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      World Cup Dreams, Gone in an Instant

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      For hundreds of the world’s best players, injury is the fear shadowing every step, every turn, every tackle as the World Cup looms.LEEDS, England — For a second, Aleksandar Mitrovic looked panicked. He slumped onto his back on the Elland Road turf, his face a grimace, his hands covering his eyes. It was not immediately apparent what had happened: Perhaps his ankle had jarred, or his knee twisted, or a hamstring popped.Fulham’s medical team rushed onto the field. Marco Silva, the club’s coach, has been “managing” his striker’s fitness for weeks, ever since Mitrovic picked up an injury while away on international duty with Serbia. He was taken off early in a defeat against Newcastle. He missed a game with Bournemouth altogether. He has admitted to playing in “a lot of pain.”Now Mitrovic lay prone for no more than a minute, patiently acquiescing, as the doctors rotated his foot and gingerly stretched his knee. Cautiously, he stood up, doing all he could to put as little weight as possible on his left leg. Watch enough soccer and, after a while, it becomes easier to tell when a player is exaggerating for effect. Mitrovic’s eyes, fretful and wide, made it clear that he was sincere.He would not, it is fair to say, just have been worrying about missing the rest of Fulham’s victory over Leeds, or the frustration of the possibility of a couple of weeks on the sidelines.His thoughts would, instead, have rushed — unbidden and irresistible — to the worst-case scenario. The opening game of the World Cup is barely three weeks away. Coaches will start to name squads, even preliminary ones, in the next two weeks. Any setback now, any pull or strain or tear or crack, might cost a player their place.Mitrovic, like a few hundred others, would have wondered immediately if this was the moment he lost his World Cup.Aleksandar Mitrovic got an injury scare at Leeds. Others have experienced the worst.Craig Brough/ReutersIn the end, there was no reason to worry. The 28-year-old Mitrovic — who will, all being well, act as the spearhead of Serbia’s attack in Qatar — took a little while to satisfy himself that he was not taking any risks, and then threw himself back into the fray. Late on, conscious of the striker’s value, Silva withdrew him, just in case.Others have not been so fortunate. Qatar 2022’s absentee list is already a substantial one. France will not be able to call on N’Golo Kanté. Lucas Hernández, Paul Pogba and Raphaël Varane may yet miss out, too. Argentina will be without Paulo Dybala. Portugal will not have Diogo Jota in its ranks. Uruguay will have to cope without Ronald Aráujo.There are doubts, too, over many more: Marcelo Brozovic and Ángel Di María and so many English right backs that Trent Alexander-Arnold, the Liverpool ingénue so inexperienced that he has apparently yet to learn crucial skills like “tackling,” might even get to play.There is nothing unusual about that, of course. True, the World Cup has never before happened in the middle of the European season; FIFA, in a rare example of what might, in another organization, be called wisdom, has never previously thought to ask players to go straight from the blood and thunder of the domestic schedule into an era-defining international tournament with only six days to acclimatize.A thigh injury has made Leroy Sané a fitness concern for Germany.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut playing the World Cup in its traditional July slot did not make players immune from injury; the three-week firewall between the end of the European season and the start of the tournament did not possess any curative power. In World Cup years, those players aspiring to represent their nations have always had to weigh the risks and rewards as the club campaign reached its climax. Few previous tournaments, if any, have been played with a full contingent of stars.There are, though, a couple of differences this year. The most obvious is the sheer number of games. Ordinarily, by April and May, most teams are only playing once a week; it is only the select few, competing not only in their domestic tournaments but in the late stages of European competitions, that face the prospect of matches every three days.Read More on the 2022 World CupLavish Spending: No expense has been spared in putting on a show in Qatar. But the tournament is a feeling that money can’t buy, our soccer correspondent writes.United States: The American men’s soccer team has cycled through strikers during the qualifying period. It needs to settle on one before heading to Qatar.Brazil: As the team begins its quest for a sixth World Cup, it appears to have the resources needed to succeed — though Neymar still shoulders much of the load.Sticker Shock: In Argentina, the prospect of Lionel Messi’s last World Cup has helped feed a white-hot market for a beloved collectible, featuring long lines, surging prices and, briefly, government intervention.This time around, because of the squeeze on the calendar created by the looming hulk of Qatar, everyone appears to be playing constantly. That means players not only have more chances to get injured, but find themselves more susceptible to it. There is no time to rest, to recuperate, to rehabilitate. Sinews are permanently strained, bodies forever on the edge.Manchester United defender Raphaël Varane is one of a handful of France players who will, or could, miss the World Cup through an untimely injury.Daniel Hambury/EPA, via ShutterstockThe second difference is a little less easily quantified. Few players would admit that, as the season reaches its conclusion, they dial back their intensity just a little, conserving their energies for a tournament still a couple of months away. That, after all, sounds troublingly close to confessing to coasting.And yet it seems impossible that the majority — those not competing for trophies or jostling for European positions or to avoid relegation — would not do just that. It is too easy to overestimate the margins in elite soccer, to assume that everything can be measured in substantial, chunky percentage blocks.In reality, of course, the differences are so slender as to be barely perceptible. A player with the World Cup at the back of their mind does not run at half-speed, or refuse to tackle; they simply do not burn further into the red when their body is at the limit. They do not shirk a tackle, but they may not go in with quite as much force, or to quite the same extent. They shave the edges.That is not quite so easily done when the season is still taking shape, and ambition remains more potent than reality. Fulham sits seventh in the Premier League, after all, and