Raphael Stevens

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    Unai Emery Is Back for More

    NEW YORK — It has been more than three years now, but Unai Emery still remembers the moment as if he had just witnessed it. When he brings it up, all the frustration he felt on that day in March 2019 comes rushing back.Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang has just claimed the ball, the clock has ticked beyond the 90th minute and the referee has brought calm to the chaos. Arsenal has won a penalty, a last-gasp opportunity to win the match. It is also a chance for Emery, in his first season as Arsenal’s coach, to drag his team into the Champions League at the expense of the club’s bitter North London neighbor, Tottenham Hotspur.But Aubameyang, usually a lock from the penalty spot, fails to score. That shot, that missed opportunity, was the moment, as far as Emery is concerned, that ended not only Arsenal’s hopes of playing alongside European soccer royalty, but also his hold on his job as Arsenal’s manager.“We played a good season, and we were very close, but this moment…,” Emery says, allowing the sentence to trail off. He has made his point.For Emery, now two seasons into what has been by most metrics a hugely successful effort to rebuild his career at the Spanish club Villarreal, it is not only soccer games that are defined by moments: a missed penalty or a late save, a blown lead or a match-winning goal. Entire careers, he knows as well as anyone, can also be upended — or sent off on new, unexpected trajectories — by a single moment here or there.Emery, 50, did not fall all the way down the ladder after his firing at Arsenal. He was out of work only months before he landed the next summer at Villarreal, where he has directed a golden run that he believes has once again established his credentials for one of the sport’s top jobs. At least one Premier League club has come calling. (He said no.) More big clubs will follow. Emery sounds like a man who is ready to listen.“I think I recovered my level to keep in future my challenge high, high, high,” he said, raising his hands above his head. “I am very ambitious.”Emery with Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang in 2019. Player, Coach and Arsenal fans know what happened next.David Klein/ReutersHe has already been to soccer’s heights, after all: victories in three European finals with Sevilla, two seasons coaching Paris St.-Germain in the Champions League, then that call to go to London to manage in the Premier League.In 2018, Emery was tasked with leading Arsenal into the future, with managing its transition from 24 years under Arsène Wenger. The Emery era started well enough, with 11 consecutive victories, the club’s best run of form in more than a decade. But then came the botched penalty, the failure to leapfrog Tottenham in the standings, the bitter loss to Chelsea in the Europa League final. Emery survived the summer, but in November, after an extended winless run, Arsenal showed him the door.His morale-sapping departure has been traded for a two-year adventure in western Spain, a thrill ride that has delivered Villarreal’s first major trophy, moments of glory against some of soccer’s mightiest teams and proof, at least to Emery, that he can still be considered one of the game’s finest coaches.His most eye-catching successes came last season, when he took his team — a mix of rugged veterans, big-club castoffs and promising youngsters — on an improbable jaunt through the Champions League. Villarreal eliminated Juventus and Bayern Munich before threatening a comeback of cinematic proportions against Liverpool in the semifinals.That journey, Emery said, was built on players who rose to the occasion when their moment came. Much of Villarreal’s success was forged on the training field, he said, by practicing set pieces and counterattacks, by drilling into players the idea that they had to dig in and stick to a plan.“That is the difference you can reduce with other teams,” Emery said. In his view, coaches can improve their players and their teams by 10 or 15 percent. The rest is up to them, to a blend of preparation, belief and poise in critical moments.“How can I explain it?” he said. “Last year, we were worse when we played against Arsenal in the semifinals of the Europa League. We were worse than them. They were better than us. But our work before arriving to play against them — we created a very good mentality, and that is when one coach could make his team better than one that has better players.”It was a formula he brought to bear again in the Champions League last spring. Before each two-legged tie in the knockout rounds, Emery said, he told his players that they should expect to suffer and be outplayed for large spells, but that they should believe their chance would come to unsettle the opponent, either defensively or offensively. “When they start to suffer,” Emery said, “is when you can win.”Villarreal’s Pau Torres scoring against Juventus in the Champions League.Antonio Calanni/Associated PressAfter beating Juventus, Villarreal went on to eliminate Bayern Munich, too.Massimo Pinca/ReutersThe moments were unforgettable. A 3-0 victory at Juventus. A stunning first-leg victory over Bayern Munich in Spain, and then an 88th-minute goal to eliminate the Germans on their home field. Against Liverpool, Villarreal overturned a 2-0 first-leg deficit within 41 minutes to leave its opponent shaken and its stadium rocking.Liverpool regained its footing and survived — other teams get to have their moments, too — but the Champions League run has raised the profile of Villarreal’s best players. Some will move on. Their coach admits he probably will as well one day.He has already knocked back the advances of some suitors, including an approach from Newcastle United after the Premier League club was acquired by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. “It was not the right moment,” Emery said of his decision last November. Newcastle, for all its new riches, was last in the table at the time, and Villarreal was in the Champions League.That competition, he and his players knew, could change perceptions in ways that success in the Spanish league could not.“I’m in a very good environment to feel strong, to feel confident again, adding confidence in my work,” Emery said of his post at Villarreal. “And then, a new challenge.”Friedemann Vogel/EPA, via ShutterstockAt the beginning of his tenure, Emery said, he had planned to focus on the league. “But when we beat Atalanta and when we played against Juventus, the Champions League was, for me, more important,” Emery said. The club was getting recognition for its successes, and for players and coaches alike the performances could catapult their careers in new directions. “I know I have individual challenges as well,” Emery said.Emery had arrived at Villarreal bruised by the nature of his Arsenal exit. Those wounds are not completely healed. He described the departure in Spanish as a golpe — a blow. By the time he was fired, Emery was facing criticism that at times felt more personal than professional: Long before the end, former players and parts of the news media had taken aim at his command of English.Those criticisms still smart: When a fan at a preseason match in England recently goaded Emery by asking him to say, “Good ebening,” the coach responded with an obscene gesture that went viral.At Villarreal, the team’s wealthy owners have provided Emery a platform to find balance in his life, as well as a space to rebuild a belief in his style of coaching. But Emery said he was certain that his success was not a case of a coach’s finding his level, of a leader most comfortable one rung below the elite. “I’m in a very good environment to feel strong, to feel confident again, adding confidence in my work,” he said. “And then, a new challenge.”His determination to return to the top is perhaps best demonstrated by his extracurricular activities: While he has been re-establishing his credentials in Spain, he has also been working hard on his English. He described his summer trip to New York as a learning opportunity as much as a vacation with his son, Lander. It is perhaps a tacit admission that not all of the criticism during his time at Arsenal was wide of the mark.He has been ruminating on those moments at Arsenal when he could not quite get his message across, or those crucial early conversations with key players when linguistic barriers made it hard to create the type of coach-player bond essential to winning teams.“The next time I will arrive with better English,” he said.That time may come soon. For now, though, Emery is prepared to bide his time, to wait for the right moment.Jackie Molloy for The New York Times More

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    Fulham Is Back in the Premier League. Staying? That’s Harder.

