Barcelona (Soccer Team)

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      Barcelona Femení and the Pursuit of Perfection

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      Barcelona Femení is the champion of Spain and Europe, and perhaps the most dominant club team in the world. The team’s coach and his players expect it to be better.BARCELONA, Spain — These are the bare statistics of Barcelona Femení’s season so far. The team has played nine games in the league. It has won nine games in the league. It has won them, in fact, by such a margin that the word “won” does not quite capture it. Barcelona’s first game ended, 5-0. So did its second. In its third and fourth games, it scored eight.That was only the start. The next week, it beat Alavés by 9-1. Late last month, it faced Real Sociedad, the one team still vaguely, theoretically, in its slipstream at the summit of La Liga Fémenina. That finished 8-1. In the middle of all that, it found time to deconstruct Arsenal, the otherwise unbeaten leader of Britain’s Women’s Super League, too.Including its two appointments in the Champions League, Barcelona has played 11 games this season. It has conceded three goals — one each to Alavés, Real Sociedad and Arsenal — and it has scored a scarcely believable 60. Its coach, Jonatan Giráldez, has weighed all of that evidence before drawing his conclusion: Barcelona really should have scored more goals.The natural assumption might be that he is, if not joking, then perhaps exaggerating for effect, but Giráldez is quite serious. In his mind, it is a simple equation: You just have to place the numbers in proper context. “We have generated more than 200 chances,” Giráldez said. “So if you look at it like that, we have not scored very many.”Barcelona’s ledger this season: played 11, won 11, scored 60, allowed 3.Eric Alonso/Getty ImagesThis is a manager’s job, of course: to demand constant improvement from players, to refuse them the luxury of resting on their laurels, to eschew the very idea of being satisfied. “That’s what coaches are like,” said Marta Torrejón, the experienced Barcelona defender, “always wanting more.”Giráldez’s reasoning, though, is rather more pragmatic. He was promoted to head coach last summer after the unexpected departure of his predecessor, Lluís Cortés, only weeks after the club had won not just the Spanish league and its domestic cup but also its first Champions League title, crushing Chelsea, 4-0, in the final.Giráldez, 29, was given the job ahead of a cluster of other applicants — at least 20 coaches from around the world speculatively sent in their résumés — essentially as a continuity candidate, someone who knew “our ideas and our identity,” as the club’s sporting director, Markel Zubizarreta, put it.To Giráldez, the job is a considerable privilege and a constant pressure. Barcelona, now the foremost team in women’s soccer, has standards to maintain and expectations to meet. He does not ask for more from his players out of rote instinct; he does it because he knows that what appears to be a slight fissure at this stage of the season could prove a fatal fault line later on.“We have conceded two goals from set pieces this season,” Giráldez said. (The third, scored by Real Sociedad’s Sanni Franssi, came from a counterattack.) “One from a corner, one from a free kick. When you win a game, 8-1, that goes unnoticed, but we have to improve that, because when we play in the final rounds of the Champions League, against Lyon or Paris St.-Germain or Wolfsburg, that action could send us home.“If we have 25 chances in a game, the goalkeeper saves 13, and 12 go wide. In a more balanced game, we would not have so many chances, so we have to make sure we take more of them. We have to work out why we did not score more goals: We got nine against Alavés, but I had the sensation that we could have scored 15. Why didn’t we?”Barcelona’s 29-year-old, first-year coach, Jonatan Giráldez.Ritzau Scanpix/Via ReutersIt is important, he quickly adds, to recognize that it is very hard to score eight goals in a game, to appreciate and to celebrate that. And then demand even better.“You can win, 8-0, and still have a lot of things to improve,” Giráldez said. “My job is to detect what we have done badly and modify it. It is about improving every detail.”Those details are not easy to find at Barcelona, not these days. In the eight years since Torrejón joined the club, it has changed almost beyond recognition. “It is like a different place,” she said. “From zero to 100.”When Torrejón arrived, training sessions still took place in the evening, because the players either attended college or went to work during the day. Already a fixture on Spain’s national team back then, she had joined on the promise that Barcelona would turn professional. There was talk of significant investment, attracting a sponsor, building a winning team.When the move came, in 2015, it felt “like luxury,” Torrejón said: arriving at Barcelona’s training complex in the morning, having breakfast together as a team, enjoying access to the club’s medical services and its conditioning staff and its state-of-the-art facilities. Still, though, “thinking about winning the Champions League was impossible,” she said.Alexia Putellas, already honored as Europe’s player of the year, is a finalist for the Ballon d’Or.Tt News Agency/Via ReutersAsisat Oshoala scored one goal and set up another in a 4-0 win over Arsenal in the Champions League in October.Enric Fontcuberta/EPA, via ShutterstockBarcelona did not choose, unlike many of its peers, to use the financial clout of its parent club to accelerate its growth. “For 10 million euros,” or about $11.5 million, “you could buy a team of the best players in the world,” Zubizarreta said. “There are teams out there that are projects based on doing that. Lyon has done it. Chelsea has done it. Manchester City has an English core but they have done it, too.”Barcelona, he said, wanted to do it differently. “The best thing we can do is be ourselves,” Zubizarreta said. Instead of upgrading its squad with a patchwork of superstars, it decided to allow the players it had to flourish, to build a team that was “distinctively Barcelona.”Progress was halting. “It is very hard to climb the ladder organically,” Torrejón said. There was a Champions League semifinal appearance in 2017, but for three years in succession the team finished second in the league to Atlético Madrid. In that, perhaps, lay the only conceptual difference between the club’s men’s and women’s divisions. “The men’s team not winning trophies to invest in the future would not, maybe, be the best-received news,” Zubizarreta said.The reward seemed to come in 2019. Barcelona finished second in the league, again, but qualified for its first Champions League final. It met Lyon, the sport’s equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters, in Budapest, and was swept away in the first half.“It was a mirror,” Zubizarreta said. “We could see how far we had to go.”As soon as he returned from Hungary, he sought out the club’s conditioning experts. There was no shortage of talent, but he knew that Barcelona’s players had to be fitter, faster and stronger to compete with the very best clubs in Europe.What followed, according to Giráldez, an assistant coach at the time, was a “brutal” change in the way Barcelona trained. “We could improve quickly at the start,” he said. But the further up the curve the players got, the harder they had to work even for the smallest gains.That approach became so embedded in the club that it has endured even what might have appeared to be its apogee: the treble acquired under Cortés last season, capped by a destruction of Chelsea in the Champions League final that echoed Barcelona’s own experience against Lyon two years previously.And so, even now, Giráldez can watch his team, champions of everything, scoring five and six and eight and nine against its opponents, with its goal difference — in the league alone — of plus 52, and ask for more. And not only can his players understand his gentle chiding and detailed tape sessions, but they can also appreciate them.“The secret is that we are competing with ourselves,” Torrejón said. “You compete with your rival for points or for qualification, but with yourself to be better every day, for your place in the team. That is the biggest struggle: with yourself. The coach might always want more, but we do as a team. We are never satisfied.“Why be happy with scoring four when you should have scored eight?” More

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      At Elite Teams, a Shrinking Vision of What a Coach Looks Like

