It also tries to ensure smaller clubs get cash they are owed from future sales of players they nurtured.

When Moisés Caicedo made a British transfer record move from Brighton to Chelsea last year, his former clubs in Ecuador were entitled to share millions of dollars from the £115 million ($145 million) deal.

The money routed by FIFA “was a dream,” the president of CD Espoli, Lenín Bolaños, said in the FIFA report, with plans to pay for a practice ground, medical clinic and a gym.

Some parts of the FIFA transfer market rules in place since 2001 are under review after a European court ruling last month in a case brought by former France midfielder Lassana Diarra.

The existing FIFA system entitles players’ former clubs who trained them between the ages of 12 and 21 to share up to 5% of a future transfer fee.

However, clubs often were unaware a transfer had gone through or did not have the expertise or resources to pursue a claim. Now the online process is managed by the FIFA finance house which notifies buying clubs of approved payments that must be made within 30 days.

The wealthiest buying markets, England and Saudi Arabia, have paid the most in so-called “training rewards” FIFA said — $50.1 million and $18.7 million, respectively, in the past two years.

The leading net recipients have been clubs in Netherlands ($8.7 million), France ($7.8 million) and Argentina ($7.1 million).

One reason for the backlog is that clubs are not compliant with the system, the FIFA report said. It said at least 1,600 clubs in more than 100 countries are accredited.

“There are still important challenges ahead and areas for improvement,” FIFA chief legal officer Emilio García said in the 52-page report.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — For years, the global debate around the NWSL’s on-field product has centered around whether it is the best women’s soccer league in the world.

Recently, however, NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman and an ever-expanding league office have mulled a more provocative question: Can the NWSL — a women’s soccer league that is barely a decade old — be one of the best sports leagues in the world? More bluntly: Can it be relevant and compete with MLS and the NHL? Or even the NFL or the NBA?

The answers to those questions might be less important than the fact that they are being asked. That line of thinking suggests the NWSL might finally be embracing that its core ingredient is the most important to the success of any league: it is, above all, entertainment. And the NWSL has an abundance of entertainment.

Saturday’s NWSL Championship between the Orlando Pride and the Washington Spirit in Kansas City, Missouri, is a battle of the league’s top two teams. Orlando set a record for points (60) and unbeaten games to start a season (23), while both teams won 18 games in the regular season, jointly setting a league record.

Both Orlando and Washington narrowly prevailed last weekend in the most entertaining round of semifinals the NWSL has ever seen. It wasn’t just that all four teams played good soccer, and no, it didn’t matter that it was women’s soccer, either. The two games were sport at its most dramatic, captivating height.

Berman noted as much when she spoke at Audi Field on Saturday. The semifinal sold out in 72 hours. The Spirit’s quarterfinal also sold out despite overlapping the Washington Commanders NFL game being played in the area. “There was a time when that wouldn’t be in the realm of possibility,” Berman said.

What she said next matters more: “To really experience the energy of what I think is the emergence of an NWSL fan that really loves the game; they’re not just here for the environment or the experience, or to support women or women’s soccer players, but [they are] really enjoying the fact that the game itself is competitive and these are the best athletes in the world.”

For a league that for years emphasized its role as a women’s platform, it’s a shift that the NWSL is now positioning itself more simplistically: as a sport worth people’s attention, no strings attached about supporting a good cause.

The semifinals were must-see TV for the most casual sports fan. The Spirit won a penalty shootout over defending champ NJ/NY Gotham FC after Washington goalkeeper Aubrey Kingsbury stopped all three shots she faced. It was a tense, heated game in front of a raucous sold-out stadium in the nation’s capital — a crowd of 19,000-plus that erupted when the Spirit tied the score in second-half stoppage time.

A day later, the top-seeded Pride defeated the Kansas City Current behind an unforgettable, viral goal from six-time world player of the year Marta. That was the artistry before the drama: Orlando survived a late surge from Kansas City to win 3-2.

The league’s diehards know this well: Chaos is the ethos of the NWSL. And chaos is often entertaining.

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Marta & Banda ‘can’t wait’ for NWSL championship game vs. Washington

Marta and Barbra Banda speak about reaching the NWSL championship game vs. Washington Spirit.

