On a bright November day in 2014, a small group of Italian dignitaries huddled in Rome to discuss a crisis with global implications. They had to meet with a potential defector.
The young man in question, a shy kid in glasses and a black shirt, came with a highly desirable set of skills. His name was Fabiano Caruana and he played chess, better than anyone in Italy. The officials gathered at Italy’s National Olympic Committee worried that he was going to switch allegiances.
Now, Mr. Caruana is vying to become world champion—as an American. He is deadlocked with Norwegian chess superstar Magnus Carlsen after eight of 12 games held inside a fishbowl-like auditorium in central London.
If Mr. Caruana prevails, he would give the U.S. its first win in the World Chess Championship in nearly half a century. How he came to represent America is the subject of a seething controversy at the pinnacle of the game.
Though Mr. Caruana was born in the U.S., he had represented Italy for years. The Italians allege he held a highly unusual bidding war involving at least three countries for his services. They say the U.S. bid more than twice as much as the Italians. In a peculiar twist of international gamesmanship, Azerbaijan offered even more than the U.S., they say.
Mr. Caruana made his move: He picked America. His team declined to comment on the specifics of the transfer or any financial arrangements.
Further stoking the debate is the status of the second-best U.S. player, Wesley So. He was born and raised in the Philippines, which he represented for most of his life, and declared his American allegiance just months before Mr. Caruana. Critics say the knights of American chess are nothing but sellswords.
“So they are indeed buying nerds!” Mr. Carlsen tweeted in 2015 when news of Mr. Caruana’s switch became public.
Flipping allegiances is a rare and delicate occurrence in any sport. In the tiny circle of superelite chess, where only a handful of players can aspire to world championships or any degree of fame, switches like Messrs. Caruana’s and So’s can radically alter the international landscape.
The moves created a narrative: “The U.S. will not stop buying nerds until we have a world champion,” said Daniel Rensch, an international master at chess and the vice president of chess.com, which features news and games.
Rex Sinquefield didn’t set out to become the benefactor who would change American chess. Ten years ago, he was a retired financier in St. Louis who had co-founded Dimensional Fund Advisors, an investment firm that now manages more than half a trillion in assets.
He is also a chess fanatic, and he wanted to build a chess club. One chance dinner with a board member from the United States Chess Federation and several million of Mr. Sinquefield’s dollars later, St. Louis has become a global chess hub that boasts a Hall of Fame featuring the largest chess piece in the world, at 20 feet tall.
To Mr. Sinquefield, this was more than a passion project. National pride was at stake. An American hadn’t won the world championship since Bobby Fischer toppled the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky in 1972.
“We all knew what we wanted,” says Mr. Sinquefield. “We wanted an American champion.”
Mr. Caruana was born in Miami and, like the controversial Mr. Fischer, raised in Brooklyn. The best players and best tournaments were in Europe, so the budding chess prodigy, supported by his parents, moved to Madrid when he was 12. He began representing Italy, his mother’s native country, shortly afterward.
Because of Mr. Sinquefield’s patronage, top grandmasters stopped seeing the U.S. as a chess backwater. St. Louis was given a tournament on the prestigious Grand Chess Tour, called the Sinquefield Cup. In 2014, Mr. So announced his transfer from the Philippines.
Around the same time, Italy was trying to convince Mr. Caruana to stay—but they could only offer him $90,000 a year, Adolivio Capece, a federation official, wrote in an email. He shared what he had heard: that Mr. Sinquefield offered Mr. Caruana $200,000 a year, and Azerbaijan weighed in with even more, but only for one or two years. (He also noted that Mr. Caruana’s Italian was “not so good.”) The Azerbaijan Chess Federation didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Caruana recently said on HBO’s “Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel,” “I can’t really talk about the financial aspect of it, but I was offered support to be back in the U.S.”
Mr. Sinquefield said he never paid Mr. Caruana to switch federations. The Chess Club and Scholastic Center of St. Louis, where Mr. Sinquefield is president and chair of the board, does give financial support to Messrs. Caruana and So—among other top American players it sponsors.
In London, Mr. Caruana said in a news conference he is proud to have the American flag on his side of the board. “If I have a success, I would like to share it with the United States,” he said.
Mr. So, who is a Filipino citizen and in the U.S. on a green card, wasn’t financially induced to switch federations, wrote his mother, Lotis Key, in an email. Mr. So hopes to apply for American citizenship next year, she wrote.
The chess world has praised Mr. Sinquefield for bringing more attention and resources to American chess. And a modern American champion, said World Chess CEO Ilya Merenzon, would be a game-changer. “If Caruana wins, there will be a ‘Before Caruana’ and an ‘After Caruana’ for our sport,” he said.
Bookmakers made Mr. Carlsen an odds-on favorite even before actor Woody Harrelson played the ceremonial first move. (Mr. Harrelson bungled it, moving the wrong pawn and accidentally knocking over a king.) Still, Mr. Caruana’s rating is just three points beneath Mr. Carlsen’s—the smallest ever difference for a world championship.
His transfer has already paid dividends in other ways. The U.S. won the Chess Olympiad in 2016, its first since the Americans won a title in 1976. (The Soviet Union, however, didn’t participate that year.)
After Mr. Carlsen’s Norway finished fifth in that tournament, the world’s No. 1 player tweeted: “Probably need an even better squad to go further though, wonder if Caruana and So are still for sale.”
The two top players in the world drew each of their first eight games against one another. Mr. Sinquefield says if Mr. Caruana pulls off the upset, the city of St. Louis would be so excited, they’re “not going to know what to do.”
Italians still claim the defector as one of their own.
“In any case,” wrote Mr. Capece, “the Italian press…refers to Caruana as ‘the Italian player.’”
Write to Joshua Robinson at joshua.robinson@wsj.com
