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☆ F1, the NBA and a Super Bowl: Las Vegas Makes Its Play as America’s Sports Capital
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-19 | by ( Joshua Robinson | Jonathan Clegg | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

LAS VEGAS—In the 48 hours leading up to Saturday night’s Las Vegas Grand Prix, Formula One’s $600 million project here had begun to look like it was skidding off the road. The sport’s world champion left no doubt that he hated it from the moment he landed. A $10 million Ferrari was torn up by a loose drain cover on Thursday’s opening night. And a group representing 35,000 fans was so incensed by the organizers’ decision to send them home during a delay in practice that they filed a lawsuit against Formula One.

Persons: Ferrari Organizations: VEGAS, Las Vegas, Prix, Formula One

☆ The Blown Call—by the Video Ref—That’s Driving Soccer Nuts
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-04 | by ( Joshua Robinson | Jonathan Clegg | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com. https://www.wsj.com/sports/soccer/liverpool-var-tottenham-luis-diaz-ac5be184

Persons: Dow Jones, luis, diaz, ac5be184 Organizations: tottenham Locations: liverpool

☆ It’s the NFL’s Most Unstoppable Play. The Solution Comes From… Rugby?
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-24 | by ( Jonathan Clegg | Andrew Beaton | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Persons: Dow Jones

☆ Lionel Messi’s U.S. Debut Went Exactly as You Would Expect
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-22 | by ( Jonathan Clegg | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Persons: Dow Jones, lionel, messi Organizations: miami, mls

☆ How Red Bull Left the Rest of Formula One in the Dust
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-03 | by ( Jonathan Clegg | Joshua Robinson | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

The Red Bull Formula 1 team spent most of last season wondering when Mercedes, the dominant force of the sport’s recent history, would finally show signs of life. Though Red Bull had pulled ahead, it was braced for a counterattack. But as the 2022 season progressed, team principal Christian Horner couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. Mercedes just kept dropping further back in the rearview mirror.

☆ Mercedes’s F1 Dynasty Ended With a Thud. Toto Wolff Has a Plan to Bring it Back.
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-23 | by ( Joshua Robinson | Jonathan Clegg | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Toto Wolff was at the Miami Grand Prix last spring, gazing out at the most sophisticated cars in the world racing around the sun-baked, palm-fringed circuit, when a jarring realization hit him like a bucket of cold water at 180 mph. His Mercedes team, Formula One’s eight-time defending constructors’ champion and arguably the greatest dynasty in modern sports history, wasn’t just off the pace. It was completely uncompetitive. The run of dominance that he had helped to build as Mercedes team principal was coming to a definitive conclusion. Seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton would finish the season without a single Grand Prix victory for the first time in his entire career.

☆ Cristiano Ronaldo Joins Saudi Club Al Nassr
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-31 | by ( Joshua Robinson | Jonathan Clegg | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Cristiano Ronaldo, one of the greatest soccer players of his generation, effectively ended his career at the game’s top level in Europe on Friday by joining Al Nassr in Saudi Arabia for what is believed to be the richest sports contract of all time. The club made the announcement on social media on Friday evening, five weeks removed from Ronaldo’s acrimonious exit from Manchester United and three weeks after he was benched by the Portuguese national team at the World Cup.

☆ The Other Lionel Who Unlocked Messi’s Argentina
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-19 | by ( Jonathan Clegg | Joshua Robinson | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

LUSAIL, Qatar—Coaching Lionel Messi seems like the easiest job in sports: Give him the ball, and get out of the way. But for nearly two decades now, a succession of men who were charged with building a winning national team around one of the game’s greatest ever players discovered it was a nearly impossible task.

☆ Messi’s Argentina Beats France to Win the World Cup
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-18 | by ( Joshua Robinson | Jonathan Clegg | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

LUSAIL, Qatar—Over more than 15 years in professional soccer, Lionel Messi had become a champion of nearly everything. He won every major club competition available to him at least once. And he had taken soccer’s highest individual prize, the Ballon d’Or, a record seven times. Messi was so good for so long that even without a World Cup, he had a claim on being the sport’s greatest of all time. Now Messi has that World Cup, too.

