Raphael Stevens

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    For Everton and Premier League, Relegation Battle Isn’t the End

    A club’s battle to avoid relegation is being shadowed by an investigation into its spending, and nudges to announce a resolution before next season.Everything is clear at the top of the Premier League.Manchester City, with what has become an inevitable regularity, is once again the champion of England’s Premier League. Its triumph over second-place Arsenal was sealed last weekend, and those two clubs — along with Saudi-owned Newcastle United and City’s crosstown rival Manchester United — already have secured the league’s four spots in next season’s Champions League.The drama in England now is at the bottom of the standings, where three clubs will enter the final day of the season this weekend locked in a high-stakes fight to retain their places in the league, and where an investigation into the finances of one those clubs — Everton — means that whatever happens on the field may not be the final word on who gets relegated.And that is worrying the Premier League.The issue is this: Everton’s financial losses of 371.8 million pounds between 2018 and 2021 (roughly $460 million) were more than three times higher than a cap imposed by the league. In March, the Premier League charged the club with breaking its cost-control rules and assigned an independent arbitrator to investigate. By league rules, the arbitrator alone is empowered to decide the case and mete out any potential penalties.In the weeks since, however, rival clubs have pressed for a decision before the start of next season. They include, but are not limited to, those teams whose futures are inextricably linked to Everton’s finish in the league, each of them aware that a potential points deduction for financial violations — if it arrives before the new season — might seal Everton’s relegation instead of their own.The Premier League — already under pressure to announce a ruling in a separate and long-running case related to Manchester City’s spending — has quietly been pushing for a resolution, too. According to people familiar with the league’s internal discussions, Premier League officials lobbied the independent commission to reach a decision ahead of next season.The commission’s members have refused to be hurried, however, according to several people familiar with the exchanges. At times, those members even felt the need to remind league officials of the independence of the panel.Both cases come as English soccer is poised to adopt a government-appointed independent regulator, a post that threatens the Premier League’s ability to keep rulings on contentious issues in-house. The league’s critics contend that such a regulator has become necessary to police a group of owners increasingly drawn from all corners of the world, including nation-states with access to seemingly unlimited reserves of capital and lawyers.For the moment, Everton’s focus — like that of its bottom-of-the-table rivals Leicester City and Leeds United — is to avoid the ignominy (and potential financial ruin) of relegation. Only one of the three clubs will be spared that fate on Sunday, and Everton, a fixture in the Premier League since its inception in 1992, currently holds a slim advantage. It is one place — and two points — above Leicester and Leeds, and needs only match its rivals’ results on Sunday to finish above them in the standings.For relegated teams, the loss of a place in the Premier League, and the tens of millions of dollars in revenue that membership guarantees, can be a devastating blow. So-called parachute payments from the Premier League help to cushion some of the financial losses for as many as three seasons, but the consequences of the new straitened circumstances often lead to the gutting of club budgets and the departures of players, coaches and other staff members.The prospect that the fate might fall on a club and then later be reversed has angered even Premier League teams not involved in this year’s relegation fight. One Premier League executive recently expressed surprise that there had not been greater coverage of the claims against Everton and the lack of urgency to adjudicate them; the official equated the accusations of financial rules breaches to doping.The Premier League declined to comment on the Everton investigation or any efforts to speed it to a conclusion. Everton has signaled that it will dig in and fight any possible penalties; when the Premier League charges were announced in March, the club said it was “prepared to robustly defend” its position in front of the commission.Even without the threat of relegation, though, Everton is a club in disarray. Its owner, the Iranian-British businessman Farhad Moshiri, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on players since buying the club, only to have its on-field results crater and a much-hyped stadium project risk stalling because of a shortage of funds. A search for a new owner, announced earlier this year, has so far not produced a savior.The club’s financial troubles were only made worse when Moshiri’s longtime business partner, the billionaire Alisher Usmanov, was sanctioned by the British government and the European Union for his close relationship with Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin. That forced Everton to end its relationship with companies linked to Usmanov, who in recent years had plowed millions into the club and projects like the team’s half-built new stadium.Everton’s fans have been protesting its ownership for much of the season — as they did last year when the team narrowly avoided relegation. On at least one occasion this season, Everton’s leadership was advised by the police not to attend games. More

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    Dortmund, Bayern Munich and the Chance of a Lifetime

