Raphael Stevens

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    Everton's Women Are 'Not Shy About Being Ambitious'

    A series of changes, big and small, has a strengthened Everton believing it can hold its own with deep-pocketed rivals in England’s Women’s Super League.LIVERPOOL, England — Some of the changes have been small, so small as to be imperceptible, at least from the outside. This summer, for the first time, Everton hired someone specifically to take care of the uniforms of its women’s team. It is the sort of thing that serves as a reminder that, in women’s soccer, many little battles are still being won.Those small changes, though, still have an impact; they still offer a marginal gain. The laundry will no longer have to be done by another staff member, someone who is supposed to be analyzing video or planning coaching sessions, or even by the players themselves. All that time saved can now be put to proper use. Everything can be just a little bit better.And some of the changes have been considerable, like the nine new players who have joined Everton squad over the last few months. There is Toni Duggan, an experienced England international, the German defender Leonie Maier, the Italian midfielder Aurora Galli, and three players signed from Rosengard, Sweden’s champion-in-waiting, dubbed the Swedish House Mafia by their new teammates.The most significant change, though, at least as far as the club’s coach, Willie Kirk, is concerned, is the one that is hardest to describe. It struck him, most clearly, while away with his team on a preseason camp in Scotland last month. Something, he could tell, had clicked.Everton’s coach, Willie Kirk, has found it easier, and cheaper, to close the gap between midtable and the top than his men’s counterparts.Catherine Ivill/Getty Images“Maybe it is self-belief,” he said, trying to put his finger on it. “Maybe it is the feeling of watching another player walk through the doors and thinking: Yep, that’s another quality signing. Maybe it is knowing that not one player can be sure they’re starting in the next game, and that competition driving standards.”Kirk may not be able to name it, not precisely, but he is happy to talk about it. The first time Izzy Christiansen, the club’s vastly experienced midfielder, sat down with Kirk — in the winter of 2019 — her abiding impression was of a coach who had absolutely “no fluff,” she said. He did not try to give her the hard sell as to why she should sign with Everton.“There wasn’t a pitch,” Christiansen said. He simply bought her a coffee — “That’s one way to persuade me to join a club,” she said — and explained how he saw her as a player, what he thought she would bring to the team, and what he, and his club, were trying to do. “It was matter-of-fact,” she said.He is exactly the same when it comes to his intentions for his team. “We are not shy about being ambitious,” Kirk said.It is telling that, when asked if the plan for the season is to challenge the Big Three of England’s Women’s Super League — Chelsea, Manchester City and Arsenal — when the season opens on Saturday, Christiansen recalibrated the question. “That’s what we intend to do,” she said. “To compete, and to surpass. We want to take the club back into the Champions League, where it belongs.”Of course, the landscape of women’s soccer has undergone a seismic shift, both domestically and in Europe, in the decade or so since Everton last graced that competition. At the start of the 2010s, Everton’s rivals for a place were Arsenal, Birmingham City, Liverpool. They were teams mostly populated by British players; few, if any, trained in the same facilities as their respective men’s teams.Chelsea used deep pockets and expensive signings to climb to the top of the Super League last season.John Walton/Press Association, via Associated PressThe W.S.L. of 2021 is starkly different: dominated by the polyglot squads constructed, at lavish expense, by Chelsea, City and Arsenal. The former boasts not only the most expensive women’s player of all time, the striker Pernille Harder, but the highest-paid female player in the world, Sam Kerr.Manchester City can call on the backbone of the England national squad — the captain Steph Houghton, Lucy Bronze, Ellen White, half a dozen others — and has sufficient financial clout that it was able to tempt one of Everton’s best players, the Australian wing Hayley Raso, to Manchester this summer. Arsenal, meanwhile, can lay claim to possessing possibly the world’s best player: the Dutch striker Vivianne Miedema. On Friday, it picked up one of the American star Tobin Heath.Those three teams have stood, almost unchallenged, at the summit of the W.S.L. for some time. They have combined to win the last five titles — Chelsea claiming three — and have accounted for every English spot in the Champions League since 2014. They are, as Kirk admitted, a formidable barrier.And yet the club believes it can break that stranglehold. “I’ve made it clear to the players that to do it we will have to punch above our weight in terms of budget,” he said. “Finance does come into it, but we feel we are there.”He credits the club’s “clever” recruitment, led by its sporting director, Sarvar Ismailov — a nephew of Alisher Usmanov, the business partner of Everton’s majority owner Farhad Moshiri, who has now been appointed to the club’s board — for much of that growth. “We have to be flexible, and we have to be smarter,” Kirk said.Within the club, Ismailov is credited with both having a keen eye for talent and an ability to drive a bargain: There are, Kirk has said previously and approvingly, “not many in the women’s game who like him.” It was Ismailov who led the campaign to land perhaps the most eye-catching of Everton’s summer recruits, the 18-year-old Swedish midfielder Hanna Bennison, the club’s record signing.Anna Anvegard, left, and Hanna Bennison, center, are teammates in Sweden. Everton added them both, as well as Nathalie Björn, with the three players earning the nickname Swedish House Mafia.Jamie Sabau/Getty ImagesBut that is only one element. When she looks back at the club she joined almost two years ago, now, Christiansen sees “something special,” something that Kirk traces not just to the raft of new players.“We have improved our working practices,” he said, a category that doubtless includes the hiring of a uniform attendant. “We have signed a lot of previous winners. We have always had a positive environment, but that breeds a winning culture.”It is a trend he sees across the club. Everton is working on building a new stadium (principally) for its men’s team. The last two coaches of the men’s team, Carlo Ancelotti and Rafa Benítez, are both Champions League winners. The ambition for the women’s team, in Kirk’s eyes, is no different to the ambition for the men’s.Perhaps, though, that relationship does not function quite as it is often presented. Everton has been condemned — through sheer economics as much as anything else — to life in the upper mid-table of the Premier League. It would cost the club hundreds of millions of dollars in transfer fees to even have a hope of overhauling Manchester City’s and Chelsea’s men’s teams.In the women’s game, though, it can now consider itself a force. It can talk of winning a place in the Champions League, and it can think, not entirely idly, of winning a championship. It can contemplate meeting clubs that exist on a different stratum in men’s soccer as something approaching equals in women’s.That has not come cheap — Bennison alone cost a “substantial six-figure sum” to coax from Rosengard — and it has not been straightforward. But Everton, unlike many of its peers in the no-man’s-land below the elite in the Premier League, now has the reward: a chance to compete, to challenge, and perhaps to surpass. That impetus has not flowed from the men’s team to the women’s but, if anything, the other way round.That is what all of those changes, the small and the large alike, have added up to: a club that has a stage on which to be truly ambitious once more, and a team that is not afraid to talk about it. More

