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    Liverpool, Napoli and the Problem With Systems

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    As system clubs start to falter, the future seems to belong to the teams and coaches who are willing to be a little more flexible.There is no such thing as a 4-3-3. The same goes for all those pithy threads of numbers that are hard-wired into soccer’s vernacular, the communal, universal drop-down list of legitimate patterns in which a team might be arrayed: 3-5-2 and 4-2-3-1 and even the fabled, fading 4-4-2. They are familiar, reflexive. But none of them exist. Not really.The way a team lines up to start a game, for example, most likely will bear very little relation to what it looks like during it as players whirl around the field, engaged in what anyone who has not watched a lot of mid-table Premier League soccer might describe as a complex, instinctive ballet.Most teams will adopt one shape when blessed with the ball, and another without it. Increasingly, many will shift their approaches in the course of the game, responding to the lunges, the parries and the ripostes of their opponents.A team presented in a 4-3-3 on a graphic before kickoff might be playing a 3-5-2 while that image is still fresh in the memory. A coach might choose to drop a midfielder between the central defenders to control possession, or push the fullbacks daringly high, or draw a forward a little deeper. The nominal 4-3-3 might, if it all comes off, be more accurately denoted as a 3-1-4-1-1. Sort of. Maybe.And besides, every manager will have a different sense of what each of those formations means. As Thiago Motta, the Bologna coach, has said: a 3-5-2 can be a front-foot, adventurous sort of a system, and a 4-3-3 a cautious, defensive one. How the players are arranged does not, in his view, say very much at all about their intentions.Luciano Spalleti’s aversion to a system is working just fine at Napoli.Armando Babani/EPA, via ShutterstockNone of that is to say that formations are completely meaningless. As a rule, managers tend to scoff at the very mention of them. They assume that hearing any value ascribed to the idea of “formation” is a surefire sign that they are in the helpless company of a slow-witted civilian, or perhaps a child.They are, though, useful shorthands: broad-brush, big-picture guidelines that fans and opponents can use to try to find a pattern in what can look — at first — like unfettered chaos. They are a way of establishing what you think a team might look like once it takes the field, what it might be trying to do, how it might be attempting to win.Or, at least, that is what formations have always been. It may not last. There is a chance, now, that soccer’s great leap forward will render all of those old, comfortable ideas almost entirely moribund.The three decades on either side of the Millennium — the period, in soccer terms, that starts with Arrigo Sacchi’s A.C. Milan and ends with Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City — will, in time, be remembered as the sport’s age of the system, the first time its most coveted talents, its defining figures, have been not players but coaches.On the surface, there may be scant similarity between the tiki-taka that turned Barcelona into the finest club in history and the sturm-und-drang of the energy-drink infused, heavy-metal inflected German pressing game.Underneath, though, they share two crucial characteristics. They are both precisely, almost militaristically choreographed, players moving by rote and by edict in preordained patterns learned and honed in training. And they both rely, essentially, on a conception of soccer as a game defined less by the position of the ball and more by the occupation and creation of space.Fernando Diniz, the coach of the Brazilian side Fluminense, rejects the idea of rigid positions.Sergio Moraes/ReutersSoccer’s history, though, is a process of call and response, of action and reaction. One innovation holds sway for a while — the process happens increasingly quickly — before the competition decodes it and either counteracts or adopts it. Both have the same, blunting effect.And there are, now, the first glimmers of what might follow on the horizon. Across Europe, the system teams are starting to falter. The most obvious case is Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool, struggling not just with a physical and mental fatigue but a philosophical one, too. Its rivals and peers are now inoculated to its dangers.But there are others: Jesse Marsch’s travails as the manager at Leeds United can be traced in some way to his refusal to bend from what might broadly, and only moderately pompously, be called the “Red Bull School.” Barcelona, its characteristic style now widely copied across the continent, is scratching around with limited success for some new edge. Even Manchester City, where suffering is always relative, seems less imperious than once it did.The future, instead, seems to belong to the teams and coaches who are willing to be a little more flexible and see their role as providing a platform on which their players might extemporize.Real Madrid, of course, has always had that approach, choosing to control specific moments in games rather than the game itself, but it has done so with the rather significant advantage of possessing many of the finest players on earth.Pep Guardiola has some thoughts.Filip Singer/EPA, via ShutterstockThat others, in less rarefied climes, have started to follow that model is much more instructive. Luciano Spalletti’s Napoli, the most captivating team in Europe, is barreling toward the Serie A title thanks to a free-form, virtuosic style that does not deploy the likes of Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and Victor Osimhen as puppets but encourages them to think, to interpret, for themselves.Fernando Diniz, the coach of the Brazilian side Fluminense, has even given it a name: the “apositional style,” placing it in direct (but perhaps not intentional) conflict with the “positional play” that Guardiola and his teams have perfected.Diniz, like