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As well as the football being played, you may have noticed that Euro 2020 is also host to a secondary, but nonetheless entertaining tactical contest in the media room.

It began a few days ago when Cristiano Ronaldo took umbrage at sharing his news conference with two bottles of Coca-Cola. The Portugal captain removed the soft drinks from the desk in front of him and replaced them with a bottle of water.

He may have publicly slighted one of Euro 2020’s main corporate sponsors, but Ronaldo’s act of defiance soon inspired a group of copycats.

France‘s Paul Pogba upset another tournament benefactor by removing a bottle of Heineken that had been placed in front of him.

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Paul Pogba mirrors Cristiano Ronaldo’s Coca-Cola snub by removing a Heineken bottle from his Euro 2020 press conference.

It’s thought that the midfielder may have removed the bottle due to his Muslim faith, unaware that it was actually a non-alcoholic version of the beer.

Andriy Yarmolenko was next up, with the Ukraine winger swapping bottles around while cheekily attempting to forge a few new sponsorship deals of his own.

On the back of his two-goal heroics against Switzerland the previous day, Italy midfielder Manuel Locatelli took a leaf directly out of Ronaldo’s book by exchanging Cokes for mineral water. Even Russia‘s head coach Stanislav Cherchesov had a little fun during his media conference by helping himself to a complimentary swig of Coke.

The ongoing “bottle battle” at Euro 2020 hasn’t done Coca-Cola many favours either, with a dramatic $4 billion fall in share price ensuing in the aftermath of Ronaldo’s high-profile snub.

It’s certainly not the first time a partnership deal has backfired, with football witnessing more than its fair share of corporate hiccups over the years. Here’s a few:

1. Chevrolet’s Man United and Liverpool mashup

Chevrolet made a hash of things in 2013 when they attempted to bring fans of Manchester United and Liverpool together in the name of brand unity.

The company had multi-million pound deals with both clubs at the time and thus created an advert that spliced together players from either side of the divide, all reciting a message about how special their respective teams are.

As you might expect, the advert was immediately denounced by both sets of rival fans, with Chevy forced to beat a rather hasty retreat to the drawing board.

2. The wrong Wonga logo for Newcastle

Newcastle United made a similar mess of their kit launch in 2015 when they somehow managed to unveil their latest shirt with the wrong brand logo on the front.

The problem stemmed from the fact that sponsors Wonga had rebranded mere hours before the kit was launched, leaving Newcastle with a shirt that was out-of-date right from the off.

3. Dulux paint Tottenham in a bad light

Tottenham were at their Spursy best when they broke news of a major new commercial development toward the tail end of the 2020-21 season.

Spurs revealed Dulux had become their official paint supplier only for the company to kick off their new partnership by openly mocking them on Twitter.

First Dulux began by sharing a meme of Spurs’ empty trophy room, then followed up by suggesting their famous dog mascot could do a better job in defense than any of the current back-four.

Unsurprisingly, a contrite apology followed soon thereafter as they tweeted: “We’re deeply sorry for the posts from Dulux this morning in response to the announcement of our relationship with @SpursOfficial .These do not reflect how proud we are to be the Official paint Supplier of the Club. We’re investigating what happened and apologise to all Spurs fans.”

4. Ansu Fati can’t drive yet

Barcelona starlet Ansu Fati made a stuttering start to his commercial endeavours after signing up to become an ambassador for Cupra, the Spanish motor company.

The deal saw Fati presented with his very own top-of-the-line sports car, with the only hitch being that the 18-year-old winger didn’t have a driving license after injury issues prevented him from taking his test.

5. A ‘Boiler Man’ mascot

West Brom fans were faced with a stark reminder of their plight after starting the 2018-19 season in the Championship following their relegation from the top flight the previous campaign.

As if to really ram it home, the Baggies introduced their new mascot to fans before the first game of the season — a man dressed as a boiler, named “Boiler Man.”

Colin the Combi (to give him his official name) received a vociferous reception at the Hawthorns, which was not very cordial.

