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      Science and Data Change Soccer’s Definition of Old

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      Top clubs have long looked to shed players once they hit age 30. But those presumptions rely on outdated logic, statistics show.LONDON — The exact location of the threshold has always been contested. At Manchester United, for a time, it lurked close enough to 30 for that to serve as a natural watershed. Once players hit their 30s, Alex Ferguson, the club’s manager at the time, tended to grant them an extra day’s rest after a game, in the hope that the break might soothe their creaking bodies.Arsenal’s Arsène Wenger was a little more nuanced. He had a formula. Once midfielders and forwards reached the grand old age of 32, he was prepared to offer them only one-year contract extensions. “That is the rule here,” he once said. “After 32, you go from year to year.” He made an exception for central defenders; they could sign contracts that carried them to age 34.But while the precise cutoff has always been subjective, the broad and longstanding consensus within soccer is that it lies in there somewhere. At some point early in their 30s, players cross the boundary that distinguishes summer from fall, present from past. And as soon as they do, they can officially be regarded as old.Manchester City spent big, and got younger, in acquiring striker Erling Haaland.Dave Thompson/Associated PressThat delineation has long informed both the player-recruitment and the player-retention strategies of teams across Europe. A vast majority of clubs have, as a rule, adhered for years to a simple principle: buy young and sell old.Tottenham’s acquisition last month of the 33-year-old Croatia midfielder Ivan Perisic, for example, was the first time that the club has signed an outfield player in his 30s since 2017. Liverpool has not done so since 2016. Manchester City has not paid a fee for an outfield player over age 30 for almost a decade. Goalkeepers, widely held to boast greater longevity, are the only players granted an exception.Instead, players approaching the twilight of their careers are generally seen as burdens to be shifted. This summer has been a case in point: Bayern Munich has managed to alienate the almost-34-year-old Robert Lewandowski by (unsuccessfully) trying to anoint Erling Haaland, a decade his junior, as his heir.Liverpool, meanwhile, has started the work of breaking up its vaunted attacking trident by replacing the 30-year-old Sadio Mané with Luis Díaz, 25, and adding the 23-year-old Darwin Nuñez to succeed Roberto Firmino, who turns 31 in October. As it seeks to overhaul its squad, Manchester United released a suite of players — Nemanja Matic, Juan Mata and Edínson Cavani among them — into a market already saturated with veterans, including Gareth Bale and Ángel Di María.The reasoning behind this, of course, is straightforward. “The demands of the game are changing,” said Robin Thorpe, a performance scientist who spent a decade at Manchester United and now works with the Red Bull network of teams. “There is much more emphasis on high-intensity sprinting, acceleration, deceleration.” Younger players are deemed better equipped to handle that load than their elders.Just as important, though, recruiting younger players promises “more return on investment when you’re looking to move them on,” according to Tony Strudwick, a former colleague of Thorpe’s at United who also has worked at Arsenal. Clubs can earn back their outlay — perhaps even make a profit — on a player acquired in his early 20s. Those a decade or so older are, in a strictly economic sense, seen as a rapidly depreciating asset.Those two ideas are, of course, related, and so it is significant that at least one of them may be rooted in outdated logic.Liverpool gave Mo Salah a three-year deal a few weeks after his 30th birthday.Athit Perawongmetha/ReutersAccording to data from the consultancy firm Twenty First Group, players over age 32 are consistently playing more minutes in the Champions League every year. Last season, players over age 34 — practically ancient, by soccer’s traditional thinking — accounted for more minutes in Europe’s big five leagues than in any previous season for which data was available.More significantly, that has not been at any notable cost to their performance.“Age has its pros and cons,” the former Barcelona right back Dani Alves, now 39 and determined to continue his career, told The Guardian this month. “I have an experience today that I didn’t have 20 years ago. When there’s a big game, 20-year-olds get nervous and worried. I don’t.”Twenty First Group’s data bears Alves out. Though players in their 20s do press more than those in their 30s do — 14.5 pressing actions per 90 minutes, as opposed to 12.8 — that reduction is offset in other ways.In both the Champions League and Europe’s major domestic competitions, older players win more aerial duels, complete more dribbles, pass with greater accuracy — if they are central midfielders — and score more goals. More than twice as many players over age 30 now rank in Twenty First Group’s modeling of the best 150 players in the world than appeared in the same list a decade ago.The data suggests, very clearly, that 30 is not as old as it used to be.Luka Modric, who will turn 37 in September, joked recently that he might play until he’s 50.Frank Augstein/Associated PressFrom a sports-science perspective, that is hardly surprising. The idea of 30 as an immutable aging threshold predates soccer’s interest in conditioning: The current generation of players in their 30s, Strudwick pointed out, may be the first to “have been exposed to hard-core sports science from the start of their careers.”There is no reason to assume they would age at the same rate, or the same time, as their forebears. “Look at the condition that players are in when they retire,” Strudwick said. “They haven’t let their bodies go. They might need to be pushed a little less in preseason, and their recovery may take longer, but from a physical and a performance point of view, there is no reason they can’t add value into their late 30s.”That longevity can only be increased, Thorpe said, by improvements in nutrition and recovery techniques.When he was at Manchester United, he said, “the rule of thumb was always that players over the age of 30 got a second day’s rest after games. It felt intuitively like the right thing to do.” The truth, though, was that it wasn’t always the older players who needed the break.“When we researched it, when we looked at the data,” Thorpe said, “we found that it was way more individual. Some of the older players could train, and some of the younger players needed more rest.”As those sorts of insights have become more embedded in the sport, he argued, it follows that “more players should be able to do more later on in their careers.” Luka Modric might have been joking when he told an interviewer, before the Champions League final in May, that he intended to play on “until 50, like that Japanese guy, [Kazuyoshi] Miura,” but it is no longer quite as absurd as it might have once sounded.That the clubs do not appear to have noticed — that players over age 30, with rare exceptions, still seem to be regarded as a burden rather than a blessing — is, as far as Strudwick can see, now almost exclusively an economic issue.“A player’s life cycle is an inverted U shape,” he said. “But salary expectations are linear.”A more scientific approach might have flattened the downward curve of a player’s performance graph, or even delayed its onset, but it cannot eliminate it completely. At some point a player will enter what Strudwick called the “roll-down phase.” The one thing that no club wants — that no club can afford — is to be paying a player a premium salary when that moment arrives. That is what motivates clubs, still, to believe that a threshold arrives at 30: not what players can contribute, but what they cost. More

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      Robert Lewandowski, Bayern Munich and the Bitter End

