Raphael Stevens

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    When Your Champions League Dream Runs Through a War Zone

    Shakhtar Donetsk’s foreign stars fled Ukraine when Russia invaded. Now some are returning or signing up, proof that the lure of opportunity can trump fear.By the time Lassina Traoré returned to his team, everybody else was gone.In 2021, Traoré, a forward from Burkina Faso, had joined the other expensive foreign recruits lured to Ukraine by the country’s perennial soccer champion, Shakhtar Donetsk. Back then, Traoré played in a team built around a Brazilian core, supplemented by other foreign talent and some of Ukrainian soccer’s best players, for a club that was regarded as arguably the top team in Eastern Europe. Then the Russian bombs began to fall, and everything changed.When Shakhtar returned to practice after a monthslong hiatus abroad, the cosmopolitan air of the club had vanished. A roster that had been dotted with almost a dozen Brazilians just over a year ago now contains only one. Clubs elsewhere in Europe, shopping for bargains amid broken contracts, skimmed off other talent. Even Roberto de Zerbi, Shakhtar’s highly rated Italian coach, had moved on.Traoré, like all the others, could have gone, too. FIFA, soccer’s governing body, issued an edict shortly after the start of the war that allowed foreigners, whatever their contractual status, to unilaterally quit Ukrainian teams and sign elsewhere.Traoré was vacationing in Barcelona on the day Russia invaded Ukraine. He could only follow from afar as Shakhtar’s foreign stars — crammed in a hotel conference room with their families — pleaded for help as war planes circled the skies above Kyiv. Within a few days, they had left the country. Those who escaped did not return.Traoré returned to Amsterdam, where he had previously played for the Dutch club Ajax, to wait out the early months of the war. While the rest of Shakhtar’s armada of foreign talent found new clubs — some back home in Brazil, others in Europe — Traoré took his time. Slowly, the thought of returning to Shakhtar started to look like not only a viable option but the right thing to do.“I had many options,” he said after a recent practice in Kyiv, where the team has been based for the last few weeks. “The club knows. I know. And we discussed it. But I decided to stay.”For him, he said, “it’s in my culture that when they give you something, you have to give something back. For me, it was time to give back the love they gave me before.”Traoré said that he understood why many of his teammates decided not to return. He admitted that he had some difficult conversations with his wife and parents before agreeing to do so. (His wife is now living with his parents at their home in Paris.)For most of the season the team lived in a hotel complex in the western city of Lviv, but it has recently moved to Kyiv, closer to its training ground. A return to Donetsk, in the east, is out of the question; Russian forces have controlled the city since last year, joining separatists that forced Shakhtar into exile as long ago as 2014.The club Traoré has rejoined is a shadow of the powerhouse it once was. The squad and its finances have been gutted; Shakhtar estimates that it has lost at least $40 million worth of talent for nothing as a result of FIFA’s decision to let players walk away from their contracts.Shakhtar and rivals like Dynamo Kyiv play their league matches in empty stadiums. Shakhtar remains on course for a return to the Champions League next season.Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters“We have no money,” the club’s chief executive, Sergei Palkin, said on a recent visit to London. The Ukrainian league’s return, as much a symbol of the country’s resolve as a sporting competition, is played out in front of empty stands and to the sound of occasional air raid sirens forcing players from the field. The league’s television contract has collapsed. Sponsors have all but disappeared.“We have no income from Ukraine,” Palkin said. “Zero.”What money there is has come from Shakhtar’s presence in the Champions League and the Europa League, European soccer’s second-tier competition, and from the record transfer fee the club received by selling its star Ukrainian forward Mykhailo Mudruyk to Chelsea in England.New money cannot come soon enough. While FIFA allowed foreign players to leave Shakhtar without a fee, it insisted the club pay any debts to the clubs it signed those foreign players from, including a handful that did not play a single minute for the club because of the war, according to Palkin.Traoré’s decision to return, then, came as a pleasant surprise. He had cost the club $10 million in a transfer fee when he joined from Ajax in 2021. A forward who was not considered a mainstay before the war, he is suddenly a pivotal figure, and not just for what he is doing on the field.His continued presence, Traoré and the club hope, is a sign to potential recruits that soccer in Ukraine remains a viable career option. It is an option that proved alluring to players with European dreams like Kevin Kelsy, an 18-year-old striker from Venezuela.The 18-year-old Venezuelan striker Kevin Kelsy said his family was worried about his move to Shakhtar. “When I told them, they asked, ‘Why Ukraine?’” Yoan Valat/EPA, via ShutterstockNot so long ago Kelsy would not have been a target for Shakhtar, which for years used the wealth of its oligarch owner to shop at a higher price bracket. But now, in its more straitened state, Shakhtar has turned to eager young players like Kelsy and recruits from Georgia and Tajikistan.Kelsy said signing a five-year contract with a club in a country at war was a surprisingly easy decision. The prospect of fulfilling a dream of making it to Europe trumped everything else, he said — even the persistent threat from Russian missiles and planes, the regular drone of air raid sirens and the rumble of distant explosions. His family, though, had questions.“When I told them, they asked, ‘Why Ukraine?’” he said in an interview in Spanish. “They knew everything that happened, and there was a little bit of nervousness and a little of fear. But I spoke to them about this theme, that it’s very important for me to go to play football in Europe, in a big team like Shakhtar, and in the end they understood.”Kelsy, like the scores of South Americans who have signed for Ukrainian clubs in the past, views the club as a steppingstone on a journey that he hopes might one day propel him to the club of his dreams, A.C. Milan. Games in elite competitions like the Champions League, he knows, offer an elite stage to show he belongs. (Shakhtar, which led the Ukrainian league entering the weekend, is on track to return to the competition next season.)Having lost so many players, Palkin, the Shakhtar chief executive, now insists that any new recruits sign contracts that include clauses that would prevent them from taking advantage of any FIFA regulations that would allow them to suddenly leave. Any player who signs on now, he said, surely understands the commitment they are making.So strong is the pull of making it as a professional in Europe, though, that Kelsy said not even war could stop him from coming. “I try not to think about it,” he said, “and focus on what matters now.”As a new recruit, Kelsy knows no other reality as a Shakhtar player. That is not the case for Traoré, who recalls far more luxurious times. In those days, jet travel and big crowds were the norm, not the long, arduous bus journeys that are now required to fulfill fixtures in empty stadiums.“It’s not normal life like we used to have: no home, you can’t see family, and also you have to always be careful, sirens on all the time,” he said. “But you get used to it.” More

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    The Premier League Crucible Produces Something New: Ideas

