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      Unai Emery Is Back for More

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

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      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

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      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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      Hello, World. It’s Been a While.

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      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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      Man City, Liverpool, Tottenham, Arsenal: Premier League Season Hangs on Final Day

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      As City and Liverpool take aim at the title and Arsenal and Spurs settle the last Champions League place, Leeds is playing for its Premier League life.From the vantage point of its end, there is something strange and distant — almost alien — about the start of a season. It is only 10 months ago, after all, barely the blink of an eye, and yet beliefs and convictions and truths from back then now seem as archaic as the idea that we once believed you could see the future in the entrails of a goat, or that people carried pagers.It is, for example, not yet a year since Nuno Espirito Santo was chosen as the Premier League’s manager of the month for the start he had made to life in charge of Tottenham Hotspur. Likewise, the idea that Romelu Lukaku “completed” Chelsea’s team, or that Ole Gunnar Solskjaer could deliver a title for Manchester United, or that running a repressive autocracy should prevent you from owning a Premier League team might as well belong to a different world.It may not seem like it, but all of that occurred in the same Premier League season that concludes on Sunday. And while those matters have been settled, countless others have not. As far as we have come, as much as we have learned, very little has yet been decided. There is still no champion crowned, no complete list of teams that have qualified for Europe, no conclusion to the relegation battle. A season can feel like it lasts a lifetime. This time around, it all comes down to one game.

      The TitlePep Guardiola gave Phil Foden and the rest of his team two days off this week.Peter Powell/ReutersPep Guardiola, above all, wants his players to be relaxed. In the aftermath of Manchester City’s draw at West Ham last weekend — the one that effectively guaranteed the identity of the Premier League champion would be decided on the season’s final day — he did not, as might have been expected, haul his squad in for extra work.Instead, with the club’s season now hanging on a single game, he gave them some extra down time. The whole squad was granted two days’ break, a chance to rest and recuperate and escape the pressure. Ilkay Gundogan went off to get married.Guardiola is right, of course, to identify that the test awaiting City is primarily psychological. In ordinary circumstances, it would easily dispatch Aston Villa on home territory: a couple of quick, early goals, a brutal display of superiority, an imperious saunter over the line. The challenge, this weekend, is to make the circumstances appear as ordinary as possible.City does not, as it turns out, have any margin for error. The 14-point advantage over Liverpool it held in January has been whittled to just one. City has had several chances to settle the matter in recent weeks — Riyad Mahrez might have beaten Liverpool in early April; he might have beaten West Ham, too — but it has failed to take them. Now, if Guardiola’s team stumbles again, and Liverpool beats Wolves, the title will go to Anfield.The teams have been in this position before, of course: In 2019, they went into the final day separated by a single point, too.At Anfield that day, a great roar went up when news filtered through that Brighton had taken a first-half lead over visiting City. On the sideline, Jürgen Klopp knew it was “too early.” City duly struck back, emphatically — winning the game by 4-1 and claiming its second successive title. The “intense pride” Klopp felt was tempered only by the knowledge that his team had picked up 97 points and it had still not been enough.Things are a little different this time. Liverpool has already won two trophies this season, sweeping both the F.A. Cup and the Carabao Cup. Just as in 2019, it has a Champions League final on the horizon as solace, too.Liverpool has won two trophies this season and will play for a third in next weekend’s Champions League final.Tolga Akmen/EPA, via ShutterstockMore important, perhaps, its yearning for a domestic title is no longer quite as desperate. It ended its three-decade wait for a championship in the eerie silence of pandemic soccer in 2020. Klopp and his players are more circumspect than they could be in 2019.City’s task is complicated not so much by the nature of its opponent, but by the identity of Guardiola’s counterpart. It is doubtless just a coincidence that it should be Steven Gerrard who should have the final chance to push Liverpool over the line, but soccer does not really do coincidence. Villa has two former Liverpool players — Danny Ings and, in particular, Philippe Coutinho — in its ranks, too. There has been a lot of talk of narrative determinism on Merseyside over the last week.It is City’s great strength, of course, that it rarely succumbs to such superstition. It is more than good enough to swat Villa aside, regardless