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    A Perpetual Bridesmaid Gets the Crown, and Germany (Mostly) Likes the Look

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    Bayer Leverkusen can win its first Bundesliga title this weekend. For its rivals, the real joy comes in seeing Bayern Munich lose it.Executives at Bayer Leverkusen, the longstanding but habitually middleweight German soccer team, have been fielding the messages since at least February. Some were delivered in person, a quiet blessing after yet another victory. Others came via WhatsApp, unsolicited and unexpected notes from peers and acquaintances and, to their occasional surprise, traditional foes.Soccer, after all, is fiercely tribal. Rivals do not easily offer one another encouragement or congratulations. But as the German league season gathered pace, plenty wanted to laud Leverkusen’s impending achievement: It was, with each victory, getting closer and closer to being crowned national champion for the first time.And, that meant — just as importantly — that Bayern Munich was not.Leverkusen will, this weekend, surge over the line and end a run of Bayern championships that stretches back more than a decade. At least it should: All Leverkusen requires to seal the title is a single victory, which could come as soon as its game against Werder Bremen on Sunday, or for Bayern to lose.The triumph has been a long time coming, in one sense; the club was founded 120 years ago, in 1904, before the city of Leverkusen technically existed. But in another sense it has arrived more swiftly than anyone anticipated.Xabi Alonso, coach of the soccer club Bayer Leverkusen, which could clinch the Bundesliga title with a win on Sunday or a loss by its rival Bayern Munich on Saturday.Tom Weller/DPA, via Associated PressSix months ago, the team’s charismatic coach, Xabi Alonso, 42, said he would countenance the idea that his side might win the championship only if it was still in contention in April. As it is, it might claim the title so early that it cannot celebrate it properly: The season is still in full swing, and Leverkusen has at least two more trophies to chase.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Where’s the Next Generation of Great Coaches?

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      Twenty years, it would appear, is a very long time indeed. This week, a brief video montage fluttered through the flotsam and jetsam that clog my (and your) social media feeds — the engagement-farming banalities, the craven attention-seekers, the willfully deranged Kate Middleton theories — to celebrate the glorious madness of 2004.That was the year, after all, when Greece won the European Championship, a triumph so unexpected that at least one squad member had to rearrange his wedding around the team’s progress. The Greek triumph came a few weeks after Porto, led by a charismatic young coach with hair more pepper than salt, lifted the Champions League trophy.That was after Werder Bremen finished the season as champion of Germany and Valencia secured its second Spanish title in three years. Whoever compiled the video did not even need to mention the victory by a Colombian minnow, Once Caldas, in the Copa Libertadores to declare that 2004 had been a year for the underdog.The compilation clip could, at a push, be used as a sort of generational Rorschach test. It might inspire, in older viewers, that bittersweet pang of nostalgia, the ghost of a memory that this is how things used — and therefore ought — to be. Werder Bremen should be able to win the Bundesliga. Porto should be contenders to be champion of Europe. You might not want to watch Greece win the Euros again, but it was nice that it happened.Younger fans, though, may well interpret it differently. They have grown up in an era of dominance and dynasty, in which the sport’s major teams have established unprecedented primacy over their rivals, and stasis has become the truest marker of excellence. The sight of all of these unfamiliar teams lifting trophies might reinforce their suspicion that soccer is rather better now than it was then.There are two things worth pointing out in rebuttal. The first is that 2004 was an outlier even by the standards of the time. The previous six editions of the Champions League, for example, had been won by Manchester United, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and A.C. Milan. And the second — albeit obvious only with the benefit of hindsight — is that it was a liminal year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Franz Beckenbauer, ‘Der Kaiser’ of World Soccer, Dies at 78

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      In West Germany, he revolutionized his central defense position and was one of only three people to win the World Cup as a player and a coach.Franz Beckenbauer, a towering figure in soccer who led West Germany to World Cup championships as a player in 1974 and as coach in 1990, earning a reputation as one of the greatest players in the sport’s history, died on Sunday. He was 78.He died at his home, his family confirmed in a statement, but did not specify where he lived or state the cause of death. His relatives had been quoted in German media reports for months saying that Beckenbauer, who had heart surgery in 2016, had been in failing health.A cerebral player whose technical skills and tactical awareness revolutionized his position in central defense, Beckenbauer was nicknamed “Der Kaiser” for his ability to control games and score goals from a position largely charged with preventing them. He led West Germany to two World Cup finals as a player: in 1966, when it lost to England in extra time, and in 1974, when he captained the team to victory on home soil.As the team’s coach in the 1990 tournament in Italy, he collected his second world title with a victory over Argentina, led by Diego Maradona.His playing résumé is littered with team and individual honors: world and European championships with West Germany; four German club titles; three European cups; twice a winner of the Ballon d’Or as European player of the year.Beckenbauer spent the bulk of his professional career with Germany’s biggest club, Bayern Munich, before making a lucrative late-career switch to the ambitious North American Soccer League. As a member of the New York Cosmos, he was part of three more championship teams, including one in 1977 that included Pelé of Brazil.Beckenbauer coached West Germany to a World Cup victory in 1990.Bongarts, via Getty ImagesLater, as a soccer executive, Beckenbauer helped his now-unified country secure the hosting rights to the 2006 World Cup, but his actions — and those of others linked to the German bid — brought charges of corruption and a criminal case in Switzerland, the home of soccer’s global governing body. Beckenbauer was not convicted, but only because the court ran out of time to complete a prosecution under Swiss law.Before that case went to trial, his reputation came under scrutiny again when he was part of the tainted vote to award the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar.Beckenbauer, with Brazil’s Mário Zagallo and Didier Deschamps of France, was one of only three people to win the World Cup, soccer’s greatest prize, as both a player and coach. Zagallo died on Friday at age 92.A full obituary will appear soon. More

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      Xabi Alonso Isn’t Coming to Save Your Team. Not Yet.