    Fulham has made a habit of bouncing in and out of the world’s richest soccer competition in recent years. Is there a business model in being almost good enough?LONDON — The thing about Aleksandar Mitrovic is that he is not just a striker, barrel-chested and shaven-headed and keen-eyed. He is not simply a Serbian international, a fairly constant presence for his country for the better part of a decade. Nor is he merely something of a national hero, scorer of the goal that sent his country to the World Cup.He is also, it turns out, an existential question.Rafael Benítez, one of Mitrovic’s long line of former managers, has been considering the conundrum of his former protégé for about 15 minutes when he hits upon it. “There is a saying in Spain,” said Benítez, a man never short of an aphorism. “It is better to be the mouse’s head than the lion’s tail.”What Mitrovic must decide, Benítez said, is whether that is enough for him.Few players present quite such a distinct dichotomy as Mitrovic. In alternating years as his club, Fulham, has yo-yoed in and out of the Premier League every year since 2018, the 27-year-old forward has at times been one of the most ruthless finishers in European soccer, an implacable goal-scoring machine, and at others a stalled engine, a dulled blade, ineffective and anonymous.The difference, of course, is the division where he finds himself. In the second-tier Championship, Mitrovic’s record is peerless. He averages a goal every 117 minutes. He is already 12th on the division’s all-time scoring list. Last year, he made 44 appearances and scored 43 goals. Nobody has ever scored more goals in a single Championship season. The previous record was 31.That his output should diminish in the Premier League, where Fulham will return yet again this season, is hardly a surprise. He will, after all, be facing a higher caliber of defender, and Fulham, a cruiserweight sort of a club, will struggle to craft quite so many chances for him. It is natural, then, that Mitrovic should struggle to score quite so many goals: 11 goals in his first top-flight season at Fulham, and only three in his last.What is noteworthy, though, is the scale of the drop-off. By the time Fulham was last relegated, in 2021, Mitrovic was only a fleeting part of the team. A player who was far too good for the Championship appeared to be not good enough at all for the Premier League.He is not the only one caught in that same quandary. Mitrovic is, instead, simply the starkest illustration of a dilemma facing a swath of players and, increasingly, a select cadre of clubs, including Fulham. They represent possibly the most pressing issue facing English soccer on the dawn of a new Premier League season: the teams that find themselves lost somewhere between the mouse’s head and the lion’s tail.Aleksandar Mitrovic: Championship record-setter, Premier League afterthought.Peter Cziborra/Action Images Via ReutersThe TrampolineRick Parry has stopped using the term “parachute payments.” That might have been how they were designed — a way to cushion the economic blow for teams descending from the Premier League and landing in the Championship, a safety net for the loss of the vast television income guaranteed by the former — but it no longer captures their impact.Instead, Parry, the chairman of the English Football League, the body that oversees the second, third and fourth tiers of English soccer, has given the payments a name that better encapsulates their effect. The three years of extra income, totaling $110 million, function now as “trampoline payments,” Parry said.Fulham provides an apposite example. The reason that it is so easy to see the contrast in Mitrovic’s fortunes in the Premier League and the Championship is because he has spent the last four seasons bouncing between them: Fulham was relegated in 2019, promoted in 2020, relegated again, promoted again.Norwich City has done much the same (promoted in 2019 and 2021, relegated in 2020 and 2022), while Watford (relegated in 2020 and 2022, promoted in between) and Bournemouth (relegated in 2020, promoted this spring) have proved only a little less volatile.That those teams should monopolize the promotion places does not surprise Parry. It is not just that the money they receive from the Premier League allows them to run budgets far higher than the majority of their opponents in the Championship. It is the fact that so few teams in the division now receive those payments.Norwich City, like Fulham, has bounced between the Championship and the Premier League the past five seasons. This year, it went down while Fulham came up.Molly Darlington/Action Images Via ReutersThe trampoline clubs account for so many of the promotion and relegation slots in recent years that only five teams — the three ejected from the Premier League last season, as well as West Bromwich Albion and Sheffield United — of the division’s 24 clubs will receive parachute payments this year.For most of the rest, automatic promotion is effectively out of reach.“The Championship is a great league,” Parry said. “It’s incredibly competitive and unpredictable, as long as you accept that two of the relegated teams will go straight back up.”Though he sees the division’s playoffs — which widen the pool of promotion hopefuls before crushing the dreams of all but one of them — as a “saving grace, giving everyone else a target,” he believes that the entrenched inequality serves to entice owners into unsustainable spending to try and level the playing field. “There is a feeling that you have to over-invest,” he said.But while the ongoing health of the Championship is Parry’s central concern, he argues that predictability should be a source of anxiety to the Premier League, too. “It is a problem for them, too,” he said. “Its selling point is how competitive it is: for the title, for the Champions League places, at the bottom. If you know which teams are going down, then some of the drama is lost.”The Top 25As ever, at the dawn of a new season, there is a conviction at Fulham that the cycle can be broken. Marco Silva, the club’s fourth manager in four years, has been studying the root causes of the relegations suffered by his predecessors in 2019 and 2021. He is confident that he can avoid the same trapdoors. “We have to write a different story,” he told The Athletic.Like all of those teams caught on English soccer’s great cliff edge, though, the balance is delicate. Fulham, like Watford and Norwich before it, has to spend enough money to stand a chance of remaining in the Premier League, but not spend so much that — in the event of failure — the club’s future is endangered. (The lavish spree undertaken after promotion in 2020 backfired so spectacularly that the idea of recruiting too heavily in preparation for the Premier League has entered the lexicon as “doing a Fulham.”)“We have to write a different story,” Fulham’s Manager, Marco Silva, said of returning to the Premier League.John Sibley/Action Images Via ReutersFor most of those clubs, the watchword is “sustainability,” said Lee Darnbrough, a scout and analyst who has spent much of his career working for teams trying to tread the fine line between the Premier League and the Championship. Darnbrough has spent time at Norwich, at Burnley and at West Brom, before landing in his current job, as the head of recruitment at Hull City.At West Brom — English soccer’s most traditional yo-yo club — that search for sustainability led the team’s executives to budget for a place among the “top 25” teams in the country, Darnbrough said: neither assuming a place in the Premier League, nor accepting a slot in the Championship.“In my time, we didn’t finish any higher than 17th in the Premier League or any lower than fourth in the Championship,” he said. “It was sustainable like that. I wouldn’t say we were comfortable with it, but we knew where we stood. The challenge was to avoid yo-yoing between the divisions, but we knew the parameters.”The ambition, of course, was always to find a way to survive that first season, to turn the club into something of a fixture, as the likes of Crystal Palace and (more spectacularly) Leicester City have managed in recent years. “The problem is knowing at what point you are established,” Darnbrough said. “You can’t stay up once and then take the shackles off straightaway.”For a whole clutch of teams, that point may never truly arrive. Parachute payments may distort the Championship, but they are a drop in the ocean compared to what a team has earned once it has enjoyed three, four or five consecutive years in the Premier League.That, Parry said, creates a cycle in which the teams who come up are always likely to go back down. “There is a reason the Premier League clubs love parachute payments,” he said.Fulham and Bournemouth, like Watford and Norwich and West Brom before them, are trapped in the same no man’s land as Mitrovic, caught between the mouse’s head and the lion’s tail. More