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      A star striker is eager to move to Barcelona, and his club doesn’t seem to realize it might be its own fault that he wants to go.Robert Lewandowski does not, in his own words, like to make “too much show.” He is, and always has been, a touch more impassive than the average superstar. He does not greet his goals, the ones that have come for so long in such improbable quantities, with a roar, or a leap, or a scream. Instead, he grins. For the really good ones, he might go so far as a beam.He is the same off the field. Lewandowski is warm, smart, immediately likable, but his charisma is more subtle, more steady than that possessed by his peers, the finest players of his generation. He does not have the bombastic streak of Zlatan Ibrahimovic. He does not relish the spotlight quite like Cristiano Ronaldo.His Instagram account encapsulates it. There are, of course, occasional glimpses of yachts and supercars and picture-postcard tropical vacations — he is still a millionaire soccer player, and it is still Instagram — but they are interspersed with images of Robert Lewandowski, the purest striker of the modern era, pushing a child’s stroller at Legoland, and Robert Lewandowski, serial German champion, tickling a small dog.The impression he has cultivated, over the years, is of a player who regards all of the attention, all of the glamour, all of the noise not as an unavoidable consequence of his work, or even as an unwelcome distraction. Instead, he has always treated it as an active hindrance. Lewandowski’s job is to score goals. He is good at it, and he is good at it because he takes it extremely seriously.All of which has made the last two weeks something of an outlier. For perhaps the first time in his career, at the age of 34, Lewandowski has suddenly gone rogue.It started last month, not long after the ticker-tape that accompanied Bayern Munich’s 10th straight Bundesliga had been cleared away, when he declared — publicly — that he wanted to leave the club where he has spent eight seasons, the peak of his glittering career, immediately. “What is certain at the moment is that my career at Bayern is over,” he said.Friedemann Vogel/EPA, via ShutterstockThat was unexpected enough, the silent, reluctant superstar suddenly leveraging all of his renown, all of his influence, all of his clout to make as much noise as possible. But it did not end there. Instead, Lewandowski has doubled down, again and again. He has insisted that he does not want to “force” his way out of Bayern. As ever with Lewandowski, his actions speak for themselves.In a series of interviews — at almost any given opportunity — he has chastised Bayern for its lack of “respect” and “loyalty,” its apparent refusal to find a “mutually agreeable solution,” its failure to “listen to me until the very end.” He said that “something inside of me died, and it is impossible to get over that.”Perhaps most seriously, he intimated that his treatment might make other players reluctant to join the club. “What kind of player will want to go to Bayern knowing that something like this could happen to them?” he asked. Of all the sideswipes, all the jabs, that felt the most damaging, the most irretrievable. “I want to leave Bayern,” he has said, in various formats, over and over. “That is clear.”From the outside, it is not immediately apparent why that should be, why Lewandowski — with a year left on his Bayern contract — would have taken such a provocative path in order to secure his release.After all he has achieved in Germany — eight league championships in a row at Bayern, to go with two he won at Borussia Dortmund, a Champions League title, sundry domestic cups, and more than 40 goals across all competitions in each of the last seven seasons — he would be forgiven for wanting a change of scenery, a different challenge, to end his career at Barcelona, say. His approach, though, suggests something deeper is at play.Lewandowski has led the Bundesliga in goals in each of the past five seasons.Kai Pfaffenbach/ReutersAs is traditional, soccer has tried to answer that question by imbuing trivial details with tremendous narrative power. A few weeks ago, a report in the German outlet TZ revealed, Lewandowski had exchanged angry words with Julian Nagelsmann, Bayern’s young coach, when it was suggested that the latter might like to change his striker’s positioning when competing to win headers.Lewandowski, not unreasonably, pointed out that his career statistics rather suggested that he knew what he was doing. Yet when the inevitable meta-analysis of the incident was conducted, it was concluded that not only did Lewandowski not respect Nagelsmann — whose playing career extended no further than his teens — most likely the rest of the Bayern squad did not, either.It is not with Nagelsmann, though, that Lewandowski’s relationship has collapsed. Such encounters are not exactly rare. Nagelsmann is, by all accounts, broadly popular with Bayern’s players, who admire his verve and his ideas, even if they remain slightly skeptical about his effectiveness after his first season.Instead, the problem has its roots elsewhere in Bayern’s hierarchy. Amid the blizzard of words produced first by and then about Lewandowski, the most incisive came from his agent, the not-exactly-wildly-popular Pini Zahavi. “He hasn’t felt respected by the people in charge for months,” Zahavi told the German outlet Bild. “Bayern didn’t lose the player Lewandowski. They lost the person, Robert.”The source of that tension can be found in Bayern’s ill-concealed, and ultimately futile, pursuit of Erling Haaland. Hasan Salihamidzic, a decorated player in Munich at the turn of the century now installed as the club’s sporting director, had earmarked Haaland as Lewandowski’s eventual replacement. When it became clear to Lewandowski that the club was contemplating his demise even as he closed in yet another record-breaking season, he felt an unspoken covenant had been broken.Bayern’s sporting director, Hasan Salihamidzic.Andreas Gebert/ReutersIt may not soothe Lewandowski’s ego, but it would be remiss of Bayern not to be considering who will, at some point, step into his shoes; no matter what order you eat your meals in, at some point time comes for us all. Where Salihamidzic erred was in allowing his vision to become public; or, more accurately, in allowing it to become public and then not succeeding in signing Haaland. All of a sudden, Bayern had a disaffected superstar and no replacement.That may have ramifications beyond Lewandowski’s immediate future: As he has made abundantly clear, barring an unlikely change of heart, that will now lie elsewhere. “Breakups are part of football,” he said.For Bayern, though, that may only be the first issue. For a club that has spent the last decade collecting trophies so serenely that it has become possible to imagine a world in which it wins the Bundesliga in perpetuity, this is a delicate time. Not in terms of its domestic primacy — that, sadly, is now hard-wired into the system — but most certainly in its attempts to compete in Europe.Bayern has been able to ride out the rise of the petro-clubs, Manchester City and Paris St.-Germain, better than the likes of Juventus, Barcelona and to some extent Real Madrid not only because of its commercial potency, its operational expertise and its corporate appeal, but because it functions essentially as a Bundesliga Select XI.Every year, Bayern has cherry-picked the best talent from the rest of Germany — often using the lure of guaranteed trophies and an inevitable place in the latter stages of the Champions League as leverage to pay a lower price — to fill out its roster. This has a twin benefit: It weakens domestic competition, and enables Bayern to match, and occasionally to overcome, the arriviste elite elsewhere.Lewandowski collected his eighth Bundesliga title with Bayern this season.Ronald Wittek/EPA, via ShutterstockLewandowski, plucked on a free transfer from Dortmund, stood as a symbol of that approach when he arrived; at the moment of his departure, he may well signal the need for its abandonment. The Bundesliga’s clubs, after all, have never wanted to sell to Bayern, and now, given that Germany is the cash-soaked Premier League’s bazaar of choice, they do not have to. English teams pay more, and they do not insist on beating you twice a season afterward.Bayern will, instead, have to plot another course. It may have to start to offer more lucrative salaries — its approach for Liverpool’s Sadio Mané suggests that realization has arrived — and it may even need to identify other markets, other demographics, from which to source its recruits.It will have to do that at a time when its institutional knowledge is in the hands of Oliver Kahn, an intelligent, imposing figure but still relatively inexperienced in his role, and Salihamidzic, whose record in the transfer market was mixed even before his part in the impending loss of Lewandowski.Bayern has weathered the changes in soccer’s ecosystem by sticking, unabashedly, to an approach that produced results, and by entrusting its fate to a grizzled, respected set of executives. For a decade, it has worked. Without much fuss, without too much show, Bayern Munich has constructed the most successful period in its history. The public, toxic departure of Lewandowski is the first hint of rust at the heart of the big red machine.Endless, ShamelessQuick question, Karim: Would you rather have two weeks off, or four more games?Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesYou may not have noticed — you may, in fact, have taken very deliberate steps to avoid it — but, even deep into June, soccer refuses to be stopped. As well as a raft of exhibition games and qualifying matches for the next African Cup of Nations, there have, at the time of writing, already been two rounds of Nations League games in Europe.And the good news is, if you missed them, there are two more to come: After a long, arduous season that came on the back of another long, arduous season and a sprawling European Championship, Europe’s elite men’s players will finally get a vacation starting on June 15.All of this was deemed necessary, of course, because someone decided to squeeze a World Cup into the middle of the traditional European season. They did it for entirely honorable reasons, though, so that’s all fine. Likewise, it is hard to begrudge the coaches of the planet’s various national teams for feeling that they might like to have at least a bit of time working with their players before they decide who will, and who will not, be part of their plans for Qatar in November.The decision to plow on with the Nations League, though, feels counterproductive. The tournament is UEFA’s nascent pride and joy — at least at the international level — and, when the season’s schedule was being mapped out, it made clear that it was not prepared to place it on hiatus in order to afford the players a rest. Doing so, the organization worried, would stifle all the momentum the event had built.Sadly, the alternative may be even worse. The Nations League is being played out to a backdrop of complete indifference from fans and barely-concealed irritation from the players; Kevin De Bruyne, for one, has made it clear he thinks it is a complete waste of his, and everyone else’s, time. All of a sudden, the Nations League has become exactly what it was meant to replace: a series of meaningless games that are met with apathy or resentment.CorrespondenceA French soccer federation official, Erwan Le Provost, said this week that closed-circuit video footage of events outside the Champions League final had been automatically deleted, as required by law, because judicial officials did not request the footage within seven days.Anne-Christine Poujoulat/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt seems that there is a broad range of views among the On Soccer Newsletter community about the fiasco that marred last month’s Champions League final, and I’ll do my best to represent them.Let’s start with Christopher Smith. “At the African Cup of Nations, there was a stampede at the Olembé Stadium in which eight people died,” he wrote. “I don’t recall seeing anything like the indictment of France and UEFA being leveled at Cameroon and C.A.F. In fact, at least in your newsletter, this event doesn’t seem to have merited a mention at all.”These are valid points. I would suggest that there was plenty of condemnation of both Cameroon and African soccer’s authorities, but I would agree that UEFA attracted more. This is not an easy sentiment to express, but I suspect that is simply because the Champions League final is a far more high-profile event. That doesn’t make it right, of course, but it is (most likely) the determining factor.That the Olembé tragedy did not appear in this newsletter was an oversight, but I would at least direct you to the coverage of both the disaster and the tournament elsewhere in The Times.Others focused, instead, on the tension between the French authorities’ version of events near Paris and the experiences of the fans themselves. “My only thought is how close we came to another Hillsborough,” wrote Alicia Lorvo. “The fans were traumatized at what was supposed to be a happy, fun event. The people who were there with real tickets must be compensated. France must be forced to hold an independent inquiry. The situation is intolerable.”Teresa Olson, sadly, was not surprised. “It was not the fans, but the utter indifference to accommodating the sellout crowd effectively,” she wrote. “We had the same experience during the Women’s World Cup in 2019. Gates were not opened until there was physically no way they could process everyone, and there was complete indifference as to whether the fans could get to their seats in time for the games.”It is important to remember that, I think: The way the Champions League final was policed is not unusual in France. The authorities followed their playbook, with one slight twist, explained by Javier Cortés. “With all due respect, most of us still think that English fans are (for the most part) unbearably arrogant who tend to violence once they have a few beers in their bellies,” he wrote. “English fans are generally not well-liked outside their islands.”Or inside them, as it happens. Nobody enjoys criticizing the English more than the English, Javier, and there is no question that the behavior of some English fans on foreign trips can be abominable. That clearly played into the thinking of the French authorities.The Euro 2020 final was not England’s finest hour (and a half).Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockThe counterargument would run that Liverpool has been to two other Champions League finals in recent years, in Kyiv and Madrid, with no trouble at all. Problems do not trail in its fans’ wake. More important, that line of argument prompts the question as to whether funneling all of these risk factors into one place, and then locking them outside of a stadium, is really the best way to allay your worst fears. I’d suggest that it is not.Larry Machacek saw the situation along similar lines. “I conjure up images of drunk and cocaine-fueled young men, particularly the one with a flare lodged in a personal space, and the stories of Italian fans kicked in the head,” he wrote. “A few bad apples can and do tarnish the lot. France has successfully hosted many major sporting events and will continue to do so. How about advising readers of the outcomes of last year’s Euro 2020 fiasco at Wembley? Are there any profound learnings from the U.K. you would recommend?”My instinct on the first point is similar to my response to Javier: I’m not sure there is any evidence of gaggles of Liverpool fans engaging in the sort of mayhem we saw in London, and I’m not convinced that it is fair to decree them guilty until they have arrived. Doing so belies an ignorance of the differences between fans’ following a club and (a minority of) fans who follow England. They aren’t the same people, and they don’t behave in the same way.On the second, it is indisputable that what happened at Wembley last year was no more or less appalling than what happened in Paris. The problem, in both cases, was with the manner of response: Where the French were too heavy-handed, the English were too laissez-faire. There was no attempt to control the crowd whatsoever until it was too late.The lesson, then, is that neither of those approaches work, and that UEFA needs to recognize that. It should have a sense of best practices for how these occasions are managed, and central to it should be the principle that fans, wherever they are from, are welcome guests to be treated with respect, rather than a problem to be faced. More

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      European Super League Fallout, Now in a New York Court

