Raphael Stevens

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    A Nets Coach, a Few Ex-Pros and a Spanish Club With a Plan

    Mallorca, a Spanish team that has struggled to find its level but just won promotion back to La Liga, is finding out.Graeme Le Saux spent the last year mapping out two futures.In one, the club he helps run, Real Mallorca, would remain in Spain’s second division. Its budget would be halved, and difficult decisions would need to be made. Some players might have to be sold. Horizons would be lowered. That was, to borrow a term that has become familiar this last year, the worst-case scenario.In the alternative — the best case — Real Mallorca would be promoted, back to the bright lights of La Liga. The club’s cash flow would increase, and increase considerably, as television revenue poured in. The team would have to be bolstered, rather than deconstructed. Ambition, though modest, would flutter through the club.As a director of Mallorca, Le Saux saw the complication. It was, he said, a little like going to NASA and asking it either to put a satellite into orbit or to mount a fully-manned mission to Mars, but refusing to decide which until the day of departure. And you did not know the budget. Also, the same four people had to work on both projects. Le Saux was preparing for two futures that opened doors into divergent realities.Mallorca players last summer. In May, they clinched a return to La Liga.Isaac Buj/Getty ImagesLike everyone at Mallorca, Le Saux is acclimatized to that sort of uncertainty. Five years ago, a group headed by Robert Sarver — the owner of the N.B.A.’s Phoenix Suns — bought the club as it languished, anchored by debt, in Spain’s second division.The takeover attracted attention, at the time, because Sarver’s co-investors were not the usual faceless Wall Street types: they included Steve Nash, now the coach of the Brooklyn Nets, and Stuart Holden and Kyle Martino, both former United States internationals turned broadcasters.Andy Kohlberg, once a professional tennis player, would serve as team president. Le Saux — a former Premier League winner and England international, now a mainstay of NBC’s soccer coverage in the United States — came on board a couple of years later, first as an adviser and then as a director.It gave Mallorca the air of a grand experiment. Various teams in Europe — most notably Ajax and Bayern Munich — employ former players in front office or executive roles. But they are grand institutions, places bonded to longstanding traditions, more accustomed to trying to preserve tried-and-tested methods than forging new paths. Mallorca, by contrast, was effectively a blank slate. It was a chance to see what would happen if athletes could build a club in their own image.In a way, the result is almost underwhelming. It turns out, if the athletes were in charge, they would be extraordinarily sensible. They would think long-term. They would devote considerable time and energy to building what Kohlberg calls “a winning culture,” though Le Saux generally prefers “identity.”Steve Nash, center, and Stu Holden watching Mallorca play Barcelona in 2019.Alejandro Garcia/EPA, via ShutterstockThat is not to say their investment and interest is not commercially minded. Before the coronavirus pandemic, one of Mallorca’s great innovations was to introduce the first “tunnel club” in Spanish soccer, a place where corporate guests or well-heeled fans could pay a premium price for a premium seat, taking in the game while eating fresh-baked pizza and drinking cocktails.It is the sort of idea that, in general, would be greeted with scorn and derision in many places in Europe: American owners trampling over the proud traditions of the game in an effort to make a quick buck. Kohlberg’s explanation, though, sounds eminently reasonable: It was a way of “segmenting the fan experience and the customer experience,” allowing ordinary fans to enjoy the game as they always have, while accepting that some people want to, well, eat pizza and drink cocktails.Of far more concern to all of them is the way the sporting side of Mallorca is run. The principles are the same ones that bind most of Europe’s upwardly mobile teams: having a single, stylistic thread running from the first team down to the youth ranks; focusing on and investing in the academy, allowing the club to harvest homegrown talent; making coaching appointments with that vision in mind, rather than jumping at whoever happens to be fashionable or successful at the time.It is not a particularly quick process. “It took 15 years with the Suns to build that culture,” Kohlberg said. It is not an absolute one, either. “It does not mean winning every year,” he said. “It means getting to the playoffs more often than not.” And it is not, crucially, one that has any shortcuts.Mallorca isn’t used to things breaking its way when it faces Spain’s giants.Juan Medina/ReutersSoccer is obsessed with the idea that there is some sort of magic formula to success: that it can be wholly attributed to a manager’s decision to ride a bicycle or that team spirit can be developed by a particularly moist banana bread. Most famously, allowing players to eat ketchup is a crucial ingredient in both success and failure.There is a reason for this: Trivia is imbued with explanatory power because the real difference between victory and defeat is long and painstaking and, deep down, not especially attention-grabbing.“A winning culture starts with management and ownership, and then it is finding people who are consistent with that,” Kohlberg said. “Whether they are involved with training or nutrition or physiotherapy, they all have to buy in to it. And it means not continuing with people who don’t fit into that culture.”Having an ownership group that instinctively understands that — that has experienced, firsthand, the sorts of environments that thrive and the sorts that do not — gives Mallorca an idea of what makes a difference, of what matters. The former professionals he can lean on, Kohlberg said, have an instinctive awareness of what a winning culture looks like.And yet they know, too, that no matter how hard you work, how good you are, how many things you get right, nothing is guaranteed. Mallorca’s long-term vision might always have been in sharp focus, but its perspective has rarely been still. In the five years since Sarver and his group arrived, it has not played in the same division in consecutive seasons.Mallorca’s stadium will host games in La Liga again next season, when the club’s biggest challenge will be staying up.Javier Barbancho/ReutersIn the ownership group’s first full season, the club was relegated to the regionalized third tier of Spanish soccer. “That was a real shock to them, I think,” Le Saux said. “But they knew that they had to make it the best thing that ever happened to them.” The club was promoted back to the second tier a year later, and then jumped straight to La Liga, too. “I had to explain that it was a unicorn moment,” Le Saux said. “It was not the sort of thing that really happened.”Mallorca narrowly fell short of retaining its place in the top flight last year. In the summer, it lost its chief executive, and its star forward effectively went on strike, trying to force a transfer.It spent this season battling for promotion, confirming yet another change of status last month, with three games to go. Only at that point did Le Saux know what the future looked like. Rather than another year in orbit, Mallorca would be going to Mars. And it had about two months to prepare.Many ownership groups would find that infuriating, proof of the ultimate irrationality of soccer. “We are trying to change the culture, the academy, the