Raphael Stevens

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    Manchester City Beats PSG, Advancing to Champions League Final

    With a win over Paris St.-Germain, City worked past some demons and headed to the Champions League final.MANCHESTER, England — In those last few minutes, even with the game sealed and a place in the final secure, Manchester City’s staff members and substitutes could not sit still. They pulsed with energy. They roared at every poor challenge. They demanded action from the referee for every transgression. They cheered every completed pass.As the clock ticked into injury time, they fretted and fidgeted when Paris St.-Germain won a free kick within sight of Éderson’s goal. They cheered when it sailed over. The voice of Mark Sertori, the club’s longstanding masseur, bellowed out across the empty Etihad Stadium. “No chances,” he shouted. There were no more than 30 seconds left, and P.S.G. needed to score three times.To the rational brain, there was nothing to worry about. Two goals from Riyad Mahrez had long since put the outcome beyond doubt. The distant prospect of a P.S.G. revival had evaporated entirely when Ángel Di María, its Argentine wing, had kicked out at Fernandinho and duly been sent off. City had been home and dry ever since.But the rational brain goes quiet when the stakes are quite so high. For all that City has achieved in the past 13 years, as it has been transformed from hardscrabble makeweights to the pre-eminent force in English soccer, soon to be winners of three of the past four Premier League titles, and five of the past 10, the Champions League has become something of an open sore.Like P.S.G., City was built, at considerable expense, to win the Champions League. Not in the sense that it is the game’s final frontier, a team’s greatest ambition. It is that for City — this iteration of City, anyway — this competition is the ultimate purpose.It is why Pep Guardiola, the standout coach of his generation, was hired; it is why the people who hired him — his former colleagues at Barcelona, Txiki Begiristain and Ferran Soriano — were hired. It is why he has been granted the chance to gather a squad that meets every single one of his demands at a training facility built to enable him to work in absolute serenity.Soccer does not, of course, work according to a formula, no matter how much money and expertise go into its construction. They have learned that at City the hard way.The long slog of the Premier League has proved easy to master in comparison with the chimera of the Champions League. There is, as Guardiola said, “something in the stars” in this competition, and it is hard to disagree: He has spent most of the past 10 years in charge of either a powerhouse Bayern Munich team or a Manchester City side of the most exquisite brilliance, yet this will be his first appearance in the final of this tournament since 2011.Riyad Mahrez scored both goals for Manchester City on Tuesday. With his team already at an advantage coming into the match, Mahrez left no doubt which team would advance.Martin Rickett/Press Association, via Associated PressThe disappointments have been startling in their variety, compelling in their unpredictability. Under Guardiola, City has been caught cold by a youthful and unheralded Monaco, and then blown apart by a surging and hungry Liverpool. It has had its heart broken by Tottenham and its brain frazzled by Lyon.And now, after a decade of trying, it has shattered that ceiling. What this game means for soccer is a question that — for all that the fans of both City and P.S.G. will resent its being asked — the sport must continue to contemplate.This, after all, involved two teams backed by the untrammeled wealth of Gulf States competing for a place in soccer’s most glamorous, most exclusive club competition. it should not be controversial to suggest that the motives behind their current primacy are not uniquely sporting.This may have been the first time they have met on a stage quite this grand, but the simple economics at play — particularly in the aftermath of the pandemic — suggest it will not be the last. They have spent their money differently, P.S.G. on individuals and City on the broader squad, but they have spent it in sums that few, if any, of their rivals can match.Ángel Di María of Paris St.-Germain was sent off after kicking Fernandinho during an altercation on the sideline.Laurence Griffiths/Getty ImagesBut while the geopolitics and the morality and the broader ramifications matter, they do not matter — not in the moment — to the players and the staff who have been tasked with carrying Manchester City to the place where it wants to be. That is not the story they are part of, not to them.Instead, theirs is a story of personal ambition and childhood dreams and professional satisfaction, of seeing decades of dedication rewarded not by a lucrative contract or a high-profile transfer but by the long-anticipated chance to reach what is, in almost every sense, the pinnacle of their careers.That is why, a few minutes before the end, Kevin De Bruyne trooped from the field, his face flushed and his body heaving, and slumped into a chair. He, almost alone, did not spend the final few minutes bellowing and barking and chivying and chiding: There was not a drop of energy left in his body.He had spent it all chasing down P.S.G.’s defenders as they tried to play their way out of Manchester City’s relentless, lupine press, and haring back to snuff out danger on the rare occasions that Neymar threatened to pick a way through. He seemed, at one point, to lose his cool just a little, reacting to P.S.G.’s provocations, unable to resist the temptation to meet fire with fire. He had been cautioned already; he may have been removed for his own benefit.Manchester City Manager Pep Guardiola with Phil Foden.Phil Noble/ReutersWhen the final whistle blew, he walked gingerly to the field, his legs heavy. His teammates were embracing in front of him. Guardiola’s coaching staff had arranged themselves in a line to greet every single player as they came off the field. Rúben Dias was shirtless in the bitter cold of what is in theory spring in Manchester, howling in the face of whomever he could find.Manchester City has waited more than a decade for this: the culmination of a project, the realization of a plan. Guardiola has waited 10 years to get back to the final of the competition that he, for one, cherishes more than any other. His players, though, have waited far longer. They have waited their entire lives, in fact, for this one shot. And that, in that moment, is what it meant. More

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    Manchester City Battles Premier League Over Alleged Rule Breach