    A Dortmund victory on Saturday will end Bayern Munich’s streak of 10 straight titles. The prospect of a new champion should be a cause of celebration beyond a single city.The requests had started to flow almost as soon as the final whistle blew last Sunday. All through Monday, they came in great torrents to members of the Borussia Dortmund staff, to the club’s executives, to the players themselves. They came from family, of course, and from friends, and from friends of friends, and acquaintances and colleagues and that guy you met in that restaurant.Pretty quickly, Dortmund officials realized the club had to do something or, in a week where nothing is quite so precious as serenity, the situation risked spiraling into a source of stress. The team called the players together and advised them to get all their ticket requests in by the end of Tuesday, and allow the executives to take care of everything from there. After that, nobody else would be able to come to the place where everyone wants to be.That knowledge, they hoped, would allow the players to focus on the task at hand. Officially, there will be 81,365 people inside Signal Iduna Park on Saturday to watch Dortmund play Mainz in the final game of the season, but demand has been so high that Sebastian Kehl, Dortmund’s sporting director, was probably only exaggerating a little when he said it could have sold “half a million tickets.”Those in attendance will cherish the rare, beautiful simplicity of the equation. If Dortmund wins, it will be the champion of Germany for the first time since 2012: The length of the waiting list is reflective of the length of the wait. “There is no better place to celebrate winning something than Dortmund,” Kehl said. He should know: He was a player at the club the last time it claimed the title.If Dortmund can win on Saturday, it will claim its first German title since winning consecutive championships in 2011 and 2012.Ina Fassbender/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDortmund’s triumph, though, would not just be a cause of jubilation in the city itself. No team other than Bayern Munich has lifted the German championship in the past decade; every spring since Dortmund’s last win, the title has headed without fail to Allianz Arena. With a few notable exceptions — Schalke, Dortmund’s fierce rival, in particular — German soccer as a whole will toast the breaking of that stranglehold.“It is not to say anything against Bayern, because they work pretty hard and perhaps they deserved to be champion in the last 10 years,” Kehl said. “But of course it is good for everyone that the competition in our league is still there, and that maybe on Saturday there is a different champion.”Until relatively recently, this season did not look especially likely to end with that particular conclusion. Dortmund had sold Erling Haaland last summer, a year after losing Jadon Sancho. Once again, the model that had made the club such a financial success — buying bright young talent and selling it at a vast profit — would hold it back on the field.When the Bundesliga broke for the World Cup in November, Dortmund was adrift in sixth place, and Bayern appeared to be set to overtake Union Berlin and Freiburg — the two improbable early pacesetters — to take its 11th consecutive title. That seeming inevitability would further compound the impression that the Bundesliga had become little more than Bayern’s private fief.Dortmund improved, markedly, in January and February — winning nine games in a row to move into Bayern’s slipstream — but when the teams met on April 1, Bayern swatted aside its challenger. “The stories were already done,” Kehl said. “That once again it was Bayern Munich that destroyed our dream.”Bayern’s sporting director, Hasan Salihamidzic, left, and its chief executive, Oliver Kahn, not enjoying themselves.Matthias Hangst/Getty ImagesIn the weeks since, the temptation has been to ascribe the drastic swing in the clubs’ fortunes more to Bayern’s missteps than to Dortmund’s merits. Dismissing Julian Nagelsmann and appointing Thomas Tuchel has backfired on Bayern, laying bare the flaws in its squad planning. Civil war, as it tends to do in the face of disappointment, is brewing in Munich.But to attribute agency to Bayern and Bayern alone ignores the fact that something has changed in Dortmund, too. It has, for the last 10 years, generally been Bayern’s closest contender, its successor-in-waiting, the team that would benefit from any slip-up. The difference this year is not that Bayern has erred — it has done that every so often over the past decade — but that Dortmund has been able to take advantage.Manager Edin Terzic deserves credit for that, of course, and so do his players. “If you’d seen the coach after the game in Munich, or the squad, you would know that we still believed we could win it,” Kehl said.But it is testament, too, to a slight change in focus in Dortmund’s approach. The club invested not only in promise last summer, as it always does, but in the likes of Sébastian Haller, Niklas Süle and Salih Ozcan, too — players with just a little more experience, a touch more grit, veterans who saw the club not as a showroom but as the ultimate stage.Jude Bellingham is expected to leave Dortmund this summer, as most of its most valuable young players regularly do.Ina Fassbender/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is that blend that has enabled Dortmund to stay the course, to cling on and now to take advantage. It is that blend that, in Kehl’s eyes, will kick-start a virtuous circle. Dortmund will sell again this summer — not least Jude Bellingham, the most coveted player in Europe — but the proposition it can offer to reinforcements and replacements is now more convincing than ever.“It shows that we do not just develop players, produce high potential, but we can also win trophies,” Kehl said. “We want to be ambitious, but at some point you have to deliver. The capacity to win titles is massively important for me as a sporting director, to bring players to Dortmund, to convince their families, their agents, the players themselves.”That, in turn, will allow Dortmund to keep Bayern within its sights. “I am optimistic that we can now be much closer,” Kehl said. “That Bayern will not be so clearly champion all the time.”And that, of course, would be something for everyone to celebrate, not just those fortunate enough to have tickets for Signal Iduna Park on Saturday. Dortmund would not be the only unexpected champion in Europe this season: Napoli ended a 33-year wait for a title in Italy. Feyenoord swept past Ajax (and PSV Eindhoven) to win the league in the Netherlands.Both of those titles were greeted with a fervor, a euphoria that seeing another trophy added to an ever-growing pile could not possibly match. Dortmund, come Saturday evening, hopes to be in a position to do the same. Everyone wants to be there, to be part of the celebrations, because they know, deep down, that these things do not happen every day.Antiracism Is Not Just a Job for Black PlayersCarlo Ancelotti and Vinícius Júnior at Valencia on Sunday.Pablo