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      A lawsuit filed by an American soccer entrepreneur says the head of European soccer declared “war” on him for working with three top soccer teams.It has been a year since the European Super League was born and collapsed in a two-day soccer supernova of angry statements, legal threats and bad blood. But the project’s repercussions are far from over.In a court filing this week in New York, a prominent American entrepreneur accused the president of European soccer’s governing body of “declaring war” on him to prevent him from organizing a series of exhibition games in North America featuring three teams — Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus — who remain committed to the idea of a breakaway European league.The exchange between the promoter, Charlie Stillitano, and the president, Aleksander Ceferin, emerged as part of Stillitano’s employment dispute with Relevent Sports, an events and marketing company owned by the billionaire Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross.Stillitano had been Relevent’s executive chairman until his departure last spring, when he left the company amid a dispute about a pandemic-related pay cut and a noncompete clause that Relevent had demanded.In his lawsuit, Stillitano and his lawyers offered details of a text message he received in which they said Ceferin warned Stillitano that working with the three teams would effectively render him an opponent of UEFA, the governing body for European soccer that Ceferin leads.The message, Stillitano said, came after he had texted Ceferin telling him that Relevent, which for a decade under Stillitano’s leadership had organized exhibition tournaments and games for top European clubs, had forbade him from working with any of the event company’s former clients. Stillitano asked Ceferin, whose organization is part of a partnership with Relevent, for a meeting, telling him that several teams “including the three that have caused issues with UEFA” had approached him to arrange games.Those teams remain a toxic subject for many European soccer leaders. Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus have sued UEFA in Spain over the Super League failure — an action that forced UEFA to suspend disciplinary actions against the teams — and they are also trying to persuade European regulators that UEFA is abusing its monopoly position to block their efforts.For Aleksander Ceferin and UEFA, the Super League fight never fades away.Jean-Christophe Bott/EPA, via ShutterstockThe implications of the court rulings could lead to a significant change in the decades-long organization of soccer in Europe, and to new legal fights: UEFA has insisted it will resume its efforts to punish the clubs once it has the legal right do so.Ceferin reminded Stillitano of that in his reply.“I have heard about your ‘business’ with the three clubs,” Ceferin said in the text message, which was included in Stillitano’s lawsuit. “Those clubs didn’t ‘cause issues with UEFA.’ They tried to destroy UEFA, football and me personally. It’s a shame that you don’t understand it. The fact that you work with them means that me, UEFA or anyone I can have influence on will not have any business or private relation with you until you’re on the other side.”Stillitano’s lawyers described Ceferin’s message as “threatening.”“It became clear that Ceferin and UEFA — and by extension their new partner, Relevent — were declaring war on Stillitano for considering an affiliation with the three teams,” the lawyers wrote.UEFA recently negotiated a contract with Relevent, picking the company as a commercial partner to sell broadcast rights to competitions like the Champions League in North America. The organizations are also discussing the possibility of Relevent’s arranging an off-season competition that would be endorsed by UEFA.In an interview on Friday, Ceferin said he was not interested in whether or not Stillitano worked with the three clubs. But the mere idea that he would, Ceferin said, was enough to end their relationship.“When I realized that he is actually cooperating with them at the same time I decided to finish any relationship with him,” Ceferin said. He was more angered, he said, that a private text message had been disclosed in a public filing. “I never spoke with anyone about this because I have more important things to deal with than dealing with Stillitano,” Ceferin said. “By using the private correspondence publicly, Stillitano showed what his moral values are.”The case is the latest example of ongoing bad blood between UEFA and the three teams, who are among the wealthiest and most powerful in world soccer, and the peripheral damage that the Super League fight continues to cause. It has already destroyed the once-close relationship between Ceferin and the Juventus president Andrea Agnelli; the men have not spoken since last year, even though Ceferin is godfather to Agnelli’s youngest child. Now it is Stillitano who has been cut off.For years, Stillitano moved easily among European soccer’s elite, building Relevent’s soccer business by using connections and friendships to arrange matches for top teams, strike multimillion-dollar deals and rub shoulders with legendary players and coaches. But he has for months been embroiled in a dispute with the company over payments and conditions related to his departure last May.Stillitano contends that Relevent owes him about $1 million in salary and severance payments. Relevent has countered that it ended the payments only after Stillitano breached terms of a noncompete agreement by contacting its clients.According to the lawsuit, Relevent had been paying Stillitano $650,000 a year until the pandemic, when, citing reduced revenues, it moved to reduce his base pay to $200,000. The company said Stillitano agreed to the reduction; Stillitano’s filing contends the pay cut was actually a deferment, and that he would be repaid at a later date.But after Stillitano disputed the deferment, his relationship with the company deteriorated to the point that Relevent terminated his contract in May.Stillitano had little choice but to find new work after that, his lawyers argued. He was “not a wealthy man,” they wrote in the filing, and was therefore required to work. More

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      Cameroon's Goalkeeper André Onana Just Wants to Play

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      Cameroon’s 25-year-old goalkeeper has already had his career interrupted twice by bans. Now he’s back, and eager to move on.For a goalkeeper of Andre Onana’s experience, the passage of play midway through the first half of Cameroon’s Africa Cup of Nations opener should have been routine.Instead, it was anything but. Not once but twice, Onana misjudged the flight of the ball as it was crossed from one side of the field to the other. The second flap at thin air allowed Burkina Faso to take the lead, and left Onana with his head in the turf, acutely aware of his role in the chaos.Cameroon would eventually rally, score twice and win to provide relief to the millions of fans who expect them to challenge for the tournament’s championship. Onana, too, would rally, eventually playing to the reputation of a man widely regarded as one of Africa’s best goalkeepers. But his rustiness could be explained by something everyone in Yaoundé’s Paul Biya Stadium knew:For the better part of a year, Onana has hardly played soccer at all.In October 2020, Onana failed a routine drug test after it revealed traces of a banned masking agent. He claimed, and investigators agreed, that it had all been an error: He was found to have mistakenly ingested the drug after confusing his wife’s medication for his own after complaining of a headache.Rules are rules, though, and Onana was banished. For seven months, he was not allowed to even set foot inside a soccer stadium, let alone train with his teammates at his club team, the Dutch champion Ajax. And even when his ban was reduced last fall, and his drug exile ended, a new professional one began. Ajax, it seemed, had moved on while its goalkeeper was gone.A blunder by Onana allowed Burkina Faso to take an early lead against Cameroon in the teams’ Africa Cup of Nations opener on Sunday.Mohamed Abd El Ghany/ReutersSo for Onana, 25, this month’s Africa Cup of Nations championship is a rare opportunity to remind people of the player he was, and who he is: the skilled goalkeeper who helped Ajax win two Dutch league titles; the last line of defense for a team that came seconds from reaching the Champions League final in 2019; the anchor of a national squad hoping to regain a continental title on home soil.That Onana can showcase his skills in his home country in the city he grew up in is making it all the more special.“I was talking with my brother, and I said that I think I will know the whole stadium because we live close by,” Onana, 25, said in an interview on the eve of the tournament.Many of Onana’s earliest memories, in fact, involve soccer. Playing in the streets for hours with friends. Walking to the national stadium to sit in the sun watching the national team. His first heroes were African, he said, stars like Patrick Mbomba or Joseph-Désiré Job who could bring the crowd to its feet just by returning for matches at the national stadium that sat a mere 20 minutes from Onana’s front door.The national team was everything to Onana in those days. Cameroon had been one of the first African teams to become a fixture at the World Cup, and even as generations of players turned over, its matchdays offered a source of joy, and pride. Attending games, Onana said, was often an all-day affair.“We were there five hours before the game just to watch 90 minutes,” he said. “And those 90 minutes could affect your week, your month. It was amazing that time to be honest.”Onana’s journey to the national team can be traced to a pickup game before he turned 10. After spending most of the game tearing around the field in midfield or in attack, his preferred positions, Onana was told it was his turn in goal. He excelled, repelling shots that wowed his friends and also an older brother, who told him, “André, I think this is your best position.”Within months he was named as the best goalkeeper at a tournament run by an academy set up by the Cameroon striker Samuel Eto’o. His performance earned him a trial, and eventually a move, to Eto’o’s academy in Douala, about four hours from home. There, his performances caught the eye of scouts from F.C. Barcelona.Onana moved to Barcelona’s famed academy shortly after he turned 13. He quickly embraced his new surroundings, but three years into his new adventure, it all came to an abrupt stop. FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, announced that Barcelona had breached its regulations on registering minors by signing Onana and other players from outside Europe. Onana, 16 at the time, was told he could not represent Barcelona until he was 18.While the club jettisoned most of the foreign-born players subject to the rule, Onana’s promise was so high that he was persuaded to remain in the academy, where he was allowed to continue practicing every day but not to play in official games. The hiatus from competition took its toll. “You can train as much as you like but in the end you train to play,” Onana said. “And if you don’t, it affects you mentally and physically.”By the time Onana turned 18, and was again eligible to play, Barcelona had signed Marc-André ter Stegen, a promising German goalkeeper, and Claudio Bravo, who had just helped Chile win the Copa América. Onana knew, he said, his future lay elsewhere.He decided to try his luck in the Netherlands, and within a year he had established himself as Ajax’s No. 1 goalkeeper. He was only 19.The timing could not have been better. Ajax, like Barcelona, had a passion for homegrown talent, and the talents that had just started to come into its first team turned out to be its best in a generation. And the ball skills Onana had honed at Barcelona were a perfect fit for his Ajax’s style.Success quickly followed, as did strong performances against richer clubs in European competitions like the Champions League. By the summer of 2020, some of those teams had started to circle, offering Ajax millions for its young goalkeeper. Ajax declined to sell, confident the price for Onana, and its other young stars, would continue to rise.And then, just as it had a few years earlier, it all stopped for Onana when his drug test came back positive. Onana appealed the one-year ban he was given, and European soccer’s governing body accepted his explanation.But under soccer’s regulations, he was still responsible, and so the punishment, reduced to seven months, meant that starting in February 2021 Onana was effectively ostracized from soccer. When his Ajax teammates lifted the trophy that spring to celebrate a title to which he had contributed, he wasn’t allowed to enter the stadium to watch.He had, by then, made peace with his banishment. It was not, after all, his first. But Ajax officials, including the chief executive Edwin van der Sar, a former star goalkeeper, still worried about how Onana would manage the sporting and psychological toll of his time away.Onana has appeared in only two games for Ajax since returning from his most recent ban. He said he planned to leave the club after the season.Maurice Van Steen/EPA, via Shutterstock“When I left the club, I said to Edwin, ‘This is nothing, I’m already used to it,’” Onana said. “He was like, ‘André, how?’ I told him I was banned for two years. So this is just one year. I’ve got this.”To preserve his career, Onana assembled a team of seven specialists and moved to Spain, where he took training sessions every day in Salou, a beach town not far from Barcelona, to stay fit for the day his ban ended.But because he has refused to sign a new contract in the interim, Ajax used Onana sparingly, starting him only twice since he became eligible to play again in November. “I think my time is over in Ajax already,” he said. “I’ve done my best for this club. But in the end I’m not the one who decides who plays or not.”He expects to move on this summer, to another club, another league, another country. A switch to the Italian champion Inter Milan as a free agent for next season is all but agreed.For now, though, Onana is back in Cameroon, back where it all started, back on the field, back with a team that counts on him.The Indomitable Lions face Ethiopia on Thursday in the second game of their quest for an African championship. Onana sees no reason that he will not be playing. More