infrastructure, and that would be easier to do if we weren’t bouncing up and down,” Kohlberg said. Spanish soccer’s financial rules add to the complexity, since the owners are limited by what they are allowed to invest in the team.Some, in that situation, might abandon their principles, seeking an immediate fix just to stabilize. Others might, perhaps, launch some sort of breakaway project, to try to abandon the possibility of relegation altogether. It would be a stretch to say that anyone at Mallorca has enjoyed the uncertainty. “It has been difficult, emotionally and financially,” Kohlberg said.But it feels as if the athlete’s perspective is slightly different than the tycoon’s. Kohlberg takes great pride in having learned to be “nimble and conservative,” to foster an environment in which the club can take every twist and turn and yet never lose sight of its ultimate destination, or its preferred method of transport.Like Le Saux, and Nash, and Holden — Martino has divested his interest in the club — Kohlberg understands that, sometimes, you do not win. Sometimes you try your best and it does not work out. “You can only control what you can control,” he said.At the end of last season, once promotion was assured, Mallorca’s coach, Luis Garcia, decided to give a few of his lesser-used players a chance to take the field. “Not a weakened team,” Le Saux said. “Just a different team.” The club’s ultimate target already assured, the players might have felt able to go through the motions: Nothing, after all, was riding on these games.Instead, Mallorca won twice and, with the season almost over, was on course not only to win promotion but to claim the championship. “We were three minutes away from winning the league,” Le Saux said.Then its final opponent, Ponferradina, scored what Le Saux described as a “really good goal,” and that dream evaporated. He does not dress it up as bad luck, or claim the club was robbed of a glory that was its due. Sometimes, the other team scores a goal. Sometimes, in sport, you do not get what you want. You can only control what you can control. The athletes know that, even when they are in charge.A Lack of ImaginationCarlo Ancelotti, just starting his second stint at Real Madrid, with Zinedine Zidane, who just finished his.Juanjo Martin/EPA, via ShutterstockCarlo Ancelotti is back at Real Madrid. Massimiliano Allegri is back at Juventus. By those standards, Tottenham’s potential appointment of Antonio Conte, fresh from guiding Inter Milan to the Serie A title, would almost be dangerously novel. But whether Conte gets the job or not hinges, it seems, on whether Spurs can tempt Mauricio Pochettino to return from Paris St.-Germain.Every summer brings a game of managerial musical chairs, but two things stand out about this edition. The first is the sheer scale of it. It is not just Real Madrid, Juventus, Inter and Spurs looking for new coaches, or even those teams — Everton, Lazio and (possibly) P.S.G. — who suddenly find themselves in need of a replacement, but a pattern across Europe.There are still three Premier League jobs open, at Everton, Wolves and Crystal Palace. Roma, Napoli and Fiorentina all have new coaches. A majority of Bundesliga teams will go into next season under fresh leadership, and so will Lille, the French champion, and Lyon. It is verging on a complete reset.Except that it is not, because — Germany aside — so many of the names are so intensely familiar. The second defining trait of this year’s coaching carousel, particularly at the elite level, is how uninspired so many of these appointments are. Ancelotti is a fine manager, one of the best of his generation, but his return to Madrid — which he led to the Champions League title in 2014 and which fired him a year later — is an absolute failure of imagination, of vision.A mural of José Mourinho in Rome. His appeal to clubs never goes out of style.Andreas Solaro/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJuventus restoring Allegri is essentially an admission that the last two years have been a waste of everyone’s time. Spurs fired José Mourinho to find a coach with an expansive style and a belief in youth, and yet seem now to have fixated on Conte, who has neither, but does come with a thicket of championship medals around his neck.Mourinho at Roma, Luciano Spalletti at Napoli, Gennaro Gattuso at Fiorentina — these are all experienced, gifted coaches, ones who do not deserve to be condemned to the scrapheap, who still have something to offer. But still: They are hardly redolent of some grand vision for how to compete for trophies or restore a club for glory.Not one is a bold, daring choice, an effort to do something a little bit different, to see if there is another way. A stagnation has settled in, a risk aversion, one that will do nothing but perpetuate the status quo. This is a time for new ideas, but those ideas will not come from the same old faces.CorrespondenceA little nostalgia hit from Rod Auyang, who still “harbors a fondness for the ‘golden goal’ sudden death system for settling ties after 120 minutes,” rather than penalty shootouts. I quite liked the golden goal, too, though I’d like to see a slight amendment: maybe after every five minutes without a goal, each team loses a player?Tim Fuller is of the same mind. “Play an unlimited series of 10-minute periods in extra time,” he writes. “The first goal in extra time would be a ‘golden goal’ that ends the game.” To stave off fatigue-related injuries, he has two suggestions: one is to remove a player from both teams every few minutes (good), and the other is to forbid even the goalkeepers using their hands (bad, but potentially quite funny).Let’s check in with Chicago Fire fans after last week’s thoughts on their nickname.Eileen T. Meslar/Associated PressSeveral of you, including Joey Klonowski and Chris Conant, got in touch to say that Chicago is very proud of its fire, thank you very much, and I am happy to stand corrected. Whether the city is proud of the Fire, I’m not sure. And thanks to Jim Blaney, for pointing out that while Naples Volcanoes is a bad name, Naples Lava is a brilliant one. My other suggestion would have been the Naples Pyroclastic Flow, but Jim’s is better.And I loved this email from David Goguen, on the subject of authenticity. “I often let my 6-year-old son pick the matches we watch together,” David wrote. “The other day he chose a tie between Forward Madison [good name, needs punctuation] and Union Omaha.“He was tickled when the Madison fans started squawking like flamingoes in support of their club. An original gesture, perhaps a bit ridiculous, but traditions have been forged through less. And I thought it fitted right in with the quaint stands, the bucolic trees behind, and the smoke from the vendors’ grills.“It got me thinking about how every tradition has to start somewhere. There was a moment on Merseyside when the supporters heard ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ through the speakers for the first time, and maybe they were baffled. The first few times I heard FC Koln’s anthem I thought it was a lost track from Scorpions, but now it gives me chills. History has to start somewhere, and authenticity by it’s very definition can’t be faked. Here’s to real roots, however absurd, and more flamingos.”(On the subject of Forward, Madison! I loved this piece, by the sometime Times contributor Leander Schaerlaeckens, on the trend toward original, innovative jerseys not only in M.L.S., but throughout the American soccer landscape. The Kingston Stockade number, for one, is lovely. But it will have to go some to beat what longtime readers will know is officially the best jersey ever produced.) More