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      The patience of Alonso, the Bayer Leverkusen manager, says a lot about him, and just as much about a sport perpetually chasing the next big thing.Xabi Alonso has always done things at his own speed. As a player, it was his coolness, his control, his capacity to wait until precisely the right moment that made him one of the finest midfielders of his generation. As he contemplated the idea of becoming a coach, he saw no reason to change. He would continue to treat patience as a virtue.He did not start out on the second phase of his career with a five-year or a 10-year plan in mind. All he knew was that he was not in a rush. “I had an idea that I did not want to go too quickly,” he said. “But I had not really mapped anything out.”There were plenty of people who were more than happy to do it for him. Everything about Alonso seemed to indicate not only that he would go into management when his playing days drew to a close, but almost that he should. He had, after all, had the perfect education. He was as near to a sure thing as it was possible to imagine.He had played for some of the most garlanded clubs in Europe. He was one of the most decorated players of his generation, having won the Champions League with Liverpool and Real Madrid, domestic titles with Madrid and Bayern Munich, the World Cup and a couple of European Championships with Spain.He had learned at the knee of pretty much every member of modern coaching’s pantheon: Rafael Benítez at Liverpool; José Mourinho, Carlo Ancelotti and Zinedine Zidane at Real Madrid; Pep Guardiola and Ancelotti again at Bayern Munich. (Even then, he admitted that there is one notable absence from that list: Alonso would have “loved” to have been coached by Jürgen Klopp.)And, just as important, he had been a keen and gifted student. It was only in the last few years of his career, in Madrid and Munich, that Alonso actively sought to learn what it took to be a manager: He made a point of peppering Ancelotti’s and Guardiola’s staff members with questions, trying to arm himself with as much knowledge as possible. “I tried to be curious about the manager’s work,” he said.He had, though, always been more cerebral than most of his peers, an avid reader off the field and an expert interpreter of the game on it, blessed with such foresight that it sometimes appeared as if he was playing in real time and everyone else was on satellite delay. His coaches, modern soccer’s most revered minds, regarded him as their brains on the field.From the moment he retired, then, Alonso could probably have walked into any job he wanted. He could have fast-tracked his coaching qualifications, started doing a bit of judicious punditry work, called in a few favors, and been in charge of an underperforming Champions League team almost before the year was out. That, though, is not Alonso’s style.And so, instead, he took a sabbatical, and then set about earning his spurs. He spent three years back home in San Sebastián, working in the youth academy at Real Sociedad, his first club, the one he supported, the place where his father had worked. He did not conduct a series of regular interviews to ensure people knew about all of his achievements. As far as it is possible for someone of his renown, Alonso stepped into the shadows.Reasonably frequently, someone would try to coax him into the light: from Spain, from Germany, from England. “I had other possibilities,” he said, diplomatically, in an interview this week. “But I didn’t see them that clearly. I didn’t want to go somewhere I was not convinced.” He wanted to wait for just the right time, just the right place. A year ago, when Bayer Leverkusen approached him, he had a sense that it might have arrived.“I had the feeling that I had taken the right steps,” he said. It felt like a risk, of course, but he was ready. “It was the moment that either I tried, or I stayed at home. Maybe that would have been an easier life. It would have been more relaxed than right now.”Alonso’s quick success as Leverkusen manager already has bigger clubs circling.Ronald Wittek/EPA, via ShutterstockLeverkusen seemed a good match, though, the sort of club where expectations are high, but not unrealistic, and the pressure intense, rather than overbearing. It was a team with a good squad with ample room for improvement, a clear structure, a coherent vision of itself. “I had the feeling that everyone was pushing in the same direction,” he said. “That’s helpful. I had the feeling it was the right time and the right place.” He took the job.It was at that point that Alonso’s plan to take things slowly started to fall apart. Leverkusen had been toiling at the foot of the Bundesliga when he arrived. But by the end of his first season, he had managed to steer the club back into the Europa League.The job would soon get harder. Over the summer, Leverkusen sold Mousa Diaby, an electric French winger who had become the team’s most coveted asset. And yet, after 11 games of the new Bundesliga season, Alonso’s team has not lost a game. Leverkusen is top of the table in Germany, two points ahead of Bayern Munich. It has scored 34 goals. The only game it has not won was a 2-2 draw away at Bayern.All of which means the 41-year-old Alonso has overseen the best start to a Bundesliga season any team has ever made, outstripping even the imperious, Guardiola-era Bayern side in which he was a central figure.He now has to spend rather more time than he might like offering deadpan answers to questions about whether his team can lift the championship. (Predictably, he thinks it is too early to contemplate such a prospect; ask him again in April, he said).Alonso, it turns out, seems to be exactly as good at management as everyone assumed he would be. That does not mean he has changed his approach. He is still not in a rush. The problem is that the same cannot be said of the sport. Alonso always stood out because of his patience, because he possessed what the industry lacked.Barely a year into his senior management career, Alonso is already the favorite to replace Ancelotti at Real Madrid, and a contender to fill any vacancy that might arise at both Bayern Munich and Liverpool. “Maybe I could do all three,” Alonso said. “With Zoom.”He was joking, of course. He has been around long enough to know that he had to clarify that his “mind is 100 percent” at Leverkusen. It is much too soon, as far as he is concerned, to discuss where he might go next. According to his timeline, he is just starting out. “I don’t like to talk about my coaching with a lot of authority,” he said. “I don’t feel I have that authority. I’m so early.”He is young enough that he still joins in games in training — he smiled just a touch awkwardly and briefly blushed when asked if he is the best passer of the ball at the club, a physical reaction that translates roughly as “yes” — and he still cannot quite resist the lure of continually rolling a ball under his feet, caressing it, during training sessions.The withdrawal pangs from his playing days remain. “Playing is better,” he said. “Playing is much better. I shouldn’t say it but I do miss it.” As he is watching games unfold, he said, he catches himself quite often contemplating how much more fun it would be out on the field, putting a plan into action, rather than instructing others to do it.Not far removed from his playing days, Alonso might still be Leverkusen’s best passer.Federico Gambarini/DPA, via Associated PressThat is not to say he does not find management satisfying. Given his influences — in particular that great, all-conquering Spanish team and Guardiola, whom he considers a friend as much as a former manager — it is no surprise he has a clear “idea” of how he wants his team to play: a fusion of Spanish control and German intensity, all percolated through the “intuition” of his players.“They are the most important guys,” he said. When identifying potential recruits this summer, the key characteristic was not familiarity with a particular style but “intelligence,” the ability to shift between them, to make their own decisions, solve their own problems.“It is not about being robots,” Alonso said. “They have the knowledge to know what might happen, and then decide what is good with their qualities.”But management, he has discovered, is built not on grand ideas but of small gestures, too, less a matter of philosophy than personal relationships. He has had to learn “how to be a leader in certain circumstances: when to push, when to be a little softer, when not to let them relax.”Ancelotti, in particular, provided him with a clear example of how to do that, but Alonso knows he is not there yet. He is still forging into uncharted territory, for him. He needs to persuade his players to be more consistent, he said, not to drop the level they have set, not to allow their bright start to flicker and fade.He has never done that before. He is still learning, after all. He knows that will take time. He knows, too, that he has it. Soccer might be hard-wired to ask, almost immediately, what comes next. Alonso’s start has been quicker than even he might have imagined. That has brought opportunity, but it has also brought a challenge, too. He has to figure out how he can continue to take things slow.Simpler TimesAmong the many unique and heartening features of Sweden’s elite league, the Allsvenskan — and I will have much more to say on the competition and its thrilling final title race in the coming days — it is also the only major league in Europe happy to discover what happens if you just decide not to have video assistant referees.At the behest of its empowered fans, Sweden, and Sweden alone, has elected not to introduce V.A.R. Given the system’s performance elsewhere in Europe this year, it looks increasingly like a wise decision.In Sweden, the referee still has the final word.Betina Garcia for The New York TimesFor someone now accustomed to relying on remote confirmation of any and every incident on the field, though, it makes watching a game a slightly disorientating experience. The game on Sunday was settled by a penalty, the sort that might have been pored over for several minutes in the Premier League. Instead, the referee awarded it, the crowd cheered, and Isaac Kiese Thelin stepped up to take it.There was no second-guessing. There was no interminable delay. The decision was made, and it stood. It was the same when Elfsborg made two (from a distance, not impossible) claims for a handball in the dying moments, just before Malmo’s victory secured its latest Swedish championship. The referee waved both away, decisively; nobody had to hold their breath, to wait for V.A.R. to have its say.It was curious to note, too, that the protests from the aggrieved players were significantly less intense than they have become in the Premier League. Some objected, of course, and some pleaded their cases, but there was a recognizable absence of the sort of rage that can only ever be rooted in impotence. It is almost as if, by granting referees absolute agency rather than robbing it from them, Sweden has increased their authority, not diminished their status.CorrespondenceThis newsletter — particularly this section of this newsletter — is never afraid to duck the big issues of the day. I feel like we proved that beyond doubt with our discourse on where you can find the best ice cream, and the subsequent conversation around whether a soccer newsletter should concern itself with where you can find the best ice cream.Liz Honore’s question, then, might look fiendishly complex — a labyrinth of obstacles and booby-traps — but with clear eyes and a strong heart, it can be confronted head on. “Do you think, given Emma Hayes’s no-nonsense coaching style,” Liz asked, “she would have kept Megan Rapinoe on her World Cup squad, given her increased focus on nonsoccer-related issues?”In one sense, the answer to this is quite easy. Hayes does have a no-nonsense coaching style, that is true. But she has also worked with any number of players who have, admirably, taken it on themselves to bring issues close to their hearts into the public domain. So, no, I don’t think she would have disapproved of Rapinoe’s interests away from the game.The controversial bit is this addendum, which I may regret. I do not believe Rapinoe’s form dipped because of her advocacy work. I do, though, believe that Rapinoe’s form dipped, and I believe it is possible she was included in the squad to some extent because she was, in effect, too famous to omit. Whether Hayes would have done the same in that situation, I don’t know.Megan Rapinoe: too big to fail?Orlando Ramirez/Usa Today Sports, via Reuters ConJoel Dvoskin follows that up with a series of questions related to the Jim Harbaugh scandal, which I will admit right now is the sort of cheating that does not really seem like cheating to Europeans. Why wouldn’t he steal other people’s signs? Why would you have a rule about watching your opponents in advance?Joel’s two best queries — “Is cheating only a sin if it works?” and, “If everybody is breaking a rule, why is it still a rule?” — are worth bearing in mind as we discuss the parallel he drew with soccer.“People cheat in soccer all the time, but it seems to happen in a the context of a tacit agreement about the guard rails,” Joel wrote, correctly. “Eventually, the Premier League will find itself in as dicey a situation as faces the Big Ten today. In a sport with such intense competition, it is only a matter of time before someone decides to take ‘rules were made to be broken’ and ‘if you’re not cheating, you’re not trying’ to a previously unimaginable extreme.”It is entirely possible that soccer has already arrived at this moment. This week, Chelsea was accused of historic financial chicanery, and Manchester City, still facing 115 charges of similar offenses from the Premier League, announced eye-watering record revenues.Both would rather suggest that cheating is only a sin if it doesn’t work. More important, if the Premier League is unwilling or unable to punish both Chelsea and City appropriately — and the only logical sporting punishment is retrospective points deductions for the seasons in which the offenses were committed — then the league will have no choice but to ask if there is any point in having rules on spending at all. More

