New York magazine says that its highly regarded Washington correspondent, Olivia Nuzzi, is on leave after disclosing that she had a personal relationship with a former reporting subject, violating the publication’s standards.
The newsletter Status, which broke the story, and The New York Times both cite unnamed sources in identifying Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the other person involved with Nuzzi. New York magazine and Nuzzi have not confirmed Kennedy’s involvement, and Kennedy said in a statement that he had only met her once.
It’s an explosive development for the magazine and Nuzzi, whose piece featuring an interview with Donald Trump, “Peering into Donald Trump’s Ear, and Soul,” was featured on its most recent cover.
In a note to readers published late Thursday, New York said that if it had been aware of the relationship, Nuzzi would not have been permitted to cover the presidential campaign.
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New York said an internal review of her work has found no inaccuracies or evidence of bias, but that Nuzzi is on leave while a more thorough third-party review is undertaken.
“We regret this violation of our readers’ trust,” the magazine said, and a spokeswoman had no further comment. A spokesperson for Kennedy, who is married to the actress Cheryl Hines, did not immediately return a message from The Associated Press.
Nuzzi said in a statement to Status that in early 2024, the nature of some communication between herself and a former reporting subject turned personal.
“During that time, I did not directly report on the subject nor use them as a source,” she said. “The relationship was never physical but should have been disclosed to prevent the appearance of a conflict. I deeply regret not doing so immediately and apologize to those I’ve disappointed, especially my colleagues at New York.”
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It was not immediately clear how and when Nuzzi’s bosses at the magazine became aware of the relationship.
Nuzzi wrote a story about Kennedy’s campaign that was published last November, “The Mind-Bending Politics of RFK Jr.’s Spoiler Campaign,” where she described a harrowing car ride and brief hike with Kennedy and his dogs while interviewing him.
His name came up in a March 2024 piece in The New York Times where Nuzzi, Frank Bruni and Joe Klein discussed the state of the campaign at the time. “We’re forgetting or purposefully ignoring something rather important about this election: It’s not a two-man race. It’s a three-man race,” Nuzzi said, noting that at the time Kennedy was “polling competitively.”
Status quoted a representative for Kennedy saying, “Mr. Kennedy only met Olivia Nuzzi once in her life for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece.”
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Volodymyr Zelenskyy will press Joe Biden for binding security guarantees before the US president leaves office to bolster Ukraine’s position and compel Russia to join peace talks.
The Ukrainian leader has in recent months stepped up preparations for possible negotiations with Moscow in anticipation of a shift in US policy following November’s presidential election.
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Zelenskyy ordered an invasion of the Kursk region of Russia in August to gain territory as leverage in future talks and has said he is ready for a peace conference with Moscow’s involvement.
Speaking to journalists ahead of a US trip next week where he will attend the UN General Assembly and hold talks with Biden, Zelenskyy said he would present a “victory plan” to the US president that he hoped would end the war.
Zelenskyy said the plan, which he wants to be implemented by the end of December, would strengthen Ukraine and force Russia to the negotiating table.
“The victory plan, this bridge to strengthening Ukraine, can contribute to more productive future diplomatic meetings with Russia,” said Zelenskyy on Friday afternoon in Kyiv.
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He described the initiative as Biden’s opportunity to go down in history as the president who secured Ukrainian independence. He emphasised that the plan needed to be implemented before Biden left office in January.
“I think this is a historical mission,” said Zelenskyy. “Let’s do all this today, while all the officials who want the victory of Ukraine are in official positions.”
Ukraine has lost territory daily to Russia this year and Moscow has shown no sign that it was willing to negotiate.
The Ukrainian leader outlined the four points of the “victory plan” but declined to go into detail.
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The first point, he said, were further security guarantees. Ukraine has recently signed long-term commitments with the US and other western allies but wants harder assurances akin to the mutual defence guarantee that comes with Nato membership.
The second was Ukraine’s Kursk operation, which he said was “fulfilling” its task of diverting Russian offensive power.
Zelenskyy’s third request was for “specific” advanced weapons. He did not elaborate on the type of weapons system he wanted. The fourth was the joint development of Ukraine’s economy together with its partners.
“Today you help us in the implementation of this plan and in the future Ukraine will save you a lot of your resources,” said Zelenskyy.