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    How to Watch Euro 2020: Schedule, Location, Teams and More

    11 cities, 24 teams and hundreds of headaches: The European soccer championship is here after a year’s delay. Here’s what you need to know.The European Championship, generally considered the biggest soccer tournament after the World Cup, is being held this summer after a year’s delay because of the coronavirus pandemic. Here’s a rundown on the teams, the players and the host cities for what is still being called Euro 2020.When and where is the tournament?Euro 2020 — back on, with a few changes, but still refusing to admit it’s 2021 now — runs from June 11 to July 11.The Euros, like the World Cup, traditionally have been hosted by one country, or two in partnership. But for the current edition, European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, decided to spread the games around to at least a dozen cities across Europe. The choice was not universally supported, given the inherent logistical hurdles of managing sites as far apart as Spain and Azerbaijan. But it turned out to be an even more awkward decision once the coronavirus hit.First, the entire tournament was postponed a year. Then, only weeks before the first game, coronavirus restrictions for several more changes: Dublin lost its games, and several matches in Spain were shifted to Seville from Bilbao.Unless something else changes, 11 European cities will host games: Amsterdam, Baku, Bucharest, Budapest, Budapest, Copenhagen, Glasgow, London, Munich, Seville, St. Petersburg.The first game, Italy vs. Turkey, is June 11 in Rome. The knockout stages begin on June 26, and the semifinals and final all will take place at Wembley Stadium in London. The final is July 11.Robert Lewandowski, who broke the Bundesliga goals record this season, is Poland’s biggest threat.Roman Koksarov/Associated PressWho’s playing?Twenty-four teams qualified for the tournament, including all the major European powers you would expect: France, Spain, Italy, Germany, England. New rules created qualifying paths for lower-profile countries who normally miss out, allowing North Macedonia to qualify for the first time. Finland, which qualified in the traditional way, is also making its debut.Just about all the top-name players from Europe, like Robert Lewandowski of Poland, Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal and Kylian Mbappé of France, will be there. Karim Benzema is back in the French team after being dropped five years ago in a sex tape blackmail scandal, but several top players are out, and Spain will arrived at a major tournament without a Real Madrid player for the first time.Who’s missing?Qualifying knocked out regular faces like Serbia and Norway, and Romania and Azerbaijan will host games even as their teams failed to make the field.The absence of Norway will mean no Erling Haaland, whose transfer saga may be the story of the summer. Also missing will be Zlatan Ibrahimovic of Sweden, who has a knee injury, and the veteran Spain defender Sergio Ramos, who was omitted by his coach because of fitness concerns. The Netherlands goalkeeper Jasper Cillessen was dropped after testing positive for the coronavirus, and Germany’s Toni Kroos has only recently returned to training after a recent bout with it.A more recent, more worrisome injury has Belgium concerned: its star midfielder Kevin de Bruyne of Belgium sustained a fractured nose and eye socket in the Champions League final. His status for the monthlong tournament is unclear.Will fans be allowed?Yes, but the numbers and rules vary by city, and the rules are still changing. Scotland recently urged its fans, who can attend games in Glasgow, not to travel to London when the team plays there.The shifting of matches may not be over, either. As teams advance, the tournament schedule still could be affected by rules about travel set by various European governments.Who has won in the past?Portugal is the defending champion. The tournament dates to 1960, and Germany and Spain have the most wins, with three. England is the highest-profile team never to have won it (or even made the final).Who is going to win this time?France is the favorite in the betting at this stage, with England just behind. But the tournament is considered quite open, with Belgium, Spain, Germany, Portugal, Italy and the Netherlands all given a fighting chance. Slovakia and Hungary have the longest shots, at 500-1 or more.Thomas Müller and Germany will rank, as usual, among the tournament favorites.Andreas Schaad/Associated PressYou can also bet on who will score the most goals: The current favorites there are Harry Kane of England, Romelu Lukaku of Belgium, France’s Mbappé and Portugal’s Ronaldo.How does the tournament work?The 24 teams are divided into six groups of four and play three games each in the preliminary round. The top two teams from each group, plus four of the six third-place teams, all advance to a 16-team knockout round.After that, it’s single elimination, with tied games heading to extra time and then penalty kicks, if necessary, to produce a winner.How can I watch?In the United States, the bulk of the games will be on ESPN, with a few on ABC. When two games are played simultaneously, one will run on ESPN2 instead. For Spanish language coverage, many games will be on Univision. Games also will be streamed on ESPN+.Broadcasters elsewhere include Bell Media and TVA (Canada), BBC and ITV (Britain), Optus (Australia), M6 and TF1 (France), ARD and ZDF (Germany) and Wowow (Japan). Here’s a complete list.Now, the most important question. Is there a mascot?Yes. He is Skillzy. He is reportedly inspired by “freestyling, street football and panna,” which is a fancy term for a nutmeg, the move in which a player kicks the ball through an opponent’s legs.Skillzy follows in the footsteps of Super Victor (France 2016), Goaliath (England 1996) and Pinocchio (Italy 1980).Like many sporting mascots, Skillzy has drawn a mixed reception. You be the judge.You might say the Euro 2020 mascot, Skillzy, is edgy. You might also wonder why he’s wearing a hoodie and long sleeves in the summer heat.Robert Ghement/EPA, via Shutterstock More