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      Dortmund, Bayern Munich and the Chance of a Lifetime

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      A Dortmund victory on Saturday will end Bayern Munich’s streak of 10 straight titles. The prospect of a new champion should be a cause of celebration beyond a single city.The requests had started to flow almost as soon as the final whistle blew last Sunday. All through Monday, they came in great torrents to members of the Borussia Dortmund staff, to the club’s executives, to the players themselves. They came from family, of course, and from friends, and from friends of friends, and acquaintances and colleagues and that guy you met in that restaurant.Pretty quickly, Dortmund officials realized the club had to do something or, in a week where nothing is quite so precious as serenity, the situation risked spiraling into a source of stress. The team called the players together and advised them to get all their ticket requests in by the end of Tuesday, and allow the executives to take care of everything from there. After that, nobody else would be able to come to the place where everyone wants to be.That knowledge, they hoped, would allow the players to focus on the task at hand. Officially, there will be 81,365 people inside Signal Iduna Park on Saturday to watch Dortmund play Mainz in the final game of the season, but demand has been so high that Sebastian Kehl, Dortmund’s sporting director, was probably only exaggerating a little when he said it could have sold “half a million tickets.”Those in attendance will cherish the rare, beautiful simplicity of the equation. If Dortmund wins, it will be the champion of Germany for the first time since 2012: The length of the waiting list is reflective of the length of the wait. “There is no better place to celebrate winning something than Dortmund,” Kehl said. He should know: He was a player at the club the last time it claimed the title.If Dortmund can win on Saturday, it will claim its first German title since winning consecutive championships in 2011 and 2012.Ina Fassbender/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDortmund’s triumph, though, would not just be a cause of jubilation in the city itself. No team other than Bayern Munich has lifted the German championship in the past decade; every spring since Dortmund’s last win, the title has headed without fail to Allianz Arena. With a few notable exceptions — Schalke, Dortmund’s fierce rival, in particular — German soccer as a whole will toast the breaking of that stranglehold.“It is not to say anything against Bayern, because they work pretty hard and perhaps they deserved to be champion in the last 10 years,” Kehl said. “But of course it is good for everyone that the competition in our league is still there, and that maybe on Saturday there is a different champion.”Until relatively recently, this season did not look especially likely to end with that particular conclusion. Dortmund had sold Erling Haaland last summer, a year after losing Jadon Sancho. Once again, the model that had made the club such a financial success — buying bright young talent and selling it at a vast profit — would hold it back on the field.When the Bundesliga broke for the World Cup in November, Dortmund was adrift in sixth place, and Bayern appeared to be set to overtake Union Berlin and Freiburg — the two improbable early pacesetters — to take its 11th consecutive title. That seeming inevitability would further compound the impression that the Bundesliga had become little more than Bayern’s private fief.Dortmund improved, markedly, in January and February — winning nine games in a row to move into Bayern’s slipstream — but when the teams met on April 1, Bayern swatted aside its challenger. “The stories were already done,” Kehl said. “That once again it was Bayern Munich that destroyed our dream.”Bayern’s sporting director, Hasan Salihamidzic, left, and its chief executive, Oliver Kahn, not enjoying themselves.Matthias Hangst/Getty ImagesIn the weeks since, the temptation has been to ascribe the drastic swing in the clubs’ fortunes more to Bayern’s missteps than to Dortmund’s merits. Dismissing Julian Nagelsmann and appointing Thomas Tuchel has backfired on Bayern, laying bare the flaws in its squad planning. Civil war, as it tends to do in the face of disappointment, is brewing in Munich.But to attribute agency to Bayern and Bayern alone ignores the fact that something has changed in Dortmund, too. It has, for the last 10 years, generally been Bayern’s closest contender, its successor-in-waiting, the team that would benefit from any slip-up. The difference this year is not that Bayern has erred — it has done that every so often over the past decade — but that Dortmund has been able to take advantage.Manager Edin Terzic deserves credit for that, of course, and so do his players. “If you’d seen the coach after the game in Munich, or the squad, you would know that we still believed we could win it,” Kehl said.But it is testament, too, to a slight change in focus in Dortmund’s approach. The club invested not only in promise last summer, as it always does, but in the likes of Sébastian Haller, Niklas Süle and Salih Ozcan, too — players with just a little more experience, a touch more grit, veterans who saw the club not as a showroom but as the ultimate stage.Jude Bellingham is expected to leave Dortmund this summer, as most of its most valuable young players regularly do.Ina Fassbender/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is that blend that has enabled Dortmund to stay the course, to cling on and now to take advantage. It is that blend that, in Kehl’s eyes, will kick-start a virtuous circle. Dortmund will sell again this summer — not least Jude Bellingham, the most coveted player in Europe — but the proposition it can offer to reinforcements and replacements is now more convincing than ever.“It shows that we do not just develop players, produce high potential, but we can also win trophies,” Kehl said. “We want to be ambitious, but at some point you have to deliver. The capacity to win titles is massively important for me as a sporting director, to bring players to Dortmund, to convince their families, their agents, the players themselves.”That, in turn, will allow Dortmund to keep Bayern within its sights. “I am optimistic that we can now be much closer,” Kehl said. “That Bayern will not be so clearly champion all the time.”And that, of course, would be something for everyone to celebrate, not just those fortunate enough to have tickets for Signal Iduna Park on Saturday. Dortmund would not be the only unexpected champion in Europe this season: Napoli ended a 33-year wait for a title in Italy. Feyenoord swept past Ajax (and PSV Eindhoven) to win the league in the Netherlands.Both of those titles were greeted with a fervor, a euphoria that seeing another trophy added to an ever-growing pile could not possibly match. Dortmund, come Saturday evening, hopes to be in a position to do the same. Everyone wants to be there, to be part of the celebrations, because they know, deep down, that these things do not happen every day.Antiracism Is Not Just a Job for Black PlayersCarlo Ancelotti and Vinícius Júnior at Valencia on Sunday.Pablo Morano/ReutersCarlo Ancelotti did all the right things in the moment, and then, in its aftermath. He said all the right things, too. All, that is, except the one that might actually have made a difference.After 70 minutes of Real Madrid’s defeat in Valencia last week, Vinícius Júnior — certainly Real Madrid’s best player, and quite possibly the finest talent in La Liga — approached the referee and pointed out a handful of the members of the home crowd who were clearly and audibly racially abusing him, and had been for some time.The referee, as dictated by Spanish soccer’s antiracism protocols, ordered an announcement to be made to the crowd, warning that the game would be terminated if the abuse continued. Ancelotti, an astute, caring and principled sort of a coach, asked Vinícius if he felt he could continue.The Brazilian said he did. The game duly resumed, though only as a prelude to what came afterward. Real Madrid described the abuse, correctly, as a hate crime. Vinícius, clearly at his limit, having faced this kind of invective repeatedly in recent months, said that “La Liga belongs to racists.” His teammates, like his coach, offered him their resolute support. Javier Tebas, the league’s president, for some reason chose to pick a fight with Vinícius on social media, before hurriedly backtracking.The whole episode raises countless questions, though at least some of them have obvious answers. Does Spanish soccer take racism seriously enough? (No.) Are its protocols up to the job? (No.) Is Tebas’s position untenable? (Yes.) Is Valencia’s punishment, in the form of a moderate fine and a partial stadium closure, sufficient? (Obviously not.)One question that did not feature quite so much as it should have is why the decision as to whether the game should continue fell on Vinícius. Ancelotti felt the game should have been abandoned. Thibaut Courtois, the Real Madrid goalkeeper, hinted afterward that he was of the same mind. So why didn’t either of them walk off? Or the rest of the team? Or, more powerful still, why didn’t Valencia’s players?Ancelotti, doubtless, checked in on Vinícius’s state of mind with the best intentions. But he placed Vinícius in an invidious position, too, where his only two choices were to play on — and expose himself to the possibility of more abuse — or walk off, which may well have felt like giving in to the racists.Ideally, of course, this is a stain on Spanish soccer that the authorities would handle. Clubs and fans would know, in no uncertain terms, that racist abuse would be met with the most severe sanctions: docked points, games forfeited, fixtures voided. Until that happens, sadly, the burden of objection falls on the players. All the players, that is. Not just some of them.One for the RoadJosé Mourinho has not gotten better with age. Not in any practical sense, anyway: He is still just as mischievous, just as bombastic, just as provocative now as he was in his halcyon days. He hit 60 earlier this year, and so it is probably fair to assume at this point that he is never going to enter his elder statesman phase.Perhaps it is nostalgia, then, a yearning for an era when the lines were crisper and clearer than they are now — a time that is both recent and distant — that makes the prospect of Mourinho’s guiding his Roma team to victory in the Europa League next week seem surprisingly appealing.It helps that it is Roma, of course, a club of considerable scale and sweep but without the trophies to match. It helps, too, that all of these twilight victories for Mourinho feel just a little like hubris: the manager who was so dismissive of anything but the game’s biggest prizes now discovering that, as it turns out, achievement really was relative all along.José Mourinho and Tammy Abraham, Champions League winners now chasing the Europa League trophy.Lars Baron/Getty ImagesA decade ago, Mourinho scoffed at the very notion that he would ever be competing in the Europa League, let alone care about winning it. And yet here we are. He would doubtless have laughed heartily at seeing one of his peers in the Europa Conference League, too. He celebrated picking up that trophy last year by getting an image of it tattooed on his right arm.Mostly, though, it is that time has softened not Mourinho himself but the perception of him. His recidivist fire-starting, his absolute refusal to mature or mellow in the slightest, now has a charm that it lacked when he was at the game’s peak.It has the effect, now, of hearing a familiar, forgotten song, and serves as a reminder of lost innocence, youth passed, a memory of the days when the bad guys looked and talked and acted like bad guys, rather than convincing themselves and their fellow travelers that they are, in fact, the plucky heroes of the tale.CorrespondenceA contender for best question ever received by this mailbox, courtesy of Gary Karr. “By dint of some inexplicable rule, you are forced to be a beat writer covering one nation’s professional league,” he wrote, deftly providing me with an opportunity to discuss every journalist’s favorite subject: themselves. “It cannot be the Premier League. What league would provide you, and your readers, with the most interesting stories and games?”I have spent some time considering this, Gary, and I think the answer is Italy: major teams, iconic stadiums, fallen giants, feisty underdogs, plentiful gelato. But there are cases to be made for Argentina and Brazil — largely for the way the game is threaded into the culture — and, from a different angle, the Netherlands, too. Dutch soccer has always been a sort of laboratory for ideas and approaches. And a nod to Turkey, home of a league that provides endless goals, scandal, crisis and internecine wrangling.“I have a question that can’t be answered,” Bob Foltman told me, portentously. “How should we measure the quality of a coach? I ask this thinking about Pep Guardiola: I don’t doubt his greatness, but I also can’t dismiss the fact that every place he’s been, he’s had resources that 95 percent of coaches could only dream of.”This is also an excellent question, and it’s one that I think is not given enough weight in coverage of the sport. I liked Vincent Kompany’s definition, alluded to in our interview with him: Success, for a coach, comes in two forms — making the players better, and outperforming your resources. “If you have the fifth-biggest budget, and you come fourth, you have won,” he told me.Taking names in M.L.S.Dan Hamilton/Usa Today Sports, via Reuters ConShawn Donnelly is a reliable interrogator of the game’s major issues, and he is back with what looks suspiciously like vengeance. “Why do referees still scribble down the names of yellow card recipients on the back of the yellow card itself with a small pen or pencil? In 2023, isn’t there a better way? A digital assistant or voice recorder or app or something?”There are doubtless more technologically sophisticated ways, Shawn, obviously, but there’s a key question here: Would any of them be better? Would any of them actually improve on the effect of writing something down with a tiny pencil? Or would they just be … different? More