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    Premier League Preview: Has Arsenal Pulled It Together? Will United Fall Apart?

    Six contenders (more or less) and five story lines (plus a few extra) as the new season kicks off with everyone chasing Manchester City (again).Somehow, it is that time again. Cue the dramatic music, crank up the content generator and get ready to absorb the hottest takes around: the Premier League season is upon us once again.Quite what form this edition of soccer’s great hubristic soap opera will take is, of course, not yet clear. That, after all, is the fun of the thing.As the 20 teams in the richest league in the world return to the field this weekend, though, there are several questions that linger over everything. How they are answered will go a long way to determining how things play out.Will Manchester City Beat Manchester City?Manchester City’s reaction every time someone suggests its time with the trophy is up.Dave Thompson/Associated PressThe obvious question before the start of every new Premier League season is which team is likely to have won the thing at the end. Unfortunately, in the current incarnation of the league, it is not a particularly interesting inquiry. Manchester City will win it, as it has four of the past five editions, and it will most likely do so by seeing off a spirited but ultimately futile challenge from Liverpool. Although, this time, there is just one small caveat.The idea that Erling Haaland’s presence will somehow disrupt City’s rhythm sufficiently to impact the team has been overblown; it may be an awkward marriage for a few months, but both are more than good enough to thrive despite that.Far more important is the fact that Haaland is currently just one of 16 senior outfield players at Pep Guardiola’s disposal. That would be a risk in a normal season. This one has a great big World Cup in the middle, making it seem like a colossal gamble.Is Arsenal Back?Gabriel Jesus practicing a pose Arsenal expects to see a lot this season.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt sounds like damning Arsenal with faint praise to suggest that Mikel Arteta’s team has won the preseason — largely because it is — but, amid all of the hype and exaggeration, the last few weeks have produced some genuinely encouraging signs for the Spaniard and his fellow documentary stars.Gabriel Jesus, certainly, has the capacity to be a transformational signing, and his former Manchester City teammate Oleksandr Zinchenko may not be far behind. Arsenal looks like a much more complete side than it did a year ago. Not one ready to challenge City or Liverpool, perhaps, but one that could end the club’s long exile from the Champions League.Will Tottenham’s Impatience Pay Off?Richarlison traded life at the bottom of the table at Everton for a view of the summit at Spurs.Andy Buchanan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe biggest obstacle to Arsenal’s resurrection sits just down the road. Not at Chelsea, where a chaotic transfer window will most likely end with a stronger and yet somehow less coherent squad, but at a Tottenham transformed by Antonio Conte, the sort of supernova coach who comes in, pushes his players to the limit and then implodes. The worry, when he arrived at Spurs, was that the club had an almost diametrically opposed approach.That, it seems, was not a problem. Tottenham is very much in win-now mode. Ivan Perisic, Richarlison and Yves Bissouma have been brought in to turn a side good enough to get into the Champions League last year into one that can push for the title. Given the strangeness of the season, that does not seem impossible. Spurs has one chance under Conte, effectively. It has done all it can to take it.Manchester United: DiscussA rare sight this season: Cristiano Ronaldo happy at Manchester United.Ed Sykes/Action Images, via ReutersIn what may have been the purest distillation of modern soccer imaginable, Cristiano Ronaldo received a rapturous reception upon his return to Old Trafford last weekend. Manchester United’s fans clearly wanted him to know how much he meant to them, even as he has made it very obvious he does not wish to remain at the club.Roughly 45 minutes later, having been substituted, Ronaldo was leaving the stadium at halftime, very much against the wishes of his manager, Erik ten Hag, and apparently convinced that he did not need to stick around.There has, believe it or not, been progress at Manchester United this summer. Ten Hag is a smart appointment. The club has made a couple smart signings. But it is a curious progress, one tempered by the fact that United does not appear to have a list of recruits beyond players ten Hag knew and liked and undercut by the Ronaldo saga. As things stand, he may be forced to stay merely because nobody else wants to sign him. How ten Hag handles that will define the early months of his reign.Can Anyone Break the Seal?Declan Rice and West Ham floated into Europe last season. Is more in their future?Justin Tallis/AFP, via Getty ImagesIn one view, this season should be the best chance since 2016 for a team outside the traditional Big Six to make a run for a place in the Champions League. The whole campaign will be affected by the World Cup, and it is hardly ridiculous to suggest that the superpowers — stocked as they are by players headed to Qatar — may be more susceptible to fatigue in the aftermath.Whether any team can emerge from the pack, though, is a different matter. Newcastle ended last season on a Saudi-bankrolled high, but it has been substantially quieter than the LIV golf series this summer. Leicester and Wolves seem to be stagnating. That leaves, perhaps, West Ham — bolstered by a couple of smart additions — as the only viable candidate. More likely still, of course, is that David Moyes’s team cannot last the pace either and that at the end of a season unlike any other, everything will be precisely the same as before. More

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    Welcome to Soccer’s Strangest Season