    England has long relied on imported players, imported coaches, imported best practices. Now it’s trying something new for a change.Manchester City had been in possession of the ball for a minute, no more, but to the denizens of the Santiago Bernabéu, it felt like an hour or more. Pep Guardiola’s team moved it backward and forward and then backward again. It switched it from side to side, sometimes via the scenic route, stopping off to admire the view from midfield, and sometimes taking the express.Real Madrid’s players did not seem especially concerned about this state of affairs. They would have known as they prepared for their Champions League semifinal that there would be phases when there was little they could do beyond watch City move the ball around. The danger, in those moments, is allowing your concentration to flicker, just for a moment, to be mesmerized by the swirling patterns.The crowd, though, did not like it one bit. The modern Real Madrid might be something of a dichotomy of convenience — simultaneously seeing itself as the game’s greatest statesman and nothing but a scrappy underdog — but there are some boundaries its fans are not willing to cross.The idea that a visitor, no matter how talented, should come to the Bernabéu and look as comfortable as Manchester City did, in that spell on Tuesday night, was clearly one of them. Guardiola’s team looked so thoroughly at home that it might as well have had its feet on the coffee table and a wash in the machine.And so, as if to make its displeasure known, the crowd started first to whistle, and then to jeer. Boos washed down the stands, designed to encourage Real’s players to break out of their defensive phalanx, to take a more aggressive stance, to reassert their primordial right to dominance.Real Madrid is not used to being bullied on its home field.Javier Soriano/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt was hard, in that moment, not to be struck by the oddness of the scene. The idea that English teams arrive at Europe’s great citadels with a technical deficit is now horribly outdated. The idea that English soccer lacks refinement when compared with its continental cousins is, at the elite level, such an anachronism that younger viewers might struggle to believe it ever existed at all.The Premier League’s emissaries have, between them, conquered all of the most revered territory in Europe over the last couple of decades. It was as long ago as 2006 that Arsenal became the first English team to win at the Bernabéu. A couple of years later, Arsène Wenger’s team did the same thing to A.C. Milan at San Siro. Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool and City itself have all won at Camp Nou or the Allianz Arena or one of the European game’s other sacred spaces.Some of these victories have been rooted in defensive obduracy and surgical precision in attack. Sometimes, they have been won by greater physicality, higher intensity — England’s traditional virtues repurposed as weapons. One or two of them might even have been just a little bit lucky.Increasingly, though, they win by inflicting on Europe’s great and good the sort of treatment that England’s teams had to endure for so long. They have, with mounting frequency, displayed a level of tactical sophistication and technical deftness that their opponents cannot match. England has not had any reason to be ashamed for some time.City’s display in Madrid might not have led to a victory — not yet, anyway — but the scale of its superiority was nevertheless noteworthy. In part, of course, that could be traced to the individual excellence of Guardiola’s players. The coach, too, deserves credit for the work he has done in shaping and molding this team. City’s real advantage, though, was in the novelty of its ideas.Pep Guardiola, imported innovator.Borja Sanchez Trillo/EPA, via ShutterstockThere should be nothing especially controversial about the suggestion that the Premier League, in its current incarnation, is not identifiably English, not in any real sense. It bears about as much relation to the century of English soccer culture that preceded it, in fact, as the modern Manchester City does to the club that occupied the stadium on Maine Road for all those years.The colors are the same, of course. Something about the atmosphere, too, is native, idiosyncratic, even if it is all a little quieter these days. Perhaps it is possible to discern a little Englishness in the tempo of the game, in how crowds celebrate corners, in the ongoing appreciation for a thundering tackle.But for the most part, what the Premier League sells is imported. The players, of course, and more and more of the coaches, too, but everything else as well. The training methods, the organizational structures, the playing philosophies, the strategies, the tactics: All of them have been sourced elsewhere and added to the mixture.That, it should be stressed, is not a criticism. It is the Premier League’s openness — both to ideas as well as to investment — that has helped to transform what was once a backwater league into the most engaging domestic competition on the planet. The transformation in England’s soccer culture, once so insular, is something to be admired.But while the Premier League has long been a crucible, it has rarely been a laboratory. The soccer its teams play now is, of course, substantially more complex than it was 20 years ago. There are wing backs and false nines, low blocks and high presses, inverted wingers and sweeper-keepers. Every tweak, every trend, every notion has washed up on these shores eventually (and, sometimes, a little reluctantly). It is a showcase of soccer’s contemporary thought.Rarely, though, have any of those ideas actually emerged in England. Perhaps a degree of skepticism is an enduring streak of Englishness, or perhaps it is a function of the league’s wealth: Why experiment when you can, in effect, pay someone else to take those risks for you?All of the innovations that have changed English soccer have been developed elsewhere, in the start-up cultures of Europe: from Wenger’s decree that perhaps athletes should not drink the whole time and Claude Makelele and his eponymous role all the way to the high press preached by Jürgen Klopp, Mauricio Pochettino and Marcelo Bielsa.It is, then, entirely possible that Guardiola has done something unique this season. He had already pioneered the idea that a fullback might actually be a wing, at Barcelona, or an ancillary midfielder, at Bayern Munich. Now, though, he has gone one step further, and introduced the concept that perhaps a central defender does not need to be held back by a label.At the Bernabéu, it was the presence of John Stones — both a defender and a midfielder — that allowed City to exert such control. It was the numerical advantage he gave Guardiola’s team in the center of the field that meant Real Madrid had to be so passive that it risked the wrath of its home crowd.John Stones, the central defender unbound.Jose Breton/Associated PressNothing in soccer is ever truly new, of course. All of these positional switches are, as the journalist, historian and Ted Lasso product-placement expert Jonathan Wilson has noted, simply the game reverting to the formation known as the W-M, played essentially as orthodoxy in the 1930s.Many of them have fluttered around elsewhere, too, occasionally popping up in the least likely of places. Anyone hailing Guardiola’s imagination might be pointed to Chris Wilder’s Sheffield United, for example, a team that regularly allowed its defenders to moonlight as midfielders without any risk at all of being presented as soccer’s cutting edge.That Guardiola has done it, though, matters. It gives the concept his seal of approval, turns it automatically into best practice. Where he treads, others will follow. For once, the Premier League will not find itself adopting the ideas of others, perfecting and reflecting them to be admired, but with a contribution of its own that it can send out into the world, something that will forever be a little slice of England.Fitting FinaleMr. Messi will inform you of his decision when he is good and ready.Emmanuel Dunand/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNothing, Jorge Messi would like you to know, is decided yet. His adult son, Lionel, will not be making any decision on the identity of his future employer until the end of the French season. And with good reason. The Ligue 1 title race sure is a nail-biter, and Messi would not want any of the Paris St.-Germain fans who are so devoted to him to think his focus might have drifted elsewhere.That does not stop the speculation, of course. So far this week, there have been reports that Messi’s “priority” is to remain in Europe; that he has agreed to a deal to sign with a club in Saudi Arabia; that he is talking to a club in Saudi Arabia but has not yet signed on the dotted line; that he is waiting for the green light from La Liga before completing a move back to Barcelona.Needless to say, not all of these things can be true. It is hard to tell if any of them are. There is never any paperwork produced to support any of the claims. There are never any on-the-record quotes from people actively involved in the negotiations. Everything is hazy, indistinct, disguised behind what is, in this case, the coward’s or the liar’s veil of deep background.As previously noted, the most romantic conclusion to all of this is that Messi returns to Newell’s Old Boys, or failing that Barcelona. In many ways, though, it feels increasingly fitting that he should draw the curtain on his career in Saudi Arabia.What could better encapsulate this era of soccer, after all, than the sight of Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, the two men who define the modern game, who crystallized everything that it is, eking out the final drops of their talent in a country that has sought to co-opt them, and their phenomenon, for its own purposes, effectively weaponizing their star power? Perhaps, in a way, that is where Messi should be. Perhaps Saudi Arabia was your destiny all along.Every End Has a StartFor Victor Osimhen and Napoli, it’s celebrations today and consequences later.Andrea Staccioli/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAmong soccer’s very worst traits is its restless, obsessive desire to know what comes next. Managers who pull off unexpected successes must, always, be encouraged to move to different clubs, bigger clubs, to see what they might do next. Players enjoying breakthrough seasons must immediately be photoshopped into the jerseys of their many and varied suitors. No achievement is allowed to exist merely for and of itself. Meaning is only bestowed when it is clear where glory might lead.It feels a little reductive, then, to ask what might come next for Napoli. It is hard to think of a less appropriate question. Napoli has waited 33 years to win Serie A for the third time. The city is still caught in a wave of euphoria. This is no time to think about the future. Worrying about all the chores you have to do tomorrow does have a habit of ruining the perfect today.It is intriguing to consider, though, whether those celebrations might become a rather more familiar sight, as Napoli’s president, Aurelio De Laurentiis, has intimated. As the author Tobias Jones has pointed out, Napoli’s title was not a stereotypically Neapolitan triumph: It had its roots not in the magical or the mystical but in the comparatively mundane details of intelligent recruitment and adroit coaching. Those are the sorts of things, of course, that can be repeated.They will have to be. It is not just fans or the news media that have a habit of assuming that all success is a steppingstone. Europe’s apex predators do, too. Manchester United, Chelsea and Bayern Munich are all casting covetous glances at Victor Osimhen, the Nigerian forward who did so much to carry Napoli over the line. Others are watching the Korean defender, Kim Min-jae, and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, the edge-of-the-seat Georgian winger.Napoli’s plan, as things stand, is to lose no more than one (most likely Osimhen), and then use the fee it receives — $150 million or so — not only to find his replacement but to add further ballast to its squad. If the club can invest as judiciously this summer as it did last, then it may be that the party in Naples is just getting started.CorrespondenceRoyale Union St.-Gilloise after reading last week’s newsletter.Yves Herman/ReutersExciting times for this newsletter, which treads virgin ground this week by issuing an apology to a whole nation. Well, a bit of one, anyway. “A small correction from a fan of Union Saint-Gilloise,” Flor Van der Eycken wrote. “The club is not Wallonian, but from Brussels.”My lawyers, of course, would point out that this subject was raised in a direct quote from a reader, and thus morally I am in the clear, but trying to apportion blame here feels churlish. It happened on my watch, and so it is my fault. I apologize, unreservedly, to any Belgians who feel let down.Tony Walsh, meanwhile, is evidently on a very similar page to me. One aspect of Napoli’s stirring victory in Serie A that has intrigued me — and probably warrants further investigation — is how those long-serving players who left the club last summer feel about it. Lorenzo Insigne, a Neapolitan to his core, and Dries Mertens, an adopted son of the city, are the best examples, but Tony wonders about someone else. “A penny for the thoughts of Kalidou Koulibaly,” he wrote. “Eight years in Naples, and then when they win the title he is amid the chaos at Chelsea.”And Carolyn Janus Moacdieh noticed a somewhat surprising parallel in last week’s note on Leeds, a club where fans have been taught that process is no less significant than outcome. “I will not defend the show ‘Ted Lasso,’” she wrote (unnecessarily: This newsletter is pro Lasso and the causes of Lasso.) “But Marcelo Bielsa’s philosophy at Leeds sounds a lot like the idea which the creators have integrated into the show: What you do is not as important as how you do it.”And another week, another suggested career path for my dog. “I think he can learn from Pretinha, a dog that supports my team, Fluminense, and celebrates each time the team scores,” Fernando Secco suggests. “Since Fernando Diniz became coach, the dog has been celebrating a lot.” I would suggest we are reaching a tipping point as we accumulate evidence that dogs improve soccer. Maybe the solution to how to make the game more engaging to teenagers was in front of our faces, tongue lolling and tail wagging, this whole time. More

