Chelsea (Soccer Team)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares109 Views

      in Soccer

      Roman Abramovich and the End of Soccer’s Oligarch Era

      by

      Stripped of its Russian benefactor, Chelsea now faces a reckoning. Soccer’s will come next.There were, over the years, three stories that explained how Roman Abramovich washed ashore at Chelsea. Each one, now, serves as a kind of time capsule, a carbon-dated relic from a specific period, capturing in amber each stage of our understanding of what, precisely, soccer has become.The first took root in the immediate aftermath of Abramovich’s takeover of Chelsea. It was light, fuzzy, faintly romantic. Abramovich, the tale went, had been at Old Trafford on the night in 2003 when Manchester United’s fans stood as one to applaud the great Brazilian striker Ronaldo as he swept their team from the Champions League.Abramovich had been so smitten, it was said, that he had decided there and then that he wanted a piece of English soccer. He considered Arsenal and Tottenham and settled on Chelsea, drifting bohemian and glamorous just below the Premier League elite. He had fallen, so hard and so fast, that he bought the club in little more than a weekend.And that, at the time, was almost enough. It was absurd, alien, the idea of this unimaginably wealthy enigma suddenly descending on Chelsea, lavishing hundreds of millions of dollars in transfer fees as if they were nothing. But it was flattering, too, in those early days of Londongrad, of Moscow-on-Thames, as the stuccoed houses of the capital’s finest streets were filling with Russian oligarchs, the country’s finest schools thronging with their children.All of it appealed not just to the laissez-faire approach of Tony Blair’s Britain — come one, come all, as long as you can pay for the price of a ticket — but to the ego of both the country as a whole and the Premier League in particular.Russia’s young plutocrats had more money than Croesus, more money than God, money that could buy anything they wanted. And what they wanted, more than anything, it seemed, was to be British. Abramovich wanted to be British so much that he had bought a soccer team, a plaything in the self-styled greatest league in the world. His money added just a little extra spice, a further dash of glamour, to the Premier League’s endlessly spinning drama; his money served to make the great English soft power project just a little more enticing.Eaton Square in London, known as Red Square for the wealthy Russians who call it home.Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockIt was only a few years later that the second story emerged, in the aftermath of the jailing of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. Perhaps, the idea was floated, Abramovich had not fallen in love with soccer; or, rather, he had not only fallen in love with soccer. Perhaps he did have an ulterior motive. Chelsea, after all, did not just provide him with access to the very highest echelons of British society; it gave him a profile, a fame, too.He did not seem to relish it, particularly — “one day they will forget me,” he had said, in one of the rare interviews he has granted since arriving in England — but he seemed prepared to believe it a price worth paying. Being an oligarch was a dangerous business. Chelsea, perhaps, was Abramovich’s security against the shifting tides in the Kremlin.That was the story we told ourselves as Chelsea went from usurper to establishment, the club that initially inspired the idea of cracking down on arriviste wealth suddenly recast as one of its foremost advocates. It was the story that took root as Chelsea racked up Premier League titles, as it conquered Europe not once, but twice: that soccer was the sanctuary, the ultimate mark of acceptance.It was only, really, when others started to adapt Abramovich’s playbook that the narrative was challenged. First one and then two Premier League teams fell under the aegis of nation states, or of entities so closely aligned to nation states that it can be difficult to tell the difference unless you really, really want to squint. The idea of sportswashing bled into the conversation. The sense that soccer was being used took root. Abramovich’s possible motives were reconsidered.And then, on Thursday, we saw for the first time — plain as day — what the purpose of it all had been, the story in its true, unvarnished form. For two weeks, the British government had dallied over applying sanctions to Abramovich, not necessarily the richest or even the most powerful but still by some distance the most high-profile of all of the caste of oligarchs, the face of oligarchy in the west.Abramovich’s wealth remade Chelsea, and the Premier League.Ben Stansall/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA surprising portion of those two weeks, it turned out, had been spent trying to find a way to make sure that Chelsea could continue to function, roughly as normal, once Abramovich’s other assets were frozen. The players, the staff and the fans — especially the fans — must not suffer, the government said. A few hours earlier, Russian artillery had shelled a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine. But the government was clear: The sanctity of the Premier League could not be sullied.That was the purpose all along, it seemed. Abramovich probably did cherish the profile that owning Chelsea brought him. He certainly seemed to relish the sport. But mainly, he had come to soccer because it entangled him in British society in a way that owning any other business simply would not. None of the other oligarchs who have been sanctioned have been given a bespoke “license” to continue operating one of their businesses. That is not, after all, how sanctions are supposed to work. It had taken us 19 years, and the death of thousands of Ukrainians, to realize that, to see the world as it was.Now, at last, we know why Abramovich was here. Now, at last, we can begin to understand the price we have all paid. It is not only Chelsea that must now face up to an uncertain future: not only the next few months, as the club picks through the thicket of restrictions on its existence — its club store closed, its hotel no longer permitted to sell food and rent rooms, its crowds restricted to season-ticket holders — but beyond, too.The club could yet slide into bankruptcy, sold off to the highest bidder by the government. Or