Morano/ReutersCarlo Ancelotti did all the right things in the moment, and then, in its aftermath. He said all the right things, too. All, that is, except the one that might actually have made a difference.After 70 minutes of Real Madrid’s defeat in Valencia last week, Vinícius Júnior — certainly Real Madrid’s best player, and quite possibly the finest talent in La Liga — approached the referee and pointed out a handful of the members of the home crowd who were clearly and audibly racially abusing him, and had been for some time.The referee, as dictated by Spanish soccer’s antiracism protocols, ordered an announcement to be made to the crowd, warning that the game would be terminated if the abuse continued. Ancelotti, an astute, caring and principled sort of a coach, asked Vinícius if he felt he could continue.The Brazilian said he did. The game duly resumed, though only as a prelude to what came afterward. Real Madrid described the abuse, correctly, as a hate crime. Vinícius, clearly at his limit, having faced this kind of invective repeatedly in recent months, said that “La Liga belongs to racists.” His teammates, like his coach, offered him their resolute support. Javier Tebas, the league’s president, for some reason chose to pick a fight with Vinícius on social media, before hurriedly backtracking.The whole episode raises countless questions, though at least some of them have obvious answers. Does Spanish soccer take racism seriously enough? (No.) Are its protocols up to the job? (No.) Is Tebas’s position untenable? (Yes.) Is Valencia’s punishment, in the form of a moderate fine and a partial stadium closure, sufficient? (Obviously not.)One question that did not feature quite so much as it should have is why the decision as to whether the game should continue fell on Vinícius. Ancelotti felt the game should have been abandoned. Thibaut Courtois, the Real Madrid goalkeeper, hinted afterward that he was of the same mind. So why didn’t either of them walk off? Or the rest of the team? Or, more powerful still, why didn’t Valencia’s players?Ancelotti, doubtless, checked in on Vinícius’s state of mind with the best intentions. But he placed Vinícius in an invidious position, too, where his only two choices were to play on — and expose himself to the possibility of more abuse — or walk off, which may well have felt like giving in to the racists.Ideally, of course, this is a stain on Spanish soccer that the authorities would handle. Clubs and fans would know, in no uncertain terms, that racist abuse would be met with the most severe sanctions: docked points, games forfeited, fixtures voided. Until that happens, sadly, the burden of objection falls on the players. All the players, that is. Not just some of them.One for the RoadJosé Mourinho has not gotten better with age. Not in any practical sense, anyway: He is still just as mischievous, just as bombastic, just as provocative now as he was in his halcyon days. He hit 60 earlier this year, and so it is probably fair to assume at this point that he is never going to enter his elder statesman phase.Perhaps it is nostalgia, then, a yearning for an era when the lines were crisper and clearer than they are now — a time that is both recent and distant — that makes the prospect of Mourinho’s guiding his Roma team to victory in the Europa League next week seem surprisingly appealing.It helps that it is Roma, of course, a club of considerable scale and sweep but without the trophies to match. It helps, too, that all of these twilight victories for Mourinho feel just a little like hubris: the manager who was so dismissive of anything but the game’s biggest prizes now discovering that, as it turns out, achievement really was relative all along.José Mourinho and Tammy Abraham, Champions League winners now chasing the Europa League trophy.Lars Baron/Getty ImagesA decade ago, Mourinho scoffed at the very notion that he would ever be competing in the Europa League, let alone care about winning it. And yet here we are. He would doubtless have laughed heartily at seeing one of his peers in the Europa Conference League, too. He celebrated picking up that trophy last year by getting an image of it tattooed on his right arm.Mostly, though, it is that time has softened not Mourinho himself but the perception of him. His recidivist fire-starting, his absolute refusal to mature or mellow in the slightest, now has a charm that it lacked when he was at the game’s peak.It has the effect, now, of hearing a familiar, forgotten song, and serves as a reminder of lost innocence, youth passed, a memory of the days when the bad guys looked and talked and acted like bad guys, rather than convincing themselves and their fellow travelers that they are, in fact, the plucky heroes of the tale.CorrespondenceA contender for best question ever received by this mailbox, courtesy of Gary Karr. “By dint of some inexplicable rule, you are forced to be a beat writer covering one nation’s professional league,” he wrote, deftly providing me with an opportunity to discuss every journalist’s favorite subject: themselves. “It cannot be the Premier League. What league would provide you, and your readers, with the most interesting stories and games?”I have spent some time considering this, Gary, and I think the answer is Italy: major teams, iconic stadiums, fallen giants, feisty underdogs, plentiful gelato. But there are cases to be made for Argentina and Brazil — largely for the way the game is threaded into the culture — and, from a different angle, the Netherlands, too. Dutch soccer has always been a sort of laboratory for ideas and approaches. And a nod to Turkey, home of a league that provides endless goals, scandal, crisis and internecine wrangling.“I have a question that can’t be answered,” Bob Foltman told me, portentously. “How should we measure the quality of a coach? I ask this thinking about Pep Guardiola: I don’t doubt his greatness, but I also can’t dismiss the fact that every place he’s been, he’s had resources that 95 percent of coaches could only dream of.”This is also an excellent question, and it’s one that I think is not given enough weight in coverage of the sport. I liked Vincent Kompany’s definition, alluded to in our interview with him: Success, for a coach, comes in two forms — making the players better, and outperforming your resources. “If you have the fifth-biggest budget, and you come fourth, you have won,” he told me.Taking names in M.L.S.Dan Hamilton/Usa Today Sports, via Reuters ConShawn Donnelly is a reliable interrogator of the game’s major issues, and he is back with what looks suspiciously like vengeance. “Why do referees still scribble down the names of yellow card recipients on the back of the yellow card itself with a small pen or pencil? In 2023, isn’t there a better way? A digital assistant or voice recorder or app or something?”There are doubtless more technologically sophisticated ways, Shawn, obviously, but there’s a key question here: Would any of them be better? Would any of them actually improve on the effect of writing something down with a tiny pencil? Or would they just be … different? More