☆ The $45 Billion Desert City Hosting the World Cup Final
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-17 | by ( Jonathan Clegg | Joshua Robinson | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

LUSAIL, Qatar–The World Cup final will take place on Sunday in a giant golden basket of a stadium, located in the middle of a futuristic, $45 billion city called Lusail. Twelve miles north of Doha, it comes with skyscrapers, a university, wide-open boulevards and a marina for luxury yachts–all of it lit up like a petrostate Las Vegas. Twenty years ago, the entire city was no more than a pile of sand.

☆ This Is Soccer Superstar Lionel Messi's Last World Cup. Here's a Look Back at His Career.
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-17 | by ( Kate Bubacz | Jonathan Clegg | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Messi has won the Ballon d’Or award for the world’s best player seven times. His other records include the most goals scored by a player for a single club and the most hat-tricks and most assists in Spain’s La Liga. He also won Olympic gold in 2008 at age 21. Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

☆ Who Wins a World Cup Final Between France and Argentina? Qatar
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-16 | by ( Joshua Robinson | Jonathan Clegg | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

DOHA, Qatar—Shortly after winning the hosting rights for the 2022 World Cup, the project that would bring the soccer world to Qatar, the tiny petrostate decided that Qatar also needed to go out into the soccer world. It landed in a ritzy corner of Paris, not far from the Champs-Élysées where the country’s sovereign-wealth fund was looking to buy property, and picked a soccer team to become its flagship sports investment. The club was Paris Saint-Germain, and Qatar planned to turn it into the New York Yankees of soccer.

☆ The World Cup’s Hottest Ticket Isn’t Messi—It’s Morocco
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-14 | by ( Joshua Robinson | Jonathan Clegg | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

DOHA, Qatar—Amine Khayatei had flown to the Qatar World Cup from Casablanca with just his backpack and his Morocco jersey. He planned to watch his team play once and then go home after 24 hours in the country. Ten days and a string of Moroccan upsets later, Mr. Khayatei is still here.

☆ France Ends Morocco’s World Cup Fairy Tale With a 2-0 Win
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-14 | by ( Joshua Robinson | Jonathan Clegg | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

AL KHOR, Qatar—The section of French fans inside Al Bayt stadium was barely perceptible, a small pocket of blue in a corner of the Qatari desert that could have passed for Casablanca. Any time a French player touched the ball, he was met by a wall of whistles. But by the end of Wednesday night, that was the only section singing. With a goal in each half, France had done what most soccer fans expected—end the Moroccan fairy tale in the semifinals of the World Cup. Les Bleus, the defending champions here, had won 2-0, despite a performance that was often staler than week-old croissants.

☆ The World Cup Run That Croatia Built on Quicksand
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-12 | by ( Andrew Beaton | Jonathan Clegg | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Before Luka Modric was a star midfielder for the Croatian national team, he was a teenager on the youth team for Dinamo Zagreb, whose coaches had to beg him to cut his hair because it got in his eyes every time he made a pass. A couple of decades later, his hair is still long. And his eye for a pass has made him one of the best soccer players on the planet and the key to a style of play that has transformed a tiny Slavic nation into the game’s most improbable powerhouse.

☆ Lionel Messi Is Embracing His Dark Side. It Might Win Him the World Cup.
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-12 | by ( Jonathan Clegg | Joshua Robinson | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

LUSAIL, Qatar—Lionel Messi has played in five World Cups and hundreds of enormous, planetary matches. He’s one of the most famous people on earth. But if you thought you had seen it all from Messi over the past two decades, you were wrong. Here in Qatar, where he’s chasing the one trophy that has eluded him, the world is witnessing a new side of Lionel Messi. And it’s a little bit terrifying.

☆ The World Cup Contenders Who Don’t Want the Ball
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-11 | by ( Joshua Robinson | Jonathan Clegg | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

AL KHOR, Qatar—Across most of the pitch in its World Cup quarterfinal against France, England could do pretty much what it wanted. The Three Lions built attacks from the back, ambled forward and covered long stretches of the field before encountering a single blue jersey. The Three Lions dominated possession, completed over 100 more passes than their opponents, and were completely unopposed for nearly half of their buildup play. And England still lost.