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    Milan Divided by Partisanship, United in Voice

    The Champions League semifinal matchup between A.C. Milan and Inter may be less refined than its counterpart, but it does not lack for atmosphere and fervor.MILAN — Smoke wreathed and coiled around the Curva Sud, billowing in clouds thick and dark enough to obscure the top two tiers of the stadium stand almost entirely. Flags swooped and fluttered. Flares burned lurid red. Firecrackers, as loud as thunder, exploded. And all the time, the noise rose, echoed and gathered enough strength to rattle San Siro’s ancient concrete.A.C. Milan trailed by two goals at that point Wednesday, and had been for some time. Its nightmare prospect was starting to materialize: not just losing a Champions League semifinal, its first trip there in 16 years, but doing so at the hands of Inter, its rival and housemate. Stefano Pioli’s team stood on the verge of a defeat it will never be allowed to forget.It made little difference. At the front of the Curva, home to Milan’s most ardent fans, a group of men — clad wholly in black — urged their choir, tens of thousands strong, to increase the volume. The response was instant, earsplitting. “Hell is empty,” a banner unfurled by Milan’s fans had read before kickoff. “All of the devils are here.”A close examination, of course, would doubtless conclude that this Champions League semifinal matchup was not quite as refined, glossy or accomplished as the previous day’s meeting between Real Madrid and Manchester City: an encounter between a team that already belongs to history and one constructed for the express purpose of making it.This Champions League semifinal has divided Milan into red and blue.Luca Bruno/Associated PressClaudia Greco/ReutersThe power dynamics — read: who has the most money — of European soccer dictate that was always going to be the case. For all their rich histories, Milan and Inter belong firmly in the second category of European powers these days. They are not paupers, not by any means. Neither one makes an especially convincing underdog. One is owned by an American investment fund. The other is backed by a Chinese private enterprise vehicle.But they, and the league in which they play, have undeniably been diminished by the wealth that has flooded into England, especially in the last two decades. They do not have the benefit of the state-backed resources that have been poured into City. They have not ridden the turbulent waves of the game’s economics quite as well as Real or Bayern Munich.Milan had so many ticket requests for this game that it could have sold out San Siro — which hosted more than 75,000 Wednesday — no fewer than 13 times. These are clubs of renown, of widespread and fervent and deep-rooted support, not just in Italy but across the world. They are not small, even if the distorted lens of modern soccer can, from the outside, make it feel that way.Inter, for example, does not currently have a jersey sponsor. The firm that occupied that cherished real estate across players’ chests had been acquired during soccer’s brief and intensely regrettable cryptocurrency boom, the club lunging hungrily for the easy money on offer. The firm has, it will surprise absolutely nobody, subsequently failed to make some of its payments.Milan, meanwhile, has roughly 11 million followers on TikTok. Real has almost three times as many. Their players are, of course, among the best in the world, prodigiously gifted, high-specification athletes, but they can be broadly sorted into two categories: those already deemed surplus to requirements by the new elite, and those who dream one day of making it there. Few, if any, would be regarded as global stars at the peak of their fame. These are teams that have, by the standards of the superclubs, been thrown together by compromise and cost control.For all the intrigue naturally generated by this pairing — a derby played out over 180 minutes spread across six days, creating a city anxious and alert, divided by red and blue — it was understandable that it was seen, by many, as a formality of a semifinal with the teams competing for the right to be beaten in the final next month.And, in many ways, that was true. The passes were not quite as crisp. The control was a little less sure. Some of the decisions were rash. One or two of the ideas were muddled. Everything was somehow more deliberate, a fraction slower. The players of Milan and Inter might require two touches where City’s Kevin De Bruyne or Real’s Luka Modric might need only one.Sandro Tonali tried desperately, to no avail, to narrow the margin for A.C. Milan heading into the second leg.Alex Grimm/Getty ImagesLikewise, when looked at in the finest possible detail, the soccer was neither as perfectly executed nor as cutting edge as it had been at the Bernabéu. At no point, for example, did either Milan or Inter invert a full back — no, not even a single one — in order to create an overload in one of the central half-spaces.That was all true, but none of it seemed especially relevant, or to contain even the slightest real significance, because inside San Siro it was extremely difficult to think at all. The stadium, the one both clubs are so desperate to leave behind, was so noisy, so animated, so vivid and so vibrant that it bordered on a form of sensory overload.The game itself was no less compelling. It might have been a little jagged, kind of rough around the edges in comparison to what went before, but that did not seem to matter in comparison to the bustling passion of Nicolò Barella, the daring play of Federico Dimarco, the faintly desperate determination of Sandro Tonali to rescue something — anything — from Milan’s harrowing start in the first leg of the tie.If it was not, then, quite the apex of soccer as a sport, but it lacked absolutely nothing as a spectacle, right from the moment the Champions League anthem began and the Curva, in an instant, was turned into a sneering devil’s face. That is not something that should be taken lightly and presented with a pat of the head and a condescending smile as an unwanted consolation prize.There is something stirring about soccer played to a pitch of perfection, when a team transforms itself into something approaching art. That is why those who can affect that transformation are so revered, and so richly rewarded. But it does not need to reach those heights to be absorbing, engaging, thrilling. All it has to be is a contest, an occasion, an event.That, after all, has a far broader, far more visceral appeal. Some games exist to be watched, to be admired, to be appreciated. Others are there to be heard, to be sensed, to be felt. The slender technical deficiencies — of both teams — will not be remembered. In the white heat, they may not even have been noticed. The noise, though, washing down from the Curva Sud even as the thing Milan had dreaded most of all slowly came into being, will echo for some time. More

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    Manchester City and Real Madrid Will Eventually Have to Be Themselves