perhaps it will wither, slowly and irrevocably, its players leaving whenever they are permitted, the club unable to sign replacements. Maybe there will be peace, and an easing of the sanctions, and maybe Abramovich can recoup his investment and his loans. No matter how it plays out, there is no going back. The fans do not, and cannot, know what comes next. It is up to them to decide if the memories and the trophies were worth it.Mason Mount and Chelsea beat Norwich City on Thursday in their first game since the sanctions against their owner were announced. Darker days may lie ahead.Chris Radburn/ReutersThe echoes of Abramovich’s swift, abrupt exit, however, will carry out further into the game. His arrival marked the start of what will come, in time, to be thought of as soccer’s oligarch age. It was Abramovich, as noted last week, whose arrival kick-started the inflationary spiral that has fractured European soccer beyond repair, with only a handful of clubs hoarding all of the wealth of the game, ruthlessly stripping its natural resources for their benefit.His departure will prove to be no less epoch-defining. Modern elite soccer is built on growth, the conceit that there is always more money out there. That is why Real Madrid and Juventus and Barcelona want, so fervently, to launch a European Super League, because they are convinced that if only they did not have to deal with UEFA, they would be able to harvest the bottomless riches of all of the broadcasters and sponsors desperate to fill their accounts.It is why UEFA has been so determined to expand the Champions League, so convinced that it can find the money to satiate the boundless greed of the great and the good. All of it is based not only on the idea that the golden goose will keep laying, but the faith that there are a hundred, a thousand more golden geese out there, a whole flock of them.If that was ever true, it is not now. UEFA will find another sponsor for the Champions League to replace Gazprom, but it will not find one that is quite so generous. There is, after all, a premium to be paid for exercising soft power. Exponential growth is rather more challenging when one of the prime drivers of it has closed down.So, too, the clubs face a reckoning. Not only the teams owned by princelings and nation states and politicians, but those that are not. It is not just the promise of soaring television rights deals that have drawn the “acceptable” investors into soccer, the private equity groups and the hedge funds and the Wall Street speculators. They have no more fallen in love with the game than Abramovich.All of them have bought in to get out, at some point in the future, when they have made their clubs as profitable as possible, when the prospect of a lucrative return is at hand. And yet, all of a sudden, they find their list of potential buyers limited. Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia: They all have their clubs now. The great gushing of cash from China ended years ago, as Inter Milan might attest. Now Russian money is out of the question, too.Chelsea, owned by Russian money, faces Newcastle, owned by Saudi money, on Sunday.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere is no shortage of the rich and the powerful and the speculative, of course, even with those markets closed up and sealed off. But those that remain are a different type of buyer: They are other private equity firms, other hedge funds, other Wall Street and Silicon Valley types. They are, for the most part, the ones who want to make a profit. They do not want to be the ones who buy at the peak of the market. They did not make their money by being the sucker.That might seem, perhaps, a little indistinct, a touch theoretical, but it has real consequences. It means reassessing how much profit might be made, and how large the payout might be. That, in turn, means altering the equation of how much it is worth putting in. The change will not be immediate, overnight, dramatic. But it will be a change nonetheless.That will be Abramovich’s ultimate legacy, the lasting impact of the era he began on what seemed to be a whim and he ended, in the space of a couple of weeks, in the middle of a war. Soccer’s age of the oligarch is over. This time, there can be no excuse for failing to understand what the game has become. On that, we have clarity. Where it goes from here remains shrouded in doubt.CorrespondenceRyan Christopher Jones for The New York TimesWe would be here for a long time if I listed every single Brooklynite who wrote in, last week, to inform me that there are, as it happens, several cricket grounds in Brooklyn. There are so many, in fact, that my impression now is that there is little but cricket grounds in Brooklyn, and so if anything it perhaps needs to diversify its sporting offerings a little.The exact number of cricket grounds in Brooklyn remains the subject of fevered debate. Fritz Favorule pitched five, with the mention of a Brooklyn Cricket League, too, while Laurence Bachmann made mention of “at least half a dozen that I know of,” rather suggesting the real number could be in the thousands.Credit to Laurence, too, for being the only correspondent willing to take on the thornier side of that equation. “There are thousands of bakeries,” he added. That may be, Laurence, but do any of them do a steak slice? (Admittedly, he vouches for their sausage rolls, which is a good start.)Sorry, regardless, for causing such offense in what is, without question, one of the top five New York boroughs. If I’m honest, I don’t think Brooklyn particularly needs to worry about competition from Headingley.On a less fractious note, thank you to Felipe Gaete for offering a Chilean perspective on Bielsa. It was Chile, you will remember, that Bielsa transformed for a few, wondrous years into the foremost power in South American soccer. “I’ve thought a lot about why he is so loved in a field in which silverware is all that matters,” Felipe wrote.“I think he holds a good deal of the values that many of us know are right, but can’t afford to apply: He gives back a goal in the name of fair play. He is also an incarnation of what the majority of fans enjoy the most: hope. The joy of winning is usually very short compared with the sense of what it might become.”That is a wonderful, and accurate, sentiment, Felipe, so it seems fitting to leave you with the last word. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Soccer