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    The Problem When Soccer Clubs See Athletes as Assets

    Chelsea and Manchester City have both found ways to monetize their army of spare signings by loaning them out. But should soccer incentivize that, or limit it?One of the things that appealed most to Manchester City about Marlos Moreno was his flexibility. The club spotted him as a teenager, coming off the back of a breakthrough season in which he helped Atlético Nacional, his hometown club in his native Colombia, win not just a national title but the Copa Libertadores, too.Moreno, then 19, had the air of a rising star. He was the sort of prospect who stood out among the thousands of players around the world whose names and performance data flash in front of the eyes of the scouts and analysts at Europe’s biggest clubs.City’s recruitment team liked what it saw: not just Moreno’s finishing, but his creativity, his ability to play in a variety of places. The club decided to strike, paying Atlético $6 million or so to sign him, and tying Moreno to a five-year contract. Executives were sufficiently excited by the acquisition of a player they felt was one of the most promising in South America to mention his name to Sheikh Mansour, City’s owner.“He’s a versatile player,” City’s director of football, Txiki Begiristain, said when Moreno’s arrival was confirmed. “We believe he has a fantastic future in the game, and with City.”That was five years ago, in August 2016. Moreno, 24, has now completed his initial, five-year deal with City. He has not played a single game for the club. He has, instead, spent the last half-decade on a series of loans. As it turned out, he has needed to be a very versatile player indeed. Just not in the way Begiristain intended.There is, on the surface, little pattern to the arc of Moreno’s journey these last few years, no easy evidence of some grand design at play. Sometimes, he has gone to clubs in Manchester City’s orbit — Girona and Lommel, two of his stops, are owned by City Football Group — and sometimes he has not. There have been spells in Spain, Portugal and Belgium, but also Brazil and Mexico. If there is a rhyme or a reason, it is difficult to discern.Marlos Moreno, left, signed with Manchester City in 2016 but has yet to play for the club.Miguel Sierra/EPA, via ShutterstockThis summer, Moreno left Manchester on loan again. (There has never been official confirmation that he has signed a new contract, but it can only be assumed that City extended his terms beyond their initial expiration date this summer.) He has joined Kortrijk, in Belgium. It is his seventh club in five years.Moreno is not, though, an outlier. There are plenty of players on City’s books who have a similar story to tell. Yangel Herrera, a Venezuelan playmaker, is now on his fourth team in four years since signing with Manchester City. None of them was Manchester City. Patrick Roberts, once considered something of a breakout star in English soccer, is with his sixth team in six years. He has, at least, appeared for Manchester City in a Premier League game. That was in 2015.But this is not simply a Manchester City phenomenon. Chelsea, too, has a troupe of players on loan: 21, in fact, after the closure of the transfer window. Some of them — like Billy Gilmour, the Scottish midfielder lent to Norwich City for the year — are undertaking a vital step in their development. The hope at the club remains that they will come back stronger, better, more experienced and ready to command a place with the first-team squad. Others, like the fullbacks Kenedy and Baba Rahman, are not.Chelsea is often credited — if that is the right word — with pioneering the idea of a soccer club as two separate but linked businesses: one designed to put the best team on the field, with the aim of winning trophies and claiming glory; and one set up to trade players, with the aim of making a profit that can then be reinvested in the other side of the company.Matt Miazga’s Chelsea tenure has been a European tour: He has been lent to clubs in the Netherlands, France, England, Belgium and, most recently, Spain, where he now plays for Alaves.David Aguilar/EPA, via ShutterstockWhether Chelsea invented the idea is a matter of debate. Several Italian teams might suggest they were operating along similar lines long before the current European champion. There is no question, though, that Chelsea has not only industrialized the concept, it has refined it, too.Its approach has two strands. Some players are bought, developed and sold a couple of years later, flipped like real estate. Others, though, are treated as rentals, lent again and again to different clubs, the return on the initial investment spread over several years of loan fees.This practice could, perhaps, be named in honor of goalkeeper Matej Delac, a Croat who spent nine years at Chelsea, and spent each and every one of them at a different club. The whole approach — of effectively spinning off a player-trading business as another part of a club’s identity — could easily be termed the Chelsea model.Except that it is, now, not just Chelsea. It is Manchester City, too, with Moreno and Herrera and others. Liverpool is doing it more frequently. There are players at Juventus and Real Madrid, among others, who have had similar experiences. It is now pretty much standard practice at most of Europe’s elite clubs.There is a reason it has been widely and quickly adopted: It is a good idea. It is a particularly good idea now, when the coronavirus pandemic has ravaged most clubs’ finances and only a handful of teams are able to pay actual transfer fees. The loan market will grow and grow. Having players contracted for that very purpose ensures a steady stream of income: small beer, perhaps, for a team like Manchester City or Chelsea, but perhaps a vital source of funds for the teams expected to compete with them.The impulse behind it is not just economic; it is also, to some extent, sporting. The teams that are good at it — the ones that can identify talent and develop it, the ones that can command a market for those players, the ones that can place them adroitly at teams that allow their value and demand to grow — are the ones that are rewarded by the system. Chelsea can bring in Romelu Lukaku, to some extent, because it has developed an effective transfer strategy to offset some of the costs. That is to its credit.There is only one sticking point. It is a simple question, and it is one that does not traditionally detain soccer for long, but it is worth asking. Is this OK? There is economic sense here. There may be some sporting logic, too. But morally, is the idea of players not as athletes but as assets something we should not just accept but incentivize?The transfer market, as a whole, is underpinned by a deep weirdness. It is rarely mentioned — the soap opera of the market is sufficiently compelling that we, as observers, willingly suspend our disbelief — but it is unusual that an employer can prevent an employee from taking another job, one that is better paid or more appealing, regardless of what that employee wants.Manchester City signed Yangel Herrera as a teenager but has yet to play him. Instead, he has appeared in Major League Soccer and for three Spanish clubs.Savvides Press/EPA, via ShutterstockOf course, plenty of employees have contracts, which bind them to a company. But for the most part, they also have notice periods, giving them some sort of agency over their careers and lives. Perhaps a company might make life difficult should a star employee wish to leave. Perhaps it will place him on some type of gardening leave. There are not many examples where it will keep him until a prospective employer pays a wholly arbitrary sum in