is in the tick of the battle for a place in the Europa League. The consequences of not making that sprint, of not going for that tackle, could yet be considerable. This is a time when taking risks still comes with a reward.Paulo Dybala could miss the World Cup after he was injured in a game for Roma.Fabio Frustaci/EPA, via ShutterstockThat may not be how everyone sees it, of course. This season is developing to be a reasonably curious one, to say the least. It is not just that Fulham sits seventh in the Premier League. It is that Liverpool appears to be playing while mired in treacle, and Tottenham seems underpowered, and Chelsea and Manchester United have both come across as somehow inhibited at various times.It is that Union Berlin is top of the Bundesliga, with even mighty Bayern Munich trailing in its wake, and with Borussia Dortmund nowhere to be seen. It is that Juventus and Inter Milan have fallen by the wayside in Italy already, cast aside by a rampant Napoli. It is that Barcelona and Atlético Madrid are already out of the Champions League, Spain left with just one representative in a tournament it has dominated for a decade.All of this might just be the curiosities that always come with a new campaign, the vicissitudes of fate, the changing of the seasons. Each of those stories, after all, has its own, deep roots. Perhaps it is all just noise.Or it might be that, on some level, nobody wants to be Kanté, or Jota, or Dybala. They do not even, if they can help it, want to be Mitrovic. And so the typical strangeness of the new season has become more pronounced.It might be that, for the last couple of months, what has unfurled has been to some extent a phony war, contested by combatants with a different conflict in mind.The Best Player to Watch in EuropeThe season’s breakout hit: Khvicha Kvaratskhelia.Alberto Lingria/ReutersAndrés Carrasco came to closer summing up the experience of watching Khvicha Kvaratskhelia than anyone else. The head of Dinamo Tbilisi’s youth academy was contemplating whether there are any shared characteristics among Georgian attacking players, whether there is a defined national style, when he hit upon the word.Yes, he said, there is something. They tend, to his Barcelona-trained mind, to be just a little bit “anarchic.”Kvaratskhelia has, in his first few weeks at Napoli, become a sensation in both Serie A and the Champions League, not so much for what he does — though his goal return is more than respectable, particularly in a league that prides itself on its parsimony — but for how he does it.At any given moment, Kvaratskhelia does not do what you expect him to do. He makes strange, faintly unsettling choices. He plows on when he should turn back. He shoots when he should pass. He dances through defenders when the road is very clearly closed. And it is that which makes him so refreshing.European soccer is a deeply ordered world. Even those teams who seem to play with a reckless abandon, who appear so freewheeling, so maverick, tend to be playing according to set patterns. Those combinations, those movements that come so easily are in most cases the product of hours of work on the training ground. They are learned by rote, not conjured from the imagination.Kvaratskhelia — for now, at least — stands in opposition to that. He is raw, unfiltered, untamed. Defenders, at first glance, appear to be completely flummoxed by him, as if he is not playing by the established conventions. For much the same reason, many of those who have watched him frequently in Italy are thrilled by him. He is a little dose of anarchy, and European soccer is all the better for it.CorrespondenceIt’s been a while since we’ve had a confession in this section, but Dan Andersen provides the prompt for a fairly major one. It is possible that, despite my job title as chief soccer correspondent, I no longer know what offside is any more.“If Harry Kane is offside,” Dan wrote, referring to the remarkable denouement to Tottenham’s game with Sporting Lisbon on Wednesday, “video technology makes that decision in a nanosecond,” before wondering why, exactly, it took three minutes for someone to work that out.That is a question that I cannot answer, but far more troubling is that — as far as I can tell — Kane was not offside: sure, he was ahead of the last defender, but he was behind the teammate who headed the ball to him. If the ball travels backward, I was taught, there is no offside. I’m in good company, too: Eric Dier evidently learned the same thing.We may, as it turns out, both have been misled. Apparently the trajectory of the ball is irrelevant, and always has been irrelevant. This may, of course, be true: Eric and I may have been laboring under a misapprehension for years. Or it may only be true now, another tweak to a law that has been reshaped to the point of vacuousness in recent years, further evidence for my long-held belief that we all need to sit down and come up with the rules again from scratch.Onside? Offside? Who even knows anymore?Ian Walton/Associated PressJames Waller, meanwhile, wants to take our nostalgia for mud and add to it. “Given drainage systems, the ludicrously waterlogged pitch is largely a disappointing thing of the past,” he wrote. “It may have turned events into a mad lottery but it was undeniably entertaining at times.” Extra points to James for finding that footage on “Bing Video,” rather than YouTube.And finally, David Moulton is seeking clarity, which is something that can be said for all of us, really. “I am confounded by the long downfield kick by goalkeepers,” he wrote. “It is agony to watch, knowing that at best there is a 50 percent chance of success. I mean, why not pass it directly to your own player, with the expectation that they will control the ball at least somewhere past midfield?”The most straightforward answer here is tradition: goalkeepers take long goal kicks because goalkeepers have always taken long goal kicks. It is not, primarily, an attacking move, of course. The long goal kick is manifest fear. The logic behind it is that it is much better, all told, for the ball to be a long way from your goal and as close as possible to the opposition’s.I am, though, intrigued by goal kicks. It is an avowed belief that you can see all of modern soccer in its brilliance and its mania at a goal kick: half of the players clustered around the penalty area, ready to start or resist the press; half a dozen or so more deep inside the other half of the field, awaiting the counter attack; and a great, gaping green space in between, because the one place nobody ever puts a goal kick now is midfield.That’s all for this week. We have good news and bad news for you. This newsletter will, once the World Cup rolls around, be going on hiatus for a month or so. It will, though, be replaced by a daily — that’s right folks, daily — newsletter during the tournament, hopefully guiding you through all of the stories, the games and our coverage of Qatar 2022. You can decide which one is good news and which one is bad for yourselves. More