Spalletti, does not believe in assigning his players specific positions or roles, but in allowing them to interchange at will, to respond to the exigencies of the game. He is not concerned with the control of specific areas of the field. The only zone that matters to him, and to his team, is the one near the ball.In his eyes, soccer is not a game defined by the occupation of space. It is centered, instead, on the ball: As long as his players are close to it, what theoretical position they play does not matter in the slightest. They do not need to cleave to a specific formation, to a string of numbers coded into their heads.Instead, they are free to go where they wish, where their judgment tells them. If it makes it all but impossible to present a shorthand of how the team plays, then so much the better. After all, systems are designed by coaches with the express purpose of stripping the game of as much spontaneity as possible. Managers want, understandably, to control what a player does in any given circumstance. They crave predictability. They yearn for it.In that environment, it is only natural that unpredictability becomes an edge.Split VoteAlexia Putellas, world player of (some of) the year.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAlexia Putellas’s year effectively ended last July 5, the day she felt a click in one of her knees during a small-sided training game. A few hours later, she was in the King Edward VII hospital in London, attempting to absorb the news that she had ruptured an anterior cruciate ligament with the European Championship only days away. She would miss the tournament, and at that stage her participation in this summer’s Women’s World Cup was in doubt, too.Putellas is, thankfully, making excellent progress. Her recuperation has gone sufficiently well that she is not only running again, but engaging in what everyone in soccer refers to as “ball work”: the delicate process of ensuring that the repaired connections in her knee can handle the sudden, jarring twists and turns that games will likely demand. Barring any major setbacks, Putellas will feature for Spain at the World Cup that opens in July, and the tournament will be all the better for it.It was hard, though, not to be struck by her election as the best female player on the planet at FIFA’s flashy awards show Monday night in Paris. It would be unfair to suggest that Putellas was an undeserving winner. She is an outstanding player, after all. But at the same time, she had played only half the year. She did not feature in the Euros, the year’s pre-eminent women’s tournament. Her club team, Barcelona, lost the final of the Champions League.The immediate suspicion, where any FIFA award is concerned, is that her victory is a testament to the power of reputation. Both the men’s and the women’s prizes, after all, have had a habit of reverting to the default: The national team coaches and captains, and the international media representatives, generally favor whoever is the most famous, the most high-profile, the safest choice.In the case of Putellas, though, it is likely to be something else. The European champions, England, did not have a single standout player, though a case could be made for Beth Mead, the leading scorer, or Leah Williamson, the captain. Keira Walsh of England was the tournament’s best player, but she is a defensive midfielder, and defensive midfielders do not win awards.Likewise, Lyon’s run to the Champions League title was not inspired by a single individual, as it had been when the goals of Ada Hegerberg powered it to glory in 2019.This year’s field, in other words, was both broad and deep. In that context, both what Putellas achieved — Spanish champion, leading scorer in the Champions League — and what she could not played in her favor: The perception that Spain’s bid for the European Championship fell apart in her absence was supporting evidence for her legitimacy.More Like David AlibiThere comes a point, really, where everyone involved should take a look at their behavior and feel their cheeks flush with shame. There is a level of pettiness that is unavoidable in a rivalry as virulent and intractable as the one shared by Real Madrid and Barcelona. But then there is the controversy that engulfed David Alaba this week, which makes all concerned look like children.Alaba, the Real Madrid defender, is also the captain of the Austrian men’s national team. As such, he was eligible to cast a vote for The Best Men’s Player at FIFA’s sparkling celebration of self-importance. He picked, not unreasonably, Lionel Messi, as did an overwhelming majority of the appointed electorate. (A note, here, for the captain of Gabon and the coach of Botswana, who watched Messi inspire Argentina to the World Cup title and both declared Julián Álvarez the real star of the show.)Only Alaba, though, subsequently had to explain his decision. A Real Madrid player not selecting Karim Benzema, you see, was considered unacceptable not only by Madrid fans on social media but by several Madrid-based news outlets. That he would instead throw his weight behind Messi, so indelibly linked with Barcelona, was beyond the pale.Alaba, to his credit, indulged the nonsense, explaining that the Austrian team voted as a collective and that the majority of the players’ council had favored Messi. He wanted to make it plain that he considered Benzema the “best forward in the world.” Most impressively, he did this all without once mentioning how stupid the whole debate was, or noting that encouraging players to vote politically renders the concept of the award itself completely meaningless.Alaba was perfectly entitled to vote for Messi, whether in consultation with his teammates or not. Benzema would have understood that instantly. He would have been no more offended by Alaba’s selection than he would have been at the sight of France’s captain, Hugo Lloris, and coach, Didier Deschamps, not voting for him either. He is, after all, a grown-up. It is a shame that so many of those commenting appear not to be. 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      Manchester City Beats Real Madrid in Champions League Semifinal