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    N.F.L. to Drop Race-Based Measures in Concussion Settlement

    Black players’ dementia claims were being measured differently from white players’. The change could prompt a reassessment of hundreds of previously denied cases.The N.F.L. said it would scrap the use of a disputed race-based method of evaluating dementia claims made by former players in the league’s concussion settlement and pledged to evaluate for evidence of bias the hundreds of claims that had already been filed.The announcement came several months after the federal judge overseeing the roughly $1 billion settlement ordered the league and lawyers representing the 20,000 former players who are covered by the agreement to review the use of separate standards for evaluating dementia in white and Black players.In August, two retired Black players, Kevin Henry and Najeh Davenport, filed a civil rights suit and a suit against the seven-year-old settlement that accused the league of “explicitly and deliberately” discriminating against Black players by using separate race-based benchmarks to determine their eligibility for dementia-based payouts, which can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.The judge dismissed their suits, but the cases brought light to the evaluations and prompted members of Congress to request data from the N.F.L. to determine whether Black players were being discriminated against. They also prompted an ABC News report and led more than a dozen wives of Black retired N.F.L. players to send the judge in the case a petition with nearly 50,000 signatures calling for an end to race-norming.As it has in previous responses, the N.F.L. denied that the use of the race-based norms was discriminatory. But in a statement Wednesday, the league said it was committed to eliminating the use of those norms and finding race-neutral alternatives with the help of specialists in neuropsychology. While those new measures have not been identified, the decision to review old dementia claims under new assessment tools could mean that potentially hundreds more players will receive payments from the settlement.“Everyone agrees race-based norms should be replaced, but no off-the-shelf alternative exists, and that’s why these experts are working to solve this decades-old issue,” the league said. “The replacement norms will be applied prospectively and retrospectively for those players who otherwise would have qualified for an award but for the application of race-based norms.”While some former players have blamed the N.F.L., some have also taken aim at Christopher Seeger, the lead lawyer for more than 20,000 former players, who the players say knew about the abuse of race-based benchmarks as early as 2018 and did not address the issue. Lawyers for Henry and Davenport, the two former players who accused the league of discrimination, asked the court to replace Seeger in March.The former N.F.L. players Ken Jenkins, right, and Clarence Vaughn III, center right, and their wives, Amy Lewis, center, and Brooke Vaughn, left, carried petitions demanding an end to the use of race-based benchmarks in the N.F.L. concussion settlement to the federal courthouse in Philadelphia in May.Matt Rourke/Associated PressIn a statement also released on Wednesday, Seeger apologized for not having recognized the problems caused by the use of separate benchmarks for Black and white players.“I am sorry for the pain this episode has caused Black former players and their families,” Seeger said. “Ultimately, this settlement only works if former players believe in it, and my goal is to regain their trust and ensure the N.F.L. is fully held to account.”That trust may take time to rebuild. Lacey Leonard, whose husband, Louis, 36, played for six teams over five seasons, said Seeger’s apology was not enough. Leonard received a settlement after filing a dementia claim because he has a host of cognitive issues, including memory loss, anger and depression. When the claims auditor found no problems with Leonard’s claim, the N.F.L. appealed the settlement, and his claim was reversed.“Honestly, it was a half apology,” Lacey Leonard said in a phone interview. “I think the N.F.L. owes more to disabled players. It’s disheartening that in 2021 that we are still fighting systemic racism.”The N.F.L. did not say how long it would take for the league, Seeger and the panel of experts to create a new system to evaluate dementia claims. More than $800 million in claims has already been approved by the settlement administrator for a range of neurological and cognitive diseases. That number could increase significantly if many dementia claims that were initially rejected are reversed and approved.It is unclear how many Black players may have been misdiagnosed or had diagnoses that were overturned. More than 7,000 former players took free neuropsychological and neurological exams offered in the settlement. Some of them were told they did not have dementia and might be unaware of how their exams were scored.Cyril Smith, a lawyer for Henry and Davenport, asserted that white players’ dementia claims were being approved at two to three times the rate of those of Black players. But Smith was unable to substantiate his claim because, he said, Seeger and the N.F.L. had not shared any data on the approval rates for dementia claims by white and Black players.Seeger said that data would be released when new tests for dementia claims and an investigation looking at whether players were discriminated against had been submitted to the court. More