compensation.We tolerate this state of affairs in soccer partly because of tradition, partly because it protects sporting integrity; partly because we (wrongly) assume that everyone is extremely well paid anyway; partly because players do jobs we all dream of doing, so we adore them individually but hate them as a concept; and partly because the transfer market is an important and reasonably effective mechanism for wealth distribution.Even by these low and strange standards, though, the use of players as nothing more than assets — to be fattened for sale like livestock or to be rented to the highest bidder — feels like a step too far.It is akin, perhaps, to those complex derivative packages traded on financial markets, the ones that are bets on the outcomes of bets, on and on into eternity. The original purpose has been lost: It is no longer about trading to get better; it is simply about trading to make money. And the things being traded, in this case, are humans, ones who are no longer in control of their own destiny, not really.This is one of those rare problems in soccer that has a relatively easy solution: The authorities who run and, in theory, safeguard the game could quite easily rule that clubs can have only a certain number of senior professionals on their books. They could ban teams from having more than, say, five players on loan at any time.They could, but of course they won’t, which means there will be more cases like Marlos Moreno and Yangel Herrera and Matej Delac and all the others, forever on the move, hired out to whoever will take them, bonded to a club that sees them not for what they can do but for how much they can make.Selling TomorrowAntoine Griezmann completed a round-trip journey to Madrid. Barcelona paid coming and going.Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJust as time expired, the money started pouring in. The great bazaar of Barcelona had been open all summer, but it was only in the final couple of days that anyone came through the doors, the buyers and the bargain-hunters, all hoping to take advantage of soccer’s great distressed sellers.If the sale of Emerson Royal to Tottenham was a little strange — he had officially joined Barcelona only a month earlier — it is the departure of Antoine Griezmann that will sting the most: the sheer humiliation of allowing a player signed with great pomp and ceremony two years ago to return, initially on loan, to Atlético Madrid.Still, it could not be helped: Barcelona’s most pressing need was first to save and then to raise money, and at the end of the transfer window it had done just that. Lionel Messi has gone; Sergio Busquets, Gerard Piqué, Jordi Alba and Sergi Roberto have all agreed to reduced terms; Griezmann is off the salary bill. By next summer, when his move to Atlético is made permanent, Barcelona will have generated $115 million in sales.What Barcelona could not do, of course, is sell off the players that it most needs to sell: the high earners, the waning stars, the reminders of its years of folly. Philippe Coutinho, Miralem Pjanic and Samuel Umtiti are all still there. Barcelona does not have a vast amount in common with Real Madrid, but here, perhaps, there is some common ground.Whether Real’s approach (or approaches) to entice Kylian Mbappé this summer was real or not we will never know, not truly: Real Madrid insists it was, Paris St.-Germain is adamant it was not. Either way, the club has spent the last couple of seasons trying to raise the funds necessary to sign the 22-year-old Mbappé: funds that would either have been used as a transfer fee or as a golden handshake.To do that, it would have liked to sell players like Gareth Bale and Isco: big names on money to match. But nobody came forward, and so instead Real Madrid has had to cash in on a suite of promising youngsters: Achraf Hakimi and Sergio Reguilón and Óscar Rodríguez last season and Martin Odegaard this summer.The policy has worked, of course, but it brings with it an unavoidable question: How much brighter would Real Madrid’s future have been, how much more balanced would its side be, if it had been able to add Mbappé to a promising young squad, rather than having to sell off many of those players to finance his eventual arrival?It is the same question that lingers over Barcelona. Emerson, like Junior Firpo and Carles Aleña and Carles Pérez and Arthur before him, might not have made Barcelona great again, but he would, at least, have helped to rejuvenate an aging squad. Instead, he was sold, as they all were, to cover the costs of the mistakes of the past. Barcelona’s finances are in better shape now than they were a month ago. The price is a high one, though: It has had to mortgage tomorrow to pay for yesterday.CorrespondenceThere was an intriguing thought in an email from Jillian Mannarino, touching on the varying fortunes of Arsenal’s two senior teams. “Everyone following the Premier League is talking about how bad Arsenal men’s team is,” she wrote, “but no one seems to be talking about how good Arsenal’s women’s team is: stacked with superstars like Vivianne Miedema, Kim Little, Danielle van de Donk and Beth Mead, and consistently good for the last decade.”Arsenal has at least one team that is making its fans smile.Steven Paston/Press Association, via Associated PressWe will cover the start of this season’s Women’s Super League in England elsewhere this weekend. But it is worth pausing a moment on Arsenal, too, because there is a stark contrast between its two elite divisions.The women’s team recruits sufficiently and consistently well enough — including the arrival of Tobin Heath this week on a free transfer — to punch above its weight: It has not spent quite as much as Chelsea and Manchester City in recent years, but it remains a peer of those teams in a way that it is very much not in the men’s game. How can that be explained? Why can the club make good decisions for its women’s team, but not its men’s? Is it to do with the executives working on the women’s side? And if so, should someone maybe not ask their advice?These are questions I cannot answer — though I will endeavor to do so — but I can, at least, furnish Mary Jo Berman with a response. “Did Barcelona receive nothing in return for Lionel Messi?” she asked. “Couldn’t they have traded him or transferred him for cash?” They couldn’t, for the very simple reason that the club had allowed his contract to expire: He was free to move wherever he wanted. The fact that Barcelona allowed that to happen, too, remains the most interesting aspect of this summer.And Calvin Wagner was quite right to pull me up on a poor turn of phrase last week. “The transfers of Messi, Mbappé and Ronaldo are clearly more driven by the statement of acquiring their star power than footballing fit,” he wrote. “But surely the Lukaku deal has more sporting logic to it? It seems to me that he brings greater marginal gains in sporting quality to Chelsea relative to the other transfers mentioned in your column.”This is, of course, quite right. Lukaku makes complete sense from a sporting perspective — he fills a glaring need that Chelsea has — in a way that Ronaldo, for example, does not, particularly. Lukaku was included simply because of his cost, one that would have been beyond the reach of all but three or four teams this summer, rather than because of the motivations behind the deal, but that should have been made more clear.That’s all for this week. We may now be behind the paywall, huddling against the cold, but the usual rules still apply: Questions go to askrory@nytimes.com, urgent matters go to Twitter, all of the other thoughts I’ve had this week that I could not crowbar into this newsletter are littered throughout Set Piece Menu.Have a great weekend,Rory More

