Raphael Stevens

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    The Shadow of an Abuse Scandal Looms Over a World Cup Soccer Team

    Vera Pauw was accused of body-shaming players while coaching in the National Women’s Soccer League. Sinead Farrelly helped expose abuse in that league. The two are now working together on Team Ireland.AUSTIN, Texas — As Ireland prepares for its first Women’s World Cup, its coach and a newly included midfielder find themselves on opposite sides of an abuse scandal that has roiled soccer in the United States. But their separate conflicts have fused into a tentative and pragmatic alliance.Vera Pauw, 60, Ireland’s national coach and a former coach of the Houston Dash of the National Women’s Soccer League, was accused late last year of body-shaming players and of being a “power freak” who sought to control their lives when she coached the Dash in 2018. At a news conference in Austin on Friday, Pauw labeled the accusations, contained in a blistering report organized by the league and its players’ union, “absolutely ridiculous and false.”Sinead Farrelly, 33, a native of suburban Philadelphia who has dual citizenship with Ireland, was a brave and vital whistle-blower who helped lift the league’s veil of indifference toward coaching misconduct. Farrelly and other players made accusations of sexual, verbal and emotional abuse that led to four N.W.S.L. coaches’ being barred permanently from the league early this year.Pauw was not accused of sexual impropriety, did not coach Farrelly in the league and was not among those barred for life. To return to the N.W.S.L., however, she has been told that she must accept responsibility for her actions. That restriction does not apply to international soccer.For the next few months at least, Pauw, who is Dutch, and Farrelly, who ended her seven-year absence from soccer last month in returning to the N.W.S.L. and made her debut for Ireland on Saturday, are expected to collaborate as Ireland approaches the World Cup this summer in Australia and New Zealand.The United States, a four-time world champion, and Ireland will play a second tuneup match on Tuesday in St. Louis. In a 2-0 defeat to the Americans on Saturday in Austin, Farrelly sought to bring a calming presence while starting in Ireland’s midfield after only two training sessions. Pauw said that she had spoken to Farrelly before she joined the Irish team and had tried to make her feel comfortable. They share a desire to perform on soccer’s grandest stage but also a horrible commonality. Last year, Pauw said that she had been raped by a Dutch soccer official when she was a player and that she had also been sexually assaulted by two other men.For 35 years, she kept the abuse private, Pauw said in a statement last July, allowing the memories “to control my life, to fill me with daily pain and anguish.”In a broad sense, the Pauw-Farrelly union can be viewed as a dispiriting sign of how widespread accusations of impropriety are in women’s soccer.On a personal level, Pauw is trying to restore her reputation, which she believes was unfairly tarnished. And Farrelly is attempting to restart a career, once blooming with promise but prematurely shriveled by what she has described as sexual coercion, emotional manipulation and the shattering of her self-confidence by a former coach, Paul Riley.In September 2021, Farrelly told The Athletic that Riley, one of the top coaches in women’s soccer, had coerced her into a yearslong sexual relationship and once manipulated her into kissing a teammate with the Portland Thorns in front of him in exchange for a less strenuous team practice. The teammate, Mana Shim, confirmed Farrelly’s account and made other similar allegations of misconduct against Riley. He has denied having sex with any players.The revelations pulled back the curtain on systemic abuse in women’s soccer and led to wide-ranging fallout across the N.W.S.L. An investigation headed by Sally Q. Yates, a former deputy U.S. attorney general, described Riley’s misbehavior over the years as an “open secret.”Farrelly said on Saturday that her comeback would not have been possible without the catharsis of telling her story publicly. “That healing and liberation from that had to occur before I could ever play again,” she said.She has described her return to soccer as one day at a time. Farrelly said she has been asking well-wishers, “Will you still love me if I totally mess this up?”“Because that’s my biggest fear,” she told a small group of reporters. “I don’t want to go out there and fail and make mistakes. That’s just how my brain works.”Instead, she said, she was “really trying to take people’s support and not twist it into pressure.” She wants to be grateful for the experience of attempting to make a World Cup team. “I play my best when I’m having fun. I just need to bring it back to that every time.”Farrelly playing against the United States on Saturday.Dustin Safranek/USA Today Sports Via Reuters ConFarrelly announced her retirement in 2016, the result of injuries both psychic and physical, including those sustained in a 2015 car accident. But she returned to the N.W.S.L last month and signed with Gotham F.C., saying in a statement that she wanted to be a dependable player while “also having grace and compassion with myself” and hoped to “inspire others to follow their dreams, no matter how far out of reach they may seem.”Pauw’s return to the N.W.S.L. remains uncertain. Last December, in the report organized by the league and its players’ union, Pauw was accused of shaming Houston players in 2018 about their weight and attempting to “exert excessive control over their eating habits,” including discouraging the eating of fruit because of its sugar content, “with no apparent correlation to performance or health.”She was also accused of exerting control over players’ personal lives while living in the same apartment complex. The accusations included knocking on a player’s door at night and inviting herself inside; favoring some players by inviting them over for coffee and biscuits; restricting players from using the pool during the afternoon; and discouraging them from lifting weights in the belief that it would make them too “bulky.”Pauw vigorously defended herself at Friday’s news conference.“If there’s one thing that I don’t do, it is body shaming,” she said. “There is no scale in my dressing room, there’s no fat percentages taken.”“What is the standard?” Pauw said plaintively. “Can you not educate players in getting the best out of themselves with something that is technically just coaching?”No one would have complained if she were a male coach, Pauw said.“As a female coach, you’re not safe in your coaching,” she said. “You’re not safe to do your job. There’s double standards here.”The World Cup begins in three months. Farrelly and Pauw are looking ahead, seeking repair and renewal.Pauw said that Farrelly “trusts me; she trusts the truth.”Farrelly appears more wary. She said she was cautious about playing for a coach accused of abuse, even if it was not sexual wrongdoing.“I think it’s just going to be time for us to build trust and stuff like that,” Farrelly said. She took a risk, a leap of faith, she said, hoping the Irish national team would be a healthy environment for her. “It’s an ongoing thing, I think.” More

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    Benfica, Enzo Fernández and a Champions League Question: What If?