6. Don’t bet on Antonio

West Ham forward Michail Antonio bore the brunt when the club’s shirt sponsors got ideas above their station back in 2016.

After losing against Chelsea, the Hammers’ partners at Betway decided to criticise Antonio’s performance, singling out the utility man as “an accident waiting to happen” on social media.

Betway formally apologised to Antonio after the game for their “inappropriate” comment but the tweet in question is still up on their official account.

7. Man United get tapped up

Manchester United command a vast, bulging portfolio of corporate affiliations all around the world, boasting everything from snack noodle partners to official club tractors.

However, it was United’s collaboration with Kohler that raised eyebrows in 2019 when the American plumbing supply company decided to pay homage on the anniversary of the 1999 treble in the only way they knew how.

As a historic mark of respect for one of United’s greatest-ever triumphs, Kohler released a special set of taps, engraved with various references to that balmy night in Barcelona against Bayern Munich.

Sales must have been through the roof, or down the sink — as the case may be.

8. Delays on the line

Preston North End marked their progression to the 2014-15 League One playoff final at Wembley by allowing Virgin Trains to sponsor their shirts.

Sadly, due to planned maintenance work on the line, Virgin were not able to operate any trains from Preston to London ahead of the game. This left thousands of North End fans having to traipse to the national stadium by coach to watch what was ironically dubbed “The Replacement Bus Final” by those in attendance.

Preston ended up beating Swindon 4-0 on the day to seal promotion in style, so at least it wasn’t a total wash-out.

9. Oh Lord…

When it comes to naming rights, one of the most amusing side effects of such a deal came at Burnley in 2015.

One of the stands at Turf Moor is named after the Clarets’ greatest-ever chairman, Bob Lord — a revered character who oversaw the most successful period in the club’s history, winning the First Division championship in 1960 and reaching the FA Cup final the year after.

However, a partnership with an unfortunately upbeat e-cigarette brand somewhat served to undermine the reverence with which Lord’s name is spoken around the place.

Lord was many things, but “Totally Wicked” almost definitely isn’t one of them.

10. Nicklas Bendtner’s pants

Denmark striker Nicklas Bendtner revealed a pair of bookmaker-branded underpants when he scored in a 3-2 defeat to Portugal at Euro 2012.

Bendtner, who got both goals as Denmark came from 2-0 down to level the match before conceding a late winner, revealed branding from Irish bookmaker Paddy Power during celebrations of the equaliser.

UEFA didn’t see the funny side and the 24-year-old Arsenal forward was banned for one match and fined €100,000.

“It is just a pair of lucky boxer shorts that I used in the first game as well and have used before the tournament,” he said, possibly with tongue firmly in cheek. “I didn’t know I was breaking any rules but I am aware of that now.”

11. The wrong drink can cost you…

Euro 2020 players, beware. Coca-Cola has history here. Ronaldinho once forfeited a huge sponsorship deal with the brand after he conducted his introductory unveiling news conference at Atletico Mineiro in 2012 from behind two cans of rival drink Pepsi.

Coke pulled the plug on a deal worth around $750,000-a-year after watching Ronaldinho sip a Pepsi (who sponsored Mineiro) in front of the watching world.

Coca-Cola said in a statement: “Coca-Cola recognises the career and value of Ronaldinho. However due to recent developments it has become impossible to continue the partnership.”

Marcelo Pontes, Coca-Cola marketing chief, told Brazilian newspaper O Estado de Sao Paulo: “The fact that the player has appeared with a can of Pepsi was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The sponsorship had become embarrassing.”

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Rangers’ Garcia scratched with forearm soreness

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Rangers' Garcia scratched with forearm soreness

ARLINGTON, Texas — Rangers slugger Adolis Garcia was scratched from the starting lineup Sunday and got an MRI on his right forearm, a day after a collision in the outfield with second baseman Marcus Semien while both All-Star players went after a popup.