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Zelenskyy does not view the “victory plan” as a replacement for his “peace formula”, a 10-point initiative based on the UN Charter that lays out a framework for a lasting settlement.
Rather, it will give Ukraine what it needs to get Russia to the negotiating table where the peace formula would be discussed, he said.
Zelenskyy again ruled out a Minsk-style peace agreement where the conflict would be frozen, stating that Russia would only invade again. “We need a just and stable peace,” said Zelenskyy.
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Both Brazil and China have put forward alternative peace plans to Ukraine’s peace formula. Zelenskyy said these plans lacked detail and worked as “political icebreakers” against the UN Charter.
After speaking at the UN on Wednesday in New York, Zelenskyy will travel to Washington to present the plan to Biden and Vice-president Kamala Harris, who is running against Donald Trump in November’s election.
He plans to meet Trump after his visit to Washington, he said.
Late one afternoon in October 2023, as the sun slipped down over Tokyo Bay, Masayoshi Son was sitting in his private office at SoftBank headquarters, at the head of a wooden table almost as long as Vladimir Putin’s in the Kremlin. A diminutive, balding figure dressed casually in a jacket and slacks, Son was recounting to me the low point of his career, a year earlier, when he announced he was disappearing from public view.
“What a shitty life!” he exclaimed, with a trace of self-pity. “You know on my Zoom call, I see my face often on the video screen and I hate looking at my face. What an ugly face. I’m just getting old . . . What have I achieved? . . . I have done nothing that I can be proud of.”
At face value, it was an astonishing admission. Son, then 66, ranked among the world’s most renowned investors. He invested in ecommerce giants Yahoo and Alibaba before they became household names. At the height of the dotcom bubble in early 2000, he was briefly the richest man in the world. When it burst, he lost 97 per cent of his fortune, around $70bn.
But he bounced back, launching a successful broadband and mobile phone business in Japan, propelled by an exclusive deal to distribute Apple’s iPhone. Then he disrupted Silicon Valley with the $100bn SoftBank Vision Fund, and ended up making the biggest swing and miss in the history of investing. (Hence his temporary vanishing act.)
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As editor of the Financial Times, I’d met Son twice and he intrigued me as a subject for a biography. A compulsive risk taker, his story was a classic entrepreneur’s tale of survival and perpetual reinvention. But was Son a tech visionary or simply an inveterate gambler who got lucky? Why was SoftBank, the company he founded in 1981 as a pioneering software distribution business in Japan, so often described as a house of cards?
In western media Son often comes across as a cartoon character. He has compared himself to Yoda in Star Wars; Napoleon (of which more later); and Jesus Christ (who was equally misunderstood, apparently). Obsessed by longevity, he has told friends that he hopes to live past 120, and that SoftBank should be built to last 300 years.
After four sit-downs with Son, as well as interviewing more than 150 people who know or have worked with him, I have concluded there’s a lot more to this restless character than meets the eye. While Son did not invent, control or own a breakthrough technology, he is the archetypal middleman. He has ridden the technological wave which has created untold wealth and penetrated every corner of our society.
His is a story of our times.
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Masayoshi Son is a quintessential outsider. This may explain his bottomless risk appetite and his desire to prove himself, over and over again. He was born in 1957 to poverty-stricken second-generation Korean immigrants on the island of Kyushu in the western Japanese archipelago. The family home was the equivalent of a cowshed, one of dozens of makeshift dwellings on a plot of unregistered land near the railway station.
Years later, Son confessed to a friend that he suffered from a recurring dream, waking up to the stench of pig faeces in his nostrils. His friend told him it wasn’t a nightmare but a childhood memory. “We started at the bottom of society,” Son told me. “I didn’t even know what nationality I was.”
As Korean-Japanese, the Son family followed tradition and lived under a Japanese name, Yasumoto. (Son later persuaded the authorities to let him combine his Japanese first name and Korean surname — a notable breakthrough.) His father Mitsunori was a bootlegger at the age of 14, later diversifying into pig breeding, loan sharking and pachinko, a form of low-stakes gambling that offered a livelihood to Koreans shut out of the Japanese economy.
In April 2023, Mitsunori, 87, sitting in the family home adorned with photographs of his favoured second son, described how he rearranged the pins on his pachinko slot machines so that everybody in town thought they were a winner. His upfront losses were eye-watering. Then he moved the pins back into place — and started making serious money.