    The Portuguese giant knew selling Enzo Fernández would make it harder to win Europe’s richest prize. But cashing out early is a story the club knows well.On the night Enzo Fernández left Benfica, nobody mentioned his name. As they gathered in the changing room before their game on the last day of January, his soon-to-be-former teammates would have known roughly what was happening. The club was settling the finer points of Fernández’s $130 million transfer to Chelsea. The player was awaiting permission to fly to London.The silence, though, was not rooted in discomfort. Fernández’s absence did not weigh especially heavy on Benfica’s squad. They were not fretting about how they would cope without him, or lamenting the loss of a core part of their team and a starlet regarded as one of the finest midfield prospects of his generation.Their coach, Roger Schmidt, did not feel the need to take his players aside to discuss it with them, or to address it in his pregame talk. The 56-year-old Schmidt has always hewed to the legendary German coach Sepp Herberger’s rather gnomic adage: Der ball ist rund.Schmidt does not worry about what might lurk behind a silver lining. A crisis is just an opportunity in disguise. One player goes, another takes their place. The ball keeps rolling.Benfica’s players, of course, are used to it by now. No club has mastered the buy low, sell high dynamics of soccer’s transfer market quite like Benfica. Increasingly, in recent years, it has been held up as a paradigm of how a club outside the opulent halls of the game’s cash-soaked elite ought to be run.Across the Tagus River from Lisbon at Seixal, the club has built an academy that is the envy of Europe. On the sprawling, modern campus, Benfica has tapped an apparently bottomless seam of prodigies: Renato Sanches, Bernardo Silva, João Cancelo, Rúben Dias and João Félix all trace their rise to their early days at this cradle of greatness.And what the club cannot grow, it has shown a remarkable aptitude for obtaining. Benfica has established itself as a first port of call in Europe for players emerging from South America, in particular, serving as a showroom and a springboard for the likes of Ángel Di María, David Luiz, Éderson, Darwin Núñez and, of course, Fernández himself.Each has been plucked from comparative obscurity at competitive prices and later sent on their way to superstardom for a king’s ransom. Since the turn of the century, Benfica has made somewhere in the region of $1.5 billion from player sales. Since 2019 alone, the year it sold not just Félix but also the Mexican striker Raúl Jiménez and the Serbian forward Luka Jovic, it has brought in $575 million.That is a source of considerable pride inside the club. As a sports team, Benfica cherishes each of those alumni, especially those who started out at Seixal, basking just a little in their reflected glory. As a business, the club has set its target on ranking as “the first club in terms of total revenue outside of the big five leagues,” Benfica’s chief executive, Domingos Soares de Oliveira, said.Carl Recine/ReutersPeter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockFormer Benfica players in the Champions League this season include Manchester City goalkeeper Ederson, top left, Liverpool striker Darwin Núñez, above right, and Chelsea’s Enzo Fernández and João Félix.Hannah Mckay/ReutersAll of its achievements, though, are tinged with just a little regret.“Of course we do not like to do it,” Soares de Oliveira said. “The main purpose of a club is to win. Everything we do is to win, to meet the expectations of our members. If we had kept Dias, Cancelo, Félix, Enzo — we could have an ambition to win anything on an international level.”It is not that Benfica has not won, either, even as it has transformed itself into European soccer’s most prolific and most profitable trading post. The last decade alone has brought five more Portuguese titles — more than F.C. Porto and Sporting Lisbon, the club’s two greatest domestic rivals — and it has long been a fixture of the group stages of the Champions League. More recently, it has started to make inroads into the knockout phase.It is just that, if the economics of the game were less brutal, Benfica might have won so much more. This season provides a case in point. With Barcelona, Liverpool and Paris St.-Germain eliminated, there is a freshness to the Champions League for the first time in years.Benfica, once again, has made the quarterfinals. This time, though, it can see a comparatively clear path to glory. It faces Inter Milan over the next two weeks. Survive that and another Italian side — Napoli or A.C. Milan — will be all that separates Benfica from an eighth European Cup final, its first since 1990.That prospect would seem significantly closer if Schmidt was still able to call upon Fernández, a player plucked from the Argentine club River Plate for an initial $12 million last summer. Fernández had only made 29 appearances for the Portuguese team when he left for the World Cup in November. He came back from Qatar as one of the most coveted players on the planet.Benfica said it had little choice but to let Fernández walk away after his star turn at the World Cup sent his price soaring past $100 million.Bernadett Szabo/ReutersBenfica did not want to sell him in January. It did not “need” to sell him, either, according to Soares de Oliveira. The money from the sale of Nuñez to Liverpool last summer had bought Benfica some time. “I told Chelsea that,” he said. The club had hoped to hold on to Fernández for another six months, at least.At that point, though, the “will of the player is relevant,” Soares de Oliveira said. And Fernández wanted the move.“The Premier League generates so much money,” he said. “The salaries are several times higher. It makes it very difficult to retain a player.” Benfica, he said, has no interest in keeping hold of those who no longer wish to represent the club.The scale of the deal provided something of a solace, of course. Though Benfica had to pay a considerable fee to River Plate, thanks to a sell-on clause inserted into Fernández’s original contract, it still made something in the region of $70 million in profit in the Chelsea deal. It is yet another feather in the club’s cap. But that is not, really, the metric by which Benfica wants to be judged.“It is not about trading players or profit,” Soares de Oliveira said. “We would prefer to have the player six months later than have to sell him. But we cannot say no.”All it can do, instead, is chart a steady course through the churn. Schmidt has tried to be as phlegmatic as he can about the whole thing. He encouraged some players to use Fernández’s departure as a launchpad: The deal came too late in January for Benfica to source a replacement, so someone had to step up and take his place.So far, that honor has fallen to Chiquinho, a 27-year-old who has spent the last year or so out on loan. He was part of the team that helped Benfica navigate smoothly past Club Bruges in the round of 16 of the Champions League. He will, most likely, be present as it attempts to pick its way past Inter, and into the semifinals, to the foothills of the improbable.That is how it has to be, at Benfica. The ball keeps rolling. The club is used to players leaving. It tries not to let departures sidetrack them from all that it wants to achieve. But occasionally, Benfica wonders, too, if it might be a little better if it did not have to be this way.Tariq Panja contributed reporting from London. More

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    Notts County Rewrites the ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ Story