Manager Bruce Bochy said the plan had been for García, their primary right fielder, to be the designated hitter in the series finale against the Los Angeles Angels.

“The right forearm area took a pretty good shot there from Marcus, so he’ll get checked out,” Bochy said before the game. “We’ll have an MRI done, see where we’re at. My guess is, I’m hoping anyway, after the day off, he’ll be good to go.”

Bochy, without elaborating, said after their 4-1 loss that the MRI looked good.

The Rangers have a day off Monday before a three-game series at Philadelphia.

Semien was running out and García was coming in on Taylor Ward‘s popup to shallow right field in the sixth inning. Semien collided into García who had pulled up and gone down to a knee to get the ball after it dropped to the ground. Semien took a hard tumble, though both players stayed in and finished the Rangers’ 3-2 win in 13 innings.

García, the American League Championship Series MVP last year, hit his 11th homer of the season in the bottom of the sixth inning to tie the game at 1-1. He is hitting .251 and his 35 RBIs ranked fourth in the American League this season.

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Ohtani delivers first walk-off hit as a Dodger

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Ohtani delivers first walk-off hit as a Dodger

LOS ANGELES — Shohei Ohtani delivered his second major league walk-off hit, a two-out single in the 10th inning that sent the Los Angeles Dodgers to a 3-2 victory over the Cincinnati Reds on Sunday.

Andy Pages hit an early two-run homer for the Dodgers, who have won 20 of 26 after taking three of four from Cincinnati.

Pinch-hitter Will Smith drew a one-out walk in the 10th from Alexis Diaz (1-3), who got Mookie Betts to fly out before Ohtani stroked a single to right, scoring Jason Heyward. Ohtani’s latest feat set off a loud celebration for another huge weekend crowd at Dodger Stadium.

His only other walk-off hit in Major League Baseball was an 11th-inning single for the Los Angeles Angels in a 6-5 win over Houston on Sept. 4, 2020.

It was Ohtani’s 21st multi-hit game this season, the most in MLB. He is hitting .393 this month, the third-highest batting average in MLB among hitters with at least 20 at-bats in May (Kevin Pillar .447, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. .407).

Stuart Fairchild had two hits for the Reds, who have lost 15 of 18. Cincinnati also has lost seven consecutive series.

Anthony Banda (1-0) got three straight outs in the 10th in his debut with the Dodgers, who acquired the reliever from Cleveland on Friday. Banda’s win was his first since May 28, 2022, with Pittsburgh. He has pitched for the Blue Jays, Yankees, Nationals and Dodgers — and played in Cleveland’s minor league system — since leaving the Pirates less than two years ago.

Cincinnati reliever Emilio Pagan left abruptly with two outs in the ninth and a 2-1 count on Heyward. Pagan recorded two outs before throwing three straight fastballs to Heyward and then departing with a possible shoulder injury.

Diaz struck out Heyward to force extra innings.

Hunter Greene struck out eight while pitching four-hit ball into the seventh inning for Cincinnati in his second career start in his hometown. The hard-throwing right-hander got youth coaching at Compton’s Major League Baseball Urban Youth Academy and played high school ball in Sherman Oaks before the Reds made him the second overall pick in 2017.

Landon Knack yielded one run on three hits over the first 4⅔ innings for the Dodgers in his fourth major league appearance. Knack made three starts in April, and he got recalled from Triple-A Oklahoma City for this spot start apparently so the Dodgers could give a full week of rest to Yoshinobu Yamamoto.

Freddie Freeman singled in the fourth before Pages put a poor slider into the short porch down the left-field line for the fifth homer of his rookie season.

Cincinnati had been shut out for 16 consecutive innings at Chavez Ravine before it scored on back-to-back doubles to left in the fifth by Fairchild and Santiago Espinal, whose catchable drive fooled Teoscar Hernandez.

Cincinnati tied it in the seventh when pinch-hitter Spencer Steer — a Long Beach native in an 0-for-16 slump — drew a bases-loaded walk on nine pitches from Alex Vesia, who escaped the jam.