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      Bayern Munich and the Myth of Competition

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      In several of Europe’s top leagues, it already feels like the title race is over. But is dominance what fans really want?Just like that, it was over. For two months or so, there had been just the slightest flicker of hope for the clubs of the Bundesliga. They had not felt it in some time. They did not want to admit to feeling it now, not publicly: It was fragile, guilty, most likely forlorn, but it was hope nonetheless.Robert Lewandowski was gone. Serge Gnabry, for a time, seemed as if he might follow. Thomas Müller and Manuel Neuer were another year older. For the first time in a decade, Bayern Munich seemed not weak — Bayern Munich is never weak — but just a little diminished, just a little more human.At Borussia Dortmund, at Bayer Leverkusen, at RB Leipzig, the thought would have formed, unbidden and silent. What if Dortmund’s reinforcements worked out? What if Florian Wirtz flourished? What if Christopher Nkunku was only just getting started? What if this were one of those years, the in-between ones, the liminal ones, when Bayern fades and another rises?And then cold reality intruded. Bayern’s first game of the season was at Eintracht Frankfurt: an intimidating stadium, packed to the rafters, cheering on a team that had won the Europa League only a few months earlier. It was no gentle start. Not for the first five minutes, anyway.Then Joshua Kimmich scored. Five minutes later, so did Benjamin Pavard. Then, on his debut, Sadio Mané, and Jamal Musiala, and Gnabry himself, and now the Bundesliga season was precisely 43 minutes old, and all of the hope had been extinguished and all of the what ifs had been answered. Just like that, for another year, it was over.Sadio Mané needed precisely one game to open his Bundesliga account at Bayern.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHope is, of course, a little hardier than that. Nobody, not even Bayern Munich, wins a championship in August. Its defeat of Eintracht was only one game. Perhaps, in the months to come, Julian Nagelsmann’s tactics will go awry. Perhaps Bayern’s squad will break out in full-scale mutiny. Perhaps it will be afflicted by an injury epidemic. Perhaps, as outlined in this space last week, the World Cup will cleave the season into two halves, both of them beset by randomness.Still, the impression left by that opening day rout was indelible. The departure of Lewandowski, and the lingering sense of generational shift that it has engendered at Bayern, has done nothing to change the power dynamic in the Bundesliga. The destiny of its championship feels preordained, if not from the moment the season started, then certainly from the 43rd minute.That, of course, has come to be seen as German soccer’s fatal flaw. Bayern has the most fans, the most commercial clout and the most Champions League prize money, and so it has a supremacy that now circles the absolute. It has won every title for the last 10 years. Sometimes, the gap to the nearest contender stands at 25 points. There is no drama. There is no doubt. It does not feel quite right, at the top of the table, to describe the Bundesliga as a competition.Germany is, at least, not alone. In France, Paris St.-Germain started its season by scoring three in 38 minutes against Clermont and ended up running out 5-0 winners. P.S.G. has won eight of the last 10 available titles in France. Its budget, swollen by Qatari beneficence, bears no relation to any of its rivals. The air in Ligue 1, too, is thick with inevitability.In theory, of course, this not only reflects badly on both of these leagues, but also limits both their appeal and their ambition. Sports, we are led to believe, require two things to retain old fans and attract new ones, to fill stadiums, to command the attention of drifting and distracted television audiences.They are related (and often confused) but distinct. One is what is generally called competitive balance: the idea that a number of entrants to a tournament might, in the end, win it. The other is known, academically, as the uncertainty-of-outcome hypothesis: the belief that an individual game within any given competition is only attractive if fans feel — or at least can trick themselves into feeling — as if both sides stand a chance.Lionel Messi, Neymar and Co. are already atop the Ligue 1 table.Mohammed Badra/EPA, via ShutterstockThe best measure of how important these concepts are held to be by leagues themselves comes in the form of the Premier League’s deeply hubristic, though undeniably successful, marketing strategy.In England, the top flight’s sense of self is inextricably bound to the idea that not only can any team beat any other team at any given moment, but also that it alone boasts a multiplicity of challengers for the ultimate crown.Germany and France, after all, have only one. Spain has a paltry three: Real Madrid, Atlético Madrid, and whichever bits of Barcelona have not been sold off to sign Marcos Alonso. Italy’s contenders might stretch to four these days, but that is only the case because Juventus very kindly decided to spend three years self-imploding.England, though, has no fewer than six, a full half dozen teams that go into the season with a shot of winning the championship that is at least more than theoretical. The reality, of course, is substantially more complex: not just because some of the six are more equal than others, but also because having a comparatively broad swatch of contenders means a less predictable season but more predictable games.But the truth, in this case, matters less than the belief. The Premier League’s success is down, it is broadly accepted, to the fact that it is less processional than all of its rival competitions. It follows, then, that the prospect of yet another season in which Bayern Munich and P.S.G. amble to their domestic crowns is a black mark against the leagues that home them.The Premier League sells stars for sure. But it also regularly offers something more valuable: jeopardy.Frank Augstein/Associated PressThis, to most fans, feels right. It feels just. It is obviously a drawback to know, almost from the start, which team is going to emerge triumphant. Like going to a movie in full knowledge that one lover lets the other drown despite there being plenty of space on the raft, or actually the guy is a ghost, there is not much point staying until the end. There should be competitive