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      Manchester City had its way with Real Madrid — sort of. In the game’s aftermath, it was hard to shake the feeling that things had gone the other way.MANCHESTER, England — First thing Wednesday morning, Pep Guardiola’s staff will deliver to the Manchester City manager a meticulously annotated report of his team’s Champions League semifinal against Real Madrid. At roughly the same time, Carlo Ancelotti, his counterpart in the Spanish capital, will receive something very similar.Those dossiers will contain brief snatches of video, each highlighting some key tactical detail. There will be photos, too, offering a snapshot of a scarcely perceptible flaw in a player’s positioning or an expanse of the field left exposed or a darting run left unconsummated. There will, perhaps, be giant arrows in some lurid shade. There will certainly be reams of statistics.Guardiola and Ancelotti will settle down and comb through them, panning for whatever seam of wisdom they might find, mining deep into the detail in the hope of finding some kernel, some insight that might prove the difference when they play again next week. And as they do it, they will know, deep down, that it is all absolutely, fundamentally, unavoidably pointless.There is no hidden explanation, buried deep in a screed of numbers or encoded in high resolution pixels, for how Manchester City managed to beat Real Madrid yet ended the evening feeling like it had lost. Or for how it finished with four goals and the sensation that it should have had half a dozen more, or how it landed a succession of knockout blows only to find its opponent still standing there, smiling, complaining only of the mildest headache.Pep Guardiola had plenty of reason for concern during a win in which his team failed to capitalize on several opportunities.Catherine Ivill/Getty ImagesThe raw numbers of the game are not a magic eye puzzle; they are barely even a Rorschach test. No matter how long and hard you stare at them, they will not suddenly become an image, clear and sharp, of something that bears analysis and interpretation.They will not tell Guardiola how his team could be so obviously, so vastly superior by every available metric and in every conceivable way — slicker in possession and more inventive and creative and youthful and dynamic — and yet wholly incapable of shaking Madrid from its tail.And they will not enlighten Ancelotti as to how his team, somehow, remains alive and fighting in this semifinal, with a chance over 90 minutes in front of its own fans, baying and roaring, to defy all human logic and make the Champions League final. They will certainly not tell him how Real Madrid manages to keep doing this, over and over again, seeming to draw strength as it comes ever closer to the edge, continually finding the will and the wit to conjure its curious, self-perpetuating magic.Guardiola himself had acknowledged that before the game, half in jest, suggesting that there was not a vast amount of point in conducting the usual, instinctive analysis of Real Madrid because Ancelotti’s team is, by its very nature, so chimerical. He meant it, most likely, as a reflection on the virtuosity of Karim Benzema and Luka Modric, the ability of some of the finest players of their generation to bend a game to their will, but it sounded just a little like he was saying Real Madrid does not make sense.At times it felt like things could be far worse for Thibaut Courtois and Real Madrid, but several close calls ended up missing.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHe is, of course, too respectful — even of Real Madrid, the club that stood as his archenemy for the first four decades of his career — to say that out loud, but his experience at the Etihad would not have contradicted him.Real was beaten within 10 minutes: two goals down, ruthlessly exposed, looking suddenly like the expensive collection of gifted but ill-matched individuals that all right-thinking people dismissed them as about four Champions League titles ago. David Alaba, his entire career spent among the elite, appeared to have been replaced by some callow ingénue. Toni Kroos appeared to age several decades with every passing minute.And then, from nowhere, Ferland Mendy slung in a cross, the sort that comes more in hope than expectation, and Benzema planted his foot and shifted his weight and scored, even though it was not immediately clear whether both the human body and the laws of physics are designed to work like that.No matter. City was still slicing Madrid apart at will. Riyad Mahrez hit the post. Phil Foden had one cleared off the line. A beat later, Foden converted an artful, clipped cross to restore City’s cushion, to relieve the tension swaddling the Etihad.The ball had come from the foot of Fernandinho, a creaking central midfielder reborn for the evening — in extenuating circumstances — as a marauding fullback. His rejuvenation lasted two minutes. Guardiola was still celebrating when Vinicius slipped past his makeshift opponent, sprinted half the length of the field, and slipped the ball past Éderson.Bernardo Silva and City had their moments to celebrate on Tuesday, but there were fewer of them than there could have been.Lee Smith/Action Images Via ReutersCity came again, Bernardo Silva dispensing with all nuance and intricacy and simply kicking the ball, as hard as he could, his shot flashing past Thibaut Courtois. Benzema turned away, grinning ruefully, as though he could not quite believe the holes from which he has to retrieve his teammates.On anyone else, it might have looked like an admission of defeat, a final acquiescence to fate. But it is Real Madrid, and it is Benzema, and it is the Champions League, so obviously what happened was that Aymeric Laporte inadvertently — but inarguably — handled the ball in his own penalty area, and Benzema stood up and chipped a shot, languidly and confidently, straight down the middle of Éderson’s goal.Guardiola sat on an icebox in the technical area, his fingers steepling against his forehead, in horrified awe, as if trying to impose some reason on it all. It is a thankless task. This game did not make sense. Its outcome, the one that meant Real Madrid left Manchester with something more concrete than hope, with 90 minutes in front of a baying, willing Bernabeu between Ancelotti’s players and another Champions League final, did not make sense.There is no data point, no vignette, no piece of analysis that will adequately explain how Manchester City could beat Ancelotti’s team so comprehensively and yet leave with the tie poised so delicately. Real Madrid does not make sense, not in the Champions League, and all you can do is allow yourself to be washed away by it. More