Watching his father, Son learnt how to hustle. But the boy’s ambitions went way beyond pachinko gambling. He wanted to escape Japan and a lifetime of discrimination. Aged 16, he announced he wanted to learn English and study in the US. His family were dismayed, but soon relented.
Son’s six years in California, which included three years as a student at the University of California at Berkeley, were a life-changing experience. He saw first-hand the PC revolution. He read about Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs. He also made his first fortune, developing a pocket speech synthesiser with the help of a team of UC Berkeley engineers led by Professor Forrest Mozer, a nuclear particle physicist.
I tracked down Professor Mozer, then aged 92, during a visit to Berkeley in October 2021. He described Son as a modest student with little technical background but a businessman with a capital B. “That guy is going to own Japan one day,” he told his wife.
Later Mozer claimed that Son had gone behind his back and contracted with Japanese companies to sell American microchips (for the speech translator) that did not exist and for prices that he’d invented. He said he was not told Son was due to earn almost $1mn in fees. “I was his first business partner,” Mozer told me, “and on his first business deal he lied and cheated me.”
When questioned, Son rejected that, and insisted he had wrongly assumed he had permission to do what he did. (Mozer himself concedes there was no written contract between the two, just a gentleman’s agreement.) Son unravelled the Japanese deals and vowed to take more care in future. Perhaps the episode marks Son’s “original sin”, a short-cut on the way to the top that many entrepreneurs would recognise.
After his sojourn in California, Son returned home. In 1980, Japan seemed destined to be the world’s number-one economic power. Son was perfectly placed to act as a gateway for US tech businesses seeking to penetrate the Japanese market.
Bill Gates describes Son as a cultural interpreter as much as a commercial middleman. “Whenever you’ve been three or four days in Japan, and have had nothing but polite things to say to each other, invariably through an interpreter. . . then there’s this guy who speaks perfect English. It was such a relief. Masa was easy to talk to. He was an insider but an outsider too.”
After software distribution, Son pivoted to investing in internet-related business, placing two spectacular bets: on Yahoo, which earned him a six-fold return ($3.5bn), and on Alibaba, which gave a 1,310-fold return ($97bn). While he built a successful Japanese affiliate, Yahoo Japan, he never took his eye off the US market.
In the mid-1990s, he acquired Las Vegas-based Comdex, then the number-one tech trade fair, the Ziff Davis computer publishing empire and a host of dotcom properties. In 2013, he went one better and bought Sprint, the lossmaking US telecoms operator, finally pulling off a merger with T-Mobile that created a “third force” alongside Verizon and AT&T.
Throughout, SoftBank took advantage of the almost three decades of near zero interest rates in Japan. Son borrowed cheaply to pay generous prices for US assets, raising billions on the corporate bond market. “You don’t understand,” he once told a fretting colleague, “in Japan, money is free.”
In assessing Son’s track record, it is important to distinguish between SoftBank Corp, the listed company responsible for the operating companies, and SoftBank Group, the publicly quoted group holding company and major investor.
Businesses such as Yahoo Japan and SoftBank Mobile have proved highly successful and profitable. The Sprint acquisition, initially a dud, proved a winner after the T-Mobile merger. But Son has always cared more about growth than profits. SoftBank Group has long been highly leveraged, meaning it has a lot of debt in its capital structure. At times, it has ranked as one of the world’s top 10 indebted companies — not a comfortable position when inflation roared back in 2021.
Son is a major shareholder and a major borrower, using his SoftBank shares as collateral. Risk is built in. Suppose SoftBank shares fall sharply, lowering the value of the collateral, as has occurred many times during Son’s wild ride. Then panicky banks might demand the loans be repaid, destabilising the entire corporate structure.
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Son bristles when challenged, emphasising that as a co-investor he has “skin in the game” and therefore an incentive to invest responsibly. Nevertheless, some associates believe SoftBank’s founder is “addicted” to leverage. They told me he became hooked after the $20bn bid in 2006 to buy Vodafone Japan, the largest leveraged buyout in Asia at the time. He succeeded thanks to a financial magician by the name of Rajeev Misra, a former Deutsche Bank debt trader whose reward was to be put in charge of the $100bn SoftBank Vision Fund in 2017.