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    Chelsea's Champions League Secret: N'Golo Kanté

    Every coach has a plan. But players still decide games, and only Chelsea has Kanté. In the Champions League final, that made all the difference.PORTO, Portugal — Another attack had broken down, another minute had passed, and by now there was just a hint of panic in Kyle Walker’s eyes. The Champions League title was slipping away. And so he did what he has been conditioned to do these past five years. He turned to the place that always gives him the answers.As Chelsea dallied over taking a goal kick, hoping to see a few more precious seconds ebb away as it closed out its victory, Walker and Manchester City’s coach, Pep Guardiola, held an impromptu summit on the touchline. It was not hard to work out the dynamic. Walker wanted to know what to do. What had Guardiola seen? Where was the breach in the line? How did they rescue this?Guardiola responded with a torrent of instructions, as he always does. He is never short of ideas. Ordinarily, he passes them on to one or other of his fullbacks — the closest players to him — and they diffuse them through the rest of the team. This time, though, was different.Walker could see Guardiola’s lips moving. He could hear the words coming out, just about, above the din of Chelsea’s jubilant fans. But there was a look of blank incomprehension on his face, as if Guardiola had accidentally addressed him in Catalan or issued his instructions as a rap.Pep Guardiola and his players, out of time and out of answers.Pool photo by David RamosWalker furrowed his brow and stared, hard, at his coach, in a vain attempt to make it all make sense. Whether what Guardiola said got through, whether it was put into practice or not, a couple of moments later Walker was back at the touchline, this time with the ball in his hands. He took a couple of steps, and then launched it long, deep into the penalty area. A beat later, the same thing played out.Manchester City, that byword for sophistication and planning and command under Guardiola, the outstanding strategist of his generation, had resorted to soccer’s final roll of the dice, its last resort for the damned: the long throw-in.In the biggest game in the club’s history, in his own long-awaited return to the Champions League final, the system that Guardiola has so obsessively, so painstakingly coded into his players’ double helixes for half a decade had not just failed. It had broken down completely.There is a reason that, in times of trouble, Manchester City’s players seek the counsel of the bench. For all that Guardiola’s teams are often characterized as freewheeling, expressive, adventurous, the reality is — and this is not a criticism — the contrary. Manchester City’s great strength is not its pioneer spirit. It is that it has the most detailed map.Or, rather, Guardiola does. Much of what makes City so brilliant is not spontaneous, off-the-cuff virtuosity. It has all been trained and honed and perfected. Those slick interchanges of passing, all of the players darting into precise pockets of space to unpick the fabric of a massed defense? That is not improvisation. It is programming.And so when things go awry, when the plan does not seem to be working, the reflex of Guardiola’s players is to ask for further directions. It is hard to watch City for any period of time and not notice it. It is a reflex now: When some issue arises, the first instinct is always to look to the bench, to be given an update. There is no real room for personal interpretation. Under Guardiola, the system is king, and Guardiola is the system.He is not unique in that. Soccer in the 21st century is a cult of the supermanager: not only Guardiola but José Mourinho, Jürgen Klopp and Antonio Conte, Julian Nagelsmann and Mauricio Pochettino and Thomas Tuchel, the freshly minted champion of Europe.Chelsea’s Thomas Tuchel brought his family onto the field to celebrate after the final, a year after they had consoled him after he lost in it.Pool photo by Pierre-Philippe MarcouTuchel with Roman Abramovich. Tuchel told reporters after the game that it was the first time he had met the owner who hired him in January.Pool photo by Michael SteeleThey have diverse approaches and distinct philosophies, but they are united by a core belief: that at its heart, soccer is a game of competing systems. What defines the identity of the victor and the vanquished are choreographed movements and passing patterns and detailed tactics of each team. They all believe that it is the coach who has agency, that whoever has the best system will win.And yet that does not quite paint the whole picture. It would be perfectly valid to analyze Chelsea’s slender and yet convincing victory in Porto on Saturday as a tale of two systems: the