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      For Africa Cup of Nations, Embrace the Unknown

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      The Africa Cup of Nations probably will be decided by players who earn their livings in Europe. But the best of the tournament lies in its surprises.It was the No. 8 who first caught the eye. He was tall, languid, just on the border between rangy and ungainly. It was not the way he moved, so much, but the way he did not. In the middle of all the bustle and hurry, he was unusually still. He did not sprint. He did not dash. He did not even run, not really. He strolled. He meandered. He moseyed.He was playing in midfield, but he did not look much like a central midfielder. There are, in modern soccer, precisely three acceptable profiles of central midfielder: slight and inventive; dynamic and industrious; physically imposing.The No. 8 was none of them. He towered over almost everyone who drew close, but he was slender, almost fragile. In another world, he might have been a mercurial playmaker who refused to leave his local team — Robin Friday or Tomás Carlovich — but, while his technique was flawless, his energy was not especially chaotic, particularly magical.But the No. 8 was, in theory, the team’s defensive linchpin. And yet he did not throw himself into tackles or busily chase down opponents. He played simple, unwaveringly accurate passes, and then he stood all but still, waiting for the game to come back his way.To an eye raised on watching European soccer, with its blend of tactical influences and its faintly South American inflection, the initial assumption was that he was not following instructions. But he was. Or, at least, he seemed to be. He was there to occupy space, to act as a fixed point, an anchor. He did it well. It worked, too.His name was Asrat Megersa, and he was, in 2013, a 25-year-old playing in midfield for Ethiopia in its first Africa Cup of Nations in three decades. The team’s first game was a match with the reigning champion, Zambia, in the South African city of Mbombela.Ethiopia midfielder Asrat Megersa, right, against Zambia in 2013.Manus van Dyk/Gallo Images/Getty ImagesOn the surface, Ethiopia stood little chance. Zambia could call on a sprinkling of players with experience in Europe. It had a coach, Hervé Renard, of international repute. Ethiopia did not. All but three members of its squad played in their homeland, for teams like Dedebit and Saint George and Ethiopian Coffee.And yet that was not how the game played out. In the bright summer sun, Zambia found Ethiopia entirely confounding. Megersa and his teammates did unexpected, unorthodox things. Their style was not recognizable, and often, neither were their intentions. They made choices they were not supposed to make.It seemed to unsettle the Zambians. An uncertainty, a doubt crept into their play. Zambia took a delicate lead. Megersa kept standing still, kept passing the ball, kept occupying space. Ethiopia struck back, then held on for a draw. In the stands, the fans who had made the long journey from Johannesburg on packed buses, out to the fringes of the Kruger National Park, blew happily, incessantly on their vuvuzelas.Ethiopia’s fortunes changed swiftly after that. A few days later, Burkina Faso held its nerve, and beat Megersa and his team, 4-0. Defeat to Nigeria in the final group game in Rustenberg meant Ethiopia was eliminated. But that day against Zambia left a lasting impression; eight years on, I can still remember the name of Asrat Megersa.It endures, I think, because it is so rare, in modern soccer, to see something truly different. Special happens all the time; Lionel Messi is beamed into our homes every week. But different is precious. Good ideas travel quickly in elite soccer. Best practice spreads rapidly. Some small advancement made in Argentina one week will have made landfall in Europe the next.The result is not homogeneity, not exactly, but a narrow spectrum of variety. Players fit specific, familiar molds. Teams pass or teams press. They play deep or they play high. There are those who absorb pressure and those who apply it and those who do a little of both. Some do it well and some do it badly, but they are all trying to do the same things.Mohamed Salah is among the dozens of European stars called in to bolster African teams.Amr Abdallah Dalsh/ReutersThat will be true of this year’s Cup of Nations, too. Most of the 24 teams gathered in Cameroon for this year’s tournament, which opens with two games on Sunday, will know that their hopes rest, to no small extent, on how the stars they have called back from Europe perform over the next month.If Algeria is to retain its title, Manchester City’s Riyad Mahrez will be a central part of it. Egypt will invest much of its faith in Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah. The backbone of Nigeria’s team plays in the Premier League. Morocco will lean heavily on Youssef En-Nesyri of Sevilla. Senegal, the paper favorite, can call on Edouard Mendy and Kalidou Koulibaly and Idrissa Gueye and Sadio Mané.But they are just the headline acts. Their supporting casts have largely been drawn from Europe, too. Every member of Senegal’s squad plays in Europe. Cameroon has called up 22 players who do. It is not limited to the continent’s traditional powerhouses, either. Guinea has 22 players from European teams. Cape Verde has 21. Burkina Faso can call on 18.That is testament, of course, both to soccer’s rampant and to some extent rapacious global reach and to the development of the sport in Africa; the talent has never been spread quite so broadly across the continent as it is now. There are 10 teams, perhaps, who have arrived in Cameroon with a realistic hope of emerging victorious.Algeria won the Cup of Nations in 2019.Suhaib Salem/ReutersBut that intercontinental connection brings with it, too, a risk of losing something valuable. Soccer has long been a common language, the game the world plays, but as it has grown more global it has started to lose its accents. Style and taste no longer shift across borders; everything is subsumed by the Platonic ideal of soccer as preached by the Champions League and the Premier League. An orthodoxy has taken hold: Soccer has become the game the world plays the same way.The Cup of Nations, though, retains just a couple of pockets of resistance. That was what made Megersa, and Ethiopia, special. This was his interpretation, their interpretation, of the game, the game as they wanted to play, not the game as they had been told it was played.Perhaps the same will be true, this year, of Sudan — with only two players drawn from abroad — or Malawi, with just two squad members called up from Europe. Or perhaps it will be true, once more, of Ethiopia. None of its players have come from Europe this time around, either. That diminishes the team’s chances of winning the tournament, of course, but it also makes it a much more enticing prospect.The only sadness is that Megersa is not in the squad. He is 34, now, still playing in his homeland, the place where he played the game as Ethiopia played it, a uniquely bright and joyous memory.Ignorance Is BlissThe first drips of poison came on Tuesday morning, as Manchester United was still absorbing the previous night’s defeat to Wolves into its bloodstream. Apparently, the club’s players were unimpressed by Ralf Rangnick, the bespectacled 63-year-old German coach who replaced Ole Gunnar Solskjaer a couple of months ago.By Wednesday, it was emerging that one or two of the players had not even heard of Rangnick before he was appointed; despite being professional athletes with many cars and houses, they had been forced to Google him to find out who he was, had been required to spend time on Wikipedia with the general public to work out his background. Drip, drip.By Thursday, it was a flood. Chris Armas, the former New York Red Bulls coach hired as Rangnick’s assistant, had yet to teach United’s coterie of international stars how to — and there is a little paraphrasing here, but not too much — play soccer while in possession of the ball, and they were troubled that perhaps he did not know how to do it.There’s still trouble at United? Everyone blame the new guys.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesRangnick, meanwhile, was reported to be aloof and cold and also making them train at night, or at least in the dark — it is winter in the north of England; it is never anything but dark — and they did not like that at all. He lacked charisma, the whispers went. He lacked authority. He had fallen out with leading figures in the changing room. He had not impressed them in training. Drip, drip, drip.Whether any and all of these complaints — all of them let slip to various journalists on condition of anonymity — are true is, unfortunately, of secondary importance. What matters far more is the fact of their existence, the sad reality that at least a portion of United’s players are already doing what they can to ensure that the finger of blame for any future failure is pointed squarely at the coach who has been there for a few weeks, and not the players who have been there for several years.Those drips are what happens when something in a club — any club, not just Manchester United — has turned, when the atmosphere is toxic, when the strands of accountability and mutual support and collective responsibility that in ordinary times bind a squad and a staff together have snapped. That is always the rule: It is not the content of these pernicious leaks that matter, but the fact of them.Quite how United will proceed from this point is not entirely clear. Ed Woodward, the executive vice chairman, announced on Friday that he is leaving at the end of the month. He will be replaced by Richard Arnold, the club’s managing director. Rangnick has six more months before moving on to become a consultant. There will be a new manager, a new regime. The damage done by those drips, though, suggests that may only be the start of the upheaval.Learning LessonsJoan Laporta knows the safest position at Barcelona: right next to the club’s newest signing.Alejandro Garcia/EPA, via ShutterstockThere is, strangely, an answer to how Barcelona — in debt just a few months ago to the tune of $1 billion, as you may remember, and so concerned by the scale of their financial breakdown that they wanted to join a European Super League — could afford, right at the start of the month, to pay Manchester City $60 million or so to sign Ferran Torres.It is not an especially satisfactory answer, admittedly, encompassing as it does a loan from Goldman Sachs, some creative accounting, the sale of some players who have not yet actually been sold, and an odd loophole in Spanish soccer’s financial regulations that nobody had mentioned until Barcelona decided it wanted to pay Manchester City $60 million or so to sign Ferran Torres.But, still, it is an answer. Far more mystifying was the reaction of the Barcelona president Joan Laporta, a man who has spent much of the last year delivering tremulous warnings about the club’s dire finances, to the completion of the deal. “Everyone else should prepare themselves because we are back,” he said. “We continue to be a reference in the market.”This is a man, it should not need pointing out, who said those words at a time when his club could not officially register its new signing because of its ongoing financial difficulties.That Laporta should be feeling a little bullish is understandable: Torres is an astute signing at what is, by modern standards, a startlingly low fee. Laporta is in an elected position, too, and it is never too early to start campaigning.Indeed, in one sense, it is to be hoped that it is little more than hot air, that his refusal to dismiss the idea of signing Erling Haaland in the summer is little more than pride and defiance.The alternative, after all, is much more troubling: that rather than rebuild the team organically around the richly-talented cadre of teenagers it has produced over the last 12 months, Laporta is prepared to mortgage the club’s future once more, all in some quixotic pursuit of immediate success in a game now dominated by teams backed by nation states.Barcelona has been down that road before, and not long ago. It has only been a few months since it stood on the very edge of complete financial meltdown, after all. It is still only just starting to deal with the consequences. Barcelona does not need to be back, not in that sense, not for some time.CorrespondenceThis is the problem with having a little time off. You unwind, you relax, you allow your mind to drift, and then all of a sudden you’re back at work and none of it makes any sense at all. For example, why is Manuel Buchwald emailing me about the shape of the penalty area?“The logical alternative to the rectangular penalty box is the semicircular one, as is used in most other sports,” he wrote. “Field hockey, handball, lacrosse, basketball and ice hockey. In the latter case it’s the area protecting the goalie.” That is a valid point and would work at least as a basis for a new shape of penalty area in soccer, but why tell me?Not all penalties are equal.Kai Pfaffenbach/ReutersThe fact that Will Clark-Shim has also been in touch to complain about the “increased frequency of penalties in the game” jogs a memory. We were talking about something to do with penalties, weren’t we? “The game thrives on open and active play, honest industry, and clever coordination,” he wrote. “Increased penalties seem the result of incidental handballs, manufactured contact, and tedious reviews. They result in unexciting goals.”That’s a good point, too: Not all goals are created equal, and getting more goals through having more penalties is not necessarily a unilaterally positive thing. There is definitely a theme developing, because Bob Rogers has mentioned penalties, too. He is a (self-professed) “low-level referee,” and he would like to confess to calling fouls as outside the box even if they have occurred inside it, “when that is the fair value of the foul.”Ah, yes, that was it. We were discussing whether there are now too many penalties, and whether there might, perhaps, be a way of better distinguishing between fouls that warrant that level of punishment and fouls that just happen to take place in a fairly arbitrary area of the field. It always takes me a while to get up to speed, that’s all. More

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      Qui a commandité l'agression d'une footballeuse du PSG?