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    Man City to Burnley and Back? Vincent Kompany Says Not So Fast

    As he looked ahead to the summer, Vincent Kompany realized he was entering unfamiliar territory.He had spent his whole career with barely a moment to catch his breath. During his playing days, the seasons whirled by: league games, cup games, European games, international games, all piled on top of each other. Summers were squeezed into the brief gap between major tournaments and energy-sapping, globe-trotting preseason tours.As a manager, if anything, Kompany’s summers had been more hectic still. Not that it had come as a surprise: He had chosen Burnley, freshly relegated from the Premier League to England’s second tier, as his first head coaching post outside his native Belgium. The Championship is proudly, unapologetically, gleefully grueling, a competition that self-identifies as an endurance event. “Just mentioning the name is fatiguing,” Kompany said.And so it had proved. From the outside, Kompany and Burnley had made it all look rather easy. The club had confirmed an immediate return to the Premier League by clinching promotion with a month to spare. It ended the campaign with more than 100 points. To Kompany, though, that was a misconception. “This league is brutal,” he said.As evidence, he pointed to the fixture list: 46 league games crammed into 39 weeks, with the season wrapped up by May 5. “And we had a month’s holiday for the World Cup,” he said. The most valuable reward of promotion, in his mind, is not the riches that it brings but the prospect of not having to go through all of that again.“Coming out of the Premier League is the best motivation for getting back into it,” Kompany said.Kompany with midfielder Jack Cork after Burnley clinched its return to the Premier League in April.Richard Sellers/Press Association, via Associated PressAll of that, of course, had been precisely as he had expected. The trouble was figuring out what to do once the motion stopped. There would be three months between Burnley’s last game in the Championship and its first of next season in the Premier League — a break far longer than Kompany had previously experienced. All of a sudden, there was too much time.The solution he alighted on — something he had, by his own admission, never tried before — was in effect to give his players two preseasons. They would have two tranches of vacation on either side of a training camp in Portugal, an attempt to find a balance between allowing them to recharge and not permitting their sharpness to dull.He did not, though, quite practice what he preached. His season did not finish with the conclusion of the Championship schedule. On his first free weekend in 10 months, he attended four games: three in the Premier League, already scoping out the opposition for next season, and one at Salford, in England’s fourth tier.That combination, of a perfectionist’s attention to detail and an obsessive’s work ethic, is characteristically Kompany. It is what those who played with him, particularly at Manchester City, remember most clearly: a focus, a sense of responsibility and a studiousness that is perhaps best encapsulated by the fact that he used to record all of the various (and largely warranted, he was not an unjust ruler) fines he had levied as captain in an actual ledger.Nigel Roddis/EPA, via ShutterstockJames Boardman/EPA, via ShutterstockKompany was a reliable defender and serial trophy collector in his days at Manchester City. Some see him as a potential successor for Pep Guardiola.Phil Noble/ReutersAnd it is what made his move into management — first with Anderlecht, the club where he started and finished his playing career, and then at Burnley — seem so natural, so obvious, so clearly destined for success. It is impossible, of course, to predict with any surety which players will make fine coaches; Kompany, though, seemed a pretty safe bet.Safe enough, certainly, that Burnley was not his only option last summer, or his only offer since then. Kompany has a policy of not engaging with speculation on any level; the only time he grew at all flustered, during an interview at Burnley’s training facility this month, was when his determination not to discuss it chafed against his natural inclination to openness.And so while he did acknowledge that he turned down a number of “really big clubs” last summer in favor of joining Burnley in the Championship — thereby volunteering to partake in what even he describes as a “fight with a load of hungry dogs” — he would not be drawn whatsoever on what has happened since.Fortunately, others are not quite so discreet. Those voices said Tottenham got in touch after it fired Antonio Conte. Chelsea, a team seemingly permanently on the hunt for a new manager, approached him, too. Leeds considered him as a replacement when it fired Jesse Marsch. He said no to them all.This summer would, doubtless, have brought more offers, not just because of the fact that Kompany led Burnley to promotion, but the manner of it. In the space of 10 months, he has completely refashioned the club’s style, taking a team that had for years been defined by a gruff, battle-hardened, pared-back style and filling it with youth, and flair, and élan.“I built on the values that defined Burnley,” Kompany said. “Culture is different to style. What was Burnley before? Hard-working, brave, tough. I say to my players that while we might not be the biggest team any more, we can still be the toughest, the smartest, the bravest. There is a grit to our game. That hasn’t changed. We couldn’t have the flair players that we do if they did not understand what it is to be a Burnley player.”He may not see it quite as the transformation it appears to be, but it is an impressive body of work nonetheless. Rather than parlay that into a lucrative offer elsewhere — the Spurs job is still available, and Chelsea’s will doubtless come up again in a few weeks — Kompany elected, just before the end of the season, to sign a new five-year contract with Burnley.It was an unorthodox, vaguely heretical decision. Elite soccer is a shark, forever moving forward. Managers, like players, are conditioned to believe that they have to grasp bigger, better things the very instant they appear.Rather than accept offers from bigger and richer clubs after leading Burnley to promotion, Kompany signed a new five-year contract. “We are still really far from our ceiling,” he said.Matt McNulty/Getty ImagesThis, surely, was Kompany’s moment. He is only 37 — in his infancy, by managerial standards — and he had served his apprenticeship. Now was the time to clamber up another rung on the ladder toward what many assume to be his ultimate, inevitable destiny: to replace Pep Guardiola as manager of Manchester City, whenever he chooses to step aside.That Kompany chose to wait instead can be attributed, in part, to his relationship with the hierarchy at Burnley — “I trust the people” — and his excitement at what is left to achieve. The game’s economic reality might place winning the Premier League with Burnley, for example, out of his reach, but he is confident that his team, this club, has not yet topped out. “We are still really far from our ceiling,” he said.Mostly, though, his decision to stay is down to his conviction that speed should not be confused with progress. Soccer, Kompany knows, offers very few “good settings” for coaches, places where they can hone their abilities and define their methods without worrying about needless interference or the sudden, wild mood swings that can come on the back of a couple of dispiriting weeks.At Burnley, he feels he has found one. “If I am with the right people, that is a big advantage,” he said. Moving on, moving in what most would see as the general direction of up, treating management as a series of challenges to be met and levels to be passed might not be the accelerant it seems. Standing still might be a better guarantee that he gets to where he wants to go.“The only destination I have in mind, from a coaching perspective, is to be the best,” he said. “The pathway is not how quickly I get there. I want to be the best, whatever the steps are, and that outcome takes time in any walk of life.” In his mind, it is a “universal recipe,” though perhaps it is best thought of as an equation.Kompany clearly has an aptitude, and a talent, for management. His work at Burnley proves that. But talent is just the first step. “You develop talent into quality through time and effort,” he said. He has never been short on the latter. It is what has marked his whole career. For once, he feels he has the former, too. He has time, and he is prepared to take it. More

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    Real Madrid’s Vinícius Júnior Says Racism Is ‘Normal’ in Spain After Abuse at Valencia