one inculcated by Tuchel, brightly conceived and adroitly executed, overcoming the one unexpectedly — and to some extent inexplicably — adopted by Guardiola.Rather than stand by the approach that had made City all but untouchable in England since January, Guardiola chose to dispense with the services of a holding midfield player. Instead, he played Ilkay Gundogan in that role, with an array of creative, ball-playing playmakers around him.The temptation is to assess that call in psychological terms. This was Guardiola second-guessing himself, as he tends to in this competition, because he is so obsessed with winning it. Or, conversely, it was Guardiola distilling his beliefs down to their purest essence, trying to use the grandest stage of all to showcase his latest idea, the four-dimensional chess move of the boss-level supercoach.In all likelihood, the rationale was probably more technical. Guardiola expected Tuchel to sit back and defend, which would have made a holding midfielder an unnecessary encumbrance. Instead, he would need more players who could pick their way through Chelsea’s back line. It was, if one sees the game as a struggle between systems, the logical move.Reece James, one of Chelsea’s homegrown champions.Pool photo by Manu FernandezThe problem is that the game is not a struggle between systems. Or, at least, that is not all it is. On a more fundamental level, a game is also a struggle between humans: a physiological one, a psychological one, an intensely and intimately personal one. It is an examination of your fitness and your talent, your reactions and resolve. Chelsea’s system might have been superior. But so too, crucially, were its individuals.Not simply because, where City’s players seemed diminished by the occasion, driven to a frenzy by their desperation to deliver the club its self-appointed destiny, Chelsea’s appeared to be inspired by it.Reece James and Mason Mount, fresh-faced and locally reared, improved with every passing minute. Kai Havertz, the goal scorer, gave a statement performance, one that warranted his captain César Azpilicueta’s assertion that he will go on to be a “superstar.” Jorginho seemed unruffled. Antonio Rüdiger was nothing but ruffle.But more significant still was the fact that while City’s players had to turn to the bench to solve their problems, Chelsea had someone on the field to do it for them. Arsène Wenger was probably underselling it when he described N’Golo Kanté’s performance as “unbelievable.”With metronomic, almost eerie regularity, City built attacks only to find out that at the key moment, Kanté was there, in just the right place to win a tackle, at just the right angle to block a pass, at just the right time to interrupt the plan. At time, it felt as if someone had passed Kanté a script. He did not wait for instruction from the side. He just went to where the danger was, and eliminated it.Kanté was, in his own way, no less decisive here than Lionel Messi was in the 2009 and 2011 finals, or Cristiano Ronaldo was in 2014. The fact he is still pigeonholed as a holding midfielder means this will not be remembered as “the Kanté final,” but it would hardly be unwarranted.Kanté seemed to understand City’s plan as well, or better, than its players did.Pool photo by Michael SteeleBut to focus exclusively on his destructive capabilities, formidable though they are, is to do Kanté a disservice. He was also, often, the one who led Chelsea’s counterattacks. He determined the shape of the midfield. His passing helped to destabilize City’s defense. For a few minutes in the first half, he did a passable impression of Frank Lampard, turning his hand to breaking into the City penalty area, timing his run late.He did what great midfielders do, and shape-shifted as the flow of the game demanded. No wonder, as tends to happen with Kanté, a meme appeared at one point, detailing the great midfield threesomes of the recent past: Barcelona’s Xavi, Andres Iniesta and Sergio Busquets; Real Madrid’s Casemiro, Toni Kroos and Luka Modric; and Kanté, all by himself.That was, in the end, the difference on Saturday night. One team had Kanté on it, and the other did not. Perhaps there is some system that Guardiola could have conjured to negate him or to bypass him, but it is not immediately clear what form that would take.Even in the era of the supercoach, it is not always the finer tactical details alone that explain a result. The system is not always king. A game can be defined by ideas, but it can also be defined by people. And when it is, the visionaries on the sideline do not — cannot — have all the answers, because there are some things that do not appear on maps, no matter how finely drawn. More

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    Champions League Final: Chelsea Beats Manchester City