    City, the Gulf-backed soccer team on the cusp of a fourth English Premier League title, is fighting an investigation over financial control rules.LONDON — Manchester City, the English soccer team that is on the cusp of winning the Premier League for the third time in four seasons, is involved in a secret legal battle with the league over whether it complied with financial rules as it surged to become one of the sport’s dominant forces.The Premier League has been tight lipped since confirming in 2019 that it was looking into City’s finances a few months after the German news weekly Der Spiegel, citing internal club information, said the club had disguised direct investment by its owner, Sheikh Mansour, as sponsorship income. City has always insisted it has not broken any regulations and denounced the stolen documents as “out-of-context materials” that were published as part of an “organized and clear attempt to damage the club’s reputation.”City has spent millions of dollars defending itself since the allegations first emerged. Its lawyers are fighting against the league’s arbitration process, arguing that the club will not get a fair hearing, according to documents. City and the league did not immediately reply to a request for comment.City is challenging the Premier League in Britain’s civil courts, where hearings have been held behind closed doors, and where publication of material related to the case has been kept confidential despite intense public interest in the case. It is not known what action the Premier League would take if it found City to have breached its rules. Penalties in its rule book include points deductions and fines.City, backed by the billionaire brother of the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, one of the richest men in the world, waged a successful battle in 2020 when it won an appeal against a two-year ban from the Champions League after being found to have breached separate cost control rules by the European soccer governing body, UEFA. City won its case at the Switzerland-based Court of Arbitration after convincing judges that a time limit had elapsed on the evidence against it. The Premier League’s rules do not have similar deadlines.City requires just one more victory to be sure of the English championship. It is also on a charge toward securing its first Champions League crown. It holds a 2-1 advantage over Paris St.-Germain, another Gulf-controlled club, before Tuesday night’s decisive second semifinal game at its own stadium.The case is taking place against the backdrop of major scrutiny of owners in English soccer. A protest by fans of City’s crosstown rival, Manchester United, led to its game against Liverpool being postponed on Sunday after the two clubs joined City and three other English teams in signing up to a planned breakaway European competition. The plans were abandoned within 48 hours after a torrent of criticism and the threat of government action.Still, City won plaudits after becoming the first of the rebel English clubs to announce it had backed away from the project.City’s battle against the Premier League bears the hallmarks of its approach in the UEFA case. Before finding salvation through a technicality in the rules that set a five-year time limit on the infractions eligible for punishment, the club tried to have the case thrown out at the CAS before UEFA had even ruled.City’s stance in the Premier League case is a second major recent assault on the league’s governance structures. The owner of Newcastle United started legal action last fall against the league after it failed to clear a sale to Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.City’s relationship with UEFA has strengthened significantly since it successfully appealed the Champions League ban. UEFA resisted appealing the CAS judgment even after Der Spiegel published new revelations that appeared to cast doubt on some of the evidence a senior City official provided to the court.UEFA told The New York Times in a statement that it had sought legal opinion on the chance of appealing the CAS decision after Der Spiegel published new emails. “The clear view was that such an appeal would stand little chance of success in forcing CAS to rehear the case and on the slim chance it did, the chance of success at a second hearing was also limited. A similar view was also taken on the possible success of a prosecution under the UEFA disciplinary framework,” said UEFA.Its president, Aleksander Ceferin, praised City personally, issuing a statement minutes after the team last month became the first to withdraw from the proposed breakaway competition.While the superleague proposals continue to attract widespread criticism, those involved in the negotiations insist part of the rationale behind them was to cool rampant spending that has imperiled the futures of some of the elite clubs as they seek to keep up with teams backed by wealthy benefactors, particularly those controlled by the Gulf nation states.Documents reviewed by The Times showed each team would have had to submit detailed financial information to financial auditors, as well as agree to rules forbidding owners from artificially inflating teams’ balance sheets. Penalties for breaches included a suspension or ban from the competition, as well as millions of dollars in fines.City’s backers say existing rules have been designed to keep historically dominant clubs from facing competition from up-and-coming teams. Sheikh Mansour has plowed more than $1 billion into turning City into the dominant force in English soccer over much of the past decade. His largess has been spent on acquiring top executives, players and Pep Guardiola, the pre-eminent manager of his generation.City has also spent millions on rejuvenating the deprived Manchester neighborhood where it plays its home games, building new facilities and creating jobs in an area that had suffered from high unemployment. More

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    In Anti-Ownership Protests, United Fans Rediscover Their Own Power