    The teams drew the first leg of their Champions League semifinal as each tried to prevent the other from playing to its strengths.Erling Haaland had his instructions. His Manchester City teammates were methodically working the ball from the center circle all the way back to Ederson, the goalkeeper, but Haaland was not watching. He knew what was coming. Ederson pitched the ball high into the night sky, an unusually rudimentary opening gambit for a team coached by Pep Guardiola.Haaland was not watching, either, as the ball reached the apex of its parabola and started to descend. He was moving to where it was going to make landfall. He started to gather a little speed. And then, just as the Real Madrid defender David Alaba met the ball — his header sending it back into the sky — Haaland arrived, crashing into him. Not dangerously or recklessly but, with only about 40 seconds elapsed, certainly ominously.Guardiola being Guardiola, of course, the working assumption has to be that this was all preordained, the sort of effort that he has spent time perfecting on the training ground for Tuesday’s match. An understudy would have been drafted to act as Haaland’s crash test dummy. Haaland, the Norwegian striker, would have been lectured on the finer points of clattering technique. No, Erling, don’t barge into him like that; lead with the shoulder just a touch more.In this case, though, perhaps the agency lay elsewhere. Standing behind Alaba, watching the opening skirmish unfold, was Antonio Rüdiger, the German defender. Happenstance had brought him into Real’s lineup — standing in for the suspended Eder Militão — but he is not the sort to back away from a test of strength.Rüdiger has that valuable knack, for a central defender, of ensuring he gets the game he wants. He may as well have been licking his lips at the sight of Haaland’s opening salvo on Alaba. Clearly, this was going to be his sort of evening.This Champions League semifinal was, on a macro level, always going to be cast not just as a tussle between old glory and new money, the establishment and the aspirant, but as a conceptual collision, too. Carlo Ancelotti’s Madrid is inherently improvisational and player-centric; Guardiola believes, more than anything, in the power of his collective, his system. It is free jazz against orchestral arrangement. (The score, after the first of two legs, is 1-1; no sweeping conclusions on scant evidence can yet be drawn.)Vinícius Júnior, left, scored Real Madrid’s only goal.Julian Finney/Getty ImagesBut it was also — and at times, it seemed, mainly — an arm wrestle between Rüdiger and Haaland. That is not to suggest that either player is nothing but brawn, of course. Rüdiger’s job is to ensure that things do not happen; his successes are, often, inherently invisible to those not blessed with his foresight. Likewise, for someone so large, Haaland can make it very difficult to say with any certainty where he is at any given time, right up to the point when he materializes, peeling off an opponent’s shoulder.On this occasion, though, both players willingly indulged what might be described as their more muscular instincts. For an hour and a half, the two of them pulled and pushed and strained and tensed, relishing the atavistic thrill of it, each trying to establish nothing grander than sheer physical dominance over the other.Here was Haaland, dropping deep to pick up the ball, being thrown to the ground by Rüdiger. Here was Rüdiger, for some reason slipping his head through the crook of Haaland’s elbow, effectively giving his consent to be placed in a headlock, grinning in (presumably) accidental homage to Jack Nicholson in “The Shining” as he did so.Most judges, by the end, would have scored it a split decision: Haaland did not score, a rarity this season, and in truth had only a couple of sights of goal; his presence was central, though, in creating the space that led to Kevin De Bruyne’s equalizer for City, the strike that will make Guardiola’s team the slight favorite when hostilities are resumed next week in England.And that, perhaps, will not displease either coach. For all their philosophical differences, what was striking about this game was just how aware both teams were of the other’s strengths, their capacity to inflict damage. That, more than anything, might have been the enduring lesson of their encounter in a semifinal last season: Madrid conscious of just how good City can be; City conscious that a team can be as good as it likes against Madrid and still lose.Real, on home territory, was at times so passive that it tried its fans’ patience; the Bernabéu is not used, after all, to its visitors having the temerity to keep the ball for long periods of time. There was a point, midway through the first half, when City’s passing started to affront the crowd’s dignity: What had started as whistling turned, slowly but surely, into jeers.For Ancelotti, though, that was a price worth paying: Tactically, strategically, it made sense for Real to dig in, to sit deep, to lie in wait, and then to pick its moments. A few minutes later, his approach bore fruit: Eduardo Camavinga, playing the hybrid fullback/midfielder role that is so de rigueur these days, spotted a gap and levered it open, then found Vinícius Júnior in sufficient space to fizz a shot past Ederson.Even a goal down, though, City did not see the need to adopt a more assertive, more aggressive posture. Guardiola’s insatiable appetite for possession is not a purely offensive maneuver: To some extent, it is a defensive measure, too. More than he would like to admit, perhaps, he hews to his old rival José Mourinho’s adage that “whoever has the ball, has fear.”Kevin De Bruyne, right, scored Manchester City’s equalizer.Manu Fernandez/Associated PressIf Guardiola’s team is in control, he knows the opposition cannot score. In those moments, watching the ball sweep hypnotically between his players, he can feel safe. Against Madrid, a team whose superpower is its ability to score at any moment and effectively without any warning, that is doubly important.It was, both sorts of coaches seemed to have decided, that sort of occasion, one in which the focus was on preventing the opposition from expressing its identity. And so Haaland, the most devastating forward in Europe, a player who has seemed at times in his debut season in England like an inevitable force of nature, was employed — at least in part — as a battering ram.Guardiola and Ancelotti will both take heart that their approach worked, that nothing has yet been lost. Both will know, though, that at some point it will not be enough merely to stop the opposition; to win, someone will have to be themselves. More

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    The New A.C. Milan Picks Up Where the Old One Left Off

