Culture
Remco Evenepoel: The Tour de France contender who might have played for Belgium at Euro 2024
Two storylines have been dominating Belgium’s back pages.
First, the make-up of Domenico Tedesco’s team for these European Championships — and in particular, a problem position at left-back, where Rennes centre-back Arthur Theate is expected to fill in.
Second? The physical condition of cyclist Remco Evenepoel, one of the three favourites to win the Tour de France, which begins on June 29. A victory for him there would be Belgium’s first in the race for 48 years.
The connection? In another world, Evenepoel as the Belgian left-back at Euro 2024 was a very real possibility.
The 24-year-old played for the academies of both Anderlecht and PSV Eindhoven, captaining Belgium up until under-16 level, and played with two of Belgium’s current squad: forwards Jeremy Doku and Lois Openda.
Other past team-mates included Arsenal pair Jakub Kiwior and Albert Sambi Lokonga, while he shared a private training coach with Youri Tielemans and Michy Batshuayi, who were older but from the same area of Brussels.
“He was at the highest level,” Bob Browaeys, Evenepoel’s coach with Belgium Under-16s, tells The Athletic. “I never had a player with such a high-performance mindset. That was unbelievable.”
This is the story of how football helped create one of the world’s biggest cycling stars.
(Stuart Franklin/Getty Images,)
Eden Hazard’s mouth is open and the mirrored sunglasses cannot hide the pain etched on his face.
The ex-Chelsea and Belgium superstar, famously averse to physical conditioning during his playing career, is cycling up the lunar slopes of Mont Ventoux, one of the sport’s most iconic climbs.
Clad in the kit of minor Belgian cycling team Intermarche-Wanty — the equivalent of turning up to five-a-side in a Leyton Orient shirt — his Instagram post is flooded with impressed messages. Thibaut Courtois, the Tour de France, and Evenepoel himself all have their say. “Fenomeno,” says Evenepoel.
Hazard’s post shows that, in Belgium, there are two sports of importance — cycling and football — and Evenepoel has lived them both. And despite Belgium’s golden football generation, the cyclists are invariably more beloved.
Eddy Merckx, widely considered the greatest cyclist of all time and another to comment on Hazard’s post, is Belgium’s greatest sporting son. In modernity, Evenepoel has won back-to-back Sportsman of the Year awards, despite the achievements and popularity of Kevin De Bruyne and Romelu Lukaku. Wout van Aert, another cyclist, won the previous two.
Evenepoel with cycling legend Eddy Merckx at an Anderlecht game in 2022 (Virginie Lefour/BELGA MAG/AFP via Getty Images)
Evenepoel’s father Patrick was a cyclist; not a major talent but still good enough to win the 1993 Fleche Wallone, a high-profile race in Belgium, before being forced into retirement with a heart condition. A great-grandfather, Frans Van Eeckhout, was also a professional. Remco, born in 2000, picked up their genes.
“At five years old, he accompanied me to the Gordel (a cycling tour around Brussels),” said Evenepoel’s grandfather Eduard in 2022. “He insisted on riding the 50 kilometers. He barely stopped twice. We had only removed the two stabilisers from his bike for a month.”
But Evenepoel’s first love was football, where he was a left-footed midfielder who amazed coaches with his ability to run. Diminutive and with a mop of shaggy hair, his first coaches nicknamed him “Smurf”.
“His gloves were bigger than his face,” former Anderlecht youth coach Marc Van Ransbeeck told Belgian newspaper DH. “He wanted to become a goalkeeper when he first joined and dreamed of being Daniel Zitka, the starter at that time.
“But he already ran very well and had incredible endurance — I always compared it to a moped.”
Evenepoel was quickly moved outfield, where he formed a midfield partnership with Sambi Lokonga, now at Arsenal. The cyclist is an Arsenal fan and was at the Emirates Stadium for their 5-0 win over Chelsea on April 23.
“Lokonga is actually in the team I dreamed of being in, so he’s actually made my dream come true,” Evenepoel said two years ago.
Lokonga himself is similarly impressed at his former team-mate’s exploits. Evenepoel won the Vuelta a Espana in 2022, one of cycling’s three Grand Tours, and would likely have won the Giro d’Italia the following year, which he was leading, if not for a Covid-19 diagnosis.
“He was one year below me but sometimes the 1999 and 2000 players trained together, and so he trained with me,” Lokonga tells The Athletic “It’s crazy what he’s done. I know that when he was young, when we had to run up and down, he was already one of the best so that maybe helped with the distances you ride when you are a cyclist.”
When Evenepoel was in the under-10s, his father showed Anderlecht coaches a document. It was his son’s stress test results. The doctor had left a comment in the margins: “Never seen that in my career”. His coaches’ response was that Evenepoel was displaying triathlete numbers — and they were not far wrong.
From an early age, Evenepoel was aware of some of the technical limitations in his game. He worked hard to improve his right foot, doing post-training ‘extras’ before he reached double-digits.
Nevertheless, his best attributes were always those where he didn’t need the ball at his feet: fitness and mentality.
“My style of play was a bit similar to how I ride a bike,” he has described. “I had a big engine and tried to cover every blade of grass.”
From 11 until 14, Evenepoel moved to the Netherlands to play in the academy of Dutch side PSV Eindhoven. His competitiveness was evident, frequently entering pitched table tennis battles with the father of his host family. However, in 2014, he moved back to Anderlecht for family reasons: his mother was ill in Brussels.