    The protests, by Manchester United fans demanding the Glazer family sell the club, forced the postponement of a match after the stadium was stormed.At the Lowry Hotel, Manchester United’s players could do nothing but sit and watch. Outside, hundreds of fans had gathered, blockading the buses scheduled to take them on the short trip to Old Trafford. They were supposed to depart at 3 p.m., local time. It came and went. The crowd did not disperse. Then 4 p.m. ticked by on the clock. Still no movement.A couple of miles down the road, what had started out as an organized protest against the team’s ownership — the irredeemably unpopular and, by most definitions, parasitic Glazer family — had swelled and warped into something far more chaotic, far more wild.Hundreds of fans had broken through the security forces and made it onto the field. There were suggestions that some had found their way into the entrails of the stadium, reaching as far as Old Trafford’s sanctum sanctorum, the home team’s changing room. A small number of those still outside the stadium clashed with the police. Two officers were injured.United’s players were still restricted to their hotel rooms at 4.30 p.m., as the Premier League’s marquee fixture should have been kicking off. Manchester United against Liverpool is English soccer’s greatest rivalry, the meeting of its two most successful clubs. This edition even had a title on the line, for good measure, albeit indirectly: a Liverpool win would have handed Manchester City the championship.For a while, the Premier League refused to bow to the inevitable. The game would be delayed, it said, but would go ahead as soon as the players’ safety could be assured. By 5.30 p.m. — what should have been the start of the second half — the scales had fallen. The league released a short statement, confirming the match had been postponed.“We understand and respect the strength of feeling but condemn all acts of violence, criminal damage and trespass, especially given the associated Covid-19 breaches,” it read. “Fans have many channels by which to make their views known, but the actions of a minority seen today have no justification.”There are two roads that the league, the clubs involved and soccer as a whole can take from here. One is to focus on the method. It does not need to be pointed out that the violence outside the stadium — limited though it was — should be condemned. It cannot and should not be justified. The same is true of the more minor offenses of “criminal damage and trespass.”Those offenses open a door. They make it possible to depict all of those involved with the protests, both at Old Trafford and the Lowry Hotel, as hooligans and troublemakers and, above all, yobs, the epithet wheeled out whenever soccer fans need to be demonized.They disincentivize engaging with the sentiments behind the protests, make it easy to cast the events of Sunday as nothing but mindlessness and lawlessness. They turn emotion, sincere and deep, into nothing but self-serving revanchism: fans protesting because their team is not top of the league.Carl Recine/Action Images, via ReutersOli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThey offer an easy solution, the panacea that soccer always turns to in the end. Win the Europa League later this month and all of this will be forgotten, nothing more than a few million more social media engagements for the club to cite in glowing terms in the next quarterly review of its finances.The second is to avoid that easy pitfall, and to focus instead on the message. The Glazers have never been popular at Old Trafford. There were protests when they completed their heavily leveraged takeover of a club they knew little to nothing about in 2005. There were more at the end of that decade, fans decking themselves out in the club’s first colors — green and gold — rather than its more famous red to signal their discontent.That hostility has never dissipated. But for much of the last decade, it lay dormant. Not because of United’s success — by its own standards, the last eight years have been disappointing — but because of the apparent futility of protest.Manchester United, like all soccer teams, might feel like a social and community institution. It might continually pitch itself as one. It might occasionally even act like one. But it is, in the most real and relevant sense, a business, and it is a business owned by the Glazers, and because no matter how ardent the protests, the Glazers did not seem to flinch, the energy dissipated.And then, two weeks ago, Joel Glazer, a co-chairman of the club, put his name to a proposal to start a European superleague, and the fury awoke. Fans of the other English teams tainted by association with the project have taken to the streets — a protest by Chelsea fans precipitated the league’s demise; their peers at Arsenal came out in the thousands a few days later — but none have gone quite so far as United. None have brought the league that styles itself as the greatest in the world to a standstill on one of its red-letter days.In part, that is down to the unpopularity of the Glazers. The reaction at each of the clubs involved has, in some way, reflected the fans’ relationship with the owners.Arsenal is desperate to be rid of another unloved American, Stan Kroenke: It came out in force. Liverpool, where Fenway Sports Group has some residual admiration, has been a little more circumspect. Manchester City has not seen any mass gatherings, testament to the debt of gratitude its fans feel they owe its backers in Abu Dhabi. At United, hatred of the Glazers runs deep.The message their protest sent, though, stretches way beyond parochial concerns or tribal affiliations. It is not just, as it might appear, that fans do not want a superleague. That was established beyond doubt a couple of weeks ago. It is not just that fans do not want their clubs to be used as playthings by owners who care less for the names on the roster than the numbers on the bottom line.It is that, after years of fretting that their teams had been hijacked by the billionaire class and that their game had been taken away from them by television contracts and rampant commercialism and unstoppable globalization, the last two weeks have taught fans that they are not quite so powerless as they once thought.If they do not want a superleague, they can stop it in its tracks; it follows, then, that if they do not want the game they have now, then they can do something about it. As one of the chants that United players will have heard, drifting up to their rooms in the Lowry from the street below, had it: “We decide when you will play.”Manchester United’s Scott McTominay, left, and Lee Grant watching the protests from inside the Lowry Hotel.Phil Noble/ReutersThat has not felt true for some time, but, all of a sudden, it is possible to believe it. It has gone unsaid for too long, but the whole cash-soaked edifice of modern soccer has been built on fans: the match tickets and the television subscriptions and the merchandise and the captive advertising demographic.All of the money that is frittered on sky-high salaries and inflated transfer fees and inexplicable agents’ commissions: It all, ultimately, comes from fans. Fans make it all add up. Fans keep the show on the road.And it is fans, now, who have realized that means they can make it stop, too: an abortive idea for a league here, so why not a major fixture there? They have, suddenly, rediscovered their power.The irony of all this, of course, will be lost on the Glazers, and all the owners like them. It was soccer’s easily monetized fanaticism that drew them to the game in the first place, and that eventually convinced them that their harebrained superleague scheme could work. The fans, they assumed, would go with them. They did not.And now, that same force is aligned against them. The methods it chooses cannot always be condoned. But the message is clear, and it is one that soccer would do well to heed. More

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    Some Dramatic Quarterback Successions Start at the N.F.L. Draft