balance. There should be uncertainty of outcome. That, after all, is why we watch.Except that, as it happens, it isn’t. A paper published in 2020 by researchers at the University of Liverpool — and drawing on a welter of academic investigation into the motivations of sports fans — found that there was no correlation between how uncertain the outcome of any game was and how many people watched it. The link, they wrote, was “decisively nonsignificant.”That is not, it turns out, why most people watch sports, whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not. According to the researchers, there was a connection between viewership and the quality of player on show. Even more significant, though, was the name of the teams involved. The power of brand, they wrote, tended to “dominate any contribution to audience size.”Those two conclusions suggest that, rather than diminishing the appeal of the Bundesliga, Bayern’s victory did the precise opposite. Here, after all, was a team with a famous name and an established brand packed full of highly talented players. This, it would seem, is what fans want.That is the thinking that has convinced P.S.G. to try to blind the rest of Ligue 1, and much of Europe, with its sheer star power. It is the argument regularly trotted out by the Bundesliga to defend Bayern’s unimpeachable hegemony. Soccer’s dirty little secret is that it cherishes not balance, but dominance; it claims to want diversity, but nothing draws like dynasty.And yet, there is one other finding in that 2020 report that is worth noting. “A match with the highest championship significance observed in our data set would be expected to attract an aggregate audience size 96 percent higher than one with no implications at all for the prizes to be awarded at the end of the season,” even if the teams involved were the same, the researchers wrote.In other words, what fans really want — more than competitive balance, more than uncertainty of outcome, more than famous faces and powerful names — is jeopardy. They want, we want, as much jeopardy as we can get: games when it feels as if everything is on the line. That is what sells leagues. That is what attracts fans.Ultimately, neither Germany nor France can offer that. It is what is growing rarer by the season in the rest of Europe’s major leagues and quite a few of its minor ones, too, given the distorting effects of Champions League revenue throughout the continent.But that is what we want, more than anything. Seeing Bayern and P.S.G. ride roughshod over all and sundry offers a short-term hit, the fleeting satisfaction of awe but at the cost of the greater prize. There will, most likely, be no decider in the Bundesliga this season. There will be no ultimate showdown. How can there be, when everything felt settled 43 minutes in?Difficult NegotiationJorge Mendes: center of the universe.Enric Fontcuberta/EPA, via ShutterstockThe most fraught transfer of the summer, without doubt, was not the one in which a coterie of Europe’s biggest clubs sought to seduce Erling Haaland, or Manchester United’s futile pursuit of Frenkie de Jong, or even Real Madrid’s heartbreak at being rejected by Kylian Mbappé. It is, instead, Gonçalo Guedes’s move to Wolves from Valencia.Each step, after all, would have been full of snares and traps and pitfalls. First, the agent who retains a close bond with the Wolves owners, Jorge Mendes, would have had to get in touch with the agent most aligned with Valencia’s owner, Jorge Mendes, to see if the player was interested in the move.Next, those agents would have had to reach out to the player’s agent — Jorge Mendes — to see if his client was interested in the move. Guedes would then have had to get in touch with the Wolves manager, Bruno Lage, to discuss his role at his new team, perhaps through Lage’s agent: Jorge Mendes.And finally, politeness would have dictated that Guedes convey his desire to leave to Valencia’s new coach, Gennaro Gattuso. Gattuso, doubtless, would have been furious. He had tried to sign Guedes only last year, while Gattuso was (briefly) at Fiorentina. This was his chance to work with a player he so clearly admires. We can only imagine that he would have expressed his frustration at losing him in no uncertain terms to his agent. Jorge Mendes.CorrespondenceMark Cuban: N.B.A. owner and newsletter fixture.Kevin Jairaj/USA Today Sports, via ReutersAn abundance of emails arrived in the inbox this week, addressing an impressive variety of issues. On the ongoing Mark Cuban debate, Vincent LoVoi offers a handy rule of thumb: “A kid will last at a baseball game about as many innings as their age. A nine-year-old should enjoy a whole game, don’t bother taking a toddler, and be ready to leave mid-game with a four- or five-year-old.”That fits nicely, as it happens, with the suggestion from Joey Klonowski for parents of children who prefer TikTok over sports. “Take them to the game,” he wrote. The best way to assess these concepts, I think, is to test them in the wild. My son’s first taste of live soccer will come in September at our local (professional) team, Harrogate Town. He’s almost five, and I reckon he can do an hour, with snacks. I’ll report back.Joanne Palmer, meanwhile, was not alone in noticing an omission in last week’s discussion of next year’s World Cup. “Curious that Canada did not merit a mention, given that Canada beat the United States at the Olympics,” she wrote, and she is of course correct. Canada — like Australia and Brazil — will be a contender in 2023. It’s the U.S., though, that has represented the watermark for women’s international soccer for the last decade, regardless of the defeat last year, and it’s the U.S. that will offer the best gauge for where everyone else stands.As for the other World Cup, the one charging onto our horizons, Charles Kelley pointed out that it might not make this season all that strange in comparison to the 2019-20 campaign. “Temporary suspension of matches, ‘temporary’ rule changes, rescheduling of tournaments, empty stadiums, compacted schedules, emptying coffers, desperation player moves, and no kids to accompany players out onto the pitch,” he wrote.And that leads us nicely on to competing views about the World Cup itself. S.K. Gupta wanted to reflect the benefits of holding the tournament in Qatar. “It expands the game to a geographical region where it has never been held, encouraging the sport’s growth in the Middle East,” he wrote. “It will give ordinary people an opportunity to experience the culture of the Middle East and get beyond the stereotypes. Also, by having the World Cup in the Middle East, it would be feasible to have it broadcast live to most of the world during waking hours.”These are all absolutely valid, of course, though whether they are a counterweight to the fairly substantial “cons” column — the process by which the World Cup was acquired, the human rights issues, the sense that not everyone is entirely welcome in Qatar — is a matter of personal taste.To that list, we can add Juuso Sallinen’s (also valid, though not especially important) complaint. “Has anyone thought about the lack of partying in the country that will win the World Cup? The players are back in training only a few days after the final. It hardly leaves room for any proper celebration in the winning country itself.”I don’t think it’s especially shameful to think this is less than ideal, Juuso. These victories should be savored. The blame for that one, though, does not so much lie with Qatar as with everyone else in soccer, since they proved completely unwilling to sacrifice anything in order to make space for the tournament. More

