Raphael Stevens

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    Champions League: Deep Pockets, Deep Benches, English Winners

    Manchester City and Chelsea seal an all-Premier League final thanks in part to resources and rosters that no club, not even their biggest rivals, can match.MANCHESTER, England — Edouard Mendy’s palm would still have been stinging from the Karim Benzema shot he had saved seconds before as his Chelsea teammates advanced down the field. N’Golo Kanté exchanged passes with Timo Werner, parting Real Madrid’s defense. Kai Havertz’s delicate chip clipped the bar and fell, gentle as a feather, onto Werner’s head.By the end of Wednesday’s game, Chelsea’s superiority would be painfully apparent, its place in the final of the Champions League its ample and just reward. Mason Mount would add a second goal, but there might have been many more. Havertz alone might have had three. Thomas Tuchel’s Chelsea cut Real Madrid apart with an ease that, at times, bordered on embarrassing.“They played better,” Casemiro, the anchor of Real Madrid’s overworked midfield would say. Thibaut Courtois, the Madrid goalkeeper, simply described Chelsea as “the superior team.” But in that space between Mendy’s save and Werner’s goal, what would grow into a chasm was but a sliver. All that separated this result from another, quite different, was an inch or two.Sergio Ramos and Real Madrid were swept aside at Chelsea.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt had been the same in Manchester’s springtime snow the previous night. Riyad Mahrez had given Manchester City the lead only a minute or two after Paris St.-Germain had thought, wrongly, that it had won a penalty. From that point, City was immaculate. In hindsight, its victory, too, seemed predetermined, inevitable.But in that moment — had the ball struck Oleksandr Zinchenko a few inches lower; had P.S.G. been able to capitalize on the pressure it had exerted in the opening exchanges — everything turned on nothing more than the bounce of a ball, the precise placement of an arm.The nature of sports determines that, in large part, interpretation is downstream from outcome. The explanation for and the understanding of how a result came about is retrofitted, reverse engineered, from the unassailable fact of the scoreline itself.The assumption, in the case of this week’s Champions League semifinals, is that the evident supremacy of Manchester City and Chelsea would have told regardless: that Chelsea would have created those chances even if Benzema had scored; that City would have possessed the wit and the imagination to overcome conceding an unjust penalty.Manchester City has the deepest squad in the world, allowing it to swap out one star for another at any time.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat is possible, of course. Make no mistake: Chelsea and Manchester City most definitely are better teams than Real Madrid and Paris St.-Germain. They are more complete, more coherent, smarter, fitter, better drilled. But at this level, among the handful of the greatest teams in world soccer, there is no such thing as a vast difference. There are only fine margins.That is what Pep Guardiola, the Manchester City coach, meant on Tuesday night when he said that there can be “something in the stars” in the Champions League. Strange things happen. The best team does not win. The dice roll. Games and destinies hinge on the merest details: a stroke of luck, a narrow offside, a player slipping as he takes a penalty.It is Guardiola’s job, of course, to do all he can to make sure his team is not susceptible to the vicissitudes of fate, to ensure that the players at his disposal are talented enough, that his tactical scheme is effective enough, that his squad is fit enough to minimize the power of what is, in effect, random chance. But most managers accept there is a limit to what they can do: Rafael Benítez, who won the Champions League with Liverpool, saw his job as getting his team to the semifinals. After that, he knew, to some extent he had to trust to luck.What is clear, though, is that increasingly those fine margins are falling in favor of English teams. Before the year 2000, there had never been a European Cup or Champions League final contested between teams from the same country. Since then, there have been eight: three all-Spanish finals (2000, 2014, 2016), one each for Italy (2003) and Germany (2013); and three for England (2008, 2019 and, now, 2021).That concentration, of course, reflects not only the preponderance of teams from western Europe’s major leagues in the competition — those four countries now supply half of the teams that comprise the tournament’s group stage — but serves to demonstrate the shifting power balance between them, evidence of which league possesses the mix of tactical nous, technical virtuosity and sheer physicality to take center stage.When Italian teams led the world in tactics, they tended to dominate the Champions League. Spain’s golden generation, combined with first the brilliance of Lionel Messi and then Real Madrid’s second-generation Galacticos, were so technically gifted that no master plan could stifle them, until Germany’s homespun counter-pressing approach punched a way through. The Premier League’s best years have come when its traditional athleticism is married to cutting-edge tactics and technique, imported from continental Europe.That is precisely what has happened over the last few years, of course. England is now home to most of the world’s finest coaches, Guardiola and Tuchel among them. It first adopted and then advanced the German pressing style — and in Guardiola’s case, Spanish-inspired possession — marrying it with England’s long-cherished virtues of industry and physicality and both acquiring and developing players of sufficient technical brilliance to pull it off.For all of that to happen, though, England relied on its primacy in a fourth — and perhaps most significant — factor: resources. It should be no surprise that the Premier League is now anticipating a second all-English final in three years, both in the Champions League and, potentially, in the second-tier Europa League, too.Its teams, after all, have access to the sort of revenue that is unimaginable to their peers on continental Europe, thanks largely to the income from the Premier League’s gargantuan television deals. It means that, while Real Madrid and Bayern Munich and the rest can buy the same quality of player as England, only the Premier League’s elite can buy them in a certain quantity.That trend has become more pronounced, more obvious, in the age of the pandemic. The Premier League has been able to absorb the impact far better than any of its peers. And the two teams that have been able to outlast everyone else in the Champions League have been able to ride it out better than anyone.Three days before facing P.S.G. in the second leg of the Champions League semifinals, Manchester City traveled to Crystal Palace. Though it is within touching distance of claiming the Premier League title, Pep Guardiola’s team is not there quite yet: There was still something riding on the game. And yet the team he named contained only one player — Fernandinho — who would face P.S.G. City still won, comfortably.It has been a similar story for much of the last six months. Guardiola has regularly changed five, six or seven players between games, with little or no drop-off in performance or result. No other team — in England, let alone Europe — can call on that sort of depth.There is a reason that City seems so fresh, so cogent, at a time when teams across Europe are gasping for air, desperately cobbling together teams from the players they have available. The defensive partnership Real Madrid played in its semifinal against Chelsea was the 14th different combination it has used in the last 20 games. City, by contrast, could allow Ruben Días and John Stones to take the weekend off, saving them for battles ahead.Chelsea does not quite compare — seven of the players who took the field against Real Madrid had faced Fulham over the weekend — but its durability is no surprise when you consider that it spent more than $250 million on strengthening its squad last summer, as most of the rest of the game wrestled with the economic shortfall caused by the pandemic. Tuchel could leave Hakim Ziyech and Christian Pulisic on the bench on Wednesday, just in case he needed an infusion of talent worth north of $100 million.None of this, of course, is to diminish what these teams have achieved, to suggest that they do not deserve their place in the final, or to downplay the work their coaches have done in taking them to European soccer’s showpiece game. Indeed, in many ways, City-Chelsea is the perfect final for the year that soccer has had: that, at the end, the two teams left standing were those best placed to weather the storm, to endure the compact, draining schedule, that found that games that hung in the balance were weighted, ever so slightly, in their favor. More