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      Manchester City Eliminates Bayern Munich in Champions League

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      City dispatched Bayern Munich to reach the Champions League semifinals. But, as usual, getting close won’t be good enough.MUNICH — Suddenly, quietly, improbably inconspicuously, Manchester City finds itself within touching distance once more of the thing it does not like to talk about but is never far from its thoughts, the one prize that has eluded Pep Guardiola at City, the ultimate victory that has long felt like the inevitable conclusion of all that the club has done, all that it has spent, all that it has wanted.It has never been an easy subject to broach with Guardiola, the team’s head coach. How he reacts tends to depend on his mood. Sometimes, it makes him irascible, sometimes weary. There are occasions when he plays it for laughs, and moments when he goes for playful indulgence, like a man talking to a dog, as if the very thought of one of the most expensive and ambitious sports-political projects of all time gobbling up trophies is risible.“Forget it, forget it,” he said last month. “When you start to talk about that, you start to lose competitions and drop competitions.”Familiarity lies at the root of his contempt, of course. He has been asked about the possibility of winning “The Treble” — when spoken, the phrase is always capitalized — in every single one of his seasons at City, with the possible exception of his fact-finding first. For a while, convention dictated it not be mentioned until at least springtime. These days it is broached when, jet-lagged, he first steps off the plane on some far-flung preseason tour.If anything, though, it is a curious and admittedly somewhat contorted form of flattery. The treble — victories in the league, the F.A. Cup and the Champions League — is held up as an almost mythical achievement in English soccer. It stands as the ultimate seal of greatness: It has, after all, only been achieved once, though Manchester United mentions it rarely, and only when prompted.Pep Guardiola, with Manuel Akanji and Bernado Silva.Christian Bruna/EPA, via ShutterstockThat it seems to fit so readily in his purview is not just testament to soccer’s rapid-onset ossification into immutable hierarchies and to the irresistible power of money, but to the scale of dominion that Guardiola has established at Manchester City. He has already won the Premier League. He has retained it. Twice. He has broken the division’s points record. He has done a clean sweep of domestic honors. What other worlds are there left to conquer?(He might also like to direct a gentle admonishment in the general direction of his employer. In 2019, when City won the league and both domestic cups, Ferran Soriano, the club’s chief executive, commanded that the team be hailed as the “Fourmidables.” It would, he believed, thus overshadow United’s treble. Guardiola’s staff pointed out that including the Community Shield, an exhibition game taken seriously only by the winner, might be technically correct but had the effect of cheapening the achievement. They were overruled.)This season, though, has brought a minor — but telling — shift. City’s quest to clear that final hurdle has bubbled along in the background, as it always does, but it has hardly been front and center.Partly, that has to do with a deference to logic: It would be a little bit gauche, after all, to discuss one team winning every competition in sight when another is several points clear at the top of the Premier League. And partly it has to do with the distracting presence of Erling Haaland, who has spent much of the year forcing people to wonder if there is a number big enough to capture his eventual goals tally.All of a sudden, though, it is the tail end of April and the stars once more seem to have aligned. If Manchester City wins all of its games, it will claim the Premier League trophy for the third year in a row: another item ticked off Guardiola’s bucket list. It is in the F.A. Cup semifinals, and an overwhelming favorite to reach the final. And here on Wednesday in Munich, City filled in the last administrative duty before taking its place in the final four of the Champions League.Aymeric Laporte bending soccer’s rules, and Bayern’s Kingsley Coman.Matthias Schrader/Associated PressBeating Bayern Munich handsomely eight days earlier had made this game seem like a formality, though in reality it did not always quite feel like that. There were moments, particularly in the first half, when Kingsley Coman or Leroy Sané were tearing at City’s flanks and it was possible, just about, to believe that it might not be over.But then Erling Haaland scored, and it was. Bayern equalized, late on, through a penalty by Joshua Kimmich, but by that stage the Allianz Arena had long since given up hope.Magnanimously, Guardiola suggested that the aggregate score of 4-1 did not reflect the true nature of the home-and-home — probably correctly — but then these games, as he said, are defined by details. And the details, in this case, were that Bayern could not take its chances. City, by contrast, grasped those that came its way with a cold certainty, an unforgiving inevitability.It is a useful trait to have, of course, as the season enters its final, defining stretch. The challenges that remain, the obstacles between the club and the achievement that represents the absolute, unavoidable culmination of Abu Dhabi’s vision for soccer, are hardly trifles.Guardiola’s team still has to play, and beat, Arsenal, the Premier League leader. Manchester United or Brighton might await in the F.A. Cup final. Most ominously, Real Madrid lurks in the semifinals of the Champions League, just as it did last year. Nobody at City will need reminding how that ended. Guardiola regards those sorts of fixtures as a “coin flip.” He knows as well as anyone that nobody calls it better than Real Madrid.With Bayern out of the way, City will line up against Real Madrid in the semifinals.Afp Contributor#Afp/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut then City has not so much as dropped a point in the Premier League since February. In March and April, it has so far scored 31 goals and conceded only four. It has the look of a team gathering momentum, a blend of speed and force and purpose. It has the feel of a storm brewing. All of a sudden, almost surreptitiously, City has crept closer to the summit of its own grand ambitions than it has ever been.Quite what that means for soccer as a whole is a subject that will, rightly, come under scrutiny in the coming weeks, as Guardiola steers his side on those last few steps, the most delicate, the most treacherous of all. For him, though, as for his team and for the people who took a club and turned it into something else entirely, spinning it out of whole, golden cloth, this is where the path has always led. All that is left, now, is to get there. More