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    U.S. Ties El Salvador in World Cup Qualifying

    As a youthful American team took its first step toward the 2022 World Cup, it rued a few missed opportunities.SAN SALVADOR — The formula for success in World Cup qualifying is written in years of hard lessons, hard games and hard nights: Win your home games. Pick up points on the road. Survive and advance.So it should not have a been a terrible disappointment for the United States men’s soccer team on Thursday when it opened the final round of qualifying with a scoreless tie at El Salvador. A point on the road, after all, is better than the alternative.“If you’re not going to win the game,” United States defender Tim Ream said, “then you can’t lose it.”But some points are harder won, and perhaps harder to accept, than others. Fresh off a summer in which it won two cup finals against archrival Mexico, the United States had started Thursday’s match against El Salvador exactly as it had hoped. It produced three excellent scoring chances — by Gio Reyna, Brendan Aaronson and Miles Robinson — in the first 10 minutes and at times displayed the kind of free-flowing, field-stretching ball movement that has made its youth-infused roster the best team in the region again.But El Salvador, in the midst of its own rebuild under the former United States national team player Hugo Pérez, soon found its footing. Backed by a capacity crowd that had begun streaming through the gates as soon as they opened 11 a.m., nine hours before kickoff, La Selecta lacked only the clinical finishing required to cash in the chances created by its deft footwork and incisive runs. Midfielder Alex Roldan came closest to opening the scoring in the 33rd minute, dropping defender DeAndre Yedlin on the left side before curling in a shot that skimmed the crossbar.“There needs to be a calm that sets in after that initial period, where we really start taking over, and we never got that,” United States Coach Gregg Berhalter said. “It turned into too hectic of a game, and we didn’t manage that well.”Tens of thousands of El Salvador fans packed the Estadio Cuscátlan, creating an electric atmosphere.Rodrigo Sura/EPA, via ShutterstockIn the second half, the game drifted inexorably toward a stalemate amid tired legs, wayward passes and a quick succession of American yellow cards. When the final whistle blew, the United States players trudged off, projecting a sense that they could have won, while El Salvador’s basked in the cheers of an adoring crowd that seemed to feel that its team had.In his final prematch comments on Wednesday, Berhalter had called the game an opportunity, a chance to rewrite the team’s destiny right from the start of the final round of qualifying, and to do so even without the star midfielder Christian Pulisic, who skipped the trip as he continued to recover from a bout with the coronavirus.For a few of his teammates, though, it may have felt like an opportunity lost. Berhalter spoke of a lack of connections, of too much individual play and not enough switching of the point of attack. The United States captain, Tyler Adams, pointed out some of the same concerns, but also a need to be “more ruthless” in finishing chances.“It’s our first game,” Adams admitted grudgingly. “We have to take what we can from it.”The Americans’ coach, Gregg Berhalter, expressed frustration at his team’s inability to retain control of the game.Moises Castillo/Associated PressThe Americans will not have long to linger over Thursday night’s result: Two more qualifiers loom in the coming days, against Canada on Sunday in Nashville and against Honduras on Wednesday in San Pedro Sula. The former may present the tougher competitive test, the latter the more dangerous one, mentally and physically, of this compressed window.Those games will mark the first hurried steps of the final round of qualifying, normally an 18-month slog that has been compressed to a seven-month sprint because of pandemic delays and postponements. That means three games in most windows, rather than the usual two, and less time to revel in victories or wallow in defeats. It means injuries and absences like Pulisic’s may prove more problematic, and disappointing results more costly.It means that for a young United States team, whose starting lineup on Thursday had an average age of 23 years and 282 days, there will be no time to look back and wonder how Thursday might have gone differently. Now that it’s over, the Americans will fly home with their hard-won point, their hopes for three more only a few days away. More

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    USMNT Faces El Salvador in World Cup Qualifying