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    Champions League Final: The Rich Get Richer

    Seismic shocks to European soccer’s landscape have turned Saturday’s Champions League final between Manchester City and Chelsea into a sign of things to come.The shadows are drawing in across Europe.Inter Milan must shed millions of dollars from its salary bill. One or more of its brightest lights will have to be sold. Antonio Conte, the coach who only a few weeks ago ended the club’s decade-long wait for an Italian championship, does not intend to stick around to see his title-winning team broken up.Barcelona, a billion dollars in debt, must build a squad to meet its princely ambitions on a pauper’s budget. The club’s wish list does not extend much beyond the giveaway aisle: Sergio Agüero, Georginio Wijnaldum, Eric García and Memphis Depay are all out of contract, all available for nothing, a cut-price cavalry.Juventus must strip back in order to retool. Real Madrid’s president, Florentino Pérez, knows his fans crave a Galáctico but also that he cannot afford one. The usual delirium of transfer rumors swirls around Manchester United and Liverpool, but some players will have to go in order for others to arrive.It is not just the grand houses that are feeling the pinch. The Lille team that won the French title will be stripped for parts. The rest of Ligue 1 faces a fire sale. Spending in the January transfer window was a fraction of its normal level across all of Europe’s top five leagues.After years of plenty, money is tight, and times are straitened, for everybody. Almost everybody.Manchester City paid more than $80 million to add Rúben Dias, who became the cornerstone of its defense.Pool photo by Peter PowellTimo Werner, center, was the prime acquisition in Chelsea’s free-spending pandemic summer.Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockThere remain a handful of bulls in soccer’s bear market, not just immune to but liable to benefit from the recession unfurling all around them. Saturday’s Champions League final features two of them. A little more than a decade ago, it seemed certain that the 2010s would be dominated by the coming of Manchester City and Chelsea. Between them, they represented soccer’s new dawn: Chelsea, bankrolled by the wealth of its billionaire Russian owner, Roman Abramovich, and City, transformed by the functionally bottomless riches of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. For a while, their meetings were referred to as El Cashico, always with the slight ghost of a sneer: a confected nickname for an ersatz imitation of an authentic rivalry.Indeed, when Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan first arrived at Manchester City, it was Chelsea where he first trained his sights. Chelsea had been so confident of signing Robinho, the Brazil forward, from Real Madrid that its website had started selling jerseys emblazoned with his name. When the Spanish club noticed, it withdrew from the deal. City, eager to make a statement of intent, duly stepped in.The next summer, City tried to go a step further, identifying John Terry — Chelsea’s captain — as its priority transfer target. The club was, it was reported, prepared to pay him a then-unthinkable $300,000 a week. He chose not to accept, eventually, but City at least managed to bloody Chelsea’s nose: Abramovich was forced to reward Terry’s loyalty by making him the club’s highest-paid player.It took much longer for an on-field rivalry to develop. The clubs did, as predicted, emerge as the prime forces in English soccer in the 2010s: Between them, they have won eight of the past 12 Premier League titles. But rarely did they find themselves in direct opposition. More often than not, one waxed as the other waned, and the greatest threats to their immediate ambitions came from the ranks of the established elite both were seeking to usurp.Now, though, the situation has changed. Over the last year, the landscape of both English and European soccer has undergone a fundamental shift, one that has diminished almost all of their peers and leaves both Chelsea and City in a position of almost unparalleled strength. This Champions League final is not the culmination of a rivalry. It is, instead, a harbinger of what the future might hold.They owe their prospects of uncontested primacy to a confluence of factors. Foremost, of course, is the economic impact of the pandemic, and the year of empty stadiums and balance-sheet black holes.To assemble their star-studded teams, Chelsea and Manchester City have relied on some of the deepest pockets in soccer.Pool photo by Shaun BotterillEstimates vary, but most suggest that the pandemic has cost Europe’s clubs somewhere in the region of $5 billion, almost half of it borne by the 20 richest teams on the continent, some of whom — Real, Barcelona and Juventus in particular — were already struggling under the weight of mismanagement.City and Chelsea, because of the largess of their owners, seemed blissfully unaffected by that contraction. City spent $140 million on central defenders alone at the start of this season as its payroll hit an English-record high: almost $500 million-a-year, at a time when most of its rivals were trying to limit their spending.Chelsea spent more last summer than any other team in Europe, and almost as much as all 18 teams of the Bundesliga combined. Chelsea paid out more in fees, in fact, than it had at any point under Abramovich, taking advantage of being a rare predator in a world of prey to acquire the likes of Timo Werner and Kai Havertz effectively unopposed.There is little reason to believe, given the limited horizons across much of the rest of Europe, that this summer will prove any different. Among their peers, there is a growing acceptance that competing for talent with Chelsea, Manchester City and Paris St.-Germain is no longer feasible.Combating that, of course, was part of the rationale behind the short-lived and unmourned Super League. Buried in the aborted competition’s founding document were a set of specific provisions on spending that went way beyond the Financial Fair Play regulations that govern the Champions League.There would be “zero tolerance” for the manipulation of balance sheets. Expenditure on players, coaches and salaries would be strictly capped — at 55 percent of club revenues, or 27.5 percent of the highest-earning club, an effort to favor those teams with the largest fan bases — and clubs would have to commit to being profitable over a three-year period.The rules would be overseen and enforced by a monitoring body, responsible for auditing member clubs’ finances, ruling on sponsorship agreements and sanctioning anyone who transgressed. It was to be called the Financial Stability Group.City was part of the project, of course, but it was also, as those involved in its creation admit, its target. The Super League was not just a power play to grab a greater share of soccer’s revenues; it was also, for some of those involved, the only way to level a distorted playing field.Its collapse, though, has weighted the dice ever further in the favor of the new elite.Will even the dream of a Champions League final soon be out of reach for all but a few teams?Pool photo by David RamosManchester City and Chelsea had already, in effect, been given a free pass when UEFA announced, last year, that it was suspending the financial regulations that previously prevented both teams from making full use of their owners’ wealth. The losses across Europe were so broad and so great, it said, that barely any teams would be able to meet its criteria.UEFA is adamant that the system is not defunct. It says it is currently examining how to redraft and improve its cost-control rules to give them a “stronger focus on the present and the future.” European soccer’s governing body has said that it believes “wages and transfer fees, which represent the majority of clubs’ costs, must be reduced to acceptable levels.”But in their current absence there are benefits for those in a position of strength. First, by stockpiling talent now, they can in effect get in before the door closes. Second, and most important, they have an opportunity to shape the new rules to their needs.City, Chelsea and P.S.G. had long felt that the previous system of Financial Fair Play did not so much apply to them as apply at them. The original idea, their logic ran, of ensuring European soccer did not take on too much debt had been co-opted by a cartel of the game’s established powers to prevent clubs from investing in their teams, an effort to set in stone their position at the pinnacle.This time, though, as a consequence of the Super League, it is City — who in withdrawing started the collapse of the breakaway — and P.SG. — which never joined it — who can expect to have a seat at the table when the new rules are discussed. Whatever form of financial regulation is introduced, it is more likely to represent their interests than the ostracized old elite. Chelsea, its ambitions aligned with those two, will benefit by proxy.That, of course, is what those clubs who find their positions of power under threat fear: not that the collapse of the Super League will lead to some utopian, egalitarian vision of soccer’s future, but that one set of vested interests will be exchanged for another.Privately, owners admit there is little prospect now of holding back City, in particular. Some in England believe the club could win the Premier League for the next decade if it continues to use its wealth as adroitly as it has. In Europe, the fear is that the Champions League will become the exclusive preserve of the new elite, rather than the old.To some, of course, that may be a good thing, a welcome change after years of dominance by a handful of entitled and presumptuous superclubs. To others, it will have the feel of yet another step toward some grim vision of soccer’s future, where the global game becomes the plaything of oligarchs and plutocrats and nation states.Either way, the path from there to here has been laid, irrevocably, over the last year as the pandemic hit and the money dried up and the regulations loosened and the establishment crumbled. The new future is here, and it starts on Saturday. More

