Your First Look at Michelob ULTRA's Pitchside Club Event in NYC
Located in midtown Manhattan's SECOND (849 6th Ave.) event space, this six-day pop-up (July 8–13) is a premium soccer destination where fans can catch the remaining FIFA Club World Cup 2025™ matches. The Pitchside Club blends the energy of the tournament with a specially curated fan experience. Inside, you'll find vintage kits, cold pints, and electrifying match viewing—all under one roof, built for the game's most devoted enthusiasts.
As you step inside, you'll get to make your way through a player tunnel flanked by rare artifacts from the FIFA Museum—like Pelé's 1962 Brazil tracksuit and a Cristiano Ronaldo game-worn Real Madrid jersey. Inside, wall-to-wall screens stream the matches, backed by booming 4D sound in the Lovesac Lounge. Meanwhile, fans can take on friends in foosball or test their skills against a virtual Messi in a 'G-O-A-T' challenge. For something new, try Subsoccer: a fast-paced table-based soccer game where you play seated, kicking under the table for the win.
The Hypebeast Kit Bar is the event's prime offering where guests have a chance to score a free Michelob ULTRA jersey and personalize it live with exclusive patches, embroidery, and heat-press graphics. And don't miss Hypebeast Night on Thursday, July 10, where a limited-edition kit drops and stylists help fans build stylish looks. Classic Football Shirts NYC will also be on-site with a rare collection of vintage gear, while digital archives dig deep into jersey history.
Elsewhere in the space, photo ops abound—from a trophy flex with the 'Superior Player of the Match' award to share-worthy moments throughout the club. A live broadcast studio hosts watch-along shows, a sports legends panel, and celebrity interviews, adding even more to the lineup.
Lock in your RSVPhereand don't miss one of the week's most exciting matchday experiences.
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New York Times
4 minutes ago
- New York Times
Why are football's player unions so powerless compared with U.S. sports?
FIFA president Gianni Infantino spent much of the summer strolling around the U.S. at the Club World Cup, usually either following President Donald Trump or being followed by a group of football legends ready to declare how brilliant his latest idea is. But as players wilted in the heat and games were delayed by extreme weather conditions, some were keen to offer an alternative view. Advertisement 'What was presented as a global festival of football,' said a statement by Sergio Marchi, the president of global players' union FIFPro, 'was nothing more than a fiction staged by FIFA, driven by its president, without dialogue, without sensitivity and without respect for those who sustain the game with their daily efforts.' Punchy. Marchi went on to refer to the tournament as a 'grandiloquent staging that inevitably recalls the 'bread and circuses' of Nero's Rome' and said the 'inequality, precariousness and lack of protection of the real protagonists deepens'. The language may have been a little florid, but Marchi's statement served a purpose. This tournament was the latest and perhaps most trumpeted example of something FIFPro has been talking about for years: the crowded international football calendar and the increasing demands being placed on footballers. It's the sort of thing you would expect a players' union to be vocal about, and ideally change. The problem is, their efforts to get the global football authorities to do anything tangible have been frustrated. And not for the first time. Which raises the question: why is it so hard for FIFPro, and other player unions, to gain traction in football? 'FIFA's governance model allows them to do whatever they want,' Alex Phillips, FIFPro's secretary general, tells The Athletic. 'They're a law unto themselves. It's not just FIFA: this happens on a national level, and we see this quite a lot where the federation or the league don't like what the union is saying because they're challenging their power.' A perfect illustration of this came after Marchi's statement and the farcical situation where Infantino held a meeting to discuss the calendar issue, with some representatives from players' unions present, but not FIFPro. Advertisement Apparent union members from Brazil, Spain, Ukraine, Mexico, Switzerland, Ivory Coast, Latvia, Kazakhstan and the Kyrgyz Republic were all present instead. FIFPro had been involved in some lower-level discussions about the football calendar, but were not invited to this more high-profile discussion. After that meeting, FIFA announced a consensus had been reached, that players must have at least 72 hours of rest between matches and there should be at least 21 days of rest at the end of each season. Which is fine (even though FIFPro says it should be at least 28 days at the end of each season), but the FIFA press release went on to say these stipulations 'should be managed individually by each club and the respective players'. Why were FIFPro left out of a meeting like this? According to Marchi, the man at the top is the problem. 