    If the draft last week revealed anything, it was that there’s no tactful way to replace a healthy starting quarterback.Replacing a franchise quarterback is not as simple as drafting his successor. It’s more like selecting the heir to the throne of some ancient empire: full of drama, intrigue, careful diplomacy and the constant threat of open rebellion.The teams that chose possible successors to established quarterbacks in the 2021 N.F.L. draft must all proceed with some degree of caution, knowing that one false move might plunge their kingdoms into a dark age.The Tampa Bay Buccaneers drafted a potential heir to 43-year-old Tom Brady in Kyle Trask of the University of Florida with the final pick of the second round. Brady does not like to be surrounded by reminders of his mortality, but Trask’s credentials are unassuming enough that the Buccaneers can pass him off as a lowly intern for the next few months, sparing him from banishment to the labyrinth beneath the TB12 compound.The New England Patriots wisely waited until Brady was gone for a year before drafting his likely successor: the 15th overall pick, Mac Jones, who led Alabama to the national championship last season. Cam Newton has helmed the Patriots in the interim like a distant noble cousin (the 11th Earl of Ascots) retrieved from the hinterlands to keep the throne warm.The Minnesota Vikings drafted Kellen Mond of Texas A&M as a possible replacement for Kirk Cousins with the second pick of the third round. Cousins hasn’t faced a challenger for his starting job for many years. Instead of trying to replace Cousins, employers typically cope with his brand of ordinary but overpriced play by paying him more and lowering their expectations.General Manager Rick Spielman played down Mond’s role as a challenger to Cousins after the selection. Quarterback succession ceremonies often begin with this type of ritualized, ego-soothing denial of the obvious.The Houston Texans used a third-round pick (their highest selection in the draft) on Stanford’s Davis Mills, a possible replacement for Deshaun Watson, who faces 22 civil suits alleging lewd and coercive sexual behavior, two of which also accuse him of sexual assault. He has denied the claims. Before those suits were filed, Watson was seeking a trade from the mismanaged, scuffling Texans, who signed Tyrod Taylor in case Watson held out.Under those tumultuous circumstances, Mills faces more of a potential starting crisis than a starting opportunity.Terrible teams usually don’t have to worry about delicate transfers of power. The top two picks in the draft, Trevor Lawrence of Clemson and Zach Wilson of Brigham Young are now the unquestioned starting quarterbacks of the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Jets. Trey Lance (North Dakota State) must only supplant Jimmy Garoppolo, who likely updated his LinkedIn profile in March when the San Francisco 49ers traded two future first-round picks for the third overall pick. The Chicago Bears selected Justin Fields of Ohio State with the 11th pick, leaving the journeymen Andy Dalton and Nick Foles to arm wrestle for the role of overpaid mentor.For a successful franchise, however, a bungled succession plan can result in disaster. The Green Bay Packers prematurely drafted Utah State’s Jordan Love as an eventual heir to Aaron Rodgers last year, when Rodgers expected that they would add a much-needed wide receiver. The rift between Rodgers, who is likely to be a future Hall of Famer, and the organization now appears irreconcilable. The Packers appear unwilling to trade Rodgers, though they did draft Clemson receiver Amari Rodgers in the third round, which seems like a belated apology: “See, we got you what you wanted, and we even had it engraved!”Aaron Rodgers’s situation illustrates why so many teams procrastinate instead of seeking an heir apparent for a distinguished veteran. The New Orleans Saints are in deep denial about Drew Brees’s recent retirement; the team’s fourth-round pick, Ian Book of Notre Dame, is less of a successor than a nonthreatening option who’ll make the dueling underqualified claimants Taysom Hill and Jameis Winston look good by comparison.Instead of a challenger to Matt Ryan, 35, the Atlanta Falcons drafted Florida tight end Kyle Pitts in their latest effort to resuscitate a Super Bowl opportunity that died on Feb. 5, 2017. The Pittsburgh Steelers are waiting for Ben Roethlisberger to crash before having the talk about surrendering his driver’s license.Even the most successful succession plans are rarely smooth: Joe Montana and Steve Young clashed for six years in San Francisco, and Rodgers learned the art of epic melodrama at the feet of Brett Favre. Most quarterback successions are more like Cousins-to-Mond than Montana-to-Young: not worth the hassle until necessary.The Giants were lucky when the Eli Manning-to-Daniel Jones transition was relatively smooth — at least in public — in 2019. With the rites of succession behind them, the Giants concentrated on adding potential impact players like wide receiver Kadarius Toney, defensive end Azeez Ojulari and cornerback Aaron Robinson instead in this year’s draft.And if those newcomers cannot help the Giants return to the playoffs, the team will start searching for Jones’s replacement next year. More

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    Pete Lammons, Who Helped the Jets Win ’69 Super Bowl, Dies at 77

    After his football career, he bred racehorses and competed in professional fishing tournaments. He died after falling out of a boat in East Texas.Pete Lammons, the tight end for the Jets team that stunned the pro football world with a victory over the Baltimore Colts in the 1969 Super Bowl, died on Thursday in a boating accident at a professional fishing tournament in East Texas. He was 77 and had been living in Houston.Major League Fishing, the sponsor of the tournament, said that Lammons, who was participating in the event, had fallen out of his boat on the Sam Rayburn Reservoir, a popular spot for bass fishing, and that the other man in the boat tried to rescue him. A team equipped with sonar recovered Lammons’s body a few hours later.Lammons’s nephew Lance Lammons told The Jacksonville Progress newspaper of East Texas that he had appeared to be fatigued after receiving two heart stents. Lammons had competed in more than 50 Major League Fishing tournaments over the years.He played for the Jets from 1966 to 1971, spending his first four seasons with them when they played in the American Football League, which struggled to survive in the shadow of the long established National Football League.The Jets were losers in the early years of the A.F.L., which was founded in 1960. Then came the arrival of their charismatic quarterback Joe Namath in 1965.Lammons in 1967. In his seven pro seasons, he caught 185 passes for 2,364 yards and 14 touchdowns.Associated PressLammons caught a touchdown pass from Namath in the Jets’ 27-23 victory over the Oakland Raiders in the 1968 A.F.L. championship game that set up their January 1969 Super Bowl III matchup against the N.F.L.’s Colts, who were heavy favorites.He caught an 11-yard pass from Namath in the Super Bowl that was followed by Jim Turner’s field goal, giving the Jets a 13-0 lead. They held on for a 16-7 victory.The Jets said on their website that Weeb Ewbank, who coached them to their Super Bowl triumph, had called Lammons and his wide receiver teammates George Sauer Jr. and Don Maynard “the finest trio of receivers in pro ball to throw to.”Lammons called Ewbank “an outstanding coach as long as you got accomplished what he wanted.”“He kept it pretty simple,” he said in 2019 of Ewbank. “It was blocking and tackling.”After playing for three seasons with the University of Texas, Lammons was selected by the Jets in the eighth round of the 1966 A.F.L. draft and by the Cleveland Browns in the 14th round of the N.F.L. draft. Choosing the A.F.L., he played in the league’s All-Star Game after the 1967 season.Lammons, at 6 feet 3 inches and 230 pounds, became a mainstay of a Jets offense that featured Namath’s passing along with the running of Emerson Boozer and Matt Snell. He concluded his pro career with the 1972 season with the Green Bay Packers.Lammons with Joe Namath, left, in 1969. Weeb Ewbank, the Jets coach, called Lammons, George Sauer Jr. and Don Maynard “the finest trio of receivers in pro ball to throw to.”Associated PressIn his seven pro seasons, he caught 185 passes for 2,364 yards and 14 touchdowns.Peter Spencer Lammons Jr. was born on Oct. 20, 1943, in Crockett, Texas, about 115 miles north of Houston. He played football for Jacksonville High School, also in East Texas, and then played for the University of Texas from 1963 to 1965. He caught 47 passes for 706 yards and five touchdowns for the Longhorns, who were ranked No. 1 for the 1963 season.Apart from his nephew, a listing of Lammons’s survivors was not immediately available.After retiring from football, Lammons worked in real estate and partnered with Jim Hudson, his former Texas and Jets teammate at defensive back, in the thoroughbred business, breeding and racing horses.In January 2010, when Texas was getting ready to play Alabama at the Rose Bowl for the Bowl Championship Series national title, Lammons remembered how his Longhorns had defeated the Crimson Tide, 21-17, in the New Year’s Day 1965 Orange Bowl game, when Alabama was top-ranked and had Namath as quarterback and Texas was ranked No. 5.Lammons, playing at end and linebacker, intercepted a pass by Namath, caught two passes, one setting up a score, and recovered a fumble.“Best game of my life, a career day,” he told George Vecsey of The New York Times.For the moment, Lammons had skipped over another great day at the Orange Bowl stadium, at least for the Jets, when they pulled off their astonishing upset of the Colts in Super Bowl III. More

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    Tom Brady Charted a New Path. Aaron Rodgers Struggles to Do the Same.