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    Former Penn State President Will Serve 2 Months in Jail in Child Abuse Scandal

    Graham B. Spanier, who was found guilty in 2017 of one misdemeanor count of endangering the welfare of a child, must report to prison on July 9.Graham B. Spanier, the former president of Pennsylvania State University, must serve two months in jail followed by two months of house arrest for his role in a child abuse scandal that rocked the university a decade ago, a judge reaffirmed on Wednesday, according to prosecutors.The judge, John A. Boccabella, upheld the sentence he issued four years ago after Mr. Spanier, 72, was found guilty of one misdemeanor count of endangering the welfare of a child.Prosecutors said Mr. Spanier had failed to report child abuse allegations to law enforcement officials when he learned that Jerry Sandusky, an assistant coach of the vaunted Nittany Lions football team, had been seen abusing a boy in a locker room shower on campus.Mr. Spanier must report to the Centre County Correctional Facility in Bellefonte, Pa., to begin serving the sentence on July 9, prosecutors said.“He made a mistake and he’s going to pay for his mistake, but I don’t consider him to be a danger to society as I would a criminal,” Judge Boccabella said in the Dauphin County Court of Common Pleas, according to The Associated Press.Mr. Spanier had remained free as he sought relief after the conviction, which had been overturned by a federal judge in 2019 before it was reinstated by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in December.Mr. Sandusky was convicted in 2012 of sexually abusing 10 young boys and was sentenced to 30 to 60 years in prison. In 2013, Penn State agreed to pay $59.7 million to 26 sexual abuse victims in exchange for an end to their claims against the university.The abuse shocked the university and badly tarnished the reputation of its celebrated head coach, Joe Paterno, who was among those suspected of turning a blind eye to Mr. Sandusky’s conduct. Mr. Paterno was dismissed and died in 2012.Mr. Spanier had served as president of Penn State for 16 years before he was forced out in 2011. His case drew attention not only because of his stature as a university president but also because he had spoken publicly about his own history of being abused as a child by his father, who beat him severely.“The single most important thing I can say is that I’m sorry,” he told the court when he was sentenced in 2017. “I deeply regret that I did not intervene far more carefully.”On Wednesday, Judge Boccabella upheld the original sentence of four to 12 months of incarceration that he had issued in 2017, prosecutors said. In addition to the two months in jail and two months of house arrest, Mr. Spanier will also have to serve two years of probation and complete 200 hours of community service, prosecutors said.“Today marks the end of a long road towards justice for the children endangered by Mr. Spanier’s inaction — choosing to cover up the abuse at the hands of Jerry Sandusky rather than reporting it to law enforcement,” Pennsylvania’s attorney general, Josh Shapiro, said in a statement. “There are consequences for failing to protect children in Pennsylvania.”Mr. Spanier’s lawyer, Samuel W. Silver, had asked that his client be allowed to serve his sentence at home.Mr. Silver said that Mr. Spanier underwent open-heart surgery in September 2019 and had an advanced stage of prostate cancer, putting him at risk from the coronavirus, The A.P. reported. Mr. Spanier is fully vaccinated, Mr. Silver said.“Fortunately, things are not as dire as they were a year ago,” Judge Boccabella said, according to The A.P.In an email on Wednesday, Mr. Silver said that he had argued in court that “in light of the circumstances, the attorney general’s insistence that Dr. Spanier should now be confined in a correctional facility is remarkable.” More