'The biggest obstacle is the autocracy of the FIFA president, who doesn't listen — he lives in his own world,' Marchi told The Athletic this week. 'He believes that only the big spectacles are the ones that bring importance. And we feel that he's not listening to the voices of all the football players, to the needs of the players. It's great that we have a World Cup, a Club World Cup, or any world championship because it's a wonderful celebration, but that celebration wasn't created by him. It was created by the players and the spectators, the fans. 'He's simply a manager, not the owner of it. But that's not the most important thing. What's important are all the players around the world, and I've clearly told him this — I've said it to his face.' A FIFA statement on Friday read: 'FIFA is extremely disappointed by the increasingly divisive and contradictory tone adopted by FIFPro leadership as this approach clearly shows that, rather than engaging in constructive dialogue, FIFPro has chosen to pursue a path of public confrontation driven by artificial PR battles — which have nothing to do with protecting the welfare of professional players, but rather aim to preserve their own personal positions and interests. Advertisement 'The global football community deserves better. Players deserve better.' The statement discussed the summit, stating they had made 'unsuccessful efforts to bring FIFPro to the table in an environment of non-hostility and respectful, progressive dialogue'. It also said FIFA are looking to introduce measures whereby players and player unions are represented in FIFA's standing committees and the possibility of them participating in FIFA Council meetings when players' matters are being addressed. FIFA sources, speaking anonymously to protect relationships, also said that the world governing body 'made a genuine effort to engage' with Marchi and FIFPro's new leadership when welcoming them to FIFA headquarters in Zurich in January of this year. For anyone used to observing how unions work in American sports, all of this would seem very strange. In America, most sports literally cannot go ahead without a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) being reached, something negotiated between the league and the players' unions. In baseball, there are already strong fears that the 2027 season will be disrupted and the players could go on strike, largely because of anticipated differences between the parties over salary caps in the next CBA negotiations, which have been desired by the clubs for some time but are the ultimate line in the sand for players. The 1994 season was curtailed (the World Series didn't take place) and the start of the 1995 season was delayed because of a dispute involving salary caps, which has echoes in the anticipated issues for 2027. It's happened in other sports, too. The 2004-05 NHL season was cancelled over a similar disagreement related to salary caps, while the start of the 2011-12 NBA season was delayed due to disputes over the sport's CBA. The NFL also suffered a player lockout in 2011 over a variety of issues, although that was confined to the off-season and no actual games were lost. Advertisement The point is that in those cases, the players' unions had the power to bring the whole sport to a halt. In football, those at the top of the sport can afford to ignore them. One of the main reasons for this is those big U.S. sports are closed markets, operating in a single country. There are places other than America for baseball or basketball or hockey, but the elite level is so far above everything else that it's essentially the only place to play. In football, it's very different: a player can go almost anywhere they want, which is broadly a positive, but reduces leverage when it comes to disputes with the governing powers. 'We need to keep in mind that we're in an open market here, unlike the U.S.,' says Maheta Molango, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association in the UK. 'This is the problem we have, in comparison to U.S. sports — multiple stakeholders that all utilise the same assets. By which I mean players — and I use the word assets on purpose because that's how the players are treated. 'You don't have multiple stakeholders in U.S. sports, you just have the leagues. We have many: the leagues, the confederations and then the international bodies. All of them use the same assets.' And in the case of the crammed international calendar, those stakeholders keep adding games and further commitments for the players. So you'll have UEFA adding extra games to the Champions League, or creating a new competition such as the Conference League, while FIFA is conjuring the Club World Cup out of thin air, or adding more teams (and thus more games) to the proper World Cup. Throw in clubs shoehorning pre- and post-season tours into the schedule whenever they can, and it becomes like multiple children adding items on to the Buckaroo! mule, with little care given to anything around them. The unions' job — to do its best to stop the mule from chucking everything up in the air — thus becomes pretty tricky. 