    Is there muscle memory to Champions League success? An Italian giant, no longer fallen, is hoping to draw on its own.Stefano Pioli could feel it, even if he could not quite define it.In the nicest possible way, Pioli has made several journeys around the block as a soccer manager. At 57, he has been coaching in the volatile, capricious world of the Italian game for two decades. His current job, at A.C. Milan, is the 13th of his career. There is very little, these days, that counts as new to him.The couple of weeks leading up to and surrounding Milan’s Champions League quarterfinal against Napoli last month, though, were different. Quite what it was is difficult for him to identify. It manifested not just in the atmosphere in the stadium — unique, Pioli called it — but in an energy that infused the club’s inner sanctums, too.He came to understand it, eventually, as a sort of institutional muscle memory. For a long time, Milan’s present has felt just a little unworthy of the club’s past. Milan has felt, in recent years, like a club diminished, almost a relic of another age. Only Real Madrid has won more European Cups than A.C. Milan, but for 16 years Milan had not so much as made a semifinal. That is, technically, not quite a generation. In soccer time, it may as well be the Pleistocene.The mere promise of a return, though, brought everything flooding back. For Pioli, as for most of his players, it was virgin territory. For the fans, for the staff, for the directors — among their number the likes of Paolo Maldini, seemingly barely aged from his playing days — it was reassuringly familiar.“This club is used to these moments, these emotions,” Milan Manager Stefano Pioli said.Luca Bruno/Associated PressIt manifested not as a mass, Pioli said, but a force. For those games against Napoli, he said, the pressure of history “gave us more faith, more strength, more conviction.” The idea that a soccer club, with its ever-rotating cast of characters, might have some sort of vestigial memory baked into its bedrock is not poetic fantasy. “It exists,” Pioli said. “This club is used to these moments, these emotions. It knows how to be a protagonist.”For Milan, this is the stage on which it belongs. Its return represents a revival, a restoration of its grandeur, blurred but never quite lost in the tumult of the last decade or so. Even the opponent that lies in wait — its city rival and current San Siro housemate, Inter — brings the memories of how things used to be flooding back.The clubs have been here before: They were paired together in the semifinals in 2003, and again in the quarterfinals in 2007. (The auguries are good for Milan — on both previous occasions, it progressed — but not great for neutral observers: none of the four games, all home and away and yet held on precisely the same turf, could be described as a classic.)And yet the rivalry’s return is not testament to how little has changed, but how much. The Milan that took the field in 2007, on its way to winning its seventh European Cup in Athens, was the last incarnation of the club’s imperial phase: Maldini and Alessandro Nesta in defense, Andrea Pirlo in midfield, Kaká and Filippo Inzaghi upfront. It was still, recognizably, the team that Silvio Berlusconi had built, the fruits of the first modern superclub: experienced, authoritative, impossibly glamorous.The Milan that will face Inter at San Siro on Wednesday, and then again six days later, is quite different. Milan’s time in the doldrums — the years in which it was sold by Berlusconi, bought by a mysterious Chinese investor, salvaged by an activist hedge fund, and eventually purchased by an American consortium — have necessitated a complete change of approach.Where once Milanello, the club’s training facility, was famous for its ability to eke a few more years out of aging stars, the focus is now on youth. It is with great pride that Pioli points out — more than once — that his Italian championship-winning team of 2021 was “the youngest squad in history” to claim the title. That Milan returned to the pinnacle is the most important thing. But how it got there matters, too.The modern Milan is a blend of old (forward Olivier Giroud) …Marco Bertorello/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images… and new (forward Rafael Leão).Alberto Pizzoli/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesInter, notably, has refused to countenance such a switch of focus, rejecting the idea of abandoning its long-held status as one of Europe’s handful of destination clubs. “Inter is a very strong club, which rarely sells its best players,” Inter’s chief executive, Giuseppe Marotta, said last year, seemingly affronted by the idea that players might use it as a way station on their journeys to Real Madrid, Paris St.-Germain or the Premier League.Milan, by contrast, has bowed to reality, and sought to use its new place in the pecking order to its advantage. Under successive owners — first Elliott Investment Management, the activist fund, and now Red Bird Capital, backed by Gerry Cardinale — it has adopted a data-infused approach, based around locating the underappreciated and overlooked and burnishing them to a sheen.The midfielder Brahim Díaz came from the ranks of Real Madrid’s stand-ins. The versatile Malick Thiaw was plucked from Germany’s second tier. The defender Pierre Kalulu was playing for the French club Lyon’s second team. Milan has accepted that the world has changed. “A club has to have a project,” Pioli said. “Ours was very clear: to invest in young players with talent, and then give them time to grow.”A sprinkling of stardust remains, a ghost of the old glamour, in the form of Zlatan Ibrahimovic — now largely an immaculately-dressed cheerleader — and the ageless Olivier Giroud, but they have been scattered judiciously through the squad, given a role that is, at least in part, pastoral.“The club was smart in making sure there was a mix,” Pioli said. “That’s why we have been able to get such good results in such a short space of time. Sometimes, a coach can say something and it has an impact. But sometimes, when it is a teammate, a champion, it helps, too. It is all done with the same aim in mind.”Milan’s San Siro has two home teams in the Champions League semifinals. Only one can advance to next month’s final in Istanbul.Daniele Mascolo/ReutersThat aim has, broadly speaking, been an act of restoration. For most clubs, winning the championship would have been enough. Milan, though, belongs to that slim category of teams — along with Real, Bayern Munich, and to some extent Liverpool — that draw their identity less from domestic affairs and more from continental triumphs. The semifinals of the Champions League, and beyond, is where Milan, historically, feels at home.The place looks very different these days, of course. For all the mounting frenzy, the churning anxiety in Milan at the prospect of a winner-takes-all derby unspooling over the next week, received wisdom has it that both are playing for a silver medal. Whoever wins, the overwhelming favorite for the final will be whichever team emerges from the meeting of Real Madrid and Manchester City in the other semifinal. Unfeasible as it would have seemed in 2003, Italian soccer is an underdog now.Pioli, though, is undaunted. Economically, the teams of Serie A can no longer compete with even the small fry of the Premier League: Milan found itself outbid by Bournemouth, no less, when both were chasing the Italian midfielder Nicolo Zaniolo in January. Italy’s shine has faded, and its power has dimmed. This Milan is not a reprise of the glory days when Serie A towered over the world, but something closer to a requiem for them.“But when that is true, you have to be innovative,” Pioli said. “With ideas, with quality of work.” Necessity, he said, has been the mother of invention. “It has become an undervalued championship, in my mind,” he said. “There are lots of different ideas, different styles, lots of confrontations with teams and coaches who have different systems of play or how they interpret games.”That, in turn, has helped the new breed of Italian teams — their squads diminished, perhaps, from the days when they acted as a roll-call of global superstars — to begin to make up for the financial shortfall.They may not have the best players any more. They may not have the luster they once did. In the bright, harsh light, a team as grand as A.C. Milan might even come to look like a minnow. But they have, Pioli said, a “knowledge” rooted in the variety of challenges they encounter domestically, one that means they are “prepared” for whatever Europe can muster.“Calcio has suffered for a few years,” he said. “But now it is ready to be a protagonist again.” More

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    Osasuna, Facing Real Madrid in Copa del Rey, Is a Model Club