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    N.F.L. Salary Cap to Rise as Much as 14 Percent in 2022 Amid Pandemic Rebound

    If fans are in stadiums and games are played as anticipated in 2021, the salary cap for 2022 could be as much as $208.2 million.The N.F.L. and the N.F.L. Players Association on Wednesday agreed to raise the salary cap by as much as 14 percent, to a maximum of $208.2 million, for the 2022 season, according to a person with direct knowledge of the agreement, a sign that the league is quickly rebounding from the financial havoc caused by the coronavirus pandemic last season.The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the agreement had not been announced.After losing roughly $4 billion in revenue last season because of prohibitions on fans attending games, the league and the players’ union agreed to cut the salary cap — or the maximum amount teams can spend on player payroll — by 8 percent, to $182.5 million, for the 2021 season. This was only the second time the cap had been lowered since the spending limit was introduced in 1994. For the 2020 season, the salary cap — which was based on revenue from 2019 ticket sales and from preset 2020 media-deal numbers — was $198.2 million.Once the lost revenue from 2021 was calculated, the owners and the union — which split the revenue each year, with about 53 percent going to team owners and 47 percent to players — agreed to reduce the salary cap’s growth over several years rather than take a more drastic decline for one or two seasons. But now it seems that the cap will rise roughly as was expected before the pandemic.N.F.L. revenue appears likely to rebound more quickly than anticipated, for several reasons. In the coming season, the league will add a 17th regular season game, which will generate more ticket revenue for teams. Also, nearly all of the 32 teams have announced plans to host full-capacity crowds at their games this fall. The league drew just 1.2 million fans last year, down from about 17 million before the pandemic.The league also plans to return to playing several games outside the United States in 2021, after canceling all international travel last season.“We do expect a more normal experience” this season, Commissioner Roger Goodell said on a conference call with reporters.The N.F.L. also expects more income from its new media contracts, including the sale to Amazon of the rights to show Thursday Night Football starting in 2022. Amazon agreed to pay an estimated $1.1 billion per year for 10 years to show those games, about 35 percent more than Fox, which is entering the final year of its agreement.Many of the other new media agreements that the league secured in March, with CBS, NBC and other networks, do not begin until the 2023 season, all but ensuring that the salary cap will continue to grow in the coming years.The league typically announces the salary cap for the upcoming season at its owners meeting in December. The $208.2 million cap for the 2022 season presumes all games will be played in full stadiums. If those plans change, the cap might be lowered.Separately, the N.F.L. owners, in a one-day meeting on Wednesday, approved limits on team rosters. Teams will be able to invite 90 players to training camps when they open in late July. The rosters will have to be cut to 85 on Aug. 17, 80 on Aug. 24 and 53 on Aug. 31, after the third and final preseason game.Goodell declined to say what percentage of players were currently vaccinated. The league and union agreed to loosen restrictions on players who are vaccinated, in hopes of increasing the number of people who are inoculated. The league said that more than 90 percent of essential staff members on 30 of the 32 teams had already been vaccinated.The owners also approved an expansion of the prohibition against blocking below the waist. Players will now be penalized if they block an opponent below the waist beyond 5 yards on either side of the line of scrimmage and more than 2 yards outside of either offensive tackle. The rule is designed to reduce the risk of knee and ankle injuries. More

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    ‘Baggio: The Divine Ponytail’ Review: Dribbling Through a Career

    This biopic of the Italian soccer player Roberto Baggio is a botched effort.“Baggio: The Divine Ponytail,” a Netflix biopic billed as “freely inspired” by the life of the Italian soccer player Roberto Baggio, concludes with a group of the athlete’s fans greeting and applauding him. In real-life clips during the credits, an announcer calls him “probably the most beloved player in Italian football.” It’s a measure of how muddled the movie is that it never conveys how or why he became beloved.Even the soccer is perfunctory. Instead of lingering on the pitch, the director, Letizia Lamartire, cuts to Baggio’s friends and family watching on TV. Chronologically malapportioned, the film races through key developments, such as Baggio’s recovery from an injury or commitment to Buddhist meditation, and more than once abruptly flashes forward several years.Clichés become a kind of shorthand. At dinner in 1985, Baggio (Andrea Arcangeli) informs his parents and siblings that he’s signed a valuable contract. “Well, you can pay me back for the windows you broke,” scoffs his father (Andrea Pennacchi), who later adds, “Even if you earn more, you’re no better than your brother, who’s busting his ass at the factory.”By half an hour in, when the film reaches the 1994 World Cup, where Baggio plans to fulfill an apparent childhood promise to his dad, the coach likens him to the celebrated player Diego Maradona. Nothing the film has shown from the sulky Baggio, whose hair gives him his nickname, has primed viewers for the comparison.It’s possible that “Baggio: The Divine Ponytail” will resonate with soccer fans. But the protagonist’s reputed greatness has not made it to the screen.Baggio: The Divine PonytailNot rated. In Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    USWNT's Catarina Macario Is Just Getting Started