'They all have their own calendar, which make sense when you look at them individually, but they don't make any sense when you look at them holistically because they don't talk to each other,' adds Molango. We should make clear that the unions are busy with other things as well. Phillips cites an issue raised by The Athletic recently, about the number of former players going bankrupt, which is something unions help with, along with other post-career services. When a player lower down the food chain is in dispute with their club, unions step in there, too. Advertisement But on the biggest issue of the day, the international calendar, the unions have comparatively little leverage. And perhaps the biggest single reason is that wide-scale industrial action is incredibly difficult. Industrial action from players has been mentioned in passing, as vague threats around certain issues. In September 2024, Rodri said that strikes were 'close' in protest against the overwhelming international calendar, and that players will have 'no other option' if more games keep being added. That was particularly notable because he was speaking a few days before he was ruled out for the remainder of the season after damaging ligaments in his knee: it can't be definitively proven that this was a consequence of him playing 67 games for club and country over the preceding year, but such a workload can't have helped. But no large-scale, international strikes have materialised, partly because it's incredibly difficult. You have to negotiate the different labour laws in different countries, for a start. That's enough to give any lawyer a headache. Getting enough players to align behind an individual issue is tough, and you need either a massive weight of numbers or some high-profile players to sign up to the cause in order to make the relevant authority sit up. Will anyone in the latter group be willing to risk their own positions, risk their own money, essentially, for something that might not really impact them? The scale of the game is another problem. It's possible to take industrial action on individual, national levels — Colombian players, for example, voted to strike earlier this year — but on an international scale, which is the sort of level that you would need to really make FIFA jump, is impractical. On a technical level, FIFPro also can't organise a strike. 'We don't have players as members,' says Phillips, 'so we can't call players and say go on strike because our members are national player unions and national player associations.' In any case, conversations with those involved in the unions suggest there really isn't the appetite to treat strikes as anything other than a final, final step. 'No worker wants to stop working and not get paid,' says Phillips, 'so it's a final resort when negotiations fail.' Advertisement There perhaps lies one area where the unions could be doing more. Conversations with players past and present, kept anonymous to allow them to protect relationships, suggested that most weren't unhappy with the work their unions did, but felt they could be more proactive, more confrontational, even, with the authorities. Still, the impetus doesn't have to come from the unions. 'It's no longer the unions calling for potential strikes; it's the players themselves,' says Molango. 'The number of issues that could lead to strikes are limited, however those are issues that are so easy for players to feel the consequences of that you shouldn't discount anything. When you've had players who have suffered an ACL or have mental wellbeing issues because they have played too much, it's no longer you convincing them of the need for action. It's them saying we need to protect ourselves.' Marchi, who, as we've established, is not shy about talking a good game, will perhaps help the perception that the unions are too soft. But ultimately influence, without resorting to strike action, is what the unions are there for — and what FIFPro is looking for. 'We have a good relationship with FIFA on an operational level in most departments, but we don't have any decision-making power,' says Phillips. 'And that's what we're fighting for — to have a say at the top table, on issues that directly affect players' rights. To have a veto so that we would negotiate those rights, as happens on a national level, together with the clubs. 'We need a change in the decision-making process, and U.S. sports are way ahead of us on that because the players have an equal say on the big issues that affect professional players.' Will they get that? It's hard to see it happening any time soon.