Ter bewijs dat ze echt samen gespeeld hebben: Hier scoort Cody Gakpo na een (mislukte) voorzet van Remco Evenepoel. https://t.co/kb4hKRIr9y pic.twitter.com/yipf63elWS
— Hidde Spaan (@HiddeSpaan) September 12, 2022
The same year, Evenepoel was called up to the Belgium Under-15s, which was the first time that Belgium Under-16 head coach Browaeys saw him play. The next year, when Evenepoel graduated, Brouwaeys kept him as captain.
“I spoke to him often in that role,” Browaeys tells The Athletic. “And I was always puzzled. He was so professional at such a young age; just 15, talking about his preparations for games, for his careers. He was special. Uncommon.”
“In the older age groups, you’re the right hand of the coach but that’s not always easy with the youth teams because they’re so young,” agrees Anderlecht coach Stephane Stassin, speaking to Cycling Weekly. “Remco, however, was the exception: he was effectively the right hand of the coach and he talked to his team-mates. When I asked him to do something, sometimes he would say that he had already talked with his team-mates and arranged what was needed.”
Though Browaeys kept Evenepoel as captain, he did make one major change: with more technical players in the midfield, he moved him to left-back, where his charge could bomb metronomically up and down the wing.
At Anderlecht, coaches had been wary of controlling his running ability, describing him as inventing a new position: a player who attacked as a No 10 and defended in front of the back four. He would run 12km each game as a young teenager — a huge amount at that age. His biggest rival in endurance tests was defender Hannes Delcroix, one year older, now at Burnley.
“You would see Remco, on the beep tests, continuing to run while everybody else had stopped,” says Stassin. “He always wanted to know before how well Delcroix had done. They had a little competition — and we considered Delcroix a physical machine. That defines Remco. He would never let go if he was not the best.”
Evenepoel in the leader’s pink jersey at the 2023 Giro D’Italia (Tim de Waele/Getty Images)
In his later years at Anderlecht’s academy, coaches say he even beat the conditioning results of first-team defensive midfielder Lucas Biglia, a starter for Argentina in the 2014 World Cup final after moving to Lazio.
One real-life story — improbable enough to sound like legend — came during the Brussels half-marathon when Evenepoel was just 16.
“I started the race a bit earlier because I was running with a disability association,” says Stassin. “At one moment, I heard a whole group of really fast runners come by, some Kenyans, and then there was one guy who said ‘Hey coach, how are you doing?’.
“He (Evenepoel) was running like crazy again — the morning after playing a game on the Saturday. He finished eighth, I think, in 87 minutes.”
Everybody has a similar story. Sebastiaan Bornauw is a Belgium international centre-back, now at Wolfsburg, who played with Evenepoel at Anderlecht.
“It was a big coincidence that we were once both staying in the same hotel in Lanzarote,” he told Cycling Weekly. “It was a sports hotel with all the facilities, so we were playing some football and doing some pre-season together.
“One day, he asked me to join him cycling. I love cycling — I’m typically Belgian in that I love the classics in Flanders. He asked me to go on a bike tour with him and I said yes. I thought it would be 50km.
“He said, ‘Ah, yeah, the tour is between 160 and 180km’. I said, ‘Remco, good luck!’. I didn’t join him.”
Cycling is a dangerous sport. Last year, Swiss climber Gino Mader died during a descent in the Tour de Suisse; there have been dozens of other tragedies in recent decades.
In August 2020, Evenepoel endured his own terrifying crash during an Italian race: Il Lombardia. He ran wide at a narrow turn over a bridge and his handlebars caught the stonework, sending the rider, just two years into his professional career, over the edge and into a ravine.
Evenepoel fractured his pelvis and punctured his lung — but if branches had not cushioned his fall or a small ledge had not stopped him from falling further into the ravine, the consequences could have been far worse. Nevertheless, the recovery was long and arduous, with Evenepoel open about the psychological distress it caused him. However, he had come through dark times before.
Paying tribute to the late Gino Mader during the 2023 Tour de Suisse (Dario Belingheri/Getty Images)
Bornauw — alongside other former team-mates such as Alexis Saelemaekers, Lokonga, Openda, and Doku — all became professional footballers. Evenepoel did not.
“I was captain of the national team, then they put me on the bench and I started to ask myself questions: ‘Is it worth continuing?’” he told The Lanterne Rouge cycling podcast last year. “Then, I wasn’t even on the bench anymore. I just wasn’t in the top 15 players. Then I really started to hate the sport.”
Browaeys, his national manager at the time, thinks that as coaches, Belgium’s management team could have collectively improved other parts of his game.
“His football was based on his physical skill and mentality — but we missed the tactical progression a little,” he remembers. “He maybe played too much with his heart and not enough with his brain‚ but that’s logical when you’re 15 years old. From March 2016, Anderlecht began to leave him on the bench and it was very difficult for me to select him after that — especially difficult because he was my captain.
“He was often poorly placed on the pitch,” Koen Boghe, a coach at KV Mechelen, where Evenepoel played for six months after his eventual release from Anderlecht, told DH Sports. “Especially when losing the ball. We played him as a left-back and he had difficulty correcting himself tactically.
“I had the impression that he was always going full throttle, like on his bike, except that sometimes, you have to hold back from riding so as not to get caught in the back. I wonder if he could have made up for his shortcomings.”