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      Barcelona is looking for a new manager, and Manchester United may need one soon. But the pool of coaches elite clubs hire from is getting smaller every year, and that’s a problem.Marcelo Gallardo has the sort of managerial résumé that should make him irresistible to most, if not all, of Europe’s elite clubs.He has been in his current post for seven years, long enough to prove he is no mercenary, flickering brightly and briefly before moving on elsewhere. He has demonstrated that he can cope with the deepest pressure and the loftiest expectations. He has shown that he can ride the political currents that swirl around any major club. He has learned to work on a (relative) budget.Most of all, he has won. He has won over and over again. At River Plate, Gallardo has collected a dozen major trophies as a manager. He has won two continental championships, and come within two minutes of a third. One of his predecessors at the Buenos Aires club, Ramon Díaz, has described him as the greatest coach in the team’s history.It is not hard to understand, then, why Gallardo’s name is frequently linked with Europe’s great houses — most recently with the vacancy created by Barcelona’s decision to end Ronald Koeman’s loveless 14-month tenure. That the speculation never seems to coalesce into anything, that there always seems to be a preferred candidate that is not him, requires a little further explanation.Gallardo has won a dozen trophies, and two continental titles, at River Plate.Nelson Almeida/Agence France-Presse, via Pool/Afp Via Getty ImagesSeveral of Europe’s most illustrious teams have, in recent years, appointed managers who made — by traditional metrics — little or no sense. Some of them have been successful: Zinedine Zidane, for example, won three Champions League titles in three years at Real Madrid, despite finding himself in his first coaching job.And some of them have, well, turned out a little differently. Andrea Pirlo was appointed Juventus manager around three weeks after being given his first coaching role, in charge of the club’s under-23 side. He had never taken charge of an official game. He was dismissed after a single season. Frank Lampard lasted a little longer at Chelsea. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer is still clinging on, somehow, at Manchester United.A variety of factors have gone into that trend. One, of course, is the desire — shared by almost every major team — to find and nurture its own version of Pep Guardiola. Those searches are rooted in the widespread delusion that, at every club, there is some revolutionary genius lurking somewhere in the shadows, waiting for the chance to transform the game as we know it.There is, too, a cynical calculation at play. Iconic former players have always been fast-tracked into management, aided by a belief, one that can withstand even a flood of evidence, that their talent can be passed on, and also abetted by a knowledge among executives that appointing a club legend generates instant good will and — more precious still — patience among fans.Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s popularity and pedigree as a player may be extending his run at Manchester United.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut perhaps the biggest shift is in what the superclubs regard as relevant prior experience. A track record of success in management is no longer, strictly speaking, necessary. Or, rather, a particular stripe of success is no longer regarded as valid, because what constitutes success is so difficult to measure.Instead, much more important is a knowledge of how these giant, sprawling temples of self-importance work, a sense of being comfortable within them, a feeling of belonging. It is that change that has deprived Gallardo, and many coaches like him, of a chance. And it has given the superclubs something of a problem.There was, at some point in the dim and distant past, a distinct ladder for a manager to climb. A coach would start at some lower rung on the ladder — either as an assistant or at a smaller team — and slowly prove their worth. They might win promotion to the top division, take a smaller team on a European run, turn a contender into a champion.Then, and only then, would the superclubs strike. It is the approach that took Jürgen Klopp from Mainz to Borussia Dortmund and then on to Liverpool. It is how Carlo Ancelotti went from Reggiana to Parma to Juventus and on to almost every other major team in Europe. It is how Mauricio Pochettino made it from Espanyol to Southampton to Tottenham and then, after a brief break, to Paris St.-Germain. All of them took one club to another level, and were rewarded with a step up themselves.Mauricio Pochettino’s track record with Tottenham’s stars earned him a star-studded second act at Paris St.-Germain.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThis is the mechanism that should, now, promote Gallardo. He is ready for it. He has more than proved his worth on one rung. But there is an overriding sensation that it does not quite work like that anymore, that the rules of the game have changed, and that, all of a sudden, everything he has done does not count. And it does not count because of where he has done it.All of Gallardo’s success, so far, has come in South America. He won a league championship with Nacional in Uruguay and was rewarded with a post at River Plate, one of the biggest clubs in the world by anyone’s standards, an environment as impatient and demanding and expectant as anywhere. There, he has twice delivered the Copa Libertadores.But while Europe’s major clubs have no problem appointing Argentines — several of Gallardo’s countrymen work in high-profile posts in European soccer, including Pochettino and Atlético Madrid’s Diego Simeone — they have long felt that success does not easily translate to the Old World.Occasionally, that fear has been well-placed: Carlos Bianchi turned first Vélez Sarsfield and then Boca Juniors into the finest teams in Latin America, but struggled to make an impact at Roma and then, a decade later, at Atlético. Others, like Marcelo Bielsa, have made the leap a little more easily.That skepticism, though, no longer applies just to South Americans. Europe’s superclubs increasingly see an ocean all around them. Gallardo is not the only coach who might, by now, have expected to receive the call from one of the game’s giants. He is not the only one who has built a body of work that should make him a compelling candidate.There is Erik ten Hag, the Ajax coach, who has turned his club into a powerhouse in the Netherlands and is on the verge of his second deep run in the Champions League. There is Rúben Amorim, a decade or so younger, who has already ended Sporting Lisbon’s two-decade wait for a Portuguese title. There is Marco Rose, who has risen from Red Bull Salzburg to Borussia Mönchengladbach and then Dortmund.These are the coaches Barcelona or Manchester United should be looking to appoint now. They are the coaches Real Madrid or Juventus might have approached in the summer. They are, most likely, the next big things.Instead, Barcelona is hopeful of replacing Koeman with Xavi Hernández, less for his stint at Al Sadd in the Qatar Stars League than for his emotional connection with the club. Manchester United has vowed to stand by Solskjaer; if and when it changes its mind, it is expected to go for Antonio Conte or Pochettino, persuaded by their proven success.At Barcelona, the big job is not for everyone.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBoth Barcelona and United are, at least, exhibiting more imagination than either Real Madrid or Juventus: When their positions came up a few months ago, both handed them back to managers they had already fired. Ancelotti returned to Real Madrid — taking over from Zidane, himself on his second stint — and, two years after the club declared itself ready to move on from him, Massimiliano Allegri was restored at Juventus.This is not just a lack of foresight; it is a self-inflicted inability to read meaning into a manager’s achievement. The elite clubs have believed — rightly or wrongly, but certainly logically — for some time that the only reliable guide to a manager’s suitability is previous experience at that level.That is why, for example, Eddie Howe’s success with Bournemouth was not deemed enough to get him a job at Liverpool or Arsenal. He might have proved his ability in the Premier League, but that was of secondary relevance to demonstrating an aptitude at Borussia Dortmund or Sevilla, teams that compete in the Champions League and have budgets and pressures to match.The issue is that the game has become so stratified, so quickly, that the pool of clubs deemed suitable hunting grounds has withered to almost nothing. The elite are now so vast, so powerful, that only a few teams can serve as a reasonable approximation.Dortmund’s Marco Rose is following what used to be the path to a big club. That might not be true anymore.Ina Fassbender/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesCertainly, there is nowhere outside Europe’s major leagues, which counts against Ten Hag, Amorim and Gallardo, and within those competitions there are only a handful: the Milan clubs, perhaps; probably Dortmund; possibly Lyon and Marseille.And even then, it is not entirely clear what a manager would have to do to stand out. Klopp’s star rose when he led Borussia Dortmund to the Bundesliga title in successive campaigns. Rafa Benítez shot to prominence by making Valencia champion of Spain. José Mourinho captured the imagination by winning the Champions League with F.C. Porto.The game, in 2021, has been shaped to mitigate against repeats of all of those achievements. If Rose takes Dortmund to second place behind Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga, is that success, or is it simply meeting expectations? What does it mean if Ajax wins the Eredivisie, again? Is it failure if Amorim’s Sporting is eliminated in the group phase of the Champions League, or is all of this nothing more than economic determinism? How can any of this be parsed?It leaves the elite teams in a peculiar Catch-22: They want to employ managers with the right sort of experience, but the only way those managers can get that experience is by being employed. Still, it is hard to feel too much pity for the superclubs: They are the ones, after all, who have done so much to distort soccer’s reality in their favor.Far more deserving of sympathy are the coaches, like Gallardo, who find themselves trapped by a game whose rules have shifted underneath them. He, like the others, has done all he can. He has twice conquered a continent. He has built an irresistible résumé, only to be told that he has done it all in the wrong place.Right Idea, Wrong TeamsDiego Maradona’s memory has never faded in Naples.Yara Nardi/ReutersThere could, in many ways, have been no more fitting tribute. A year after the death of Diego Maradona, two of his former clubs have announced plans to face each other for a cup in his honor. The game, between Boca Juniors and Barcelona, will be played in January. It will be staged in Riyadh.We could probably just leave it there, but to be clear: Maradona spent two seasons at Barcelona, one of them interrupted by injury, and often traced many of the demons that haunted him to his time there. He may be indelibly associated with Boca, and his love for the club is not in question — after retirement, he maintained a private box at the Bombonera — but he enjoyed only a single campaign there in his prime. By the time he returned in 1995, he was a shadow of what he had been.It is a shame that both of these teams, then, should be trying to lay claim to his legacy. Far more fitting would be a two-legged tie between the teams where he spent the bulk of his career, staged at the stadiums that now bear his name: the home of Argentinos Juniors, where he started his career, and that of Napoli, where he sealed his legend.The brands of Barcelona and Boca Juniors are much more potent than either of those clubs, of course. They are far more glamorous targets for Saudi cash in that country’s attempts to dress itself up as a sporting powerhouse rather than, you know, a repressive autocracy. But they should not be allowed to contort history to suit their own ends, to weight Maradona’s story in their favor, to erase those places where he wrote the majority of it from the record.CorrespondenceEvents, ultimately, have a habit of making fools of us all. Scarcely 48 hours after a finely crafted newsletter appeared in your inboxes, explaining how Manchester United had perfected the art of soccer-as-content, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer let his team lose by 5-0 to Liverpool, raising the possibility that the club might actually do something to get out of its content sweet spot, with the devastating consequence that last week’s column might have seemed wrongheaded.Liverpool 5, Manchester United 0. Ronaldo? Still the star of United’s drama.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesStill, let’s look for silver linings: Manchester United remains trapped by self-doubt, and so has not (yet) fired Solskjaer; defeat has proved, once again, that what is bad for Manchester United the team can be good for the exposure of Manchester United the brand; and Jim O’Mahony has paid me the compliment of thinking I am too young to remember the 1990s.“You are too young to have witnessed United’s heroic efforts saving themselves from defeat in the final minutes of a game during the 1990s,” he wrote. (I’m not.) “United of the 1990s would often play badly in the first half and then change momentum, often with a heroic substitute, and win the game. The name of one key substitute for United from that era was Solskjaer.”This is all true, of course: Manchester United long ago had a taste for the dramatic comeback. I’m not sure it happened quite as much as we think it did, though. I’m also not sure it’s something that should serve as an aspiration. Much better to have games won nice and early.George Weissman is not a man who seems to respect my need to fill a word count. “Your column boils down the incontrovertible fact that the whole should always exceed the sum of its parts, and that is rarely the case since the retirement of Alex Ferguson,” he wrote. That basically sums up Manchester United, yes. But it does not fill a newsletter.We’ll end on a more philosophical question from David DeKock, channeling his inner Charles Hughes. “On every throw-in from the penalty area sideline, teams should heave it into the danger area and see what happens,” he wrote. “Why do teams not do this every single time? Have there been studies on percentages?”For a long time, the answer to this would have been stylistic: A long throw-in was seen as unsophisticated, a little agricultural, the sort of thing that Stoke City did. Now, though, I do sense that it is changing: Brentford and Midtjylland, two of the more forward-thinking teams, treat throw-ins as David would advocate. So, too, does Liverpool, which employs a specialist throw-in coach. All three are analytically driven, which leads me to believe that they have numbers to explain their choice, though they have not (as far as I know) chosen to share them. More