    All fans should want their teams to be more like Osasuna.It is not quite eight years since Osasuna found itself at what Fran Canal, the team’s chief executive, described as the “worst moment in its history.” The team was a single defeat from the ignominy of relegation to Spanish soccer’s third tier. Bankruptcy loomed. The club, he said, stood at the precipice “socially, economically, in terms of credibility.”On Saturday, Osasuna will face Real Madrid in the final of the Spanish cup, the Copa del Rey. Pamplona, its home city, is decked out in the team’s colors. Tens of thousands of fans are expected to descend on the Plaza del Castillo to watch only the second major final in the club’s history.It is not the case, of course, that the journey between those two points has been straightforward. It has taken considerable amounts of deft, arduous, painstaking work to rebuild and revive Osasuna. Its rise has been of such a speed, and such a scale, that by definition it cannot have been easy.It is striking, then, that Canal and his colleagues make it all seem, well, obvious.One example: Aimar Oroz, a 21-year-old midfielder enjoying a breakthrough season, runs through the list of teammates he has known, essentially, since childhood. Six or seven spring to mind immediately. “The changing room is really important,” he said. “It helps the atmosphere when the people in there are friends.”Another: In January, Osasuna’s coach suddenly found himself devoid of healthy fullbacks. He could have signed a player, or converted a midfielder into the role. Instead, he drafted in a 21-year-old, Diego Moreno, from the team’s academy. Moreno trained with the team for two days, made his debut in the cup, and within the week was in the lineup for a league game. “That is always where we look first,” Braulio Vázquez, the club’s sporting director, said of the academy. “If the type of player that we need exists here, we will not go and sign one.”Real Madrid’s Carlo Ancelotti, left, will call on some of the world’s most expensive players in the final. Jagoba Arrasate’s Osasuna squad was built differently.Alvaro Barrientos/Associated PressSimplicity, in soccer, is a deceptively complex thing. It is easy to proclaim the virtues of common sense. It is quite another to stand by them in the vortex of hope and pressure and expectation.Osasuna’s results, though — on course for a top-half finish in La Liga, finalists in the Copa del Rey, all of it on a budget that is a fraction of most of its rivals — mark the club as such a model of best practices that the most pressing question is in plain sight:Why doesn’t everyone else do it?The Navarra GeneAt first glance, it is the sort of statistical anomaly that warrants further investigation: Navarra, the Spanish province sandwiched between the Basque Country and Aragon and glazed by the Pyrenees, produces more professional soccer players per capita than anywhere else in Spain. A few years ago, a study found that there was one player for every 22,000 people in the region.There is a part of Ángel Alcalde, Osasuna’s director of youth development, that would like to believe that is somehow hereditary. He smiles at the idea that there might be such a thing as what he calls a “Navarra gene”: a random genetic mutation that for some reason makes the 650,000 inhabitants of the province better at soccer than everyone else.Osasuna fans after their club reached the final.Jesus Diges/EPA, via ShutterstockHe knows, though, that the correct answer is likely to be the simplest one. Navarra’s success has its roots in two things that are not mysteries at all: system and structure.“There is a culture of soccer in Navarra,” Alcalde said. “But it is a region with just one club: Osasuna. We work with 150 affiliated youth teams. We have 20,000 players in our orbit. We have a very well-developed scouting network. We look for talent under every rock.”Osasuna does not, of course, have a free run at those players. Part of the reason Navarra as a whole has proved so productive over the years is that the major teams in the neighboring Basque Country — Athletic Bilbao and Real Sociedad — have long regarded the province’s players as fair game. More recently, Barcelona and Villarreal have identified it as fertile ground, too.Osasuna cannot pay quite as generously as any of those teams. It certainly cannot match the glamour of Barcelona. What it can offer, though, is a sure path from youth soccer to a professional career, from potential to fulfillment. “Our job is to generate a flow of players for the first team, and to make sure they are ready to jump from Disneyland into Jurassic Park,” Alcalde said. “If you want to become a player, then I am certain this is the best place to do it.”He is keenly aware, though, that most of those hopefuls who come under his charge will fall by the wayside. “Becoming a player is complicated,” he said. “There are only very few who make it.” To offset that, the emphasis at Tajonar, Osasuna’s youth academy, is as much on health, psychology and emotional development as it is on soccer. “We want to make sure the sport does not do them any damage,” he said. “We do not want to leave broken eggs on the road.”There will, on Saturday night, be plenty of players on the field whom Alcalde and his staff might point to as validation and vindication, players with, if not a Navarra gene, then certainly what Alcalde calls “Tajonar DNA.”It is telling, though, that he is just as proud of those who will not be there. “We had one boy who suffered two really bad knee injuries,” Alcalde said. “He had a lot of talent, but it cost him his career. He studied data science at university, and now he is invited back to the club to work with our data department. That is important. We want Tajonar to be a mark of prestige for everyone who comes through, not just the people who become players.”Osasuna recruits locally with the promise of a straight line from prospect to professional.Cesar Manso/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhere Monday MattersAimar Oroz got the call a few months ago. It comes, eventually, for every member of Osasuna’s first team: a request from the academy staff to spend an afternoon training with the youth team, offering any tips or advice they might have, correcting any mistakes they see.Sometimes, players are sent to train with the youngest members of the club — boys no older than 11 or 12 — but for Oroz and the Croatian striker Ante Budimir, who joined him that afternoon, their charges were a little older: the under-16s and under-18s.Oroz, in truth, did not relish the role of expert. He is shy, by nature, and only just out of the academy himself. He did not feel especially comfortable being drafted as an older head, or issuing commands. Still, it is a tradition at Tajonar. “It is part of the club,” he said. “It’s something we’re glad to do.”The message is clear, and twofold: Those sessions show the younger players that the door is open, and they remind the older ones that, no matter how far they might go, they should always remember where they came from.Osasuna’s stadium is the loudest in Spain.Vincent West/ReutersWhatever happens in the final on Saturday, the experience will broaden Osasuna’s horizons. A victory — the first major honor in the club’s history — would mean a place in Europe next season. Merely reaching the final gives Osasuna access to a spot in Spain’s lucrative Super Cup, staged every January in Saudi Arabia.Playing will compound the impression that this is a club going places. Its stadium, El Sadar, has been renovated and in its new, sleek form has been voted one of the best in Europe; it is, officially, the loudest in Spain. Now, all of a sudden, it is home to a team ensconced in La Liga and competing with Real, Barcelona and Atlético Madrid — likely the other three Super Cup entrants — for honors.That success, though, changes absolutely nothing. It is not that Osasuna lacks ambition; far from it. But the club, Canal said, will not “lose its values,” will not abandon the methods that have worked so well so far. It will continue to do the simple thing, the obvious thing.“We know that means there will be bad moments,” said Vázquez, the sporting director. The success of this season will not necessarily follow again next year. “But that is the policy of the club, and the people understand that,” he said. “We cannot normalize something that is not normal.”And so, whatever happens on Saturday, Osasuna will go on being run as it has been for these past eight years, from the nadir to the zenith. There might be a celebration. There might be a commiseration. The club that emerges on the other side will be exactly the same.“Monday,” Canal said, “will still be Monday.” More

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    PSG or Lens: Who Had the Better Season?