Another view was that while Evenepoel’s fitness was good, he lacked short-distance explosiveness. When his boyhood club released him in January 2017, Evenepoel was distraught. He has never gone into detail about his final months at Anderlecht but spoke of getting “a disgust of football simply because of everything that happens inside the clubs”.
One former team-mate, Vince Colpaert, told the Belgian website VP that “Mechelen wanted him but Anderlecht was childish… they did not want to release him and he was only allowed to play practice matches, while we had competitions every weekend. Then he played twice in six months.”
“I was close to depression,” Evenepoel has said. “I’m a very sociable person, but I didn’t talk to anyone anymore.”
Evenepoel is one of the biggest stars in professional cycling and is hugely popular in Belgium (Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images)
Close to the end of his time at Mechelen, Evenepoel sat in the woods on his bike. He had always used mountain biking as a form of off-season training — but the trails had brought him to a crossroads. He was even considering stopping elite sport himself and becoming a physio.
“I said to myself: ‘Either you do your training and you go for it, or you take your bike, go back home, and change sports, your whole life’,” he told the Lanterne Rouge podcast. “This was at 17. I was a very good student but that year, I was just trash at school. It was an up-and-down year. I just lost my mind.”
That day, he made the decision to quit football and, based on his raw biometric data, pursue cycling.
“He still had a nice profile for a wing-back,” remembers Browaeys. “I was surprised when I heard he had become a cyclist because honestly, for me, it was still possible to become a professional player.”
But stubbornness has always been part of Evenepoel’s make-up and on this day, he was resolved. As he tells it, he snuck into the family garage and took his father’s road bicycle, which was far too large for him.
“My parents didn’t know I was changing sports. Only my personal physical coach,” Evenepoel remembers.
From his home, he rode up the famed Mur de Grammont (more widely known in Flemish as the Muur van Geraardsbergen), completing the 117km in three and a half hours — and at a startling average speed of 34kph. It was his first time using a road bike outside.
As soon as his father saw the data, Evenepoel no longer needed to keep his riding secret. He immediately competed in his first races as an unaffiliated rider in a black jersey — coming 10th in a local time-trial with an ordinary bike with road handlebars, 50 seconds off the winner.
Evenepoel is the current time trial world champion (Dario Belingheri/Getty Images)
In cycling-mad Belgium, even local races are closely watched by teams — and Evenepoel was immediately picked up by a junior club. His rise to the top of his new sport is another story entirely, but here are some highlights.
He won 34 of his first 44 races. At the 2018 European Junior Road Cycling Championships, just 14 months into his new career, he won both the road race and time trial — finishing nine minutes ahead of the second-place finisher in the former. Both titles in the Junior World Championships followed later that year.
The crash at Il Lombardia in 2020 set him back but Evenepoel is now entrenched as a Grand Tour winner and one of the world’s best all-round riders, a half-step back from the current big two: Slovenia’s Tadej Pogacar and Denmark’s Jonas Vingegaard.
What role did his football career play? Relatively few players reach such a high level of football before successfully switching sports, owing to football’s onus for early specialisation. British sprinter Adam Gemili is a rare counterpart. Evenepoel’s raw fitness, in a sense, has always been there but football fostered his competitiveness — and though some coaches deemed him tactically naive, Evenepoel still thinks it provided his strategic outlook.
“I think football maybe helped me with the mind games during the race,” he told reporters in April. “In football, you have to try to crack your opponents mentally by putting your foot a bit harder on their toe than you should do.
“Stuff like that helps me, in a race, to go over the limit a bit and try to have different tactics than other teams would. Maybe physically, football didn’t help me a lot to come into cycling but more the mental games and the other games going in the bunch during the race. Nothing negative but sometimes, when you are suffering, you have to make it look like you are not suffering. Stuff like that is what I learned more from football.”
His tactics were good enough to win the complex 21-stage Vuelta a Espana in 2022, while victory in the following year’s Giro was cruelly prevented by Covid-19. The peloton is agreed that Evenepoel is a rider with the potential to win all three Grand Tours over the course of his career.
The Tour de France is next — and though he sustained a nasty crash in the Tour of the Basque Country two months ago, fracturing his collarbone, he recovered enough to win the time trial at the Criterium du Dauphine in June, the Tour’s main warm-up race.
Back in lockdown, Evenepoel returned to Anderlecht to train. When crowds returned, a parade finally gave him the opportunity to wear purple in front of a capacity Lotto Park. But an interview during training allowed him to explain how he really felt.
“I spent 11 years here,” he told reporters. “To be honest, the last few years were the toughest. They broke me a bit mentally.
“But when I look back on it now, it has made me stronger as a person and in life. Thanks for trying to break me. Frankly, I am more proud to wear (my cycling) jersey. And now I have more fun.”
(Top photo: Getty Images; design: Dan Goldfarb)
This article is part of the “Beyond the Track” series, a dive on the surrounding scene, glamour and culture that makes a Grand Prix.
LAS VEGAS — A dash of dancing fountains, a sprinkle of star power supplied by a collection of celebrity chefs, and even something to chase it all down with champagne. Welcome to the Bellagio Fountain Club, a perfect recipe of the trappings the Las Vegas Grand Prix offers that makes it the most unique race on the Formula One calendar.