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      The End of the Transfer Fee

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      With the vast majority of teams no longer able to pay stratospheric transfer fees, elite players are recalculating risk and reward on their terms.The two transfers that drew all the oxygen from the summer of 2021 were both monuments to the past.Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have dominated their sport for a generation. That they are both, now, approaching their autumns did not matter; as soon as the chance to to sign them arose, neither Paris St.-Germain nor Manchester United paused for thought. Any doubt at all about what they might do, how they might fit, was assuaged by what they had done.Amid all of the noise generated by those two moves — and two of the greatest players of all time changing clubs in the space of a few weeks will generate a lot of noise — another transfer, one that might come to be seen, in time, as a harbinger, rather faded into the background.That David Alaba had always wanted to play in Spain had long been an open secret. He had, over the course of 12 years at Bayern Munich, won everything there was to win: a couple of Champions Leagues, fistfuls of German titles, a Club World Cup or two. He was part of a Bayern team that won the domestic and international treble. Twice.It was at Bayern where Alaba became, for a time, the best left back on the planet. And when that was not enough, it was at Bayern where he became one of the world’s best central defenders, too. He was appointed captain of Austria’s national team. And, throughout, he was paid beyond handsomely to do it all, by a club that prides itself on the bond it establishes with its players.But Alaba harbored a desire, at some point in his career, to test himself at one of Spain’s twin titans, Real Madrid or Barcelona. Though it is slightly awkward to acknowledge it, now, it was never entirely clear if he had strong feelings on which he would prefer. By late 2020, though, it had become obvious he felt the time was right.Alaba and his representatives had been trying to agree to a new contract with Bayern for some time; his last deal in Bavaria was set to expire in the summer of 2021 — when he would be 29 — and the club wanted to tie him down for the remainder of his peak years. Negotiations, though, were achingly slow. Bayern felt Alaba’s salary demands were too high. They started to suspect there was a reason for that. In October, the club unilaterally withdrew from the talks. Alaba, one of Bayern’s crown jewels, would walk for nothing.In April 2021, he did just that. Despite interest from at least three Premier League teams, Alaba signed a five-year contract with Real Madrid. Reports in Germany at the time suggested it would be worth far more than Bayern had been willing to pay him: $75 million in total, by some estimates. He also stood to earn somewhere in the region of $25 million as a golden handshake.David Alaba: Madrid on his mind.Susana Vera/ReutersWhat Alaba had done, in an American context, was not especially unusual. He had, in effect, used free agency as a way of maximizing the value of what would be, in all likelihood, the most lucrative contract of his career. It was what LeBron James did first to join the Miami Heat, and then to sign for the Los Angeles Lakers. Kevin Durant did it. Albert Pujols did it. Everyone does it.In soccer, though, a star of Alaba’s caliber running a contract down has always been — if not quite a unicorn — the exception, rather than the rule.Quite why that pattern has held is open to interpretation. Players tend to sign long-term contracts, and clubs tend to want them to do so. It gives both sides security, after all. The player knows that their earning power is not dependent on a poorly-timed, lightning-strike injury. The club does not have to worry, every couple of years, about being held over a barrel by an agent.But that is not the only reason. Contract negotiations are rarely, despite appearances, about money; or, rather, they are always about money, just not about money as an end in itself. They are, invariably, about status. A player’s salary is a measure of how much they are appreciated by their club in relation to their teammates, and their peers. The same logic can be applied to the length of their contract. The longer the team will pay you, the more you must mean to it.The corollary to all of that is, of course, that teams tend not to want players to reach the end of their contracts. As a rule, should a valuable player enter the last 18 months — or two years, in some cases — of a deal and prove reluctant to commit to a new contract, the club will seek to sell. Put crudely, allowing a player to run down their contract is, in effect, ceding the economic initiative to the asset, rather than the investor.And yet, increasingly, across European soccer, that is precisely what is happening. Alaba, it seems, may have opened the floodgates. At P.S.G., Kylian Mbappé, the standard-bearer for the sport’s first post-Messi, post-Ronaldo generation, has made it so clear that he wants to leave for Real Madrid on a free transfer in six months that he has even written a comic book on the subject. Reports flutter around Europe every few weeks that a deal has even been agreed.Kylian Mbappé has made no secret of his desire to run out his P.S.G. contract and move to Real Madrid.