    The World Cup will split seasons in two in much of the world, including the Premier League campaign that opens this weekend. What is revealed could be fascinating.Gian Piero Ventrone surveyed his handiwork with just the hint of a smile. A few minutes earlier, Ventrone, Tottenham Hotspur’s fitness coach, had gathered the club’s players together on the turf at the Seoul World Cup stadium and informed them of their next assignment.They had, by that stage, already been training for more than an hour, in searing heat and cloying humidity. Now they had one final exercise: Ventrone instructed the players to run the length of the field. Not once, or twice, but 42 times. The winner, he said, would be the last man standing.Now, as he looked around him, he saw those same players strewn across the field. Son Heung-min had collapsed, his muscles screaming and his lungs burning. Richarlison had sunk to his knees, gasping for air. Harry Kane had vomited. Ventrone was satisfied. Preseason, as far as the club’s fitness coach could see, was going swimmingly.Son Heung-min is feeling the effects of Conte’s gruelling pre-season drills 😳pic.twitter.com/g5mvtjlPV1— The Spurs Web (@thespursweb) July 11, 2022
    There was something strange, though, about the footage of that session — held in front of 6,000 fans during Spurs’ tour of South Korea — when it emerged last month. The methods deployed by Ventrone felt just a touch anachronistic, a relic of a bygone era, when players let themselves go over the summer, before they invented tactical periodization, before everyone was strapped to a GPS vest at all times.They felt particularly outdated this summer of all summers, though, given what lies ahead not only for Son, Kane and the rest of Tottenham’s team, but for several hundred of the world’s best players in England’s Premier League and elsewhere. The season on which they are embarking — the Premier League and the Bundesliga kick off this weekend — may well be the busiest, longest and most draining they will ever experience. As a result, it might also be the strangest.Arsenal, rebuilt around striker Gabriel Jesus, kicks off the Premier League season at Crystal Palace on Friday. It could send players from a half dozen countries to the World Cup in November.Paul Childs/Action Images Via ReutersIt is not quite right, of course, to say that this is the first time in soccer’s history that there has been a winter World Cup. Chile in 1962, Argentina in 1978 and South Africa in 2010 were all winter World Cups. Nor is it strictly accurate to declare this the first time there has been a World Cup in the middle of the club season; after all, not every domestic competition runs from August to May.What makes Qatar 2022 unique, instead, is the fact that it will be the first World Cup to take place in the middle of the season for the overwhelming majority of its participants.Eight days before the tournament starts, most of the players summoned by their nations will still be locked in club combat in Europe. Exactly a week after it finishes, those employed by teams in the Premier League, at least, will be expected to take up the cudgels once more.In between, some of them will have taken part in seven of the most important games of their careers, all of that stress and emotion and exertion condensed into only a few weeks and played out in a series of purpose-built stadiums surrounded by towns and neighborhoods that exist for no reason other than the staging of a single event. This World Cup is not just a hiatus, a brief intermission to the season; it is a lacuna, a disconnect, a deus ex machina.Quite what its impact will be is difficult to predict. As usual, the return of the Premier League brings with it a suite of known unknowns that will define the season: Will Erik ten Hag turn Manchester United around? Why has Pep Guardiola decided that Manchester City does not need a full complement of substitutes? Can Arsenal be trusted?Manager Erik ten Hag is navigating a tricky situation with Cristiano Ronaldo, who wants out of Manchester United.Ed Sykes/Action Images Via ReutersNone of those questions, though, is nearly as pressing as attempting to discern the effect of the World Cup. It is hardly revelatory to suggest that there will, in effect, be two halves to this season: the first, a jostling for position, running from this weekend until the first week of November, and then a second, a sprint for the line, commencing late in December and concluding with the Champions League final on June 10.Those two periods, though, may not bear any real relation to one another. It is easy to imagine that, in the weeks immediately before the tournament, players anticipating a place in Qatar might suddenly become conspicuously — if not entirely consciously — risk-averse, and that afterward, the usual order of things will be upturned by players exhausted from the World Cup being thrust immediately back into action against colleagues who have had a month to rest and to relax.That might, in an optimistic reading, be a good thing. Perhaps the creeping predictability of even the Premier League — the league where anything can happen, as long as it involves Manchester City winning the title — will be put on hold, even just for a year, as the randomness invoked by a midseason World Cup upturns the established order.Julián Álvarez and Erling Haaland give Manchester City an entirely new look up front.Tony Obrien/ReutersOr perhaps not. Perhaps the gap between the elite and the also-rans is now so great that it takes more than a few weary limbs to level the playing field. Perhaps the squads of the self-appointed aristocrats are so strong that they will emerge not only unscathed, but with their dominance somehow enhanced.All that can be certain is that there will be an impact. What was so noteworthy about Ventrone’s brutal training session in Seoul was not that it was taking place on the eve of a season in which managers might have been expected to safeguard their players’ fitness, rather than risk burning them out long before the end, but that it was in South Korea at all.Tottenham, like the rest of the Premier League’s big beasts, had seen preseason as a chance to take the show on the road, to play a couple of money-spinning exhibition games around the globe. The players were not gently introduced to the longest, strangest season of their careers. They were, instead, flown across the world and then run into the ground. That is just the start of it. More than ever, this season, the winner will be the last one standing.The Real Test AwaitsThe United States beat England in the semifinals of the 2019 World Cup. The teams will collide again in a friendly in October in London.Pete Kiehart for The New York TimesA few minutes before the final whistle, Vlatko Andonovski rose from his seat, smoothed the figure-hugging salmon-pink sweater he had chosen for the occasion, summoned his colleagues and made for the exit. He had, apparently, seen enough of both France and the Netherlands. He did not need to know who won. (France, futilely.)Andonovski, the United States women’s coach, seemed quite relaxed that night in Rotherham, just as he has throughout his stay in England for the final stages of Euro 2022. He was not making notes. He chatted happily with the phalanx of other managers and executives and scouts gathered in the tournament’s various directors’ boxes. He seemed unperturbed, unruffled.Do not, though, be fooled. Andonovski will have departed Europe in no doubt that next summer will not be quite so insouciant as this one. In a host of ways, Euro 2022 represented a seismic shift for women’s soccer in England and in Europe: the size of the crowds, the interest of the television audiences, the immediately discernible boost in momentum and, most pressing for Andonovski, in terms of the caliber of its play.Over the course of his stay, he will have noted that the threats to the United States’ hegemony are many and varied: a French side sufficiently gifted to beat the Dutch, the defeated World Cup finalists of three years ago, despite the absence of three of its brightest stars; a Germany reborn thanks to the blazing promise of Lina Magull and Lena Oberdorf.And, of course, most notably, an England team blessed with a depth of resources and richness of talent that perhaps makes it the equal of the United States, a team imbued with a conviction and a purpose by its coach, Sarina Wiegman, and now pulsing with the confidence and self-belief that only triumph can bring.The United States remains the standard-bearer in the women’s game, of course. There is a reason that tickets for its visit to Wembley in October sold out in only hours, and it is not just to do with coursing English pride. Alex Morgan, Rose Lavelle, Sophia Smith and the rest are a blockbuster draw. But Andonovski will have left the Euros in no doubt that his team’s dominance is in more peril now than it has been for a decade, as Europe surges into view. His job is to quell that rebellion. His days of relaxation will not last for long.Wants Are Not the Same as NeedsJoan Laporta: man of the people (but especially the people who demand new signings).Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesOf all the many eye-catching lines in my colleague Tariq Panja’s interview with Joan Laporta, the man hoping he will find the exit to the hole currently occupied by Barcelona if only he keeps digging, one in particular stood out. The club’s 400 million fans, he said, “require a level of success” that renders the idea of a patient, painstaking rebuild impossible.There is no question that Laporta’s approach to Barcelona’s crisis — spending vast sums on new signings in the hope of winning trophies immediately and kick-starting a “virtuous cycle” of triumph and investment — is risky. Still, though, it is just about possible to discern some sort of logic behind it.What is curious is the notion that this is what his club’s fans not only desire, but demand. Laporta almost seemed to be suggesting that, if Barcelona does not maintain a steady supply of flashbulb moments and fond memories, then those 400 million souls would simply drift away.To many, that is not how fandom works. Fan, after all, is not a synonym for consumer. A fan does not drift away when thick turns to thin. A fan can bear a couple of fallow years (especially at a time when Barcelona could very easily point to Pedri and Gavi and Ansu Fati and convince those same fans that a golden dawn lay at the end of a brief period of night). A fan should, in theory, be more concerned by the club’s long-term health than its short-term glory.And yet, for Barcelona as much as any elite team, that does not appear to be how all fans work. Laporta’s approach is defended to the hilt by an army of supporters on social media. His lionization is such that one member compared him, in what may be a first, to both the Pope and Kim Jong-un.Perhaps Laporta is right. Perhaps there is a section of Barcelona’s public that demands immediate satisfaction, that cannot countenance the idea of a few years of finishing as low as, say, third. Those are the people that Laporta believes he has to appease. Perhaps he is right. They are, it seems, real. They do exist. Whether they should be described as fans or not is a different matter.CorrespondenceMark Cuban would be delighted to know that he has prompted such contemplation among the readership of The New York Times’s pre-eminent soccer newsletter. He’d be even happier to know that so many of you agreed that he was right to worry that fans who come to sports through TikTok may not have the attention span to watch a whole game.“Kids may have grown out of ‘Tom and Jerry,’ but cartoons and the networks they ran on didn’t have an algorithm in their pocket, one they’ll carry for the rest of their lives, to keep that impulsive short-fix delivery method in their hands and vision,” wrote Eric Blind.Joel Gardner wrote along similar lines. “Cuban got rich in the sports business from his college days, so we ignore him at our peril. Kids have always had attention issues. Never before, though, have there been so many stimuli. The evening news is no longer Walter Cronkite. Ditto ‘SportsCenter,’ with its plays of the day. Cram that down through social media to TikTok, and it bodes ill not just for sports but for all human discourse.”Tim Ireland/EPA, via ShutterstockFor Brian Yaney, meanwhile, Cuban sounded like “another parent engaged in a desperate daily struggle to extract his child from the mind-numbing oblivion offered by transient social networks and to engage them in positive developmental activities.” Brian worried that by demurring, I was not “paying enough attention to the real world,” outside of sports consumption.I did not want to dismiss Cuban’s concerns glibly, certainly. I’m a parent, too, and though my children are too young to have encountered social media, we have already seen the effects of on-demand streaming on one of them. (Just cartoons and some portent of doom called ‘Blippi,’ but only because we couldn’t get him to pay attention to ‘Succession.’)And, as Neil Postman so brilliantly illustrated, I have no doubt that the condensation of information, and the conflation of news and entertainment, has wreaked untold damage on public discourse.In the context of sports, though, I have more hope. It doesn’t strike me as especially unusual that kids wouldn’t watch entire games; it seems logical that appreciation for a sport develops as we grow older and more comprehending of its nuances. And even if that is not the case, it strikes me as a shame that nobody in sports ever thinks that maybe it would be easier to address things like a lack of competitive balance than work out a way to boil down an entire game into a 12-second video clip. More