This is the league where last-place teams win championships the following season (as Gotham did in 2023), results frequently change in the final minutes (the term “NWSL After Dark” was coined years ago to recognize the league’s unpredictable games), and just about anything weird can happen, including a player flipping the double bird to a referee on broadcast TV (yes, really).

Previous iterations of NWSL leadership too frequently failed to embrace the totality of the league’s gripping cinema. They also did not have the luxury of media rights deals that showcased the league’s product to the masses.

This season was the first of a four-year rights deal that the NWSL struck with ESPN, CBS, Amazon and Scripps (ION). The agreements meant that the majority of NWSL games were on TV this year and in places where sports fans already are.

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Bonmati slams Liga F for failing to market itself like NWSL & WSL

Barcelona’s Ballon d’Or-winning midfielder Aitana Bonmati says the Spanish Liga F is far behind the NWSL and WSL when it comes to promoting itself to potential fans.

ESPN calls itself the worldwide leader in sports, CBS is a major home of professional and college football, and both already broadcast several other soccer leagues, meaning the NWSL could (in theory) meet soccer fans where they already were. Amazon’s Prime Sports is a growing player in the space, and ION already successfully broadcasts WNBA doubleheaders as it now does for the NWSL.

Compare this to 2017, when the NWSL announced a historic media rights deal with A&E (including giving up equity in the league to A&E) that placed a weekly featured national TV game on Lifetime, the home of murder mystery romance movies on a loop. The league simultaneously launched the “Pass The Ball” campaign with celebrities talking about NWSL athletes as role models, which sounded more like an appeal for charity than an advertisement for an exciting product.

The partnership between the NWSL and Lifetime seemed great at the time, but the bar was low. The league had come from the depths of being broadcast on sketchy YouTube streams and a handful of games on cable. The message of going all-in on Lifetime was also clear: Women are the primary demographic of that channel, so of course women’s soccer would be a hit, right?

In retrospect, the thinking — of the Lifetime deal, but more so of how the league positioned itself, and what it thought to be its target demographic — was self-limiting. Fast-forward to today and the NWSL’s slogan is in its second year of a marketing campaign called “We Play Here,” which clearly positions the league as the home of world-class athletes.

The league’s front office has multiplied from a handful of hard-working folks in Chicago in the early years to approaching 100 now stationed in Manhattan in New York. Multiple senior executives at the league came from the NFL, and Berman joined from the NHL in 2022.

The billionaires buying up teams come with a wealth of sporting experience, too. Laura Ricketts, of the Ricketts family that owns MLB’s Chicago Cubs, purchased the Chicago Red Stars last year. The struggling franchise has a lot of work to do, but this year’s NWSL record crowd of nearly 40,000 at Wrigley Field represented an ambition and execution previously unthinkable in that market and, in large part, within the league.

Carolyn Tisch Blodgett was confirmed as an investor in and the new governor of Gotham FC days before the team’s championship win last year. The Tisch family has part-owned the New York Giants for the past three decades.

Earlier this year, Tisch Blodgett told ESPN that she treats Gotham as the same long-term investment as the Giants. She also sees a pathway toward making the club a globally recognizable brand, something other team owners have echoed.

“I’ve been really clear with my team that my vision is to build one of the best global sports franchises, period,” she said earlier this year. “That’s across men’s and women’s, that’s across sports, that’s across continents. When you think about the best global sports brands out there, there are no women’s teams on that list, and it’s just a matter of time until it is.”

One of the teams playing in Saturday’s NWSL Championship is attempting a similar trajectory. The Spirit are owned by Michele Kang, who also now owns French power Olympique Lyonnais and second-division English side London City Lionesses. Kang has been vocal about the need to invest in more infrastructure in the women’s game, and just this week she announced a $30 million investment in U.S. Soccer’s women’s and girls’ programs.

The key to a great sports product whether women’s soccer, American football or any other sport is entertainment. The NWSL is full of that, and it will be on display again Saturday in what might be the most anticipated final in league history.

Can the NWSL be a great sports league? There’s still growing to do, but at last, the league might finally be asking the correct questions.