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      Science and Data Change Soccer’s Definition of Old

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

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      Robert Lewandowski, Bayern Munich and the Bitter End

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

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      The Champions League’s Drama Is Worth Savoring, and Saving

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      The Champions League’s late-stage drama is a feature, not a bug. Let’s hope no one messes that up.The nights happen so often now that the possibility they are a coincidence can be safely discounted. They occur with such startling regularity that they do not really count as rare, not anymore. They still possess the texture and the echo of an exception, but by this stage they are better thought of as part of the rule. They are a feature, not a quirk in the code.There have been 26 games so far in the latter stages of this season’s Champions League. A conservative estimate would suggest that seven of those games — just a little over a quarter, if you prefer your information in fractions — qualify for inclusion in the competition’s ever-growing list of classics.They have not all been identical. Villarreal’s dissection of Juventus was thrilling in a wholly different way than Real Madrid’s stirring comeback against Paris St.-Germain. Benfica’s chaotic, innocent draw with Ajax had little in common with the grit and sinew of Manchester City’s elimination of Atlético Madrid. That they have not followed a pattern, though, does not mean they are not part of one.This is, now, what the knockout stages of the Champions League do. It has been that way for at least five years, if not longer: Barcelona’s 6-1 defeat of P.S.G. in 2017 is as viable a candidate as any for the era’s starting point. After that, the caution and the fear that had characterized this competition for most of the first decade of this century was jettisoned, replaced by an apparently unbreakable commitment to abandon and audacity and ambition. Games that had once been cautious, cagey, cynical were now, instead, reliably conducted in a sort of dopamine-soaked reverie.It has reached the stage where it is possible to wonder at what point the Champions League will run out of ways to top itself, when we all become numb to its wonder. And yet, somehow, it keeps mining new seams, discovering new heights. It was hard to envisage how the tournament might improve on that victory by Real Madrid over Lionel Messi and Neymar and Kylian Mbappé — but sure enough, a month or so later, there were the very same Real players, spread-eagled on the turf of the Bernabéu, trying to process how a game could contain two comebacks, one following in the wake of another.It may be the recency bias talking, but it felt like even that paled in comparison with what the first of the semifinals produced. Real Madrid was involved again — that does not, it is fair to say, appear to be a coincidence — in a frenetic, inchoate, wholly baffling meeting with Manchester City. Real lost the game four times, and might have lost it many more times over, and yet escaped with both its reputation and its hopes of returning to the final for the first time since 2018 somehow, despite it all, enhanced.The drama doesn’t always feel great in the moment.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is worth at least attempting to consider what lies at the root of this shift. This is, after all, probably the first era in the seven decades or so of the European Cup where the latter stages have been regularly defined not by an inherent tautness, an anxiety over what might be lost, but by a euphoric, wild excitement about what there is to win.In part, that must be attributable to the sheer quality of stars on display, the fact that so many of the very best players in the world are now clustered together at just half a dozen or so clubs, the ones that have become accustomed to reaching this stage of the competition. Likewise, it seems obvious that the margins between these teams are now so fine that their encounters are inevitably volatile. The slightest shift in momentum or belief, the smallest error, the most imperceptible tactical switch can have seismic consequences, one way or the other.The format helps, too. UEFA, led as ever by the booming voices of its leading clubs, has been considering the idea of abolishing home-and-home semifinals in favor of a single, weeklong “festival of soccer,” held in one city, leaving the semifinals dispensed with in only 90 minutes. By UEFA’s standards, this is not a particularly bad idea. Single-leg semifinals increase jeopardy. That is, broadly, to be encouraged. Collecting all the later drama in one city offers a chance to create a carnival-style event, a miniature tournament within a tournament, a defining climax to the European campaign. On the most basic level, it is hard to deny that it would be exciting.There are logistical complications, of course. Only a handful of cities in Europe could play host to four teams at the same time. (So much for spreading the big occasions around.) It seems an idea designed to be transported outside of the continent: That is less than ideal, too. It would most likely lead to the gouging of fans, based on the incontrovertible logic that everything leads to the gouging of fans. And it would, most damaging of all, remove at a stroke the biggest game that any club can host on its own territory.Villarreal kept the result close in Liverpool, which might have been its aim.