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    Premier League Players Will No Longer Take a Knee Before Every Game

    The gesture, begun by players in 2020 as part of an effort to highlight racism, will continue, but only before certain matches.While Premier League soccer players will continue to take a knee to protest racism this season, they said Wednesday that the gesture would no longer take place at every game.Players will kneel, for example, at the Premier League’s season-opening games this weekend; on Boxing Day (Dec. 26); during two weeks dedicated to racism awareness in October and March; on the final day of the season; and before the F.A. Cup and League Cup finals.“We remain resolutely committed to eradicate racial prejudice and to bring about an inclusive society with respect and equal opportunities for all,” the team captains said in a statement released by the Premier League. The players said they believed the gesture would have more impact if performed less frequently.Premier League players began kneeling for a few seconds after the opening whistle when matches resumed after a pandemic hiatus in June 2020. The protest coincided with Black Lives Matter protests in the United States and the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis.The gesture was inspired by the former N.F.L. quarterback Colin Kaepernick and other American athletes who had taken a knee before games or during the national anthem, and was widely adopted in leagues and sports in Europe and elsewhere. Players on dozens of teams have taken a knee before international matches, and women’s squads — though not all of them — did the same during the recently completed Euro 2022 championship.England’s Georgia Stanway and two Swedish players before their Euro 2022 semifinal last week.Molly Darlington/ReutersPremier League players had continued to kneel before every game, and players at many games in lower-tier leagues in England have done the same.The gesture brought praise in some quarters. “I feel the power every time the players drop down and show solidarity,” said Troy Townsend, the head of development at Kick It Out, a nonprofit organization that promotes equality and inclusion in soccer. But a few Black players dismissed it as a mostly empty gesture that did little to bring real change. Wilfried Zaha of Crystal Palace, who grew up in England but plays for Ivory Coast’s national team, stopped kneeling in early 2021. He said the protest “has just become a part of the prematch routine.”The kneeling occasionally drew boos, both in England and more frequently when English teams traveled abroad. England fans were jeered by some of their own supporters before games leading to last summer’s European Championship.And in June, when the England players knelt before a game in Hungary, they were jeered by a crowd largely made up of children under 14; most adults were barred because of racist chanting by Hungary fans at earlier games.The kneeling was not universal, either. Many teams from other nations did not kneel before games, making for a sometimes incongruous sight at Champions League and international matches: the players from English teams and clubs on one knee before kickoff, while their opponents stood only yards away, waiting for them to rise so the game could begin. More

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    England Exults After Women’s Euros Soccer Win