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Rusev just doesn't stand out at all in today's WWE
Some places do power rankings. Here at Cageside, we do a stock report. In this weekly series, we identify three Superstars (or groups of Superstars) who are on their way up, and three that are moving in the opposite direction. After a busy week that included Becky Lynch's proposal for Lyra Valkyria, Roman Reigns addressing Paul Heyman's betrayal, and Jelly Roll standing in the ring while Logan Paul runs into him, a lot of fortunes were changed. With that in mind, let's see whose stock decreased the most this week: On this week's episode of Raw, Rusev took his first singles loss since returning to WWE three months ago, falling victim to a Brogue Kick from Sheamus. Rusev has only had a handful of matches since coming back to WWE, and he's made close to no impact on the product. His work is fine, but watching him and Sheamus do battle does sort of seem like it's a time warp back to a decade ago, and I don't think that's a good thing. Nothing really stands about Rusev's gimmick today that seems like it's going to catch on and warrant a big push over the current crop of stars on the WWE roster. A-Town Down Under abruptly broke up this week after what felt like at least one full year of their story going nowhere. The official split happened in a backstage segment on Raw where Grayson Waller tried to align himself with the New Day after saying he was glad to finally have the 'dead weight' of the injured Theory off his back. Just like that, Waller has a new creative direction in WWE, while the guy who beat John Cena at WrestleMania 39 has never been more irrelevant. The megastar is nowhere to be seen on WWE programming since losing in a gauntlet match on the July 14 episode of Raw. His absence is tied into the strange circumstances surrounding Seth Rollins' knee injury. The bottom line is that WWE creative has nothing for LA right now, and it looks like he won't be booked in a match at SummerSlam. Now let's see whose stock increased the most this week: Kross is finally gaining traction on Raw as part of a program with Sami Zayn. Their feud is even getting a spotlight on the SummerSlam card, which is a pretty big deal for Karrion. There are a lot of rumors and reports about Kross' WWE contract status, and it's happening at a good time as more fans are rallying behind him. After being gone from WWE for over one year, Kiana James returned to SmackDown in a managerial role of sorts for Women's United States Champion Giulia. This is a very good spot for James to land in, because it should guarantee regular TV time for her during Giulia's current push. James would likely be lost in the shuffle in the women's division otherwise, but this spot gives her a good chance to show off her talking skills and get fans invested in her character. The build to SummerSlam has generally been rushed and underwhelming, but one of the bright spots is the angle between Styles and Mysterio. The comedy of Styles hanging around backstage in disguise to keep an eye on the cowardly Mysterio has been very effective at building interest in their Intercontinental title match at WWE's biggest party of the summer. There you have it, Cagesiders. Whose stock do you think changed the most this week? More from Not everyone is marking out about Eva Marie's return Mansoor's Raw Debut was classic WWE Is this who caught Lilly's eye? Former WWE champs face off on (checks notes) Main Event Yes, Angel Garza shoved a rose up Drew Gulak's butt on Raw Raw recap & reactions: Flip the switch Flair already added to title match at WrestleMania Backlash EVA MARIE IS BACK
Fox Sports
6 hours ago
- Fox Sports
'Wake Up. Watch Film': The Origin of Titans QB Cam Ward's Obsessive Drive
At the end of Titans minicamp in June, Cameron Ward was asked about his summer plans. "Work out, stay in the playbook and throw the f--- out of the ball," he said. The blunt statement was a verbal representation of how the No. 1 overall pick carries himself. In an era when athletes spend more and more time on their brands, Tennessee's hopeful franchise quarterback embodies simplicity. He doesn't draw any more attention to himself than is necessary. Ward just wants to play football, literally. "Phone on DND. Wake up. Watch film," Ward said last week when asked how he manages to carry the weight of expectations. "I talk to five people a day besides my teammates. Talk to my parents and my dog. That's really it. I just be chilling. Go home and I don't really do too much. Eat and then go to sleep." With training camp just underway, the Titans have already come to admire Ward's approach. It's the same one that's been integral to his improbable rise from zero-star recruit — with