Misra was one of several talented executives trained as mathematicians, who applied their engineering skills to finance rather than academia. Over time, they lent a mercenary streak to SoftBank, stoking their boss’s appetite for dealmaking.
To some degree, the cultural shift was inevitable as SoftBank evolved from a Japanese technology conglomerate to a global investment group. But it was also a recipe for infighting at the top, latterly between Misra and Marcelo Claure, a 6ft 6in Bolivian-American who led the Sprint turnaround. Often the spats played out in the media. “They leaked like septic tanks,” says a SoftBank colleague.
Although Son adopts an abstemious public profile, his private consumption is more extravagant (albeit drawing on his own money rather than the company’s). He pays for his private plane and his favourite red wine (from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, at a minimum $6,000 a bottle). He has extensive properties around the world, including three conjoining houses in central Tokyo likened by one visitor to Wayne Manor, fictional home of Batman.
The basement features an artificial golf course where Son and guests can play in all-weather conditions on any course in the world. One portion of the house is decorated in the Empire style, the period between 1800 and 1815 when Napoleon modernised France and redrew the map of Europe. I discovered Son has a fascination with the Corsican Little Corporal, a fellow outsider.
In early 2020, a team from Elliott Management, the New York activist investor, paid a visit to Japan. Having bought a 3 per cent stake in SoftBank, their goal was to persuade Son to improve corporate governance, thereby boosting the share price. When an Elliott executive invoked the example of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, or Bill Gates of Microsoft, Son erupted in frustration.
Delusional? Not if you believe that Son is bent on “Making Japan Great Again”. After the collapse of the bubble economy in 1989-90, Japan entered a “lost decade” characterised by deflation and tepid growth. Son, the outlier, remains an object of suspicion among the Japanese business establishment. He counters by playing the patriot, claiming he wants to revive the country’s animal spirits. But his vision of a resurgent Japan contains a megalomaniacal streak.
When Son launched the $100bn SoftBank Vision Fund, an arms race in the world of venture capital ensued, leading to wholesale value destruction. Doling out sums of between $100mn and $200mn would have meant Son meeting hundreds of individual founders to check their credentials. Even with his legendary stamina, working 20-hour days, often flying on his private jet through multiple time zones, that was a physical impossibility.
Crucially, much larger sums — $500mn or more — were required to move the needle in a giant fund like the Vision Fund. The target companies couldn’t be start-ups as such; they were “later-stage” companies, turbocharged for growth by the injection of SoftBank capital. One of these companies was WeWork, founded by Adam Neumann, a tall Israeli with a planet-sized ego.
Son was utterly sold on Neumann, a fellow dreamer who spoke about world domination. When WeWork’s losses piled up, colleagues pleaded with Son to stop. The boss refused to budge.
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“As you all object, I am becoming more and more interested in this company,” he said. “I am looking at Alibaba and only he [Neumann] looks like Alibaba today.”
The initial Alibaba investment in 2000 — two bets of $20mn and $80mn — turns out to have been a curse as much as a blessing. Eager to prove his success wasn’t a one-off, Son talked about creating 10 SoftBank Vision Funds with a total war chest of $1tn dollars. These were castles in the air — the stuff of hubris.
Those who know Son say he is a brilliant operator (when he focuses), an average investor and a terrible trader. Between 2019-21, as markets turned down, Son suffered heavy losses on Vision Funds 1 and 2. He tried to recover by speculating wildly on options trading, using an in-house hedge fund called Northstar. SoftBank was left nursing multibillion-dollar losses.
For 18 months, he withdrew from public view, ostensibly serving penance but in reality plotting a comeback. Today, he is betting the house on artificial intelligence in order to reclaim his position as one of the world’s leading entrepreneur futurists.
To date, his record is fitful at best. Between 2017 and 2022, he mentioned “AI” more than 500 times in quarterly and annual results presentations. Yet when it came to OpenAI and its breakthrough product ChatGPT, the lead investor was Microsoft. Son never got a look in.
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Part of the problem was timing. In the Vision Fund years, AI businesses were either small scale, early in development or out of the public eye. During the Covid pandemic, Son was grounded in Tokyo. In early 2022, when travel restrictions were finally lifted, with the exception of China, SoftBank was sandbagged by record losses.
