Politics
Missing in action: King Felipe, Pedro Sánchez and Emmanuel Macron
There’s been no shortage of top political figures attending World Cup matches to cheer on their home teams, but when Spain faces off against France in the tournament’s semifinals in Dallas today, neither the country’s head of state nor its head of government will be in the stands.
Spanish King Felipe VI traveled to Guadalajara, Mexico, to witness the national team’s triumph over Uruguay last month but has been unable to attend the subsequent matches against Austria, Portugal and Belgium due to his packed royal agenda, which will also block him from being present at Tuesday’s match. Shortly before the players take the field, the royal family is due to preside over the annual Princess of Girona Awards ceremony in Barcelona, during which they will recognize the achievements of young Spanish and Latin American artists, researchers and social workers.
The absences aren’t representative of the king’s commitment to Spanish football: The monarch is a keen supporter of the national team, and underscored his support in May, when he appeared in the video unveiling the players selected to represent the country in the World Cup. Following the match in Mexico last month, Felipe VI took the unusual step of joining the players in the locker room to personally congratulate them for their victory against Uruguay.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez will also miss the match.
The head of Spain’s government has been invited to attend the Bastille Day celebrations in Paris, which will also keep French President Emmanuel Macron away from the game. Sánchez is expected to return home afterward to focus on the response to the devastating wildfires in which dozens of people have died near Spain’s Mediterranean coast.
If Spain makes it to the final, the royal family is expected to be on hand to cheer the national team on, just as it did when its players won the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
But it’s unclear if Sánchez intends to travel. Although the prime minister has repeatedly expressed his support for Spain’s players, he has not committed to attend the tournament. That stance isn’t unusual: Spain’s prime ministers traditionally celebrate the country’s victorious athletes once sporting events have concluded and they’re back in Madrid.
The great and good of the Brussels bubble has gathered tonight to watch the France-Spain match in a cavernous art gallery rented out by the French embassy.
Ostensibly to mark the country’s Bastille Day, the reception quickly became a watch party for the semifinal, with peoples loading up plates of cheese, bread and canapés.
Attendees include France’s EU ambassador Philippe Léglise-Costa, the EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas and Spain’s Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares, sweltering in the heat of the un-air-conditioned building.
But the mood quickly turned from one of jubilation to worry and even despondency after Spain scored its opener. A palpable gasp went up, first from one side of the hall and then the other, thanks to the slight delay between the two projectors.
A second Spanish goal after half time sets this up to be a potentially bitter end to a day of patriotism.
LONDON — A police cover-up after a 1989 football stadium tragedy was seminal in shaping soon-to-be new British Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s political outlook.
Upon returning to the House of Commons this evening for the first time as a member of parliament, Burnham used his maiden speech to hail a proposed new Hillsborough law — named after the Sheffield football stadium where 97 Liverpool fans lost their lives in a crush — which imposes a duty of candor on public officials.
Burnham faced raw anger and heckles of “justice” and “truth” in 2009, when he was culture secretary, at a memorial service at Liverpool’s Anfield stadium to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the disaster.
Days before he moves into No. 10 Downing Street, Burnham pledged to end the U.K.’s “cover-up culture” and put “decency back at the heart of the British state.”
Burnham said the law will “change the way this country thinks and works about justice,” as it “truly is a rewiring of the state and a passing of power from the authorities to the hands of ordinary people.” MPs approved the legislation Tuesday evening, and it will now go to the House of Lords for further scrutiny.
DALLAS, Texas — The World Cup was supposed to be Dallas’s moment to shine. The city is famously image-conscious, and the powers-that-be trumpeted the fact that more Cup matches were scheduled here than any other host city. It seemed like a coup for a town whose football team (the other kind of football) bills itself as “America’s team.”
But off the pitch, Dallas leaders have spent the spring and summer fighting a series of political fights, many of them centered around sports. It’s a cautionary tale to the many European tourists who have marveled at America’s glittering sporting venues, but are unaware of the complex economic and political forces that have shaped them, for better and for worse.
Before the soccer tournament even started, the city’s pro basketball team had announced it was leaving its downtown arena. Then the hockey team decamped for a new arena in the suburbs.
Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson was booed when he attended a World Cup Fan Fest. Along the way, the city was forced to furlough non-essential workers because of a budget shortfall, so the public libraries were closed for a day last week.
“There’s a lot of — the only word I can think of is — drama,” City Councilmember Paula Blackmon said.
To be clear, the World Cup matches aren’t being played in Dallas. They’re 15 miles west, in Arlington, Texas. The Texas Rangers play baseball a few blocks away.
But Dallas proper could still stake a claim as a professional sports hub. The Dallas Mavericks (basketball) and the Dallas Stars (hockey) have spent the last 25 years at American Airlines Center, a retro-styled arena just north of the central business district, which is served by its dedicated light rail stop. That arena’s future has been at the heart of the fighting.
Last fall, the city began discussing the idea of tearing down its City Hall to make way for a new sports arena. The building is showing its age — or its neglect — and city officials estimate it’ll take hundreds of millions of dollars to repair it.
Some in Dallas questioned whether the teams need a new arena, since the American Airlines Center — which is 1.6 miles from City Hall — seems to work just fine. Others objected to tearing down the building since its architect, I.M. Pei, is kind of a big deal.
The conflict divided the city council into two factions — the majority in favor of tearing down the building, the minority trying to preserve it. Blackmon and another council member, both of whom favor preserving the old City Hall, sued the city in June trying to block a vote on tearing down the building.
To some extent, the fight has been a proxy for the broader fight over how to preserve downtown Dallas. AT&T, the telecom giant which has had its corporate headquarters in Dallas since 2008, announced this spring it’s moving to the suburbs, citing rising crime, homelessness and government dysfunction. Even the luxury retailer Neiman Marcus, the most Dallas of institutions, is closing its downtown store.
Former Dallas Mayor Laura Miller, who got into politics after a career as an investigative reporter, said the fracas over the sports arena is a symptom of the city’s dysfunctional government. Dallas has a weak mayor and its city council has been divided for decades, which gives developers — and sports teams — the upper hand in negotiating with the city.
Miller is famous locally for turning down the Dallas Cowboys when team owner Jerry Jones asked for a publicly-financed stadium inside the city in the early 2000s.
The Cowboys — like the Mavericks and Stars before them — promised to help redevelop neglected parts of the city. Miller argued that the city was better off putting its funds into basic services like public safety and infrastructure — and pointed to a string of broken promises from the sports teams and other big developers.
“It’s kind of Dallas’ Achilles heel, because Dallas will just do anything to quote unquote ‘save the teams,’ even though all the teams are all within a 30-minute drive of all of our homes,” she said.
Dallas’s local organizing committee for the World Cup declined to comment for this story, as did a spokesperson for the Mavericks. A spokesperson for the Stars didn’t respond to requests for comment. Johnson, the Dallas mayor, also declined several interview requests.
Most of the fighting has been invisible to World Cup fans, who will flock to town Tuesday for the region’s final World Cup match, which is the semi-final between France and Spain. But the outcome of the city council fight could affect Dallas for decades to come.
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