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      Barcelona Fires Manager Ronald Koeman and Casts Eye at Xavi

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      Successive defeats to Real Madrid and Rayo Vallecano convinced Barcelona to fire Koeman, its Dutch manager. Xavi Hernández is a favorite to replace him.Ronald Koeman knew even before he arrived in Barcelona that his journey as the club’s manager had ended. His team had just lost for the second time in four days, beaten by Real Madrid on Sunday and then by modest Rayo Vallecano on Wednesday. It was marooned in ninth place in La Liga. There could be, the club decided, no way back.The decision to fire Koeman was made while he and his players were still in transit. Barcelona’s president, Joan Laporta, had spent the flight back from Madrid consulting with several executives, according to Sport, the Catalan newspaper, and then informed Koeman that he had decided to end his 14-month tenure. A statement from Barcelona made the decision official a little after midnight.FC Barcelona has relieved Ronald Koeman of his duties as first team coach— FC Barcelona (@FCBarcelona) October 27, 2021
      For all the urgency of those last few hours, Koeman’s demise has been anything but swift. He led Barcelona to a disappointing — but hardly disastrous — third-place finish in his first, and only, full campaign at the club, the season salvaged somewhat by a victory in the Copa del Rey.The summer, though, brought sweeping change. Koeman had to manage the sudden departure of Lionel Messi — a seismic shift for which he was not even forewarned, let alone forearmed — and then try to build a squad to regain the Spanish title, and compete in the Champions League, while operating under considerable financial constraints.Despite the rise to prominence of a clutch of talented youngsters, including the midfielders Gavi and Pedri, and the return to fitness of another, forward Ansu Fati, Koeman had struggled to forge a cohesive unit. His summer recruits had done little to improve the team’s fortunes: Memphis Depay had flickered occasionally, but both Eric Garcia and Luuk De Jong had struggled to make a positive impact.By the end of September, the club had already lost ground in the Spanish title race, and it had twice been embarrassed in the Champions League: beaten first by Bayern Munich, 3-0, and then by Benfica. It retains some hope of qualifying for the knockout rounds in the spring after an unconvincing win against Dynamo Kyiv last week.That victory seemed to have afforded Koeman a stay of execution, but it proved, instead, a false dawn. On Sunday, Real Madrid beat Barcelona, 2-1, for its fourth successive triumph in the Clásico. Afterward, dozens of angry fans surrounded Koeman’s car as he and his wife tried to leave Camp Nou after the game.And then on Wednesday, a single goal from the veteran striker Radamel Falcao condemned Barcelona to defeat against Rayo, a humble, impoverished club from the outskirts of the Spanish capital. Whatever good will there was toward Koeman — an iconic former player for Barcelona, scorer of the goal that brought the team its first-ever Champions League title — evaporated, both inside and outside the club.Koeman was expected to visit Barcelona’s training facility in Sant Joan Despí on Thursday to say goodbye to his players; by that stage, the club hopes to have identified or, perhaps, even appointed his successor. For now, the job will go to yet another former Barcelona player, Sergi Barjuán, who was installed as the club’s caretaker manager on Thursday. Sergi had most recently been the coach of Barcelona’s B team.Though both Marcelo Gallardo, the coach of the Argentine team River Plate, and Imanol Alguacil, manager of Real Sociedad, have some support as potential permanent replacements, Laporta is thought to see another former Barcelona player, Xavi Hernández, as the standout candidate.Xavi’s managerial experience remains moderate — he has spent the last three seasons at Al Sadd, the Qatari team where he ended his playing career, and enjoyed some success — but his popular appeal is unmatched.He was not only part of the great Barcelona team that lifted three Champions League trophies in the space of six years under Pep Guardiola and then Luis Enrique, but came to be seen as the apogee of the philosophy and playing style that has underscored the club for decades. To Laporta, restoring him to his spiritual home would serve as a way of connecting Barcelona’s present to its glorious recent past. More

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      Cherish the Feel-Good Stories. They Won’t Last.