At first taste, a who’s who of chefs coming together just hours before qualifying might be hard to swallow. Ah, not so, says Wolfgang Puck, explaining there are parallels between performing at a high level on the track and concocting a gourmet meal in the kitchen.
“A restaurant is exactly the same as a Formula One team. Both are like an orchestra,” Puck told The Athletic. “It’s exactly the same. Because everybody has to work together and everybody has to help each other. You have to really bring it on because it is also all about timing. In a restaurant, if you have three or four different stations and one order has this or that and you have five different dishes coming out for one table, you can’t have them all coming at the same time. So it’s organization and a lot of training.”
Puck is no F1 novice; he closely followed the European-centric sport as a boy in Austria. Naturally, his favorite driver was fellow Austrian Niki Lauda, who later became a good friend. The mere mention of the three-time world champion’s name causes Puck to smile, with him immediately reminiscing about watching Lauda race whenever F1 visited the street circuit in Long Beach, Calif.
Back then, Puck was a rising chef, on the precipice of becoming one of the first chefs to crossover into the mainstream culture, while Lauda was already recognized as an F1 legend. A friendship was formed, and each time Puck attends a grand prix, it brings back a flood of memories of watching races around the globe.
“A restaurant is exactly the same as a Formula One team. Both are like an orchestra,” celebrity chef and F1 fan Wolfgang Puck says. (Christopher Trim / Cal Sport Media via AP Images)
Puck was also here a year ago attending the inaugural Las Vegas Grand Prix, and he is wowed by how this race became an event, a word he emphasizes because how can a setting like this — the famed Bellagio fountains behind him, and a purposely constructed street circuit that winds through Las Vegas’ famous landmarks — be a mere race.
“I think (the grand prix) shows Las Vegas really in a good way because they race at night,” Puck said. “I really think it’s really an amazing thing to finally have it here. People can come from all over the world. There are more hotel rooms so close by, like I go to the Formula One in Budapest and they have very few hotel rooms, you have to stay 50 miles away in a little donkey hotel. Then, you need to get out of the parking lot. Like this year, we waited two-and-a-half hours to get out of the parking lot. That doesn’t happen here.”
Although champagne toasts and caviar dishes have always been synonymous with the globetrotting sport that races in exotic locales, there is no denying that F1 is presented much differently than it was even five years ago.
Propelled by the “Drive to Survive” effect, the boost in U.S. interest in the sport often credited to the Netflix docuseries, races have become such a spectacle that a gathering like this one featuring nearly 20 name chefs doesn’t feel out of place on a grand prix weekend.
And just as Puck is an example of a more traditional F1 fan, another attendee here represents the other side of the spectrum.
“My daughter. All my daughter,” Mark Wahlberg said, explaining how he discovered F1.
Like so many, “Drive to Survive” was the entry point for Grace Wahlberg becoming infatuated with the sport. In particular, she was drawn to McLaren teammates Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri. Before too long, her newfound interest piqued her father’s own curiosity, eventually leading to Mark, the famed actor, pulling some strings so that Grace could get the chance to sit inside one of Norris’ older cars.
“She has a big crush on two of the guys, Oscar and Lando, and so she wanted to meet them,” Mark Wahlberg told The Athletic. “So me being a dad who likes to make things happen for my kids, I figured out how I could track Lando down and get a car sent to the house. It was cool for us to be able to spend some time together and enjoy something.”
How did actor Mark Wahlberg get into F1? “All my daughter,” he says. Daughter Grace is a fan of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri. (Christopher Trim / Cal Sport Media via AP Images)
Donnie Wahlberg nods his head and smiles as his younger brother describes how he got into F1. It’s the kind of nod that implies, “I told you so,” because Donnie has long been a fan, discovering the sport and learning its intricacies when they toured Europe during the heyday of the boy band New Kids on the Block.
Donnie has lots of opinions on F1 but little time now to express them all. He has to jet to meet his wife. But before he departs, he wants to make one thing known: He loves Michael Schumacher. And while the debate among fans of who is better often centers on Schumacher, Ayrton Senna or Lewis Hamilton, Donnie leans in a different direction. His vote: Max Verstappen is the GOAT.
Mark gives his own smile as Donnie makes his point, though he prefers not to wade into the debate. Maybe Mark’s devotion to McLaren isn’t quite yet to the level of Grace’s or Donnie’s, though it doesn’t appear far off. Nor is his support mere lip service, instead it comes from a genuine place. He may be here at the Bellagio supporting his other brother Paul, a chef who’s worked in the restaurant industry since he was a teenager, but he’s also here because he’s a fan happy to be immersing himself in the event.
And here on a Friday afternoon atop a structure purposely built so fans could watch cars speed down Las Vegas Boulevard, F1 fans old and new intermingle. The event is all anyone is talking about.
“It’s a global event now,” Puck said. “Back then, Americans didn’t know Formula One. It wasn’t that popular. It’s not like today.”
The Beyond the Track series is part of a partnership with Chanel.
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GO DEEPER
‘Perfect marriage of speed and glamour’: How Vegas becomes F1’s celebrity magnet
(Top photo: Jordan Bianchi / The Athletic)
Culture
NFL Week 12 roundtable: Giants’ QB plan post-Jones, NFC West race, is Bo Nix legit OROY contender?
You can officially count the New York Giants among the teams whose offseason will be built around finding its next franchise quarterback.
