Good morning. It's Monday. Today we'll find out about a former City Council speaker who just bought a soccer team 3,400 miles from New York. We'll also look at how a van could help people who are struggling with opioid addiction.
From the beginning of 2002 to the end of 2005, Gifford Miller was the second-most powerful person in New York City government. As the City Council speaker, he tangled with the mayor at the time, Michael Bloomberg, overriding his vetoes more than 30 times. Then, when he sought Bloomberg's job, Miller endured a humiliating loss in the Democratic primary, coming in last among the five major candidates — even though he had entered the race with the most money to spend. He left politics for another field that can have its ups and downs: real estate development. He formed a group that built an affordable housing complex in the Bronx. Now Miller has plunged into a different kind of project, this one 3,400 miles away. With investors — one of them a teammate from when Miller played soccer in high school — he bought a Portuguese soccer team, Atlético Clube de Portugal. The team is nudging its way toward full-fledged professional status in Portugal's multitiered league system. In its first preseason matches, Atlético Clube has won once and lost once. The third match ended in a draw. "Very good results for us," Miller said. He said that the price for a controlling stake in the team was 1 million euros, or just under $1.1 million, and that he and his partners had planned to invest $8 million over the next five years. Atlético Clube had been "essentially an amateur team" lately, but it played well enough to move into a division in which professional players had to be hired. The team's budget jumped to €1.3 million, up from €75,000 last year. Miller, 54, was not new to soccer when he bought in. His first exposure to the sport that the rest of the world calls football came when he was 6 or 7 and his family lived in London. "I was a Liverpool fan because in the late '70s, Liverpool was the greatest team," Miller said. In high school, he played "quite poorly, both in American terms — because Americans had no idea what they were doing in soccer in the '80s — and in absolute terms." He attended the World Cup in 2006, months after leaving the City Council. Then he turned to real estate. And then, in 2018, Miller and his wife went to Lisbon for a vacation. It was love on first landing, and he is no less ardent now: "It's the San Francisco you wish San Francisco was," he said when I spoke with him by phone last week. "I started thinking about how do I spend more time here," he said, and "the natural thing for me" was to try real estate. He started a "golden visa fund" for developers: At the time, Portugal was one of several eurozone countries offering five-year residency permits to noncitizens who invested at least €500,000. "It seemed like a good idea," he said, "and then the government decided, not so much." The Portuguese government, concerned about the overheated housing market, dropped real estate as an option for would-be expatriates from outside European Union countries. Then he had another idea. "I said, 'I really want to buy a football team,'" he said. Atlético Clube tried outside ownership a decade ago with an investor who, Miller said, "turned out to be a match-fixer." He said that Atlético Clube had to part ways with the investor, and the team was relegated to League 8, the lowest level. Atlético Clube moved up to League 3 — "the first properly professional division," Miller called it — when he became involved. Real estate is a part of Miller's plans for Atlético Clube: The stadium needs upgrading. He said that if Atlético Clube were to move up to the next division, the team could not play in that stadium, which "doesn't meet the requirements" for League 2. "It needs some love," he said of the venue, "but we don't want to turn it into one of these sterile football stadiums that you see everywhere." Miller said that his first dog was named Shankly, after the Scottish soccer player Bill Shankly, who managed Liverpool from 1959 to 1974. Miller's second dog is named for Jürgen Klopp, the German player who became Liverpool's manager in 2015 and announced in January that he would step down. "Our coach is Nikola Popović," Miller said. "I haven't decided whether the next dog will be Niko or Poppy. It depends on how the coach does." WEATHER Prepare for a chance of showers, persisting through the evening, with temperatures in the mid-80s. At night, thunderstorms are possible. Temperatures will drop to the low 70s. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until Aug. 13 (Tisha B'Av). The latest Metro news
To help people quit fentanyl, vans dispense methadone
Methadone has been used for decades to treat opioid addiction — and is also difficult to come by, a problem health providers hope to ease with a new fleet of RV-size supply vans. Government rules have kept methadone distribution tightly controlled. But as America's deadly overdose crisis has worsened, some of those rules have changed — and some public health experts hope that mobile treatment programs like one in the Bronx can increase access. The vans were approved in 2021 by the federal government, which lifted a moratorium that had been in place since 2007. The goal is to reach some of the millions of Americans struggling with opioid addiction that the nation's roughly 2,000 methadone clinics cannot. My colleague Sharon Otterman writes that methadone can be distributed only at special clinics that impose strict rules on recipients — and now at vans affiliated with those clinics. Regulations had limited the distribution of methadone to keep it from being sold on the street, availability that could lead to overdoses even though methadone is less potent than fentanyl. Still, the vans are not a panacea. While they make treatment more accessible, Dr. Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health, said that the cost and the remaining restrictions limit the number of people they can help. Constructing and outfitting a methadone van costs about $375,000, according to the New York organizations that run them. The vans have to replicate the high-security environment of clinics, with a security guard, 360-degree cameras and a safe for the medication. In New York, state officials have approved 11 vans, but so far, only two are on the road, both in New York City, said Dr. Chinazo Cunningham, the state's commissioner of the Office of Addiction Services and Supports. "This is new, so we don't know," he said, "but we're hopeful that it will improve access and we'll reach people that wouldn't ordinarily be reached." METROPOLITAN DIARY Bag of chips
Dear Diary: It was humid outside when I boarded the A train with two friends from school to enjoy the Fourth of July at Rockaway Beach. The subway car was practically empty. Armed with a cooler of sandwiches and a bag of beach towels and sunscreen, we rode all the way to Beach 90th Street. When we got to the sand, we set up our towels and hid our valuables in a bag of chips, an act that seemed foreign yet familiar because this was our first trip at the beach alone. Every other beach outing had been organized and supervised by our parents. We ran into the water and splashed in the waves … for about 10 minutes. A torrential thunderstorm arrived, and lifeguards hurried everyone out of the water. Annoyed, we headed under a platform where other beachgoers had set up their chairs and coolers to enjoy the holiday despite the weather. Suddenly, the crowd started singing "Party in the U.S.A.," and a wave of ease washed over me. Anywhere else in the world, my day would have been ruined. Not here. — Maayan Lerner Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. P.S. Here's today's Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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N.Y. Today: Gifford Miller bought a team
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