    PORTO, Portugal — Manchester City’s players did not seem to want to leave. Not right away, at least. They stood, as if frozen in place, as Chelsea’s players heaved the prize City craves more than any other into the air. They could not go. To go, after all, would be to accept that it was real, that it was over.They had found themselves on the far side of the field at the Estádio do Dragão, silver medals draped around their necks. To get to the mournful safety of the locker room, they would have to walk past the seats that had, only a few minutes earlier, contained the massed ranks of their fans, hoping and willing that City might find a goal, that it might find salvation, that it might win a Champions League final it would go on to lose to Chelsea, 1-0. The seats were all but empty now. The fans had not stuck around to watch, to wallow.Slowly, the players mustered their last vestiges of energy and began their long, sorrowful march. Several were on the verge of tears. Several more were long past the verge. Others seemed glazed, scarcely able to move, as if they were buffering, trying to process what had happened, what this meant.It was just as they started to move that the fireworks went off, crackling and glittering and thudding into the sky. Soon, City’s whole team and its staff members were obscured, swallowed whole by a great cloud of cordite by fireworks that were supposed — were expected — to be for them. That is the thing about soccer, about sports. Sometimes, things do not turn out like they should.Kyle Walker and his teammates had to endure a celebration they had hoped would be their own.Jose Coelho/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn a lot of ways, Chelsea and Manchester City are two sides of the same coin. They are the vanguard of the money that has swept into soccer over the last 20 years, brought by hedge funds and vulture capitalists and oligarchs and nation states. They are, depending on one’s perspective, either the great insurgents or the nouveaux riches.But they are, at the same time, fundamentally different. The Chelsea of Roman Abramovich has always embraced chaos. It has now won the Champions League twice, both times in seasons in which it changed its manager at the slightest hint of disappointment, in seasons when its ultimate triumph made little sense.The Chelsea that was champion of Europe in 2012 was managed by Roberto Di Matteo, who won the trophy without his captain and with a debutante left back. The Chelsea that repeated the trick in 2021 has a squad that is both vastly expensive and curiously incomplete. Its leading goal-scorer, domestically, is a defensive midfielder who only shoots, really, when he takes penalties. Its main striker does not score goals. He does not, at times, look like he knows how.Manchester City, by contrast, is a monument to control. In the 13 years since it was taken over by a member of the royal family of Abu Dhabi, it has sought to perfect every single aspect of being a soccer team. It has worked under the assumption that success is, effectively, a formula: that if all of the variables are regulated, winning is inevitable.And so City is the benchmark: it has the best youth academy, the best training facilities, it has a playing style that unifies the club from bottom to top. It has the most data and the biggest scouting network, it has the deepest squad and the greatest manager and the most sophisticated commercial operation and the largest network of sister clubs.Chelsea’s N’Golo Kanté, who dominated a midfield City had hoped to control.Pool photo by Susan VeraNone of it has come cheap. Quite how much all of it has cost is not possible to put a precise figure on, but it has cost not far off a couple of billion dollars, at the very least, to transform a soccer team that was a byword for disappointment into a gleaming advertisement for the modernity and mastery of its backers.It has worked. Under Pep Guardiola, City has risen to become the dominant force in English soccer. For three of the past five years, it has probably — by most metrics — been the best team in Europe, whatever that means, really: the most complete and the most consistent, the one with the highest ceiling.It is a constancy that has always evaded Chelsea, always too turbulent, too impatient, too comfortable with change. And it has been achieved by translating the control that defines the club into its playing style. Guardiola wants not just to have possession of the ball, but to have ownership of space itself: to dictate where passes go and where players do.All of it, each meticulously-selected piece of the puzzle, had been done with this moment in mind. The Champions League represents the ultimate fulfillment not just of Guardiola’s vision, but City’s. It is justification for all of that investment, vindication for all of those ideas, and it is reward for doing all of those things right.There is just one flaw. Success is not a formula. Not this sort of success, anyway, the success that relies on an alignment of the stars and the rub of the green and the minutiae of countless little moments. That is the undeniable, untameable nature of sport: that, in the end, there is always something that you cannot account for, something that you cannot control. That, sometimes, things do not turn out the way they should.Pep Guardiola, who has been in charge of some of Europe’s best teams for the past decade, failed again the win the trophy he values the most.David Ramos/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAnd so, in the game that represented that manifestation of its destiny, Manchester City sought to exert a supreme, almost obsessive, control, and found only chaos. Guardiola named a team full of attacking midfielders — one at left back, three in midfield, two more upfront — with the aim of starving Chelsea of first the ball and then hope. In the event, it was City who seemed frantic, uncertain, whizzing and whirling round the field at breakneck speed to try to slow down the game.It lost because Chelsea was the precise opposite. It is only six months since Thomas Tuchel, its coach, was fired by Paris St.-Germain, unable to recover from losing the Champions League final last season. He was tasked not only with replacing Frank Lampard, a beloved club legend who many fans thought deserved more time to prove his worth, but with shaping some sort of identifiable team from the morass of gifted, but drifting, players he inherited.He was told to fashion order from chaos, and this was his ultimate, his irrevocable proof. City barely laid a glove on Chelsea. It found its every path blocked, its every idea pre-empted, its every thought read. As Guardiola’s team grew more frenzied, Chelsea held its fire, bided its time, and waited for the moment to strike.Kai Havertz flicked the ball past City’s goalkeeper, Ederson, and turned it into the net in the 42nd minute.Michael Steele/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIts chance came just before halftime. For all those midfielders in Guardiola’s lineup, not one of them was in the vicinity of Mason Mount as he picked the ball up in his own half. Timo Werner, the nonscoring striker, darted into a channel, dragging City’s central defenders from their positions. Kai Havertz sprinted into the gap. Mount found him, and he bore down on goal, unencumbered, unaccompanied.That was enough. That was all Tuchel’s team needed. It would be Chelsea’s players, at the end, running around the field, running to their fans, running on fumes and on adrenaline, running nowhere in particular, running because joy that pure, that uncut, the joy of a dream realized, is beautiful chaos.And it would be City’s on that long march past those empty seats, through that cordite cloud stinging eyes already raw with tears, slowly coming to terms with the fact that — for now, at least — it is real, and it is over. This is the game they were gathered to win, the trophy that is the club’s ultimate purpose. This was their moment. But that is sports. Success is not a formula. Sometimes, things do not turn out as they should, as you expect. Sometimes, there is just a little bit of chaos.Pool photo by Susana Vera More

