Raphael Stevens

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    The World Cup Has Swapped Suffering for Style

    A common language and a common goal have resulted in a homogenizing of the World Cup’s teams, and a rise in parity.DOHA, Qatar — The key word of this World Cup is not one that FIFA would be especially happy to plaster on its marketing materials. It has become the tournament’s leitmotif, the focus of countless news conferences and interviews. It has been cast as the sport’s ultimate virtue.We have been told, again and again over the past month, that there is one trait more than any other that a player must possess, that a team must display, that determines who gets to win and who has to lose: the ability, as almost everyone involved in the tournament has said, to suffer.It has been used as a warning: Luka Modric, a Croatia midfielder, declared in the round of 16 that his team was “used to suffering, and if we have to suffer, we will.” It has been used as a boast: “We have an excellent technical staff, we know how to suffer,” Croatia’s manager, Zlatko Dalic, said a few days later.Some teams see it as part of their identity — “We are a team that knows how to suffer,” the French defender Jules Koundé said after a semifinal victory — and some see it as an option of last resort. “We know how to suffer when it is necessary,” as Lionel Messi put it after a semifinal victory over Croatia. Very occasionally, a stray voice arises, wondering if it is all such a good idea. “We know how to suffer,” Messi’s Argentina teammate Nicolás Tagliafico said. “But we must try to suffer less.”If the word sounds just a touch discordant in English — this expression, it seems most likely, has entered the sport’s lingua franca from the Spanish verb sufrir and would be better translated as “endure” — it fairly neatly encapsulates the nature of the soccer we have seen over the past month.France ended Morocco’s unlikely run in the semifinals.Kirill Kudryavtsev/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere has been no shortage of tense, compelling games in Qatar. Whether that quite justified the assertion of Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president, that this tournament produced the “best ever” group stage is a little more complex. Tense, compelling games are, after all, the World Cup’s calling card: Its rarity and its unforgiving format mean that this is essentially what it is designed to produce.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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    Keeping the National in National Team Coach

    There is nothing in the rules that requires a World Cup team to be managed by someone born, raised or otherwise connected to that country. So should it matter?DOHA, Qatar — Brazil’s players already seem to have identified their preferred candidate. They had known, long before their quarterfinal defeat to Croatia sent them out of the World Cup, that Tite — the affable, cerebral coach of the national team for the past six years — would be stepping down. Now, they had decided that the most exacting job in international soccer should go to Fernando Diniz.The 48-year-old Diniz certainly had a strong case. The squad’s elder statesmen, Daniel Alves and Thiago Silva, offered glowing references. So did a couple of the team’s younger members, Antony and Bruno Guimaraes, who had worked with him early in their careers. Most important, he had Neymar on board: As long ago as July, Brazil’s most influential star had tweeted about his admiration for Diniz.Not everyone is quite so convinced. Ronaldo, the World Cup-winning striker who has functioned, essentially, as a ghost at the feast during this tournament, suggested he did not “see many options” for Tite’s successor among Brazilian coaches. Diniz, he said, was the best of them, but he was far more enthused by the idea of something unprecedented: appointing a foreigner to coach the Brazilian national team.The Italian Carlo Ancelotti, the Spaniard Pep Guardiola, the Portuguese Abel Ferreira were all, Ronaldo said, more appealing. “I get a good feeling from these names,” he said.Several Brazilian players have suggested that Fernando Diniz, a Brazilian, should be the national team’s next coach. Others are pressing for the country’s first foreign coach.Sergio Moraes/ReutersBrazil is not the only country to have left Qatar rather earlier than expected that finds itself wrestling with this issue. A quarter of the teams in the tournament had barely picked up their baggage from the carousel before they parted company with their managers. A couple, the Netherlands and Spain, have moved quickly to appoint replacements. Six more are beginning their search for candidates. A handful of others, including England and Portugal, may yet join them.That task, though, is not quite as easy as it sounds. Managing a national team is not — and has not been for some time — the pinnacle of a coach’s career. Most of the game’s most feted managers, obsessives who thrive on fine-tuning their complex, intricate systems on a daily basis, find the disjointed nature of international soccer unattractive.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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    Morocco Gave Everything in the World Cup Semifinal. It Needed a Little More Against France.

    AL KHOR, Qatar — The drums kept on beating. The whistles kept on shrieking. Morocco’s players kept on coming, again and again, their legs burning and their lungs heaving, as they raged against the dying of the light. At the end, Morocco had run out of road. At no point, not for a second, did it run out of fight.The World Cup, then, will culminate in the sort of blockbuster final that both FIFA, its organizer, and Qatar, its host, have craved: Lionel Messi’s Argentina, seeking to deliver arguably the finest player of all time his crowning glory, against Kylian Mbappé, his heir apparent, and France, aiming to become the first nation in half a century to retain the most coveted prize in sports. Today, Gianni Infantino feels very smug indeed.Regardless of which team emerges triumphant on Sunday, though, which story line is reverse-engineered as destiny, on some level this will always be Morocco’s World Cup, the one that made it a trailblazer, a record-breaker, a watermark that will not fade. From this point on, a whole slew of achievements will all be the first since Morocco.It was here that Morocco became the first team from the Arab world to make a World Cup quarterfinal. Then, a few days later, it was here that it became the first African team to extend its run all the way to the semifinals.That it could go no further, beaten by France, 2-0, in a breathless, furious game at Al Bayt, neither erases nor diminishes those feats. It does not alter the fact that it was in Qatar where Morocco proved to a “whole generation” that it could produce “miracles,” as its redoubtable goalkeeper, Yassine Bounou, put it. It was in Qatar that Morocco, according to its coach, Walid Regragui, redefined the limits of “what was possible.”A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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    Argentina’s Most Sacred World Cup Watch Party: Maradona’s Former Home