    She learned soccer in Brazil and developed in the United States. Now a pro in France, the 21-year-old forward is proving she belongs alongside the world’s best players.The first steps of Catarina Macario’s path toward professional soccer are easy to pick out, even in the grainy videotapes of her playing the sport as a girl. She doesn’t scissor over the ball so much as dance over it. She darts past defenders or lobs the ball over them. She leaves goalkeepers flat-footed.Even before she had entered her teens, Macario had mastered the two skills every Brazilian striker learns early: how to put the ball in the net and how to race toward the nearest camera to celebrate.And yet Macario was different. Soccer is ubiquitous in Brazil, so it was only natural that she gravitated to the game played on its beaches, fields and streets. But as a young girl growing up in São Luís, a coastal city in Brazil’s northeast, and Brasília, the capital, she used to wonder if becoming a professional was even viable.In a country where 47 percent of the population identifies as mixed race, Macario was a triple outlier: a girl with dark skin who played soccer. Discrimination and a lack of opportunities were common. So were insults. She was called a monkey. A lesbian. Just for wanting to play.“Sadly, I was often the only girl at that time,” said Macario, whose first forays in the sport were games with classmates in a futsal league and on boys’ teams. “It was very much so shamed upon to be a girl and playing soccer.”She added: “I knew I loved soccer and I wanted to be a professional soccer player, but I would question whether it would even be possible just because of that.”Less than a decade later, Macario, 21, has carved out a place for herself alongside the top players in the world.Macario signed with Lyon in January. It is battling P.S.G. for the French title.Jeff Pachoud/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn January, she turned pro, announcing she would forgo her senior year at Stanford University — where she scored 63 goals in 68 games — to sign with the world’s most dominant professional team, Olympique Lyonnais Féminin. Weeks later, her switch in citizenship complete, she made her debut for the World Cup-winning U.S. women’s national team (and scored in her second game). On Tuesday, she was expected to be named to the United States roster for an important pre-Olympic tournament.If Macario’s rise continues, and if she can beat out a who’s who of more experienced players — Megan Rapinoe, Alex Morgan, Carli Lloyd, Tobin Heath, Christen Press, Lynn Williams — for a place in the American attack, she could be headed to the Olympics by July, and to a World Cup by 2023.“I think she is the future of what the U.S. women’s national team wants to be,” Macario’s former coach at Stanford, Paul Ratcliffe, said in a phone interview. “I envision they could build a team around her, that’s how highly I think of her as a player.”Sometimes, she can hardly believe how far she has come, and how fast.“To me, I’m essentially just this little kid that’s going to play with the best players in the world,” Macario said in a video call this spring from her apartment in Lyon, France. “It’s a little intimidating, but at the same time, that’s the challenge — that’s why I chose to be here.”On the ball, Macario is eye-catchingly quick, powerful enough to create space, deft enough to leave defenders grasping at the ones she has vacated. After Macario’s first goal for the U.S. national team, Megan Rapinoe called her a “different kind of player.” Others have placed her on an higher plane: comparing her to Brazil’s six-time world player of the year, Marta.Even in her childhood, Macario stood out. She says she can’t recall the number of lamps she and her older brother broke while playing soccer in their apartment in Brazil, but she remembers the hours she dedicated to extra training with her father before practices to nurture her talent. It was what she used to answer the discrimination, the obstacles and the people who told her a girl didn’t have a place in soccer, and show them she deserved one “based on what I did on the field.”“Maybe,” she added, “I’m even better than you.”When she turned 12, though, a rule barred her from continuing to play with boys in Brasília, where her family was living. Without any competitive girls’ teams as an option, the family took a leap of faith, Macario said, and decided to allow her to move to the United States with her father and brother to secure a better future.When the family arrived in San Diego, they didn’t speak English, and were grappling with the separation from Macario’s mother, who remained in Brazil, where she worked as a doctor. The long-distance relationship continued for seven years. Her mother still lives in Brazil, with plans to travel to France.“The one thing that was keeping us together, in a way, was the fact that I was playing soccer and that I was getting better,” Macario said.A brilliant youth career attracted the attention of top college teams, but there was a constant pressure, she said, to keep going, to make the family’s sacrifices worth it.Macario was a record-setting scorer and two-time national champion at Stanford.Randy Vazquez/Bay Area News Group, via Associated PressHer steep rise from college star to full-time professional was swift after she became an American citizen last October. Hours earlier, she had been called up to her first training camp with the senior national team. But to be eligible to play, she first needed the approval of FIFA, soccer’s global governing body. When it arrived in January, the U.S. women’s coach, Vlatko Andonovski, wasted no time bringing her into the fold.“Of course, as an immigrant to the U.S.A. myself, I understand how special it is to get that U.S. passport, so I’m really happy for her,” said Andonovski, a native of North Macedonia.Andonovski was in a select group of people from whom Macario sought guidance as she weighed the choice of a career in Europe or in the National Women’s Soccer League in the United States, where many of her national teammates play. The decision to go to Lyon was Macario’s, but Andonovski told her he supported whichever path she chose as long as her play continued at a high level. “Most important,” he said, “what she is getting in France is training with world-class players every day.”Moving to Europe is a nontraditional path for most American college players, though increasingly an option for national team stars. While her decision to go and to take on learning yet another language was difficult, Macario said her choice of playing for the United States over her birth country, Brazil, which had pursued her for years, was a simple one.“I left Brazil for a reason, and that was because my parents wanted a better life for my brother and I,” she said of moving to the United States. “For me, it’s home. It’s where I became who I am today.”“It’s a little intimidating,” Macario said of competing at the highest levels of women’s soccer, “but at the same time, that’s the challenge.”Gregg Newton/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAnd while the most surprising part of her trajectory — from youth scoring sensation in Southern California to national champion at Stanford to the women’s national team to Lyon — may be the speed with which it took place, she says she knows she still has quite a bit to learn.“I’m not up to that level yet,” she said of training against international teammates like Lyon defender Nikita Parris or alongside forwards she has long admired, like Lloyd. “During practices, they’re so intense. It almost makes the games easy.”Now she shares the field with them and others, and she expects to continue to do so for years to come. Looking forward, she said, her goals are simple.“Win everything,” she said, laughing. More