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      L’agression de la footballeuse du PSG a choqué les esprits: attaquants masqués, barre métallique, sa coéquipière Aminata Diallo arrêtée. Ces dernières semaines, de nouveaux éléments sont venus bouleverser la première version de l’histoire.VERSAILLES — La nuit est déjà tombée quand Aminata Diallo franchit le fronton de béton de l’Hôtel de Police pour quitter le bâtiment. 36 heures plus tôt, des agents de police ont frappé à la porte de son appartement, l’ont tirée de son sommeil, et l’ont emmenée en garde à vue.Enfin libérée, Aminata Diallo, milieu de terrain de l’équipe féminine du PSG, fait défiler les centaines de messages qu’elle a reçus. Elle tombe des nues. Inconnue quelques jours plus tôt en dehors du petit monde du football féminin français, son nom fait la Une des journaux aux quatre coins de la planète.Selon la presse, Aminata Diallo est celle qui, un mois plus tôt, conduisait la voiture depuis laquelle une de ses coéquipières avait été tirée du siège passager et agressée par un homme masqué. Toujours selon la presse, elle-même s’en était sortie indemne, alors que sa coéquipière et amie Kheira Hamraoui avait été frappée à coups de barre métallique. Aminata Diallo est donc celle qu’on a interrogée, non pas comme témoin, mais comme suspecte de ce qui, selon la police, pouvait être un coup monté.Avec ses relents de jalousie sportive, sa ressemblance avec l’affaire Tonya Harding et ses liens avec le PSG (champion de France en titre et l’un des clubs de foot les plus riches au monde), l’affaire a rapidement fait le tour de la planète.Mais plus on en apprend — sur une histoire d’infidélité conjugale, sur des accusations à l’encontre d’autres joueuses de l’équipe, et sur des coups de fil à d’autres joueuses médisant sur la victime avant l’agression — plus la première version de l’histoire est remise en cause.Aujourd’hui, plus personne ne sait qui croire. Ni quoi.Un dossier en suspensAminata Diallo, convaincue que sa garde à vue était une erreur de la police, a refusé de se faire assister d’un avocat lors de ses interrogatoires.Loic Baratoux/Abaca/Sipa USA, via AP ImagesPlus de trois semaines se sont écoulées depuis qu’Aminata Diallo, 26 ans, quittait le commissariat de Versailles après deux jours d’interrogatoires et une nuit passée dans une cellule minuscule et nauséabonde. L’enquête se poursuit, mais la police semble loin de comprendre qui, ou quoi, est derrière cette agression qui a eu lieu le 4 novembre. dans une rue sombre de Chatou, en banlieue parisienne.Certains faits sont indiscutables. Kheira Hamraoui, 31 ans, a été victime d’un grave délit. Aminata Diallo a été interrogée puis relâchée. Aucun des agresseurs n’a été identifié. Aucune arme n’a été retrouvée. Et personne n’a été accusé du crime.Mais en enquêtant sur les semaines tumultueuses qui ont suivi l’agression, le New York Times a aussi découvert que Kheira Hamraoui a plusieurs fois laissé entendre que d’autres personnes en lien avec le club, (dont au moins deux co-équipières) seraient impliquées dans l’affaire; qu’alors que le PSG faisait s’entraîner Aminata Diallo et Kheira Hamraoui chacune de son côté, et séparément de leur équipe, depuis des semaines, une erreur de calendrier les a amenées à se croiser et à échanger des noms d’oiseau; enfin, il a découvert que la police a relâché Aminata Diallo sans déposer de plainte, mais a refusé de l’innocenter et de lui rendre ses deux téléphones et son ordinateur portable.En attendant, les dommages collatéraux s’accumulent. Diallo et Hamraoui voient leurs noms salis et leur carrières bouleversées. La cohésion dans les vestiaires du PSG en souffre, compromettant les ambitions de victoire d’une des meilleures équipes d’Europe. Et le mariage d’une légende du football français impliqué dans l’affaire en a pris un coup : sa femme a annoncé dans un communiqué qu’elle demandait le divorce après qu’il lui a avoué avoir eu une liaison avec Kheira Hamraoui, selon son avocat.Kheira Hamraoui en août dernier. Elle et Diallo ont passée des vacances ensemble et étaient coéquipières au sein du club du Paris Saint-Germain et de l’équipe nationale.  Tim Nwachukwu/Getty ImagesLe New York Times a recueilli des informations sur l’agression et ses suite en interviewant une douzaine de personnes en contact direct avec les principaux protagonistes et ayant connaissance de l’agression et des évènements des jours qui l’ont suivie, dont des amis, des membres de leurs familles et des associés des joueuses, leurs avocats, des membres du PSG et de la police.Parmi les personnes interviewées, beaucoup tendent à réfuter les soupçons de jalousie et de trahison. La plupart n’ont accepté de parler qu’à condition que leur nom se soit pas cité, jugeant l’affaire trop sensible.Telle qu’elle se présente aujourd’hui, la situation est toujours aussi compliquée : Kheira Hamraoui a revu la police la semaine dernière, et il y a de fortes chances qu’Aminata Diallo soit elle aussi interrogée à nouveau. Les joueuses doivent reprendre l’entraînement avec leurs coéquipières mardi, mais l’affaire est désormais entre les mains d’un juge d’instruction pour une procédure qui pourrait durer au moins 18 mois. Pendant ce temps-là, les autorités et les joueuses continueront d’essayer d’élucider les dessous de cette petite minute qui, dans une rue peu éclairée, a fait basculer leurs vies.Un dîner d’équipeC’est au Chalet des Iles dans le Bois de Boulogne, aux abords de Paris, qu’Hamraoui, Diallo et leurs coéquipières du PSG ont dîné le soir de l’agression.James Hill pour The New York TimesPour les convives, ce dîner dans un restaurant chic situé sur une île dans un des plus grands parcs de Paris n’avait pourtant rien de particulier.C’était au début du mois de novembre, le club avait réuni les joueuses autour d’un bon repas pour entretenir cette cohésion qui leur avait permis de débuter la saison sans essuyer la moindre défaite, et pour les préparer aux prochaines épreuves.Aminata Diallo avait accepté de prendre Kheira Hamraoui et une autre joueuse, Sakina Karchaoui, dans sa voiture. Le restaurant ayant peu de places de parking, le club leur avait demandé de faire du co-voiturage. Les trois joueuses, qui habitent non loin les unes des autres dans une banlieue nord-ouest de Paris, s’étaient rapprochées depuis qu’elles avaient rejoint le PSG l’été précédent : Kheira Hamraoui venait de Barcelone, Sakina Karchaoui de Lyon, et Aminata Diallo avait été temporairement “prêtée” à l’Atletico de Madrid. Diallo et Hamraoui, déjà coéquipières à l’occasion d’un précédent passage au PSG et de stages avec l’équipe nationale étaient particulièrement proches. Elles avaient même passé des vacances ensemble.Après le dîner, vers 22h30, les trois jeunes femmes reprennent la voiture de Diallo, une Toyota Corolla fournie par le club. Hamraoui s’installe sur le siège passager, Diallo entre l’adresse de Karchaoui dans son GPS et elles prennent la route.Après avoir déposé Karchaoui dans une rue rendue étroite par le grand nombre de voitures garées tout au long, Diallo redémarre doucement lorsque deux hommes masqués surgissent de derrière une camionnette. Ils tapent sur le capot de la voiture pour la faire stopper et hurlent à l’attention de Diallo et d’Hamraoui :“Ouvre la porte!”Les agresseurs agissent très vite. Le premier ouvre la portière côté conducteur et plaque Aminata Diallo contre le volant. Le second arrache Kheira Hamraoui du siège passager.“Celui qui était de mon côté s’est saisi de moi et m’a extirpée du véhicule,” a déclaré Kheira Hamraoui à la police (d’après les extraits de ses déclarations publiés par la presse française). “Avant, il s’est emparé d’une barre de fer rectangulaire qu’il avait cachée dans son pantalon ou sous son pull. Il m’a donné un coup dès les premiers instants de l’agression pour m’obliger à sortir de l’habitacle.”Les blessures de Hamraoui étaient des coupures et d’importants hématomes au niveau des genous.Courtesy Harir AvocatsElle a déclaré à la police que l’agresseur visait essentiellement ses jambes.Kheira Hamraoui dit qu’elle est tombée sur la chaussée : “J’ai vu qu’il visait essentiellement mes jambes, et moi, j’essayais de me protéger avec mes mains.”Elle se souvient aussi avoir entendu un des inconnus crier quelque chose à propos d’un homme marié. Plus tard, Aminata Diallo dira à la police avoir entendu la phrase: “Alors comme ça, on couche avec des hommes mariés ?” Elle dira aussi avoir entendu des insultes à connotation sexuelle au travers des hurlements de Kheira Hamraoui , sur laquelle pleuvaient les coups.L’agression dure moins d’une minute avant que les agresseurs ne prennent la fuite. Hamraoui rentre et s’affalle dans la voiture, une main en sang. Les deux femmes appellent immédiatement Sakina Karchaoui, dont le domicile est à moins de 100 mètres, pour lui raconter ce qui s’est passé et lui demander de les rejoindre. Elles filent ensuite aux urgences les plus proches.Les suitesLes urgences de l’hôpital de Poissy, où Hamaraoui  s’est rendue pour faire soigner ses blessures quelques heures après l’agression.James Hill pour The New York TimesPendant le trajet, Diallo au volant, les joueuses préviennent le club de ce qui vient de se passer. Le directeur-adjoint de la sécurité du PSG, Frédéric Doué, arrive aux urgences avec Bernard Mendy, entraîneur adjoint de l’équipe féminine. Peu après, une amie de Kheira Hamraoui les rejoint aussi.Une fois les blessures de Hamraoui soignées, les agresseurs n’ayant pas été identifiés, les responsables du club interdisent aux joueuses de rentrer chez elles. L’équipe s’est arrangée pour qu’elles passent la nuit dans un Holiday Inn proche de leur terrain d’entraînement, à une quinzaine de kilomètres à l’ouest de Paris.Les trois jeunes femmes connaissent cet hôtel car elle ont y logé quelques semaines après leur transfert au PSG l’été précédent. Sakina Karchaoui et Kheira Hamraoui prennent une chambre à deux. Aminata Diallo s’installe dans une chambre voisine. L’amie de Kheira Hamraoui , elle aussi, passe la nuit à l’hôtel.Sur place, les jeunes femmes essaient de comprendre qui peut bien être à l’origine de l’agression. D’après plusieurs personnes au courant de leur conversation, Kheira Hamraoui est catégorique dès le départ : un membre du club est forcément impliqué. Les joueuses évoquent aussi un épisode étrange qui a eu lieu quelques semaines plus tôt : plusieurs de leurs coéquipières avaient reçu des appels anonymes d’un homme qui disait du mal de Hamraoui. Mais plus tard cette nuit-là, Kheira Hamraoui évoque aussi d’autres suspects, citant notamment le mari d’une quatrième joueuse du PSG, qui se trouve être aussi l’agent d’une autre star française de l’équipe.Le lendemain matin, après une nuit brève et agitée, les jeunes femmes reprennent leurs discussions. Pendant qu’elles parlent, le téléphone de Kheira Hamraoui sonne. C’est Éric Abidal, un ancien joueur de l’équipe nationale française qu’elle a connu au FC Barcelone, le club où elle a joué pednant trois saisons et dont il était alors le directeur technique.Eric Abidal, deux