of Gerrard’s intentions and motivations. Guardiola is well aware, though, that his team will have to be relaxed to do it. No matter how good this City side is, if the outcome is in the balance with 10 or 20 or 30 minutes to go on Sunday, the nerves will start to shred.The Champions LeagueHarry Kane and Tottenham hold the slightest of leads over Arsenal entering the season’s final day,Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOf all the issues yet to be resolved, the battle for Champions League places next season is perhaps the most straightforward. In theory, anyway, the identity of the fourth English team to qualify for next season’s Champions League was settled 10 days ago, when Tottenham beat its bitter rival, Arsenal, in the North London derby.That win — followed by a win over Burnley three days later and Arsenal’s defeat at Newcastle on Monday — allowed Spurs to leapfrog Mikel Arteta’s team. It also means Tottenham goes into the final day with a two-point advantage, and a vastly superior goal difference. Simply avoiding defeat in its final game would be enough to ensure its safe passage back into Europe’s elite, and condemn Arsenal to another year on the outside.That should not be too much of an ask: Antonio Conte’s Tottenham faces Norwich City, long since relegated and the proud owner of precisely one league win since January. The outcome of Arsenal’s curtain call, at home to Everton, should be irrelevant. (The squabble over the last slot in the Europa League is almost a mirror image: West Ham will snatch that from Manchester United if it overcomes Brighton and United fails to beat Crystal Palace.)For both Arsenal and Spurs, the immediate future hinges on which side of that divide they finish. Once a mainstay of the Champions League, Arsenal has not featured in the competition since 2017. The club intends to offer Arteta considerable financial support in the transfer market this summer regardless of where the team finishes, but the options it will have for how to spend that money will be defined by whether it is in the Champions League or not.Spurs’ absence is significantly shorter — a finalist in 2019, it has missed only two years — but its return is no less meaningful. A place in the Champions League may be enough to convince its restive coach, Conte, to stay on, not least because it would allow him greater freedom in bolstering his resources. It might also stave off another summer dominated by doubts over where, precisely, Harry Kane sees his future.The DamnedEverton’s win on Thursday meant it was out of the relegation fight.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere is a photo of Dominic Calvert-Lewin, shirtless and smiling beatifically, that just about sums it up. He is standing on the field at Goodison Park, surrounded by fans and by police officers, wisps of smoke passing above his head. His eyes stare into the camera. It is an image of outright salvation.At halftime on Thursday, Everton looked doomed. It was losing at home to Crystal Palace, and the possibility of the club’s first relegation in close to a century was hovering ever nearer. And then, in 45 minutes, Frank Lampard’s team performed a pulse-quickening rescue act. One goal. Another. Then with five minutes to go, Calvert-Lewin launched his body at a cross and headed home a winning goal. Everton had taken it right to the last moment, but it had survived.As fans flooded onto the field at Goodison Park, swarming their heroes and, in at least one incident, using their moment of euphoria to needlessly antagonize Patrick Vieira, the Palace coach, the relegation battle was reduced to two. Watford and Norwich are gone to the Championship next season. One of Leeds United and Burnley will join them.The probability is that it will be Leeds. It travels to Brentford, a place it has not won since the end of rationing in the 1950s. Leeds must, realistically, win and hope that Burnley loses at home to a Newcastle team that has long since fulfilled its ambition for the season.Jesse Marsch and Leeds are almost out of time.Lee Smith/Action Images Via ReutersThe reason for that is significant. Leeds’s form has turned around, just a little, since Jesse Marsch was installed as its coach — replacing the beloved Marcelo Bielsa — at the end of February. Marsch has won three and drawn three of his 11 games, and three of the five defeats he has suffered have come against teams in the top six. The other two came in his first two games.It is the nature of soccer, though, that it will be deemed Marsch’s fault if Leeds slips back to the Championship after two years in England’s top flight, if the return to the elite that the club spent 16 years dreaming of turns out to be nothing but a fleeting visit. That is the nature of management; the ruthlessness of it explains the salary.And yet, if Leeds is demoted, the defining factor will not have been its form under Marsch but its permeability in the last days of Bielsa’s regime. Bielsa lost his last four games by an aggregate score of 15-0. In the space of four days in December, Leeds conceded 11 goals. Its vulnerability, ever since then, has been its goal difference. That is why it is effectively a point behind Burnley even as they are level on points. That, more than anything, is what leaves Leeds United on the brink of the abyss once again, relying on nothing more than hope for salvation. 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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      What Do We Mean by Good Soccer?