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAt Chelsea, both Antonio Rüdiger and Andreas Christensen are out of contract soon and both have delayed signing new deals; Real Madrid has been mentioned as a suitor for the former, too.The saga over Paul Pogba’s contract at Manchester United seems to have been dragging on for so long that it might as well be mentioned in the cave paintings of Lascaux. His deal, finally — for the good of humanity — expires in the summer, too. It is perhaps less surprising that there does not seem to be any great rush to alter that particular situation.Mohamed Salah, meanwhile, has a little longer to run on his deal at Liverpool. Like Sadio Mané and Roberto Firmino, Salah is committed to Anfield until 2023. But talks over a new contract have reached an impasse. He does not seem especially fazed by that fact. It is almost as if he knows that if a new contract does not materialize, he will be able to name his price to take his talents elsewhere.It is tempting to assume that the shift can be attributed, solely, to money, too. All of these players — even Christensen, the youngest of all of those mentioned — have earned enough during their careers to make sure their grandchildren never have to worry about income.They have sufficient financial security to tolerate the small risk that they will pick up an injury before they can land their windfall. The reward is worth it, after all: As Alaba found, a club that has not had to pay a transfer fee can be much more generous with its welcome package.That is not, though, the only factor. The financial landscape of European soccer has changed markedly over the last two years, a consequence not only of the coronavirus pandemic, but of the chronic mismanagement of the game’s elite teams during the wild, hedonistic years that preceded it.The vast majority of Europe’s major teams can no longer afford to pay stratospheric transfer fees, not if they can avoid it.It was telling that, Liverpool’s capture of Luis Díaz apart, the January trading period was characterized by clubs desperately trying to trim their expenses: Barcelona jettisoned Philippe Coutinho and tried to shift Ousmane Dembélé elsewhere; Arsenal offloaded its erstwhile captain, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, to Barcelona on a vastly reduced salary; even Juventus, which signed Dusan Vlahovic from Fiorentina, freed up space by handing off two players to Tottenham and, remarkably, Aaron Ramsey to the Scottish champion, Rangers.Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang’s transfer fee suited Barcelona’s budget perfectly: zero.Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNone of these clubs can afford to hand out the sort of sums that it would take to pry a player from the few of their peers that have weathered the storm well: the likes of P.S.G., Bayern and the vast majority of teams in the cash-soaked, bulletproof Premier League.Real Madrid, for example, might be able to pay Rüdiger $60 million over four years, plus a handsome arrival bonus (not least because that cost is absorbed over the length of his contract when it is entered onto the club’s books). It could not, though, pay him $60 million over four years, a handsome arrival bonus and give Chelsea $60 million, too.Even if it could, though, there is no reason to believe Chelsea would accept such an offer. The European champions are bankrolled by a Russian oligarch. There is no price point at which economic logic kicks in, because — like Manchester City and P.S.G. — Chelsea, for all that it attempts to be self-sufficient, does so out of inclination, not out of necessity. It does not have to be subject to economic logic if it does not want to be.For a player at any of those clubs that has emerged unscathed from the last couple of years to have access to a full suite of options on the market is, then, to reach the end of their contract, or near enough for their current team to blink. Their employers cannot be pushed, so they have to jump.This is, perhaps, the conclusion soccer has been waiting a quarter of a century to see. Twenty-five years ago, the Bosman ruling turned the sport on its head, enshrining in European law for the first time the idea that a player, when their contract was up, was in complete control of their destiny.That has been the case for more than a generation, but it is only now that the first few players seem to be breaking from tradition, exploring the full range of possibilities unleashed by that case.For the overwhelming majority of the rest, of course, that will not be possible: The young, the hopeful, the unsettled and the unwanted will all still have a price, just as they have always done. Some teams will have to sell. Others will be happy to buy.For the elite few, though, what was once the security of a long-term contract might soon come to be seen as restriction. Rocco Commisso, the outspoken owner of Fiorentina, had it right when he reflected on his club’s being forced to sell Vlahovic, its prize possession, to Juventus, its loathed rival: The player and his agents, Commisso said, had it in their minds from the start to run down the player’s contract, and to keep all the rewards for themselves.The age of free agency may now be upon us. It might, in time, come to be named the Alaba Model, in honor of the quiet transfer in the noisy summer of 2021 that started it all, the deal that offered a glimpse of the future while everyone was dawdling in the past.Cutting Out the Middle TierDele Alli, who might get to do more than warm up once he joins Everton.Peter Powell/ReutersJanuary had been a month of slumber, right until those last couple of days. It was only when Europe’s transfer deadline loomed that everyone suddenly sprang into action. Everton did the most Everton thing imaginable, signing two good players — Dele Alli and Donny van de Beek — who play in much the same position, therefore condemning at least one of them to failure.Tottenham, too, conformed to type, shipping out Tanguy Ndombélé and Giovani Lo Celso, as well as Alli, only to replace them with Dejan Kulusevski and Rodrigo Bentancur, leaving Antonio Conte with a squad roughly exactly