    The dramatic 2-1 victory over Germany in the European Championship final touched off celebrations that have been more than 50 years in the waiting.LONDON — For over 50 years, English soccer fans have hoped, prayed and sung that a major trophy would “come home.” Now it finally has. And they can hardly contain themselves.Thousands of supporters screamed and chanted on Sunday at Trafalgar Square in central London and at other viewing parties around the country, where the final of the women’s European Championship was displayed on big screens.On Monday, pictures of the Lionesses, as the team is known, dominated the front pages of British newspapers after their 2-1 win over Germany at Wembley Stadium in London, the headlines lauding them as “game changers” or “history makers” and declaring “No more years of hurt.”Politicians and royals sent messages and congratulations to the team on its victory — a dramatic conclusion with parallels to England’s last major championship, in 1966, when the country hosted the men’s World Cup and its team defeated Germany in the final.But the success held the potential to go beyond national pride and euphoria, with women’s soccer occupying the public consciousness in Britain like never before.“I think we really made a change,” said the team’s Dutch coach, Sarina Wiegman, at a news conference after the match. The team had done a lot for the sport but for the role of women in society, too, she added, a sentiment that was echoed by others.“It’s been an amazing month and an amazing day yesterday,” said Mark Bullingham, the chief executive of the Football Association, England’s governing body for soccer.“I think it will really turbocharge everything we have been doing in the women’s game,” he said in an interview on “BBC Breakfast” on Monday, adding that the organization had invested heavily in women’s soccer over the past few years.“There is no reason we shouldn’t have the same number of girls playing as boys and we think it will create a whole new generation of heroes who girls aspire to be like,” he said.There’s certainly room for improvement. A report published in March by “Fair Game,” a collective of 34 English soccer clubs, found that a gaping gender divide in soccer clubs throughout England and Wales kept the sport “living in the Dark Ages.”Only 11.1 percent of board members at Premier League clubs are women, and two-thirds of the league’s teams have all-male boards, the report said. Significantly fewer women were attending games in England compared with other countries.“This is at a time when public attitudes toward sexism and misogyny are changing, and football needs to change too,” said Stacey Pope, an author of the report.That change felt possible as the Lionesses emerged victorious on Sunday from a match that was attended by a record number of fans — the crowd of more than 87,000 was the biggest for any European Championship final, men or women.Queen Elizabeth sent a message of congratulations to the team, writing that while the athletes’ performances deserved praise, “your success goes far beyond the trophy you have so deservedly earned.”“You have all set an example that will be an inspiration for girls and women today, and for future generations,” she wrote.Kevin Windsor, a graphic designer in London, watched the match with his 3-year-old daughter, who was wearing a princess gown. “My daughter doesn’t have to have an interest in football. She just has to know that it’s an option,” he wrote on Twitter. “That she can become anything she sets her little heart on. From a princess to a lioness. And everything in between.” More

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    Hello, World. It’s Been a While.

    On the pleasures and pains of joining up with other people after a long, quiet time in the Covid doldrums.I am traveling on a train, reading a book, glad to be alive.Reading a book while traveling on a train is my favorite thing to do in the world; the well-being derives from staring out the window as the scenery rushes past, knowing that if I drop my eyes a book will be there to catch them. This is as good as it gets. Or better.Today, the book is Rupert Everett’s “To the End of the World,” the actor’s characteristically waspish diary of the making of his directorial debut, “The Happy Prince,” a film in which he also cast himself in the lead role of Oscar Wilde. It is not yet 9 a.m., and I find myself alone in the rear carriage with “something sensational to read in the train.” I am not merely glad to be alive; I am jubilant.For obvious reasons, over the last couple of years there hasn’t been much opportunity to do my favorite thing in the world. Today I am doing it en route to London, where I am going to do my second favorite thing in the world: sit in a darkened room all day with strangers — and a few friends — watching old films and television programs.To mark the centenary of the birth of the pioneering British writer Nigel Kneale, the Picturehouse cinema in Crouch End is hosting a daylong celebration of his work. There will be screenings of shows like “The Quatermass Experiment: Contact Has Been Established” (1953) and “Murrain,” a rare episode of the little-seen television series “Against the Crowd” (1975). There will be panel discussions with experts from the British Film Institute and a reading of a “lost” radio script by Kneale. In something of a coup for the organizers, the actress Jane Asher has agreed be quizzed about her part in the folk-horror classic “The Stone Tape” (1972).I fully anticipate the sort of event where audience members shout “WOW!” when shown a comparative presentation of digitally upgraded 35-millimeter film stock. Not only am I jubilant, therefore; I am actively jubilating.The first fans of Arsenal Football Club to join the train do so at Sittingbourne. Six ruddy-faced men in red and white replica shirts settle themselves nearby, noisily opening cans of strong lager they pronounce to be palatable — no, not palatable, delightful! — though not in those exact terms. It is 9:08 a.m.As I get up to move seats, trying not to draw attention to myself, I recall that, as a writer, Nigel Kneale was fascinated by the tension between the individual and the crowd, a tension I feel squarely between my shoulder blades as I exit the carriage.The same thing happens at Rainham, the next stop down the line, and again I get up to see if I can find a quieter seat. Ever more Arsenal supporters join the train, bantering and shouting and proposing a morning toast to their team’s fortunes with Special Brew. (In a few hours’ time, Arsenal will play a football match against a rival team called Manchester United, hence the influx of “Gooners” this early in the day.)With all this commotion, I am finding it increasingly hard to focus on “To the End of the World” by Rupert Everett. “I love trains,” he writes on page 282. “Oscar is all about trains and absinthe.” I try adopting a Wildean attitude toward my fellow passengers. After all, what is Special Brew if not the absinthe of the masses?But when, at Chatham, I have to relocate for a fourth time, I do so petulantly. The little metal tray table in front of me bleats tinnily as I jab it back into place. I hasten from the scene muttering failed epigrams. When I plonk myself down again, two carriages along, I realize I have misplaced my glasses, without which I cannot read a word, and I feel too embarrassed to go back and look for them. This is a fugue of my favorite thing.Most discussions of whether it is better to travel or to arrive fail to take into account a third option, which is that perhaps it would have been better to stay at home. In common with many people, I have found it more difficult to return to the world than I had thought I would in the doldrums of 2021. Was everything always this tiring? Another epigram bubbles up: “What’s the point of going out? We’re just going to wind up back here anyway.” Thank you, Homer Simpson.I may not be able to read my book, but I can still gaze out of the window. Rochester Castle, with its 12th-century keep, glides past, and already there are children playing on the grounds. We cross Rainham Marshes and I spot scattered groups of bird-watchers who have been at it since dawn. Coronavirus remains rife; the economy is lurching out of control; the planet is on fire; there is war in Europe. As more travelers join the London service, some bound for the football, others to go shopping at Westfield Stratford, it occurs to me that no one on this train is ever going to return to normal, because normality isn’t where we left it. But who would blame us for trying?As if to confirm this unexpected epiphany of fellow feeling, a tap comes on my shoulder. I look up. Holding out my glasses to me is a man in an Arsenal shirt.Later, safe in the dark of the Crouch End Picturehouse, there will be a screening of “Quatermass and the Pit” (1967), the film adaptation of Kneale’s 1958 teleplay. The original version concludes with words from Professor Bernard Quatermass delivered amid the smoking ruins of the capital city: “Every war crisis, witch hunt, race riot and purge is a reminder and a warning. We are the Martians. If we cannot control the inheritance within us, this will be their second dead planet.”I’ve seen this film before. I go to the pub instead.Andy Miller More