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      The best games manage to be both compulsive viewing and technically excellent, but those that clear that bar are rare. And that presents fans with a choice.MANCHESTER, England — Jesse Lingard was streaking away, the ball at his feet, on the right wing. Their legs weary and their hopes dwindling, Arsenal’s defenders heaved and hauled to keep up with him, as if they were running into a stiff wind. And on the other side of the field, Cristiano Ronaldo started to sprint.It was a true sprint, too, a track sprint, a coached sprint: starting in a low crouch, his back straightening as he reached full tilt, head held high, arms pumping. The clock had just ticked past 90 minutes, but there seemed to be a magnet drawing Ronaldo to Arsenal’s penalty area, some elemental force. He had scented a chance from 60 yards, and he just could not resist the aroma.Ronaldo arrived in the penalty area roughly at the same time as Lingard, and the ball, but the chance never came. He came to a sudden halt, stood for a moment, and then doubled over, gulping down the air. It was fitting, really, a breathless end to a breathless game, the sort of evening that leaves the fans as drained as the players.Manchester United had won, 3-2, but the richness was in the detail: Arsenal’s opening goal, scored by Emile Smith-Rowe as David de Gea, the United goalkeeper, lay prone on the goal line, nursing an injury he had sustained by running into his own player; the quick thrust and parry early in the second half, as United took the lead and then offered Arsenal a reprieve almost immediately; the confected, compulsory drama of the referee, Martin Atkinson, walking achingly slowly to the monitor to award the penalty kick that won the game.As entertainment, it was difficult to beat. It was compelling and enthralling and pulsating, a sort of Platonic ideal of a Premier League game, all of the characteristics that English soccer prides itself on, that it sells to the world at a premium, distilled into 90 minutes. It was, by that measure, a good game of soccer.But by another, it was not. Michael Carrick had been in charge of United that night. His successor, Ralf Rangnick, was sitting in the directors’ box. At the end of the game, Carrick told his players that he would not only be stepping down but leaving the club altogether, off in search of fulfillment elsewhere.Ralf Rangnick pondering the scale of the job he has accepted at United. Jon Super/Associated PressUnited played like a team that had internalized that uncertainty. It had the air of a side between managers, one only just beginning to emerge from a month of confidence-sapping crisis. There was no shortage of individual talent, but there was a lack of organization, an undeniable jaggedness to their play. Martin Odegaard appeared wholly unmarked to score Arsenal’s equalizer. Passes went astray. Attacks bubbled and then fizzled out. It was obvious United wanted to win. It was not always so obvious that it knew how.Arsenal might have known precisely who its manager was, but it was no better. Mikel Arteta has crafted a young, game team, but with that youth and that exuberance comes a naïveté. Having taken the lead, it ceded the initiative. It squandered possession. It folded as United attacked. It ran out of ideas. Its most experienced player, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, was irrelevant throughout.As a technical exercise, then, the match was hardly conclusive proof of the Premier League’s old boast that it is the best domestic competition in the world. It was mainly striking as an illustration of how far both United and Arsenal have fallen: watching on, Rangnick must have seen all of that haphazard defending, uncertain pressing, that rushed passing and thought that perhaps the Premier League was not so different from the Bundesliga after all.For everyone else, it was difficult to watch either team without being struck by how far both have fallen, to wonder quite what Alex Ferguson or Arsène Wenger would have thought if you had told them that the roles of Roy Keane and Patrick Vieira would one night be taken by Scott McTominay and Mohamed Elneny.Those two definitions of good are not always in tension — the best games, of course, manage to be both compulsive viewing and technically excellent — but, in truth, those that clear that bar are rare beasts. And that presents us, as fans, with a choice, one that strikes at the heart of what it is about sports that makes us want to watch, what we want a sport to be.Mohamed Salah and Liverpool: when a team morphs into one long knee slide.Clive Brunskill/Getty ImagesAnnibale Frossi, the former Inter Milan manager, once declared that the “perfect result to a game of football is 0-0,” because that represents “a balance between the attacks and defenses on the field.” There is truth in that, but it does not sound as if it would offer a particularly gripping spectacle. Entertainment lies, often, in the imperfections: the lapse in concentration that leads to an attack; the mistake that concedes an equalizer; Harry Maguire. Which good do we want?If that sounds an ephemeral, philosophical question, it is not, not at the moment. European soccer’s financial imbalance — between the Premier League and everyone else; between the dozen or so superclubs and