    After Valencia fans called the Real Madrid star a monkey, Spain’s top soccer official called racial abuse a stain on the entire country.Vinícius Júnior has had enough.The Real Madrid forward, a magnet for racist chants from the stands in Spanish stadiums for the past two seasons, took to social media after the latest attack against him on Sunday, when he was called a monkey by fans in Valencia. This time, he took aim not only at his abusers but also at Spain itself.“It wasn’t the first time, nor the second, nor the third,” Vinícius Júnior wrote in a post on his Twitter and Instagram accounts. “Racism is normal in La Liga. The competition thinks it’s normal, the federation does too and the opponents encourage it.” Spain, he said, was becoming known in his native Brazil “as a country of racists.”On Sunday, Vinícius Júnior was met by fans chanting the word “mono” — monkey — before he even stepped off the Real Madrid bus outside the Mestalla stadium in Valencia. The match was briefly halted in the 71st minute as he pointed out some of his abusers to the referee, and an antiracism statement — part of a league protocol for such incidents — was read to the crowd over the stadium loudspeakers. By the end, though, it was Vinícius Júnior who was cast as the villain: He received a red card in the dying minutes of injury time after scuffling with an opponent who had charged at him.The referee Ricardo de Burgos Bengoetxea trying to calm Vinícius Júnior as he protested that he was being racially abused.Aitor Alcalde/Getty ImagesReal Madrid said it believed the abuse directed at its player qualified as a hate crime under Spanish law, and the club said it had filed a complaint with the relevant authorities demanding an investigation. “We have a serious problem,” the president of Spain’s soccer federation acknowledged Monday, calling racism in the nation’s stadiums an issue “that stains an entire team, an entire fan base and an entire country.”Bouts of racial abuse echoing through the stands in Spanish soccer stadiums are not uncommon or new, but they have become particularly pointed toward Vinícius Júnior, who has emerged as one of the league’s marquee players since the departures of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.In a statement announcing an investigation into the events on Sunday in Valencia, La Liga acknowledged it had reported nine separate incidents of racist abuse against Vinícius Júnior in the past two seasons alone. By then, the player had taken to social media, where he wrote that the attacks on him were tarnishing Spain’s image around the world.“A beautiful nation, which welcomed me and which I love, but which agreed to export the image of a racist country to the world,” he wrote. “I’m sorry for the Spaniards who don’t agree, but today, in Brazil, Spain is known as a country of racists.”He even suggested a failure to act against racism could drive him from the country.The reaction to what occurred at the Mestalla brought new scrutiny on Spanish soccer’s handling of racism inside stadiums. In a television interview immediately after the match, Real Madrid’s coach, Carlo Ancelloti, reacted incredulously when he was asked to talk about the game. “I don’t want to talk about football,” he said. “I want to talk about what happened here.”In a news conference that followed, local journalists tried to correct Ancelloti’s assessment that the entire stadium was responsible, telling him he had misheard the chanting. Then officials from Valencia issued denials of widespread racism in the stands, despite videos online appearing to show large sections of the crowd chanting “mono.” Some reporters suggested to Ancelloti that a majority of supporters had actually been chanting “tonto,” a word that means silly in Spanish. “Whether it was ‘mono’ or ‘tonto,’ the referee stopped the game to open the racism protocol,” Ancelotti replied. “He wouldn’t do that if they just chanted ‘tonto.’ Speak to the referee.”Within hours, La Liga’s chief executive, Javier Tebas, was engaged in a back-and-forth exchange with Vinícius Júnior on Twitter. In it, Tebas defended Spain, detailed the efforts the league had made to tackle racist behavior and scolded Vinícius for what Tebas said was a failure to show up to two meetings to discuss the abuse he had received.Tebas’s statement led to a furious response from the player.“Once again, instead of criticizing racists, the president of La Liga appears on social media to attack me,” Vinícius wrote. “As much as you talk and pretend not to read, the image of your championship has been hit by this. See the responses to your posts and you will have a surprise. Omitting yourself only makes you equal to racists.”The incident drew criticism, and messages of support, from around the world.Speaking at a news conference at the close of a G7 summit in Japan, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said he wanted to send a message of solidarity to Vinícius, saying it was “unjust” that he “gets insulted at every stadium where he plays.”“It’s not possible, in the middle of the 21st century, to have such strong racial prejudice in so many football stadiums,” Lula said.Current and former players also rallied around Vinícius, taking aim at the authorities in Spain for not doing more to stamp out racism, which some commentators in the country have routinely described as merely an effort to gain an advantage on the field.Kylian Mbappé, who almost moved to Spain last season to join Vinícius in Madrid, posted a message of support on Instagram. He was joined by Neymar, a Brazilian star who also faced racial abuse when he played in Spain for Barcelona.La Liga issued a statement detailing what it said were its efforts to stamp out racism in its stadiums. The league said it was working with the authorities in Valencia to investigate what took place, and it vowed to take legal action if any hate crime was identified. Still, it is limited in the type of penalties it can levy against clubs. Stadium closures, for example, can be sanctioned only by the national soccer federation.The latest incident will mean new scrutiny on the federation, and Spanish soccer, at a time it is looking for global support to secure the hosting rights to the 2030 World Cup as part of a joint effort with Portugal and Morocco.“We have a problem of behavior, of education, of racism,” the Spanish soccer federation president Luis Rubiales told a news conference Monday. “And as long as there is one fan or one group of fans making insults based on someone’s sexual orientation or skin color or belief, then we have a serious problem.” More

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    Manchester City’s Premier League Success Leaves Many Cold