stops at Incarnate Word and Washington State before starring at Miami last season — to becoming the No. 1 pick in the NFL Draft. It's an approach molded, in many ways, by his family. Ward learned the importance of routine from his father, Calvin, and that only his work would bring him peace. When you play well, they're going to talk about you. When you play badly, they're going to talk about you. That's what Calvin stressed when Cameron started his college career at Incarnate Word, the only school to offer him a scholarship coming out of high school. "'You got the offer you wanted. You got an opportunity to go prove yourself, so you got to block everything out,'" Calvin told me of his message to his son as he started college. "'It's about you, football and your education now. That's all it's about.'" That approach paid dividends for Ward, whose upbringing offers further context. He saw his grandparents twice per week while growing up in little West Columbia, Texas. His paternal grandfather dropped out of school in eighth grade to help care for his 13 brothers and sisters when their father passed away, taking a job as a construction worker. He rose to become the vice president of the small company. On draft night, Ward wore the 25-year-old Rolex that had belonged to his late grandfather, who had worn it no more than three times in his life. "My dad was a quiet man … pretty much leading by example," Calvin said. "Simple man. Family man. Church deacon. Never took a vacation." For the past 35 years, Calvin has worked at a nuclear plant. He drives an hour from the family's home in West Columbia to begin his 10-hour shift at 7 a.m. When Cameron was young and Calvin got home, they would promptly go to the backyard to do throwing drills with a passing net — the reps he didn't get in Columbia High School's Wing-T offense. "It got to the point in high school where when I got home, I say, 'Let's go get it' and he's already done it," Calvin recalled. But Calvin knew his son's mentality was truly different at the start of his college career. Ward's first college game was on the road at McNeese State. His parents stayed in the same hotel as the team. When Cameron visited them before curfew the night before the game, he brought his play sheet — color-coded, with more than a couple of hundred plays — to go over the calls. "It was like 'OK Dad, this is what we coming out with,'" Calvin recalled him saying. "Or, 'Hey, in this situation, this is what we're going to do.' And I ask him questions. "I'm sitting there looking during that first game and I'm like, 'Based on what he said, this is going to happen,'" Calvin added. "And it happened." UIW is where Cameron learned to obsess over film. He watched so much there that coaches would have to tell him to go back to his dorm. That approach has traveled with him to the NFL. Ward gets to the Titans' facility around 5 a.m., earlier than some of the coaches. It's a habit that began in the offseason program, when he'd do film study early with some of the rookie pass-catchers. Coach Brian Callahan has already talked to Ward about pacing himself. "Everybody always starts out of the gate pretty hot," Callahan said in June. "But you start to get into the actual routine, and you understand how long of a season it is and the marathon that it is for young players from the time they finish their college season to the time they finish NFL season. I've made that point [to him]. I'm not telling him what to do. I'm just making the point that there's a lot ahead of him that he's not aware of yet when it comes to this, the length and the week-to-week-to-week grind that comes up for these guys. It is a marathon." A marathon that Cameron will attack the only way he knows how. Last Monday, the day before the Titans' reporting date for training camp, Ward arrived at the team facility at 4:45 a.m. "At the end of the day, Cameron wants to be successful," Calvin said. "He doesn't care about the glamor. He doesn't care about the glitz. He doesn't care about the money. He wants his team to win, and he wants to be successful. … When he hits the field, he wants to beat the brakes off. That's just who he is. "You've probably seen that there's not enough focus on him being the first pick or whatever," Calvin added. "He honestly does not care. That's the honest truth. He doesn't care. "He just wants to work, get better, help his team improve." Ben Arthur is an NFL reporter for FOX Sports. He previously worked for The Tennessean/USA TODAY Network, where he was the Titans beat writer for a year and a half. He covered the Seattle Seahawks for for three seasons (2018-20) prior to moving to Tennessee. You can follow Ben on Twitter at @benyarthur . 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