    Notts County is having one of the most remarkable seasons in its long history. It might even win the league. But you don’t get to star in someone else’s drama.NOTTINGHAM, England — The irony of it all, really, is that Notts County would make a terrific subject for a documentary.The elevator pitch is simple. After more than a decade of financial strife and rolling existential crises — featuring both a convicted fraudster and fictional Gulf investment — the oldest professional soccer club in the world puts together a record-shattering campaign, one that promises to restore the team to something close to its former glory.The casting is rich and compelling. There is a fallen Premier League prodigy searching for a home, a virtuoso Portuguese playmaker who has never seen an opponent he cannot nutmeg, and a 26-year-old striker experiencing such an absurd hot streak that he was, at one point, being compared to Erling Haaland. Tasked with shaping them into a team is a manager whose adventurous, accomplished approach is still just a little unorthodox in the mud-spattered lower reaches of English professional soccer. But the results are spectacular.In a division that is competitive to the point of arbitrary, the team loses only twice all season. It has scored more than 100 goals, and it’s on course to break the league’s points record with four games left. It might yet win the title. Plenty of shows have been commissioned on less.That is the story of Notts County’s season, but that does not mean it is the story that will be told. Millions of viewers will, in all likelihood, come to think of the club as an antagonist: an obstacle to be overcome, a threat to be parried, a challenge to be met. And that means one of the most remarkable campaigns in Notts County’s long and occasionally illustrious history will be relegated to a supporting role in someone else’s story.Notts County will enter Monday’s game tied with Wrexham on points. But only one of them can win the league.Mary Turner for The New York TimesTwo Teams, One NarrativeA few weeks ago, the producers of “Welcome to Wrexham” — the FX documentary following the takeover and attempted revival of the Welsh town’s forlorn soccer team by the actors and entrepreneurs Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney — made contact with executives at Notts County. Out of courtesy, they said, they wanted to establish how much the club wanted to feature in the show’s second season.It is hard to see how Notts County will not play a prominent role. For months, it and Wrexham have been locked in a breathless race to escape the National League, the fifth tier of English soccer. There is only one automatic promotion slot available — bringing with it a guaranteed return to the ranks of the Football League — and neither side has blinked in its pursuit of it.The pace has been eye-watering. Both are expected to end the season with more points than the division has ever seen. Their nearest rival is 25 points adrift. Each has fed off the other’s refusal to wilt. “We’ve been pushing each other,” said Connell Rawlinson, the Notts County captain. (He was born in Wrexham, and still lives close by: add that to the list of subplots.) “If Wrexham didn’t have us and we didn’t have them, would either of us be as good as we are?”Strictly speaking, Wrexham has long had the edge. Its squad is deeper, and more expensive. It has an extra game to play, as well as the home-field advantage when it meets Notts County on Monday evening, a match with the air of a ready-made season finale.In public, Notts County’s manager, Luke Williams, has done what he can to prepare the club — the fans, the executives, his players — for disappointment. “It’s not that we’re not clear,” he said after watching his side pick apart yet another opponent in late March. “It’s that we’re not even close. We need a two-loss swing.” One of those defeats duly arrived on Friday — Wrexham lost at Halifax — but it still held that crucial game in hand.In private, Williams acknowledges that the prospect of being forced to go through the National League’s somewhat arcane and distinctly treacherous playoff system in search of a second chance at promotion “haunts” him. “I haven’t slept since Christmas,” he said.Mary Turner for The New York TimesNotts County, founded in 1862, is the oldest professional soccer club in the world. Mary Turner for The New York TimesThe players have reacted slightly differently. “I’d rather be part of doing something like this, having that pressure and that stress, than sitting in mid-table with nothing to compete for,” Rawlinson said. “I’m sure the Wrexham team and the fans are enjoying it, too.” He paused, at that point, and thought about the truth of that statement. “Well, maybe not the fans, so much.”That graciousness is fairly typical of relations between the clubs. Given the intensity of their title race — and the stakes involved — it might be expected for a sporting rivalry to metastasize into an outright hostility, particularly given the advantages at Wrexham’s disposal.It is the Welsh club, after all, that can call on TikTok and Expedia as sponsors, and McElhenney, Reynolds and his wife, Blake Lively, as regular guests. Notts County’s stardust extends no further than the singer Jake Bugg, born in Nottingham, who sponsors the club’s away jerseys.That financial primacy has a real-world impact. When Wrexham was short of a goalkeeper, it coaxed Ben Foster, a former England international, out of retirement. Notts County had to recall a 19-year-old from a loan at a club two divisions below.For the most part, though, there is no sense of outrage or oppression. Instead, Rawlinson, said, there is a recognition that both teams are “steeped in history, and that neither club should be where they are.”“The publicity Wrexham has brought has been great for the division as a whole,” he said. “There are a lot of eyes on these games now.”There will be far more, though, who encounter them not as contemporaneous sporting events but as something else: a small part of a broader narrative, one that is packaged and polished and consumed on a delay of several months, once the conclusion is known.“I was coming out of a game a few weeks ago, when we’d just got to 97 points,” said Tom Wagstaff, a founder of the Notts County Talk YouTube channel. “As annoying as it is that we’re not clear at the top, it is incredible to be involved in something like this. I genuinely think it’s the best title race the league has ever seen. But I don’t know if that is how it will be perceived.”“The publicity Wrexham has brought has been great for the division as a whole,” Notts County’s captain said. “There are a lot of eyes on these games now.”Mary Turner for The New York TimesEnd GameThe framing, after all, is not in Notts County’s hands. The act of making television, after all, involves not simply telling a story but choosing which aspects of that story should be accentuated. Documentaries necessarily have a perspective. And that perspective changes the way a story is not only told, but understood.Nobody in Nottingham is particularly worried that “Welcome to Wrexham” will cast Notts County as the bad guys, the villains of the story of this season. Nobody at the club seems especially offended at the idea that the show might present the team backed by Hollywood money as in some way “plucky.”But they know that, however the season ends, far more people will watch the documentary than follow the National League in real time. For those viewers, Notts County’s story will not be a stand-alone achievement, a thing that happened in its own right and with its own meaning, but rather something that exists solely as it pertains to its effect on Wrexham. Its meaning will be contorted and confused and to some extent lost. It will not be consumed as sport at all, not really. It will just be part of the plot.In that, perhaps, there is a solace. “Really, we’ve done them a favor,” said George Vizard, Wagstaff’s co-presenter on YouTube. “If it wasn’t for us, they’d have won it weeks ago. And for the show, it must be better to win it like this than it would be if they had won it at a canter.” The story will, in the end, be about Wrexham. But it will be thanks to Notts County that there is now a much better story to tell. More

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    U.S. Women Win a World Cup Soccer Tuneup but Lose a Top Scorer