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      The Superteam That May Be Selling Itself Short

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      Vfl Wolfsburg casts itself as an underdog in Germany and in the Champions League. That doesn’t reflect reality.The grounds for VfL Wolfsburg’s inferiority complex are thin, at best. This is a club that has been crowned champion of Germany in five of the last six seasons. It has reached at least the quarterfinals of the Women’s Champions League in every year of the competition’s existence. It has made five finals, and won two of them.Its squad drips with experience and talent: Alexandra Popp, the German talisman, and her international teammates Svenja Huth, Merle Frohms and Marina Hegering; Lena Oberdorf, arguably Europe’s most exciting young player; the seasoned Dutch international Jill Roord, restored to Germany after a couple of years away in England.By any measure, Wolfsburg is a bona fide superpower, a dominant force domestically and a longstanding contender internationally. And yet even its players seem to have internalized the idea that they are underdogs. A few weeks ago, Popp herself suggested that Bayern Munich — Wolfsburg’s only serious rival for the German title — had started the season as “strong favorites, and that has been the case for the last couple of years.”Svenja Huth is one of the handful of Germany stars on Wolfsburg’s roster.Gonzalo Fuentes/ReutersIt is not quite clear why anyone — let alone Popp, fully aware of the quality of player lining up alongside her on the field — should believe that to be the case. The most obvious rationale is that the Bayern’s reputation, particularly in Germany, is such that it exerts a kind of reflexive gravity: It has sufficient weight that it is capable of bending light, and logic, around it.As soon as Bayern started to invest heavily in its women’s side, as it did around a decade ago, the natural assumption was that it would win. That is what Bayern does, after all: It wins. It is the club’s calling card, an inevitability threaded into its DNA. And to an extent, that is true. Bayern has picked up three Bundesliga titles since 2015. It has been as good as its word. It has won. It has just not won as much as Wolfsburg.And yet, somehow, the success of Popp and her teammates has still been overshadowed by the rise of Bayern. In truth, it is hard to shake the sense that Wolfsburg’s location — and what might best be described as its nature — has not worked in the team’s favor.Wolfsburg is a factory town, its identity bound up with Volkswagen, the city’s major employer and greatest claim to fame. Both the men’s and women’s divisions of VfL Wolfsburg are even now regarded, on some subconscious level, as factory teams.When the women’s side lifted its last Bundesliga title, Ralf Brandstätter, the chief executive of the car manufacturer, described the players as “personable and successful ambassadors for the club, for Wolfsburg and of course for Volkswagen.” There is not, it does not need to be said, anything especially glamorous about being seen as ambassadors for Volkswagen.And European women’s soccer is undeniably drawn — at this stage — to glamour (a charge that can just as easily be laid at the men’s game). The Champions League has, for some time, been the private fief of Lyon, a team whose recruitment strategy has long copied that of the Harlem Globetrotters: Its approach has been no more sophisticated than identifying the best players on the planet and working out how much it would take to persuade them to move to the banks of the Rhone.Bayern Munich and Barcelona collided in this season’s Champions League group stage.Andreas Gebert/ReutersThat model has bled down, not just to Lyon’s great domestic rival, Paris St.-Germain, but to the moneyed plains of England’s Women’s Super League, where Manchester City, Chelsea and, more recently, Manchester United have used their uncontested financial advantages to attract enviable collections of the best players in the world. Bayern has followed much the same blueprint.Even Barcelona, which prided itself on its homespun approach to success, its idiosyncratic, characteristic style and its inviolable principles, has been unable to resist the pull of women’s soccer’s increasingly frenzied transfer market. Last summer, it made the English midfielder Kiera Walsh the most expensive player on the planet.In that context, a team like Wolfsburg — largely German, devoid of genuine star names (Popp and potentially Oberdorf apart) and based not in one of Europe’s grand metropoles but in a city frequently caricatured as little more than a production line surrounded by houses — is always likely to struggle for the spotlight.Increasingly, though, Wolfsburg is becoming difficult to ignore. Tommy Stroot’s side is on course for another Bundesliga title. If it can avoid defeat at Bayern this weekend and it would enter the home straight with a two-point lead at the top of the table. A second straight European semifinal is on the cards, too, after a 1-0 win at P.S.G. this week.A quiet confidence is taking root among Stroot’s squad that they have nothing to fear, even in the Champions League. “The only thing that can stop Wolfsburg winning it is ourselves,” Popp told FIFA.com earlier this month.Its victory in Paris, in front of a fervid, boisterous crowd, settled a few of the ghosts of last season, when Stroot’s team froze in front of more than 91,000 fans at Camp Nou, losing to Barcelona, 5-1, in the first leg of their semifinal.“We experienced the same noise from the crowd at Barcelona last season,” said Dominique Janssen, the Dutch midfielder. “You try to take that experience away with you, and know that it gets easier the more it happens.”The club might not have lifted the Champions League trophy since 2014, but neither Lyon nor Barcelona looks quite as imposing this time around as they have in seasons past. Like Bayern, Chelsea and Arsenal, there is a sense at Wolfsburg that the field is leveling just a little. It might think of itself as an underdog, but the superteam that everyone has forgotten, in the place that nobody bothers to look, has no reason to feel inferior.Doing Business in PublicThe general rule of thumb, when it comes to prospective takeovers of major soccer teams, is that there is an inverse correlation between heat and light. The more public a suitor, the less likely they are to succeed. Among executives regularly involved in these transactions, the dictum runs that the serious bidders are also the quietest.All of which, of course, has been upended by the ongoing process to find a new owner for Manchester United. As should have been expected, any interested party was made to sign a “strict” and “binding” nondisclosure agreement before being offered access to the club’s detailed financial accounts. (There is a tautology here, obviously: Nondisclosure agreements are rarely described as “loose” or “really more of a guideline.”)Still, it might be worth checking the wording. It is not just that the identities of the two leading contenders tussling for the club — Jim Ratcliffe, a petrochemical billionaire, and Sheikh Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani, the son of a former Qatari prime minister and ABSOLUTELY NOT linked to the Qatari state — have become public. It is that everything else has, too.It has been possible, in fact, to follow this multibillion dollar transaction in surprisingly forensic detail. There were statements to accompany the submission of their bids, as well as ballpark figures of their valuations of the club. There have been details about when and where they have held further talks with United’s current hierarchy ahead of a very public — and completely artificial — deadline for offers. Ratcliffe was even photographed at Old Trafford along with his negotiating team.“Oh, what a surprise to see photographers here for my secret talks. Maybe I can hide in front of this crest.”Phil Noble/ReutersNews organizations tend not to rail against transparency. The more people want to talk, the better, particularly when it pertains to a club that commands as much interest as United. In this case, though, it might be worth pausing to ask who benefits, exactly, from what would ordinarily be a faintly clandestine process playing out in the open.For the contenders, it presents a chance to win hearts and minds, and perhaps that is no bad thing. For the Glazer family, the current owners, it is a way to smoke out as much interest as possible, and that is entirely their prerogative. For Raine, the bank that has been tasked with overseeing the deal, it is a chance to drive up the price, and by coincidence its commission.Everyone involved, in other words, is using United — a club that regards itself, not without cause, as the biggest sporting institution in the world — for their own ends. United is reduced to a mere asset, a trinket to be haggled over and horse-traded, a passive participant in the proxy wars of billionaires. And that, when it comes down to it, is about as good a definition of modern soccer as you will find.“Failure”Julian Nagelsmann, now out of the hot seat at Bayern Munich.Michaela Rehle/ReutersJulian Nagelsmann always wanted to be Bayern Munich manager. It was the job he coveted more than any other during his meteoric rise, back when he was European soccer’s coming force, its baby-faced managerial prodigy, an outsider who was overturning conventional wisdom of what a coach should look like, what steps they needed to take, how old they really ought to be.When he left his first job, at the equally neophyte Hoffenheim, for RB Leipzig, it was with the express purpose of positioning himself to take charge at Bayern. Leipzig was his designated intermediate step, the place where he would go to get from here to there, to where he always wanted to be.And though the move worked, he never felt quite like a natural fit with Bayern Munich. The images, early on in his tenure, of him scooting around Bayern’s training facility at Sabenerstrasse on a hoverboard felt somehow jarring, a Silicon Valley tech bro on vacation at Neuschwanstein. There always seemed to be just a hint of unease in the air: a hunt for a mole here, an unwarranted, unedifying outburst there.If the timing of his demise is curious — he was set to be fired on Friday, with his team in second place in the Bundesliga, a point behind its next opponent, and with a Champions League quarterfinal on the horizon — then the fact of it was not. Bayern places great stock in having a coach whose face fits. It is a shifting, vague criterion, but one that condemned him in the end. Nagelsmann never felt right, not quite.His solace, of course, is not simply the Bundesliga title he picked up in his first and only full season in Munich — proof that nobody fails at Bayern, not in any meaningful sense of the word — but the fact that he will be able to parlay that experience into something else soon enough.Bayern, it turns out, will not be his final destination. Nagelsmann will now be a contender for any of the handful of elite jobs that becomes available. Once a manager has broken through that ceiling, after all, it quickly transforms into a floor. The best evidence for that is the man who is reportedly replacing him: Thomas Tuchel, fired by Paris St.-Germain and fired by Chelsea, but hired in an instant by Bayern. For Nagelsmann, Munich will be just another step along the way.CorrespondenceWe are moving away from the many and varied failings of penalties and onto socks this week, courtesy of Shawn Donnelly. “What’s the deal with these Premier League players’ socks?” he asked, in the tone (I am assuming) of Jerry Seinfeld. “Half of them seemed to be ripped up in the back. Is this a new style, or can the sportswear brands not produce a sock strong enough for the rigors of the Premier League?”This is a good question, and in a rare stroke of good fortune, it is one I can actually answer. It is to do with reducing pressure on the calf muscles. Kyle Walker, the Manchester City defender, seems to have been the pioneer in this particular realm of what we may as well, for want of a better word, call science, and now it is almost de rigueur.Free the calf.Phil Noble/ReutersMoshe Arenstein, meanwhile, makes a perfectly coherent point of logic. “As we enjoy this great part of the year with amazing Champions and Europa League games, why on earth would the final game be just one game? Isn’t the best part of this tournament the home and away? Do we not deserve a final that has two games as well?”That, of course, was exactly how one European tournament functioned until relatively recently: the UEFA Cup, the forerunner of the Europa League, only switched to a single, showpiece final in 1998. (The Intercontinental Cup, the predecessor of the Club World Cup, ran as a home-and-away affair until 1980.)This newsletter is not above a dash of misty-eyed nostalgia, of course, but on this one I err on the side of modernity: there is an appeal to a two-legged final, but there is no drama greater than a one-and-done, surely?And Tom Gantz, rightly, takes issue with my description of dead-rubber group stage games in the expanded men’s World Cup as being “pointless soccer.”“Pointless to whom, exactly?” Tom asks. “The chance to watch the best soccer players once every four years is something I won’t pass up even if the outcome of every game doesn’t actually affect progression in the tournament.”I will cede that point as graciously as possible: No soccer match is truly pointless, is it? And I say that as a man who once attended a group stage game in a minor cup competition in which both teams had already been eliminated, and yet it ended in a penalty shootout anyway. More