ESPN Stats & Information and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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‘This fan base is going to fall in love with him’: How Luis Arráez is following in Tony Gwynn’s footsteps

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'This fan base is going to fall in love with him': How Luis Arráez is following in Tony Gwynn's footsteps

Comparisons to Tony Gwynn began to follow Luis Arráez when he first established himself in the big leagues, growing more prevalent as the hits piled up and the batting titles followed. Arráez wasn’t as prolific, but his skills and the way he utilized them — consistently spraying baseballs to unoccupied spaces all over the field, barreling pitches regardless of how or where they were thrown — made links to one of history’s most gifted hitters seem inevitable.

Tony Gwynn Jr., the late Hall of Famer’s son, often heard them and largely understood them. But it wasn’t until the night of May 4, while watching Arráez compile four hits in his debut with the same San Diego Padres team his father starred for, that he actually felt them.

“I honestly had goosebumps watching him put together at-bats,” said Gwynn Jr., a retired major league outfielder who serves as an analyst for the Padres’ radio broadcasts. “It took me back to watching film with my dad as he was basically doing the same thing.”

Gwynn was universally celebrated throughout the 1980s and ’90s, but Arráez stands as a polarizing figure in the slug-obsessed, launch-angle-consumed era in which he plays. Some, like the Miami Marlins team that traded him away earlier this month, see a one-dimensional player who doesn’t provide enough speed, power or defensive acumen to build around. Others, like the Padres, who used four prospects to acquire him at a time when trades rarely happen, see the type of offensive mastery that more than makes up for it.

What’s inarguable is that Arráez is the ultimate outlier.

Case in point: The publicly available bat-speed metrics recently unveiled by Statcast feature a graph that places hitters based on their relationship between average bat speed (X-axis) and squared-up rate (Y-axis). All alone on the top left corner, far removed from the other 217 qualified hitters, is Arráez. He has the slowest swing in the sport but also its most efficient, theoretically, because he meets pitches with the sweet spot of his bat more often than anybody else.

Arráez has only 24 home runs in 2,165 career at-bats. But his .324 batting average since his 2019 debut leads the majors, 10 points higher than that of Freddie Freeman, the runner-up. He walks at a below-average clip, but his major league-leading 7.5% strikeout rate is about a third of the MLB average during that stretch, cartoonish in the most strikeout-prone era in baseball history.

He is elite even when he chases: The major league average on pitches outside the rulebook strike zone since the start of the 2023 season is .162. Arráez’s: .297.

“Now with the analytics they focus on home runs, they focus on guys hitting the ball hard but hitting .200,” Arráez said in Spanish. “But in my mind, and with all the work that I do, I stay focused on just doing my job — not try to do too much or try to do what they’re telling me to do. Analysts say my exit velocity is [among] the lowest in the big leagues. Amen. Let them keep saying that. As long as I have my health, I keep doing things to help my team, I’m going to be fine.”

Arráez became the first player to win a batting title in the American and National leagues in consecutive seasons last year. But trade rumors surrounded him from the onset of 2024, his second-to-last season before free agency. As a 27-year-old two-time All-Star with a .324 career batting average, a sterling reputation and a stated desire to remain in South Florida, he was a player the directionless Marlins franchise could build around. But a new front office considered him expendable. A 9-24 start to the season created an opening. And on May 3, five minutes before the first pitch was thrown in Oakland, Marlins manager Skip Schumaker called Arráez into his office.

“I’m not going to lie to you,” Arráez said, “I wasn’t ready to be traded.”

Schumaker told Arráez he’d have to remove him from the lineup because a deal with the Padres was close. He gave him the option of returning to the clubhouse or going into the dugout for one final moment with his teammates. Arráez stayed until the fifth inning, retreated to his hotel room, waited on a call from Padres officials and hopped on a flight at noon the following day to meet his new team.