their underlings; between the state-backed and the self-sufficient — has allowed a handful of teams to achieve a level of excellence that is more sustainable than ever before.There exists a group of clubs that can carry squads of quite impossible depth, slipping in one $70 million player after another; gobbling up any talent that emerges elsewhere; acquiring the best in sports science and data analysis and youth development.Those teams are capable of playing soccer that touches perfection: Bayern Munich and Manchester City and Liverpool and Chelsea. Entering Friday, the Premier League’s top three had goal differences of +23, +32 and +26. Only two other teams have positive goal differences, and one of those is Manchester United, which is currently on +1. P.S.G. is already 11 points clear at the top in France. Bayern is on course for a 10th straight German championship.Alphonso Davies and Bayern Munich strolled through the Champions League group stage, winning all six games and outscoring their opponents by 22-3.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere is a pleasure in watching all of them, of course, as there is a pleasure in watching any master at work. The intricacy of City’s movement, the ruthlessness of the attacks of Bayern and Liverpool, Chelsea’s precision-engineered craft. But that is unrelated to whether they produce games that are compelling to watch. Just as Manchester United and Arsenal did not have to be good to conjure a good game, the converse is true. Good teams do not necessarily lead to good entertainment.To Chelsea, Bayern and the rest, that is of no concern: The professional part of professional soccer means that their only duty is to win, as much and as well as possible. It can feel a little dirty, too, to discuss soccer in these terms, gathering it under that great umbrella that encompasses television and cinema and music and all the rest.But, ultimately, that is what soccer is supposed to be: entertainment. It is because it is entertaining that we keep watching. It is, in part, why fans are quicker to turn on coaches who prioritize the dour and the miserly rather than those who speak airily of their visions of the game. Excellence can take the breath away. But it is the flaws that keep us coming back for more.The Not-So-Lovable UnderdogThe Atlético Madrid-Porto Champions League match in one photograph.Luis Vieira/Associated PressIt has been hard not to admire Atlético Madrid for the last decade or so. Not only because of what Diego Simeone has achieved — the two league championships, the two Champions League finals — but the circumstances in which he has done it, and the approach he has taken.Atlético has emerged as a consistent power in La Liga and the Champions League on a fraction of the budget enjoyed by its rivals both in Spain and in Europe. It has done so not by copying the stylistic orthodoxy of the elite, but by subverting it. Where others have sought elegance and beauty, Atlético has prized courage and grit and a snarling, street-fighting determination.That has made it a useful corrective in the era of the smooth, glossy superclub: Atlético is a reminder that power and money are not always everything, that there is more than one path to be taken, that beauty can be in the eye of the beholder.Criticizing Atlético always risks sounding prudish. Simeone’s team embodies certain martial values, after all, a vision of soccer that many cherish. Competitive sports is not meant to be gentle. And yet, on its journey through the Champions League, it has felt a little like something at Atlético has curdled. It has become the underdog you want to lose.At Anfield, a few weeks ago, Simeone’s team spent a considerable portion of the game trying to incite Sadio Mané into doing something reckless. Against Porto, on Tuesday, its response to coming under concerted pressure was to spark two full-scale brawls.When Atlético had a player dismissed, it did not grit its teeth and dig in; it set about leveling the field. This time, it worked. The Porto substitute Wendell reacted to Atlético’s provocation. Brushed on the touch line, the Atlético striker Matheus Cunha fell to the ground theatrically, and the referee duly produced a red card.Atlético went on to win the game, and book its place in the last 16. Not long ago, the frenzied scenes of celebration would have been quite uplifting, another demonstration of Simeone’s team’s indomitability. This time, it was not quite so appealing.Atlético no longer seems a team that can indulge in soccer’s dark arts — and there is a place in all sports, for gamesmanship, and it is even possible to marvel at their master practitioners — but a team defined by them. In another time, those brawls might have looked like a deliberate tactic: It is Atlético, after all. But not this time. This time, it looked like a team losing control, letting its demons run.Coming Saturday: M.L.S. CupNew York City F.C. players this week at Providence Park in Portland, Ore., where they will face the host Portland Timbers on Saturday in Major League Soccer’s championship game. N.Y.C.F.C. is making its first appearance in the final. More on them in The Times this weekend.Troy Wayrynen/USA Today SportsWarning SignsThis is a slightly strange week, it has to be said, to issue some grand proclamation about the strength of the Premier