fois vainqueur de la Champions League à Barcelone et deux fois sélectionné dans l’équipe nationale pour la Coupe du Monde, demeure une populaire dans son pays natal. Albert Gea/ReutersKheira Hamraoui demande à Éric Abidal si sa femme pourrait vouloir lui faire du mal, puis lui annonce qu’elle s’est fait agresser. Le téléphone étant sur haut-parleur, tous ceux dans la pièce entendent sa reaction: il semble abasourdi. Ils échangent encore quelques mots, puis l’appel prend fin.Peu après, Sakira Karchaoui et Aminata Diallo partent petit-déjeuner au camp du club, à Bougival. Elles s’entraînent puis rencontrent des membres de la direction pour leur raconter les détails de l’agression. (Kheira Hamraoui ne les accompagnait pas ; elle était retournée faire soigner ses blessures). Plus tard, les joueuses, ainsi que les coéquipières qui avaient reçu les appels anonymes, sont allées faire de nouvelles déclarations à la police.Inquiet de voir qu’on s’en était pris à une de ses joueuses, le club désigne des agents de sécurité pour surveiller les domiciles des trois joueuses pendant quelques jours, mais ne divulgue pas la nouvelle de l’incident.Au sein de l’équipe, pourtant, la tension monte. L’attaquante de l’équipe nationale Kadidiatou Diani, qui en veut à Kheira Hamraoui d’avoir cité son mari parmi les éventuels suspects — il n’a pas été inquiété, ni même interrogé par la police — la prend à partie alors qu’elle s’entraîne sur un vélo en salle.Le 9 novembre, moins d’une semaine après l’agression, Aminata Diallo débutait le match de Ligue des Champions contre le Real Madrid à la place de Kheira Hamraoui. Sakira Karchaoui était aussi de la partie. Tout semblait normal, excepté l’absence de Kheira Hamraoui que le club justifia pour “raisons personnelles”. Encore une victoire pour le PSG. Et toujours aucun but encaissé depuis le début de la saison.Ce soir-là, comme souvent après les matchs, Aminata Diallo se couche tard. L’adrénaline la tient éveillée jusqu’à 3 heures du matin. Elle vient de fermer l’œil, selon ses proches, quand des coups frappés à sa porte d’entrée la tirent de son sommeil. Elle ouvre et se retrouve face à quatre officiers de police.36 heuresL’hôtel de police de Versailles, où Diallo est restée environ 36 heures en garde à vue.James Hill pour The New York TimesPoliment mais fermement, l’un d’eux demande à Aminata Diallo de les suivre au commissariat. Ses collègues fouillent le domicile et emportent plusieurs objets, dont au moins deux téléphones et un ordinateur portable. Arrivée au commissariat, Diallo refuse une offre d’être assistée par un avocat pendant son interrogatoire.Dès le début de l’interrogatoire, Aminata Diallo comprend que Kheira Hamraoui l’a désignée comme suspecte. Les policiers sous-entendaient qu’au retour du dîner, elle avait pris une autre route que celle qu’elle avait indiquée au départ. Ils lui demandaient pourquoi elle conduisait si lentement après avoir déposé Sakira Karchaoui. Ils lui ont ensuite soumis l’hypothèse suivante, publiée très vite dans un journal français alors que Diallo est encore en garde à vue : l’agression aurait été motivée par son désir d’être titularisée au poste de milieu de terrain, occupé par Hamraoui, dans l’équipe première.C’est cette hypothèse qui a catapulté l’histoire de l’agression dans les médias internationaux et suscité des comparaisons avec la tristement célèbre agression de la patineuse Nancy Kerrigan en 1994.La police procède à plusieurs interrogations d’Aminata Diallo, revenant à chaque reprise sur une même série de questions sur le trajet en voiture et sur ce qu’elle-même faisait pendant l’agression. Les policiers l’interroge aussi sur ses liens avec un homme emprisonné à Lyon pour des délits (notamment des extorsions) sans rapport avec l’agression. Connu sous le nom de Ja Ja, cet homme compte plusieurs footballeuses parmi ses connaissances, explique Diallo à la police, dont Kheira Hamraoui. La police a confirmé par la suite que lui aussi avait été interrogé au sujet de l’agression.Après l’avoir gardé pour elle, Aminata Diallo finit par révéler à ses interrogateurs qu’elle avait entendu un des agresseurs accuser Kheira Hamraoui de coucher avec un homme marié. (Au bout du cinquième interrogatoire de Diallo, la police a appris que la carte SIM du téléphone portable de Kheira Hamraoui est enregistrée au nom d’Eric Abidal; jusque là, cette dernière leur avait simplement dit que cette carte était liée à un ancien petit ami.)Aminata Diallo a raconté à des amis qu’à partir de ce moment-là, l’interrogatoire s’est adouci. Les officiers lui disent tout de même qu’elle devra passer la nuit au poste afin, dès le lendemain, qu’elle puisse prendre part à une “confrontation” avec Kheira Hamraoui – la confrontation, propre aux enquêtes françaises, consiste à réunir les suspects et les témoins pour que chacun expose sa version des faits.En guise de réconfort, la police autorise Aminata Diallo, qui est musulmane, à commander son dîner via une application de livraison. Elle choisit un sandwich au poulet halal.Un avenir incertainÀ Bougival, le centre où s’entraîne l’équipe féminine du PSG. Depuis peu, Hamraoui se rend aux entraînements accompagnée d’un garde du corps. James Hill pour The New York TimesLe lendemain, en fin d’après-midi, Aminata Diallo s’est donc retrouvée donc face à Kheira Hamraoui. Plus tard elle a dit à ses proches qu’elle avait trouvé “bizarre” de découvrir ce dont on l’accusait, à savoir que Kheira Hamraoui aurait entendu dire par des coéquipières que Diallo était derrière l’agression. Celle-ci a nié l’accusation. La confrontation a duré environ une heure. À la fin, Diallo a été autorisée à partir.Une amie d’Aminata Diallo est venue la chercher à la sortie de l’hôtel de police. Pendant le trajet, alors qu’on la reconduisait chez elle, Diallo a très vite réalisé l’ampleur qu’avait pris l’affaire — et sa notoriété bien malgré elle — à la lecture des centaines de SMS d’amis, de sa famille et d’autres.Le soir même, elle engageait un avocat, Mourad Battikh, pour la représenter. Le lendemain, le manager du PSG, Ulrich Ramé, lui a rendu visite chez elle accompagné d’un médecin. Ils l’ont encouragée à passer du temps avec ses proches pour se remettre. Elle insistait au contraire pour reprendre l’entraînement. Tout ce qu’elle désirait, c’était de retourner sur le terrain. Le club lui a fait comprendre que ce n’était pas possible, du moins dans un premier temps.Comme il y avait une pause dans le programme du PSG, Diallo en a profité pour aller à Grenoble voir sa famille, dont certains avaient appris l’agression et son arrestation dans les médias.Abou Dieng, un cousin, a confirmé au New York Times qu’elle espérait recommencer à jouer pour le PSG, l’équipe qu’elle a toujours rêvé de représenter : “On ne parle même pas de Kheira Hamraoui. On ne parle que de foot et de son retour aux entraînements.”De retour à Paris, Aminata Diallo a repris seule les entraînements. De même pour Kheira Hamraoui, le club s’appliquant à programmer leurs séances d’entraînement à des heures différentes et veillant à ce qu’elles ne se retrouvent jamais sur le terrain au même moment (sans toujours y parvenir). Leur purgatoire a commencé à prendre fin lundi, quand elles se sont entraînées ensemble pour la première fois depuis l’agression, après l’intervention du syndicat des joueurs français. Mardi, elles ont rejoint leurs coéquipières, mais un responsable du club leur a annoncé qu’elles ne les accompagneraient pas en Ukraine en milieu de semaine pour un match de Ligue des Champions.Ni l’une ni l’autre ne s’est exprimée publiquement sur l’agression, ni sur ses suites. Mais quelques jours après la libération d’Aminata Diallo, son avocat Mourad Battikh a qualifié à la télévision son arrestation d’ “infamante, scandaleuse et incohérente”. Quelques heures plus tard, c’est l’avocat de Kheira Hamraoui, Saïd Harir, qui réagissait à l’antenne en montrant des photos des blessures infligées à sa cliente.Le PSG, qui a refusé de répondre à nos questions, reste discret sur les rebondissements d’une affaire qui semble désormais également signer la fin du mariage d’Éric Abidal. L’avocat de son épouse Hayet a annoncé que sa cliente demande le divorce. Le 18 novembre, il a publié un communiqué dans lequel Hayet Abidal affirme que son mari reconnaît avoir eu une liaison avec Kheira Hamraoui. Plus tard sur Instagram, Eric Abidal a demandé à sa femme de lui pardonner.Hayet Abidal a nié toute implication dans l’agression. Mais Maryvonne Caillebotte, la procureure chargée du dossier, a déclaré le 15 novembre au journal Le Monde qu’Éric Abidal “sera entendu prochainement”. Une audition de son épouse n’est pas non plus exclue.Mourad Battikh, l’avocat de Diallo, ne décolère pas sur la façon dont sa cliente a été traitée par la police. “Quand c’est Aminata, ils montrent leurs muscles et ils la mettent en garde à vue”, s’indigne-t-il. “Quand c’est Éric Abidal, une personnalité forte, célèbre, populaire, ils prennent leur temps et procèdent lentement pour être sûrs de ne pas faire d’erreurs.”Mourad Battikh, l’avocat d’Aminata Diallo, dans son bureau à Paris.James Hill pour The New York TimesL’avocat Saïd Harir, engagé pour représenter Kheira Hamraoui.James Hill pour The New York TimesL’équipe féminine du PSG traverse une crise. Son premier match après le scandale a été une raclée (6-1) par son principal rival, Lyon, qui compromet sans doute ses espoirs de conserver le titre de champion de France. Certaines coéquipières de Kheira Hamraoui ont demandé qu’on éloigne leur casier du sien dans les vestiaires. D’autres ont avoué à la direction du club qu’elles auront du mal à reprendre le jeu avec elle. Plusieurs des meilleures joueuses du club veulent simplement passer à autre chose.Pendant ce temps-là, les agresseurs sont toujours en cavale et personne ne sait où cette affaire mènera. Une attaque préméditée comme celle qu’a subie Kheira Hamraoui est passible de cinq ans de prison, selon une porte-parole de la police de Versailles.Aminata Diallo souhaite que justice soit rendue, affirme son avocat. Elle est convaincue de son innocence et déterminée à poursuivre sa carrière au PSG — son contrat prend fin dans six mois. “Sa réputation a été ternie par les journaux du monde entier,” déplore Me Battikh.Kheira Hamraoui aussi veut que justice soit faite, mais elle continue de croire que c’est au sein du club que la vérité verra le jour. Elle l’a dit lors de son dernier entretien avec la police, le 29 novembre. D’après un témoin de sa comparution, les enquêteurs l’ont réinterrogée sur le comportement d’Aminata Diallo dans la voiture et sur la route qu’elle a empruntée.Dans son bureau aux environs des Champs-Élysées, son avocat, Me Harir, affirme qu’il s’agit avant tout de découvrir qui sont les auteurs de l’agression. “On espère que les coupables seront inculpés rapidement,” confirme-t-il.Il ajoute, à propos de Kheira Hamraoui : “Ce qu’elle veut aujourd’hui, c’est que l’on respecte sa vie privée, que l’on respecte son statut de victime.”Romain Molina et Daphné Anglès ont contribué à ce reportage. More