    Mallory Swanson was carted off with a knee injury during a 2-0 victory over Ireland. She is considered key to the United States’ hopes of winning a third consecutive World Cup championship.AUSTIN, Texas — The United States defeated Ireland 2-0 on Saturday in a tuneup for the Women’s World Cup but lost its top scorer this year when forward Mallory Swanson went down with what appeared to be a serious injury to her left knee late in the first half.In the 40th minute, Swanson, 24, took a pass on the left wing, turned upfield and was challenged by the Irish defender Aoife Mannion. No foul was called, but Swanson fell, crying in pain and grabbing the back of her left knee. Several teammates consoled her.She was placed on a stretcher with her knee immobilized and made a heart sign with her hands while being carted off the field. She was taken to a hospital, according to a spokesman for the U.S. Soccer Federation.If Swanson does not recover in time for the World Cup tournament, which is slated to be played in Australia and New Zealand from July 20 to Aug. 20, it could deal a heavy blow to the United States’ hopes of winning a third consecutive world championship.“We don’t know the extent of the injury yet,” Coach Vlatko Andonovski said after the match. “I’m hoping for good news in the near future.”As Swanson left the stadium, Andonovski said she told him with a smile, “Coach, I’ll be good. I promise I’ll be good.”Andonovski said he replied, “You’re stronger than me.”In the 24th minute, Mannion had nudged Swanson into Ireland’s goalkeeper, and Swanson remained down for several minutes before resuming play. But this time, she did not get up and was replaced by Trinity Rodman.Swanson had already scored seven goals in five games this calendar year, and in six consecutive games overall. She had been ascendant after being left off the United States team for the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, an omission she called crushing. She acknowledged that she fell adrift for a time.The Americans historically have been resourceful in replacing injured players. The star forward Abby Wambach broke the tibia and fibula in her left leg before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but the United States won the gold medal without her.The first goal of Saturday’s match was scored in the 37th minute by defender Emily Fox, who drove a low shot inside the left post from outside the penalty area. It was her first goal in 28 appearances for the national team. In the 80th minute, midfielder Lindsey Horan extended the United States’ lead to 2-0 on a penalty kick.Julie Ertz of the United States, left, returned to the field on Saturday after giving birth to a son last August. Eric Gay/Associated PressIn the 68th minute, midfielder Julie Ertz entered the match, making her first appearance for the United States since the Tokyo Olympics after giving birth to a son last August. Four minutes later, she drew a yellow card. If Ertz regains full fitness, she would provide much needed grit in the defensive midfield.The United States and Ireland will play again on Tuesday in St. Louis, the last American match before its 23-player World Cup roster is announced. The United States will face Vietnam, the Netherlands and Portugal in group play in the tournament. More

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    Lionel Messi, Barcelona and Limited Options