      Roman Abramovich, Owner of Chelsea FC, Has Assets Frozen By Britain

      by

      The Premier League club will be allowed to continue operating, but it cannot sell tickets or merchandise and is blocked from buying or selling players.LONDON — For Chelsea F.C.’s players and coaches, the first snippets of information arrived in the text messages and news alerts that pinged their cellphones as they made their way to a private terminal at London’s Gatwick Airport on Thursday morning.The British government had frozen the assets of their team’s Russian owner, Roman Abramovich, as part of a wider set of sanctions announced against a group of Russian oligarchs. The action, part of the government’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, was designed to punish a handful of individuals whose businesses, wealth and connections are closely associated with the Kremlin. Abramovich, the British government said, has enjoyed a “close relationship” with Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, for decades.The order applied to all of Abramovich’s businesses, properties and holdings, but its most consequential — and most high-profile — effect hit Chelsea, the reigning European soccer champion, which was at that very moment beginning its journey to a Thursday night Premier League match at Norwich City.News reports and government statements slowly filled in some of the gaps: Abramovich’s plans to sell the team were now untenable, and on hold; the club was forbidden from selling tickets or merchandise, lest any of the money feed back to its owner; and the team was prohibited — for the moment — from acquiring or selling players in soccer’s multibillion-dollar trading market.And hour by nervous hour, one more thing became clear: Chelsea, one of Europe’s leading teams and a contender for another Champions League title this season, was suddenly facing a worrisome future marked by austerity, uncertainty and decay.Even as it announced its actions against Abramovich and six other Russian oligarchs, the government said it had taken steps to ensure Chelsea would be able to continue its operations and complete its season. To protect the club’s interests, the government said, it had issued Chelsea a license allowing it to continue its soccer-related activities.The license, which the government said would be under “constant review,” will ensure that the team’s players and staff will continue to be paid; that fans holding season tickets can continue to attend games; and that the integrity of the Premier League, which is considered an important cultural asset and one of Britain’s most high-profile exports, will not be affected.But the sanctions will put a stranglehold on Chelsea’s spending and seriously undermine its ability to operate at the levels it has for the past two decades.By Thursday, the effort to ensure that no money flows to Abramovich was playing out in ways large and small. The telecommunications company Three suspended its jersey sponsorship — a lucrative revenue stream — and asked that its logo be removed from Chelsea’s uniforms and its stadium.At a club-owned hotel near the team’s Stamford Bridge stadium, the front desk stopped booking rooms and the restaurant shut down food and beverage service. Around the corner, at the official Chelsea team store, business continued as usual until security officials abruptly closed the shop. Shoppers, who had been filling baskets with club merchandise, were told to put everything back and leave.Moments later, signs were taped to the locked entrances. “Due to the latest government announcement this store will be closed today until further notice,” they read.Security guards closed Chelsea’s team store and blocked entrances to its stadium on Thursday.Hannah Mckay/ReutersAn uncertain future awaits, with the sanctions affecting everything from the money Chelsea spends on travel to how it dispenses the tens of millions of dollars it receives from television broadcasters.Chelsea acknowledged its new reality in a statement, but suggested it intended to immediately enter into discussions with the government about the scope of the license the team had been granted. “This will include,” the team said, “seeking permission for the license to be amended in order to allow the club to operate as normal as possible.”At the club on Thursday morning, staff members were struggling to come to terms with what the government’s actions would mean for them, their jobs and the team. Many club officials, including Chelsea’s coach, Thomas Tuchel, a German, and Abramovich’s chief lieutenant, the club director Marina Granovskaia, were still trying to understand what they could and could not do.One major deal is off the table: The freezing of Abramovich’s assets makes it impossible — at least in the short term — for him to follow through on his announced plans to sell Chelsea. Under the new arrangement, the British government will have oversight of that process. And while it said it would not necessarily block a sale, the effect would be to heavily diminish any proposed sale price, and the proceeds “could not go to the sanctioned individual while he is subject to sanctions” — leaving Abramovich little incentive to move forward.Whatever happens next, nothing will be the same at Chelsea. Since Abramovich arrived as a little-known Russian businessman in 2003, he has lavished more money on buying talent than almost any other club owner in soccer history, with Chelsea’s constant flow of players and coaches in and out of the club being a hallmark of his years in charge. In the minutes after the sanctions were announced, though, it quickly became apparent that Chelsea would cease to be a player in the multibillion-dollar player trading market, unable to acquire new talent, to sell any of its current players and, without Abramovich’s regular infusions of his personal fortune, to continue to pay the huge salaries of the players it currently employs.The American Christian Pulisic and other Chelsea players now face an uncertain future.Toby Melville/ReutersFor Chelsea fans, too, there was confusion about how and when they could attend games. While season tickets will remain valid, any new sales are prohibited, including to away matches and, crucially, any future Champions League games should the team advance to the later rounds of the competition. Chelsea’s next Champions League game, at the French champion Lille, is set for Wednesday; a berth in the quarterfinals is at stake.That trip and any future travel outside London will now be carefully scrutinized after the government announced a per-game limit of 20,000 pounds (about $26,000) in travel expenses. Those penalties might have been among the discussion points as Chelsea’s players and staff members traveled to the private terminal at Gatwick Airport, south of London, to board a chartered jet for the short flight to Norwich.By then, Tuchel’s phone was buzzing. Tuchel, the coach who last week responded angrily to a stream of questions about Abramovich and Ukraine at a news conference, probably knew little more than those who were peppering him with questions.On Thursday, he would have been trying to focus on the trip to Norwich City, where his team won, 3-1, and on the one that will follow on Sunday, Chelsea’s first home game since its world turned upside down.At that game, perhaps for the final time in months, Chelsea will play in front of a full house. A sign attached to the entrance of Stamford Bridge said as much on Thursday: The home game against Newcastle United is sold out. More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Soccer

      How a Russian Oligarch Is (Probably) Overvaluing Chelsea

      by

      A Russian Oligarch’s Very Highly Valued TeamIn announcing his sale, Abramovich said he would not ask the club to repay that debt, the equivalent of $2 billion.With loans forgiven, a quick auction will now take place. A successful buyer would be acquiring a star-laden club that will require regular cash infusions to keep up with the world’s top teams.Any new owner will also face a costly rebuilding project to upgrade the creaking Stamford Bridge stadium. In 2018, Abramovich shelved a planned $1.3 billion rebuild amid difficulties in renewing his British business visa. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Soccer