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      Lionel Messi Wins Record Seventh Ballon d’Or

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      The Paris St.-Germain star capped a year in which he led Argentina to the Copa América title by edging Bayern Munich’s Robert Lewandowski.Some of the most illustrious names in soccer’s long history only managed to win the Ballon d’Or, the sport’s most prestigious individual prize, once. George Best, Zinedine Zidane and Eúsebio all have just a single award to their names. Ronaldo, the great Brazilian striker, won two. Johan Cruyff, arguably the finest European player in history, has three.After Monday night, Lionel Messi has seven.Messi, 34, effectively retained the trophy he last won in 2019 — controversially, the award was not handed out by France Football last year because of the coronavirus pandemic — after a year in which he ended his long wait for an international honor, winning the Copa América with Argentina, and left Barcelona, the club where he had spent all of his career, for Paris St.-Germain.When your dad wins an other Ballon d’Or 🙌#ballondor pic.twitter.com/UWKir71mX5— Ballon d’Or #ballondor (@francefootball) November 29, 2021
      “It’s incredible to be here again,” Messi said. “Two years ago I thought it was the last time. Winning the Copa América was the key.”“I don’t know how many years I have left,” he added, “but I hope many more.”Messi finished with 613 points in the voting, only 33 more than the runner-up, Bayern Munich striker Robert Lewandowski. In 2019, the last time the trophy was awarded, Messi beat Liverpool defender Virgil van Dijk by only seven points.Barcelona may have lost Messi this year, but it still took home some hardware on Monday: Alexia Putellas, a star midfielder on its treble-winning women’s team, became the third winner of the women’s Ballon d’Or, and the teenager Pedri, a rising talent who is already a fixture for Barcelona and Spain’s national team, was honored as the world’s best player under 21.Messi, who had arrived at the gala at Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris in a shimmering tuxedo, a look matched by his three young sons, was typically soft-spoken in accepting his award. He praised his former teammates at Barcelona and his countrymen with Argentina, and vowed to fight for new trophies with his new club, P.S.G.Messi defeated Lewandowski in voting by 176 journalists and conducted by France Football, which awards the Ballon d’Or (almost) every year. Many experts argued Lewandowski deserved the honor in 2020, when it was not handed out because, organizers said, disruptions to the soccer calendar had made it impossible to judge. Messi said he agreed with that position.“I think you deserved to win the award last year,” Messi told Lewandowski from the stage, calling it “an honor” to stand against him for top honors in 2021.Jorginho, the Brazil-born Italy midfielder, was third in the balloting, reward for a season in which his club team, Chelsea, won the Champions League and Italy won the European Championship. Real Madrid and France striker Karim Benzema was fourth, and Jorginho’s Chelsea midfield partner, N’Golo Kanté, was fifth.Ronaldo, who finished sixth in the voting, was absent from Monday’s ceremony, but his rivalry with Messi was not. On his Instagram account, Ronaldo angrily took issue with a comment made recently by France Football’s editor in chief, Pascal Ferré, in an interview with The New York Times about the award’s prestige.“Ronaldo has only one ambition, and that is to retire with more Ballons d’Or than Messi,” Ferré said, “and I know that because he has told me.”Ronaldo — despite suggesting as much in other interviews — denied he had made the comment, saying, “Ferré lied, used my name to promote himself and to promote the publication he works for.”“It is unacceptable,” he added, “that the person responsible for awarding such a prestigious prize could lie in this way, in absolute disrespect for someone who has always respected France Football and the Ballon d’Or.”Though 2021 has hardly been a vintage year by Messi’s standards — Barcelona was beaten to the Spanish title by Atlético Madrid and eliminated from last season’s Champions League in the round of 16 — his achievement with Argentina, as well as the attention drawn by his move to France after winning six Ballons d’Or at Barcelona, was enough to convince the award’s jurors.That Messi had never won an international trophy with his national team had always been held against him in the debate over whether he warrants the status as soccer’s greatest ever player. His rivals, after all, had triumphed with their countries as well as their clubs: Pelé led Brazil to three World Cups, Diego Maradona inspired Argentina to one and Cristiano Ronaldo helped Portugal claim the European Championship in 2016.Messi finally put that idea to rest in this summer’s Copa América, breaking down in tears on the field after Ángel Di María’s goal had given Argentina its first international trophy since 1993, beating Brazil, the host, in the final.His tally of seven Ballons d’Or now puts him two clear of Ronaldo, his great rival: The Portuguese forward remains on five, but he has not won the prize since 2017, and at age 36 he is more than two years older than Messi.Putellas, the 27-year-old midfielder who is captain of Barcelona’s all-conquering women’s team, won the women’s Ballon d’Or. Her victory completed a clean sweep of last season’s prizes, after she led her Barcelona side to the Champions League title and a league and cup double in Spain, and then was honored as Europe’s player of the year.Her main rivals for the Ballon d’Or were mostly familiar faces: Barcelona had become the first women’s team to register five nominees in a single year, and two of Putellas’s teammates — Jennifer Hermoso, who was second, and Lieke Martens, who was fifth — finished in the top five in the voting.“Honestly it’s a bit emotional, and very special,” Putellas said. “It’s great to be here with all of my teammates, since we have lived and experienced so much together, especially in the past year.”“This is an individual prize,” she added, “but football is a team sport.” More

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      Barcelona, Real Madrid and Transfer Rumors From Another Age

