Messi, Ronaldo and Soccer’s Golden Sunset

In the heady, innocent days of 2016 — before all of the largely dreadful things that have happened since had happened — Nick Serpell was given what was, by the standards of the time, a faintly morbid task.

As naïve as it seems in hindsight, a theory had taken hold on social media — the place where all theories take hold — that the year was cursed. It had started, it seemed, with the death of David Bowie, and it did not stop. Alan Rickman died. Zaha Hadid died. Harper Lee died, and Leonard Cohen, and Johan Cruyff, and Muhammad Ali, and Prince.

Serpell’s job was to find out whether this really was unusual, or whether it was simply the effect of the public nature of grief in the social media age. As the BBC’s obituaries editor, he searched through the number of prepared obituaries that the broadcaster had published in the first three months of that year — the kind that all news organizations, including The Times, keep on file for a host of well-known figures — and then compared the total to the previous few winters.

There had, he found, been a considerable leap: From January to March 2012, for example, only five people deemed worthy of a prewritten obituary had died. It had been eight in 2013, 11 in 2014 and 12 the following year. By 2016, though, that number had skyrocketed: In the first three months alone, Serpell found, the BBC had run 24 ready-made tributes.

Serpell, though, remained unconvinced there was a curse; the explanation seemed to him to be far more prosaic. The apparent rise, he divined, was down to the fact that the world was now more than half a century on from the first great flowering of a shared popular culture — with the dawn of television, the growth of pop music and the global reach of Hollywood.

Though some of those who had died in early 2016 were distressingly young, many more had been in their 70s and 80s, the products of that blossoming of mass popularity. It was not that a greater proportion of prominent people were dying; it was that there was, 50 years or so after technology made some form of worldwide celebrity more attainable, a much deeper pool of prominent people who might die.

That phenomenon has an echo this year in a very different — and thankfully much less mournful — context. The 2022 World Cup will act as a profound watershed for soccer; it will, in a distinct, almost tangible way, mark the ending of one era and the start of another, a generational shift played out live on television.

That it will, almost certainly, provide the conclusion to the international careers of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo — assuming Portugal makes it past North Macedonia in its playoff final on Tuesday — has long been assumed. Their starlight is so bright, though, that it has served to obscure all of the other farewells that will come on the kafala-built fields of Qatar.

This World Cup will extinguish the light of a whole galaxy. It will, most likely, be the final time Luka Modric, Thiago Silva, Daniel Alves, Manuel Neuer, Thomas Müller, Jordi Alba, Ángel Di María, Luis Suárez, Edinson Cavani, Eden Hazard and Antoine Griezmann will grace the grandest stage sports has to offer. Robert Lewandowski, Gareth Bale, Arturo Vidal, Alexis Sánchez and James Rodríguez may yet join them, another clutch of superstars on a valedictory tour.

World Cups, of course, have always had that purpose. Just as they are the forge of greatness, they act, too, as the place it takes its bow. It is not especially unusual that players — as Silva and Alves, in particular, have — should continue their careers to ensure one more shot at the greatest prize of all. The 2006 World Cup final was Zinedine Zidane’s last ride, after all.

In that light, this World Cup is no different from any other. And yet the sheer numbers suggest something different; they give the impression that soccer will go into the tournament with one elite and emerge from it with quite another. That is not because there is a greater proportion of famous players at the end of their career than normal. It is because there are more famous players, full stop.

It is likely that the last 15 years will come to be seen almost exclusively through the lens of Messi and Ronaldo. They have, after all, dominated this era of soccer, and so it is fitting, in many ways, that they should come to define it.

Such an interpretation, though, would be reductive. It is better thought of, instead, as soccer’s first truly global age: an era in which fans across the world could watch almost every second of a player’s career, in which the great and the good encountered one another with unprecedented frequency in the Champions League and came into our homes through video games, a time when rare talent clustered together at a handful of superclubs.

The generation that will exit the stage in Qatar is the last bastion of the first generation of players who started and ended their journeys in that ecosystem; they are the equivalent of that bloom of mass, shared popular culture that germinated in the 1960s. Lewandowski is far more familiar, far more famous than Gerd Müller, his predecessor at Bayern Munich, ever was. More people will notice when Suárez retires from Uruguay than concerned themselves with Enzo Francescoli’s departure.

That they have been so prominent for so long has as much to do with the scientific and medical advances available as it is their ability. There was a reason, a couple of weeks ago, that the two standout midfield displays in the Champions League, all indefatigable energy and irrepressible dynamism, came from Modric, 36, and Vidal, 34. That level of performance, in that rarefied company, would not have been possible even 20 years ago; it has served to prolong their careers and, in doing so, expand their legacies.

Qatar, for many of them, will be their last stand. It will lend the tournament a faint air of sorrow. A whole generation, one that we have watched from the start, one that we have come to know like none before, one that has become part of the fabric of the game, will depart, all at once, and we will, at last, have to say goodbye.

That Horse Bolted. Quick, Lock the Door.

Financial Fair Play — no, no, stay with me — was, like deep-dish pizza or the “Sex and the City” reboot, absolutely fine in theory. In the middle of the first decade of this century, it was abundantly clear that European soccer needed to find a way to make its teams less vulnerable to the caprice of reckless owners, to prevent them taking on colossal, unmanageable debts.

The problem was with the application. The idea was twisted and contorted by the game’s elite clubs — aided and abetted by pliant governing bodies — until a set of rules that had been intended to promote sustainability became a method to entrench the status quo. Not that it mattered, really, because the punishments for failing to abide by them were pretty quickly proven to be toothless anyway.