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut the most compelling argument against change is that, of all the things in soccer that could do with a tweak or an upgrade or a wholesale overhaul, the Champions League semifinals are pretty much at the bottom of the list. The knockout stages of the Champions League have consistently caused jaws to drop and breath to be taken for half a decade. The current structure strikes just the right balance between risk and reward, suffering and salvation, and it is all carried out against a succession of fiercely partisan, deliriously raucous backdrops. That is part of its magic, too.Increasingly, though, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that these spectacles represent the natural culmination and sole benefit of the yawning chasm that separates the game’s elite and everyone else. It seems quite likely that they are a product of soccer’s superclub era.In domestic competition, those teams that are staples of the later rounds of the Champions League are so overwhelmingly superior to most of their opponents that whatever threat they face tends to be fleeting and cursory. Teams overmatched for talent and resources pack their defenses and hang on for dear life; that, after all, is all they can do.That is what happens if the power balance is off in the Champions League, too. Consider this week’s other semifinal, Liverpool’s relatively serene defeat of Villarreal. That, certainly, was not a classic. It felt, instead, far more akin to the matches that account for the vast majority of games between the elite and everyone else in Europe’s five major leagues: one team trying to contain and confound, another trying to pick a way through, the only real question being whether the favorite will take its opportunities when they inevitably emerge.But then how could it be anything else, when one of the teams had been constructed on a comparative shoestring? What other choice did Unai Emery, Villarreal’s coach, have? Command his players to try to match Liverpool and watch them lose badly, all in the name of entertainment? To scold Villarreal for failing to deliver a spectacle is to misunderstand what, precisely, the team was there to do, to forget the unbridgeable gap that lies between what we want a game to be and what the players on the field desire. Villarreal had not traveled to Liverpool to make friends.Smile, Étienne Capoue: You and Villarreal aren’t done yet.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is, of course, relatively rare to have a team like Villarreal in the semifinals, or even the quarters. The latest stages are populated more or less exclusively by teams generally used to taking what might be thought of as the active role in games, rather than the reactive. Real Madrid and Bayern Munich and Liverpool and Manchester City and all the rest — right down to Benfica and Ajax, outside the five major leagues — are used to asking questions, not answering them. The only time their mettle is tested is when they encounter a true peer, a fellow oligarch, and the time they do that most often — when it matters, at least — is later on in the Champions League.The fireworks that follow, with gleeful predictability, are a result of those teams being taken — of them taking each other — out of their comfort zones, finding themselves enduring the sort of heat and light they are used to inflicting. That is what fires the spectacle, what has turned these springtime school nights into compulsive viewing, what has made the knockout rounds of the Champions League soccer’s most reliable forge of wonder.Taking FlightNow playing a starring role in Los Angeles: Angel City F.C.Stephen Brashear/USA Today Sports, via ReutersConsidering it has not yet so much as taken to the field for a competitive game, there is a remarkable sense of anticipation surrounding Angel City F.C., one of two expansion teams in the National Women’s Soccer League this year.In part, of course, that is probably connected to the stardust of the club’s ownership consortium, its slick branding, its considerable presence on social media. Few teams have managed to attract so much attention in so little time, the meaning of which is explored in detail in this excellent piece by my colleague Allison McCann.Mostly, though, the success of Angel City’s launch is testament to the appetite for elite women’s soccer in Southern California. Nearly half a million people watched the broadcast of the team’s preseason encounter with the San Diego Wave a few weeks ago. The team already claims six official supporters’ groups. Some 15,000 season tickets have been sold — not bad going for a team that does not yet have a permanent home.It is not to diminish that achievement to say that, from a European perspective, that raises a fascinating question: How do you come to support a team before it exists?It is an article of faith, here, that fandom cannot be instantaneously generated. Fandom is something that is passed down, handed on, somewhere between a religion and a virus: To support a team is to understand its history and its lore, to identify yourself as a member of a longstanding tribe. It is an expression of solidarity with a geographical place, a social demographic, a pre-existing community.Barcelona’s women, relative newcomers at their century-old club, have a built-in base of support.Joan Monfort/Associated PressThat is why, as the women’s game has grown in Europe, the instinct has been to attach women’s clubs to men’s equivalents, partly in the hope that loyalty might be immediately transferred, partly for financial security and brand recognition, and partly because a team called Manchester Spirit, or equivalent, one that played in red and sky-blue stripes, would alienate an entire city before it had even started.And so it is anathema to think that 15,000 people can have such deep-rooted feelings for something that, until March, was entirely theoretical.That is not to doubt the sincerity of that attachment, to assume it is artificial. Rather, the phenomenon calls into question whether fandom works as those of us who live in Europe assume it does. Perhaps it is a more conscious process than we like to tell ourselves. Perhaps it is a choice, rather than a compulsion. After all, more than a century ago, that is precisely what happened here. Teams were conjured into existence, and people went to watch, and to cheer, and to support.(Bumper) CorrespondenceYou may remember, a few weeks ago — back before I skipped a correspondence section in order to have a few days’ unwarranted vacation — we had an email from a reader named Seamus Malin.“I’m curious if he is the former television commentator,” wrote Douglas Goodwin. “The Seamus Malin to whom I refer was the one and only American — albeit with an Irish accent — voice on television my father, my grandfather and I could tolerate. Often we watched games not featuring him with the volume off. Seamus Malin was a gift, and if he is in contact with you, please pass along my heartfelt thanks.”He was not alone in making that inquiry. Not having watched ESPN in my younger days because, well, we did not have ESPN in Britain then, the name did not immediately leap out at me. But it clearly stirred something in many of you, all of whom wanted to pass their thanks along to Seamus. I’m delighted, as ever, to serve as a conduit.Stop us if you’ve seen this photo before.Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters“Your last column was needlessly equivocal about why the Bundesliga is so boring,” S.K. Gupta feels. “There is only one reason and that is the 50+1 rule. By precluding outside investment, no one can challenge the status quo. If the Bundesliga wants to become a genuine sporting competition with some uncertainty about the end result, they must make their clubs attractive to investors who would invest funds to build a competitive team.”There have been times, I will admit, when I have been tempted to come to the same conclusion. The Bundesliga acting as Bayern Munich’s fief is, I think, a problem for German soccer.But I’m not convinced that breaking the bond between team and fans is the solution. I suspect that particular road leads to the Premier League, where, instead of one rich team, you end up with a cartel of four or five or six, monopolizing not only the title but all of the other prizes, too. German fans cherish their culture. Change is necessary, but not at any cost.David Hunter is closer to my way of thinking. “You didn’t mention the obvious solution: a salary cap,” he wrote. “American football has one, and there are rarely routine winners season after season.” This is true, of course, but there is one giant hitch: a salary cap could only work if it was agreed to by clubs in every league in Europe, rather than just one. And that prospect is, unfortunately, an extremely distant one.Finally, let’s go back a couple of weeks. “If we, the fans, decide what matters in football, it’s worth noting that the viewing public and teams’ owners have very different ideas of the concept of risk,” wrote Alex McMillan. “Fans cherish risk: It’s what makes winning anything worth something. The owners of the wealthiest clubs detest it: It threatens their billion-dollar investment.”This is, to me, the crux of the issue over soccer’s future. The game thrives on risk. It is the running of it and the taking of it that makes it appealing. But, yes, that is diametrically opposed to what owners want and — if we are being kind — what sustainable businesses need. Almost every debate about where the game goes, or what it must do, boils down to that tension. How it plays out will define what shape soccer takes. More

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      With 10 Straight Titles, Has Bayern Munich Broken the Bundesliga?

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      As Germany’s perennial champion extended its decade of dominance, even its own fans were starting to worry that its success is getting a little boring.The first time Gregor Weinreich saw Bayern Munich crowned champion of Germany, he celebrated until sunrise. That was 1994. Three years later, when it happened again, he was so euphoric that he ran onto the field at the club’s old Olympic Stadium, a flare burning and sputtering in his hand. He was not alone. Many hundreds more did the same.Those memories remain sharp and clear and warm a quarter of a century later. His recollections of much more recent triumphs, by contrast, are already faded, fuzzy, indistinct. Weinreich knows Bayern won the title in 2014, and 2015, and 2016, and 2017, but he cannot tell them apart. “If you ask me about those championships, I have almost no memories,” he said.It is not hard to see why Bayern’s success has blurred into a single shapeless mass. On Saturday, the club beat second-place Borussia Dortmund — the last team to deprive it of the championship, back in 2012 — to win the Bundesliga title for the 10th year in a row.Weinreich did not plan to stay awake until dawn to exult in that achievement, to revel in the perpetuation of the sort of uncontested primacy that most fans, in theory, crave. His loyalty to Bayern Munich might be unswerving — he is a former chairman of Club Number 12, a Bayern fans’ group — but he does not particularly see yet another championship as a cause for celebration.He is not alone in that sentiment, either. “More and more Bayern fans are concerned about the lack of competition,” he said. “I don’t know if it is a majority yet. But of course more and more fans doubt the value of a competition that produces the same winner for 10 years.”Bayern Munich had claimed the Bundesliga trophy nine years running. On Saturday, it made it 10 in a row.Kerstin Joensson/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn certain lights, this has been a compelling season for German soccer. Just over a week ago, Eintracht Frankfurt took so many fans to Barcelona for a Europa League game that the Spanish team had to launch an internal investigation into how quite so many of them acquired tickets.Eintracht won that night, booking its place in the semifinals of the Europa League. It might face another Bundesliga representative, RB Leipzig, in the competition’s final next month. S.C. Freiburg, a modest club from the picturesque fringes of the Black Forest, meanwhile, not only remains in unlikely contention to qualify for next season’s Champions League, but has reached the German cup final for the first time in its history.“All of the other fights have been pretty interesting,” said Christian Streich, the Freiburg coach who has come to be seen, in recent years, as a sort of voice of reason in German soccer. “Relegation has been interesting. There are teams going for the Europa League who have not qualified before. It is just that the Bundesliga title race has, unfortunately, not been too exciting.”That is hardly atypical. Bayern has finished each of the last two seasons 13 points ahead of its nearest challengers. Only once in the last decade — in 2019, when Dortmund limited the gap to two points — has Germany witnessed a genuine title race rather than a stately procession. That year apart, no team has finished within 10 points of Bayern since 2012.Dortmund, Bayern’s opponent on Saturday, was the last club to win the title other than Bayern. Wolfgang Rattay/ReutersThat success is, of course, to Bayern’s great credit. It has long been Germany’s biggest, richest, most glamorous team, but for years was held back by its supernova streak. Its combustible blend of powerful players, superstar managers and squabbling executives would self-destruct so reliably that the club became known as F.C. Hollywood. Consumed by infighting, it would every so often allow one of its rivals — Dortmund or Werder Bremen or VfB Stuttgart — to sneak in and claim a championship.Bayern’s relentlessness in the last 10 years has