Had Son conserved his firepower rather than splurging money on more than 500 separate companies in the Vision Funds, he would have been perfectly placed. With company valuations beaten down by higher interest rates, Son could have acquired stakes in promising AI-related businesses at bargain prices. In hindsight, he admits, “Timing-wise maybe we were a little too early.”
It’s a familiar story: right instincts, wrong timing. (If he’d held on to his 5 per cent stake in advanced chipmaker Nvidia in 2019, he could have made another fortune.) Yet one of Son’s AI bets has paid off handsomely. UK chip designer Arm — acquired in 2016 — is at the centre of yet another super-vision: a $64bn plan to transform SoftBank Group into a sprawling AI powerhouse, including a foray into the development of artificial-intelligence chips, announced in May. The goal is to build a prototype by 2025, with each chip being able to process vast volumes of data. This hugely ambitious venture aims to create SoftBank Group’s own vertically integrated AI ecosystem, from manufacturing chips and operating data centres to industrial robots and power generation.
True, SoftBank cannot touch the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft, but Son is a customer and supplier to the hyperscalers. His new chipmaking venture involves billions of dollars of investment. Once a mass-production system is established, the AI chip business could be spun off, realising billions of dollars of value to its parent SoftBank.
How does this movie end? Those betting on a financial apocalypse have been disappointed. Call Son lucky, call SoftBank too big to fail. After four years studying the world’s greatest disrupter, my message is unequivocal.
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Don’t ever count him out.
‘Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of Masayoshi Son’ by Lionel Barber is published by Allen Lane on October 3
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PHOENIX (AP) — The Arizona Supreme Court unanimously ruled Friday that nearly 98,000 people whose citizenship documents hadn’t been confirmed can vote in state and local races, a significant decision that could influence ballot measures and tight legislative races.
The court’s decision comes after officials uncovered a database error that for two decades mistakenly designated the voters as having access to the full ballot. The voters already were entitled to cast ballots in federal races, including for president and Congress, regardless of how the court ruled.
Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, and Stephen Richer, the Republican Maricopa County recorder, had disagreed on what status the voters should hold. Richer asked the high court to weigh in, saying Fontes ignored state law by advising county officials to let affected voters cast full ballots.
Fontes said not allowing the voters who believed they had satisfied voting requirements access to the full ballot would raise equal protection and due process concerns.
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The high court, which leans Republican, agreed with Fontes. It said county officials lack the authority to change the voters’ statuses because those voters registered long ago and had attested under the penalty of law that they are citizens. The justices also said the voters were not at fault for the database error and also mentioned the little time that’s left before the Nov. 5 general election.
“We are unwilling on these facts to disenfranchise voters en masse from participating in state contests,” Chief Justice Ann Scott Timmer wrote in the ruling.
Of the nearly 98,000 affected voters, most of them reside in Maricopa County, which is home to Phoenix, and are longtime state residents who range in age from 45 to 60. About 37% of them are registered Republicans, about 27% are registered Democrats and the rest are independents or affiliated with minor parties.
Arizona is unique among states in that it requires voters to prove their citizenship to participate in local and state races. Voters can demonstrate citizenship by providing a driver’s license or tribal ID number, or they can attach a copy of a birth certificate, passport or naturalization documents.
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Arizona considers drivers’ licenses issued after October 1996 to be valid proof of citizenship. However, a system coding error marked nearly 98,000 voters who obtained licenses before 1996 — roughly 2.5% of all registered voters — as full-ballot voters, state officials said.
The error between the state’s voter registration database and the Motor Vehicle Division has since been resolved.
That number of votes could tip the scales in hotly contested races for the state Legislature, where Republicans hold a slim majority in both chambers.
Voters also are deciding on the constitutional right to abortion and on a state law that would criminalize noncitizens for entering Arizona through Mexico at any location other than a port of entry.
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Though Richer and Fontes disagreed over the status of the voters, both celebrated the court’s ruling.
“Thank God,” Richer said on the social platform X. He told The Associated Press on Thursday that maintaining voters’ statuses would be administratively easier.
Fontes, in a news release, called the ruling a “significant victory for those whose fundamental right to vote was under scrutiny.” Election officials will be contacting voters who need to update their proof of citizenship after the election, he said.