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      Enjoy the underdogs now, because money will restore Europe’s usual order soon enough.By Wednesday night, the humiliation was complete. In the space of 24 hours, the two teams that had for so long regarded themselves as the pinnacle of modern soccer — the greatest clubs in the world, the inevitable destinations of the game’s best and brightest, the rightful possessors of its biggest trophies — had been humbled, one after the other.First, Real Madrid had not only lost at home, it had lost at home to a team making its first appearance in the group stages of the Champions League, a team from the poorest country in Europe, a team from a place that does not, in many ways, actually exist. Carlo Ancelotti’s team now sits second in its group, three points behind Sheriff Tiraspol.They might have laughed at that in Barcelona, welcoming the chance to take a little respite from their own troubles by delighting in the demise of their rival. The schadenfreude would not have lasted long.The next night, Ronald Koeman’s team fell behind within three minutes against Benfica — the sort of team that Barcelona, in the days of its pomp and glory, would have swatted aside without appearing to break sweat — and went on to lose, 3-0. Barcelona’s record in the Champions League, a competition the club traditionally hopes to win, now reads played two, lost two, scored none, conceded six.This is as low as Real Madrid and Barcelona, the twin, repelling poles of the clásico, have been in a generation. Between them, they have won 7 of the last 13 editions of the Champions League. Now, there is a growing possibility that at least one of them will not even survive to the knockout stages of the tournament in the spring.Koeman’s job hangs by a thread. La Liga has, in effect, placed Barcelona in financial handcuffs. Real Madrid’s debts are colossal, too, a thunderstorm rolling in from the horizon. Both clubs have lost touch already with the teams they once regarded as subordinates — the Premier League’s elite, Bayern Munich, Paris St.-Germain — disappearing into the distance. Their auras have been shattered and their ambitions winnowed. Their era, by almost every available metric, should be over.Yet Real Madrid is currently top of La Liga. And Barcelona, diminished and dispirited, buffeted by crisis at every turn, has a game in hand. If it wins it, it will be only two points behind its old rival. The team that has twice been embarrassed in Europe has not lost a domestic game this season.The early weeks of a campaign are the time for the willing suspension of disbelief. The conditions, after all, are right. The sample size is still small. The vagaries of the schedule wield an outsize influence. Injury and fatigue have not yet started to have an impact on resources. It is in the opening bars of autumn that the game’s chorus line gets its chance to shine.Neil Maupay and Brighton narrowly missed a chance to move into first place in the Premier League.Matt Dunham/Associated PressThere are, at first glance, plenty of those stories around Europe at the moment. Last Monday, before thoughts turned to the week’s Champions League engagements, Brighton had the opportunity to go top of England’s top flight for the first time in the club’s history. It missed out, but a 95th-minute equalizer from its striker, Neal Maupay, meant that Graham Potter’s team has taken 13 points from its opening six games, as many as Chelsea, Manchester City and Manchester United.An unheralded Lens, improbably, lies second in the nascent table in France. Real Sociedad is second in Spain, and has not lost a game since the opening day of the season. Mainz and Freiburg are (for now) in contention for European spots in the Bundesliga; so is F.C. Köln, usually little more than a synonym for chaos.In Scotland, both Edinburgh teams, Hibernian and newly-promoted Hearts, are keeping pace with a stuttering Rangers at the top of the table. Celtic is struggling so badly that it is below even Dundee United. In the Netherlands, Willem II, from the provincial city of Tilburg, beat PSV Eindhoven last weekend to move into second place.In the Women’s Super League, both Tottenham and Aston Villa have started encouragingly. In Spain, Real Sociedad’s women have matched Atlético Madrid and Barcelona point for point so far.Tottenham’s women are, for the moment, above more pedigreed rivals in the Women’s Super League table.Andrew Boyers/Action Images Via ReutersNone of these dreams will last, of course. As the season wears on, the decisive factor is — more often than not — the depth of a team’s resources rather than the heights of its ability. In the year that Leicester City won the Premier League, the great exception that proves the rule, it was notable how little Claudio Ranieri, the coach, needed to change his lineup.Most weeks, almost uniformly, the core of his team was available. A story that, in hindsight, looks like destiny might have had a very different ending had Jamie Vardy pulled a hamstring, or N’Golo Kanté been the unfortunate victim of a mistimed tackle.Most teams, of course, have to endure those injuries, and when they do so, their ambitions suddenly shrink. It is the elite, the teams made fat by years of Champions League revenues and lavish commercial sponsorships, that can afford to carry squads capable of absorbing those blows without any noticeable dip in performance. As winter sets in, cold economic reality bites.That moment seems to come earlier every season. All of the uplifting stories of unexpected, early success warrant a second look. Willem II, for example, might be second in the Eredivisie, but it is probably significant that the team at the summit, Ajax, has scored 30 goals and conceded one in its first seven games. Willem II is second, but it is second by quite a long way.Real Sociedad’s men’s and women’s teams are both punching above their weight so far.Vincent West/ReutersThe same is true in France, where P.S.G. already has a healthy lead over Lens — nine points after eight games, and that after two months in which Lionel Messi has barely featured domestically — and in Germany, where Bayern has scored almost three times as many goals as third-place Wolfsburg. Barcelona’s women’s team, the reigning European champion, has scored 26 goals in four games. It has conceded none.The top four spots in the Premier League, too, have been occupied almost since the start of the campaign by the four teams expected to finish there in May. Juventus started the Serie A season abysmally, failing to win any of its first four games; Napoli, by contrast, has clicked almost immediately.And yet the most compelling parallel has not been last season, when Juventus limped to fourth, but a few campaigns prior, when the club started almost as poorly, and then won 26 out of 28 games to collect yet another title convincingly.Most troubling of all, of course, is Spain, where Real Madrid and Barcelona have diminished at startling, alarming speed, and yet remain out of the reach of all but two — Atlético Madrid and, at a pinch, Sevilla — of their supposed peers.There is a reason for that. Even with its finances ravaged, Barcelona can afford to maintain a squad that few others could countenance, the upshot of decades of unequal distribution of the country’s television revenue. This is the ultimate vindication of a risible, self-interested approach: between them, Barcelona and Real Madrid have stifled La Liga of competitive integrity so effectively that their floor is still above almost everyone else’s ceiling.Barcelona may have its problems, but it also has players like Ansu Fati.Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe same is true of P.S.G. and the Premier League’s Big Four and Bayern Munich, and it is true of Ajax in the Netherlands and Club Brugge in Belgium and countless other teams in countless other leagues. Only in the rarest circumstances would any of the unexpected contenders, currently sitting in positions of unaccustomed prominence, actually be able to turn their early heat into genuine light. But that is not the point.Whether Real Sociedad, in the end, wins the league this season is secondary to the idea that Real Sociedad — and by extension every other team outside the established elite — can believe that, in certain circumstances, it could win the league.That hope, naïve and unrequited as it might be, is crucial, particularly in an era of such yawning financial disparity. It is vital that teams believe in possibility, in the chance that the elite might stumble, that they might be able to profit, that the stars might align. That it is no longer possible, not really, to sustain that delusion suggests something important has been lost, and it may not come back.Courage and CowardiceSinead Farrelly came forward twice, at least. In 2015, she reported the inappropriate behavior — and that, given the scale and the nature of the allegations, is putting it lightly — of her coach, Paul Riley, to her team, the Portland Thorns. Earlier this year, an email chain made public by Alex Morgan on Thursday made clear, she made the same complaint direct to the National Women’s Soccer League’s leadership.And twice, nobody seemed particularly interested in hearing what Farrelly had to say.That this week she then came forward again, along with a former teammate, Mana Shim, demonstrated her conviction, her perseverance, her fury. That she did so publicly underlines her courage.That she had no other choice but to do so, though, reflects appallingly on the cowardice of the authorities whose job it is to the protect the players who stock their teams, who grace their league, who generate their product.Riley left the Thorns after that initial investigation, but had another job in the N.W.S.L. a few months later. Thanks to Morgan, we know that Lisa Baird, the league’s commissioner, effectively dismissed Farrelly’s second complaint, made in April, without indicating she would be investigating further.Only when the league’s hand was forced, when Farrelly and Shim had held it to account by telling their stories to The Athletic, was any action taken. Within hours, Riley was fired from his post coaching the North Carolina Courage. It was the second such dismissal in the N.W.S.L. in a matter of days, and the third for misconduct in a matter of weeks.There are two stories here. One is, although rooted in darkness, inherently uplifting: that the bravery of these women might make the N.W.S.L. a safer place for their colleagues and successors.The other has a very different moral: that the league itself, so conscious of its own fragility — perhaps overly — chose to sweep all those red flags under the carpet rather than look after its players’ well-being.“They say we should keep quiet because there might not be a league,” Thorns defender Meghan Klingenberg wrote after the allegations surfaced Thursday. “We should take low pay, otherwise there’s no league. Don’t talk about the crappy hotels, the bus fires, the unsafe fields, the substandard medical care.”The players of the N.W.S.L. — as all professional athletes do — make considerable sacrifices to play the sport they love. Doubtless, they make more than most, in order to help the women’s game to grow, and to thrive. But these sacrifices, let alone what Farrelly and Shim endured, are too high a price to pay. Talking about these issues is not what places the league in jeopardy. The danger lies in permitting them to exist in the first place.Sorry, Not SorryBruno Fernandes apologized for missing a penalty. But did he need to be sorry?Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockBruno Fernandes’s penalty was, it goes without saying, really quite a bad one. Impressively bad, almost, particularly for a player who has always seemed so unruffled by the stress and the strain of taking a penalty.For once, though, it appeared to get to him. Perhaps it was the circumstance — a chance to avert a chastening home defeat to Aston Villa — or perhaps it was the context: The presence of Cristiano Ronaldo at Manchester United these days means Fernandes has no room for error. As soon as he missed one penalty, he would have known he would not get the next one.Whatever the reason, though, and however bad the penalty, there was absolutely no reason for him to feel compelled to issue a lengthy apology to his fans and teammates a few hours later, just as there had been no reason whatsoever for Jesse Lingard to plead for clemency in public after his error condemned United to defeat against Young Boys of Bern a couple of weeks ago.Players do not have to apologize for making mistakes. They do not even have to apologize for playing badly. That is not the covenant between fan and athlete. All we can rightfully expect is that they try, that they commit, that they do their best. We have no right to demand that they succeed. It is the point of sport that sometimes, effort goes unrewarded.The question that arises from the fact that both Lingard and Fernandes felt compelled to do so is not — as it was represented, in some quarters — whether players have become too reliant on agencies to run their social media accounts. It is, instead, why those advisers might suggest a pre-emptive apology is necessary.The answer to that, of course, is the same as the explanation for why players engage agencies to handle Twitter and Instagram in the first place: Fernandes and Lingard, and the people curating their online presences, will have known that their missteps would be a vector for untold, untrammeled abuse. They apologized to try to staunch the flow. The problem there is not the apology itself, it is the abuse that necessitates it. That is the issue soccer has to address: not that players are apologizing, but that they feel the need to do so.CorrespondenceIniquities or inequities? Sometimes it’s hard to say.Paul Ratje/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesEagle-eyed as ever, there were several of you — not least Thomas Alpert and Brendan Greer — who wondered whether the mention of modern soccer’s “iniquities” was a typo; perhaps, those of little faith asked, I meant “inequities,” instead?It’s healthy for us all to admit to mistakes, sometimes. Was it a typo? No. I meant to type iniquities. Did I realize iniquities and inequities were different words? Also no. Still, now that I have been educated, I can say with some confidence that they both probably apply to 21st century soccer.Alex McMillan noted another lapse: “You did seem to get sidetracked in answering the question about whether any country, other than the U.K., fields multiple national teams.” Fortunately, Alex is a little more focused. As well as the People’s Republic of China, two of the country’s Special Administrative Regions — Hong Kong and Macau — field teams, as does the Republic of China, better known as Taiwan, but competing under the name Chinese Taipei.“Practically speaking,” Alex wrote, “in this case you have one country with four identities in and of itself.”Aaron Stern and Darren Wood, meanwhile, queried the decision to focus last week’s column on Marcos Alonso. “The admissions about Alonso’s conduct made it difficult to return to the piece about his technical ability and role at Chelsea with the same amount of interest,” Darren wrote.“What I found odd, unsettling, was the way your piece made concessions to conduct that some might judge as sufficient to exclude Alonso from analysis, then returned to its prior analysis of his sporting ability. Is the premise that players’ conduct and character might not exclude them from the efforts and attentions of both writer and reader, if their athletic skill merits it? How egregious must their conduct and character become before we exclude them from any type of analysis?”This is not a question that has a simple answer, and it would be an insult to your intelligence to present one. All I can do, I think, is to walk you through my thought process, while making no claim that my thought process is objectively correct, or that there is such a thing, in these instances, as objectively correct.The logic of last week’s column was that Alonso is an interesting case study as a player: not just a curiously exact specialist, but a player whose fortunes have ebbed and flowed quite dramatically, depending on the identity and the attitude of his coach. Given that Chelsea’s meeting with Manchester City was the most significant game of last weekend, it felt a fitting time to explore the nuances of his situation.It would, I agree, be irresponsible not to mention the broader context, both in light of his conviction in 2011 and his more recent decision not to take the knee. Doing that while maintaining a coherent thread is a difficult balancing act — and it is entirely possible that I did not pull it off — but I would hope, at least, that it made clear the piece was not attempting to cast Alonso as a straightforward, sympathetic hero.The broader issue, of course, is whether Alonso should be considered worthy of coverage at all. That is a judgment call — and as such, you are free to disagree with it — but my conclusion was that, as long as a distinct line is drawn between the individual and the athlete, objective coverage is both possible and reasonable. Singling Alonso out for praise on some sort of moral level would be one thing; assessing him as a player is another. That may not be the right answer — there may not be a right answer — but I hope it, at least, answers the question. More