    City claimed its third straight Premier League title on Saturday. But admiring its excellence is not the same as accepting its methods.As it turned out, Manchester City had already done all it needed to do. On Saturday night, Pep Guardiola’s team’s last remaining rival — a bone-tired, spirit-sapped Arsenal — finally stumbled and fell. For the third time in three seasons, Manchester City was untouchable at the summit of the Premier League.The coronation will come on Sunday, City’s home game with Chelsea transformed into a processional, but it felt somehow fitting that the title should be decided without the league’s undisputed sovereign so much as kicking a ball. This has, after all, been a fait accompli for some time.Quite where the turning point of this season came is open to interpretation. It may have been City’s dismantling of Arsenal at the Emirates Stadium in February. Or its humbling of the same opponent at the Etihad Stadium two months later.Pep Guardiola has suggested that neither moment is exactly right. Everything changed, he has said, with an impromptu meeting in the aftermath of a February draw with Nottingham Forest. That was the moment, the Manchester City manager either believes or wants to believe, that his players buckled down, took control, and bent the Premier League to their will.Or, perhaps, none of that is true. Perhaps there is no turning point to identify. There is a very good chance that the season has simply ended the way it was always going to end, the way that Premier League seasons increasingly tend to end. Perhaps the outcome was preordained. Perhaps we all knew, deep down, how this was going to go.Advancing to the Champions League final kept City on track for three trophies.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesRegardless, that is another item crossed off Manchester City’s bucket list of inevitabilities. Only a handful of teams — four, to be precise — have ever won three English titles in a row: Huddersfield Town in the 1920s, Arsenal in the 1930s, Liverpool in the 1980s and Manchester United, twice, in the early part of this century.It is an accomplishment that has, until now, been the exclusive preserve of only two managers: Herbert Chapman, with Huddersfield and Arsenal, and Alex Ferguson. (Liverpool changed its coach in the middle of its run.) It has long been seen as the ultimate threshold for greatness, the game’s pearly gate. Manchester City, and Guardiola himself, have now passed through it.In doing so, they have reached another milestone in what appears to be a deliberate, concerted campaign to build a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence that this is the greatest club side England has ever produced.Over the course of Guardiola’s six-year tenure, City has gobbled up every record it can find, etching its name at the top of almost every one of the sport’s statistical leader boards. It has the most points any team has ever collected in a season. And the most goals. It has won the most consecutive games in a campaign, and had the highest goal difference, and the biggest winning margin.It was the first team to complete a clean sweep of all four domestic trophies. In Erling Haaland, it can lay claim to possessing the most prolific striker in a single Premier League season. At some point, it may not even need that caveat: Haaland has five games to score 12 goals and pass the all-time high-water mark. If he does not do it this year, he may well do it next.Erling Haaland: goal machine.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIndeed, such is City’s domestic supremacy that the only worlds it has yet to conquer are on more distant shores. See off Manchester United in the F.A. Cup final and Inter Milan in the Champions League final and City would be just the second team in English history to complete the fabled, sanctified treble.After that, its ambitions would have to turn to the faintly fantastical. No team has ever won four English titles in a row. Nobody has ever won seven competitions in a single year, or done a quadruple. No English side since Nottingham Forest has retained the European Cup. Perhaps City could try and become the first team to win a game in zero gravity, or while only using their left feet, or with a lineup comprised solely of people called Neil.It has become a reflex to suggest that this is simply the nature of soccer. There is, as the former Manchester City captain Vincent Kompany put it, always an “ogre,” a team that sits at the top of the pile, that towers over the landscape, that sucks up all the oxygen. “It’s never been any different,” Kompany told The New York Times in an interview earlier this month. “Liverpool was an ogre. Manchester United was an ogre.”There is some truth in that logic, but it is not a whole truth. In its years of plenty, in the 1970s and 1980s, Liverpool was undeniably a rich club: In the years before broadcast revenue and television deals and money-spinning global tours, it had the one advantage available, that of being a big city team in a big city stadium.For Pep Guardiola, every option is a good option.Lee Smith/Action Images, via ReutersBut it was not drastically richer than most of its rivals. Its challengers were sometimes Manchester United and Leeds and Everton, but they were also Ipswich and Derby County and Nottingham Forest. The game’s hierarchy was much flatter, its stratification not nearly so ossified.Twice, between 1977 and 1991, Liverpool held the British transfer record, but only for a sale: first Kevin Keegan to Hamburg, and then Ian Rush to Juventus. In that time, West Bromwich Albion, Wolves, Forest and City all spent more money on a player than anyone had previously. Liverpool did not break the £1 million barrier until 1987.United’s primacy was much more modern, much more recognizable, built on the club’s commercial heft. It is worth parsing, though, one of the phrases that entered the sport’s lexicon during that period: Fergie Time, the idea that referees generally gave United as much time as required in a game to find a way to escape disappointment.That was not true, of course. The reason United developed a reputation for late winning goals was because of the character and resilience of Ferguson’s immensely gifted team. But the idea stuck nonetheless.United was the dominant team of its age. It was possible, though, for opposition fans to trick themselves into believing it was all down to luck, to the grace and favor of the powers that be, and that if only the fight was fair then United would receive its comeuppance.The same cannot be said of Manchester City. All of those records, the monopoly it has started to exert on the game’s history, point to a type of hegemony that English soccer has not previously experienced. City has not just reconfigured what it takes to succeed in the Premier League, but redefined how the game thinks of excellence. Its dominance feels more extreme than anything that went before, largely because it is.And yet the response to it has not been the loathing that was generated by Liverpool and United — an animus so potent that it has been passed down from one generation to the next — but a sort of acquiescence. Guardiola’s style of play is widely admired. The beauty of his team, the ingenuity of his ideas, draws fulsome and fawning praise.Guardiola is most likely one victory from his fifth Premier League title.Molly Darlington/ReutersThe success of the club itself, though, feels somehow cold, clinical, detached. Manchester City has the air of a machine, both in the way the project has been constructed and the manner in which the team plays. It should not be a surprise, then, that it should elicit roughly the same emotional response. This is a state-backed enterprise of bottomless wealth and grandiose vision. It is impossible to resist. But it is also difficult to adore.City’s advantage is not, as is often suggested, that it can spend more than anyone else, though few teams could afford the squad that Guardiola has at its disposal, or indeed the Catalan himself. Manchester United has frittered away hundreds of millions in the transfer market. Chelsea, too. Liverpool commits almost as much in salary to its squad.The edge is in the consistency. City is rarely — if ever — forced to sell a player on anything other than its own terms. That is what separates it, as much as anything, from all of its peers. Plenty of clubs have a plan. City is the only one that has the privilege of seeing it through without being subject to the arbitrary tides of reality.That is not the same, though, as not playing by the same rules. It is a coincidence, doubtless, that the run of form that will end with Guardiola’s team claiming yet another title began after the club was charged with 115 counts of rules breaches — dating back over a decade, the whole span of its dominion — by the Premier League.Those charges retain the capacity to alter, on some fundamental level, all of the mosts and firsts and bests that City has accrued over the years. The titles, the trophies, the records — they are all contingent on that case.Jack Grealish, still the most expensive British player in soccer history.Odd Andersen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is just about possible for fans, for the game, to swallow the idea that a club owned and operated for the purpose of furthering the interests of a nation state is acceptable. It is just about possible for the television networks and media outlets that rely on the draw of the sport’s rolling soap opera to wallow in whatever moral gray area they can find.It would be much harder to excuse and explain and — above all — to accept that one team felt that the rules it had signed up to did not really apply, to decide that it did not need to be subject to the same constraints as everyone else.Many of the charges might feel historic, dated, but this has always been a long-term project. What happened 10 years ago led, inexorably, to today, to this, to Manchester City having a third title in three seasons, standing on the verge of a treble, its name scored next to almost every record English soccer can offer.What it has done, over these last few years, is plain for all to see. How it will be remembered is yet to be decided. More

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    North America Got the 2026 World Cup. Now Who Will Get the Final?