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      P.S.G.-Bayern: Choupo-Moting Shows Benefits of the Slow Burn

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      Eric-Maxim Choupo-Moting was never a can’t-miss talent. But as he leads Bayern Munich against P.S.G., he has proved he belongs right where he is.There were always plenty of things about Eric-Maxim Choupo-Moting that caught the eye. The scouts dispatched to watch him tended to find that his build grabbed their attention first: tall but not rangy; broad-shouldered and muscular but lean. What held it, though, was everything else.He was quick: quicker than might have been expected for a player of his size. Choupo-Moting could be a target man, a flag that a team might plant in the ground to claim surrounding territory, but he could move. He could hold his own, physically, but there was a delicacy and a refinement to his touch, too.“He had a lot of positives,” said Kevin Cruickshank, a scout who tracked Choupo-Moting in the player’s native Germany for several seasons before helping bring him to England. “He had a combination of things that you do not see too often.”His most valuable trait, though, would not have been visible even to the most careful observer. Of all his many and varied characteristics, the one that has defined Choupo-Moting’s career more than any other has been his patience.These days, Choupo-Moting, a 33-year-old forward, is an established part of Bayern Munich’s squad, a member of the glittering cast at one of Europe’s great powerhouse clubs. This week, the draw for the round of 16 of the Champions League takes him to another of his alma maters, Paris St.-Germain. Choupo-Moting has spent the last five years on the grandest stages the game has to offer.Choupo-Moting with Neymar in 2020. He scored a vital goal in P.S.G.’s run and later played in the final against Bayern.Pool photo by David RamosHe has won domestic titles in France and Germany. He has scored to propel his team into a Champions League semifinal and played in a final. He has called some of the best players of his generation and the next teammates: Neymar, Kylian Mbappé, Robert Lewandowski, Manuel Neuer.Unlike most of them, though, he had to wait for it all to come. Choupo-Moting’s career has followed the sort of slow-burn trajectory that has become increasingly rare in modern soccer, where major clubs trawl the planet chasing any scent of juvenile promise and talent that is expected to ignite upon arrival.Choupo-Moting did not emerge, fully formed, from some hothouse academy, a teenager anointed for greatness. He spent his formative years at Hamburg, his hometown club, Germany’s great comatose giant. He left, at the age of 22 — by which time the game’s leading players are expected to have established themselves as stars — with an expired contract, a few dozen appearances and five goals to his name.By the time he was in his mid-20s, Choupo-Moting had earned a reputation as a steady, reliable Bundesliga forward. At Mainz, working with the club’s youthful, progressive coach, Thomas Tuchel, he scored 22 goals across three seasons. His three campaigns at Schalke proved similarly productive.He did not, though, worry that time was passing him by. “As a player, of course you have goals,” Choupo-Moting said in an interview last week. “But I always try to be happy for what I have. The highest level of success is happiness. I was happy at Hamburg, at Mainz, at Schalke. I was never sitting at home thinking: I am 24 already, I should be playing at another level. What if I don’t sign for a ‘big club’ this summer?“I never had that fear. I never had those questions in my head. I knew, as long as I tried everything, I would be happy. That’s all I wanted: to go home and say I tried my best. I was at Schalke, and for me Schalke was a big club. We played Champions League. That was one of my dreams. I had that fighting spirit to play on the highest level, but my parents always taught me to be patient.”Choupo-Moting scored five goals in his only season at Stoke City. When the club was relegated, his teammates said the bigger surprise was where he went next: P.S.G.Darren Staples/ReutersHis next step, in retrospect, seemed a backward one. He had always been attracted to England, drawn by the magnetic pull of the Premier League. When his contract at Schalke expired, Cruickshank and his colleagues at Stoke City — hardly a destination of choice — made their move.It was a deal rooted in pragmatism. Stoke saw in him a player “who could come in and help us straightaway,” Cruickshank said, rather than someone who could be molded into a star. That assessment proved basically correct. His payoff in a struggling team was modest: five goals and five assists in 30 games. Respectable, but not spectacular. Stoke was relegated.It was at that point that Choupo-Moting signed for P.S.G. His Stoke teammates had not exactly seen it coming.Doubtless, it helped that his former coach at Mainz, Tuchel, was now in charge in Paris. “He knew me,” Choupo-Moting said. “He knew what I could do, he knew I could still improve, that I could help a big team.” Despite all those years of waiting, and now closer to his 30th birthday than his teenage promise, the striker felt exactly the same way.Looking back, the transition has not been an easy one. Choupo-Moting had spent a decade or so in the relative shadows; the lights shine brighter at P.S.G., and Bayern, than they do anywhere else. “You have big players in front of you, players with bigger names, players with a lot of quality,” he said. Both in Paris and more recently in Munich, he had to wait for his chance to come.When it did, he felt he belonged. “You hear people ask why this player is at that club or another player at another club,” he said. “But you have to remember: Big clubs have a lot of quality people observing players.“If a player gets there, they deserve to be there. After that, it is on you, on the player, to show your potential, to show you deserve to stay at that level. With time, the quality you have determines if you get the chance. Some players get that chance straightaway. Sometimes you have to work more. But if you work hard, success will come.”That is what Choupo-Moting has found. At both clubs, it was assumed he would be a deputy to the frontline stars. At both, he more than proved his own worth. He scored a 93rd-minute winner in a Champions League quarterfinal for P.S.G. Though he largely had to fill in around Robert Lewandowski at Bayern, his numbers were impressive, averaging nearly a goal in every 90 minutes of playing time in the Bundesliga last season, and closer to two goals per 90 in the Champions League. When Robert Lewandowski departed Bayern last summer, the club decided not to acquire a replacement, preferring instead to trust in Choupo-Moting.Choupo-Moting is surrounded by bigger names at Bayern. “If a player gets there, they deserve to be there,” he said. After that, he added, it is on the player “to show you deserve to stay.”Nacho Doce/Reuters“It is difficult, because when a striker scores goals, you have to be patient,” Choupo-Moting said of the two years he spent as Lewandowski’s understudy. When Lewandowski left for Barcelona, he said, “I knew I would have a more important role. I always knew I could help the team. I had no doubts. From the beginning, I always told the people upstairs, the bosses, that I knew I could.”That he has made it, at last, to where he always felt he belonged is testament not only to his perseverance, but perhaps to something of a shift in the game itself. Players of Choupo-Moting’s profile — technically smooth but physically imposing strikers — have always been rare, but as the role of the forward has changed in recent years, they have become rarer still.“Maybe there was a time, when Pep Guardiola was with Barcelona, teams wanted to play with a real, strong No. 9, and it worked out,” Choupo-Moting said. Since then, he wonders if the game has come full circle. “It has changed,” he added. “Nowadays it is more and more important to have a striker who is strong, good with the ball, has that combination.”Soccer itself, in other words, has moved toward Choupo-Moting. The most exclusive teams on the planet have, belatedly, seen what was there all along. They might have taken their time. It is fortunate, then, that Choupo-Moting never had a problem with being patient. More