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    After Stumbling to the Finish Line, Liverpool Clinches Champions League Place

    A win at Anfield guaranteed the club a place in the Champions League next season, but only a brief respite before it plunges into soccer’s new reality.LIVERPOOL, England — The goals arrived just as the nerves were fraying and the anxiety mounting, just as the 10,000 fans inside Anfield for the first time in a long time were recalling that watching soccer, live and in the flesh, is not how memory might have made it seem. It is not all celebration and carnival and song. Most of the time, it is nothing but stress.In the end, Liverpool’s road on the final day of the Premier League season was a straight one; the twists and turns would come elsewhere. Jürgen Klopp’s team needed to win to clinch a place in next season’s Champions League, and it duly delivered a victory by beating Crystal Palace, 2-0. The fretting and the furrowing would be for Chelsea and Leicester City, the other two teams in the chase.But Anfield did not know that, 20 minutes in, when Leicester took the lead at home against Tottenham and Liverpool was toiling against Palace, the sort of obdurate and organized opponent that had made the club’s winter so bleak, and for a brief moment the table rumbled and Klopp’s team was fifth, out in the cold.Fans had not been here for the six consecutive home defeats that derailed Liverpool’s season: they had all happened in a sterile and silent Anfield, but they had left a scar. And so as the news from Leicester filtered through, the mood seemed to shift. The songs, initially jubilant, felt a little more urgent.It took some time for the fans to set aside their stress and celebrate again.Pool photo by Paul EllisSadio Mané’s opening goal proved a potent antidote, for a while. Chelsea was losing at Aston Villa, Leicester winning. But as the clock ticked, the specter of the worst-case scenario appeared. Liverpool’s margins were fine. One mistake and a goal elsewhere and there would, at the last, be a sting in the tail.Anfield seemed on edge once more. The songs had stopped. In their stead came impatient rumblings whenever danger seemed to bubble, disappointed groans when an attack broke down. It is not only fans who might have romanticized the reality of being at a game, of the presence of a crowd. It can inject energy and vim and zest into players. But its demands can also cow and daunt and unnerve them.It was at that point, with the game and the day and the season entering its final few minutes, that Mané scored again. Anfield exhaled. The news elsewhere was good: Chelsea was losing, and so, too, was Leicester, kicking away the reprieve it had been offered. Liverpool had left it late to be sure, but it was safe.The songs could start again; the final odds and ends could be tied up. The departing Georginio Wijnaldum was afforded a rapturous ovation by the fans, and a guard of honor by his teammates. There was a lap of appreciation. Coming back to Anfield would bring a happy return.Liverpool didn’t need it in the end, but Gareth Bale and Tottenham provided some late — and vital — assistance at Leicester.Pool photo by Shaun BotterillBy Liverpool’s recent standards, of course, this season still goes down as a disappointment. In 2019, the club’s last game was a victory in the Champions League final. Last year, belatedly, its final appearance at Anfield was to lift the Premier League trophy. Merely securing a seat at Europe’s top table is not what Klopp and his players aimed to do this year.But all achievements are relative. Liverpool is not alone in having suffered a spree of injuries this season, but it is not easy to come up with another team — perhaps Leicester aside — that has been quite so hard hit. Klopp has been without his first-choice central defense since November. He lost his only specialist backup in January.The two midfielders Klopp deputized as back-line cover missed considerable spells, too (one, the captain Jordan Henderson, only returned to the substitutes’ ranks on Sunday). When he said, on the eve of this game, that Manchester City would not have been crowned champion if it had suffered similarly, particularly in the condensed schedule of the pandemic, it was treated as a barb, an unbecoming serving of sour grapes. He did have a point, though.Claiming third place, in those circumstances, may not represent a great triumph, but it still ranks as a considerable achievement. As recently as March, Liverpool was in free fall, risking compounding the hundreds of millions of dollars lost as a result of the pandemic by missing out on the riches of the Champions League.Klopp, though, has forged an impressive unanimity of purpose since then. Liverpool’s last 10 games have brought eight wins, and no defeats. It has been the in-form team in English soccer for the last two months. It is understandable that Klopp’s vision of the future is bullish, centered on the belief that when his squad is restored to fitness, Liverpool will be “the team nobody wants to play” once more.It is not, though, quite so straightforward. The pandemic might have had a more direct impact on teams like Arsenal and Tottenham, but its effect on Liverpool should not be underestimated.The club has won no little acclaim in recent years for its astute use of the transfer market: spending big when necessary — on the likes of Alisson and Virgil van Dijk — but also on its ability to snuffle out comparative bargains: Andy Robertson, Wijnaldum and even, to some extent, Mohamed Salah.Such liberal spending may not be possible as the club wrestles with the financial black hole opened by the pandemic. It will not be alone in that, of course. For Liverpool, though, just as worrying is the fact that it has only been able to spend that money because of its almost unrivaled ability to sell players.For Jürgen Klopp and James Milner, merely salvaging a Champions League place from this season was worth celebrating. Next year, the team and its fans will expect more.Pool photo by Paul EllisLiverpool has sold better than anyone in recent years, both in gleaning vast sums for its stars — the $170 million or so banked from Barcelona for Philippe Coutinho — and in haggling premium amounts for unwanted assets.It sold Dominic Solanke to Bournemouth for $22 million or so, and the backup goalkeeper Danny Ward to Leicester for $15 million. Danny Ings, Ryan Kent and Rafa Camacho — Ings aside, names hardly recalled at Anfield — raised about $50 million between them.Those are prices, though, that belong to another world, one of boundless money and limited thought. Liverpool will not be able to raise such eye-watering sums for Divock Origi and Xherdan Shaqiri and Marko Grujic and the rest this summer. If it harbored hopes of selling either Mané or Salah for a premium fee in order to finance the team’s next transformation, it is likely to be disappointed, too. For players of their age, the luxury market has stalled as well.Liverpool’s late run to the Champions League has, perhaps, drawn a little of the sting, given the club a little more elastic to play with as seeks to avoid such a narrow escape next year. With his injured stalwarts returning, Klopp is right to expect brighter things. But the road is not always as straight as it turned out to be at the end of a fraught and troubled campaign. There are still twists and turns, chicanes and hairpins, to negotiate. More