    A decision on which city will host the men’s 2026 World Cup final is expected in the fall. Leaders from the New York area are making their case, with Dallas and Los Angeles also in the running.It has been almost five years since a bid from the United States, Canada and Mexico beat out a proposal from Morocco to host soccer’s 2026 men’s World Cup. Now the competition has turned intramural.The stadiums for the tournament have been chosen, but FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, has not yet said which one will host the final game.Officials from New York City and New Jersey are starting a concerted push to land that final for MetLife Stadium at the Meadowlands, including an event in Times Square on Thursday morning with Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey and Mayor Eric Adams of New York.“Eric and I believe strongly that we have the most compelling case by far to get the best package, including the final,” Murphy said in a joint interview with Adams on Wednesday morning.At most other World Cups, there is an obvious choice for the final game. Moscow, Rio de Janeiro and Paris were always going to be chosen when their countries hosted the tournament. But there are several attractive candidates for the 2026 final, to be played July 19. (Though Mexico and Canada will host some of the tournament’s 104 games, the bidders agreed that the majority of the matches — and everything from the quarterfinals on — would be in the United States.)The only previous time the United States hosted the World Cup, in 1994, the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif., got the final. This time, SoFi Stadium is the Los Angeles-area site on the list of stadiums for 2026. But that stadium was built primarily for N.F.L. football, and there is concern that the field there is too narrow for soccer, which would require removing some seats, and reducing capacity.Dallas has also emerged as a leading candidate, in part because nearby AT&T Stadium can potentially be expanded to offer over 100,000 seats for soccer.But Adams and Murphy are making their case that the New York City area outshines those places as the best spot for the game.“Yes, L.A. is known for its extravaganza and its appeal of Hollywood,” Adams said. “But I think New York is the largest stage.”Murphy said: “New York is the international capital of the world. With no disrespect to Dallas, we’re taking about New York.”The other contenders are not lying down. “We are making our case to the committee right now that we would be the perfect site for the semifinals and finals,” Dan Hunt, president of Dallas’s bid, told the local NBC affiliate late last year. “We have two great airports, we have the infrastructure, we have the hotels, we have AT&T Stadium. We have what it will take to host what I call ‘the Super Bowl on steroids.’”Kathryn Schloessman, head of the Los Angeles bid, said, “Our region is so fortunate to have a world-class stadium and infrastructure to be in consideration for hosting the final and other prominent matches.”The decision will ultimately be made by top FIFA officials, up to and including President Gianni Infantino, with input from the regional governing body, Concacaf, and U.S. Soccer. It is expected in early fall.Whether the New York region wins the final or not, there are likely to be about eight games at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. “Eight games is like eight Super Bowls in six weeks, so no matter what the games look like it’s going to be a huge success,” Murphy said. “We’ll sell every one of them out; it doesn’t matter who’s playing.”“But clearly to get the final — and we think we’re in the best position to get the final — is the icing on the cake that is almost unparalleled in sports,” he added. “There is both prestige and I’m sure an extra boost to the regional economy.”If a “huge success” is coming either way, why is there such a hunger to land the final? Adams acknowledged another motivation: “I’m extremely competitive, and I want to beat other cities to have the final. We were chosen, now it’s time for us to bring home the Cup.” More

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    With Stakes at Their Highest, Manchester City Rises Higher Still

    MANCHESTER, England — No matter what happens from here, regardless of whether Manchester City’s campaign in the Champions League ends with medals and parades and the realization of the club’s ultimate, meticulously-planned dream, it felt as if something shifted amid the delirious, crowing tumult of the Etihad Stadium on Wednesday night.It is not enough to say that Manchester City defeated Real Madrid to seal a place in the Champions League final for the second time in three years. It is not just that Pep Guardiola’s team demolished the reigning champion, outclassing the club that regards this competition as its own private party by 4-0.It is that City did so with a performance — given the circumstances, given the stakes, given the identity and reputation and talent of the opponent — that surely ranks among the finest, the most dominant, this tournament has seen. This was Manchester City sending a message, making a statement, proving a point. And in the process, it was also Manchester City vanquishing its ghosts.Midfielder Bernardo Silva scored Manchester City’s first two goals.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJulián Álvarez had the fourth, moments after he came on as a substitute.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesGuardiola’s travails in this tournament are well-known. He is, by common consensus, the finest coach of his generation, and yet he has spent much of the last decade or so finding new and inventive ways not to win the Champions League. He has contrived to lose to Monaco and Lyon, Liverpool and Tottenham. He lost a final to Chelsea because he fiddled with his team. He lost a semifinal to Real Madrid in the blink of an eye.It has become a trope that Guardiola, in his urgency, overcomplicates matters. There is a theory — one that he himself alluded to here — that his background, as a Barcelona fan, has given him what might look in certain lights like a slightly unhealthy fixation with this tournament.He has always scotched it as nonsense, of course, dismissing the idea that there might be a pattern, attributing the repeated disappointments to nothing more complex than the vicissitudes of the game. That has done little to quell the sense, though, that the Champions League had become his — and by extension Manchester City’s — Achilles’ heel, the one world that the club’s bottomless, state-backed wealth and knife-edge precision could not conquer.