John Groseclose, who was among the voters whose citizenship was in question, said he was relieved he wouldn’t have to spend more time running around to resolve the mix-up.
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Earlier this week, he said he waited an hour and a half at a motor vehicle office in Tempe only to find that the employee who attended to him was unaware of the issue and did not know how to update his voter registration — despite him providing an official birth certificate and new passport.
“I’m glad that none of us are going to be disenfranchised over an error generated by the MVD 20 some-odd years ago,” Groseclose told the AP.
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Saudi Arabia’s grand boxing project is going global. At London’s Wembley Stadium tonight, British fighters Anthony Joshua and Daniel Dubois face off in the first European showdown organised by Riyadh Season. It follows last month’s fight night in Los Angeles also under the Riyadh Season brand, which began life as a programme of cultural events in the Saudi capital.
This is a sign of things to come. Unlike golf, those leading Saudi Arabia’s sporting push have found a rhythm in the world of boxing, bringing rival promoters together under the Riyadh Season umbrella so that fans and broadcasters get the fights they’ve been craving. Boxers and promoters, meanwhile, get bumper paydays.
Boxing is one of the most biddable sports with a global audience, but the Saudis have had recent success in tennis too. Perhaps this is the big lesson drawn from the expensive LIV Golf experiment — it’s much cheaper to join forces with the establishment than to upend it.
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This week we’re looking at the latest big news from Nike, where the chief executive is out. And we ask if football fans are reaching breaking point in the face of rising prices. Do read on — Josh Noble, sports editor
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On June 27th, Nike chief executive John Donahoe presided over one of the bleakest earnings calls in the history of the sportswear maker. Not only was the company still trying to find its level between online and brick-and-mortar sales, he said, but consumer demand for the brand’s trainers and athletic apparel was slowing.
The company made its name outfitting world-record runners, but the swoosh earned a dubious distinction of its own that day: the worst stock drop in Nike’s nearly 44-year history as a public company. So swift was the market reaction that co-founder Phil Knight issued a rare statement saying “I am optimistic in Nike’s future and John Donahoe has my unwavering confidence and full support.”
Barely three months later, Knight yanked that support away. On Thursday, the board of directors announced Donahoe will retire next month, to be succeeded by Nike veteran Elliott Hill.
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Donahoe, 64, leaves a mixed record at the world’s largest athletic brand. He ably steered the company through the pandemic, despite only taking the helm in January 2020, accelerating a push towards higher-margin online sales that padded profits. He pulled the company to its overdue revenue goal of $50bn just last year. But while Donahoe proved adept at tech and sales — he was poached by Nike from software company ServiceNow after a career spent at consultancy Bain and online retailer eBay — he lacked an essential component for a shoe brand: knowing what’s cool.
Several of Nike’s shoe “drops”, or limited edition releases, either missed the mark or reeked of desperation, such as an announcement this summer of the commercial sale of a once, collector-only Wu Tang dunk. Partner retailers which sell Nike shoes like JD Sports and Foot Locker praised rival brands like Adidas, New Balance, and On, for “newness”.
In selecting Hill, 60, as the next CEO, Nike’s board is going back to the future. Texas native Hill was once an assistant athletic trainer for the Dallas Cowboys and later started at Nike as an intern after business school. He has 32 years experience at the swoosh, including five years at European HQ in the Netherlands, and oversaw all of Nike’s commercial and marketing operations before his retirement in 2020.
“I couldn’t be more excited to welcome Elliott back to the team. His experience, understanding of Nike and leadership is exactly what’s needed at this moment”, said Knight in a statement issued on Thursday. “We’ve got a lot of work to do but I’m looking forward to seeing Nike back on its pace”.
When the European Super League launched (briefly) in 2021, one of the main arguments for tearing down football’s status quo was that fans were being deprived of exciting matches between elite teams.
Evidence this week suggests that argument was built on sand. When Liverpool visited AC Milan in the opening game of this season’s Champions League, one of the main talking points was of empty seats inside the San Siro. While the Italian club had an average home attendance for league matches last season of just under 72,000, local estimates put Tuesday’s turnout at around 60,000. So what’s going on?
Milan have started the season slowly — and lost the game against Liverpool 3-1. But more than 71,000 showed up a few days earlier to see the Rossoneri host Venezia in an Italian league match.