as good as the one he had before all that whirlwind activity, only $50 million lighter.Much more uplifting, of course, was the news of Christian Eriksen’s signing with Brentford. Eriksen, who will turn 30 on Feb. 14, has not played in seven months, not since he collapsed to the turf and went into cardiac arrest while playing for Denmark at the Euros last summer. His return, then, was different from the money-driven moves and hard-feelings exits as friends, rivals, former clubs and fans lined up to wish him well.But it is worth pausing on another deal, too, one that attracted a little less hullabaloo: Manchester City’s acquisition of Julian Alvárez, a 22-year-old forward, from the Argentine club River Plate. Quite what City expects from Alvárez is not entirely clear: Some within the club’s hierarchy see him as a potential replacement for Sergio Agüero; others, it seems, feel he may spend time at City’s network of clubs before arriving in England.Either way, his arrival — as well as that of the 17-year-old wing Zalan Vancsa — illustrates the next phase in City’s attempts to reshape soccer’s established order in its favor. The transfer market, ordinarily, functions as a pyramid. Players move up the tiers at ever increasing cost; those at the top pay a premium to avoid risk.Is Julián Álvarez Manchester City’s next big thing?Natacha Pisarenko/Associated PressIn the ordinary run of things, then, Alvárez might have moved from River Plate to — say — Benfica. Benfica would pay $20 million: a large bet, of course, but not an astronomical one. If he succeeded, then perhaps he would move to Atlético Madrid for $50 million, the price having risen because Atlético could be more certain that he would be a success.Only after he had passed that step would a team of City’s profile — one expecting to win the Premier League, and hoping to lift the Champions League, too — step in and pay $80 million or more for a player it could almost guarantee had the quality to contribute.It is, of course, in City’s interests to short-circuit that process, to have a scouting process so refined and so sophisticated that it can tell who will succeed and who will not without being forced to pay Roma and Atlético and all the other denizens of soccer’s (financial) second tier to find out. It is to the club’s credit if that is the case.Whether it is in the game’s interests is less clear. Money trickling down through the transfer market is the closest thing soccer has to a solidarity mechanism. Flipping players has long allowed countless clubs — Lyon and Porto and Sevilla and Borussia Dortmund among them — to compete despite massive financial disparities.Clearly, there is a sense among the elite that such an approach does not work for them (and, let’s be clear: it doesn’t). In their eyes, the risk is now worth the potential reward. True, City may not have a use, in the long run, for either Alvárez or Vancsa. In that case, they will be sold. And the profit — and there will, in all likelihood, be a profit — will not be banked by a club in desperate need of it, but by one of the richest teams on the planet. More

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      Georginio Wijnaldum and the Collective Toxic

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      No one can compare themselves to Simone Biles, but Wijnaldum’s exit from Liverpool carried many of the same themes.This is not a comparison, because there is no comparison. Nobody, really, can understand what it is like to be Simone Biles. There have, of course, been athletes burdened with the same sort of level of superhuman expectation, their personhood erased in the transcendence to icon, turned into the face of a sport or an avatar for a generation or a standard-bearer for a nation, but they number barely a handful.And none of them have been in Biles’s precise circumstances. None of them — not Michael Phelps or Michael Jordan or Lionel Messi or whoever — know what it is like to be Simone Biles, at her age, in her mind, with her talent, at her level, in her sport, with her background, in this moment and this culture, with all of those things combined.Nobody else has been through what she has been through. Nobody else is qualified to tell her what path to take, because nobody has ever taken that path. Her experience has been unique; it is hers and hers alone. There is a glory in that, but there is also, perhaps, a shadow of bleakness.Georginio Wijnaldum cannot be (and, remember, is not being) compared to Biles. He is an elite athlete, too, of course. He will know — certainly more than most of us — a little of the sacrifices she has had to make and the demands she has had to meet and the devotion she has had to show to reach the pinnacle of her sport.But there is, of course, no comparison at all. Wijnaldum is a fine midfielder, a Premier League and Champions League winner and a sometime captain of his country, but it would be a bit of a stretch to suggest he has redefined soccer itself, or conjured a whole new vision of the sport from his own imagination, or redrawn the boundaries of what we think is possible.He has never had to endure the pressure of competing in an individual sport, or one that is entirely reliant on his own individual performance. If Wijnaldum made a mistake, a teammate might be there to bail him out, or he might get a chance to rectify it a few minutes later, or make up for it the following week.Biles has none of those safety nets. Even the slightest misstep might mean the difference between gold and silver, gold and nowhere, for her and her teammates. There is no second half, no return fixture, no long slog of a league season. There is only, every four years, perfection or failure, here and now.Biles and Wijnaldum are not alike. There is no comparison. But, for one fleeting moment, it may be worth considering their stories in conjunction.This week, as you will have noticed, Biles withdrew (as of this writing) from two of her Olympic finals. She did so, she said, to prioritize her mental health. She had been feeling, as she had alluded to on Instagram, as though she had “the weight of the world on her shoulders” at times.