    Ahead of World Cup qualifying, a young team with a fresh attitude says it is unburdened by the failure of its predecessors to qualify for the tournament.SAN SALVADOR — As drama goes, at least by recent United States World Cup qualifying standards, the news rated a raised eyebrow, not a blaring alarm.Christian Pulisic, still finding his way back to fitness after a positive coronavirus test and 10 days in isolation, had not traveled to El Salvador with his United States teammates on Wednesday, one day before they were to open the final round of qualifying for soccer’s 2022 World Cup. Pulisic would not play in Thursday’s game, the team announced, and neither would goalkeeper Zack Steffen, who was enduring a late-breaking case of back spasms. He had stayed back in Nashville, too, where the United States will return this weekend to face Canada.“We feel like we have a deep team,” Coach Gregg Berhalter said. “Now’s the time to show it.”It was the kind of clipped confidence that has become Berhalter’s signature throughout his coaching career. Losing two starters was not a crisis, but “an opportunity,” he said calmly. Berhalter talks a lot about opportunities. This summer’s Nations League had been an opportunity to prove his best players could go toe to toe with rival Mexico and win, which they did. The Gold Cup that followed had been an opportunity, too, for a different set of U.S. players. The Americans beat Mexico to win that one as well.Christian Pulisic remained in Nashville, where he will train on his own while his teammates face El Salvador on Thursday.Mark Humphrey/Associated PressIt’s a lot easier, Berhalter and his players have found, to talk about opportunities when you’re collecting trophies. For the bulk of the current United States team, though, the eight-team final round of qualifying that begins with three games over the next week is just that: an opportunity to show that a new generation of talents — the current roster’s average age is about 24 — can move away from past disappointments, can rely on new players, can write its own story.“When Greg first came in to the national team, he put a plan in place that I don’t think any national team coach has been willing to take the risk of doing,” midfielder Tyler Adams said. “Basically changing the whole way that the system would work, inside and out, whether it was our tactics, the players that we wanted to have, what certain positions needed to do, the qualities that we needed to have, and basically how we could develop and get better leading up to this point, to our first qualifying game.”He, and they, know there will be stumbles: bad fields, bad weather, bad referees, even bad results. They might come immediately, or they might come in a month or two, but they will probably come. In the last cycle, the United States failed to win a single road qualifier. Then it was the last game, not the first, that had been the biggest opportunity lost.Any assessment of the state of the U.S. team at the start of this qualifying cycle’s final act has to start at the end of the last one: with that crushing loss at Trinidad and Tobago that led the team to miss the World Cup for the first time in a generation.For weeks, Berhalter and his players have been asked about that night. Midfielder Kellyn Acosta’s memory is probably clearer than most — he had entered the match as a second-half substitute and was on the field when his team’s world went dark — but he has learned not to rehash it much in interviews. Midfielder Brendan Aaronson, who was only 16 at the time, struggled to remember if he had seen any of the game live. His teammate Weston McKennie was certain he had not. “I don’t really watch sports,” he said.But the fact that most of the players couldn’t remember the match subtly spoke to something else, something probably more important to them and their coach today: They weren’t there. They weren’t part of it. And they certainly weren’t to blame for it.“I don’t think the group now really sees it as a burden,” McKennie said of the shadow of 2017. “I think it’s more, we’re not really going to focus on what’s happened in the past. Obviously it’s going to be in the back of our heads somewhere, but that’s not going to be our main fuel, our main focus: trying to redeem what happened years ago.“I think right now we’re just trying to create a legacy of our own.”Several of the young stars who could start against El Salvador on Thursday — including Adams, McKennie, Gio Reyna, Josh Sargent and Sergiño Dest — did not make their national team debuts until after the Trinidad defeat. Berhalter wasn’t hired for more than a year after the loss. It was 2019 before he coached his first game.The United States beat Mexico in a cup final in June, then did it again in August. Jack Dempsey/Associated PressNow, though, his team is humming. The summer tournament triumphs gave the players a taste of CONCACAF competition, and of the rough play and hot nights and dubious calls that have often marked World Cup qualifying in the region. And for the first time, the final round will open with three matches in a single window, a clutch of games that should, in theory, favor a Berhalter team that boasts of more depth than the likes of El Salvador, Canada and Honduras.They all know every game matters. For years, the qualifying calculus has been a simple formula: Win your home games and then pick up points on the road. But the new breed is not interested, not really, in how things used to go.“Our mentality is to win all the games we can,” McKennie said. “I don’t think we have a formula where, ‘Let’s win our home games and grab a couple points on the road.’ Our goal is to prove we’re the best in CONCACAF, and I think the only way to do that is to dominate it.”Said Adams: “There’s no Plan B for us. There’s only been a Plan A, and that’s to qualify for the World Cup.” More

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    El Salvador's Secret Weapon: a Fan and His Computer