League. After all, only one of its four representatives in the Champions League recorded a victory in the final round of group games.Manchester City lost at RB Leipzig. Manchester United drew at home to the Swiss champion, Young Boys. Most damaging, Chelsea conceded a late equalizer against Zenit St. Petersburg that meant it did not win its group, making its task significantly more difficult in the last 16 (unless it draws Lille, the weakest of its potential opponents, on Monday).But the nature of that sole victory felt instructive. Liverpool did not need to beat A.C. Milan. Jürgen Klopp’s team had already won its group with ease, allowing him to change his side considerably. By a conservative estimate, he omitted eight first-team players from the game. Milan, by contrast, had to win to have any chance at all of qualifying for the knockouts.And yet Liverpool, with a team far weaker than it would ever dream of sending into a Premier League game, still strolled to victory. In the context of the week, that means little. But take a step back and it fits a pattern: England has provided both teams for two of the last three Champions League finals. Only one English team — United last year — has failed to make it out of the group stage since Tottenham in 2016.Raheem Sterling’s Manchester City was one of three Premier League teams to win their Champions League group. All four English entries made the last 16.David Klein/ReutersThere is nothing new in one league’s emerging as the best on the planet. Italy held that status in the 1990s. Spain has been able to lay claim to it for stretches of the current century. Perhaps it is just England’s turn again, as it was between 2005 and 2010 (give or take a little blurring at the edges.)The difference this time is the size of the gap. The Premier League’s financial advantage is growing at an alarming rate: its television revenues are increasing at the same time that most of continental Europe’s clubs are trying to claw back money lost to the coronavirus pandemic.Liverpool’s second team can include a $45 million defender like Ibrahima Konaté, and a $50 million midfielder like Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain. A.C. Milan, on the other hand, had the chance to sign Bernardo Silva from Manchester City this summer but simply could not come close to his $8 million-a-year salary.The nature of the Champions League — the vagaries of the draw, the immediacy of the format, the outsize influence of injury in a knockout competition — means it cannot be guaranteed that a Premier League team will win it this season. But there are, now, only one or two continental sides that might realistically match the English contingent.The financial gulf is now so great that the trend should only grow stronger over the next few years. Of course, continental Europe’s clubs could spend their money more wisely, they could recruit better, and they could play smarter (Italian and Spanish teams, for one, need to adopt a higher tempo to compete). But the imbalance is such, now, that it is hard to see how it is corrected.CorrespondenceThere was, it turns out, a glaring inaccuracy in last week’s newsletter. This is unacceptable, of course, and I will be duly censured for it — though my attempts to secure myself the traditional soccer punishment, a weeklong suspension on full pay, have been unsuccessful — but I think you may understand: apparently, Juventus is not the only club in the world to have its own font.Bea Reiter points to the Kansas City Current, of the N.W.S.L., which boasts a hand-drawn effort to “reflect the power and movement of the brand.” Major League Soccer’s Columbus Crew can make the same claim, Harmon Vredeveld informs us: It has a bespoke font, too, called NineSix, a nod to the year of the club’s founding. Every day, as they say, is a school day.Apologies are also owed to Ben Myers and Naomi Farley, who were equally offended that I forgot to add Weston McKennie in my list of young players Juventus might, if it were so minded, try to build a revitalized team around. He warranted a mention, certainly, though I fear he may yet prove a victim of the club’s short-termism.Weston McKennie thanks you for your letters.Peter Cziborra/Action Images Via ReutersLet’s end on a positive note, because Zach Hollander has the kernel of an excellent idea to share. “Don’t you think it would be beneficial to have the Ballon d’Or decided after summer tournaments, but before the next season starts? That way it would take into account one full season, and let players who have an incredible club season not be “forgotten” for having a slow start to the next season.”This is thoroughly sensible, but the solution is far easier: Leave the Ballon d’Or where it is, for reasons of history, but move the other individual award — the FIFA one, rather cumbersomely called The Best — to the end of the season. That way, each award has its own, defined place, rather than sharing space: one for the calendar year, one for the soccer year. More

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      The European Super League Explained