come to be explained, then, by its ability to control its taste for self-immolation. Bayern hire the right coaches, sign the right players, smartly appoint alumni to illustrious positions behind the scenes. It has, as Fernando Carro, the chief executive of Bayer Leverkusen, said, “done excellent work over the years.” Bayern is what happens when big teams are run well.And that, German soccer’s power brokers have long insisted, is a good thing. Executives at the Deutsche Fussball Liga, the Bundesliga’s governing body, have long presented Bayern’s dominance as an advantage for the league. Bayern’s virtue, the theory goes, not only serves as an advertisement for German soccer, but it exerts a pull on the competition itself, helping to drag everyone else along in its wake.Dario Minden, the vice chairman of Unsere Kurve, an umbrella group representing the interests of game-day fans across Germany, does not go along with that analysis. “It’s not that they don’t make mistakes,” he said. “They do. They make big mistakes. It is just that they have such an advantage that they can afford to make mistakes.”In his eyes, there is no great mystery as to why Bayern keeps winning. “The core of the problem is that Bayern’s annual budget is $380 million and Dortmund, the second-richest team, has a budget of $270 million,” Minden said. “Then there are small teams, like Greuther Fürth, operating on $19 million.”That financial advantage means Bayern exists in a different reality from its putative peers. “The simple fact is they don’t need to sell their players,” said Carro, the Leverkusen chief executive. “That means Bayern can keep the core of their team together for years.”Bayern’s wealth means it never has to sell stars like Thomas Müller, above, or Robert Lewandowski, the Bundesliga goals leader in seven of the past nine years.Andreas Gebert/ReutersTo Carro, that is not an insurmountable obstacle. Leverkusen, he said, starts every season believing it can end Bayern’s dominance. “If you don’t go in with that approach, you might as well not compete at all,” he said. “The margins can be incredibly slim. There have been chances for contenders to step in at times, and there will be new ones in the future. Yes, you need to perform on your highest level for a long time, but I am convinced it can be done.”To others, though, the situation is far more perilous. There are many, in Germany, who believe the Bundesliga now stands as a warning to every other major league in Europe about the dangers of what happens when, as Minden put it, the principle of “competitive balance is broken” on some fundamental level.“The Bundesliga is boring,” he said. “That is just common sense.”His opinion is not a niche position within German soccer. There is, indeed, a groundswell of support for the idea that something has to change. The issue is that nobody can quite agree on what that something might be.Weinreich, for example, argues that the status quo is effectively ossified by the fact that, every year, the same teams — led by Bayern — receive vast windfalls for competing in the Champions League, creating what is, in effect, an unbreakable virtuous circle. “The way the money is distributed was designed in such a way that a club that already has a dominant position in its country benefits,” he said.Last year, fans of both Bayern and Dortmund — the two most regular beneficiaries of the current system — suggested a change to the way that money is allocated, so that more of it flows to teams further down the food chain. “As far as I know, this was the first time that fans had demanded their own clubs receive less money,” Weinreich said.Others would go further still. Minden was part of a task force convened by Germany’s soccer authorities that recommended not only far more stringent financial regulations — largely designed to stop teams like Leipzig, Leverkusen and Wolfsburg, who are underwritten by corporate backers — but also a luxury tax, modeled on the sort seen in sports in the United States.Carro, meanwhile, suggested that the only quick fix to Bayern’s hegemony would be to abolish the 50+1 rule that means Germany’s clubs must — with a handful of exceptions — be controlled by their fans. That would, in theory, allow for the sort of outside investment that reshaped the landscape of England’s Premier League, though it is one that has precious little popular support within German soccer. “The league should not strive to improve at any price or by any means,” Streich said.Even Bayern’s most senior executives have expressed an openness to changes that might weaken its grip on the Bundesliga title.Filip Singer/EPA, via ShutterstockMinden went further, suggesting he would find it “disgusting” — a form of “moral bankruptcy” — for German teams to be owned and operated by some of the investors who have bought Premier League teams. “I could not celebrate a goal that had been bought and paid for by a dictator who dismembers journalists,” he said.Besides, to his eyes, abandoning the 50+1 system would exacerbate the problem, rather than solve it. “It would cause huge damage,” he said. “It would still be the big clubs that attracted investment. The only global brand in Germany is Bayern Munich. The money would still come to them, and we would lose our democracy, and our culture.”Even the ultimate beneficiary of the current power balance has not proved entirely resistant to the idea of change. Earlier this year, the D.F.L. revealed that it was discussing — among a suite of options — the merits of appending playoffs to the end of the Bundesliga season.Most of its constituent clubs came out fiercely against the concept. The one that did not was Bayern Munich. “Of course, the league would be more attractive if it had more competition at the top,” said Oliver Kahn, the club’s chief executive. “There are no sacred cows for me. If playoffs help us, then we’ll talk about playoffs. A mode in the Bundesliga with semifinals and finals would mean excitement for the fans.”It would also, of course, diminish Bayern’s advantage, make it more prey to random chance, to a bounce of the ball, to the rub of the green. Perhaps that is what it would take, though, for the club — or at least some of its fans — to feel something again.It just won’t be this year. On Saturday, Bayern won its 10th consecutive championship. “And unless very improbable things happen, maybe there will be 15, or 20,” Weinreich said. Winning a championship is supposed to be unforgettable. The problem comes when you cannot remember one from another. More

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      The End of the Transfer Fee

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

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      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