    The revival of El Salvador’s soccer team is a tribute to better organization, coaching and talent. But it also owes a debt to a fan with a gift for scouting.SAN SALVADOR — For more than a decade, Hugo Alvarado scoured the internet for soccer players who might improve El Salvador’s national teams. He was, he admits bashfully, pretty good at it.Working from a home computer in California, he quickly identified dozens of members of the vast Salvadoran diaspora, players with Salvadoran-sounding names or Salvadoran-looking faces and places on the rosters of European professional clubs, M.L.S. academy teams and American college programs. Then, one by one, he tracked them down. Those who expressed interest in playing for El Salvador were added to the growing database on Alvarado’s website.There was always one hitch, though: Alvarado didn’t work for El Salvador’s soccer federation. He had no authority to recruit players to its national teams. He was just a fan who wanted better teams to support.“I wanted to see a more competitive national team,” he said this week, more than a decade after beginning his project. “So that’s why I do what I do.”As the final round of qualifying for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar begins this week in North and Central America, there has been much talk about the rebuilding of the United States men’s team in the wake of its 2017 qualifying failure. But its first opponent on Thursday, El Salvador, also has new leaders, a new coach and a new crop of bright young talents. And the reconstruction it has undertaken may be just as comprehensive.El Salvador was the first Central American country to qualify for the World Cup, in 1970, and the first to return to it a second time, in 1982. Its team has mostly floundered since then, boxed in by small thinking, big scandals and an inability — or an unwillingness — to modernize. Quietly, that may all be changing.Last fall, El Salvador’s federation hired Diego Henríquez, a former youth international who had played college soccer in the United States, as its first sporting director. Henríquez’s first hire was Hugo Pérez, a respected former U.S. Soccer player and coach.Their aim, initially, was to focus on stocking El Salvador’s youth teams with better players, from anywhere they could find them. A former United States under-17 player from Indiana with a Salvadoran father. A New York Red Bulls academy product with a Salvadoran mother. A pro in the Netherlands who was actually eligible to play for four countries, and had already worn the jersey of one of them. Even Pérez’s nephew, a former U.S. youth soccer teammate of Christian Pulisic, fit the bill.Joshua Pérez, top, a former member of several United States youth teams, and Enrico Dueñas, who once played for the Netherlands’ under-16 team, are two of the latest foreign-born recruits to El Salvador’s national team.Francisco Guasco/EPA, via ShutterstockThat kind of open-arms strategy is hardly unique — Italy, England, Spain and many other countries have all fielded foreign-born players — and Pérez knows the value of it as well as anyone: Born in El Salvador, he played more than 70 times for the United States and represented the country at the Olympics and the World Cup. And he, like almost everyone else in Salvadoran soccer, had heard about the detective work Alvarado was doing.“Bringing talent from different parts of the world could be a plan in any federation,” Henríquez said, noting the United States has long done it, and Mexico has more recently made overtures to players born and developed in America. “That’s part of restructuring our identity.”Ambition, though, works best with a plan. Under Pérez and Henríquez, El Salvador has a holistic approach: top-quality training and coaching, but also improvements in nutrition and sleep and fitness and an emphasis on “what it means to represent El Salvador, what it means to wear a national team jersey, what it means to come to a camp and be a professional.”The early returns have been promising: Hired to run the youth teams, Henríquez and Pérez added responsibility for the senior team in April, after worrisome results in an earlier round of World Cup qualifying led to a coaching change. Building around young players and new recruits, El Salvador advanced to the knockout round of this summer’s Gold Cup, a major regional championship, and even gave Mexico a brief scare before exiting in the quarterfinals.Toronto F.C.’s Eriq Zavaleta was one of the first players Hugo Alvarado added to his database in 2011. A starter for several U.S. Soccer youth teams by then, he made his debut for El Salvador in June.Brandon Wade/Associated PressEl Salvador has few illusions about the job ahead in World Cup qualifying: The region only gets three and a half spots in next year’s tournament from its eight-team octagonal qualifier, and few expect La Selecta, as El Salvador is known, to claim one. The region’s representation will grow, however, when the World Cup expands to 48 teams in its next cycle.“Our main objective is 2026,” Henríquez said. “We just started, and we know that.”More new players will be part of the plans by then, but so will Alvarado. On the day he was hired last October, Henríquez told reporters that he was open to “anyone who can help” El Salvador improve. One of his first stops was to the man in California with the home computer and the rich knowledge of the kind of players who might be available. In October, Henriquez hired Alvarado as the first full-time scout in the federation’s history.Henríquez said the plan was to refine Alvarado’s hobby and to focus him on finding not every potential Selecta player, but specific ones. Instead of a vacuum cleaner, he would in essence become a personal shopper, presented with a shopping list of specific needs — supplementing an age group’s team, for example, or providing options to look at in a certain position, or a distinct role. He, and Henríquez, still aren’t sure how much talent might be available.“I need five Hugo Alvarados in North America,” Henríquez said.Alvarado’s latest find, the 20-year-old midfielder Enrico Dueñas, is just the kind of prospect he and El Salvador will be seeking. A veteran of the Ajax and Vitesse academies and eligible through his lineage to play for four countries — the Netherlands, where he was born, but also El Salvador, Finland and Curaçao — Dueñas was discovered by Alvarado through the player’s sister, whom he met after methodically going through a list of Dueñas’s Facebook friends.Receptive to the approach, Dueñas made his competitive debut for El Salvador in an Olympic qualifying tournament in Mexico in March, and he has been included in Pérez’s roster for the first three World Cup qualifiers.On Sunday, he arrived in El Salvador for the first time.For Alvarado, Dueñas and another player he identified long ago, the uncapped Costa Rican import Cristian Martínez, have created the kind of buzz he used to covet when he first created his website.But they are also rekindling the memories of how his father used to talk about El Salvador’s glory days of 1982, and 1970, before civil war sent the country’s citizens scattering for safety around the globe. Now he is trying to bring at least a few back.“I strongly believe that we have the talent to put a team in the World Cup,” Alvarado said. “And I’m a strong believer that foreign-born Salvadorans can get us there faster.” More

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    N.F.L. Moves New Orleans Saints’ Season Opener to Jacksonville