Daniel Jones’ being benched and then released is just one development highlighting league happenings leading up to Sunday’s Week 12 action. The Giants host the Tampa Bay Buccaneers with fan favorite Tommy DeVito in line to start.
Elsewhere in this week’s roundtable, our NFL writers Mike Sando, Zak Keefer and Jeff Howe discuss the NFC West. Could it be the league’s most fascinating division title race?
What about the Offensive Rookie of the Year race? Is the Denver Broncos’ Bo Nix (or another rookie quarterback) closing in on the Washington Commanders’ Jayden Daniels? Though Anthony Richardson has redeemed himself in Indianapolis, how will he and the Colts fare against the buzz saw that is the Detroit Lions? The 11-point favorite Kansas City Chiefs — sans Taylor Swift — visit Charlotte and the Carolina Panthers for the first time in eight years. The Harbaugh Bowl caps off Week 12 on Monday night, too.
Read more on what’s catching our writers’ attention this week.
The Daniel Jones era is over as the Giants host the Bucs. What’s next for Jones? What does the Giants’ plan at quarterback look like this offseason?
Howe: They tried to move up for a top QB in April, and I’d expect a similar effort — if not a more concerted one — this spring. The Giants are still in contention for the No. 1 pick, so they might get their choice of QBs, but the race has primarily been focusing on Cam Ward and Shedeur Sanders. There isn’t a marquee prospect in this class, though, and there are personnel executives who have already said they wouldn’t rank any of the 2025 QBs ahead of the six first-rounders from April. The Giants, like every QB-desperate team, should be aggressive, but they can’t force it. As for Jones, he’ll enter the camp competition vortex for teams that aren’t able to find a starting-caliber QB in the draft. It’s recently worked for the likes of Baker Mayfield, Sam Darnold and Russell Wilson, so I’d highly recommend a friendly offensive system.
GO DEEPER
2025 NFL Draft order projections: Cowboys, Bears tumbling toward top-10 picks
Sando: Jones projects as a backup somewhere, possibly with a team that has playoff aspirations and could stand to upgrade behind its starter. The Miami Dolphins are only 4-6, but they could use an upgrade behind Tua Tagovailoa. The Arizona Cardinals have Clayton Tune. Tampa Bay has Kyle Trask. The Minnesota Vikings have Nick Mullens. Maybe those teams love their backups, but I could see teams in their situations considering Jones.
As for the Giants, who will be making the decisions there? How high will their draft choice be? Which veterans might be available? It’s just way too early to know what the Giants are going to do, based on all the important unknown variables. They need to find a veteran able to start and possibly develop so they aren’t too dependent on their next drafted QB — especially in 2025, which doesn’t look like the best year for drafting at the position.
Keefer: Jones is going to make a lot of money in this league as a capable backup somewhere, removed from the expectations that come with being a franchise guy. I can’t see a team — barring an unforeseen injury — rolling with him as the starter in Week 1 next season. Not after what he’s put on tape the last two seasons. And the Giants will find themselves this spring backed into one of the worst corners in football: needing a quarterback in a draft that doesn’t feature a lot of quarterback talent. That’s caused teams to reach in the past, and it’s burned them for decades. New York would be wise to go the veteran route before the draft just to be safe. I wonder whether the prospect of Justin Fields taking over would get Giants fans excited.
Daniel Jones was benched Monday after the New York Giants’ 2-8 start to the season, during which he completed 63.3 percent of his passes for 2,070 yards, eight touchdowns and seven interceptions through 10 games. (Mario Hommes / DeFodi Images via Getty Images)
The Broncos, on the road against the Las Vegas Raiders on Sunday, are in the thick of the AFC playoff hunt. Is Bo Nix (or another rookie QB) a legitimate Offensive Rookie of the Year contender or is it still Jayden Daniels’ award to lose?
Howe: It’s Daniels’ award to lose, and Drake Maye is playing better than Nix. If Daniels and the Commanders tumble while the Broncos snag a playoff spot, there’s absolutely an avenue for Nix to claim the award, but I would still take Daniels over the field.
Sando: It’s Daniels’ award to lose, but there is some uncertainty about how strongly he and that offense will finish. Nix is definitely gaining on him from a production standpoint. We can see that in the table below, which shows production for Daniels, Nix and Maye over their past six games. That’s a big change from early in the season.
Rookie QB comp: Last six games
| QB | Daniels | Nix | Maye |
|---|---|---|---|
|
W-L |
3-3 |
3-3 |
2-4 |
|
Cmp-Att |
101-163 |
132-192 |
122-181 |
|
Cmp% |
62.0% |
68.8% |
67.4% |
|
Yards |
1,203 |
1,409 |
1,214 |
|
Yds/Att |
7.4 |
7.3 |
6.7 |
|
TD-INT |
6-1 |
11-2 |
9-6 |
|
Rating |
94.2 |
104.7 |
89.0 |
|
Sacked |
11 |
11 |
15 |
|
QB EPA |
13.0 |
31.2 |
10.4 |
|
EPA/Pass Play |
+0.11 |
+0.13 |
+0.05 |
Keefer: Mike is right — it’s not only Bo Nix entering the conversation but Drake Maye as well, although he won’t be able to boast the relative team success Daniels is enjoying in Washington and Nix is enjoying in Denver. Voters for these types of awards often lean on turnaround stories, and for a while this season, Daniels was scripting the best one in football. He’s still in front, but how he responds to consecutive losses might very well end up deciding this award.