    P.S.G. will win another French title this year, and Lens won’t win a thing. But it’s worth asking: Who had the better season?Briuce Samba was trying, as best he could, to share the crowning glory of his career with his wife. The goalkeeper’s road to stardom had been a circuitous one. By Samba time he was 24, he had played only a handful of senior games. He spent the next few years toiling in the second divisions of France and England.Now, though, it had all paid off. In March, not long before his 29th birthday, Samba was told he had been selected for France’s squad for its upcoming European Championship qualifiers. He would be sharing a changing room with Kylian Mbappé, Antoine Griezmann and the rest. He would wear the No. 1 jersey.Naturally, it was an achievement Samba wanted to celebrate with his wife, Jessica. He called her on FaceTime to revel in the moment together, but it did not — by his own admission — really work. He was, as he put it in an interview with the French sports newspaper L’Équipe, too busy being “jumped on” by his delighted teammates at his club team, R.C. Lens.Samba’s long-awaited call-up has not been the only thing Lens has had to celebrate in the last few months. He was probably exaggerating when he suggested this has been the “best season the club has had in 120 years” — an assertion that the 1998 team, which won the French title, might reject — but not by much.Lens won’t win the French title, or any other trophy. But it has still been a fantastic season.Francois Lo Presti/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThanks in no small part to Samba, a key element in the most miserly defense in France, Lens started the season with a nine-game unbeaten run. It did not lose its second game until the start of February. It beat Monaco in Monte Carlo, Marseille in Marseille and then swept past Paris St.-Germain on home turf.Thierry Henry, no less, described Lens as the best team to watch in France. “It is contagious when you see a team going forward, fighting together, regardless of the starting 11,” he said. As late as April, the Lens manager, Franck Haise, was being asked if his team — constructed on a shoestring by modern standards — had a chance of winning the title. “We can always dream,” he said. “We’re not going to forbid ourselves anything.”In the end, that will most likely prove a step too far. Lens is currently six points behind P.S.G. with only five games to play. The emphasis now, for Haise, is on beating second-place Marseille again on Saturday and securing a place in the Champions League for the first time in two decades.The title, as was always probable, will be returning to Paris. When it gets there, though, it will find a club in a starkly different mood to Lens.Angry Paris St.-Germain fans protested outside the club’s offices and a few players’ homes on Wednesday.Mohammed Badra/EPA, via ShutterstockThese are troubled times at P.S.G., though whether it is more troubled than any of the other times is not clear. Lionel Messi, the greatest player of all time, the jewel of the Qatari project to transform the club into a genuine European superpower, is currently on two weeks’ unpaid suspension, having traveled without permission to Saudi Arabia for a family vacation.(“Who thought Saudi has so much green?” Messi asked his 458 million Instagram followers this week. The answer, presumably, is “anyone who has seen your contract with the Saudi Tourism Authority.”)In the circumstances, it seems reasonably unlikely that he will be signing a new contract when he returns to Paris. Few will mourn his departure: not Messi, who has always given the impression that his relationship with the club has been emotionless, transactional; not the club, which can now part with him at no financial or emotional cost; and not the P.S.G. fans, who have spent most of the last five months jeering him at every opportunity.That will not be the summer’s only departure. A clutch of P.S.G. players, carrying the can for yet another year of disappointment in the Champions League, will be shipped out to make room for new signings.There is the lingering possibility that Neymar may be among them; it is possible that Kylian Mbappé, his relationship with the club’s hierarchy once again strained, might find his feet itching once again. Christophe Galtier, the manager, will not be around to coach, whatever happens. That job will go, instead, to whoever P.S.G. can find to manage them who is not Christophe Galtier.Winning yet another French title will make no difference to any of that. The club’s fans will be pleased, of course, by the passing of another year in which none of its rivals had any cause to celebrate. But it is hard to discern any emotion approaching genuine joy. This is just how things are now.P.S.G.’s Big Three (for the moment): Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé and Neymar.Carl Recine/Action Images, via ReutersThis will, after all, be P.S.G.’s ninth French title in 11 years. It does not matter who the coach is. It scarcely matters who the players are. It makes no difference if the team is good, or bad, attractive, ugly, interesting, dull. It can win the league when it is riddled with dysfunction, falling apart behind the scenes. It can win the league when nobody is enjoying themselves. It can win the league and it changes nothing.In time, few at P.S.G. will remember much about this season. Not the good parts, anyway. There will be some dim recollection of Messi’s unauthorized trip, of the surprising amount of greenery in Saudi Arabia, of Galtier’s brief, unhappy stint in charge, but little else. It will blur, quickly, into nothing but a fuzzy outline of disappointment.Lens, by contrast, will end the season with nothing but happy memories, recollections of one of the finest campaigns in the club’s long history. There will be no trophy to commemorate it, but no matter. The year that Samba was called up to the France team, that Lois Openda scored all those goals, that Haise might have won something, will be etched into legend.It is tempting to ask, then, which of those two teams has experienced the better season? Which has enjoyed themselves more? Soccer is, after all, about emotions as much as it is about glory, and the emotions on offer in the heart of Pas-de-Calais seem substantially healthier than those playing out in Paris.It is, though, perhaps better to ask whether all of that wealth, all of that power, has truly made P.S.G. happy, or whether — more than a decade on from the arrival of its Qatari backers — one of the richest clubs in the world, the pre-eminent force in French soccer, the team that employs Mbappé and Messi and Neymar, might look at little old Lens and think: That looks like fun.Lens, living its best life.Francois Lo Presti/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA Test of What MattersThe journey, then, is complete. In the space of three short years, Leeds United has traversed the full range of soccer’s theoretical spectrum: from Marcelo Bielsa at one end, with his unwavering belief in spectacle and romance and aesthetics, all the way to Sam Allardyce.There is, presumably, a parable in here somewhere. More than one, perhaps. It might be an example of how revolutions can only triumph if their leaders remain loyal to their principles. Or it might illustrate how pragmatism and compromise have a habit of intruding on even the purest, the most innocent, among us. It might be that ideas do not always survive an encounter with reality. It might be that they are abandoned too quickly by the callow and the plain.Either way, Leeds now stands as a curious case study. During Bielsa’s tenure, it was not simply the outcome — promotion back to the Premier League, a top half finish — that restored pride to the team’s fans, but the methods. Leeds had a style, an identity. The club, at long last, stood for something.Big Sam: reporting for duty.Sang Tan/Associated PressAllardyce, appointed this week with the desperate, urgent task of somehow staving off relegation by sheer force of reputation, represents a permanent break with that. Allardyce is not always given the credit he deserves for the farsightedness he displayed early in his career, but he would not argue with the assertion that he is an outcome-oriented manager. He wants results. He does not much care how he gets them.Whether Leeds fans can buy into that, though, is a difficult question. They have spent the last few years, after all, cherishing the idea that the journey matters as much as the destination, internalizing the Bielsista logic that what you do is not as important as how you do it. Soccer has long believed that fans are happy if they are winning; everything else is window dressing. Leeds may provide a petri dish to find out.Please Do Not Be So Emotional, They ScreamJürgen Klopp would like to speak to the manager.Carl Recine/ReutersA torn hamstring — Grade 2C, six weeks out — was the least Jürgen Klopp deserved. His racing over to celebrate in the face of a slightly bemused and utterly undeserving fourth official in the aftermath of Liverpool’s late winning goal against Tottenham last Sunday was, without question, an inherently ugly act. The Liverpool manager will, deservedly, be punished.Severely, too, because he has form for this sort of thing. He has already served one touchline ban this season. He can expect his second to be substantially longer, partly for the flagrancy of his offense and partly because the incident — broadcast live in the Premier League’s flagship Sunday afternoon slot — was sufficiently high-profile that it has become a lightning rod for the State of Our Game. The Football Association, in these circumstances, feels compelled to look and act tough.It is not to excuse Klopp’s actions, though, to suggest that — as ever — there is something missing from the conversation. Every so often, managers, coaches, players and fans are informed in arch, censorious tones that they must control their emotions better. They must not get too angry, or too impatient, or too passionate, or even, at times, too gleeful.And yet at no point does anyone seem to connect that emotionality with the sustained pitch of frenzy laced into the rhetoric that surrounds soccer: the constant calls, on broadcasts and in print, for players to be dropped or sold or replaced; for managers to change their methods or lose their jobs; for fans to fear or rage or despair.Is it any wonder that some of the participants in the game struggle to maintain their equanimity when they are endlessly informed that their jobs are on the line, that everything except eternal victory is failure, that each and every setback is evidence, deep down, of some moral shortcoming on their part?There is a reason that exists, of course: The soccer industry thrives on controversy and debate and drama and outrage. The people passing judgment act as observers when they are, in fact, participants. Klopp deserves to be barred. He needs, obviously, to calm down. He needs to control his emotions better. He is not, though, the only one.A Step Too FarTo return to a theme: Soccer does not, as a rule, know how to gauge relative success. Arsenal’s (men’s) team will, for example, spend much of the next month or so having its very character pored over and picked apart and dredged for clues as to why, exactly, it did not win the Premier League title.The fact that this in itself represents a considerable triumph — that Arsenal was in a position to be criticized for not winning the Premier League — will receive considerably less attention.With any luck, the club’s women’s team will avoid the same fate. On Monday night, Arsenal lost at the death in the semifinals of the Women’s Champions League: a single lapse, after more than two and a half hours of soccer, from Lotte Wubben-Moy that allowed Pauline Bremer to sweep Wolfsburg to a 5-4 aggregate victory.Pauline Bremer’s late goal in extra time lifted Wolfsburg over Arsenal, and into a Women’s Champions League final against Barcelona on June 3.Richard Heathcote/Getty ImagesIt would be possible, of course, to point out that the ongoing failure of the clubs of the Women’s Super League to establish some sort of competitive dominion in Europe is, given their financial edge, a substantial disappointment. Or to suggest that Arsenal, with home-field advantage and an early goal, had lacked the composure to see the game out. Or to take the path of least resistance and just blame Wubben-Moy for being caught in possession.But again: Success is relative. Arsenal made it to the last minute of extra time in the semifinals of the Champions League without its captain, Kim Little, and its three best players, Leah Williamson, Beth Mead and Vivianne Miedema, all of them victims of long-term knee injuries. Getting so far, coming so close, in those circumstances, is not failure. It is quite the opposite.CorrespondenceNever let it be said that this newsletter does not confront the most pressing issues in sports: corruption, engagement, how to get your dog into soccer games. “I would suggest you approach a club and offer him as a mascot,” Stephen Gessner wrote. “You might have to teach him some tricks: bark when the opposition scores, growl at the referee, jump on the opposing manager.”This is a perfectly valid suggestion for most dogs. Sadly, it does not apply to my dog, who needs to be in my presence at all times for his own peace of mind and who has a steadfast objection to learning anything. He does have a natural indisposition toward authority figures, though, so he could probably tick the “growling at the referee” box.“Maybe if I wear a scarf they won’t notice.”David Klein/ReutersThe good news is that Phil Aromando might have solved the problem. “I have no idea if your dog is interested in Major League Soccer,” he wrote. (Not sure, I’ve never asked.) “But St. Louis City S.C. has just opened a pet friendly section at their stadium.” Moving to St. Louis strikes me as extreme, but also somehow more realistic than teaching him to walk at heel.I wondered, meanwhile, if we had exhausted our seam of suggestions to improve soccer, but there is still time for a couple of doses of common sense.“Why can’t incidental, or nonthreatening, handballs in the box just be punished with indirect free kicks from the spot of the infraction?” Doug Lowe asked. “It would give the team a scoring opportunity that isn’t brutally punished, as it is with a penalty.” Great question, Doug, because this seems perfectly logical to me.Adam weighed in on the need to engage the next generation of fans. “As a high school math(s) teacher,” he wrote, “I fully agree with the assertion of ‘to hell with pleasing restless, bored teenagers.’ They’re entitled enough as it is.” I have redacted Adam’s surname for his own protection, in the very unlikely event that any of his teenage students get this far into the newsletter.And finally, Lee Gillette is here with an eternal plea: Why don’t more people talk about Belgium? “As refreshing change goes, Union St.-Gilloise almost ended its first season in the top division for 48 years with a title, and it is in the running once again,” he wrote. “In Belgium’s infuriating four-team title playoff, Union is surrounded by Flemish clubs. The only Walloon club to win the title in years was in 2009, and Union hasn’t won a title since 1935.”He is quite right, of course: We have covered the club’s rise before, but Union should nevertheless have been included last week as a potential usurper to the established order. Mind you, perhaps be grateful that it slipped my mind: Dortmund, naturally enough, blew its chance at a first title in a decade at the first available opportunity. More

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    ‘Everybody Is Welcome Here.’