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    Bayern's Robert Lewandowski: The Making of a Goal Machine

    Bayern’s Robert Lewandowski is the most complete, most ruthless, most polished striker of his generation. On Saturday, he broke a record that had stood for half a century.Robert Lewandowski does not characterize it as thought. Not conscious thought, anyway. In those moments when he has the ball at his feet and the goal in his sights, even after all these years, even when he can lay claim to being the most complete, most ruthless, most polished striker of his generation, he is not thinking.Or more to the point: He is not aware of himself thinking. He is not weighing options, rifling through possibilities, selecting the best of them. Thinking takes time, and there is no time. “There is not even half a second to think about what to do or how to do it,” he said.And yet he is thinking. Or more to the point: He is learning. He is absorbing information, analyzing it, filing it away.There was a moment in his game for Bayern Munich against Borussia Dortmund in March when the ball fell to Lewandowski on the edge of the penalty area. He took a touch, and a shot. It was not, by his own admission, “perfect.” His effort flew over the crossbar. Lewandowski turned away in disappointment, ruing an opportunity wasted.Except that it wasn’t. In that fraction of a second, the 32-year-old Lewandowski still noticed the following things: where Marwin Hitz, the Dortmund goalkeeper, was positioned on his line; when and how Hitz set himself to react to his shot; which of Dortmund’s defenders closed him down and which backed away; and the complex interplay of angles that accompanied their movements.He took all that in, computed it and reached a conclusion. “I thought that next time, maybe it would be possible to score either between the legs or to go for the far post,” he said. He logged it for later.An hour or so later, Bayern had recovered from the two-goal head start it had afforded Dortmund. Lewandowski had scored twice: once from close range, once from the penalty spot. Bayern led, 3-2.In the game’s dying minutes, Bayern’s Alphonso Davies crossed the ball to Leroy Sané. Rather than collect it, Sané feinted, allowing the pass to run through to the advancing Lewandowski. All of a sudden, he was pretty much where he had been in the first half: on the edge of the area, the ball at his feet, the goal in his sights.Again, he was not thinking. His subconscious had taken over. But this time, he had all the information he needed. One touch opened an angle. A second fizzed the ball low and beyond the reach of Hitz, into the far corner. “I had found the solution,” he said.The Straightest Way to GoalLewandowski has 39 goals for Bayern Munich, one shy of the Bundesliga single-season record that has stood since 1972.Pool photos by Andreas GebertStrikers, as a rule, tend not to be picky. Their ruthlessness is rooted in an understanding that all goals count the same: the one snaffled from a few inches after the goalkeeper has spilled the ball is no more or less valuable than a flying volley or an overhead kick. Artistic merit does not win games.It is a little surprising, then, that Lewandowski will confess to having a favorite type of goal. It is not the one you would expect from a player whose brilliance is rooted in economy. He does not, by his own admission, “like to make too much show.” He takes no more touches than necessary; every action is chosen only if it serves the ultimate purpose of scoring.That lack of ornament is his hallmark. It is why the first instinct of his teammate Thomas Müller is, in any given circumstance, to give him the ball. “I always try to find the straightest way to goal,” Müller said. As a general rule, he said, that path runs through Lewandowski.And yet there is one type of goal that Lewandowski enjoys more than any other: a strike from long range, the type Müller describes dismissively as “a circus shot.” “If I can score from outside the box, that is extra,” Lewandowski said.He can, at least, afford to be choosy. He has, after all, scored an awful lot of goals: 38 in two years for Znicz Pruszkow, his first senior club in his native Poland; 41 in two seasons for Lech Poznan; 103 in four years at Dortmund. At Bayern, somehow, his trajectory has grown even steeper.“I don’t feel I am 32,” he said. “I feel better than I did when I was 26 or 27.”Pool photos by Andreas GebertHe currently has 292 goals in 327 games for the club. This season, which started not long after his 32nd birthday, he has scored goals with bludgeoning, devastating consistency. After yet another hat trick as Bayern clinched a ninth straight league title on Saturday, he is one short of equaling Gerd Müller’s record of 40 goals scored in a single Bundesliga season, with two games to play. The mark has stood untouched for four decades, but Lewandowski could have broken it weeks ago: He had scored 35 goals in his first 25 games when he picked up a knee injury in late March.That, in a way, is what is most compelling about Lewandowski. There might now be just the faintest dusting of gray hairs at his temples, but he shows no signs of slowing. If anything, he is accelerating. “I don’t feel I am 32,” he said. “I feel better than I did when I was 26 or 27.”In part, he attributes that to the arc of his career. He was not earmarked for stardom from a young age. He did not start out in the academy of a major team. His first steps, instead, came in the Polish third division. From that point on, he said, he felt he “had to prove something.”When he arrived at Dortmund in 2011, he remembers feeling he had to train when others might have taken days off to recover: The pain, he said, “was not important.” Looking back, he wonders if he pushed himself too hard. “After three months, I was too tired, so I needed longer to show my form,” he said.To those who have worked with him, though, his hunger is only a part of the formula. In an interview with the German newspaper Bild this year, Jürgen Klopp, his manager at Dortmund, called Lewandowski the best player he has coached. “How he pushed himself to become the player he is today, that’s extraordinary,” Klopp said. “He took every step he needed to be that goal machine. Every one.”Built to ScoreOnly a knee injury has slowed Lewandowski this season.