The Chiefs are 11-point favorites on the road against the Panthers and, presumably, they’ll bounce back Sunday. Does the loss in Buffalo combined with the Lions’ continued rise change how you feel about Kansas City?
Howe: A bit, yes. If the Chiefs managed to beat the Buffalo Bills with a subpar performance, that might have been a wrap, but the Lions and Bills are decisively better right now. And though everyone is waiting for the Chiefs to get significantly better as Patrick Mahomes gains experience with his skill players, we shouldn’t overlook the fact Josh Allen and the Bills will do the same. No one who has watched the playoffs for the past half-decade is ever going to write off the Chiefs, but they’re objectively behind Detroit and Buffalo entering the most pivotal stretch of the season.
Sando: The way the Bills offense handled the Chiefs defense should be concerning for Kansas City. Kansas City can improve as the season progresses because it is well coached and it will be developing key players as Isaiah Pacheco returns, Xavier Worthy gains experience, etc. But it feels like a good year to be Detroit or Buffalo, all things considered. The Chiefs are very good but less dominant than their record indicates.
Keefer: I learned my lesson last year. The regular season simply does not matter for the Chiefs. They’ve come to transcend football norms during their dynastic run. It doesn’t matter that plenty of their wins this season have been unconvincing. Doesn’t matter that Travis Kelce has taken a step back. Doesn’t matter that Patrick Mahomes has looked mediocre — or worse — for stretches. Doesn’t matter that they couldn’t close out the Bills last week. They absolutely remain a legitimate Super Bowl contender and can beat anyone in the playoffs. Remember, as Kansas City proved last year, it’s not the team that looks the best in November and December, it’s the one that gets hot in January. More than any team out there, it knows how to do that.
The Harbaugh Bowl takes place Monday night. The Baltimore Ravens trail in the AFC North title race. The 7-3 Los Angeles Chargers escaped the Cincinnati Bengals last week. There are plenty of storylines in this one. Which one intrigues you the most?
Howe: Before the season, coaches and executives around the league predicted Justin Herbert would make a jump with Jim Harbaugh, who would prioritize the ground game and a high-level defense to complement his quarterback. Harbaugh proceeded to run a conservative offense, but he’s given Herbert more of a chance to let it rip as of late. If Herbert topples the Ravens, he’s going to earn serious MVP consideration.
Sando: I’m interested in seeing whether the Chargers’ much-improved defense can slow Lamar Jackson with the benefit of whatever inside info they have from coordinators Jesse Minter and Greg Roman, who spent significant time on the Ravens’ staff. Is this a game the Chargers can play on their terms? What happens if this game picks up where Chargers-Bengals left off? Will Justin Herbert keep pace with Jackson in that case?
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Keefer: The Chargers-Bengals game was one of the best of the season — Herbert went wild in the first half, then Joe Burrow put together some of the best football I’ve ever seen him play in the second. The intriguing layer of the Harbaugh matchup Monday night is how Lamar Jackson bounces back from last week’s loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers (his -0.21 EPA per dropback and 66.1 passer rating were season lows). Jackson typically torches teams outside the AFC North, and a statement win Monday against an elite defense — the Chargers lead the league in scoring defense at 14.2 allowed per game — would push him right back in front of the MVP race.
It’s time for the biweekly NFC West temperature check. The Los Angeles Rams (5-5) host a hot Philadelphia Eagles team Sunday night. The San Francisco 49ers (5-5) are on the road against the Green Bay Packers. The Cardinals (6-4) and Seattle Seahawks (5-5) meet. Which team is in the best position to win the division?
Howe: I liked the Cardinals as a fun surprise team this season, but I didn’t anticipate they’d be a serious division threat, even if injuries among their opponents are a big reason. I’ll stick with the Cardinals because they’re playing the best and continue to get better. I do like the Seahawks and think they’re neck and neck with Arizona, so their two meetings in the next three weeks could very well tell the story in this division race. Seattle needs to focus more on the run game, though, and the O-line injuries have been problematic. The Niners still have the highest ceiling in the division, but they’ve been giving away too many games and I’m not ready to assume that pattern is about to magically break. The Rams have been too inconsistent, although I can’t rule out Matthew Stafford’s flipping a switch and keeping them in the mix.
Kyler Murray and the Arizona Cardinals could be one of the league’s surprise teams at 6-4 and atop the NFC West. (Stacy Revere / Getty Images)
Sando: The Athletic’s model gives the Cardinals a 58 percent chance of winning the division, followed by the Rams (23 percent), the 49ers (12 percent) and the Seahawks (8 percent). Is it really that lopsided? I see this division coming down to the final week, when San Francisco visits Arizona and the Rams visit Seattle. All four teams could have a shot at 9-8. Any team getting to 10-7 probably will win the division. I don’t see any team with a big advantage, but I question whether the 49ers can stay healthy enough to prevail.
Keefer: The Cardinals are playing the best of any team in the division, and as Jeff noted, these two meetings with the Seahawks could end up deciding the NFC West title. (San Francisco and L.A. have been too inconsistent.) But critical this time of year are the teams that are showing tangible signs of improvement, and the Cardinals fit the bill: Arizona has won four straight, including its last two by a combined 45 points. In three of those wins the defense allowed less than 16 points. On offense, Kyler Murray has been lighting it up. By mid-January, I like the Cardinals to win their first division title since 2015.