It is hard to see the system’s successor — the snappily titled financial sustainability regulations — being any more effective. The new guidelines, the product of a decade of squabbling and a year of negotiation, will have little or no impact on the way any of the major teams operate. The regulations’ impact, as before, will be to shut the stable door long after the horse is roaming free in the paddock, eating all of the best grass.

By now, it is abundantly clear that the way to manage the central problem in European soccer — the lack of competition engendered by financial imbalance — does not lie in a set of fiscal rules. They are too easily circumvented, too lightly enforced and invariably introduced several years too late.

Instead, the solution has to be sporting. The biggest teams will always make the most money — or at least say they make the most money — and will therefore have an advantage when spending is limited to a percentage of income. The more effective way to improve competition, both between clubs and between leagues, is to limit how they can spend it.

A hard salary cap, the sort often seen in North American sports, is clearly not something the clubs are prepared to accept. But there is nothing at all to stop UEFA from instituting policies that demand all teams have a significant proportion of homegrown players, or a certain number of squad members under age 23. There is no reason it cannot cap the number of players any team can send out on loan, or even introduce rules that grant effective free agency to players who have not made a specific number of appearances.

Any and all of those measures would discourage the hoarding of stars by a handful of teams. In turn, they would allow that talent to be spread more evenly around Europe’s various leagues. They would encourage teams to be more judicious in the market, to think more long-term. They would help to level the playing field not by suppressing some, but by lifting others.

Passing on the Pain

The strange thing is that Steven Gerrard knows, better than most, quite how devastating injury can be. By his own estimation, during his career he endured somewhere in the region of 16 operations. He has screws in his hips. He struggles these days to go to the gym.

He is aware, too, that the impact is more than physical. A decade or so ago, after missing six months of Liverpool’s season with a groin problem, he admitted that he had been “as low as I have ever been.” He called it the “hardest period of his career.” He felt, at times, as if his “body had given in.”

Injury, of course, is unavoidable. Many of the issues Gerrard faced can be attributed to wear and tear, the body buckling under the strain placed on it by any elite athlete. That is, after all, the most common source of injury: not a reckless tackle or a dangerous challenge, but the almost humdrum popping of tightly wound hamstrings or the tearing of overworked ligaments. Gerrard, now the Aston Villa manager, was right to say last weekend that pain is “part of the game.”

That does not justify his conclusion, though. The Arsenal winger Bukayo Saka had complained after his team’s 1-0 win against Gerrard’s Villa that his opponents had been “purposefully” targeting him for rough treatment. Gerrard’s response was blunt. Saka, he said, had to “learn, and learn quick” that “it’s not a no-contact sport; tackling is allowed, physicality is allowed.”

In part, that can be attributed to ordinary managerial hypocrisy — this was the same Gerrard, after all, who has previously complained that his teams do not “get enough protection” from referees — but it is also, in some way, the passing on of a generational trauma.

Just because Gerrard and his peers were exposed to (and occasionally contributed to) a level of brutality that was entirely unnecessary does not mean their successors should have to do the same. Just because injury is part of sports does not mean we should not do all we can to minimize its effects. Players endure enough pain as it is. The game should be seeking to ensure they do not have to go through more than is necessary.

Correspondence

Two fairly hefty questions dominated this week’s inbox. First, Ian Greig wondered what might happen to the “luxury end” of soccer when “the oligarchs, princes, petty dictators and willing killers of the world come to realize that sports-washing does not work? Who in Newcastle had ever thought about the rate of execution in Saudi Arabia before last weekend?”

“When was the last time everyone in Paris had bad thoughts about a Gulf government?” he asked. “I’m willing to bet that there is more than one Qatari prince who understands that the attention brought to their country by the World Cup has not been flattering.”

There are, I think, two sides to this. In one sense, I suspect Ian is quite right: I don’t think at least some of these regimes — particularly in Qatar — fully realized the scrutiny that would come with their co-opting of the world’s most popular game. My instinct is that Qatari officials didn’t really expect a decade-long discussion of the kafala system when they set their sights on the World Cup.

The other, sadly, is less positive. Sports-washing most definitely does work, because national branding and reputation laundering are only the most superficial aim of the project. It is as much about enmeshing yourself — or your nation — into both the Western consciousness and the Western financial system as slapping “Dubai 2020 Expo” on some advertising boards.

Manchester City is a prime example: Abu Dhabi has won plaudits for regenerating part of the city, yes, but much more important is that the club has become a way for the state to establish links with a whole variety of businesses, from tire companies to hedge funds. If you want a relationship with Abu Dhabi, then Manchester City serves as a convenient front door. And in that, it has been hugely successful.

The second, even more challenging query comes from Dan Ross. “The real question isn’t, ‘Who is too evil to own a soccer team?’” he wrote, “but ‘Who gets to decide?’” After all, as he noted, “scoundrels can fly any flag.”

“The only acceptable answer is that the world decides as a whole,” he concluded. “When a country becomes a pariah by global consensus (notwithstanding a few holdouts), its ruling class should not be allowed to participate in the global economy and culture — or sport.”

This does, indeed, appear to be where we have landed, and I’m inclined to agree that there is no truly elegant solution at hand. That is not to say that more could not be done, though: It seems fairly straightforward to me that no nation state — or investment arm of a sovereign wealth fund — should be allowed to own a club, for one. That would apply just as much to Norway as it does to Saudi Arabia.

Of course, plenty of people would be willing to find a way around that, and some would doubtless find a way through. But all that means is that it is incumbent on leagues, clubs and federations to make sure they are at least asking the right questions of prospective purchasers. That should not be too much to ask.