    The chase for a transcendent star in the twilight of his career requires a new term: GOATwashing.The choices facing Lionel Messi are these. He can sign on for another year, maybe two, locked in what seems to be a loveless but lucrative marriage of convenience with Paris St.-Germain. The downside is that he must endure the occasional indignity of hearing his name whistled and jeered and taken in vain. The upside is the chance to continue to play in — but if we are honest, not win — the Champions League.Option two: He could take the easy route, the smooth and seamless path that leads straight to the golden sunset. Al Hilal would very much like to pay him an eye-watering sum of money to turn the Saudi Premier League, in effect, into his and Cristiano Ronaldo’s very own Las Vegas residency. Cons: He would have to bid farewell to the (European) Champions League. Pros: $400 million a year.A third path, to Major League Soccer — and more specifically, Inter Miami — can provide all of the same drawbacks and none of the same benefits. He would not earn nearly so much. He would still be absent from the club tournament he cherishes the most. He would have to be coached by Phil Neville. The pull of Miami, the lure of the United States and the prospect of the 2026 World Cup are appealing, but they may not be appealing enough.All of which, of course, leaves the road down which Messi’s heart would surely guide him. He never really wanted to leave Barcelona. He certainly did not want to leave the way he did, rushed out of the door by stark economic reality. Messi had spent his career deciding his own fate, only to have the nature of the end of it decided for him.Lionel Messi in 2021, on the day he left Barcelona.Andreu Dalmau/EPA, via ShutterstockThe sense of unfinished business is mutual. “I have a thorn in my side that Leo could not stay at our club,” Rafa Yuste, Barcelona’s vice president, said last week. He wished, he said, that “all of the conditions could come together so that this mutual love story ends with Messi at Barça. When you are in love and you separate from someone, you always want to stay in love.”As overblown as that might sound, it would be churlish to dispute Yuste’s sincerity. Barcelona almost certainly sees some sort of sporting logic in bringing back Messi, of course. Correctly or not, the club genuinely believes that success is more likely with him than without: both directly, as a result of his performances, and indirectly, thanks to the boost to the brand that his presence would provide.But that does not mean the romantic impulse is not genuine. Barcelona has come to see Messi as a Platonic ideal of its principles, the ones he was reared in from his days as a shy, homesick teenager at La Masia. Through its own colossal mismanagement, the club to which he devoted his career was not able to give Messi the goodbye it wanted or he deserved. It feels a duty to right the wrong.It would be naïve, though, to believe that is the only motivation. Barcelona’s apparent fixation on the return of its king is powered by a swirl of emotions. Affection might be one of them, but so too is nostalgia, in its purest sense, an attachment not to who Messi is but to what he represents.Everything about the modern Barcelona screams that it has become a place obsessed by and addicted to reclaiming a past that still feels achingly real, overwhelmingly present. It is a club that could convincingly claim to be the biggest in the world barely a moment ago, the home of the finest side in history, and it is a club that continues to rage against its loss of status.So much of what Barcelona has done in recent years has been inspired by a refusal to acknowledge the ticking of the clock, the changing of the seasons. The pursuit of the European Super League, the appointment of Xavi Hernández as manager, the mortgaging of its own future for immediate glory: This is the desperate, thrashing reflex of a club that assumed its primacy was the natural order of things, and does not understand why the world has been allowed to change. Restoring Messi to azulgrana would offer the opioid comfort of a step back in time.Barcelona’s image of itself as a great club never wavers.Nacho Doce/ReutersAnd then, rather more tangibly, there is political necessity, the projection of power. Barcelona is not owned by an individual; it is a members’ organization, one that functions, at least in theory, as a democracy. Joan Laporta, the club’s current president, will soon enough have to seek another mandate from the team’s 143,000 socios.Currently, he would have to stand for re-election as the president who lost Messi. He would much prefer, one would think, to be able to claim to be the man who returned him to where he belonged.After all, possessing Messi is more than having arguably the greatest player of all time in your ranks. His move to P.S.G., two years ago, proved that he is as much symbol as star. Messi represents relevance and importance, glamour and appeal. He would be a sign that the lean days had come to an end, of Barcelona’s resurgent virility.Most urgent of all, though, is the reputational benefit, not to Laporta as a president but to Barcelona as a club. Once as pristine a sporting brand as could be imagined, the sort of team that considered its jerseys so sacrosanct that it refused to despoil them with a sponsor, Barcelona has been wracked by scandal for years.The Super League was — and is, given its ongoing refusal to abandon the project — a bad look. The allegations that the club’s former administration hired a public relations company to boost its own reputation and to tarnish a number of players, executives and critics were not much better.Neither, though, was nearly as damaging as the charge, currently under investigation by both the Spanish judicial authorities and UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, that the club paid a former vice president of Spain’s refereeing committee some $7.6 million over the course of 17 years.Rival fans now regularly shower Barcelona with fake money bearing the image of the club’s president, Joan Laporta.Manu Fernandez/Associated PressBarcelona, of course, has insisted it has done nothing wrong: The club has suggested the stipend it is accused of paying the official, José María Enriquez Negreira, between 2001 and 2018 was for perfectly ordinary “technical reports into refereeing.” It is, the club has intimated, the sort of thing everybody does. There is, we have been told, nothing to see here.That line has not been universally accepted. Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, has described the allegations as the “worst reputational crisis” Spanish soccer has ever seen. (Barcelona responded by calling on Tebas to resign.) Aleksander Ceferin, the president of UEFA, has called it “one of the most serious situations” he has seen in soccer. Regardless of any potential sporting penalty, the reputational blowback — should Barcelona’s staunch defense not hold — would be indelible.It is hard to believe that it is a coincidence that Barcelona’s pursuit of Messi has become extremely public in that context. It is not just nation states, after all, that are in the business of using the game’s brightest stars to rehabilitate their reputations, to draw the eyes of the audience, to cast the unpalatable and the unpleasant firmly in deep shadow. Mere soccer teams can do it, too.Barcelona’s love for Messi is deep and it is sincere. But its need for him — as a symbol of power, as a reminder of what it once was, as a source of quick and easy dopamine, as a way of drawing the eye away from what it would rather you did not see — is greater still.He has four choices in front of him. They are, at heart, all the same. Barcelona wants to use him to clean its image just as surely as P.S.G. wants to use him to prove its primacy and Al Hilal wants to use him to burnish a nation’s reputation and Inter Miami wants to use him to grow a league. There is no romance at the heart of any them, none at all. It is business, just business, and nothing more.Cold, Brutal and Entirely IrresistibleAntonio Conte talked himself out of a job at Tottenham.Paul Childs/Action Images, via ReutersGary O’Neil’s career as a Premier League manager began, unexpectedly, late last August. His predecessor at Bournemouth, Scott Parker, had talked himself out of a job a few days earlier, using the occasion of a 9-0 defeat at Liverpool to explain, in great detail, exactly how little chance the club had of avoiding relegation.O’Neil was supposed to be what is now, by convention, called not a caretaker or a place-holder manager but an “interim,” a coach who will be replaced by a safer pair of hands as soon as one could be identified. But he did well, avoiding defeat in his first six games and slowly helping the team acclimatize to the Premier League. Quietly, perhaps a little reluctantly, Bournemouth made his appointment permanent during the World Cup.Gary O’Neil is now the 10th longest-serving manager in the Premier League.There was a point, not so long ago, when it seemed English soccer had finally learned the benefits of patience. Clubs seemed to have internalized the idea that reflexively firing a coach at the first sign of trouble was not ideal from a long-term planning perspective. Just as significant, they were putting more thought into their appointments in the first place.That particular dam broke in the last two weeks of March. Crystal Palace firing Patrick Vieira, on the back of almost three months without a win, proved the decisive fissure. Between then and now, three more managers have gone. Leicester, now at grave risk of relegation, fired Brendan Rodgers. Antonio Conte committed dismissal-by-press-conference to get himself out of Tottenham. And, of course, Graham Potter met his inevitable, if accelerated, demise at Chelsea.None of those decisions were especially flagrant examples of the caprice of Premier League owners, of course, but the failures of both Conte and Potter probably say more about the people who appointed them than they do about the coaches themselves.Conte was handed a squad in need of a rebuild and tasked with winning immediately. Potter was placed in charge of a squad so large that the changing room at the training ground reportedly could not accommodate it — several players had to change on chairs brought in from elsewhere — and told to fashion a cogent team in only a few months.The ability to choose the right job, of course, is an invaluable part of the armory of any elite coach; Potter, still in the early stages of his career, will doubtless heed that lesson when he selects his next opportunity. But his failure at Chelsea, like that of Conte at Tottenham, is not solely his fault. He should not be allowed to become a scapegoat for those who made it impossible for him to succeed in the first place.After all, they are still in place. They are in charge, in fact, of choosing a replacement, with precious little evidence so far that they should be trusted to make the right selection.It’s HomeAndy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockEngland got a boost of confidence in its biggest game before this year’s World Cup by beating Brazil, 4-2 on penalties after a 1-1 tie, on Thursday in a meeting of the European and South American champions at Wembley. The victory, like England’s triumph in last year’s European Championship final in the same stadium, was delivered off the foot of Chloe Kelly.CorrespondenceA lingering sense of guilt has been gnawing at me for the best part of a week. On Sunday, you see, I arrived in Naples, eagerly anticipating seeing Napoli — you will have noted my enthusiasm for Napoli over the past few months — take another step toward a first Serie A title in more than 30 years by coolly dispatching A.C. Milan on home turf.It did not quite work out like that. Milan picked Napoli apart, strolling to a 4-0 win against a team that, for the first time this season, looked bereft of both purpose and poise. And, on some level, it felt as if it were my fault. This is a superstitious place, after all. Maybe I had tempted fate. Maybe I had invoked hubris.At times like these, it is important to remember that correlation is not causation. Which brings us, rather neatly, to Deborah Chuk’s email. Last week’s analysis of Liverpool’s assorted problems, she felt, missed out arguably the most significant. “Why does nobody mention the sale of Sadio Mané?” she wrote. “This was the glue that held the team together. They needed him badly.”This argument — that the star of the show was Mané, not Mohamed Salah, all along — is not an uncommon one, nor is it unreasonable. Mané was, for years, a stellar performer for Liverpool. He did not, at times, get the credit he deserved. His departure and Liverpool’s demise do, without question, overlap perfectly.And yet I’m not convinced. Mané’s form in his last couple of years in England had been patchy: spells in which he was as devastating as ever, and stretches in which he seemed a little faded. It felt like the right time to move him on. More relevant, I suspect, is that none of the players signed to replace him have had anything like his impact.James Spink, too, wanted to discuss something of a leitmotif. “Chelsea’s women’s side is coached by a remarkably gifted manager who knows the game, is articulate and honest and a great ‘man manager.’ Wouldn’t it be interesting if an owner had the guts to hire Emma Hayes to shatter that glass ceiling?”This one has a short answer: yes. It would, in fact, not just be interesting but wholly warranted. It won’t happen, though. Not when there are candidates with the glowing résumés of … Frank Lampard who can be hired instead. More