    When Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks like Brady, Rodgers and Russell Wilson grow frustrated with their teams, the nature of N.F.L. contracts makes it hard to scramble away. Brady ultimately succeeded by running out the clock.The final contract that Tom Brady signed in New England, in August 2019, contained a clever provision that prevented the Patriots from placing a franchise or transition tag on him, ensuring that, as he desired, Brady would become a free agent after the season.In this booming era for quarterbacks in the N.F.L., even average players are paid tens millions of dollars, to say nothing of stars like Brady, who got $22 million guaranteed in that deal. Five quarterbacks were taken in the first round of the draft Thursday night — including at the first three spots — as teams fervently aimed to build around personality and production at the most important position in American pro sports.Yet, as Aaron Rodgers is discovering, quarterbacks have little power, because this is the N.F.L. and not the N.B.A., where the best players, armed with guaranteed contracts, can prioritize winning over financial concerns. In the N.F.L., players who want to change teams are at the mercy of their contract structures and have barely a modicum of control over their careers.However disenchanted Brady became in New England — with the lack of receiving talent, with his diminishing power to influence personnel decisions — he did not air his grievances publicly. Done with the Patriots after two decades and six titles, Brady didn’t pout. He just left. His contract allowed him to do so.And in Tampa Bay, where Brady signed before the 2020 season, he found a better roster, a front office that valued his opinion and, in the end, a vindicating championship.Among the few to see Brady’s seventh Super Bowl win in person was the Seattle Seahawks’ Russell Wilson, who has become the N.F.L.’s most sacked quarterback across his first nine seasons since the league merged with the A.F.L. more than a half-century ago. Wilson must have noted that the 43-year-old Brady shredded Kansas City’s secondary from a clean pocket.Seven days after the game, Wilson told the news media that he wanted a larger voice in Seattle’s personnel decisions. His agent also let it be known that there were four teams that Wilson would agree to be traded to — without actually, you know, demanding a trade.Even before losing to Brady and the Buccaneers in last season’s N.F.C. championship game, Rodgers called his future in Green Bay “a beautiful mystery.”Mark Lomoglio/Associated PressThis week, reports of Aaron Rodgers’s dissatisfaction with management detonated in the frenetic hours before the draft. His veiled refusal to play for Green Bay again was swatted down just hours after reports of it surfaced. The team’s general manager, Brian Gutekunst, avowed that Rodgers would not be traded. Rodgers and the Packers, it should be noted, lost to Brady and the Buccaneers in the N.F.C. title game in January.That the news of Rodgers’s discontent broke when it did suggested a calculated disruption by one of the league’s most calculating disrupters, an attempt by the quarterback’s camp to embarrass the Packers just as they embarrassed him on draft night last year. That was when they traded up to draft a quarterback, Jordan Love, without communicating their intentions to Rodgers, who then had four years left on his contract.Either way, the Packers’ clunky handling of the situation and long-term draft strategy antagonized Rodgers. Craving vengeance, he had the best season of his career.Rodgers tends to choose his words with the precision of a safecracker, and he sprinkled cryptic hints about his feelings in various interviews. To wit, he acknowledged his tenuous relationship with the team a few days before losing the conference title game, calling his future “a beautiful mystery.”And that was before Packers Coach Matt LaFleur made the confounding decision to attempt a close field goal, while down by 8 points late in the game, instead of trusting Rodgers to throw a tying touchdown.Both Rodgers and Wilson have publicly broached the possibility of divorce from their teams, sending implicit “make me happy or I’ll ask out” threats. But neither Green Bay nor Seattle is incentivized to do anything beyond listen to its quarterback’s gripes and try to improve the overall quality of the roster.Rodgers was surprised, and miffed, when the Packers traded up to pick quarterback Jordan Love, left, in the 2020 N.F.L. draft.Morry Gash/Associated PressRodgers, 37, is contractually tied to the Packers through 2023. His only options in the wake of that draft-day report are toothless: He can skip mandatory minicamp in June or training camp in July, and he can remain absent once the season starts. But by holding out or even retiring, Rodgers would accrue fines and even, perhaps, lose some bonus money he is still owed. Rumor has it “Jeopardy!” is looking for a full-time host.Considering the more palatable salary-cap charges Green Bay would incur if it traded Rodgers next year — $17.2 million, according to Jason Fitzgerald of the website Over the Cap — it’s far more likely that the Packers, when they drafted Love, were envisioning parting with Rodgers before the 2022 season. Rodgers has reportedly declined an extension.“There’s pride involved, it’s personal and there’s money,” said the longtime N.F.L. executive Randy Mueller, who served as general manager in Miami and New Orleans. “You’re talking about three ingredients that are like kerosene.”Before allegations of sexual misconduct by Deshaun Watson surfaced in lawsuits, the Texans’ quarterback harbored similar disenchantment with his team. Incensed by Houston’s front-office dysfunction and roster mismanagement, and coming off a 2020 season in which he led the league in passing yards, Watson insisted that he would never play for Houston again.Watson had a no-trade clause negotiated into the four-year extension he signed in September 2020, giving him sway over where he would play next, but the Texans also had leverage: They signed Tyrod Taylor in March, setting up a scenario in which the team could let Watson sit out the full 2021 season, perhaps longer, while fining him millions of dollars for missed time. Russell Wilson has been sacked more times in his first nine N.F.L. seasons than any other quarterback since the league merged with the A.F.L.  Stephen Brashear/Associated PressAt one point not long ago, Brady and Rodgers each envisioned spending his entire career in one place, playing into his 40s with the team that drafted him. But circumstances changed. The Packers drafted Love; Bill Belichick — the Patriots’ coach, general manager and jury — stared his quarterback down. So Brady moved south to win with a team that valued his input.“Everybody wants to be Brady,” said Marc Ross, a longtime personnel executive with the Giants and the Eagles. “To try to compare what he does and the things that he’s accomplished and the maneuvers that he can make, he’s just really one of a kind.”The Packers, like the Texans, had already solved one of the biggest team-building conundrums in professional sports. If the most precious commodity in the N.F.L. is a star quarterback, the hardest task is finding one — and team owners didn’t get to be as rich as they are by always treating commodities like people. More