    A Buenos Aires businessman bought Diego Maradona’s old house and has been opening it up for Argentina’s World Cup matches, meat included.BUENOS AIRES — Argentina had just punched its ticket to the World Cup final with a 3-0 victory over Croatia on Tuesday, but most Argentines at the party simply wanted to poke around this stranger’s house.There was a retiree taking selfies in a mirrored corner bar. A house cleaner hung out the window of a bare bedroom. A tattoo artist checked out a backed-up toilet upstairs. And a hotel owner who had brought his mother-in-law was wandering around barefoot.“When I entered, I started crying,” said Osvaldo Bonacchi, 52, an air-conditioner repairman, who was starting to tear up again on the spiral staircase leading to the carpeted attic, where someone said there used to be a sauna. He had lived nearby for 15 years, and always wondered what it was like inside.“To be here is a dream,” he said.The battered, three-story brick chalet in a quiet Buenos Aires neighborhood once belonged to the Argentine soccer hero Diego Maradona, and in this World Cup, it has become one of the hottest places in Argentina to watch a match.A local entrepreneur bought the house last month and has opened the doors for the past several games, paying for drinks and more than 1,000 pounds of meat for hundreds of friends, neighbors and strangers crowded around Maradona’s backyard pool to cheer on the national team.The bar in Maradona’s former home.Ariel Fernando García, the new owner of the home, with his daughters on what was once Maradona’s balcony.“We started letting people in, and then they collapsed and started crying,” the house’s new owner, Ariel Fernando García, 47, said of the first party. “For me, he was an extraterrestrial,” he said of Maradona. “No man has given more joy to Argentines.”Maradona died of a heart attack in 2020 at age 60 but remains one of Argentina’s biggest figures. His story of a poor Buenos Aires boy rising to become one of history’s greatest soccer players and the leader of Argentina’s 1986 World Cup championship team has made him a sort of deity in this nation of 46 million.In fact, the Church of Maradona is a legally recognized religion in Argentina, now entering its 25th year, that claims tens of thousands of members with branches around the world. Some Google searches will return a little box of questions that other people searched, starting with: “Is Diego Maradona a God?”A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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    Brussels Court Orders 3 Linked to Qatar Bribery Case to Stay in Prison

    Belgian officials said they suspected a Gulf country of trying “to influence the economic and political decisions of the European Parliament.”BRUSSELS — A court in Belgium ruled on Wednesday that two suspects in a case linking current and former European lawmakers to alleged bribery by Qatar should remain in prison until trial and that a third should wear an electronic monitor, as the snowballing scandal continued to rock European Union institutions.Four people, including Eva Kaili, a former vice president of the European Parliament who is from Greece, were charged last week with corruption, money laundering and participation in suspected bribes from Qatar, in what may be the biggest scandal in the history of the Parliament.A court hearing for Ms. Kaili was postponed until Dec. 22, the office of the Belgian federal prosecutor said on Wednesday, so she remains imprisoned outside Brussels. Parliamentary lawmakers also stripped Ms. Kaili of her title as vice president during a plenary session in France.Court documents seen by The New York Times identified the other suspects as Pier Antonio Panzeri, a former member of Parliament; Francesco Giorgi, Ms. Kaili’s partner and an assistant to a current European lawmaker; and Niccolo Figa-Talamanca, secretary general of a Brussels-based charity. Mr. Panzeri and Mr. Giorgi were ordered to remain detained until trial, and Mr. Figa-Talamanca was ordered to be placed under electronic monitoring.Two others were arrested in Italy in connection with the case, the Belgian prosecutor’s office said.Belgian officials said they suspected a Gulf country of trying “to influence the economic and political decisions of the European Parliament.”The Belgian intelligence services have been working for more than a year with similar services in other countries to “map suspected bribery” of European lawmakers, the justice ministry told The Times.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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    Théo Hernandez, France’s Goalscorer, Stepped Up After His Brother, Lucas, Fell

    Most of the injuries that have befallen France, that sapped its team of world-class stars like N’Golo Kante and Paul Pogba, occurred before Les Bleus began playing in Qatar. But one, a torn knee ligament for Lucas Hernandez, came early in their first match against Australia.The man who replaced him at left-back just scored France’s first goal in its World Cup semifinal against Morocco. His name his Théo Hernandez, and he is Lucas’s younger brother.In the fifth minute, Théo Hernandez, who plays for A.C. Milan, corralled a loose ball near the goal post and showed tremendous poise and agility in getting on top of the ball with his left foot, sneaking it past the Moroccan goalkeeper, Bono.An absolute dream start for France 🇫🇷 pic.twitter.com/utpt5ysaTn— FOX Soccer (@FOXSoccer) December 14, 2022
    Théo Hernandez committed the foul Saturday late against England that led to what could have been a tying penalty; Harry Kane missed it. But today, he made up for that mistake with a goal that might lift France into its second consecutive final. More