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    Gerard Piqué’s Kings League Has Seen Soccer’s Future

    Gerard Piqué has always been an ideas guy. He has, at various times, had ideas about industries as disconnected as isotonic sports drinks and international tennis tournaments. He has invested in the sunglasses business and the cellphone video game industry. He has dabbled in media rights and soccer team ownership and organic burgers.For a long time, Piqué did all of that while also being one of the standout soccer players of his generation, a cornerstone on a series of Barcelona squads that harvested glory in industrial quantities and a key component on a Spanish national team that won a World Cup and a European Championship. Excelling at soccer, though, was never enough.“One of the first things he said to me was that he had finished training by 12,” said Nicolas Julia, the founder of the digital sports platform Sorare. “Some of his teammates liked to play video games. Some were happy hanging out with their families. He loved to go to the office and build something.”He was driven to do so, those who have worked with him say, because he knew that soccer would not last forever. “I think he saw a lot of his teammates retire and have nothing to do,” said Javier Alonso, a former colleague. “They were only 35 but had no real life except eating in nice restaurants and playing padel. He did not want that.”Piqué played his last game for Barcelona in November.Albert Gea/ReutersPiqué was well suited to his side hustle. He is not, by all accounts, much given to sleep. He is a natural networker, a frequent and instinctive schmoozer. His decade-long relationship with the pop singer Shakira gave him a profile outside sports. He has a mind one associate described with the Spanish word “inquieto”: restless, curious, perhaps just a touch easily distracted. He is far more flexible than might be expected of someone so famous, Alonso said, adding, “He is happy to listen to experts.”Indeed, Piqué found his side career so rewarding that late last year he decided to bring it front and center. A couple of weeks before the start of the World Cup, he declared Barcelona’s next game would be his last. Business had “never been an afterthought for him,” Julia said. Now, he wanted to go all in.Rather than fit his work around his training schedule, Piqué now devotes much of his time to Kosmos, the investment vehicle he established in 2018 with the help of capital from Hiroshi Mikitani, the founder of the Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, a former Barcelona shirt sponsor.He had used it to invest in areas “he understands the most,” as Julia put it, usually at the intersection of sports and technology. There was a production arm, focused largely on sports documentaries, and an athlete management wing. He had set up an e-sports team and taken over the running of F.C. Andorra, a minor league soccer club in Spain.There have been successes: Sorare has grown exponentially since his investment; F.C. Andorra has been promoted to Spain’s second tier for the first time; and Koi, his e-sports franchise, has become a major player.Piqué, center, and the Kosmos chief executive, Oriol Querol, left, drew up the basics of the Kings League over a single lunch appointment.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesHis two biggest plays, though, have been wreathed in controversy. In 2020, Kosmos helped arrange a deal to stage the Spanish Super Cup in Saudi Arabia. When it emerged that Piqué, then an active player, had reportedly received a $25.9 million commission, both he and the Spanish soccer federation had to insist there was nothing illegal about the arrangement.Then, this year, the International Tennis Federation prematurely ended his most valuable, high-profile project: a $3 billion, 25-year deal with Kosmos, signed in 2018, to turn the Davis Cup into a World Cup-style event. Both sides have subsequently threatened to sue the other.Those setbacks, though, have not discouraged Piqué. As Alonso, a former chief executive of the company, once said of Kosmos: “What we do here is Gerard dreams, and we try to make those dreams a reality.” His latest dream is an ambitious one. Piqué wants to take the game that made him a star, and make it better.Waning AttentionThe future of soccer appeared to Piqué while he was on his way to lunch. Not so much the fine details: the dodgeball-style kickoffs, the secret weapons and the guest stars disguised by lucha libre masks all came later. But by the time he had finished his 15-minute walk from his office in Barcelona to the restaurant, the big picture was clear in his mind.Soccer’s central problem, as Piqué diagnosed it, was this: For an audience raised on a diet of bite-size content and guided by the instant satisfaction algorithms of YouTube and Twitch and TikTok, 90 minutes is actually quite a long time.The traditional soccer game, he decided, contains far too many opportunities for eyes to wander: throw-ins, say, or teams getting their marking schemes right during corners. Younger viewers, Piqué was convinced, would not stand for that. The sport he had always loved would have to adapt.Piqué and his partners reimagined everything from kickoffs to penalty shootouts when they created the Kings League. But they’re open to changing the rules at any time. Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesHow? He and Oriol Querol, the chief executive of Kosmos, spitballed ideas on their lunchtime stroll. Soccer should be shorter, for one. It had to minimize the natural pauses, or find a way to fill them. It had to copy and adopt the rhythms and features of video games and streaming and reality television to meet the viewers in their natural habitat.By the time Piqué and Querol arrived for lunch, they had the outline of an idea. Within a few months, it would have a form: the Kings League, a seven-a-side competition staged in an indoor arena in Barcelona. Its dozen teams are largely made up of former players, and owned and run by some of the country’s most prominent streamers.By the metrics Piqué, Querol and their colleagues care about, it has been an overwhelming success. It accrued some 238 million views on TikTok in January — more, Querol pointed out, than all of Europe’s traditional leagues combined. More than two million people watched some or all of a single round of games at the end of February on Twitch, TikTok and YouTube.Ronaldinho, the former Brazil and Barcelona forward, was one of several high-profile pros who lent their star power to the Kings League.Enric Fontcuberta/EPA, via ShutterstockRonaldinho played for Porcinos, the team owned by the streamer Ibai Llanos. His live commentary only brought more attention to the league.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesIts Final Four-style playoffs, held on March 26, took place in the considerably grander surrounds of Camp Nou, the stadium where Piqué spent 14 years as a cornerstone of an all-conquering Barcelona team. The steep stands were packed with 92,000 ticket-buying fans.That popularity has not been universally welcomed. Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, has been the most prominent, outspoken critic. The Kings League, he has said, is not a serious rival to his competition. It is just a “circus,” he contends, filled with “streamers dressed up like clowns.”Piqué has been unmoved. The traditional “product of soccer is outdated,” he said in response to Tebas. It is in desperate need of “more stimulating rules” to attract and engage a new generation of fans. He knew as he went to lunch that soccer had to change. The Kings League is his attempt to change it.EnigmaAt the turn of the year, a few months after their relationship ended, Shakira released a song that contained a number of extremely thinly veiled critiques of Piqué. The most barbed centered on his apparent infidelity. In one line, the singer accused him of trading “a Ferrari for a Twingo.”A couple of days after the song came out, with his nascent competition still aggravating all the right people, Piqué duly turned up at the league’s headquarters in Barcelona at the wheel of a tiny white Renault Twingo. As he climbed, a little uneasily, out of the car, he grinned at the handful of photographers waiting for him. His smile betrayed a confidence that his joke would land.Players of the 1K Team, which is owned by a former Spain goalkeeper, Iker Casillas.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesThe move was typical of the marketing strategy he adopted for the first season of the Kings League. He was not necessarily above turning his personal life into a promotional tool if it might generate interest: In reference to another line in the same song, suggesting he had swapped a “Rolex for a Casio,” he would later claim (sarcastically) that the Japanese watchmaker had come on board as a sponsor.He was happy to stoke controversy, too, even if it acted as an open invitation to the league’s critics. In an early round of games, one team featured a mystery player, clad in a mask to hide his identity and registered only as Enigma. The player was, the Kings League let it be known, currently employed by a team in La Liga. (This was not strictly true.) The infamy was worth it for the intrigue.Those confected dramas might seem to bear out Tebas’s assessment of the Kings League as a circus, one that is not so much a pioneering vision of the future as a veterans’ seven-a-side league garlanded by novelties and promoted with gimmicks.Its evident popularity, though, warrants greater reflection. It has, as the sight of the heaving stands of Camp Nou made clear, found an audience. Much of that can be attributed, of course, to the presence not only of Piqué, Sergio Agüero and Iker Casillas, all of whom serve as team presidents, but also the likes of Ibai Llanos, the Spanish streamer, and Gerard Romero, a wildly popular online soccer journalist.“The streamers were the key,” Querol said. “You can make a case that Ibai is the most famous person in Spain now.”The Kings League is as much a media venture as a soccer one; it favors a “total access” approach in which even referee’s conversations are broadcast.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesViewers who have tuned in to see them, though, have at the very least not been deterred by the “more stimulating rules,” drawn from a wide array of sources, that Piqué and his colleagues believe are vital for soccer to continue to flourish.The concept of a player draft comes directly from American sports. Others are more esoteric: Kings League kickoffs, which feature both teams charging en masse for the ball, are drawn from water polo, and it has revived an approach to penalties last seen in Major League Soccer in the 1990s. (It is telling that one feature inherited from old-school soccer is a postseason transfer market: Piqué and Kosmos have identified that nobody is bored of transfer rumors.)“We took some things from e-sports, too,” said Querol, citing not only the decision to stream everything before, during and after games, but also a “total access” approach in which viewers can hear what referees and players are saying.“Then we took things like each team having a secret weapon in each game, something they can use whenever they think it might have the most impact, whether it is a penalty or an extra player, from video games,” Querol added. “But none of it is static. It’s constant reflection. We change whatever we can change.”Kings League matches are designed to hold the attention of viewers accustomed to the constant stimuli of streaming and gaming.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesThat process continued through the season. When Querol and his team noticed that games tended to drift at the end of the first half, they started cutting the number of players on the field at that precise moment. Anything, in other words, to keep the audience on its toes, to ensure that something was happening, to stop the eye from drifting and the thumb from scrolling.“It is sport,” Querol said. “It wouldn’t work if the soccer was not of a high standard. That is really important.” But that is not the only consideration. In his view, as in Piqué’s, soccer cannot just be soccer anymore. “The priority,” he said, “has to be the spectacle.”That, perhaps, is the point that all those critics who dismissed the Kings League have missed. It may well be a circus. But Piqué might respond that there is nothing wrong with being a circus. Circuses are popular. They draw a crowd, they hold the gaze, because nobody is ever quite sure what is coming next.Iker Casillas with a young fan. His investment in Pique’s venture shows promise: More than 92,000 fans showed up for the Kings League final. Samuel Aranda for The New York Times More