The main culprit for Tuesday night’s empty seats appears to be rising ticket prices — seats in the lower tier of the San Siro began at more than €120.
The issue of rising costs for football fans has been creeping up the agenda across Europe in recent months.
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This year 19 of the 20 English Premier League teams announced increased season ticket prices, while some did away with certain discounts for concessions.
At Nottingham Forest, for example, a child’s ticket in one part of its home ground more than doubled. Fans of Wolverhampton Wanderers urged the club to reconsider price hikes in order to “preserve the very lifeblood of this famous old club”. Fulham supporters held up yellow cards to protest against the £3,000 rate for a season ticket in some sections of the new Riverside Stand.
“Ticket prices are a ticking time bomb and club executives have their hands over their ears. Something has to give”, the Football Supporters Association said last month.
And it’s not just ticket prices. The cost of replica shirts has also been rising fast. The new Manchester United home shirt starts at £85, but will set you back over £100 if you want a name and number on the back, or if you want an exact copy of the match-worn version. (Although that’s still some way off the £900 options outlined in this weekend’s HTSI.)
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Price rises are being propelled by various factors. Inflation across the globe has driven costs for everything from electricity to wages and food. Ticket prices are a quick and easy lever to pull in response — effectively passing on rising costs to the end consumer.
But there are other pressures at work. Tighter spending rules both at European and domestic level are pushing clubs to focus relentlessly on maximising revenue.
The globalisation of the game also means there is a growing pool of football-mad tourists only too willing to pay whatever it takes for a chance to see a top team in the flesh, especially in holiday hotspots like Rome, Paris and London.
In the Milan example, it’s hard to ignore the influence of institutional investors. After private equity firm RedBird Capital Partners bought the club in 2022, revenue generated on matchdays rose to €73mn from €33mn a year earlier and €34mn pre-pandemic. Commercial, TV and sponsorship income all rose considerably too — helping the club to its first annual profit in 17 years.
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Tuesday night’s empty seats may prove a one-off. The issues could also be specific to club and competition.
But as the pull from new regulation and the need to generate investment returns leads more clubs to raise prices wherever they think they can, executives will face increasingly tough choices — and less forgiving supporters.
Cricket has been booming thanks to the Indian Premier League gold rush. But are we reaching saturation point? And is there now a bubble? Those are some of the questions we look to answer in this Big Read.
Lord Sebastian Coe is one of seven candidates to replace Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee who steps down in March next year.
Adrian Wojnarowski, veteran NBA journalist for ESPN who single-handedly transformed sports reporting for the social media era, announced his retirement from the industry and will become the general manager of the men’s basketball team at his alma mater, St. Bonaventure University.
Glasgow has agreed to stage a slimmed down Commonwealth Games in 2026, which will be partially funded by Australian taxpayers. The state of Victoria had previously been lined up as hosts, but pulled out after deciding it was too expensive.
Raj Sports has paid $125mn to bring a new WNBA team to Portland, Oregon, the latest step in raising the total number of teams in the league from 12 to 15. Raj Sports also owns the Portland Thorns women’s football team.
The Diamond League has announced an increase in prize money, the latest salvo in the battle for the future of athletics.
Qatar Airways has replaced Turkish Airlines as a main sponsor of the Uefa Champions League. The six-year deal is worth up to €500mn, according to SportBusiness.
Shohei Ohtani had the single best game by a baseball player in the history of the sport on Thursday night: three home runs, two stolen bases, ten runs batted in for the Los Angeles Dodgers in their 20-4 rout of the Miami Marlins. Even wilder, he became the first player in more than a century of Major League Baseball to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in a single season, establishing the so-called 50/50 club. (Non-baseball fans may be familiar with the 40/40 club, the previous benchmark of a power player, as it inspired the name of Jay-Z’s exclusive Manhattan lounge.)
“That has to be the greatest baseball game of all time”, Ohtani’s teammate Gavin Lux said Thursday night. “I’ve never seen anybody do that even in little leagues.”
Scoreboard is written by Josh Noble, Samuel Agini and Arash Massoudi in London, Sara Germano, James Fontanella-Khan, and Anna Nicolaou in New York, with contributions from the team that produce the Due Diligence newsletter, the FT’s global network of correspondents and data visualisation team
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