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      At F.C. Barcelona, a Sensation Worse Than Sadness

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      The Camp Nou’s reaction to a humbling defeat in the Champions League was a measure of how far and how fast a mighty team has fallen.They would have expected anger. As Barcelona’s players chased shadows on Tuesday night, as Bayern Munich toyed with them and teased them and tore through them, time and time again, they would almost have been waiting for the fury to come, for the Camp Nou to bare its teeth.That is the way it has always been, after all. Barcelona has never been an easy crowd. The club has long worried that it is, in fact, a theater crowd: sitting there, quietly, demanding to be entertained, quick to make its displeasure known if not just the result, but also the performance, is not up to scratch.There were plenty of points on Tuesday night when the crowd might have turned. After the second goal, perhaps. After yet another uninterrupted Bayern attack. After it became clear there was no way back, not in 90 minutes, and maybe not for some time. The players would certainly not have been surprised by it. They might even have been anticipating it.And yet it did not come. Even as Bayern ran in a third, completing Barcelona’s humiliation, there was no shrill chorus of whistles, no torrent of jeers washing down the stands, no great guttural roar of frustration and disappointment. There were flashes — Sergio Busquets and Sergi Roberto were booed from the field — but they were occasional, fleeting.Instead, the players were subjected to something far more damning, far more telling, infinitely worse: pity.That, more than anything, was a measure of how far and how fast this club has fallen. On a Champions League night, as its team was dismantled by a putative peer and rival, the Camp Nou crowd — among the most demanding in sports, an audience spoiled by a decade of some of the finest soccer in history — was not spitting fury but offering gentle, sincere encouragement.Robert Lewandowski, Thomas Müller and Bayern Munich now set a standard Barcelona can no longer match.Albert Gea/ReutersThe fans sang the name of a teenager, the midfielder Gavi, not because of anything he had done but simply because of what he had not. They applauded when Barcelona threaded a handful of passes together. They urged the team forward. They recognized, in essence, that for the first time in ages, Barcelona needed their support.There is no great profit in dwelling, yet again, on how it has come to this, or in chastising the club for its profligacy, its absurd recruitment, its financial recklessness, its pigheaded belief that the sun would always shine and the good days would last forever.There is no point listing the succession of nadirs that have served as signposts: the defeats in Rome and Liverpool and Lisbon; the loss of Neymar and then, this past summer, of Lionel Messi himself, both to Paris St.-Germain.They have been illusions, after all. Nobody knows quite, not yet, where the bottom might be, how far Barcelona might still fall. In its own way, this defeat to Bayern was no less harrowing than the 8-2 loss in Lisbon a year and a lifetime ago: not as dramatic a collapse, of course, not as eye-catching or as immediately shocking, but just as comprehensive, and just as instructive.It was not just that Bayern was better in every single position: stronger and fitter and more technically adept. It was not just that Bayern was better coached and better organized and more precise.It was that Bayern seemed to be playing modern, elite soccer, full of pressing triggers and rote movements, while Barcelona — for so long the team and the institution that defined cutting-edge — had the air of a team from the past, parachuted in from the 1950s and told that now the game is actually about inverted wingers occupying half-spaces. The 8-2 was, in a certain sense, a freak result. This was not. This was just an illustration of how much better Bayern is, these days, and of how far from the pinnacle Barcelona has drifted.Pedri, Barcelona’s brightest young thing, might be a luxury the club can no longer afford.Albert Gea/ReutersAnd perhaps, in that, there is a glimmer of hope. The era of the superclubs, and the shrieking hyperbole with which those teams are covered, has a distorting effect. Obviously this Barcelona team is weaker than its predecessors, drastically so. Evidently this Barcelona team is a long way short of Bayern Munich and Manchester City and Chelsea and the two or three other teams that might harbor some sort of ambition of winning the Champions League.But it is not, in terms of its raw materials, a bad team by global standards. Marc-André ter Stegen remains one of the finest goalkeepers in the world, and Jordi Alba one of the game’s best left backs. Gerard Piqué is not, all of a sudden, a terrible defender. A midfield built around Pedri and Frenkie De Jong has a rich potential. Once Ansu Fati and Ousmane Dembélé return, there is promise in attack, too.A smart, innovative coach might not be able to turn that team into a Champions League winner, might not even be able to craft a side that could beat Bayern Munich. But there is certainly talent enough there not to be humiliated, not to look passé. Teams like Red Bull Salzburg have only a fraction of Barcelona’s ability — yes, even this Barcelona, reduced as it is — and yet can emerge with credit from games with Europe’s grandest houses.There is no reason to believe that Barcelona, with a more progressive coach than Ronald Koeman in charge, could not level the playing field at least a little. Without question, it should be possible to forge a team that does not look surprised at the fact that an opponent from the Bundesliga might press high up the field.It is likely to be a forlorn hope. There has been little to no indication from Barcelona that this is a club likely to make an imaginative, forward-thinking coaching appointment. The likeliest replacement for Koeman is Xavi Hernández, a player raised in the school of Johan Cruyff and Pep Guardiola, an echo of the past rather than a glimpse toward the future. Nostalgia is Barcelona’s opium. It dulls the pain, but it deepens the problem.There is no reason to believe it is even a team ready to build around its young talent. After all that cost-cutting this summer, Barcelona celebrated by signing the journeyman Dutch striker Luuk De Jong on loan. It remains a place affixed to the short term. Both Pedri and Fati are out of contract at the end of this season; so parlous are the club’s finances that it may yet find that it cannot retain one or both of them.The bad news? Barcelona’s loss to Bayern on Tuesday might not be the bottom.Albert Gea/ReutersWithout that sort of intervention, then, this is all that is left: a hollow shell, a shadow team, a side that looks like a bootleg imitation of Barcelona rather than Barcelona itself. For more than a decade, those blue and red jerseys represented style and panache and adventure and excellence.The sight of them, for all but the most hardened Real Madrid fans, brought a jolt of excitement, a sharp thrill of expectation to anyone who loved soccer. They were Messi and Ronaldinho and Rivaldo and Romário and Guardiola and Laudrup and Cruyff. They were Berlin in 2015 and Wembley in 2011 and Rome in 2009 and Paris in 2006. They were Real Betis fans standing to applaud in defeat and the Santiago Bernabéu rising to its feet in despair.That is not what you think of when you see Barcelona now. You think, instead, of what it was and what it has become. You think of a club that has had its bones picked clean by its rivals, that has been left grasping at the shadows of its past. You think of how it used to be and how this is not the same. You see a team dressed as Barcelona but not a Barcelona team.Not so long ago Barcelona inspired awe. Now, that has been replaced: by sorrow at how far it has fallen, by regret that it has come to this, and most of all, most damning and most telling of all, infinitely worse, what Barcelona inspires above anything else is what the Camp Nou showed its team, its diminished heirs of impossible giants, on Tuesday night: pity.78 HoursThree days after winning in his return to the Premier League, Cristiano Ronaldo watched from the bench as United lost in the Champions League.Arnd Wiegmann/ReutersThis is how it is with Manchester United, these days. It is endemic, habitual, seemingly scored into the very fabric of the club over the last eight years.On Saturday evening, Old Trafford was lightheaded, still swooning from the sight of Cristiano Ronaldo in a red jersey once more. United had beaten Newcastle. Ronaldo had returned with two goals. The club was top of the Premier League, being spoken of not only as a title contender — and let’s face it, Manchester United, four games into a season, is always a title contender — but as a force restored by the gentle touch of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, a colossus once more bestriding the world.By Tuesday night — 78 hours or so later — it felt as if United was on the verge of crisis. It had been beaten, in the last minute of extra time, by Young Boys of Bern, the sort of team that English soccer culture pigheadedly refuses to take seriously, in the sort of game that a Premier League team is told it has to win by a succession of pundits who have never seen its opponents play.What a difference a few days can make in United’s mood.Phil Noble/ReutersSolskjaer’s tactics were under the spotlight. His substitutions were being queried, his choices questioned, his capability doubted. Could United hope to fulfill its soaring ambitions while he remains at the wheel? Would the club be able to rescue its season by qualifying for the last 16 of the Champions League, or was disaster waiting around the corner?The truth, of course, lies somewhere in the middle. Manchester United is a very good team. It is stocked with enormously talented players, including one of the greatest of all time. But its squad lacks the coherence of some of its rivals — most notably Manchester City and Chelsea — and its style is not as highly defined as, say, Liverpool’s. Solskjaer is not a dogmatist, like Pep Guardiola, and he is not a tactician in the same league as Thomas Tuchel. The fanfare and the fatalism are both overblown.What is significant, though, is the persistence of both, and how quickly the atmosphere around the club can flit between the two. There is no team quite so volatile in European soccer as the modern Manchester United. That does not necessarily predicate against success — if it did, José Mourinho would have had a very different career — but it does suggest that the club is not quite where it wants, or needs, to be.CorrespondenceAn extended section this week, reflecting the fact that so many of you got in touch to offer your own ideas as to how soccer’s calendar might be amended — and improved — from 2024 onward. I can say with some certainty that the readership of this newsletter is substantially more creative than FIFA’s task force on the subject. Admittedly, that is a low bar, but still: Well done, everyone.Let’s start with Will Clark-Shim, who proves the value of simplicity. “Here’s my uneducated flyer: What about the World Cup every three years? While I appreciate the value of scarcity, it’s a real shame that we don’t get more meaningful intercontinental games between top national teams. A three-year cycle would allow for a World Cup one year, continental tournaments another, and a respite for the men (with the women taking center stage) in the third.”England and the rest of Europe’s women’s teams spent the week preparing for World Cup qualifiers. Will soccer’s new calendar leave room for them?John Sibley/Action Images Via ReutersIt is strange, isn’t it, how we are all in thrall to the tyranny of even numbers? We have major sporting events every four years because that is what the ancient Greeks did — an Olympiad, like a lustrum, is one of my favorite weird units of time — but there’s no real reason for it to be the case now, and there is a neatness to a three-year cycle that is appealing.Arvand Krishnaswamy goes even bigger, asking: “Can’t the World Cup become a knockout cup like the F.A. Cup? Every country participates and like the F.A. Cup you may end up with unexpected victors.” This is hugely impractical, Arvand, but it would be extremely enjoyable. There is, too, the core of an idea here that might work: Would it not be possible to blur the lines more between qualifying and the finals, so that it all feels like one tournament?An alternative from Arthur Amolsch, who sees the value in turning “the regional national team tournaments into World Cup qualifiers. That occurred to me as I watched the 2021 CONCACAF Gold Cup. The top ‘X’ number of teams would qualify; in CONCACAF, that would be three. Absolute ties would be settled with a one-game playoff in a neutral country.”This would have value in several confederations, and most clearly in South America, except for the fact that it reduces the income streams for everyone, by cutting the number of games. That would, I suspect, make it unpalatable across the board.Adding World Cup qualifying consequences might raise the stakes, and the profile, of continental championships like the Nations League and the Copa América.Stephen R. Sylvanie/USA Today Sports, via ReutersTo his enormous credit, nobody had more ideas than Fernando Gama, whom I have come to think of as a reliable source of common sense. The pick of them were reducing the number of teams in top flights — he proposed a maximum of 16; I would go up to 18 — and condensing “all international matches to a six-week break from mid-December to the end of January.”He would also advocate a clear demarcation of mid-May and June for further international engagements — either more qualifying or a major tournament — with July ring-fenced as a month of vacation for all players every year.Two more, unrelated to the World Cup. The first is from Joe Morris: “Do you think transnational leagues have died a death as an idea to strengthen domestic football among smaller nations? Obviously the Super League was transnational, but that was very much about entrenching the advantages enjoyed by the elite, rather than improving the prospects of a Dinamo Zagreb, IFK Goteborg, Red Star Belgrade or Celtic. Will these ideas be left for good or do you see them making a comeback?”At this point, it feels as if they are not at the forefront of anyone’s mind. Combining the Dutch and Belgian leagues was floated by some Belgian clubs last year, but with little to no support from the other side of the border. That’s a shame: Cross-border leagues, to my mind, are both spectacularly straightforward and hugely needed to help smaller markets close the gap just a little.An F.A. Cup-style format might allow for more World Cup stunners, like Oman’s victory over Japan in a qualifier this month.Agence France-Presse, via Jiji Press/Afp Via Getty ImagesS.K. Gupta, meanwhile, combines the last two editions of the newsletter in one suggestion. “You have covered the problem of players on loan who never play for their own clubs. One of the solutions to these issues would be allowing the consolidation of clubs to include B teams in lower leagues. This would give teams a financial incentive to develop players, give them regular playing time in lower leagues, and not constantly loan them out.”I do not like B teams as a concept — though I see the advantages — but I am convinced that partnerships should be allowed: elite teams pairing with lower league sides, investing in their facilities, training their coaches, and loaning them the cream of their youth teams. That enables the smaller team to retain its identity, but provides the bigger one with something it lacks.All of these ideas are available to Arsène Wenger, should he wish to get in touch. More

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      UEFA Plans $7 Billion Pandemic Relief Fund for Soccer Clubs