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    New Zealand’s Soccer Team to Wear Dark Shorts, Citing Period Concerns

    The women’s soccer team said its players would not wear white shorts at the World Cup this summer, acknowledging the anxiety that some players had expressed about period leaks.For the first time, New Zealand’s women’s soccer team will not have a uniform that includes white shorts, the country’s soccer association announced on Monday, acknowledging concerns that some players have expressed about periods.White shorts have been a persistent concern for athletes who are anxious about period leaks, prompting teams and competitions to review their uniform policies in recent years. The change by New Zealand was made as women’s national soccer teams were preparing for the World Cup, which New Zealand is hosting with Australia this summer.Nike unveiled new team uniforms on Monday for the 13 women’s national teams it partners with, including New Zealand, the United States and England, whose players had asked Nike last year to swap the white shorts from their uniform. The new uniforms for England and most of the other countries Nike partners with do not have white shorts.New Zealand’s women’s national team, the Ford Football Ferns, will instead wear a white shirt with teal shorts as its main uniform and an all-black colorway with a silver fern pattern as its secondary uniform, New Zealand Football said on Monday.The new uniforms will first be used in competition for the team’s exhibition matches against Iceland and Nigeria this month.Hannah Wilkinson, a striker, said in a statement included with the federation’s announcement that the change from white shorts was “fantastic for women with any kind of period anxiety.”“In the end it just helps us focus more on performance and shows a recognition and appreciation of women’s health,” she said.England’s Football Association did not say why it swapped out white shorts for blue ones, but its players had publicly campaigned for a change.Richard Heathcote/Getty ImagesTeams and competitions, responding to a push by athletes, have increasingly recognized that players want more practical uniforms. White shorts can show period leaks and also are frequently see-through when wet.The All England Club, which hosts the Wimbledon tennis tournament, said in November that it would allow women to wear dark undershorts, a departure from its traditional all-white dress code.In March, Ireland’s women’s rugby team said that its players would wear navy shorts instead of white shorts at the Six Nations Championship, a major international competition.In February, the Orlando Pride of the National Women’s Soccer League said that it was switching from white shorts to black ones for its secondary uniforms so players would be “more comfortable and confident” when playing. The team’s main uniform is purple.“We must remove the stigma involved in discussing the health issues impacting women and menstruating nonbinary and trans athletes if we want to maximize performance and increase accessibility to sport,” the team’s general manager, Haley Carter, said in a statement at the time.Ahead of the World Cup, which runs from July 20 to Aug. 20, this push for change seemed to be reflected in the uniforms Nike unveiled on Monday for its partnering national teams: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, England, France, South Korea, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Portugal and the United States.With the exception of Brazil, which retains white shorts for its secondary uniforms, the teams will play in colored shorts. Players on each team also have the option to play in shorts that include a liner designed by Nike to protect against period leaks.The United States women’s team played in all-white uniforms when it won the 2019 World Cup in France. The team has used both dark and white shorts for its home and away uniforms.The team’s two most recent uniforms have had dark shorts for both home and away games because of “Nike’s conscientious efforts,” Aaron Heifetz, a spokesman for the United States women’s national team, said in an email.England’s Football Association did not say why it swapped out white shorts for blue ones, but its players had publicly campaigned for a change.The association said in a statement that it wanted its players “to feel our continued support on this matter” and that their feedback would be taken into consideration.“We have appealed to international tournament organizers to keep this subject in consideration and allow for greater flexibility on kit color combinations,” the association said.During the women’s European Championship last July, the England forward Beth Mead said that the team had asked Nike to change the white shorts.“It is very nice to have an all-white kit,” she said, “but sometimes it’s not practical when it’s the time of the month.” More