“This Olympic Games I wanted it to be for myself but I came in and I felt like I was still doing it for other people,” she said. “It hurts my heart that doing what I love has been kind of taken away from me to please other people.”“This Olympic Games I wanted it to be for myself but I came in and I felt like I was still doing it for other people,” Simone Biles said after she pulled out of the competition. Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesIn the general tumult of the Olympics, it would have been easy to miss Wijnaldum’s intervention. This summer, he left Liverpool for Paris St.-Germain. His contract had expired; conversations with the club’s ownership had foundered for several months, the two parties unable to find common ground over how much, and for how long, a player of his age should be paid. His last appearance for his former team, at Anfield in May, was very clearly a goodbye: there was a guard of honor, and a special presentation.This week, Wijnaldum attempted to provide a little bit of context as to why he had left a team he had said publicly he would have been happy to remain at for years to come. He seemed to suggest that ownership did not “love” or “appreciate” him as much as it might have done. But he also mentioned the role played by social media.“On social media, if we lost, I was the one who got the blame,” he said. He felt it was heightened during his contract standoff — “when it went bad, I was the player they blamed, that I wanted to leave” — and never spread to fans in the stadium, but he acknowledged that its roots were deeper. “Basically in the last two seasons I had it a few times,” he said.The reaction was, broadly, dismissive: it was assumed that Wijnaldum was either making excuses, or engaging in a little light, perfectly healthy whataboutery to make a decision that was, likely, far more practical (he wanted a longer contract than Liverpool was prepared to offer, and therefore he left) seem more palatable.And yet, in the context of Biles, it is worth taking Wijnaldum at his word. For all the differences between their situations, their worlds, though, their stories echo — however dimly — each other.Athletes of all stripes exist and perform under pressure: from themselves, from their coaches, from their teams and their teammates, from their fans, from their sponsors. That has always been the case; they become adept, far more so than most of us could countenance, at both functioning and thriving in that environment.What has changed, now, is the scale of that pressure: not just its height, but its breadth. Biles came into Tokyo as the designated “face of the Games,” the star of the United States team, the greatest gymnast in history. NBC’s promotional material for the Olympics ran that, to her, “certain laws do not apply, like gravity.”It would be easy — and not inaccurate — to point the finger of blame at the news media for indulging in that sort of hype, for placing that much expectation on a 24-year-old woman, for exposing her to an intolerable level of pressure. It would be no less valid to suggest that the news media had a role to play in turning Wijnaldum’s contract dispute into a source of consternation among some sections of Liverpool’s support.Wijnaldum, who played his final game for Liverpool in May, noted a stark contrast between how he was treated online versus how he was treated in person. Phil Noble/Agence France-Presse, via Pool/Afp Via Getty ImagesBut to do so would be to ignore a change in the media landscape that, in almost every other context, has been determined to be wholesale and revolutionary. Wijnaldum was keen to stress that there was a difference between how he was treated online and in person; the former turned on him far more quickly, far more vociferously, than the latter ever did.Wijnaldum is not an athlete on the same level as Biles. His journey is not parallel to hers, in a million different ways. Their experiences are wildly different. But like her, his career is played out on social media: his every performance scrutinized and dissected, his every shortcoming highlighted, his every failure pounced upon. He is told what is expected, and he is told, rightly or wrongly, when he does not live up to it.It is easy, when discussing an athlete on social media, to assume that they do not hear: that their feeds are managed by agencies — “post something like” — or to believe, in some way, that the spoils of their success, either the money or the fame, inure them to basic human emotion.But they do hear, and they do see, and they do feel. Those insults cut through. Those demands are noticed. Those expectations — not of the sponsors or the coaches or the journalists alone, but of all of us — have a weight. How much that played a role in Biles’ need to take some time and space only she will know, and she is under no compunction to share, but the swirling maelstrom in which she is expected to live her life does not exert some influence. If Wijnaldum is aware of it, it is hard to believe Biles is not.There has, in the days that followed Biles’ initial decision to withdraw, been what she has described as an “outpouring” of support. Her example will, hopefully, make it easier not only for athletes to discuss their mental well-being, but to know where to draw their own lines.But they are not the only ones who need to heed her lesson. They are not the only ones who need to think about the mental health of the stars we have made, the icons we have cast. It is for all of us, too, to remember that pressure does not just come from within. It is exerted, too, all those thousands of comments building their own gravity, their own force, one that is felt by the good and the great alike.Trading UpDavid Alaba showed he can do it all for Austria’s national team and for Bayern Munich. With Real Madrid, he may be asked to do it all, all by himself. Pool photo by Justin Setterfield/EPA, via ShutterstockDavid Alaba can do pretty much everything. He has, for some time, been one of the world’s finest left backs. In his last couple of seasons at Bayern Munich, he has emerged as one of the best central defenders on the planet, too. That’s some going, given that he would also get a game in midfield for pretty much every team in Europe.All of which will come in useful at Real Madrid, where the current plan appears to be to ask the 29-year-old to play in all three positions simultaneously.That is not quite fair. Real has two left backs, in Ferland Mendy and Marcelo, though the latter is in the (late) autumn of his (illustrious) career. It has a midfield — Casemiro, Luka Modric, Toni Kroos — that is not so much settled as petrified. Alaba would be helpful in both roles, but it is in central defense that the need is greatest, so it is in central defense that he must play.It is a crisis of Real’s own making. First, it forgot to tell Sergio Ramos its contract offer had a best-before date, resulting in him joining Paris St.