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      European soccer’s governing body will give cash-strapped teams access to their future earnings from club competitions like the Champions League.As European soccer clubs continue to count the costs of a global pandemic that has led teams large and small into financial distress, European soccer’s governing body is preparing to establish a relief fund of as much as $7 billion to help struggling teams manage their growing debts.The plan, according to several officials briefed on the negotiations, would be for the governing body, UEFA, to secure financial relief for cash-strapped teams who play in major European club competitions. The repayments would be tied to the teams’ future payouts from their participation in those tournaments run by UEFA; for the teams involved in the latter stages of the Champions League, Europe’s premier club competition, those paydays can be worth up to 100 million euros a year (almost $120 million).UEFA has for months been in talks with banks and private equity firms about creating the fund. According to the officials, the first relief payments would be made available to clubs that qualify for Europe’s three annual club competitions: the Champions League, the Europa League and the new Europa Conference League.For many European teams, the financial relief is desperately needed. Billions of dollars in revenue has been wiped off team balance sheets since the coronavirus first started to impact the soccer industry in early 2020. Clubs in dozens of countries were forced to play games without spectators for months, and some had to pay rebates to broadcast partners and sponsors. All but a handful of teams have endured significant pain.A.C. Milan players during a Europa League match in an empty arena in December.Vincenzo Pinto/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBarcelona, for instance, was unable to retain the services of its most famous player, Lionel Messi, amid ballooning debts of more than $1.5 billion, and its president said last week that the club was expecting this year’s losses to approach $570 million, a record figure for a soccer club. While many of Barcelona’s financial problems are self-inflicted, the result of years of poor management, red ink has spilled across balance sheets across Europe. The Premier League, soccer’s richest domestic competition, suffered its first drop in revenue since it was first established in 1992.UEFA had been in talks with Centricus, a London-based investment firm that had also been involved in talks with FIFA about financing its enlarged Club World Cup, but it has more recently focused on striking a deal with a group of lenders that includes Citigroup and UniCredit, according to the people with knowledge of the talks. They declined to be identified because discussions with the clubs are continuing, and because no deal has been reached.UEFA declined to comment on the talks or the relief fund. But it has discussed the proposal with the European Club Association, the umbrella body representing about 200 top division European teams.UEFA has asked the E.C.A. to survey its members to understand their financial needs. The most pressing concern is related to tens of millions of dollars in player trading debt. Those obligations, accumulated over several years as teams bought and sold players to one another, are a vital source of revenue to small- and medium-sized clubs. Any default on them risks creating a contagion effect, though, given how interlinked club debts have become.The player trading market — worth $7 billion before the pandemic — has now slowed considerably, with more sellers than buyers and clubs struggling to offload players they can no longer afford. The chief executive of one of Italy’s biggest clubs said the market for middle-tier players — those worth between $5 and $30 million, trades that lubricate the market in the good times — are now few and far between. Instead, teams have become increasingly reliant on loans and free transfers to unload contracts and salaries they can no longer afford.UEFA’s president, Aleksander Ceferin. His organization is planning to roll out new cost-control rules that could include spending caps and a luxury tax for clubs that breach them.Antonio Bronic/ReutersAccording to one of the people familiar with the talks, UEFA’s participation in the relief fund is critical, since it will allow the banks to secure their investment against the future income of its competitions, rather than the balance sheets of individual teams. That arrangement would reduce the risk for the lenders while also ensuring lower than usual rates of interest for clubs. To determine the amounts clubs are eligible to receive, UEFA will create a rating profile for teams based on their likely income from the Champions League, the Europa League and the Conference League, a new third-tier competition that is being launched this season.UEFA’s initiative comes months after a failed effort by a group of 12 leading teams — citing the need for greater financial stability as well as a greater share of soccer’s wealth — to form a breakaway superleague.UEFA is only the latest soccer body to seek outside investment in an effort to mitigate the ongoing effects of the pandemic. Spain’s professional league announced earlier this month that it had struck a deal to sell almost 11 percent of broadcast and commercial income for 50 years to a private equity fund in return for a $3 billion investment. Italy’s league has been negotiating a similar arrangement.UEFA hopes the financing will allow teams to restructure their debts at lower interest rates. At the same time, it is planning to revamp the financial regulations governing the teams in its competitions.The current decade-old arrangement known as financial fair play has run its course, according to UEFA’s president, Aleksander Ceferin, and clubs are now bracing for a new set of cost-control rules. One likely option is a combination of a cap on spending linked to revenues and a luxury tax, similar to one imposed by Major League Baseball on teams that elect to spend far more than their rivals.The move is an effort to inject greater clarity into a process that has often left UEFA unable to enforce its rules on the continent’s biggest-spending teams. Under the new system, UEFA leaders argue, teams will know exactly how much they will have to pay if they overspend. The system, though, is unlikely to have any meaningful impact on growing competitive imbalance between clubs that can spend freely on talent and those that cannot keep up. More

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      Messi's Arrival in Paris Reflects a Troubling Time in Soccer

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      He could not stay where he wanted; few teams could afford him. Even one of the best players of all time was not able to resist the economic forces that carry the game along.In those frantic, final hours in April, before a cabal of owners of Europe’s grandest clubs unveiled their plan for a breakaway superleague to an unsuspecting and unwelcoming world, a schism emerged in their ranks.One faction, driven by Andrea Agnelli, chairman of Juventus, and Florentino Pérez, president of Real Madrid, wanted to go public as quickly as possible. Agnelli, in particular, was feeling the personal pressure of acting, in effect, as a double agent. Everything, they said, was ready; or at least as ready as it needed to be.Another group, centered on the American ownership groups that control England’s traditional giants, counseled caution. The plans still had to be finessed. There was still debate, for example, on how many spots might be handed over to teams that had qualified for the competition. They felt it better to wait until summer.If the first group had not won the day — if the whole project had not exploded into existence and collapsed in ignominy in 48 tumultuous hours — this would have been the week, after the Olympics but before the new season began, when they presented their self-serving, elitist vision of soccer’s future.That the Super League fell apart, of course, was a blessed relief. That this week has, instead, been given over to a dystopian illustration of where, exactly, soccer stands suggests that no great solace should be found in its failure.On Thursday, Manchester City broke the British transfer record — paying Aston Villa $138 million for Jack Grealish — for what may not be the last time this summer. The club remains hopeful of adding Harry Kane, talisman of Tottenham and captain of England, for a fee that could rise as high as $200 million.And then, of course, dwarfing everything else, it emerged that Lionel Messi would be leaving — would have to leave — F.C. Barcelona. Under La Liga’s rules, the club’s finances are such that it could not physically, fiscally, register the greatest player of all time for the coming season. It had no choice but to let him go. He had no choice but to leave.Everything that has played out since has felt so shocking as to be surreal, but so predictable as to be inevitable.There was the tear-stained news conference, in which Messi revealed he had volunteered to accept a 50 percent pay cut to stay at the club he has called home since he was 13, where he scored 672 goals in 778 games, where he broke every record there was to break, won everything there was to win and forged a legend that may never be matched.As soon as that was over, there came the first wisps of smoke from Paris, suggesting the identity of Messi’s new home. Paris St.-Germain was, apparently, crunching the numbers. Messi had been in touch with Neymar, his old compadre, to talk things through. He had called Mauricio Pochettino, the manager, to get an idea of how it might work. P.S.G. was in touch with Jorge, his agent and father.Then, on Tuesday, it happened. Everything was agreed upon: a salary worth $41 million a year, basic, over two years, with an option for a third. As his image was stripped from Camp Nou, a hole appearing between the vast posters of Gerard Piqué and Antoine Griezmann, Messi and his wife, Antonela Roccuzzo, boarded a plane in Barcelona, all packed and ready to go.Messi and his wife, Antonela Roccuzzo, on their way to Paris on Tuesday.Instagram/Antonelaroccuzzo/Via ReutersJorge Messi assured reporters at the airport that the deal was done. P.S.G. teased it with a tweet. Messi landed at Le Bourget airport, near Paris, wearing that shy smile and a T-shirt reading: “Ici, C’est Paris.”This was not a journey many had ever envisaged him making. But he had no other choice; or, rather, the player for whom anything has always been possible, for once, had only a narrow suite of options.There is a portrait of modern soccer in that restricted choice, and it is a stark one. Lionel Messi, the best of all time, does not have true agency over where he plays his final few years. Even he was not able to resist the economic forces that carry the game along.He could not stay where he wanted to stay, at Barcelona, because the club has walked, headlong, into financial ruin. A mixture of the incompetence of its executives and the hubris of the institution is largely responsible for that, but not wholly.The club has spent vastly and poorly in recent years, of course. It has squandered the legacy that Messi had done so much to construct. But it has done so in a context in which it was asked and expected to compete with clubs backed not just by oligarchs and billionaires but by whole nation states, their ambitions unchecked and their spending unrestricted.The coronavirus pandemic accelerated the onset of calamity, and so Barcelona was no longer in a position where it could keep even a player who wanted to stay. When it came time for him to leave, he found a landscape in which only a handful of clubs — nine at most — could offer the prospect of allowing him to compete for another Champions League trophy. They had long since left everybody else behind, relegated them to second-class status.And of those, only three could even come close to taking on a salary as deservedly gargantuan as his. He should not be begrudged a desire to be paid his worth. He is the finest exponent of his art in history. It would be churlish to demand that he should do it on the cheap, as though it is his duty to entertain us. It could only have been Chelsea or Manchester City or Paris.To some — and not just those who hold P.S.G. close to their hearts — that will be an appetizing prospect: a chance to see Messi not just reunited with Neymar, but aligned for the first time with Kylian Mbappé, who many assume will eventually take his crown as the best, and with his old enemy Sergio Ramos, too.That it will be captivating is not in doubt. And doubtless profitable: The jerseys will fly off the shelves; the sponsorships will roll in; the TV ratings will rise, too, perhaps lifting all of French soccer with it. It may well be successful, on the field; it will doubtless be good to watch. But that is no measure. So, too, is the sinking of a ship.Paris Saint-Germain supporters waited for Messi to arrive at Le Bourget airport, north of Paris, on Tuesday. Francois Mori/Associated PressThat the architects of the Super League arrived, in April, at the wrong answer is not in doubt. The vision of soccer’s future that they put forward was one that benefited them and left everyone else, in effect, to burn.But the question that prompted it was the right one. The vast majority of those dozen teams knew that the game in its current form was not sustainable. The costs were too high, the risks too great. The arms race that they were locked into led only to destruction. They recognized the need for change, even if their desperation and self-interest meant they could not identify what form that change should take.They worried that they could not compete with the power and the wealth of the two or three clubs that are not subject to the same rules as everybody else. They felt that the playing field was no longer level. They believed that, sooner or later, first the players and then the trophies would coalesce around P.S.G., Chelsea and Manchester City.It was sooner, as it turns out. P.S.G. has signed Messi. City may commit more than $300 million on just two players in a matter of weeks, as the rest of the game comes to terms with the impact of the pandemic. Chelsea has spent $140 million on a striker, too. This is the week when all their fears, all their dire predictions, have come to pass.There should be no sympathy, of course. Those same clubs did not care at all about competitive balance while the imbalances suited them. Nothing has damaged the chances of meaningful change more than their abortive attempt to corral as much of the game’s wealth as possible to their own ends.But they are not the only ones to lose in this situation. In April, in those whirlwind 48 hours, it felt like soccer avoided a grim vision of its future. As Messi touched down on the ground near Paris on Tuesday, as the surreal and the inevitable collided, it was hard to ignore the feeling that it had merely traded it for another. More