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    Chelsea’s Graham Potter Paid Price for Owners’ Spending Spree

    American owners spent billions to buy the Premier League club and then millions more on players. But as Chelsea sinks in the standings, is the worst still ahead?LONDON — Every week, it seemed, Chelsea officials worked their phones to quiet the whispers that Graham Potter was about to be fired. And every week the news media quickly relayed those reassurances to Chelsea’s fans, even as the defeats mounted, the grumbling grew louder and the team’s plunge down the Premier League table showed little sign of slowing.This Chelsea, its new American owners said in their own private briefings to reporters, was going to be different from the one previously controlled by Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch famous for his habit of churning through managers. Now, fans were told, the changes and the investments were for the long term.That was until Sunday. This time, the whispers were true: Potter was out.His exit, after only six months in charge and after the club spent hundreds of millions of dollars on new players for him to coach, was jarring. But it was also just the latest head-spinning announcement from Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali, the two American financiers who have thrust themselves forward as the frontmen for a soccer project that shows little sign of any overarching plan.And the cost just keeps rising.First, Boehly, Eghbali and their American-led consortium paid a record 2.5 billion pounds (roughly $3.1 billion) to acquire Chelsea, a club that lost about $1 million a week during the nearly two decades it was owned by Abramovich, and committed to spending another $2 billion on the team over the next decade. That shook up the soccer industry overnight, changing the valuations teams set for themselves. Within months, the owners of Manchester United and Liverpool had put their clubs on the market.Then came the new players, first in an initial group of acquisitions last summer and then in another big-ticket wave in January. They arrived in London at a cost of more than 600 million pounds (about $750 million), an extreme outlay that had no previous precedent, and which puzzled — and frustrated — even Chelsea’s most free-spending rivals, since it drove up the asking price for talent around the world and simultaneously made it harder for Premier League clubs to offload players they no longer wanted.But players weren’t the only costs. In between the shopping sprees, and within their first 100 days, the new owners had also dispensed with Thomas Tuchel, the German coach they had inherited, and who brought the club the Champions League title just over a year earlier. To replace him, Chelsea lured not only Potter but also half a dozen members of the coaching staff at his former team Brighton. The cost? About $25 million in buyouts, plus long-term contracts for all involved.Todd Boehly became a fixture at Chelsea as the face of its American-led ownership group.David Cliff/Associated PressIt seemed, in the moment, a shrewd (if pricey) bit of business. At Brighton, Potter, 47, had slowly and deliberately turned a provincial club, a relative newcomer to the Premier League, into a team that now has realistic aspirations to regularly finish in the top half of the table.Yet at Chelsea, the environment has appeared to be anything but deliberate. Now, with Potter gone, no one seems to know the plan for a collection of players — team feels too strong a word — cobbled together with what appears to be little coherence.There’s Marc Cucurella, the wing back brought in from Brighton at great expense but deployed, curiously, as a center back on Saturday; and forward Mykhailo Mudryk, whose experience did not seem to match his nine-figure price; and the 21-year-old Argentine midfielder Enzo Fernández. There are so many new faces at Chelsea, in fact, that at times the strategy has appeared to be nothing more than a simplistic desire to gather as much of the world’s best young talent as possible, whatever the cost, and find places for them to play later.Even as Chelsea was firing Potter, for example, multiple news media outlets reported that Chelsea was working to sign a 15-year-old prospect from Ecuador, reports the club did not deny.Maybe Potter knows what to do with all the disparate parts? That would at least explain the curious line in the statement about his firing that noted he had “agreed to collaborate with the club” on the transition to whatever comes after him.Graham Potter, whose service and staff cost Chelsea a small fortune, didn’t last a full season.Tony Obrien/ReutersBruno Saltor, one of the coaches who arrived with Potter from Brighton, will get the unenviable task of holding things together temporarily, starting with Tuesday’s visit by Liverpool. It is unclear how long his tenure will be, though, with Chelsea now starting a search for its third coach since the American takeover in May.News media reports have already linked the club with high-profile out-of-work coaches like Julian Nagelsmann, recently fired by Bayern Munich, and Mauricio Pochettino, an Argentine who coached both Southampton and Tottenham. That Boehly and Eghbali will make the right decision, though, is questionable.Chelsea, despite its deep pockets, looks to be a monumental repair job. It was beaten at home by Aston Villa on Saturday in Potter’s last game in charge, a performance that highlighted the effects of the curious squad-building undertaken in the last months. While it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring forwards, none of that cash was dispensed on a recognized scorer. Saturday’s 2-0 defeat — a game in which Chelsea took more than 30 shots yet rarely looked like it could recover from its early deficit — was the fifth goal-less performance by the club since the start of February.Chelsea stands 11th in the Premier League table. A date with Real Madrid looms in the quarterfinals of the Champions League next week. Winning the competition is now Chelsea’s its only realistic chance of playing in it again next season, but that remote possibility suddenly seems vital.Chelsea’s finances, already in disarray because of the cost of the takeover, the new coaches and the new players, could soon come under more serious strain. Failure to qualify for next season’s Champions League would mean the loss of tens of millions of dollars of revenue. That could put the club in violation of the Premier League’s cost control rules, raising the possibility of sanctions — or hurried player sales in a market that will know the team needs to sell quickly to balance its books.Sunday was a dark day for Chelsea’s owners. What’s ahead could be much, much worse. More