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    Wasn’t this game supposed to be in Turkey?

    The short answer to that question above is: yes. The reasons are more complicated and, like so many things these day, all related to the coronavirus.The Champions League final is in Portugal for the second year in a row. This time, like last year, it was a late solution, and each time it required the consent of officials in Turkey, which has now lost the chance to host the final two years in a row.A promenade in Istanbul earlier this week.Emrah Gurel/Associated PressThe decision earlier this month to move the final from Istanbul, which had recently re-entered a virus-related lockdown, came after discussions between European soccer leaders and British government officials, who had been seeking to bring the game to London, broke down over differences about quarantines and testing, among other issues.When those talks failed, Portugal’s soccer federation raised its hand and offered to be a safe harbor again. From my colleague Tariq Panja earlier this month:Discussions about a move were completed quickly. After City and Chelsea had confirmed the all-English final, and as talk swirled about a change of venue, Tiago Craveiro, the chief executive of the Portuguese soccer federation, reached out to UEFA. Officials at the soccer body were then reeling from that day’s sudden announcement that travelers from Britain faced severe restrictions for any travel to Turkey. That created a crisis that went well beyond questions about fan access.Players on both sides faced the prospect of having to isolate for 10 days upon their return to Britain, creating doubts over their participation in the European Championship, the national team competition organized by UEFA that is second in size and importance only to the FIFA World Cup.With Portugal on Britain’s green list — and thus subject to far less stringent travel rules — Craveiro offered to organize the final at short notice. Porto was picked because it did not get an opportunity to stage Champions League games last year when the event was confined in its Lisbon bubble. More

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    Pep Guardiola hasn’t been to the final in a decade. Really.

    Chelsea Manager Thomas Tuchel was in the Champions League final last season, when he coached Paris St.-Germain. His center back Thiago Silva started for him that day.But while Manchester City and Chelsea are annual fixtures in the competition, they (perhaps surprisingly) lack direct, or even recent, experience with the final. City’s Ilkay Gundogan has played in it. Chelsea’s Mateo Kovacic has watched it from the bench. Twice.But perhaps no one in today’s game is more associated with the game than Pep Guardiola, the Manchester City coach who started in it twice as a player and won it twice, spectacularly and memorably as the coach of Barcelona. What people forget is that despite all his (almost) all-conquering successes in later stops at Bayern Munich and more recently at City, Guardiola has not tasted the final since his last win with Barcelona in 2011.Rory Smith wrote this week about his ambitions, his missteps and why this weekend has been such a long time coming. More

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    Is the Champions League Final Christian Pulisic’s Moment?

    There is an American at today’s game. Two actually.Christian Pulisic is expected to feature for Chelsea, though it will be from off the bench, the high-water mark in stages for the high-water mark in American players in Europe.The other American, Manchester City goalkeeper Zack Steffen, most likely will be a spectator in Porto unless there is an emergency or two in his team’s camp. Steffen’s consolation is that he has already become the first American to win the Premier League.But for most fans in the United States, Pulisic will be the main talking point today. Even since he joined Chelsea from Germany’s Borussia Dortmund in 2019, for a $73 million fee that raised eyebrows on both sides of the Atlantic, he has battled to find his place in London, and his team.Chelsea and its fans have had little complaint about his play.Just last month, he scored the goal that provided a valuable point on the road against Real Madrid in semifinals.A week later he showed similar poise to set up a goal by Mason Mount that finished off Madrid.But the ongoing competition for places in Chelsea’s star-studded attack is never easy; a year after bringing Pulisic into a team that already had Mason Mount, who plays a similar game, Chelsea bought the German forwards Timo Werner and Kai Havertz.Injuries, too, have been a persistent issue for Pulisic, and that is perhaps part of the reason Chelsea Coach Thomas Tuchel has tended to see him as more of a second-half super sub than a 90-minute fixture in his team.But did his performance against Real Madrid, and some other strong outings this spring, change that impression? No. He will start on the bench as usual, but said this week that he would be ready when called.“I’ve learned a lot, I’ve come very far,” Pulisic said in an interview with CBS Sports this week. “There have been some real ups, also some times where I had some really difficult moments. I’m happy with my form now. I’m happy with the way I’m feeling. I’m confident.” More