    As much of New Orleans remained without electricity in the wake of Hurricane Ida, the Saints’ Week 1 home game against the Green Bay Packers was relocated.The Saints will open their season in Jacksonville, Fla., as New Orleans recovers from Hurricane Ida, the N.F.L. said on Wednesday.The Saints will play the Green Bay Packers on Sept. 12, a Sunday, at TIAA Bank Field, home of the Jacksonville Jaguars.Though the Superdome, the team’s stadium in New Orleans, did not suffer major damage when Hurricane Ida swept through the region, nearly a million customers in Louisiana were still without power days after the storm tore through the state, causing flooding and knocking out power lines. Entergy, Louisiana’s largest utility, said on Wednesday that it could be days before electricity was fully restored in New Orleans and other Louisiana cities hit by Ida.Saints personnel and their families on Saturday relocated to North Texas before Ida’s arrival, holding practices at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, home of the Dallas Cowboys. Saints Coach Sean Payton said on Tuesday that the team would continue to train in the Dallas-Fort Worth area as New Orleans recovered from the storm. He said the region made sense because it had many Saints fans nearby, stadiums capable of hosting N.F.L. games and a major airport.“We’ve got enough fans in this area and Houston, and certainly from northern Louisiana, that we think that would be something that’s very realistic,” Payton said.The team moved practices to Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, which has an indoor field and other training facilities. Doug Miller, a team spokesman, said the Saints’ training facility in Metairie, La., just outside New Orleans, received only superficial damage in the storm, and the team has allowed officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, to use offices there.The decision to move the Saints’ first regular-season game came two days after Tulane announced that it would move its college football matchup on Saturday against Oklahoma to Norman, Okla., from New Orleans.By the time Tulane made its decision, the football team had evacuated to Birmingham, Ala., and seen its hopes for a Tuesday return to New Orleans dashed.“Obviously, that was wishful thinking,” Willie Fritz, the Tulane coach, said at a news conference this week after his team fled rain in Birmingham and practiced in Tuscaloosa, Ala. “It’s a very unfortunate situation. We feel for the people in New Orleans.”The university said Monday that it would decide in “the days ahead” how to handle planned home competitions in football and women’s volleyball. The football program is next scheduled to play in New Orleans on Sept. 11, while the volleyball team’s next home matches are scheduled for Sept. 17.“We’re like the Terminator: You’ve got to just point us in the right direction and we will go there,” said Fritz, who added that Tulane officials had been able to get onto campus to pick up equipment, including the Green Wave’s uniforms and cleats.The N.F.L. did not say whether future Saints home games would be moved. Their Week 2 and Week 3 matchups are road games. The Saints will play the Carolina Panthers in Charlotte, N.C., and then the New England Patriots in Foxborough, Mass.The Saints’ second home game of the season is scheduled for Oct. 3 against the Giants.In 2005, the Saints played their entire regular season on the road after the Superdome was damaged during Hurricane Katrina and the city’s residents were displaced. The team opened the season at the Giants in East Rutherford, N.J., and played its remaining games at the Alamodome in San Antonio and Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, home of the Louisiana State football team. More

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    Patriots Cut Cam Newton After Covid-Related Disruptions

    Newton was sidelined early last season with the virus and missed practices last week because of a mix-up over protocols. The rookie quarterback Mac Jones will be New England’s starter.After entering training camp as New England’s starting quarterback, Cam Newton didn’t just lose that job on Tuesday — he lost his roster spot, too.The Patriots cut Newton, the N.F.L.’s most valuable player in 2015, as they began paring their roster to the league-mandated 53 players before Tuesday’s 4 p.m. deadline. The move allows the rookie Mac Jones, who excelled in camp and the preseason, to start in Week 1 against the Miami Dolphins on Sept. 12. Newton’s release was first reported by The Boston Globe.Newton, 32, started all three of New England’s preseason games, including Sunday’s preseason finale at the Giants, in which he played two series. But he missed three days of practice last week because of what the team said was a “misunderstanding” related to Covid-19 protocols after a team-approved medical appointment out of the area. His absence enabled Jones to take more first-team snaps.“I feel like everybody’s way ahead of where they were last year,” Coach Bill Belichick said of Newton on Tuesday, hours before news of his release surfaced. “Certainly, he started at a much higher point than what he did last year, so definitely moving in the right direction.”Not long after he was released, Newton thanked his fans in a statement posted on his Instagram account.“I really appreciate all the love and support during this time but I must say … please don’t feel sorry for me!! I’m good,” Newton wrote.Last season, his first in New England, Newton’s ups and downs were emblematic of the league’s struggles to play during the pandemic. He was infected with the coronavirus early in the season, missing one game and forcing the N.F.L. to move the Patriots’ game against the Kansas City Chiefs to a Monday night after Newton tested positive for the virus. The Patriots flew to Kansas City, Mo., in two planes — one for players and staff who were exposed to Newton and one for everyone else.After the season, Newton said his time away from the team so soon after arriving had made it harder for him to learn the playbook.In training camp this season, Newton declined to confirm whether he received a vaccine against the virus, saying only that the issue was too personal to discuss. But after his medical appointment last week, he went through a five-day process to rejoin the team that applies only to unvaccinated players.Under N.F.L. rules, unvaccinated players must be tested every day for the virus, as opposed to once a week for vaccinated players, and they cannot move around the team facility or mix with teammates as freely as vaccinated players.Once one of the league’s most electrifying players as the franchise quarterback for the Carolina Panthers, Newton had the misfortune of sustaining a serious foot injury in 2019, limiting him to two games, a few months before a new regime took over the front office and a pandemic disrupted off-season player movement. The Panthers released him, but as other quarterbacks signed quickly, Newton languished for months, reportedly unwilling to be a backup.In the depressed market for his services, the Patriots saw an opportunity. After cutting ties with Tom Brady, the team signed Newton to a one-year, incentive-heavy deal in June 2020, and he promptly beat out Jarrett Stidham in training camp. Starting 15 games for New England, Newton rushed for 12 touchdowns and completed 65.8 percent of his passes, though the offense sputtered for vast chunks of a season undermined by infrequent practices and meager skill players.The Patriots, wanting an established quarterback on the roster before free agency began, re-signed Newton in what was a prelude to a bigger investment at the position. For the first time in his 22 drafts in New England, Belichick drafted a quarterback in the first round, taking Jones at No. 15.No defense in 2020 could stop Jones, who at the University of Alabama threw for 4,500 yards with 41 touchdowns and four interceptions, leading the nation with 11.2 yards per attempt and a 77.4 completion percentage. A traditional pocket passer, Jones was an outlier among the quarterbacks chosen in the first round of the draft.But the Patriots were enamored of his awareness, steady improvement and command of the offense. In the preseason, he completed 36 of 52 passes for 388 yards and a touchdown.“I’m going to be ready whenever my time comes up,” Jones said Sunday night.That time has come, and against the Dolphins in Week 1, he will most likely start opposite the player he succeeded at Alabama, Tua Tagovailoa. Newton could be attractive to teams with unsettled backup situations, among them the Jets, Dallas, Houston and Washington. But it is also possible that his vaccination status will deter other teams from signing him because they do not want to risk disrupting their season. More