      Chelsea Is for Sale as Pressure on Roman Abramovich Mounts

      by

      As British lawmakers take aim at wealthy Russians, Roman Abramovich confirmed he was seeking to sell the Premier League team he has owned since 2003.LONDON — Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch whose vast fortune transformed Chelsea into a global soccer powerhouse, confirmed Wednesday that he is actively seeking to sell the team. He has set a deadline of Friday for interested parties to submit “indicative offers” for the club he has owned for almost two decades, and is said to be seeking at least $2.5 billion for the club.Only days ago, Abramovich, 55, had announced his intention to transfer the “stewardship and care” of Chelsea to members of its charitable foundation. The move — in which he notably did not suggest he would surrender ownership of Chelsea — was seemingly designed to distance the club from the impact of any possible sanctions levied by the British government against him as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.Britain this week proposed new legislation targeting wealthy Russians like Abramovich, many of whom amassed their fortunes through cronyism or ties to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, and then shielded it overseas behind shell companies and opaque investment deals.But on Wednesday, in confirming his decision to sell the team, Abramovich framed the sale as a painful and personal sacrifice, but one from which he would not profit. Abramovich said he would not seek the repayment of the roughly $2 billion of his personal fortune he had invested in Chelsea over the two decades he had owned it, and also said he had instructed his representatives to set up a charitable foundation to receive the net proceeds of the sale “for the benefit of all victims of the war in Ukraine.”The comments about Ukraine were his strongest yet addressing the impact of Russia’s invasion, and its effects on its neighbor and its residents. His words, however, stopped short of condemning President Putin, or Russia, for launching military action.“Please know that this has been an incredibly difficult decision to make, and it pains me to part with the club in this manner,” Abramovich said. “However, I do believe this is in the best interest of the club.”Though Abramovich had suggested in a rare public statement on Saturday that the Chelsea foundation trustees were best placed to “look after the interests of the club, players, staff and fans,” he has in recent days tasked the Raine Group, a New York advisory firm, with identifying a new owner for the team. Prospective investors have been informed they must have prepared an outline of their bid by the end of this week.Their number includes Hansjörg Wyss, a Swiss billionaire noted for his support for progressive causes, who told the Swiss newspaper Blick that he was among a group of four people to have “received an offer to buy Chelsea” on Tuesday. Wyss insisted that he would not buy the club alone, and would prefer to be a part of a consortium of “six or seven investors.”“Abramovich is trying to sell all his villas in England; he also wants to get rid of Chelsea quickly,” Wyss told Blick. “Abramovich is currently asking far too much. You know, Chelsea owe him £2 billion. But Chelsea has no money. As of today, we don’t know the exact selling price.”Abramovich’s wealth has produced five Premier League titles, two Champions League crowns and a talent-rich roster to rival any club in the world.David Klein/ReutersAnother contender, Todd Boehly, a billionaire investor and a part-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, reportedly offered Abramovich $2.9 billion for Chelsea in 2019. The current price is believed to be around $2.5 billion, though there is speculation that it will fall lower still if Abramovich’s urgency to part with the team grows.Chelsea had been directing interested parties toward Raine whenever groups attracted by the glamour of owning the London team made contact. But until this week, Abramovich had shown little appetite for selling.That has changed with notable speed. Abramovich has been named on several occasions as a suitable target for sanctions in Britain’s parliament since Putin commanded Russian forces to attack Ukraine last week.Chris Bryant, a lawmaker for the opposition Labour party, this week claimed that Abramovich was hastily trying to sell off his British property portfolio in anticipation of his assets being frozen, and asked if he should be allowed to continue owning a soccer team. On Wednesday, Keir Starmer, the Labour party leader, directly asked the prime minister, Boris Johnson, why Abramovich had not yet been targeted.Abramovich has always claimed, often with the support of lawyers, that he has no connection to Putin and nothing to do with politics. On Monday, his private representative was reported to have suggested — without evidence — that he had been asked to try to negotiate a peace settlement in Ukraine. The comments came only days after officials close to Abramovich suggested the billionaire had no role in politics or close ties to Putin.Abramovich has owned Chelsea since 2003, having bought the team seemingly on a whim — negotiations, the story went, took place over a single weekend — and for reasons that have remained opaque. He had previously considered moves for Arsenal, Tottenham and Fulham, as well as examining the possibility of buying teams in Spain and Italy, but why he settled on soccer at all has never been adequately explained. Abramovich does not give interviews.He arrived at Chelsea when it was at a comparatively low ebb, struggling to qualify for the Champions League and without a domestic championship in half a century. But the infusion of his personal fortune, amassed through his stake in the Russian oil giant Sibneft and his interests in the country’s aluminum industry, changed that almost immediately.Abramovich bankrolled some of the most lavish spending in soccer history, attracting a rotating cast of stars to Stamford Bridge and kick-starting a decades-long inflationary spiral that only a handful of other clubs have been able to match. Under his ownership, Chelsea has won five Premier League titles, two Champions League crowns — most recently last May — and, only a few weeks ago, the Club World Cup.Roman Abramovich turned up in Abu Dhabi in February to watch Chelsea win the Club World Cup.Hassan Ammar/Associated PressHe was on the field last May in Portugal, too, after Chelsea won the Champions League.Pool photo by Michael Steele/EPA, via ShutterstockAbramovich, who has rarely seen his team in England over the last few years after withdrawing his application for a British visa in 2018, joined his players on the field in Abu Dhabi to celebrate their most recent trophy, just as he had when it won the European title in Portugal last May.The team’s most recent accounts provided a clear illustration of how Abramovich’s wealth has been able to subsidize huge losses in order to keep the team successful: Chelsea lost more than $200 million on its way to that second Champions League title last season. Abramovich is estimated to have invested something in the region of $2 billion in the club — interest-free loans worth about 10 times the price he paid for the team — since acquiring it in 2003.His announcement on Saturday that he intended to hand the “care” of Chelsea to the trustees of its charitable arm indicated that he was sufficiently worried by the prospect of the freezing of his assets in Britain to try to limit its impact on the club. The move was so surprising to those trustees that several are believed to have expressed their concerns to the Charity Commission, Britain’s charity regulator, which confirmed that it had opened a “serious incident report” in the aftermath of Abramovich’s unilateral announcement. Staff members are similarly bewildered at the pace of events.Russia-Ukraine War: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 4A new diplomatic push. More