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      The Danger Lurking Behind the Premier League’s Wealth

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      Teams that can’t match England’s spending now face a choice: Accept that they can no longer compete for the best talent, or risk everything to try.The precise nature of the hierarchy is, in truth, a little confusing. The job titles are, in isolation, grand and impressive, but taken together, all of those capital letters become somehow vague and a little meaningless. There were, for a while, two Technical Directors, one Director of Global Talent and Transfers, and a Co-Director of Recruitment and Talent.Quite which of those is most senior is not entirely clear. Perhaps that is intentional. And it feels, certainly, like Co-Directors should come in pairs, at the very least, but in this case there may be just the one. An unkind eye might suggest it is all just a touch Schrutian.The expertise of the individuals who fulfill each of those positions, though, is beyond reproach. In the gap between the summer transfer window and the winter equivalent, Chelsea’s owners set about hiring some of the most well-regarded recruitment staff that global soccer has to offer.They picked up — in no particular order, because what order they are supposed to be in is not easily assessed — Christopher Vivell to be Technical Director, and Joe Shields as Co-Director of Recruitment and Talent. Then there was Laurence Stewart, brought on to act as a “technical director to focus on football globally,” and Paul Winstanley, the Blues’ Director of Global Talent and Transfers.Their résumés were flawless. Vivell and Stewart both had connections to the Red Bull network of clubs, long regarded as one of the finest hothouses of talent in global soccer. Stewart also had worked at Monaco, another team famed for its eye for potential. Shields had helped turn Manchester City’s academy into one of the best in Europe. Winstanley had been central to Brighton’s emergence as arguably the Premier League’s smartest club. In gathering them together, Chelsea had assembled an unmatched brain trust to help it conquer the transfer market.How useful any of that experience would have been on Tuesday is open to question. Under the guidance of Behdad Eghbali, one of Chelsea’s co-owners, the club concluded a deal to sign Enzo Fernández, the finest young player in a World Cup watched by more than a billion people.To get it over the line, Eghbali and his team of crack negotiators agreed to pay the release clause written into Fernández’s contract at Benfica, a figure that was roughly 10 times the amount the Portuguese club had shelled out for him only six months ago. It was a remarkable coup, akin to walking into a very expensive shop, paying the price on the label and exiting in triumph.Benfica’s Argentine midfielder Enzo Fernández was Chelsea’s prize winter signing.Carlos Costa/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat is not, to be clear, to deride the qualifications of any of Chelsea’s appointments, or even to highlight the obvious disconnect between how they forged their reputations and what they will be required to do at Stamford Bridge.It is, instead, to stress the reality of the Premier League’s spending in general, and Chelsea’s in particular. For all of the armies of scouts that clubs employ, for all of the celebration of scouting gurus and technical directors with the magic touch, for all of the intellectual energy invested in the process of identifying and sifting talent, English soccer is now so impossibly wealthy that all of it is secondary, really. The clubs of the Premier League can see the players they want, the players everyone wants, and throw money at the problem until they get what they want.There have been two tones to the coverage of Chelsea’s January spending. One, perpetuated by television, the more breathless elements of the print media, the Premier League itself, and the many and varied financial firms for whom the staggering wealth of English soccer represents an opportunity, has been celebratory.In this view, the absurd figures that the club has spent are seen as a direct measure of power and status, and the club’s technique of spreading the accountancy cost of those deals over unusually long contracts has been presented as some ingenious mechanism, one that has brilliantly circumvented soccer’s halfhearted attempts to leash its clubs to the idea of sustainability.The other is not nearly so bombastic, so popular, so triumphalist. It feels a little like doom-mongering, like worrying about litter at Woodstock, or perhaps even somehow wonkish, like asking a Hells Angel about the fuel economy of a Harley. It uses terms like “competitive balance” and “inflation,” and it is generally met with accusations of base jealousy.And yet the latter is, sadly, correct. Chelsea’s spending in January has bordered on wanton, and the amount of money committed by the teams of the Premier League as a whole — as always — has been not only obscene but also dangerous, not only for the clubs themselves but also for English and European soccer as a whole.Chelsea’s new owners have spent lavishly to reshape a team that won the Champions League less than two years ago.Paul Childs/Action Images, via ReutersThe reasons for that are relatively well-covered ground. The higher Premier League clubs push prices, the greater the inflationary risk for everyone else. Chelsea might have the financial resources to pay more than $100 million for a player — Mykhailo Mudryk — who has played six games in the Champions League, and so might Arsenal. It may even have the backing to survive if it finds itself saddled with a cadre of underperforming players on long contracts. But most clubs do not.That leaves a vast majority of teams — even celebrated ones, even famous ones, even comparatively rich ones — facing a choice when the next Mudryk comes along: Either accept that level of talent is no longer available to you, or risk everything to try and compete. Barcelona has tried that. It led to ruin. Juventus, too. That led to disgrace. The only option, then, is submission.There are sporting effects, too. The disparity between the Premier League and the other major leagues — let alone everyone else — is now so vast that even executives at some of the greatest clubs on the continent admit that they are marooned in “feeder” competitions. In one recent example, A.C. Milan, the reigning Italian champion, could not match the financial package on offer to Nicolo Zaniolo, the Roma forward, by Bournemouth.That is not, as it happens, something that is in the Premier League’s long-term interests; England’s clubs need somewhere to offload their unwanted players in the future, after all. But it is more immediately devastating for soccer as a common endeavor across Europe and the world.As talent concentrates in one league, in one country, everything else fades and withers in the shadows, condemned to seeing its most precious flowers plucked by England as soon as they blossom. All of a sudden, the rationale behind a continental super league does not seem quite so brazenly venal.There is one aspect, though, that is not addressed enough. The people who emerge, for example, from the signing of Fernández with credit are not Chelsea’s team of negotiators, led by Eghbali himself, who managed to persuade Benfica to sell its best player for the fee it wanted in the first place.No, the credit goes entirely to Benfica, the club that took Fernández from Argentina and accelerated his development, and now gets a richly deserved (if bittersweet) profit from its work.Fernández and Gonçalo Ramos helped Benfica reach the Champions League round of 16 before star turns at the World Cup. Only the latter will be present when the team plays Club Brugge in two weeks.Pedro Nunes/ReutersA couple of days after the deal was finalized, Chelsea confirmed a small rearrangement of its star recruiters: Stewart and Winstanley would, now, be co-sporting directors (yes, both of them). But the truth is, it does not need their eye for talent, not really. It does not need to be smarter than everyone else, not when it can be richer. What it has done, what English soccer does habitually, requires no great expertise, and as a result it lacks glory, too.Recruitment is a valid part of soccer. A season is, perhaps, best thought of as a test of each club’s institutional strength: not just the talent of the players it puts on the