-Germain on a free transfer. And then this week, it agreed to sell Raphael Varane to Manchester United for $60 million. That pair has been Madrid’s bedrock for a decade. In their absence, Alaba is going to have his work cut out.Quite what lies behind Real’s thinking is difficult to parse — though the only cogent logic is that it is financial — but, either way, it is hard to make the case that the team will be stronger this season than it was last. Barcelona is only in slightly better shape, and that is presuming that Lionel Messi does, in fact, sign a new contract, and the club finds some way to register its four new signings without contravening La Liga’s rules.All of which suggests that, for the first time since the turn of the century, there is a genuine power vacuum at the top of La Liga. Atlético Madrid, the reigning champion, should have a chance to retain its title. And Sevilla, for so long the best of Spain’s rest, may finally scent a once-in-a-generation opportunity.It has had to trade this summer, too, as it does every year: selling the winger Bryan Gil to Tottenham and — though the deal is not yet complete — the defender Jules Koundé to Chelsea. Koundé, in particular, would be a loss: a player of prodigious talent and stratospheric ceiling.But that is more than offset by what Sevilla has been able to wrangle in return. From Spurs, the club elicited not only $24 million, but the playmaker Erik Lamela. Chelsea is, reportedly, prepared to offer cash and the France defender Kurt Zouma to get its hands on Koundé.Neither will be mourned, particularly, by fans of their previous teams. Both have long since faded in English eyes. But to Sevilla, they represent a class of player the club cannot usually attract. Lamela, plagued by injury, managed 35 games for Spurs last season; Zouma featured 36 times for Chelsea.These are not high-risk, high-reward gambles. They are not hidden gems being asked to step up a level. They are seasoned professionals, able to command regular game-time at one of Europe’s biggest teams — and Spurs — and who can be expected to slot straight in to Julen Lopetegui’s side.They will join a squad that already contains Diego Carlos, Papu Gómez, Lucas Ocampos and Ivan Rakitic. For years, victory for Sevilla has been reinventing itself every summer, searching for the next big thing to sell. Now, for the first time in a long time, its team has a very different profile: one built, it would seem, not with an eye on tomorrow but with all of its focus on today.CorrespondenceGood news for those readers who feel this newsletter does not scratch their Major League Soccer itch: you are not alone. Far from it, in fact.William Ireland goes out to bat for Liga MX — “the best North American League, and one of the ten or twelve best leagues in the world” — while Steve Iskra nominates Australia’s A-League. “This is the league that produced the young players that beat Argentina in Tokyo,” he wrote.Joe Klonowski would like to see more on the N.W.S.L., while Ian Roberts completes the acronym soup by throwing the U.S.L. into the mix. “A league of passion among the players and fans, instead of a league bringing in players who are well past their sell by date,” he wrote. And Fernando Gama brings up the Copa Libertadores, now bubbling up nicely as it reaches the quarterfinal stage.I would like to thank all of you for your suggestions, and assure you that they have been taken on board. Bear with me, though. I don’t think The Times will allow me to hire staff to help spread the burden.Fernando’s email provided especially good value this week, because he touched on the issue of (men’s) soccer at the Olympics, too. “The games are typically played in August, when the season is starting, so nobody wants to release their players,” he wrote. “And FIFA does not control the Olympics, and cannot profit from it, so doesn’t feel compelled to enter into a rift with clubs over it.”These are both salient points, highlighted by the reminder from Peter Zwickl that Germany only sent 18 players to Tokyo. “Several players or clubs, of a list of 100 candidates, rejected the invitation by the German coach,” he wrote, which just about encapsulates Olympic soccer’s problem.But let’s leave on a more upbeat note from Rey Mashayekhi. “Five years ago, at the Rio Games, Brazil’s defeat of Germany in the Gold Medal match was a hugely significant, cathartic experience for all invested in the Seleçao, coming as it did two years after the horrors of Belo Horizonte in the 2014 World Cup semifinal.“When Neymar converted Brazil’s fifth and decisive penalty, sunk to his knees and looked to the heavens as the stadium exploded in pandemonium around him, it struck me as a truly great moment with all the emotional release of any triumph in the sport.” There’s a reminder here about one of those easily-forgotten truths in soccer, and in any sport: all of it matters as much as we decide that it matters.That’s all for this week. If you would like to vouch for why I should cover Lithuanian soccer or games in Kyrgyzstan (or anything else, for that matter): askrory@nytimes.com. Twitter might work, too. And if it doesn’t become a newsletter, there’s half a chance it will end up as a Set Piece Menu episode. There is, after all, only so much content.Have a great weekend,Rory More