☆ Prominent Soccer Journalist Grant Wahl, 48, Dies While Covering World Cup in Qatar
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-10 | by ( Joshua Robinson | Jonathan Clegg | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

DOHA, Qatar—Journalist Grant Wahl, one of the most prominent chroniclers of American soccer over more than 20 years and a longtime writer for Sports Illustrated, died on Friday night while covering the World Cup in Qatar. Mr. Wahl was at the quarterfinal match between Argentina and Netherlands in Lusail, north of Doha, when he suffered what medics at the scene called a cardiac arrest. His death was confirmed by the U.S. Soccer Federation in a statement on social media.

☆ France Edges England, 2-1, to Advance to World Cup Semifinals
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-10 | by ( Jonathan Clegg | Joshua Robinson | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

AL KHOR, Qatar—The history of England’s national soccer team at the World Cup is a story of agonizing missed penalty kicks. The tournament-ending failures are known to fans almost in shorthand, each one its own national catastrophe: Turin 1990, Saint-Etienne 1998, Gelsenkirchen 2006. On Saturday night, Harry Kane added one more to the list: Al Khor 2022.

☆ Argentina Sinks the Netherlands in Shootout to Advance to the World Cup Semifinals
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-10 | by ( Joshua Robinson | Jonathan Clegg | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Lionel Messi of Argentina celebrates scoring the team’s first penalty in the shootout. LUSAIL, Qatar—The World Cup quarterfinal between Argentina and the Netherlands was the sort of matchup that required little explanation. Here was the nation that invented modern attacking soccer vs. one of the greatest individual attackers ever to play the game—tactics vs. inspiration. And for 100 minutes on Friday night, inspiration was winning.

☆ How Morocco Built a World Cup Cinderella in Four Months
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-09 | by ( Andrew Beaton | Jonathan Clegg | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Morocco’s national soccer team spent the better part of 20 years doing its best to act like a European powerhouse. It borrowed Spanish coaching techniques, built a state-of-the-art soccer academy modeled on France’s Clairefontaine and imported its managers from across the Mediterranean. Over the past two decades, Morocco has been run by a Portuguese coach, a Belgian, three Frenchmen and a Bosnian.

☆ Lionel Messi’s Last Dance Is More of a Stroll
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-09 | by ( Andrew Beaton | Jonathan Clegg | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

When Lionel Messi takes the field for Argentina’s World Cup quarterfinal against the Netherlands on Friday, it will mark the latest moment in what is likely his final run at the trophy. Except it’s actually been more of a walk.

☆ The Matchup That Could Decide England vs. France
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-07 | by ( Joshua Robinson | Jonathan Clegg | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

DOHA, Qatar—In the final minutes before France coach Didier Deschamps sends the defending World Cup champions onto the pitch against England on Saturday, he will make one last run through the tactics with his 11-man unit. His opposite number, Gareth Southgate, will be delivering the same speech to the Three Lions. The point is to take the natural chaos of soccer and make sense of the 22 moving parts on the field. This is the rare instance when Deschamps and Southgate may want to boil it all down to two of those.

☆ The Kid Who Replaced Cristiano Ronaldo
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-07 | by ( Jonathan Clegg | Joshua Robinson | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

LUSAIL, Qatar—Gonçalo Ramos grew up dreaming of being the next Cristiano Ronaldo. He wasn’t alone. Most Portuguese kids who have kicked a soccer ball in the past 20 years had the exact same fantasy. The difference is that only one of them would get the call to actually replace Ronaldo in a do-or-die match at the World Cup.

☆ The Audacious, Inadvisable Gamble Behind Morocco’s Winning Penalty
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-07 | by ( Joshua Robinson | Jonathan Clegg | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

When the moment came for Morocco’s Achraf Hakimi to take the most important penalty kick in his country’s history, he was suddenly faced with a million options. He had 196 square feet to aim at from 12 yards out. Go right or left, high or low. Hard or soft. All Hakimi had to do to send Morocco past Spain and into the World Cup quarterfinals was put the ball where the goalkeeper wasn’t.

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