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    Coming This Season: Pep Guardiola 3.0

    Manchester City will begin defense of its Premier League title with a team that doesn’t (exactly) look like its predecessors. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing.Two months on, the euphoria has not yet faded. A few days ago, with the rich promise of a new season drifting into view, Manchester City released “Together: Champions Again,” an official documentary detailing the thrilling, triumphant journey that culminated in Pep Guardiola’s team lifting yet another Premier League trophy last May.There are still drops of pleasure to be wrung from the happy memories, even as the thoughts of Manchester City’s fans start to drift to the delights to come. Saturday’s meeting with Liverpool in the Community Shield, the phony war that traditionally heralds the dawn of a new English season, offers the chance to see Erling Haaland in sky blue, a first glimpse of the player around whom the club’s future will be built.It is strange, then, that flourishing in that valley between the twin peaks of jubilation and anticipation, has been just a hint of melancholy. Guardiola has, every couple of weeks, had to pay tribute to a departing star: first Gabriel Jesus, then Raheem Sterling, and finally Aleksandar Zinchenko.“The nicest player I ever worked with,” Guardiola said of Jesus. “An explosion,” he said of Sterling. “An important player in the locker room,” he said of Zinchenko. The players have noticed it, too. “There has been a lot of change this year,” Kevin De Bruyne said recently. “It has been quite sad, because I had good relationships with the players who have gone.”Gabriel Jesus will do his scoring for Arsenal, not City, this season.Julio Cortez/Associated PressThese are not the sorts of departures that have become familiar to City in recent years. There was sorrow, of course, when Yaya Touré and Vincent Kompany left, and when David Silva followed, and when Sergio Agüero departed. These were players who would be commemorated, soon after, in statuary outside the stadium, or players who deserved to be.But their exits were natural, inevitable, predictable. The sun was setting on their careers; City, a club that has grown accustomed to the idea that tomorrow always offers more, could offset its sadness with the knowledge that they had given their all, that the team could only grow in their absence.Sterling, Jesus and Zinchenko, though, are different. None of them are ready to retire. None have outlived their usefulness. They have left, instead, because they feel like they can be more useful somewhere else, and they have done so in a steady stream. The Manchester City that takes the field this season will be distinct from the one depicted lifting the Premier League trophy, wreathed in smiles, in the documentary.That is not to say worse, of course. The truism — echoed by Haaland after he made his first appearance in preseason last weekend against Bayern Munich at Lambeau Field — that City has spent the last couple of years playing “without a striker” is not accurate, as Jesus would doubtless point out himself. But it has not had a striker of Haaland’s type, his profile, for some considerable time, and it has not had a striker of his quality since Agüero was at his peak. Haaland’s presence alone should make City more of a threat, not less.Erling Haaland: coming soon to a goal celebration near you.Justin Casterline/Getty ImagesBut it does not seem too much of a stretch to suggest that City will be different. The club might have identified Marc Cucurella, the Brighton left back, as the ideal successor to Zinchenko — a fairly straight swap, given that Guardiola chiefly deployed the Ukrainian as a left back — but Sterling’s substitute is Julián Álvarez, a young Argentine striker, rather than what might be termed a wide forward.To Guardiola, Jesus was the sort of player who could “press three defenders in 10 seconds,” and play across three positions. Haaland, it is safe to say, will be used rather differently. Likewise, Fernandinho, having chosen to spend the final years of his career in Brazil, has been replaced by Kalvin Phillips, a more direct sort of a midfield player.Quite what impact all of this has on the way City will play is not yet clear, of course. Guardiola has been plain that he expects his new arrivals to fold into what he has built; he will not be reconstructing his masterpiece, or redefining his philosophy, to suit them.He might have acknowledged that Haaland’s “movement and quality in the box” compels his team to “put as many balls as possible into the box,” but it is fair to say that he will not be reinventing himself as a long-ball manager, the sort who encourages his wingers to sling in crosses from all angles at a striker memorably described by the comedian Troy Hawke as a “Nordic meat shield.”“We’re going to adapt the quality that the players have to be involved in the way we play,” Guardiola said. “We are not going to change the way we play.” That may broadly be true, but at the same time it is impossible to imagine Guardiola not finessing his approach somewhat to reflect the range of characteristics in his squad.Kamil Krzaczynski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHaaland, certainly, will have to learn Guardiola’s ways of doing things, but it hardly seems a stretch to suggest that the manager will have to learn how to elicit the best from his forward, too. City’s press, for example, may require a slight recalibrating. The same is true for the way its attacking line rotates, and its preferred methods for building play.The outcome, doubtless, will be what it always is with Guardiola: a team that dominates possession, scores great floods of goals, and either wins or comes very close to winning almost every competition in which it is involved. The question, instead, lingers on how it chooses to get there.Guardiola has a somewhat checkered history with players regarded as pure No. 9s: He turned Robert Lewandowski into the finest exponent of the position on the planet, and had no little success with David Villa and Agüero, but struggled to dovetail with Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Samuel Eto’o.That he has approved the signing of Haaland — and to a lesser extent Álvarez, a player many at City suspect will prove something of a secret weapon this season — suggests Guardiola recognizes the need to fine-tune his style.Not because of some shortcoming — as he has said, City has done “pretty well” under his aegis, after all — but because he wonders if there might be a way for it to become even more impressive, even more devastating. This has been a summer of euphoria and anticipation at Manchester City, but it has also been a summer of change. That change has been made in the belief that what emerges will be different than what came before. Different, but better, too.Euro 2022: Almost Home NowEngland will face Germany in the final of Euro 2022 on Sunday in London, where they are already talking, yet again, about how football’s coming home. The Times will provide live coverage of the match at nytimes.com. To ensure you know what you’re talking about at your watch party, or so you can pretend to look smart if you really haven’t been paying attention, here’s some background reading from earlier in the tournamentPeople Get OlderMark Cuban has, it seems, started channeling Helen Lovejoy. Just as he did in March, and then again in April, Cuban used an interview with Men in Blazers this week to fret and to fluster about teenagers. Not their moral and spiritual fiber so much, admittedly, just how they consume professional sports content. But still: Won’t somebody