    • 63 Shares169 Views

      in Soccer

      Soccer’s Problem With Silver Medals

      by

      It was notable when Spain’s players kept their runner-up awards after losing a final. It shouldn’t be.In all the photographs, there is one constant. In some of the images, Spain’s players stare at the ground, disconsolate, chewing over their loss to France in the final of the Nations League. In others, they give interviews, lead-faced and faintly forlorn. In one, Luis Enrique, their coach, offers respectful applause for his team’s conquerors.But in all of them, Spain’s players have thin, navy blue ribbons draped around their necks. Each of the players had walked to the raised platform hastily constructed on the field after Sunday’s final at San Siro in Milan. Each of them had taken the medal offered to him. And each of them had carefully placed it around his neck.That should not, of course, be especially noteworthy. In most sports, the athlete or the team that finishes second sees its silver medal as a source of pride. Occasionally, it might be with eyes glazed with tears. Sometimes, it is through gritted teeth. Often, it is with a lingering air of regret, a sense of what might have been. And it always takes the pain a little while to subside. Second — close, but no cigar — can hurt most of all.Ferran Torres and Spain lost to France in Milan, 2-1.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut only in soccer are silver medals treated as if they burn. Players and coaches frequently give the impression that they would rather not touch them at all. Last summer, the majority of England’s players made a point of refusing to wear the medals they had earned for finishing second in the European Championship.A few weeks earlier, most of their counterparts at both Manchester City and Manchester United had conspicuously refused to don the tokens they had received after losing the Champions League and Europa League finals. José Mourinho has made a habit of disposing of any reminder he might have that he ever lost a major final.This is, at a rough guess, a phenomenon that manifests very rarely outside soccer. The beaten finalist at a tennis major does not make a point, in front of the watching world, of handing whatever prize he or she has been awarded to a fan. Olympians do not regularly refuse to stand on the podium without their silver or bronze medals around their necks, nor do they hurl them into the crowd on their way out of the stadium/pool/velodrome/whatever the place where the horse disco takes place is called.In fact, the scorn for silver medals is not even a feature of all soccer. In 2019, the Netherlands players who had just lost the Women’s World Cup final to the United States kept their medals. Many emerged from their locker room to speak to the news media, eyes still a little raw, with the bittersweet spoils of their wondrous, uplifting summer draped around their necks.Even for teams used to winning it all, bronze can feel better than nothing.Andre Penner/Associated PressMen’s soccer, though, seems to have embraced the idea that second is just first last and turned it into a dogma. Perhaps that is because of the message it sends: The act itself is, without question, somewhat performative, a little piece of theater, a flourish for the fans to demonstrate that nothing less than total victory will do.Or perhaps it is because of the absolutism that drives so many of the defining characters in the men’s game. Plenty of the sport’s most successful managers have made a point of telling their players that they should not savor even their winners’ medals. Alex Ferguson, like Brian Clough and Bill Shankly before him, used to tell his squads that they should forget winning a league or a cup almost immediately, that it was to serve only as a springboard for further success. Soccer has long been consumed by a desire for dominion so intense that it is, when looked at in the cold light of day, just a little deranged.And as much as Mourinho is too often, too easily blamed for all of modern soccer’s ills, it would not be desperately difficult to trace a line from some of his more public rejections of anything short of gold to a wider embrace of the practice, to believe that once he had made it clear that silver was not acceptable to him, it made it almost inevitable that others would follow. A coach who cherished second, after all, would seem somehow callow in comparison.For José Mourinho, only finishing first will do.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockWhy it came about, though, is perhaps less significant than what it implies.It is curious how unrelated strands of loose narrative can coalesce. Last week, there was a minor commotion over Norwich City, the team rooted to the foot of the Premier League. A former player had wondered if Norwich added a vast amount to the league, what with the club’s insistence on being stable and sensible and cautious, all traits that act as synonyms for “boring” in the hyperbolic soap opera of England’s top flight. A couple of days later, Newcastle was bought by Saudi Arabia. Oh, no, sorry: by the sovereign investment fund of Saudi Arabia. The two are not linked. No, really.Newcastle’s fans greeted the club’s new owners as its saviors. Their appeal lay not only in detaching Mike Ashley, the hated former proprietor, from the club, but in the promise of what the new owners might do: Lavish money on the team, propel it toward the summit of the Premier League, fulfill all of the ambitions and the dreams of the long-suffering — for a given value of suffering — fan base.The juxtaposition of the two was curious. It was Newcastle, a team now owned for nonsporting purposes by what is most definitely not the financial arm of a nation state, that was portrayed as living some sort of fantasy. It was Norwich, a team which is run with a long-term plan, a clear vision and no little affection, that was having to justify its existence in the Premier League.These are, of course, the wrong way around. Norwich should be held up as the aspirational model — in conception, if not in results — rather than Newcastle. But then this is a sport that disdains silver medals. It is not an industry, an ecosystem, that is adept at gauging comparative success, at understanding that there is not only one winner, and lots and lots of losers, but that lots of teams can win or lose depending on their own horizons. It is not a place that fully grasps the idea that the journey matters — give or take — as much as the destination.It may well have been easier for Spain to take some small pleasure in the mementos the team was handed in Milan because of the circumstances in which they had been attained: in the final of the Nations League, a tournament that is just a step above an exhibition tournament. All athletes are competitive, but it is unlikely that Luis Enrique and his squad were experiencing the same sort of sorrow as England’s players at Wembley this summer.But even so, perhaps it hints at a subtle shift in the landscape, away from the brutal, zero-sum belief that victory can take only one form and that everything else is therefore necessarily failure, abject and shameful. Sometimes, coming in second is an achievement in itself. Grasping that, you sense, might make the sport just a little healthier, just a little happier, as a whole.Memory Plays Tricks on YouLionel Messi was, perhaps, trying to save his friend’s feelings. He has known Sergio Agüero for years, and so, when Agüero asked why he had never won a Ballon d’Or, Messi picked his path delicately. He did not, for example, say, “You have not won it because I exist, and so does Cristiano Ronaldo.” Instead, he was a little more diplomatic. You win the Ballon d’Or if you win the Champions League, Messi told Agüero, according to the latter. His failure was linked to that of his team.By Messi’s logic — and Messi knows a thing or two about winning the Ballon d’Or — that leaves only one winner this year. Four members of last season’s Chelsea team have been nominated, but only one of them won the European Championship, too. This should, by extension, be Jorginho’s year. (The women’s honor could go to any of the five nominees