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhen Holger Broich looks at Lewandowski, he does not see what we see: the deftness of his touch, the surety of his finishing and the coolness of his head. Or, rather, he does not see only that. He sees beyond it, too, to what he has come to see as the real wonder of Lewandowski, the real source of his talent: the way, at the deepest possible level, that he is built.As Bayern’s head of science and fitness, Broich knows Lewandowski better than anyone. He knows that Lewandowski can tolerate an extraordinary amount of stress and pain, as his almost spotless injury record demonstrates. He knows that his metabolism allows him to develop, and regenerate, the sorts of muscle fiber a striker needs.He knows that at least part of that is hard-wired into Lewandowski’s DNA. “Talent is a very broad term,” Broich said. “It has to do with genetic prerequisites, too.”But Broich also believes that all of that accounts for only “40 to 60 percent” of athletes’ ability. The rest depends on who they are, what they do with it. And Klopp was not exaggerating when he said that Lewandowski’s whole life, for more than a decade, had been designed to help him score as many goals as possible.It started with cornflakes. “Every morning, I ate cornflakes with milk,” Lewandowski said. “I thought it was fine. It was only breakfast, I was skinny, I had muscles. I thought sweet things were OK because I didn’t have a problem with my weight. But sometimes, by 10 a.m. or 11 a.m., I was tired, even before training, and I didn’t know why.”So in his early 20s, he started to experiment. He cut out milk. He avoided refined sugar. “I saw a difference after a few weeks, a few months,” he said.But his focus was not on the immediate. “I thought that if I changed the things I did, it could help me play at a higher level for longer,” he said. “I knew I could not expect immediate results. I did it because I had to try. I knew if I started at the top level a little later, I could be there for longer.”Now — thanks in part to the expertise of his wife, Anna, a nutritionist — Lewandowski, semifamously, eats his meals in what is generally accepted to be the wrong order. “If I have time to have dessert, I prefer to eat it an hour or so before lunch,” he said. “I don’t always eat it, but if I do, I try to have a distance between carbohydrates and protein.”Lewandowski scored three times Saturday in a 6-0 rout of Borussia Mönchengladbach that sealed Bayern Munich’s ninth straight Bundesliga title.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is not simply his diet that has been refined. Over the years, Lewandowski has investigated anything and everything that might give him an edge. “These details make a big difference,” he said. “It is not just performance or ability: If something that can help me run faster, run more, recover quicker, I try to do it.”That, obviously, comes at a cost. A life built around scoring goals inevitably means a life stripped of other things. Lewandowski professes not to miss any of it; the only thing he regrets, he said, is that soccer’s unrelenting schedule means he does not get to be spontaneous, to take a weekend off to go away with Anna and their two daughters.And so even now he keeps searching for edges. He takes a keen interest in the work Broich and his sports science team do at Bayern: the performance diagnostics, the individualized training programs. What Lewandowski is — the way he is built: the muscle fibers and the metabolism and the genetic predisposition — might account for half of what he has achieved. The other half is down to who he is. After all, as Broich said, “the rest has to be acquired.”The Switch“He took every step he needed to be that goal machine,” said Jürgen Klopp, who coached Lewandowski at Dortmund. “Every one.”Pool photo by Leon KuegelerThere is a story that Lewandowski tells about a day spent on a golf course with a group of friends. They were there, ostensibly, for a friendly round. They were not competing, not in any real sense. Until, that is, Lewandowski noticed he had a chance to win.“It was like a switch had been flicked,” he said. “The professional player in me came out. The button changed from off to on, and I saw the difference between playing for fun and playing to win. You have to choose whether to have fun or whether to compete.”That time, Lewandowski managed to reverse the process. He did not win. “That time, I chose to have fun,” he said. (He may, of course, be saying this because he did not win.)There are other occasions, though, when he needs the switch. At Bayern, Lewandowski has won everything there is to win. He was chosen by FIFA as the world’s best men’s player last year. He is closing in on 500 career goals, and on Gerd Müller’s once-untouchable record. There is nothing left for him to prove.He has honed his instincts to such a point that he can, without thinking, absorb all the information he needs to solve a problem, to score a goal, in a fraction of a second. He has turned himself into a machine.But even now, every goal brings with it an overwhelming sense of joy. “You feel like you did when you were a child,” he said. It washes over him, now, for 30 seconds, maybe a minute.And then, every single time, he is faced with a choice. “You can think: I have scored once, it’s enough,” he said. “You can lose focus, start freestyling. Or you can think I have scored once, so maybe I can score another. Is one enough, or do you want more? You need the button.”Lewandowski has never had much difficulty making that choice. He does not even have to think. Or more to the point: He is not aware of himself thinking. “You press the switch,” he said, and you start to think about scoring again, and again, and again.A mural on the wall of an elementary school in Lewandowski’s native Poland.Wojtek Jargilo/EPA, via Shutterstock More