(Top photo of Bo Nix: Dustin Bradford / Getty Images)
Culture
NWSL infrastructure is the ‘hardest problem to solve’. Here’s how things stand around the league
All eyes will be on Kansas City, Missouri this weekend when the Orlando Pride and the Washington Spirit face off in the NWSL championship on Sunday. In a way, it will bring the season full circle with CPKC Stadium hosting an action-packed finale.
The stadium’s opening in March marked a historic moment for the NWSL, raising the standard for a club’s stadium experience. With its 11,500-seat capacity, the Current became the first NWSL club to sell out every home game in the regular season.
Although privately financing a stadium might be an unrealistic goal for some clubs, or even an unnecessary one, what the Current has accomplished with CPKC Stadium makes room for a larger conversation about infrastructure in the NWSL. Last year, league commissioner Jessica Berman described that as “probably the hardest problem to solve long-term, and one of the most important problems for us to solve as soon as possible”.
That being the case, The Athletic has taken stock of some of the biggest infrastructure-related wins and losses of the 2024 season.
Most teams are using shared facilities
Nine NWSL clubs in the 2024 season shared a venue with an MLS club. That will increase to 10 teams next year as a new MLS team comes to San Diego. Four teams share training facilities, too. Some teams also share space with a lower-division men’s team, from MLS Next Pro or USL for example.
The only team not to share its venue was the Kansas City Current, which largely used private financing to build its own stadium and training facilities.
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While sharing resources has its upsides, there can also be friction between teams. Take the disagreement between DC United and the Spirit over their long-term deal in 2021, forcing the Spirit to train at a local high school while the matter was resolved.
Three years later, the Spirit is now in a very different place, heading to another NWSL championship after winning its first title in 2021. It now has American businesswoman Michele Kang as majority owner, and Audi Field is its full-time home venue after splitting time between multiple stadiums in previous seasons. This year the Spirit sold out three matches, with its semi-final win against NJ/NY Gotham drawing 19,365 fans.
Rodman celebrates during the 2024 NWSL Playoffs semi-final match at a sold-out Audi Field (Amber Searls / Imagn Images)
Kang has not been shy about expressing her goal of Spirit one day having its own facility. This seems especially pressing now, given that USL Super League’s DC Power, partly owned by DC United, also calls Audi Field home.
In other instances, as for Racing Louisville and USL club Louisville City, having a shared facility means also sharing ownership, which makes it easier to make last-minute decisions, like when deciding to offer your venue as an alternate with only a few days’ notice.
Issues of being a tenant, and not an owner
Earlier this month, San Diego Wave FC was forced to move its final home match of the regular season across the U.S. to the aforementioned Louisville at Lynn Family Stadium because of poor playing conditions at its home, Snapdragon Stadium.
“The safety and wellbeing of all players is our top priority, and the current field conditions at Snapdragon Stadium, which are the responsibility of a third party, have not met the standards required for a safe playing environment,” the club said in a statement.
The Wave had a series of planned celebrations, including a fan appreciation night, a ceremony for Emily Van Egmond’s 100th NWSL appearance and a ceremony for Alex Morgan’s retirement. All of which had to be moved following the venue switch. Morgan’s celebration will happen next year. The venue also will host two games in the SheBelieves Cup in February.
Megan Rapinoe sustained an ACL injury during the first half of the 2023 NWSL Championship match at Snapdragon Stadium (Orlando Ramirez / Imagn Images)
Field issues in San Diego are not new, with multiple season-ending injuries for NWSL players happening at Snapdragon last year, including Megan Rapinoe’s injury in the early moments of the 2023 NWSL championship. These issues extended into the 2024 season, with former interim coach Landon Donovan saying that “outside of replacing the whole field” there was little to be done to remedy the issue.
Because the Wave is only a tenant, it has limited say over what San Diego State University does and soon cedes next priority to MLS expansion team San Diego FC.
The MLS team will have priority in scheduling, despite the Wave having a loyal fanbase and averaging 19,575 fans per game. Only one other women’s team in the world averages higher attendance, according to the club: Arsenal Women in the Women’s Super League. The university’s contract with the MLS club, though, specifies there will be an annual meeting at the start of each contract year to discuss topics such as “stadium maintenance and capital improvement plans” and “field of play quality”.
The crowding at Snapdragon has led at least one team, the professional rugby team San Diego Legion, to relocate in the new year. The team announced Tuesday it would move to the 6,000-seat Torero Stadium to make way for more weekend home matches.
Public land and public funds – or private financing?
A similar availability snafu happened in Chicago, when the punk rock festival Riot Fest announced it would be held at SeatGeek Stadium in Bridgeview, Illinois, on the same day as a home game for the Chicago Red Stars. The stadium is publicly owned by the Village of Bridgeview, and the hope was that both events would happen concurrently.
“It is unfair and unfortunate to have our club put in this situation, shining a light on the vast discrepancies in the treatment of women’s professional sports versus men’s professional sports,” Red Stars president Karen Leetzow said at the time.
The problem resolved when Riot Fest announced the festival would be relocating to Chicago proper, bringing an anticlimactic end to the months-long drama. The timing of this dilemma unraveled just after the Red Stars had packed Wrigley Field in a historic game against Bay FC on June 8.