from the all-conquering Barcelona team that won the Champions League, but Alexia Putellas, as captain, seems the consensus pick.)It is interesting to consider how that will look in hindsight. A particular rabbit hole opened up on Twitter this week in which fans debated the merits of the 2003 winner of the award: Juventus midfielder Pavel Nedved. (Quite what spawns these hellmouths of unreason, and quite what draws you in, remains a mystery to me, but no matter.) Nedved was, it was decreed, undeserving, particularly in a year in which Thierry Henry had scored 32 goals in 56 games for Arsenal.Pavel Nedved, in his prime, was a worthy winner.Carlo Ferraro/European Pressphoto AgencyThat parallel is irrelevant, of course — Nedved was a midfielder, not a forward, so was not really employed to match Henry’s numbers — and it leaves out the context: Nedved pulled Juventus to the Champions League final and won Serie A. That season, Henry’s brilliance did not earn Arsenal a trophy.It was not a shock, at the time, that Henry had not won it; if there was any player who had a greater claim than Nedved — regarded as one of the finest players of his generation — it was Andriy Shevchenko, the A.C. Milan striker who scored the winning penalty to claim the Champions League.That it seems unusual now is, of course, testament to the cultural primacy of the Premier League; to Henry’s more enduring greatness, in comparison to Nedved’s; and, perhaps, to the nature of how we remember. Assessing individual contributions to team sports can be difficult — where Messi and Ronaldo are not involved, certainly — and so what lasts, as time passes and memories fade, are the numbers. And yet the numbers, as Agüero and Henry can testify, do not tell the whole story.Long Road, Short JourneyThe picture, now, is starting to drift into focus. We have the first two confirmed qualifiers for next year’s World Cup; predictable but sincere congratulations to Germany, which always qualifies easily, and a respectful raise of the eyebrow to a Denmark team that, it would appear, is now invincible. The rest of the field, meanwhile, is starting to take shape.In Asia, it is hard to imagine that Saudi Arabia — four games, four wins — will not qualify. In South America, Brazil and Argentina can almost be taken as a given, but the identity of the two countries that will join them as direct qualifiers is much more intriguing. In North America, just a glimmer of a gap has opened up between Mexico, the United States and Canada and everyone else.In Europe, there is a confected air to the fretting over whether France, Belgium and England will not qualify — they all will; stop worrying — but several of the other favorites face moderately stressful Novembers: Portugal, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands are by no means guaranteed automatic slots.That leaves Africa — where the structure of qualifying makes the whole process unsatisfactorily arbitrary, but undeniably dramatic — and Oceania, where barely more than a year out from the tournament, qualifying has not even started.It has already been pushed back twice because of the logistical challenges presented by the coronavirus pandemic; the latest plan is to stage a qualifying tournament in Qatar next spring, though what format that will take — and whether clubs will release players to compete in it — has yet to be settled.New Zealand, the regional heavyweight, had not played a game in almost two years before a pair of friendly victories against Bahrain and Curaçao in this international window. Quite how Danny Hay, the country’s coach, is supposed to forge a team capable not only of seeing off the rest of Oceania but then winning a playoff against a team from another confederation, scheduled for June next year, is not entirely clear. Hay has not lost hope. The last window’s friendlies, he said, were the “start of the road to the World Cup” for his team. Given the circumstances, it is hard to believe that is a road that will end in Qatar.CorrespondenceThe traditional mix of the serious and the trivial in the emails this week, as this newsletter is careful to curate its shades of light and dark. We had dozens of communiqués regarding Newcastle United’s new ownership, including one from Bob Lovinger, who wondered if “England is worse than other countries when it comes to the characters bankrolling its sports teams?”Worse — as it applies to the moral worth of ownership groups — is a value judgment, and not one that it would be fair to make. But in one sense, the word most definitely applies to England: The Premier League, in particular, has always made it clear that it is “ownership neutral,” and has taken great pride in it.The league basically does not care who invests in its clubs, as long as they haven’t committed any particularly obvious recent crimes and have pockets bulging with money. That does not strike me as the best policy if you are even vaguely concerned about safeguarding what are — and what we are told are — precious social institutions.In Newcastle, any new owner was good enough. A deep-pocketed one was better.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesK.L. enticed me, meanwhile, with an articulate and perceptive opening statement on the “vital idea that sport is less about actually winning than creating an infrastructure that allows hope to flourish, no matter how improbable silverware might be. You may be creating a fiction, but if it is a fiction your fans can believe in, you’ve done your job.”But K.L. lost me, just a touch, with the assertion that followed, regarding Newcastle’s abrogation of ambition under Mike Ashley. “Finishing 15th in the Premier League is objectively more important than winning England’s domestic cups, if the alternative to not finishing 15th is getting relegated.”That is indisputable, of course, and it was very much the logic adopted by Ashley, but it has always struck me as a false parallel. There is no conclusive proof, as far as I am aware, of teams that take the domestic cups seriously being relegated more frequently. There is not even a compelling body of proof that it necessarily makes the difference between finishing 15th and 16th.And an intriguing point from Paul Bauer: “I suspect the Premier League was going to find a way around the controversy of Saudi ownership, thinking if they did not allow it, the Saudis would likely go to other leagues with their money.”This idea has been raised elsewhere, not least by one of the lawyers involved with the takeover, but I’m not sure it is reflective of how the Premier League thinks. The major leagues in the United States seem — at least from the outside — to think strategically and collectively much more naturally, and much more frequently, than the major soccer leagues of Europe. Plenty of the Premier League’s members have an unfortunate tendency to conflate the best interests of the league and their own best interests.That was the serious stuff; the trivial comes in the form of the many enquiries as to the correct pronunciation of my name. It’s Roar-Ee — spelling it that way might actually be better — but just get as close as you can.There were a couple of suggestions that perhaps this was not the best parallel — my name is apparently reasonably common, though I’m not sure children in Leeds in the 1980s saw it that way — and that using it was indicative of my own privilege. First off: It wasn’t necessarily a serious example. But, having thought about it, I’m not sure I buy the idea of privilege on this one.Some names are hard for some people to say. That is universal; it cuts across creed and color and nationality and everything else. And I would have thought that accepting that is also universal. We should all make an effort, of course; I take great pride in putting my accents in the right places. But we should also make an effort to understand if people sometimes fall short.The final word, this week, goes to Joe Bellavance. “I was prepared to fall out of my chair, laughing, when you signed off as ‘Greg,’” he wrote, reminding us all of another universal truth: that the best jokes are the ones you forget to make. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Soccer