field or the vision of the manager but the structures it has built to enable them to succeed. Scouts, like the medical staff or the marketing team, contribute toward every trophy.That, at least, is how it should work. The wealth of the Premier League distorts it. There is no sport in arbitrarily having more money than everyone else. Making wealth a precondition to success is effectively asking fans to cheer rich people’s ability to buy things.And yet that is exactly what the Premier League has become. There is no reason to expect fans to object to that; if that is the game, then their only concern is that their club plays it, too. There is no reason to expect the Premier League itself to take action, either. English soccer, you may have noticed, has no problem at all with its own direction.The league’s owners, perhaps, might be expected to exercise some self-control, what with being trapped in a spiral of conspicuous consumption that makes them vulnerable to the arrival of someone with even more money than them, but that may be a little too utopian.Instead, the only place to turn is to the game’s governing bodies, to UEFA and to FIFA and their dependent federations, and to ask what they intend to do about it, whether they are content to watch as the Premier League cannibalizes the sport as a whole, whether they are satisfied that the game is now determined as much in the frenzied capitalism of the transfer market as it is on the field.These organizations are not powerless. They do not have to stand by. They could institute transfer levies or luxury taxes or squad limits or homegrown quotas to try to staunch the spending, to reinstitute some sort of balance. Or they could sit and watch, as they have for so long, as soccer fractures and splinters and breaks under the weight of all that cold, hard cash.Germany Learns a New Word: TitelkampfThe perception that the Bundesliga has, in the course of the past 10 years, been little more than a procession toward glory for Bayern Munich is not quite true. In almost every season, there has been a moment in which a challenger seems to have a glimmer of a chance. It has mostly proved fleeting and it has always proved futile, but it has helped a little to stave off the sense of dread inevitability.In some senses, then, the Bundesliga table after 18 games of the current season is not especially unusual. Bayern is on top, of course, with just a narrow gap to its nearest challenger, the remarkable Union Berlin. What is different this time, is what is happening just below that. Union, in second, and Eintracht Frankfurt, in sixth, are separated by only four points. Bayern is not facing one usurper. It has to confront five of them.Thomas Müller and Bayern Munich are at the top of the table in Germany, but looking over their shoulder for a change.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat is significant. In a scenario in which one team is desperately clinging to Bayern’s coattails, all it takes is a single setback for everything to unravel. Bayern’s big red machine keeps winning. A lone defeat for its challenger transforms a small points deficit into an apparently insurmountable one.With five contenders — Union, RB Leipzig, Borussia Dortmund, Freiburg and Eintracht, in that order — the possibility of Bayern’s striding off into the distance is reduced. One or two challengers might lose ground one weekend, but they are unlikely to collapse all at the same time. Bayern will not be able to burn everyone off in the course of a few weeks.Instead, Julian Nagelsmann’s team, stuttering just a little itself, will have to get used to having company for a vast majority of the season, with all of the pressure that brings. In all likelihood, it will still finish the campaign as Germany’s champion. This time, though, it may well have to work for it.Rising TideManchester United, in the end, stood firm. In the closing days of the January transfer window, Arsenal tried on several occasions to persuade the club to part company with the England striker Alessia Russo. The final bid, by all accounts, would have broken the world record — paid by Barcelona to sign Keira Walsh last year — by some distance. United, though, said no.Much of this is a good news story for the Women’s Super League in particular and for women’s soccer in general. Arsenal, deprived of two of its finest players by long-term injury, is prepared to commit significant funds to sign a replacement. United is serious enough about its pursuit of the W.S.L. title that, even with Russo out of contract in the summer, it decided to refuse the potential six-figure windfall.Arsenal failed in its bid to pry Alessia Russo away from Manchester United.Ed Sykes/Action Images, via ReutersRising transfer fees are, in general, a sign of health, a marker that more money is coming into the women’s game, that clubs are pushing resources toward their women’s teams, that players are being accorded the sort of value that befits their status as elite athletes and evermore high-profile stars.The one note of caution is the same as in so many things where women’s soccer, a sport forging its path in the 21st century, seems wedded to ideas rooted in the 20th century conventions of the men’s game.Or, to put it more plainly: Are we really absolutely sure that transfer fees are a good idea? Is this definitely the best way to run the industry? If you were designing a sport from scratch, would that be the mechanism that allowed talent to move around and competition to flourish? Or would you be cognizant of the risks, aware of what the men’s game has become, and at least ask if there might, perhaps, be an alternative?CorrespondenceThe subject of whether American sports have enough swearing continues to prompt rather more conversation than Google’s algorithm might expect, with Dan Rosenbaum losing points for citing New York Rangers fans chanting “Potvin sucks” as an example of spite — that’s a bit P.G. for my tastes — but recovering admirably with an outstanding theory about the differing natures of crowds.“Most soccer fans see the opposition once a season,” he wrote. “Maybe two or three times, in various cup competitions. In baseball, we see a division rival around 10 times a year, in three different sets of games. The vitriol is therefore expended over time, rather than being focused. Except for Phillies fans, who seem to have boundless depths of bile.”The newsletter regular Shawn Donnelly, meanwhile, has a question. “Chelsea bought Enzo Fernández for a cool $130 million,” he wrote, correctly. “Do they pay Benfica this sum immediately? Or is that payment spread out over a number of years, the way I pay off my Subaru Impreza?”I’m not quite sure whether that last bit is boasting or a subtle message to Subaru, but regardless: Some Premier League teams, in particular, will put the full cash total down for a deal, often as a way of improving their chances of signing a player they really want. In most cases, though, payments are delivered in installments: perhaps two or three, front-loaded in the first couple of years of a contract.An inquiry from Brett Jenkins, too, a confessed “novice” fan who is seeking recommendations for “soccer books, fiction and nonfiction.” The first recommendation is, always: Do not read soccer fiction. Unless it is written by Steve Bruce.Nonfiction is richer territory. It pains me to do it, but Jonathan Wilson’s “Inverting the Pyramid” is probably the precise book you are seeking, but there is a whole canon worth exploring, most of it also written by Wilson, but with noble exceptions from David Winner, Sid Lowe, David Goldblatt, Joshua Robinson and Jon Clegg, and some idiot. I love all of James Montague’s work, too, but my favorite soccer book, by a whisker, is Robert Andrew Powell’s “This Love Is Not for Cowards.”The final query comes from Alex Converse, who I can only presume is the person who invented the sneakers. “I follow Tottenham and I wonder why, with five substitutes available, Antonio Conte doesn’t routinely put on fresh wingbacks at halftime,” he wrote. “Don’t you want someone with fresh legs, who can move fast, end to end?”This is a great point, and not only for Spurs. It feels to me as if coaches have yet to tap deep into the potential effects of having five substitutes. At the World Cup, they seemed to be used not so much to help coaches change their approach as to maintain energy levels. At club level, I’m not sure we’ve seen quite the same policy yet. We will, I think, in time. More