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    The Giants Traded Back in the Draft and, Some Say, Well

    Some fans scratched their heads at Dave Gettleman’s decision to trade back in the draft for the first time. But scooping receiver Kadarius Toney at No. 20 and getting draft assets was no fleecing.When the Giants finally chose Kadarius Toney, a wide receiver from the University of Florida, with the 20th pick in the N.F.L. draft, the team’s fans in Cleveland took a good 10 seconds to start a slow clap, mouthing undecipherable questions beneath their masks.It was probably the best reaction that Giants General Manager Dave Gettleman could have hoped for after several seasons of fans calling for his resignation at previous drafts.Gettleman traded down from the 11th pick, in exchange for Chicago’s spot at 20th, a fifth-round pick in this year’s draft and first- and fourth-round selections next year, a haul that should help him add talent for the future.Gettleman swallowed his words on trading back — a move he has never made in eight prior drafts as a general manager. Just last week he told reporters that he would refuse to do so because of the chance of “getting fleeced.”“So,” he said with a laugh after Thursday’s first round in a video call with reporters, “we made a trade back. Obviously it was too good an opportunity. It added too much value, and we felt very comfortable with where our board was, and we felt comfortable with who would be there, who would be available in that slot. So we made it.”Gettleman admitted that he was hoping for more quarterbacks to go early Thursday to open up Jaylen Waddle or DeVonta Smith, wide receivers out of Alabama who were taken by Miami at No. 6 and Philadelphia at No. 10. Once Philadelphia traded up to the 10th pick, Gettleman, who said he was in talks over the past week with Chicago’s general manager Ryan Pace, made the deal for the Bears to move up to land Ohio State quarterback Justin Fields.Though Toney did not receive the warmest initial welcome from in-person fans, he offers the Giants a versatile weapon on offense, having transitioned from quarterback in high school to a wide receiver by the end of his college career.“I really feel like it helped me as far as learning plays, learning the offense, seeing things and defenses, and recognizing coverages on the run and on the move,” Toney told reporters after his selection, adding that he also spent time at running back. “I think it helped a lot in my game.”Toney, who has been touted for his ability to make plays inside and out, had 70 receptions for 984 yards and 10 touchdowns in 2020. In a pandemic-altered selection process, N.F.L. talent evaluators have relied on rewatching tape, videoconference interviews and socially distanced workouts on college campuses. The Giants met Toney in person at the Senior Bowl in January, which aided in their decision, said Chris Pettit, the team’s director of college scouting.Since Gettleman took over as the Giants’ general manager in December of 2017, the franchise has gone 15-33: three seasons with double-digit losses. In 2020 under rookie head coach Joe Judge, the team finished with a 6-10 record and contended for its first postseason berth since 2016, because of the weakness of the N.F.C. East division.In 2018, Gettleman selected at No. 2 Saquon Barkley, who was sidelined in Week 2 last season with an anterior cruciate ligament tear. The team announced Wednesday that it had picked up Barkley’s fifth-year option. In 2019, the G.M. took with the sixth overall pick the current starter at quarterback, Daniel Jones, who has slowly improved his accuracy after taking over for the two-time Super Bowl winner Eli Manning.That year Gettleman also drafted Dexter Lawrence and Deandre Baker, who was waived in September 2020, in the first round. Last year, the Giants chose offensive tackle Andrew Thomas, who started 15 games this year.Perhaps under less scrutiny and still feeling the afterglow of its first A.F.C. championship appearance since 1993, Buffalo (13-3 in 2020) added defensive end Gregory Rousseau from Miami at No. 30. The Bills have incumbent starters at defensive end, Jerry Hughes and Mario Addison, and can take time developing the 21-year-old Rousseau, who was named the A.C.C.’s defensive rookie of the year as a redshirt freshman in 2019. That year, he had 15.5 sacks — second only to Chase Young’s 16.5 — and won all-conference honors. He was one of many players who opted out of the 2020 college football season amid the pandemic.“I feel like I really rely on my motor a lot but I’m also going to just keep getting my technique better, and I’m going to just be the best player I can be,” Rousseau told reporters after his selection. “I’m ready to earn the respect of my teammates, my peers, my coaches and everybody in Buffalo — even the fans.”The Jets also traded up for their second pick in the first round after selecting quarterback Zach Wilson second over all. At No. 14, they gathered Alijah Vera-Tucker, an offensive guard from the University of Southern California, as the team hopes to rebrand its line under new head coach Robert Saleh. They had already traded former starting quarterback Sam Darnold to the Carolina Panthers earlier this month. More

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    When the Goals Come Out of Nowhere