      Marcos Alonso, Chelsea and the Genius of Thomas Tuchel

      by

      There is no such thing as a good or a bad player, only one in the right (or wrong) system.Things got so bad, at one point, that even Marcos Alonso’s father was telling him to go. His fallout with his coach at Chelsea, Frank Lampard, had been spectacular and it had been total. Alonso had been substituted at halftime during a game at West Bromwich Albion, but instead of dutifully filing out to support his teammates, he had instead skulked off to wait on the team bus, stewing at the injustice of it all.When Lampard found out, he was furious. First, he rebuked Alonso for his disloyalty, his petulance, in front of his teammates, a public shaming that often functions as soccer’s nuclear option, and then he ostracized him entirely from his team. For four months, Alonso did not play so much as a minute of soccer.His father — also Marcos Alonso — had been a professional, too, playing for Atlético Madrid and Barcelona. His grandfather — you can probably guess his name — spent eight years at Real Madrid. Both, Alonso’s father told him, would have been tempted to “tell the manager where to go,” and then demand the club’s owner allow them to leave.It was not the first time that Alonso’s Chelsea career seemed to be stalling. He had thrived under Antonio Conte — the coach who signed him, for $32 million, in 2016 — for two seasons, and started well under his replacement, Maurizio Sarri. But then, as the club’s form dipped, by his own admission, so did Alonso’s. Sarri had asked him for “something different,” and he had found it hard to adapt. After a spell struggling with injury, he found it hard to regain his place in the team.Alonso had persevered through that, though, and he determined to ignore his father’s advice and do the same after the collapse of his relationship with Lampard. It paid off: In January, Lampard was fired. Alonso was restored to the substitutes’ bench for Thomas Tuchel’s first game as his successor. He returned to the field a few days later, scoring Chelsea’s second goal in a win against Burnley.It was only at the start of the current season, though, that he has re-emerged as a regular presence. Ben Chilwell, his rival for the left-sided role in Tuchel’s team, returned late from his summer exertions with England; it is only in the last week or so that he has been considered fit enough for selection.Tuchel has figured out that Alonso is not a left back, nor is he a left wing. As a left wing-back, though, with cover behind him and options ahead, he is perfect.Hannah Mckay/ReutersA year or so after it seemed his Chelsea career was over, Alonso has thrived in Chilwell’s absence. He was, arguably, Chelsea’s best player in its victory against Tottenham last week. At the start of the month, he had stood out as Tuchel’s side neutralized Liverpool — despite playing the entire second half at a disadvantage — at Anfield.His skill set seems uniquely suited to the exigencies of Tuchel’s system. His height bolsters Chelsea’s back line in defense; his diesel stamina allows him to cover huge tracts of turf over considerable periods of time; his attacking instincts make him a valuable offensive outlet; and his pinpoint delivery makes him a key supply line for Romelu Lukaku.For all his ability, though, Alonso is not an easy player to admire. In 2011, he was at the wheel of a car which crashed into a wall in Madrid while traveling at more than twice the speed limit in wet conditions; a young woman was killed. Alonso’s blood alcohol level was over the legal limit. Five years later, he was told that he would not be sentenced to prison for involuntary manslaughter, but fined $71,000 and banned from driving for three years, all of which had already been served.This week, he revealed that he had decided that he would stop kneeling in protest of discrimination, preferring instead to point to the officially sanctioned “No Room For Racism” badge that adorns every Premier League jersey.That is his right, of course, and Alonso has made it plain that he is “fully against racism” and has no desire to make a political statement. But still, it is not what you might call a great look: a white player’s deciding that taking the knee is “losing a bit of strength,” and taking unilateral action without consulting any of his Black teammates, several of whom have been the victims of racist abuse.It is worth considering Alonso’s case, though, purely as a sporting phenomenon. He is a relative rarity in modern soccer, in that he is a highly tuned positional specialist in an era when versatility — for the vast majority — is a professional necessity. It is not just that Alonso plays in one position, it is that he appears to succeed only in one interpretation of one position.He is not especially effective as a traditional left back — to an outsider’s eye, he lacks the acceleration to recover — and he is not quite creative enough to play as a left wing. As a left wing-back, though, a blending of the two roles, with cover behind him and options ahead, he is perfect.Alonso’s attacking instincts make him a valuable offensive outlet, and his pinpoint delivery makes him a key supply line for Romelu Lukaku.David Klein/ReutersMore than that, he is a compelling example of a truth that bears repeating: Whether he looks a key cog in Chelsea’s success or a spare part depends not on his basic level of ability — which, within reason, we can assume to have remained essentially consistent — but on the identity and nature of his coach. Under Conte and Tuchel, he has thrived. Under Sarri and Lampard, he drifted. There is, as ever, no such thing as a good or a bad player, only one in the right or wrong system.But most of all, he stands as testament to the work Tuchel has done at Chelsea. It is startling to think that it is only eight months since Alonso was in purdah under Lampard and Chelsea was running the risk of missing out on qualifying for the Champions League.Tuchel has transformed the team at a speed that should not, really, be possible, a speed that even he might have thought was a little too ambitious. When he arrived, he spoke of closing the gap on Manchester City and Liverpool within a season. He did it, instead, almost instantaneously: Chelsea goes into Saturday’s meeting with Pep Guardiola’s team as champion of Europe and City’s apparent equal, if not superior, in the Premier League, too.What makes it all the more impressive is that Tuchel has done it without any great overhaul of his squad. Chelsea added Lukaku and Saúl Ñiguez to its ranks this summer, of