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    Chelsea Proves a Point While Collecting One at Liverpool

    A red card put Chelsea to the test, but a draw won with control, composure and calm felt like much more.LIVERPOOL, England — Romelu Lukaku’s second half was not an especially glamorous one. There was a lot of running, darting into the slivers of space on either side of Liverpool’s central defenders, hoping for a ball that rarely came. There was a substantial amount of tussling and wrestling with Joel Matip, in particular, the two scrabbling for every inch of ground.There were not, conversely, many touches: only 20 in all after halftime, not quite one every two minutes. There was only, in the entire span of that 45 minutes, one scoring chance, a single moment that Lukaku spent his entire night trying to conjure, a snapshot from just inside the penalty area. He caught it well. No sooner had it left his foot than Virgil van Dijk blocked it.Such is the lot of the striker, of course: all of those moments of glory, as they wheel away, their arms aloft, adulation pouring forth upon them from the stands are the product of countless hours of unseen, unyielding and often underappreciated work. Every goal is reward for all of the effort silently expended. Lukaku, now in his second tenure at Chelsea, has been doing this long enough to be used to it.Even then, though, Saturday’s 1-1 draw at Liverpool will have felt like an arduous evening. Circumstances had dictated that Lukaku spent much of the second half looking backward, rather than forward. Chelsea had been leading, through a clever header from Kai Havertz, with the clock ticking toward halftime when Reece James handled the ball on the goal line.James was — eventually — sent off, Mohamed Salah converted the penalty, and Anfield smelled blood. From that moment, it was clear that Chelsea’s second half would be dedicated to holding out, not pushing on, and Lukaku, restored to the club for $135 million this summer, would endure an evening of silent toil.Chelsea striker Romelu Lukaku tangled with Liverpool’s Virgil van Dijk, right, and Joel Matip all afternoon.Peter Powell/ReutersThanks to both his cost — Lukaku is now the most expensive player in soccer history in terms of cumulative transfer fees, at least until Kylian Mbappé joins Real Madrid — and that status, there is a natural inclination to assume that the final piece in the puzzle is also the most important, that this Chelsea team is now constructed for, and around, Romelu Lukaku.His first display, at Arsenal last week, did little to disabuse anyone of that notion. He played there with all of the intent and menace of an avenging hero, scoring within 15 minutes of the start of his second spell in England; he may well have single-handedly robbed Pablo Marí, his direct opponent that day, of any scrap of self-belief for several years.His second game, on Saturday, served as a reminder that there can only be a final piece if the puzzle is nearly complete. Lukaku was, through no fault of his own, an optional extra for much of this game, against one of Chelsea’s putative rivals for the title, and yet the club’s traveling fans still greeted the final whistle of a roar of approval.Thomas Tuchel’s team had not won, of course, not in any strict, literal sense, but championships are built on moral victories, too, and this one was resounding. Chelsea — even playing at a disadvantage after James departed, in front of a baying crowd, against a team with one of the most potent attacking tridents in world soccer — produced a display of quite stunning control, and composure, and calm.There was no dispute that the ball hit Chelsea defender Reece James on the line, keeping it out of the goal.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe referee, Anthony Taylor, deemed it a penalty, and a red card.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesChelsea’s captain César Azpilicueta, and nearly everyone else in blue, disagreed.Peter Powell/ReutersFor much of the first half, Chelsea had frustrated its host, seemingly reducing the great green sprawl of Anfield — the open expanses in which Liverpool thrives — to nothing but a postage stamp. Every way that Jürgen Klopp’s team turned, there was a blue jersey. Chelsea has an inexorable ability to fill space, to turn every alley blind.Liverpool had been growing a little rushed, a little ragged as it sought a way out of that vise, with van Dijk and Trent Alexander-Arnold at one point reduced to despairing loudly at each other over the width of the field: Van Dijk wanted his teammate to push forward; Alexander-Arnold could not see where he was supposed to go.The penalty, and the red card, alleviated that pressure, but it redoubled Chelsea’s determination. Tuchel reorganized: Thiago Silva came on in the heart of defense, César Azpilicueta shifted out to the right, the indefatigable Mason Mount played as a holding midfielder and an attacking midfielder and an auxiliary right wing back, too.Chelsea had lost N’Golo Kanté to an injury at the break, a third cause of regret, and yet his spirit seemed to suffuse his team. In 45 minutes in which Liverpool exerted a monopoly on the ball, in which Lukaku barely featured, it did not create a single, clear-cut chance. There were a handful of efforts from range, but no way through, no way around, no way out. Even Klopp, in the aftermath, could barely contain his admiration. “A man extra is not a massive advantage against a side with the defending skills they have,” he said.Liverpool’s Andy Robertson with Chelsea’s Mason Mount.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is this, as much as the threat of Lukaku, that makes Chelsea such a threat: the air of invulnerability, of redoubtable stolidity, that Tuchel has bestowed on his team in his eight months as coach. Chelsea has the firepower to see off the majority of the Premier League’s teams. But just as important is that it has the battery to keep out the great and the good.It is easy, in the frenzy of the summer, as new players arrive to garland old teams, to believe that what matters is who can call upon the most talent, that titles are handed out to the sides with the most dazzling squad lists and the greatest expenditures.But that is not quite how it works. There is another stage to the process: those resources have to be fashioned into a functioning unit, all of those gifted individuals crafted into a team. Lukaku may yet prove the final piece in the puzzle for Chelsea. What matters more, though, is that Tuchel had already put the rest of it together. More