    Kaig Lightner founded the Portland Community Football Club to give local youth an inexpensive chance to play. When he came out as transgender, they gave him a place to belong.PORTLAND, Ore. — The soccer coach looked out at two dozen or so of his players and felt nervousness course through him like a rip current. His heart pounded, and his voice felt unsteady.Kaig Lightner (pronounced “Cage,” a phonetic shortening of his initials — K and J) had been thinking of this moment since the summer of 2013 when he founded the Portland Community Football Club, a program for teaching soccer to mostly first- and second-generation immigrant youth who lived in his city’s most distressed neighborhoods.In the four years since, Coach Kaig had become a friend, an ally and even, to some of his players, a father figure.How would they react once he told them he had been raised as a girl?He had always asked his players to be open and honest about their lives. That he had not modeled such deep honesty filled him with remorse.The election of Donald Trump — who had promised to appoint conservative judges and whose vice president, Mike Pence, had opposed gay rights and was seen as supporting conversion therapy — had ignited a sense of foreboding and uncertainty within the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. Lightner certainly felt it. He worried that the players — tweens and teens on this afternoon — would leave his club. Or that their families would cut ties, no matter how good the program had been at mentoring and providing a safe space to grow up in.Lightner considered all of this, took a deep breath and knew he needed to speak up.“I haven’t totally shared with you something about myself.”“It’s an important thing for me to share with you because we all should be who we are.”“I am transgender.”One player chuckled nervously but walked to Lightner for a hug. Most looked straight at their coach in a kind of wonder and awe.No one left.At P.C.F.C., nobody gets cut. Families pay $50 to join, but less than that is OK. Not paying a dime is fine, too.Mason Trinca for The New York TimesBorn Katherine Jean Lightner and raised in a comfortable suburb east of Seattle, nothing about Lightner’s adolescence was easy. Lightner, who consented to the use of his former name and gender identity throughout this article, recalls a paralyzing fear that began around age 4 that he was a boy stuck in a girl’s body. When his family called him Katie, he protested. It sounded too feminine. Kate was better by a shade. He refused ballet lessons. His mother bought him a tailored dress. He wore it once, then vowed to never wear it again.As the years went on, Kate favored baggy pants, sweats, billowing T-shirts and baseball caps turned backward. A favorite birthday gift was a bright red Michael Jordan baseball jersey.“The way she presented, she did not look like a typical girl,” recalled Leslie Ridge, a friend who attended high school with Lightner in the 1990s. “And because of that, she was made fun of constantly, especially by boys. It was brutal to see how painful that was for her.”The bullying taunts and sense of unease ignited a terrible internal storm. “I began to think of myself as a freak,” recalls Lightner. “The feeling was that I don’t belong here. I don’t belong in any space.”Sports became a refuge.An excellent softball, basketball and soccer athlete, Lightner found that on fields and courts he could be judged solely based on performance.“Sports kept me alive.”Lightner helping with warm-up practices.After rowing crew at the University of Washington, Lightner moved to Portland after graduation in the early 2000s. There he coached soccer for kids between 8 and 14 on a team that initially looked much the same as the white, affluent ones on which Lightner had grown up playing.After changing his name to Kaig, Lightner approached a fellow soccer coach he regarded as a trustworthy friend and explained that this was a first step toward becoming a man.The reaction was laughter.“It didn’t take me long to realize that coaching as an out trans person at that time, in the years around 2005, ’06, ’07, was just not going to work,” Lightner said. “I was not going to be safe.”“It didn’t take me long to realize that coaching as an out trans person at that time, in the years around 2005, ’06, ’07, was just not going to work,” Lightner said. Mason Trinca for The New York TimesLightner left coaching for a while. He flew to Baltimore for breast removal surgery and began weekly sessions of hormone replacement therapy. His voice deepened. New layers of muscle wrapped around his shoulders. His jaw grew square, and his face sprouted the beginnings of a beard.Eventually, he took a job as an instructor for after-school programs in the working-class outskirts of Portland, home to the city’s population of immigrants from Africa, Mexico, Central and South America, and Asia.Lightner quickly saw that the abundant sports opportunities in the city’s wealthier communities barely existed for the kids he was now working with. He had always felt like an outsider and now saw that the players he coached — the children of working-class immigrants in one of America’s whitest cities — thought of themselves in much the same way. Considering how he could best help, Lightner focused on what had kept him going through all those years of adolescent anguish.“Soccer had been my main way of finding healing and connection, and I wanted that for these kids, too,” he said.Lightner offering Bella Martinez, 7, a tip on a defensive play.Lightner giving P.C.F.C. players a ride to a game.After a year of cobbling together seed money, Lightner formed the Portland Community Football Club in 2013 with grant funding and donated equipment from Nike. The club was a rarity because everybody had a place. Nobody got cut. Lightner emphasized developing skilled players more than turning out stars. Families paid $50 to join, but less than that was OK. Not paying a dime was fine, too.At his first practice, held in a worn corner of a public park, 50 kids showed up. Soon it was 75. Then 100. The club played during the winter, spring, summer and fall.“Coach Kaig became a constant in our lives,” says Shema Jacques, one of the program’s early stalwarts. Jacques, now a 22-year-old Marine, first picked up the basics of soccer in a Rwandan refugee camp but honed his game at P.C.F.C. “From the start, I could tell he believed in us. He would be there for us for anything we needed. I had never experienced someone being like that before.”Lightner was open about being a transgender man to everyone in his life except the players and families of P.C.F.C., and the dissonance ate at him. So on that rain-swept day in 2017, he gathered every player who had shown up for a chat before practice.“I want you guys to know about me, and I also want you guys to know that I’m still me,” he said. “I’m still the same person I was five minutes before you all knew this, right? I’m still the same guy who comes out here, gets you guys to be better soccer players, gets on you when you’re not playing hard, loves you no matter what.”He saw nothing but acceptance as he looked into his players’ eyes. One of them was Jacques.“Suddenly, hearing that, it all made sense,” Jacques said. “This is why he knows what it is like for so many of us — not being accepted, trying hard to fit in. I actually felt more connected to him as he spoke, and I am not alone. He was still the person I looked up to and wanted to be like.”“Suddenly, hearing that, it all made sense,” said Shema Jacques, one of P.C.F.C.’s early stalwarts. “This is why he knows what it is like for so many of us — not being accepted, trying hard to fit in.”Six years later, the only thing that has changed about P.C.F.C. is its growth. There are more coaches and a small administrative staff. The roster of registered players has swelled to 165. It is also about more than just soccer now. During the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Lightner received a grant that allowed P.C.F.C. to provide its families with fresh groceries, rental assistance and help tapping into social services.“None of the families abandoned Kaig once he spoke his truth,” says Carolina Morales Hernandez, whose young son and daughter have grown up in the program.“Sometimes people join, and they will call me and say, ‘We heard this and that about Kaig,’” she adds. “I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s true, yep. The head of the P.C.F.C. is a transgender person, but that changes nothing. Everybody is welcome here.’” More