    A Greek striker is one of the top scorers in Europe, and his play has caught the eye of big clubs. But are his goals a product of his talent, or his environment?Giorgos Giakoumakis had never scored goals. Not in great numbers, anyway. He had played 22 games, spread across three seasons, before he finally managed a single one for his first club, a team of modest ambitions and close horizons called Platanias, based on his home island, Crete.In the early stages of his career, he broke into double figures for a single campaign only once, mustering 11 goals in his final season at Platanias. It appeared, at the time, to be his breakthrough. That summer, he moved to A.E.K. Athens, one of the three powers that dominate the Greek capital.There, Giakoumakis would carve out his own little place in the club’s mythology. Midway through his debut season, he scored a 93rd-minute winner to settle a derby with Olympiacos, decisively swinging a finely poised title race in A.E.K.’s favor. It was his first league goal for the club. It would also prove to be the last.He spent much of the next two seasons out on loan, A.E.K. hoping either that he would find his form or that it might find a buyer. The signs were not promising. A spell back on Crete — this time with O.F.I. — brought two goals. A year in Poland, with Gornik Zabrze, produced only three.Giakoumakis seemed set for a career as a journeyman. There was nothing on his résumé that so much as hinted at what would happen next.This season, out of nowhere, Giakoumakis has been transformed into one of Europe’s most prolific forwards. He has scored 24 goals in 27 league games. He got three on his debut with his new club. He has scored four goals in a single game twice. He scored 11 — previously his career-best for an entire campaign — in January alone. That month, no player in Europe scored more.More impressive still, he has done it all while playing for VVV Venlo, a club struggling to avoid relegation at the foot of the Eredivisie, the Dutch top flight. It currently sits 17th out of 18 teams. Earlier this season, it managed to lose by 13-0 to Ajax. It has recorded only six wins all year, and has scored only 39 goals. Giakoumakis accounts for almost two-thirds of them. “Without him,” his teammate Christian Kum said, “things would have been much worse for us.”Giakoumakis after Venlo’s most notable result this season: a 13-0 defeat to Ajax in October.Olaf Kraak/EPA, via ShutterstockThat sort of form attracts attention. Giakoumakis’s career prospects have been, in the space of just a few months, utterly transformed. He is now a fully minted Greek international, having made his debut for his country in November. Clubs further up soccer’s food chain have suddenly taken an interest. Norwich City, recently promoted to the Premier League, has watched him. So, too, has Southampton.Many would caution them to treat his supernova burst with a degree of skepticism. This sort of thing happens, after all, with curious frequency in the Eredivisie. Dutch soccer has a long, proud and quite odd history of previously unheralded strikers suddenly hitting an almost impossibly rich vein of form.Sometimes — as in the case of Ruud van Nistelrooy, Luis Suárez or Klaas-Jan Huntelaar — it is a harbinger of greater things to come; they could score great gluts of goals in the Eredivisie because their talent, their dedication and their brilliance meant that they could score great gluts of goals anywhere.And sometimes — as in the case of Georgios Samaras, Vincent Janssen or, perhaps the most famous example, the Brazilian Afonso Alves — it is not. Sometimes, the volume of goals a striker scores in the Eredivisie is, if not quite an illusion, then certainly a trick of the light. Sometimes they do not go on to shine on a grander stage. Sometimes, their success says more about the shortcomings of Dutch soccer than it does about them.“You do wonder why it always happens here,” said Arnold Bruggink, formerly of PSV Eindhoven and now an analyst for ESPN. “It is because all the teams want to play in the Dutch way. Even among the smaller teams, there is a sense that you have to play well. Everybody wants to do the same, even if they don’t have the quality to do it.“It is a very young league, and it gets younger every year: it is not unusual here to have central defenders who are 19 or 20. A player who is 26 is a veteran. And young players make mistakes. If you look at the bottom teams in Spain or Germany, they will have conceded maybe 50 goals in 30 games. Here, it is often 60 or 70.”Vincent Janssen’s 27 goals at AZ Alkmaar earned him a move to Tottenham in 2016. He now plays for Monterrey in Mexico.Julio Cesar Aguilar/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesInstinctively, then, it feels as if Giakoumakis’s story is actually about Dutch soccer: Its moral is that because goals come fast and loose in the Eredivisie, their meaning is difficult to discern, a reminder that there is no correlation between how many goals a player scores in the Netherlands and how many they might score elsewhere.And yet there is a problem with that reading. Goals might be cheap in Holland, but not every Eredivisie team has a striker — every season — who scores them by the bucketload. The leading scorer at Ajax, as it canters to another championship this year, is Dusan Tadic, a midfielder. Something, then, must be different about Giakoumakis, just as something must have explained Alves or Janssen in years gone by.The answer, of course, lies in context. There is a degree of serendipity in how Giakoumakis found himself in Venlo. It is not the sort of club that can afford to be choosy. It plays in one of the smallest stadiums, and has one of the smallest budgets, in the Eredivisie. At Venlo, success is getting to fight relegation again next year.Stan Valckx, the man in charge of cobbling together its shoestring team, has no vast network of scouts. He cannot pay colossal transfer fees. He has to keep his eyes and his mind open, and he has to take risks. Most of all, he has no choice but to listen to every pitch from every agent for every player. “I always answer the phone,” he said.That is how he found Giakoumakis. Last March, he got yet another unsolicited call, from an agent suggesting he take a look at a 26-year-old Greek striker playing in Poland. Valckx did what he always does: a little cursory investigation. Giakoumakis’s numbers were not especially impressive. “If you just looked at the statistics, he probably would not have come to us,” he said.Giakoumakis has already made his debut for Greece.Thanassis Stavrakis/Associated PressFootage of his performances, though, was more promising. “We have a team that plays more often in its own half than the opponent’s,” Valckx said. “We need a striker with depth in his game, who can hold the ball up, who works hard.”Giakoumakis ticked those boxes. The club’s manager at the time, Hans de Koning, was encouraged by how Giakoumakis tended to celebrate his (rare) goals with his teammates, rather than taking the acclaim for himself. His salary was within Venlo’s reach. Valckx flew to Poland to watch him in the flesh, only to find that — because of attendance restrictions to combat the spread of coronavirus — he was not allowed into the stadium.Instead, he watched the game in a sports bar. Still, he liked what he saw. The next day, he met Giakoumakis in a hotel. The player had done his research. He knew a little about his prospective teammates. He could identify which system Venlo played. Valckx was convinced this was a risk worth taking.He does not pretend that he expected Giakoumakis to take Dutch soccer by storm. He did not think — he possibly did not even hope — that he was signing a player who might end the season as the Eredivisie’s top scorer, ahead of all the coruscating young talents at Ajax and PSV. He saw Giakoumakis as the sort of player who might “score a goal every now and again, as a bonus.”But it is not only in the Eredivisie where what goals — or a