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      Talk about stars headed to Barcelona and Real Madrid conveniently leaves out an important fact: Neither club can afford them at the moment.Everything starts with the interviews. Mohamed Salah granted the first, to the Spanish newspaper AS, last December. He talked about his career, his ambitions for the season. He demurred when asked if he would finish his career with Liverpool. He offered a couple of placatory bromides about the continuing virility of Real Madrid and Barcelona.A few months later, not long before Liverpool faced Real Madrid in the Champions League, he did the same with Marca. The interview had a copy-paste quality: Salah talked about his career, his ambitions for the season. He demurred when asked whether he would finish his career with Liverpool. He offered a couple of placatory bromides about the continuing virility of Real Madrid. (Marca did not ask about Barcelona.)The interviews were not, it is fair to say, significant because Salah said nothing especially revelatory or surprising or explosive. Their meaning lay entirely in their existence. The fact that Salah, not typically given to inviting newspapers into his home, had broken the trend for Real Madrid’s twin courtiers said all that needed to be said.Appearing in the pages of AS and Marca, after all, is part of a long-established ritual, the first step in a familiar dance. It is — or has been, for a long time — a way for a player to flutter their eyelashes in the direction of either of Spain’s giants (though Real Madrid, most often). It is a sign that they would be interested, should an offer for their services arrive. In general, it is also a signal that Real Madrid, in particular, reciprocates the affection. And it is a whispered warning to that player’s current club that only a new contract, an improved salary, might stave off the inevitable.It is no surprise, then, that the last few months have seen a steady drip-feed of thinly-sourced transfer rumors suggesting that this might be Salah’s final season at Liverpool, that one or the other of Spain’s repelling poles might be at his shoulder, in his ear, coaxing him away.Currently, the favorite is Barcelona. Quite how that has happened is not entirely clear. In the English-speaking news media, the story has been credited to El Nacional, a Catalan newspaper that is, currently, of the view that Liverpool is about to sell not only Salah but also, apparently, its captain, Jordan Henderson, and its record signing, Virgil van Dijk.Players like Dani Alves, 38, now feel like a better fit for Barcelona’s budget.Enric Fontcuberta/EPA, via ShutterstockBut El Nacional does not claim to be the original source: It attributes the rumor to a website called Fichajes. That is, of course, responsible journalism — always credit your sources, kids — but it does not clear anything up, because Fichajes’ original claim was that Real Madrid wanted to sign Salah. Its first mention of Barcelona came three weeks after El Nacional ran the story.Quite what prompted the change is anyone’s guess. Much has been made of a quote from Xavi Hernández, the club’s new coach, a couple of years ago describing Salah as a “top” player. That he said it in a sentence that also referred to Sadio Mané and Roberto Firmino is not mentioned. Nor is the fact that it is hardly a staggering admission. Salah is a top player. That is objectively true.What is omitted entirely from this wildfire of speculation, of course, is that Barcelona does not have anything like the money needed to sign Mohamed Salah. This is a club, remember, that has racked up $1 billion or so in debt. It is operating under strict salary controls instigated by La Liga. It has, by a generous estimate, about $10 million to spend on its squad in January.It is projecting yet another loss in this financial year. Its debt restructuring deal with Goldman Sachs means it has to cut back its operating costs drastically by 2025 or grant its lenders control of the television revenue that acts as the club’s primary source of funding. “A sword of Damocles,” as the International Finance Review described it. Barcelona also has a new stadium to build.It cannot afford to pay Liverpool the nine-figure fee it would demand for Salah. It might struggle to meet the $400,000-a-week in salary the player would want, even on a free transfer in 18 months’ time. (It also absolutely should not be thinking about deals like that for aging players: that is, after all, what got Barcelona into this mess in the first place.)Real Madrid’s financial situation is better — though it, too, has an expensive stadium refurbishment to consider, as well as the biting impact of the coronavirus pandemic — but it is significant that when it tried to sign Kylian Mbappé last summer, his current club, Paris St.-Germain, believed it to be nothing more than posturing; Real Madrid could not, the French team concluded, genuinely afford to pay any club $200 million for a single player.There is a reason that Real Madrid waited until the contract of David Alaba, the versatile Austrian master-of-all-trades, expired before signing him from Bayern Munich. There is a reason it is hoping Mbappé’s deal in Paris will be allowed to run out. There is a reason it is considering the likes of Antonio Rüdiger, the Chelsea defender, and Paul Pogba, the Manchester United midfielder, to revamp its team.Real Madrid knows it does not possess the financial heft to persuade Premier League teams to sell these players if they do not want to, because English soccer’s television revenues mean those teams almost certainly never need to sell. It knows, too, that paying a transfer fee and the stellar salaries top players command is beyond its reach. It has to cut its costs, and cloth, accordingly.Real Madrid’s transfer budget may take a back seat to its construction budget.Susana Vera/ReutersThis is a stark shift in soccer’s landscape. For decades, the working assumption has been that Real Madrid and Barcelona represent the apex of the sport’s hierarchy: They were its alphas, its final destinations, its mega-predators. That no longer holds true. Real Madrid and Barcelona, for now and for some time to come, no longer sit at the top of the food chain.That soccer’s whirling rumor industry has not noticed this does not matter, particularly. It is, by its very nature, slightly fantastical. That is part of the fun. Should a whisper ricocheting between click-hungry websites across Europe prove to be grounded in nothing but smoke and air then it does not, really, do any harm*. There may be disappointment at the end — when you expect Mohamed Salah but get Luuk de Jong — but in the meantime, readers enjoy the flight of fancy. The advertisers get eyeballs. The websites get paid.[*Other than to further undermine trust in the news ecosystem in general, and therefore permit the rise of the deliberately, cynically unreliable and the perniciously fake.]What is significant, though, is that players — or, more accurately, agents — do not yet seem to have caught on to that fact. The game’s altered tectonics mean that, for a player like Salah, flirting with Marca and AS is no longer much of a bargaining chip. Real Madrid is not an immediate threat to Liverpool, not any more.That is an important change, and not necessarily a positive one. Players at the Premier League’s top six teams — more or less — are effectively trapped. They will not sell to each other, not easily, as Tottenham proved in refusing Manchester City’s advances for Harry Kane last summer. The only club that can afford to extricate them is, most likely, P.S.G.Liverpool, Manchester City, Chelsea and Manchester United, in particular, are no longer proving grounds for Real Madrid and Barcelona. In those interviews, Salah twice said that his future was in his club’s hands. It was taken, at the time, as a challenge to Liverpool: to offer him a contract that fulfilled his true value, or else.But perhaps it was simply a recognition of the truth. Liverpool, like the rest of the Premier League’s elite, is in control of what happens to its star players, of how long the dance lasts, of when the song ends.Getting the Numbers RightPortrait of a mismatch.Carl Recine/Action Images Via ReutersAt roughly the same time as England was running in its 10th goal of the evening against San Marino, Italy was running out of ideas. The Italians, the European champions, had a relatively simple task in their final qualifying game, a road trip to Belfast to face a Northern Ireland team with nothing at stake but pride: Italy had to win to seal its place in Qatar next winter, and hope that Switzerland, its rival, did not rout Bulgaria at the same time.With 10 minutes to go, though, it was getting desperate. The score was mounting in Lucerne — two-nil, three-nil, four — but remained unmoving at Windsor Park. Italy could not pick its way through Northern Ireland. It could not play around Northern Ireland. And so, eventually, desperately, it tried to go over, launching a series of hopeful, hopeless, long balls into the penalty area. It did not work. The final whistle blew. The crowd roared.And so, not quite six months after it conquered a continent, Italy faces the prospect of navigating a hazardous playoff round simply to make it to Qatar. The idea brings back unhappy memories: It is only four years, after all, since Italy lost at the same stage to Sweden — a potential opponent, this time around — and missed out on Russia 2018 altogether.Those two results are worth considering in tandem. England’s 10-0 demolition of the tiny city-state prompted a reprise of the old, loaded discussion about whether UEFA needs to introduce prequalifying to weed out some of the weaker teams in its field. Italy’s 0-0 stalemate convinced Derek Rae, the respected ESPN commentator, to suggest that perhaps Europe merited more spaces at the World Cup.Italy’s week: no goals, but one lifeline.Peter Morrison/Associated PressNeither of these ideas is quite as charged as they seem to be (warning: there is no fulmination about to happen). Only two federations — Europe and South America — do not filter the pool of teams before the final stage of qualifying. It happens in Africa, Asia and North America. It is not anti-competitive. It is not the equivalent of the European Super League. It is simply changing the structure of how teams qualify for the World Cup.Likewise, the concept of expanding Europe’s footprint is not without merit. The presence of not only Italy but Portugal — the last two European champions — in the playoff round indicates Europe’s strength in depth.There is a good chance that 50 percent of all the teams in South America will be in Qatar, as opposed to a quarter of Europe’s, and just 10 percent of Africa’s. Africa, certainly, is underrepresented. But that is not to say that Europe is overrepresented: According to the (flawed) FIFA rankings, 18 of the best 32 teams in the world are in Europe. It has 13 slots for the World Cup.At the heart of both of these arguments is what you think the World Cup should do, and should be. If it is there to gather the world’s best teams, then Europe should have more slots and there should, probably, be prequalifying. If it has another mission, to function as an inclusive carnival, to help countries around the world aspire to something, then it should not.Of course, at least one of these arguments has been rendered moot by FIFA: This will, after all, be the last 32-team World Cup. Starting in 2026, 16 European teams will qualify (and nine from Africa), but the competition’s aspirational quality will not have been diminished. It is easy to rail against the expansion of the World Cup. In some lights, though, it has the faintest glow of logic behind it.Yes, Yes, Canada, We KnowJason Franson/The Canadian Press, via Associated PressAs many of you will have noticed, Canada now sits proudly atop the Octagon that will determine North and Central America’s entrants for next year’s World Cup, thanks in no small part to an impressive 2-1 win against a stalling Mexico in what appeared to be the actual North Pole.We receive reasonably regular correspondence demanding we cover — in this newsletter, for some reason, rather than anywhere else — Canada’s sudden emergence as a global superpower. And we will (because it’s a fascinating story, not because of mob rule), as qualification draws closer. But for now, please make do with this video of a man jumping into a snowdrift in celebration.Cashing In on MaradonaThe majority of speculative emails that I receive, these days, are related to soccer’s nascent romance with the world of NFTs. It is, after all, a natural fit: a nihilistic, self-regarding world where value has been completely detached from inherent worth and, well, cryptocurrency.It is a subject that makes me feel deeply uneasy. Soccer is only just starting to reckon with its unhealthy relationship with gambling, and it seems to be using NFTs — which, as far as I can tell, follow much the same dynamic — to plug the gap. The sport should, I feel, be a little more careful about where it takes its money, and precisely what its partners do. The sport does not feel the same way.But the sheer volume of those emails is, all of a sudden, being challenged by an upstart: correspondence alerting me to some project or other about Diego Maradona. There is an Amazon Prime series about his life, one which seems to borrow its dramatic aesthetic from a telenovela and its soccer scenes from When Saturday Comes. There is a reissue of Jimmy Burns’s biography. There is a Spotify podcast about his final few days, hosted by the renowned investigative journalist Thierry Henry.Napoli’s most recent tribute to Diego Maradona was sartorial.Jennifer Lorenzini/ReutersThis is all harmless, of course: much more harmless, potentially, than NFTs. And yet there is a faint feeling of exploitation here, too, that Maradona’s story has already been packaged as content, his legacy used as script fodder, his myth portioned into rights and sold off. It is only a year since his death. It feels too soon, somehow, to start setting in stone how we should think about his life.CorrespondencePlenty of feedback on alternative cards this week. “The punishment has to be extremely unpalatable to both the players themselves and the managers, while not destroying the contest,” wrote Timothy Ogden. He suggests that the player receiving an orange card would still have to serve a subsequent, one-game suspension, and that a team must have a designated replacement, a player who cannot be used as a regular substitute.Alex McMillan and Carson Stanwood are both in favor of simple sin bins for tactical foulers: 5 or 10 minutes out of the game, with no further punishment. But there was a bit of outside-the-box — literally, as you will see — thinking from David Simpson, too. For a tactical foul, he wrote, “the offended team should be allowed to place the ball anywhere outside the penalty area for a direct free kick.” That’s a really good idea. More