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      in Soccer

      Lionel Messi Leaves Barcelona for PSG

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      Leaving Barcelona, Messi is set to join P.S.G. on a two-year contract that highlights the growing gap between soccer’s rich and its superrich.Paris St.-Germain, the French soccer powerhouse bankrolled by the state of Qatar, has agreed to a two-year contract with Lionel Messi.The agreement, which comes days after Messi bid a tearful farewell to F.C. Barcelona, the club where he had spent his entire professional career, concluded a brief and exclusive bidding war for Messi and reunited him with his former Barcelona teammate Neymar on one of the most expensive and talented attacking teams in soccer history.The deal also highlighted how Gulf riches have so altered modern soccer’s economics that even some of the world’s biggest, richest and best-supported teams are now no match for state-sponsored teams in the arms race to acquire the most elite players.Messi’s signing was confirmed by a team official with knowledge of the agreement and in a video posted to the club’s social media account. Messi flew from Barcelona to Paris-Le Bourget airport on Tuesday afternoon, emerging to wave to the fans who had gathered there to welcome him while wearing a shirt with the P.S.G. slogan “Ici C’est Paris.”P.S.G. has called a news conference for Wednesday morning to introduce Messi.Messi’s new contract is for two years plus a third option year, according to the official. It will pay him about $35 million a season, an enormous amount but only a fraction of what he was earning at Barcelona.Almost from the moment F.C. Barcelona announced last week that financial obstacles meant the club and Messi would not be able to continue their trophy-laden, two-decade association, Messi’s destination was in many ways a question of which of two Gulf-royalty-backed teams he would choose.Would it be Manchester City, owned by a brother of the ruler of the United Arab Emirates, one of the few clubs willing and able to spend freely in the era of the coronavirus pandemic? Or would it be P.S.G., the star-laden French champion financed by Qatar, a club that, like City, appears immune from a financial crisis that has shaken the global soccer economy?City tried to sign Messi a year ago, when he first suggested he might leave Barcelona, the only professional team he has played for, but he later recommitted to the Spanish club even as he criticized the way it was being run.A free agent after his contract expired in June, Messi had been unable to close a new deal with Barcelona because of a financial crisis that meant the numbers simply could not add up.To re-sign Messi, the greatest player in club history, Barcelona would have had to shed more than $200 million from its payroll to meet stringent requirements set by the Spanish league. It could not. Certainly not in a way that, according to Barcelona’s new president, Joan Laporta, would not imperil the future of a club mired in debt and expecting losses of almost 500 million euros in the next year.In a news conference on Sunday, Messi broke down in tears as he confirmed what the club had announced last week: that Barcelona’s current financial crisis and the Spanish league’s cost-control rules made it impossible for him to sign a new contract. Yet even as he said goodbye, Messi seemed to be trying to soften the blow of his departure, for fans, for the club and also, it appeared, for himself.“I did everything I could,” Messi said. “From my side, I did everything to stay. That is what I wanted.”Lionel Messi, 34, had been a Barcelona player since joining its academy as a 13-year-old.Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut a player reportedly earning about $132 million a year in salary and bonuses cannot move just anywhere.He may be 34, but Messi’s performance levels appear to be undimmed by age. Just this summer, he was the player of the tournament, the top scorer and the assists leader as he led Argentina to the Copa América, its first national team title in almost three decades.P.S.G. will add him to an attack that includes two of the best forwards in the game — Kylian Mbappé, the jet-heeled French star, and Neymar, the Brazilian who was once Messi’s teammate at Barcelona.With Messi in its star-studded ranks — and even if Mbappé is sold, possibly to Real Madrid, to recoup some of the cost — P.S.G. will once again take aim at the Champions League, the biggest prize in club soccer but a tournament that, despite P.S.G.’s billions of dollars in spending, it has failed to win. Messi has won the competition four times with Barcelona.Unlike Barcelona, though, P.S.G. is still trying to write its history. And it is doing that by spending money. A lot of money.It signed Mbappé and Neymar for the highest fees in soccer history and then surrounded them with even more high-priced and high-earning talent lured from rivals around Europe. Messi, for example, is joining a team that this summer added the Italian goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma, the Netherlands midfielder Georginio Wijnaldum and the Real Madrid captain Sergio Ramos. All three, like Messi, were out of contract.It is unclear just how P.S.G. will justify the addition of those salaries, and Messi’s, under European soccer’s cost-control rules. But like Manchester City, which broke the British transfer record this summer by signing Aston Villa’s Jack Grealish for 100 million pounds ($139 million), the club appears to be free of domestic or regional rules on spending.Both P.S.G. and City have been investigated by European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, for breaching financial regulations, but each has managed to avoid significant penalties by successfully appealing cases to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Its hand strengthened by those successes, P.S.G.’s influence in the corridors of power has only grown.Its president, Nasser al-Khelaifi, now sits on UEFA’s board and serves as president of the influential European Club Association, the umbrella body for more than 200 top-division teams across Europe. He is also the most senior official at BeIN Media Group, the Qatar-based broadcast network that is the largest buyer of UEFA broadcast rights.For Barcelona, on the other hand, the sight of Messi’s wearing a different team’s colors — something unthinkable as recently as six weeks ago — will be the bitterest sign of how powerless even Europe’s biggest clubs can be in a marketplace dominated by nation states with deep pockets and big dreams.Rory Smith contributed reporting. More