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      Whether you’re a lifelong fan or an outsider who doesn’t know your Manchesters from your Madrids, we’ve got answers to your pressing questions.A little more than a year after European soccer found a renewed sense of unity in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, the sport now faces its greatest crisis in a generation.Late on Sunday night, 12 of the world’s biggest soccer clubs unveiled a plan to launch what they called the Super League, a closed competition in which they (and their invited guests) would compete against one another while claiming even more of soccer’s billions of dollars in revenue for themselves.The announcement cast doubt not only on the ongoing viability of the Champions League — the sport’s showpiece club competition — but also called into question the very future of the domestic leagues that have been soccer’s cornerstone for more than a century.All of a sudden, it is not clear where soccer is heading, or what it will look like when it gets there. Here, then, is what we know so far.First things first: What is a Super League?The concept has been around for decades: a Continental competition that incorporates all of the most famous names from the Europe’s domestic leagues every year into an event all their own. For a long time, it has effectively been something between an aspiration and a threat. Sunday night, though, was the first time anyone had given it a physical form.Who gets to play in it?So far, there are 12 founding members. The teams that have been the driving force behind the project — Real Madrid, Manchester United, Liverpool and Juventus — have kindly invited eight other clubs to join them: Barcelona and Atlético Madrid from Spain, Inter Milan and A.C. Milan from Italy, and the rest of the Premier League’s self-appointed Big Six: Manchester City, Chelsea, Tottenham and Arsenal.They expect to be joined soon by three more permanent members, though it is not clear yet why those teams have yet to disclose their involvement. Paris St.-Germain in France and the Portuguese giant F.C. Porto were seen as likely candidates, but both have distanced themselves from the project. The organizers are eager to have a team like Bayern Munich, the reigning European champion and one of the world’s biggest clubs, but on Monday, Borussia Dortmund’s chairman said that not only was his team out but also that Bayern agreed with his position.Whatever the final roster, those 15 founding teams will form the league’s bedrock. The full allotment of 20 clubs each season will be fleshed out by a rotating cast of five more teams, chosen through some sort of formula that the organizers haven’t gotten around to deciding just yet.That sounds a lot like the Champions League.It does, to be fair. But the roster for the Champions League is set each year based on clubs’ performance in their domestic leagues. The Super League will have permanent members who face no risk of missing out on either the matches or the profits.The ‘Super League’ AnnouncementTwelve leading European soccer clubs issued a statement on Sunday confirming their plans to form a breakaway league. Here’s what they said at the time.Read DocumentHow will it work?The 20 teams will be split into two divisions — 10 teams in each — and then play one another home-and-away. At the end of the regular season, the top four clubs in each division will progress to a knockout round that will be familiar to viewers of the Champions League. The difference is that those playoffs will be held over the course of four weeks at the end of the season.Will the Super League teams still play in their current domestic leagues?That is absolutely their plan. It may not be the leagues’ plan.Is this about money?Yes. According to their own estimates, each founding member stands to gain around $400 million merely to establish “a secure financial foundation,” four times more than Bayern Munich earned for winning the Champions League last season.But that is just the start, really: The clubs believe that selling the broadcast rights for the Super League, as well as the commercial income, will be worth billions. And it will all go to them, rather than being redistributed to smaller clubs and lesser leagues through European soccer’s governing body, UEFA. At the same time, the value of domestic leagues and their clubs will diminish drastically as they are effectively rendered also-rans every year.Two architects of the Super League: Liverpool’s John Henry and Real Madrid’s Florentino Pérez.Armando Babani/EPA, via ShutterstockWon’t the Super League teams fight over all that money?The founding members have decreed that spending on transfer fees and wages will be capped at a certain percentage of revenue, which — theoretically at least — gives owners far more chance to restrict their spending at the same time as they are maximizing their income.Sounds good for those clubs. Their fans must be happy?Not so much, no. The reaction has been one of spittle-flecked rage at the betrayal of tradition. It does not help that, though several of the clubs have released statements insisting they will consult with fan groups as the project develops, nobody thought to do that ahead of time.It is hard, though, to be sure how universal the sense of outrage and betrayal is. There is a little evidence — though it is hardly overwhelming — of a demographic split in the reaction to the idea, and it may be that this is what the clubs are banking on: that older fans may be more wedded to tradition, and younger ones may be won over more easily. More