For the better part of a month, Switzerland has been in the grips of football fever, with fans packing stadiums and myriad public-viewing sites for the UEFA Women’s Euro championship. Zurich bureau reporter Levin Stamm writes today about the payout for players. Plus: One of North Korea’s US pawns tells all about the nation’s wild remote worker scheme.

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As Shirly Piperno watched Italy march into the semifinals of the UEFA Women’s Euro soccer tournament, she grew more and more enchanted. The players at the event in Switzerland this month have shown incredible grace and grit, she says, and as an Italian American, Piperno has felt like they were her team. But when she looked into getting tickets for either the final or a semifinal, she discovered she was too late. And that made her feel pretty good. “They were all already sold out,” the finance professional living in Zurich says at a public screening of Italy’s last-minute semifinal loss to England. “That’s a good thing, I guess”—because it shows growing interest in a competition that’s long been an also-ran to men’s soccer. 

England and Italy prepare for their semifinal in Geneva on Tuesday. Photographer: Jose Breton/Getty Images

The four-week event will wrap up Sunday with a rematch of the 2023 women’s World Cup final between England and Spain. The match sold out months in advance, and the stadiums were packed at 22 of the 24 early-stage games. Over 600,000 tickets have been sold, more than at any previous European women’s tournament, and the Swiss public broadcaster says 822,000 viewers tuned into the game between the host country and Norway. That kind of audience—almost a 10th of Switzerland’s population—was once reserved for the men’s soccer team, the legendary Lauberhorn downhill or national tennis hero Roger Federer. “My brother is a football fanatic, but he barely followed women’s games in the past,” says Piperno, 31. “This time, he’s watched almost every single game.”

When it comes to money, though, the women’s competition still lags far behind men’s soccer. The participating teams (or their national soccer associations) will share a total pot of €41 million ($48 million), double what it was at the previous tournament, in 2022. But it’s a fraction of the €331 million the organizer, UEFA, paid out last year during the men’s Euro championships in Germany. Even though UEFA expects to get roughly 20 times as much revenue from this year’s event as it did 12 years ago, the group says it will likely lose €32 million. The men’s tournament last year, by contrast, netted the soccer association €2.1 billion.

The atmosphere in the stadiums—think cheering families rather than drunken hooligans—has gained momentum throughout the tournament and, to the surprise of many, didn’t taper off after Spain eliminated the home team in the quarterfinals. Scenes like Germany’s Ann-Katrin Berger miraculously stopping what would’ve been an own-goal against France or Spain’s Aitana Bonmatí catapulting Germany out of the tournament with an overtime decider when she was almost in the end zone have made loyal fans out of erstwhile skeptics. “I’ve seen so many families celebrating women’s football with their kids,” says Swithun Mason, a 53-year-old consultant in Zurich. “For me, that’s a sign of how this tournament really has been changing the world from the sidelines.”

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How North Korea Infiltrated IT Jobs

Chapman. Photographer: Ash Ponders for Bloomberg Businessweek

When Christina Marie Chapman first stumbled blindly into a web of international intrigue, in 2020, she’d been trying to turn her life around. She was living in the tiny town of Brook Park, Minnesota, occupying a run-down travel trailer on a rural property her mother owned. Over Chapman’s adult life she’d lived in Texas, England and Colorado—drifting between jobs at big-box stores, fast-food chains, casinos, mortgage brokers—“not anything that I ever dreamed of doing as a child,” she recalls.

The daughter of an ex-Marine father and an accountant mother, she’d been born in South Korea, where her father was stationed, and bounced around before spending her formative years in Pine City, a dozen miles from Brook Park. Now, at 44, she’d retreated home to start over. She took out loans to attend a coding boot camp, hoping to pull herself out of the mire of dead-end jobs. Finally done with the coursework after five months and thousands of dollars, she created a LinkedIn profile to advertise her new skills. Occupation: software engineer.

It was there, that February, that she received an unsolicited message from a man going by the name Zhonghua. He said he worked for a China-based software company looking to pair overseas workers with American jobs. (The company name, Chapman recalls, was written in Chinese characters.) They needed a US representative to serve as an intermediary between the workers and the employers, Zhonghua told her. “He said that they had looked at my projects and they looked at my education,” she says, and that she was perfect for the job. They wanted to make her “the face of the company,” Zhonghua told her.

To Chapman, it felt as though someone had turned over the rock she’d been stuck under for much of her life. “I thought I had finally found a dream job,” she says. “Like that they recognized something in me that I didn’t.”

As Covid-19 shut down the country over the subsequent weeks, Zhonghua proposed a test project: building a website for a roofing and fencing company in Texas. “We each have to do things to learn how to trust each other,” he told Chapman. He would trust her not to take the job out from under his company. She would trust that the money would be paid first to him, and then she’d be sent her fee.

The job was a success, and she got paid. Then Zhonghua went quiet for months, until late 2020, when Chapman says she received a box containing a laptop. The next day she got a Skype message from someone saying they worked with Zhonghua. “They said, ‘OK, this is what you’re going to do now: You’re going to set up the computer for me so I can access it and work,’ ” she recalls. Soon, more laptops arrived. Zhonghua got back in touch and told her she’d receive $300 a month for each one she hosted. Her dream job had landed on her doorstep, or so it seemed.

Instead, it would prove to be the beginning of a long nightmare.

Evan Ratliff, in a Businessweek exclusive, tells Chapman’s story: Confessions of a Laptop Farmer: How an American Helped North Korea’s Wild Remote Worker Scheme

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