Arráez didn’t have enough clothes for the additional six days of the Padres’ road trip. He wore his Marlins-colored cleats through stops in Phoenix and Chicago and compiled eight hits in 20 at-bats during that stretch. After the team got back to San Diego, he used the May 9 off day to search for an apartment and spend time with his mom, wife and three daughters, who flew in for a weekend visit, then delivered a walk-off single against the rival Los Angeles Dodgers in his home debut the following night. He’s still living out of a hotel room crammed with unopened boxes, but he already feels wanted. Embraced, even.

“They’ve welcomed me here with open arms,” Arráez said. “I feel as if I’ve been here since spring training.”

Arráez was a 4-year-old in Venezuela when Gwynn played the final season of his 20-year career in 2001. When Gwynn died in 2014, Arráez was still a teenager on the Minnesota Twins‘ Dominican Summer League team. Hearing comparisons to Gwynn made him curious enough to find old clips of a player who was mostly foreign to him. He began to study his approach to hitting, marveling specifically at Gwynn’s ability to let pitches travel deep into the strike zone before driving them to the opposite field.

Conversations with one of Gwynn’s most important mentors, Twins icon and gifted batsman Rod Carew, brought Arráez more insight. Now similar conversations are taking place with Gwynn’s only son. When the Padres return from their seven-game road trip through Atlanta and Cincinnati, Arráez plans to visit the Gwynn statue that sits just outside of Petco Park. He isn’t necessarily leaning into the comparisons, but he isn’t running from them, either.

“It’s such a great experience when fans embrace you with open arms and tell you that I’m a mini Tony Gwynn, and that I have a lot of traits that remind them of him,” Arráez said. “It’s nice to hear people say things like that.”

Perhaps the quality Gwynn and Arráez share most is self-awareness. “Know thyself” is a line Gwynn Jr. heard his father say repeatedly growing up, one that translated directly to how he approached his profession: He knew his strengths, worked relentlessly to maximize them and never tried to emulate others. Arráez’s new teammates already see the same in him.

“It’s not like he goes up there and just does it,” Padres third baseman Manny Machado said. “He puts a lot of work in the cage, before games, even before BP and stuff like that. He knows his strength, and he works on it.”

Baseball’s evolution has made it harder than ever for someone like Arráez to exist. Pitchers have never thrown harder, data has never been more prevalent, batting averages have hardly ever been lower. But Padres manager Mike Shildt is adamant that Arráez shouldn’t be an anomaly.

He recalled an old San Diego Union-Tribune article that re-ran May 9, on what would have been Gwynn’s 64th birthday. It detailed the amount of time Gwynn spent working on hitting, and it validated something Shildt had long believed: That more players could hit .300, even today, if they worked on the craft of doing so as diligently and as pointedly as Gwynn did. As Arráez does.

“When you have an ability to hit a ball to all the different areas, you’re going to hit,” Shildt said. “And big picture, our industry hasn’t taught that anymore. It’s not valued anymore. It’s not monetized anymore. You can’t quantify this, but it’s a shame how many amateur and lower-level professional players have been excluded from continuing to play because they don’t meet a measurable. They don’t meet an exit velocity or bat speed or launch angle, or all of those things that this game is now basically recruiting and monetizing blindly. They’re just getting hits. And somehow that became out of vogue in our industry in general.”

But those are now someone else’s problems. The Padres will gladly take Arráez, all he his and all he isn’t, and slot him ahead of Machado, Fernando Tatis Jr. and Xander Bogaerts in hopes of riding his singular bat to the playoffs.

Arráez is still six batting titles away from catching Gwynn. He isn’t anywhere near as good a defender or as lethal a baserunner as Gwynn was early in his career, and he needs another decade-plus of similar production — heightened production, actually, given the .345 batting average Gwynn boasted between his ages 27 and 37 seasons — to even approach him as a hitter. But Arráez’s style is the closest we’ve got.

And if there’s one place that can appreciate it, it’s his new one.

“This fan base is going to fall in love with him,” Gwynn Jr. said. “It’s how a lot of them grew up watching baseball.”

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