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    Perhaps, given the nature of the City project, that was always likely to evaporate eventually. This is a club, after all, that has an unavoidable mechanized quality. For all the richness of its style, the gleam of its talent, it is hard not to discern the cold, calculated precision with which it has been constructed.It is a club that feels as if it has been built — to the exact specifications of the best coach in the world, and then equipped with the best of everything that money can buy — rather than one that has grown. At some point, that was always going to tell. At some point, establishing yourself as the Champions League’s dominant force is less a sporting challenge and more an economic formula.That, though, should not be allowed to disguise the style with which City swatted aside Real Madrid. Guardiola had, in the days preceding the game, detected in his players the three ingredients he believed would be required if they were to seal a place in the final against Inter Milan in Istanbul on June 10.There was a sense of “calm,” he said, a lack of panic and anxiety and nerves. There was “tension,” too, the edge, the alertness that is necessary to perform. And, crucially, there was the “pain” of what happened last year, when City fell victim to that peculiar magic that is wielded by Real Madrid and Real Madrid alone. For a year, Guardiola said, his team had been forced to “swallow the poison” of that game. This was the chance to purge it.In the first half, in particular, it felt as if this might come to be remembered as the high-water mark of Guardiola’s project in Manchester, the culmination of the team he has spent the past six years constructing, honing, polishing, perfecting.By halftime, City led by 2-0, thanks to two goals from Bernardo Silva, and it would have had every reason to feel more than a little disappointed. Erling Haaland had missed two glorious opportunities. Kevin De Bruyne had whipped an effort across the face of goal.Real Madrid had spent 45 minutes pinned back not only in its own half but in its own penalty area, apparently powerless to break City’s spell, to escape its stranglehold. Its players, many of them veterans of multiple triumphs in this competition, seemed harried and frantic, suddenly stripped of their poise and their prowess.Toni Kroos and Luka Modric of Real Madrid after Silva’s second goal.Michael Regan/Getty ImagesLuka Modric could not judge the weight of his passes. Toni Kroos kept giving the ball away. Vinícius Júnior, stranded on the left wing, forlornly urged his teammates to step forward. Federico Valverde, overwhelmed in midfield, seemed continually baffled to discover that there was always another light blue jersey behind him.Real Madrid’s reputation is such, of course, that even when wounded most teams would consider it a threat. At no point, though, did City consider shrinking into itself. Guardiola, clearly, had scented something: not just the chance to win a game but to change the story, to shift the emphasis.Riyad Mahrez came on. Phil Foden came on. Whirling, gesticulating, prowling on the touchline, Guardiola urged his players forward. Manuel Akanji made it three. Julián Álvarez, in the dying embers of the game, added a fourth. A victory turned into a triumph, and then morphed into a rout.This was not simply City taking revenge on Real Madrid for last year. It was City exorcising all of those demons it has built up over the years, all of the disappointments it has endured, all of the times the machine that Guardiola has built has stalled at precisely the wrong moment.At the final whistle, as Real Madrid’s players sank to their haunches — bereft at the defeat, relieved the humiliation was at an end — the Etihad Stadium was filled with wild, discordant noise. The club was playing Gala International. The fans were roaring, booming, exulting. The word “Istanbul,” displayed in neon pink, was emblazoned on the giant screens in the corners of the stadium. Guardiola, his energy almost frantic, was hopping and jumping and dancing with his players.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesGreatness now rests in Manchester City’s grasp. It should claim the Premier League title this weekend, its third in a row. It has already qualified for the F.A. Cup final, against Manchester United. It will, though Guardiola protested it, be an overwhelming favorite in the Champions League final. It is 270 minutes, no more, from winning a treble. Whatever happens, though, whatever comes next, this victory was not simply a step on the way. It was a destination in itself, the night that Manchester City vanquished its ghosts. More

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    Inter Milan, Finding a Way, Reaches Champions League Final

    Lautaro Martínez scored late in the second half to give Inter a date with Real Madrid or Manchester City in next month’s final in Istanbul.Simone Inzaghi has spent most of his season on the brink. His Inter Milan team had been sufficiently erratic that the club appeared of the mind to end Inzaghi’s tenure as manager if he failed to make it past the last 16 of the Champions League. He survived that. Most assumed it was simply delaying the inevitable. The ax would fall if — maybe when — Inter fell in the quarterfinals.A month or so later, the shadow that has trailed Inzaghi for so long has disappeared, and there is nothing left but light. Over the course of two legs — both held at San Siro — his Inter team swept past its neighbor, rival and housemate, A.C. Milan, to reach its first Champions League final for 13 years. Its berth in the final — sealed with a 1-0 victory on Tuesday, and a 3-0 triumph on aggregate — marks not only the finest achievement of his career, but one of the most improbable adventures the competition has seen.LuLau with the dagger. 🥶 pic.twitter.com/fsynbEohaK— CBS Sports Golazo ⚽️ (@CBSSportsGolazo) May 16, 2023
    Inter will, of course, be seen as little more than cannon fodder for either Manchester City or Real Madrid, two very modern powerhouses, in the final. But even that underdog status does not quite capture the sheer improbability of the club’s presence in the biggest annual game in world soccer.For years, Inter has been facing mounting financial problems. Its debts reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Its owner, the Chinese businessman Steven Zhang, has been seeking to sell the club for several seasons, even before the coronavirus pandemic ravaged Inter’s accounts.Quite how desperate the situation has become was neatly illustrated by the club’s blank jerseys for both semifinals against Milan. Inter does not currently have a primary sponsor; the cryptocurrency firm that had occupied that prestigious advertising real estate having failed to make its payments earlier this year.Inter’s Edin Dzeko, who scored a vital goal in the first leg. Isabella Bonotto/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe straitened finances are manifested in the club’s squad, which lacks the star power of most Champions League finalists. Other than its captain, Lautaro Martínez, and the midfielder Nicolò Barella, Inter does not possess a slew of assets the rest of Europe’s giants would covet. Inzaghi, instead, has had to work with a selection of veterans, castoffs, hopefuls and journeymen.And yet, against Milan, it produced a performance of remarkable poise and control. Edin Dzeko and Henrikh Mkhitaryan had effectively settled the tie last week, scoring two goals inside the first 11 minutes inside the same stadium, and Milan rarely threatened to mount a comeback in the return. Inter may lack glamour and flash, but few teams in Europe have quite so much grit and grizzle.Martínez’s goal, late on, sparked wild celebrations among Inter’s fans, but in truth they might have started booking their flights to Istanbul long before it went in. None of them would have expected this to be how their season ended: a team seen as a makeweight, at least in Europe, thrust onto the greatest stage of all. Inzaghi, though, has taken them to the brink. More