please think of the children?Cuban’s theory is based on his realization that his 12-year-old son engages with sports only by devouring highlights on TikTok, that most transient of social networks. A few seconds of a dunk or a 3-pointer or a goal, then he moves — or is moved by the algorithm — on to whatever captures his fancy next.This, as far as Cuban is concerned, has dire consequences for the sports that produce those highlights, based on the assumption that we are accidentally breeding an entire generation of humans without an attention span. These young people will, he believes, never develop the ability to follow a game over the course of an hour, or an hour and a half, and thus it is incumbent on the sports to adapt to the demands of their new audience.He is not alone in this, of course. Luminaries as respected as Florentino Pérez and Andrea Agnelli have suggested more or less the same thing — though not based, presumably, on a sample consisting exclusively of a Cuban scion — and the same fear has come to permeate much of the news media, print and broadcast alike.Yeah, sure, but will this Manchester City fan still love cheese when he’s 25?Jeff Hanisch/USA Today Sports, via ReutersNow, given that we have all apparently decided that wealth is an accurate measure of wisdom, intelligence and virtue, turning billionaires into our new philosophers, deviation to this orthodoxy does not seem to be tolerated. There does, though, seem to be one apposite fact missing from this puzzle: the fact that people grow up.Children being restless and easily distracted is not a new thing. It is not a function of the social media age. There is a reason, for example, that “Tom and Jerry” was a five-minute cartoon in which animals hit each other with mallets, rather than an hourlong slow burn filmed in the style of a Nordic noir.It does not feel impossible that, perhaps, younger people have always struggled to pay attention to games in their entirety; that they have been inclined to dip in and out; that they have preferred, for example, to consume the relatively brief clips on “Match of the Day” or an equivalent, rather than settling in with a beer and a snack to watch a whole 90 minutes. It is just that now they can get those highlights on TikTok, rather than on linear television.There is a strange insecurity to the sports industry. It is, at the same time, a vast and overweening production, full of strut and swagger and self-importance, and yet convinced of its own impending demise. Cuban’s son will, like everyone else, get older. And as he does so, he and the rest of his generation will learn the delights of delayed gratification, to appreciate the finer arts of their chosen sports, to realize that the highlights are a gateway, not a replacement.Romance: Not DeadPablo Porciuncula/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAs Cristiano Ronaldo contemplates his next move in the 2D chess match he is playing with Manchester United, he could do worse than to take into consideration the most heartwarming — and among the most intriguing — transfer of the summer: Luis Suárez, the Uruguayan striker, going back to where it all began.Suárez, even at 35, had options after leaving Atlético Madrid this summer. He was linked with Aston Villa, and a reunion with his former Liverpool teammate Steven Gerrard. There were offers from Major League Soccer, where the Seattle Sounders held his discovery rights. He might have chosen to go to the Middle East, to Saudi Arabia or Qatar.Instead, Suárez’s head was turned by a sweeping, organic campaign from fans of Nacional, the team in his homeland that he left some 16 years ago, to take his journey full circle. There were, by all accounts, some 50 million tweets left on the hashtag #SuárezANacional. The club’s fan base printed and wore tens of thousands of masks of his face at a league game last month.Pablo Porciuncula/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOn Thursday, they had their reward.“All of the videos and messages we have received have been so moving, it really touched our hearts in this situation where we had to decide,” Suárez said after announcing his return to Montevideo. “It was impossible to turn down the chance to play for Nacional again.”Suárez is not an uncomplicated figure, and he has not always made it easy to admire him. But it is difficult not to see the romance in his decision to turn down far more lucrative, far more ego-soothing offers in favor of something more authentic. Humans like stories, and Suárez has chosen to complete his.Ronaldo does not appear ready to do that yet. At 37, his priority remains to play in the Champions League, to have one or two more chances to add another couple of honors to his extended résumé. Manchester United, the team that made him a star, cannot offer that, and so he does not want to be there any more.Nor can Sporting Lisbon, Ronaldo’s equivalent of Suárez’s Nacional: Ruben Amorim’s team is in the Champions League, at least, but it is a bit of a stretch to imagine it venturing far into the knockout rounds. That has left one of the best players of all time in a curious position. He needs one of Europe’s best teams to be sufficiently badly organized to sign him, but sufficiently well run to win the Champions League. That is not a story that will have a happy ending.CorrespondenceLast week’s newsletter drew two distinct strands of communication. One centered on the future or otherwise of headers, with various suggestions for how they might continue to be incorporated — or not — into soccer.“Maybe one compromise is limiting them to corners and free kicks into the box?” suggested Ajoy Vachher. “Clanging heads and hard-struck balls hitting heads would still happen, but much less frequently, and a critical part of the game would be preserved.”Many others went for a more comprehensive solution: Michael Valot, Mary Jo Berman and Tom Kalitkowski all suggested that some sort of “lightweight headgear” might allow the game to preserve heading while minimizing long-term risk. That is thoroughly sensible, of course, but I do wonder how culturally acceptable it would be to players and to fans.I also thought Tim Schum made a fascinating point about the relevance of the development of the ball itself. The consensus holds that, because modern balls are lighter, they pose less risk than the heavy, sodden, leather balls that players of previous generations were compelled to head as “an act of courage.”That has come with a risk, though. “With the modern ball has emerged the ability of artisans to ‘spin’ or shape the flighted ball toward or away from goalkeepers,” Tim wrote, something that may have served to ensure crossing’s ongoing prominence in the game.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe other theme, you will be unsurprised to learn, centered on language. Thanks, first of all, to Kevin Duncliffe, for pointing out that the word “soccer” remains “alive and well” not only in the United States, but Ireland, too.“In news media generally, soccer is the preferred term, and football is reserved for the Gaelic game,” he wrote. “In conversation, ‘football’ may refer to either sport and you have to pick it up from context. Meanwhile, here in the United States, I remain ever eager to point out that the term ‘soccer’ is neither American nor an abomination.”And thanks to the dozen or so Italians, or Americans of Italian extraction or with Italian links, who educated me on the etymology of the word calcio. Lisa Calevi, for example: “I must remind you that calcio comes from calciare, meaning to kick.” My Italian is passable, though a little rusty, but I will confess I did not know that, and I am grateful for the correction. More