lack of them — signify is difficult to pin down. What has enabled Giakoumakis to shine at Venlo is that the way the team plays suits him. His sole job is to be in the box, to win the ball in the air, to take chances. “I have never seen a striker so focused on goals as him,” Kum said. He is not asked to do anything he is not good at.The same is surely true of all of those improbable names who went before him, Samaras and Janssen and Alves and all the rest. They, most likely, thrived because they found themselves in teams that accentuated their strengths and disguised their weaknesses.That they could never burn quite so brightly as they did in the Eredivisie does not mean they were bad players who got lucky. True, perhaps, they benefited from those callow and generous defenses that make goals a little easier to come by in the Netherlands. And true, maybe their golden year was an exception, rather than the rule.But it seems likely, too, that some fundamental truth was missed: that goals and the ability to score them are not innate traits, something that can be smoothly transplanted from one place to another with nothing lost in transit.That nothing at all on Giakoumakis’s résumé suggested he was capable of this season did not mean it was impossible; that his time at Venlo has been so fruitful does not mean he will automatically be able to do the same next year, whether he is in the Netherlands or England or elsewhere.Whether he is good or bad or indifferent is not fixed; what came before will not define what comes after. What they say about goals is, perhaps, true of all players: What matters most is being in the right place, at the right time.Strength in DepthManchester City’s 2-1 win in Paris moved it within reach of its first Champions League final.Alex Grimm/Getty ImagesFor the second time in three years, the Premier League stands on the cusp of a clean sweep. In 2019, English teams took up all four slots in Europe’s major finals — Liverpool beating Tottenham to the Champions League, Chelsea overcoming Arsenal in the Europa League final — and, in 2021, it is 90 minutes away from repeating the trick.Manchester City and Chelsea, certainly, are well-placed to make the Champions League final. City is in the stronger position, thanks to Paris St.-Germain’s second-half collapse, but Chelsea has less to fear: It turned out that beating a Liverpool team that had also lost to Burnley and Brighton did not prove Real Madrid was ready to reclaim its European crown.Christian Pulisic is the first American to score in a Champions League semifinal.Bernat Armangue/Associated PressManchester United, meanwhile, demolished Roma, 6-2, to seal — or as good as seal — its return to the Europa League final. Arsenal retains a hope of completing the set: Mikel Arteta’s flawed and fragile team lost at Villarreal, 2-1, but he will have seen enough to believe redemption is possible next week in London.It is dangerous to draw sweeping conclusions from relatively small sample sizes, but the direction of travel seems clear. The coronavirus pandemic has eviscerated the finances of clubs all over Europe, but the same financial advantages that made the Premier League such a force in 2019 have enabled its clubs to ride the storm better than most.There will always be exceptions, of course. Perhaps the Europa League will return to its rightful home in Seville next year. Maybe Bayern Munich or Barcelona will be able to mount a successful Champions League campaign in 2023. No rule will ever hold entirely true. But it feels distinctly like prominence is now the Premier League’s to lose.Management Shake-Up at Red Bull HQJesse Marsch, who won a league and cup double at Red Bull Salzburg in 2020, will take over the company’s Leipzig operation next season, the club said Thursday. He will replace Julian Nagelsmann, who is moving to Bayern Munich.Pool photo by Maxim ShemetovCorrespondence: Super League SpecialIt might only have lasted two days, but what a two days it was. All that plotting, all that intrigue, all those appearances by Florentino Pérez on late-night Spanish television — I hope they do another superleague soon. You’ll be unsurprised to learn that the very notion of it brought a deluge of correspondence, the best of which I’ve tried to answer below.Dave Moore: How much of the intense anger has to do with Brexit and class antagonism? Yes, people resented having tradition and history messed with, but isn’t part of the ongoing white hot outrage directed at the feeling that in a world in which there is a finite amount of money, people like these owners have a lot of it, and then they wanted even more?Quite a lot, Dave. I think this is the same feeling that we would have toward things like Big Tech or governmental corruption if it didn’t all seem so complex and distant. The idea of the Super League upset fans on a sporting level — promotion and relegation is almost sacred, it seems — but the perception of greed from the already staggeringly wealthy was too much to bear.Walid Neaz: If the rules were slightly different, might the plan have succeeded? For example, if the 12 teams didn’t have a permanent spot beyond the first season, but could then be subject to relegation if they had a bad year?There is definitely a format that could have made this idea more palatable — I have an idea myself that I might be willing to share once everyone has stopped shouting — but a lot of the failure was a public relations one. Nobody ever made a good case for change, even if the change in question was bad.At Real Madrid, the big question is: OK, now what?Javier Soriano/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBill Kelsey: How deep into dire straits are Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus if they are clinging to this idea?Deep, in the case of the two Spanish teams. Juventus’s problem is more sporting: The club’s executives know it isn’t possible to keep up with the Premier League teams or P.S.G. This was the only way of equalizing the revenue.Stephen Gessner: People forget that the Premier League was formed in 1992 by a breakaway group of owners who needed more revenue, mostly from TV.True, but the Premier League was always attached to the rest of the Football League by promotion and relegation. In one sense, it was a rebranding, more than a breakaway.Paul Speelman: Would some sort of salary cap be worth looking at?Yes, in principle, but no, in practice. How do you implement that rule across Europe, let alone South America and Asia? And how do you get lots of competing clubs who don’t trust one another to sign up for it?Michael Fisher: Don’t you think players need to be more involved in decisions concerning the future of soccer?Absolutely. I wonder if there is a time, now, for FIFPro — the global players’ union — to be more central in these discussions. More parochially, it strikes me that there is a pressing need for a Premier League-specific union within the broader English union, the P.F.A.Some of the most public protests against the Super League came from players who would be locked out of it.Pool photo by Mike HewittKathleen Hayward: Why is nobody discussing the $130 million penalty clause, which Florentino Pérez is unlikely to forgive?Good question, though I suspect the answer is that nobody is quite sure at this point how enforceable it is. As I understand it, there were clauses in the contract that made pulling out possible in certain situations. Besides, officially Pérez hasn’t given up on it yet ….Matt Watts: I’m interested that there was no mention of your change of stance on the issue: that something like this was inevitable?That was my stance, Matt, and you’re quite right: I hadn’t factored in how vitriolic the opposition to it would be, or how potent the impact of that would prove. Now I’m of the view that this idea is dead in the water for at least 10 years. But that said, in a way, I was right: It was inevitable that they would try it, and they did. (Is that a stretch? It feels a stretch.) More