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    France Is the First Country in Over 20 Years to Qualify for Consecutive World Cup Finals

    France’s quest to repeat as champion reached a climactic stage today when Les Bleus nipped Morocco, 2-0, on goals by Théo Hernandez and Randal Kolo Muani to advance to the World Cup final.In denying Morocco, the tournament darling, an implausible berth in the final match, France became the first nation in more than two decades to qualify for consecutive finals. The last was Brazil, which actually made three straight, from 1994-2002.A magnificent French team edged Croatia in 2018 to win the title, and though this squad is no less marvelous, only four of its starters from that year — Olivier Giroud, Antoine Griezmann, Kylian Mbappé and Hugo Lloris — are likely to feature against Lionel Messi, Lionel Messi and Lionel Messi and Argentina on Sunday.Although nations have played in consecutive finals on five other occasions, only two — Brazil, in 1958 and 1962, and Italy, in 1934 and 1938 — have won both. The other instances include the Netherlands, in 1974 and 1978; West Germany, in 1982, 1986 and 1990; and Brazil, in 1994, 1998 and 2002. More

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    Why Is Antoine Griezmann France’s Most Important Player?

    For Antoine Griezmann, the first few months of this season drifted uncomfortably close to indignity. His status at Atlético Madrid, it seemed, had diminished to the extent that he was a mere curiosity, one of the most celebrated forwards of his era reduced to something between a meme and a punchline.The problem was not, really, of his own making. A few years ago, Griezmann had left Atlético — the team that had helped to make him a star — for Barcelona. The move, announced in a glossy, LeBron James-style documentary that did little to endear him to anyone, did not work out.The Barcelona he had joined was creaking and fading, the dull rumble of thunder gathering in the distance. Griezmann played well only in flashes and flurries, not the sort of return expected — or needed, given the club’s increasing desperation — for his eye-watering cost. Last year, he was permitted to return on loan to Atlético, his purgatory in Catalonia at an end.The complications, though, did not end. His loan deal ran for two seasons. If he played a certain number of minutes in the second campaign, Atlético would be compelled to pay Barcelona a set fee to retain him permanently. Unwilling to commit and hopeful of reducing the price, Atlético sought to find a loophole.Diego Simeone, the club’s manager, started introducing Griezmann only as a second-half substitute. He played 30 minutes here, 20 minutes there. Atlético never confirmed the rationale, but that Griezmann was being held back as a negotiating technique seemed apparent.Antoine Griezmann on the bench before an Atlético Madrid LaLiga game in October.Jon Nazca/ReutersThat particular issue was, thankfully, sorted out before the World Cup. But the damage — at least to Griezmann’s reputation — had been done. Barcelona did not want Griezmann. Atlético did, but only on the cheap. He was no longer the impish, inventive forward who had been regarded as one of the finest players in the world only a few years earlier. Now, he was an afterthought.And then came Qatar. Griezmann is not the most celebrated member of France’s attacking line — that title would go to Kylian Mbappé — and he is not the most prolific, thanks to the evergreen Olivier Giroud. He may not have the world at his feet, like Aurélien Tchouámeni. But there is a compelling case to be made that Griezmann is the most important member of Didier Deschamps’s squad.Griezmann may not be France’s star, but he is certainly its brain. It is Griezmann who provides imagination, and guile, and craft. That is what has always appealed to Deschamps about him, what has helped him accrue 72 consecutive appearances for his nation over the past six years.At this World Cup, though, it is another trait that has made Griezmann invaluable. After injuries to Paul Pogba, N’Golo Kanté and Karim Benzema, Deschamps had to construct a new approach for the French on the fly. He had to recalibrate his midfield and adjust the positioning of his attack. Griezmann is the one who makes it all work. He has the intuition to alter how he plays, and where he plays, to keep things running smoothly, and the versatility to make sure he thrives wherever he is required.Griezmann has always had that gift, of course. He has, at various stages in his career, played on both wings, as a lone striker, and as a central, creative force. At club level, it is possible — even likely — that his versatility has held him back. Europe’s major teams now play in high-definition systems, ones in which the specialists required for every role are recruited at vast cost. That Griezmann is not quite so easily pigeonholed might, in some lights, look like a drawback.In international soccer, though, it is quite the opposite. Even Deschamps, beneficiary of the fruit of the sport’s most prolific talent farm, has to adjust and adapt to what is available to him; he cannot simply buy a solution to any particular problem. In those circumstances, a player like Griezmann, someone who can be whatever the coach needs him to be, is a rare and precious thing: a Swiss Army knife that serves, quite nicely, as a key.Under manager Didier Deschamps, Antoine Griezmann has accrued 72 consecutive appearances over six years for France’s national team.Ronald Wittek/EPA, via Shutterstock More