Chicago hosted Bay FC at Wrigley Field in front of a record-breaking crowd. (Daniel Bartel / Imagn Images)
While the Red Stars have been tenants of SeatGeek Stadium since 2016, and are contracted through the 2025 season, club leadership has been outspoken about wanting to find a home closer to Chicago.
“Every week, we’re meeting with influential people here in the city who can help us get this done,” Leetzow said in August. “I have a whole series of talking points I’ve been refining and honing throughout the summer and into the fall as the (state) legislators go back into session.”
The hope is for city officials to commit public funding to a women’s soccer stadium like they did to renovate Soldier Field, where MLS side Chicago Fire FC currently competes. That might be a tall ask, though, as the Chicago Bears and White Sox are also bidding for public funding for stadium projects.
The Chicago Fire said last month they are considering building a privately financed, soccer-specific stadium in the city, and had already toured three sites for the project. The MLS team left SeatGeek Stadium, which is 30 minutes outside the city, by paying $60.5 million to get the Fire out of its lease with the venue early in 2019 after Joe Mansueto acquired a controlling stake in the team.
What about training facilities?
Investing in better infrastructure also means investing in training facilities that will help develop and prepare players.
Last year, the Utah Royals unveiled multi-million-dollar expansion and remodelling plans for an NWSL-specific training site at their Zions Bank Real Academy, a 42-acre campus with several grass and indoor fields that houses the franchise’s clubs, including Real Salt Lake in MLS. The Pride and Houston Dash have similar, dedicated spaces with their MLS counterparts.
NWSL expansion club Bay FC announced in September plans to build a training facility in San Francisco’s Treasure Island neighborhood, slated to open in 2027.
“Having a permanent dedicated space that is built specifically for our players and football operations staff will allow us to continue to attract the best national and international talent and continue our Club’s mission of being a catalyst for innovation and change for our athletes and the community,” Bay FC chief executive Brady Stewart said at the time.
The news drew criticism, though, for the decision to develop an area with a history of hazardous waste.
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More recently, Angel City Football Club unveiled plans to relocate to a nine-acre site on the campus of California Lutheran University, where they plan to upgrade and remodel a 50,000-square-foot training center. The center was previously home of the Los Angeles Rams and will undergo a multimillion-dollar remodel entirely financed by the club, serving as the team’s home for up to four years.
“The size of this performance center is incredibly important, because not only can we provide the resources and staffing and tools that they need today, but we have enough room to grow and evolve,” Julie Uhrman, president and co-founder of Angel City told The Athletic. “So, if we extend beyond from a first team to a second team to Academy, we have the ability to grow.”
The new facility will be exclusively for Angel City and feature custom lockers for players, coaches and staff. Other custom features include a dedicated locker room for players under 18, a children’s playroom to support players and staff, an onsite studio for content creation, a custom boot wall and a private outdoor relaxation lounge.
“Our commitment is that we are going to build a permanent Performance Center for our players, and we’ve actively been working on that since 2020,” Uhrman said. “Wanting something that’s 10-plus acres is challenging and takes time, and while we’re doing that, we wanted to build the best temporary training facility that we could.”
That search for a permanent home remains a “work in progress”, she added. So far, the club has “identified a couple of locations that we’re really excited about.”
Where do things stand for expansion clubs?
The NWSL is growing, with plans to announce a 16th team before the end of the year. The latest expansion club is expected to begin playing in 2026 alongside Boston. While the league isn’t hinting at which direction it will go, it’s safe to assume that having a concrete plan for a team’s facilities and infrastructure could be a deciding factor.
The ownership group in Boston proposed renovating George R. White Stadium in Franklin Park for the team’s home venue, where BOS Nation FC will play. This would be secured through equity and involve a public-private partnership with Boston Public Schools, which would retain ownership of the stadium for its own use.
As for a potential 16th expansion team, one ownership group in Cleveland recently announced the joint purchase of 13.6 acres of state land to build a $150 million, 12,500-seat stadium on what is currently undeveloped land in the city’s downtown. Cleveland Soccer Group (CSG) plans to pursue a public-private partnership, similar to Boston’s thinking.
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“I think it’s really important because most stadiums in this country have had some public financing element to them,” Murphy said. “If you look back in the state of Ohio even, maybe over the past 30 years, there’s been about $2 billion spent in this state across Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton, Toledo, (and) other cities on men’s professional (sports), and over the same periods it’s been $0 for women.”
Big step forward for soccer in The Land! ⚽️
The Cleveland Metroparks just approved a 13.6-acre land deal for a proposed stadium, part of Cleveland Soccer Group’s efforts to secure an NWSL expansion team.
Team bid results expected later this year! pic.twitter.com/h5ukBVHtQI
— I’m From Cleveland (@ImFromCle) September 19, 2024
Cleveland Metroparks purchased the roughly $4.2 million state-owned property, where the stadium will sit, from the Ohio Department of Transportation. CSG will fund the purchase, with the stadium remaining publicly owned. The purchase of this property, though, is contingent on CSG being awarded the NWSL expansion bid.
Some other potential expansion groups, such as a campaign that launched in Nashville last month, have not shared specific details on their own facilities plans. The local MLS club, Nashville SC, has however expressed interest in potentially sharing their stadium, Geodis Park.
(Top photo: Jamie Squire / Getty Images)
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