course, but mostly Tuchel has simply repurposed the tools he has inherited, even the peculiar, esoteric ones, like Alonso.His is not so much a triumph of making square pegs fit in round holes, but of changing the location of the holes so that the dodecahedrons can work, too, taking all of the raw materials he was handled — all of the players who might have thought their time was up, who might have been written off, who might have gone another way — and turned them into a purring, smooth-running machine.The criteria a player and a manager are subject to are not the same; more than that, they are diametrically opposed. A player can only thrive in a system suited to their abilities. The truest test of a manager, though, is to find that system, regardless of the players.If You Build It, They Will Come. Sometimes.The crowd wasn’t particularly thin for Manchester City’s draw with Southampton last week, but it was empty enough to bother Pep Guardiola. Andrew Yates/EPA, via ShutterstockThere was, as there was always going to be, just a little mirth at the end of Manchester City’s goal-less draw with Southampton last week. Only a few days earlier, Pep Guardiola had been busy scolding the club’s fans for not coming in sufficient numbers to City’s Champions League game with RB Leipzig; this was not, as the scoffing went, the best way to persuade them to heed his call.There is not a vast amount to be gained from lingering on the details of that curious little spat — Guardiola seemed to complain that the stadium wasn’t full; a representative of City’s fans suggested that maybe not everyone can afford to pay eye-watering ticket prices to watch soccer once a week; Guardiola said he had not complained, so did not have to apologize — but there is a lesson at the heart of it that soccer as a whole will, soon, need to address.It is easy to understand why Guardiola is frustrated that the team he has built — the best in City’s history, one of the finest England has ever seen, a side that not only essentially guarantees victory every week, but does so with a style that it is impossible not to admire — might not sell out for a game against a (recently-established) European power.And yet that is not quite the whole story. Guardiola was at pains to tell the club’s fans that his team “needs” them, but that does not quite have the ring of truth. City, more than anyone else, does not really need an external, emotional impetus. It is a smooth, slick, unrelenting machine, regardless of its surroundings. That is no criticism; it is testament to both the club’s investment and his coaching. It is what makes City so successful.But a guarantee of victory, and of victory obtained through dominance, is not necessarily the sort of thing that attracts fans. It reduces the urgency of attending: Why go and see this win, when another win is around the corner? Why spend that money on a low-stakes game — a Champions League group-stage opener — against a team that is not especially familiar when you could save it for one that means much more?It is not certainty that attracts fans, that generates atmosphere. It is, instead, the thing that Guardiola has done his very best to extract from every facet of City’s existence: jeopardy. It seems an obvious point to make, but it holds: a 3-2 win is far more memorable than a 5-0 win, particularly if you have had a series of 5-0 wins in the last few weeks and months and years.Deep down, fans thrive on nothing quite so much as drama and risk and doubt. It is that which makes victories taste all the sweeter. The idea of an endless series of processions is appealing, but only to a certain point; after a while, it loses its edge. Fans like to feel needed, as if they are making some difference to the end result, whether that is true or not.At City, that is often not the case. That has always been true of all of the elite teams — Chelsea and Liverpool and Paris St.-Germain and Real Madrid and all the rest — and is becoming more and more true as the iniquities in the game grow more stark. Certain clubs have always expected victory. Worse, they now get it, almost every week. On the surface, a goal-less draw with Southampton may have been the last thing Guardiola wanted. In reality, it may have been exactly what he needed: a little reminder, to City’s fans, that nothing is entirely guaranteed.Preziosi MemoriesEnrico Preziosi appears to have sold a controlling interest in Genoa. But we have been here before. Simone Arveda/EPA, via ShutterstockThis time, it seems as if it is for real. Enrico Preziosi has come close to selling Genoa, the famed Serie A team he has run like a medieval fief since 2003, a couple of times in the last few years. There was a memorandum of understanding with at least one American finance house. There was a dalliance with a consortium with links to Qatar.It is worth treating reports that he has sold a majority stake in the club to 777 Partners, an investment firm based in Miami, with just a pinch of skepticism: Preziosi would not, after all, be the first old-school Italian owner to sell up and then change his mind. Both Silvio Berlusconi and Maurizio Zamparini, men cut from similar cloth to Preziosi, managed to reappear after apparently divesting themselves from their teams.Most Genoa fans will hope, of course, that this is the last they see of the 73-year-old toy magnate. He has not, after all, been what you would call a model owner. Under what might, in a kind light, be called his stewardship, the club has recruited and fired managers. He has been found guilty of match-fixing. He has proved profoundly incapable of taking the club, well, anywhere.Though the record of Serie A’s other North American owners — there are now seven teams with U.S. or Canadian ownership — is mixed, it would not take much for 777 Partners to be an upgrade: a little stability, and some thinking only a touch more strategic than “appoint the same guy over and over again at the first sign of trouble,” would just about do it.More and more teams in Italy are starting to think that way; as much as Preziosi’s departure means the league is just a little less colorful, just a little less chaotic, it is a sign that things are changing. If this is, indeed, his exit from Serie A, it is part of a marked shift away from the way things used to be, and slowly, gradually, toward how they ought to be.CorrespondenceBen Cohn starts off with a good, precise question on international soccer — “Is my impression that players participate out of love, and the quest for glory, without really getting paid right?” but then follows it up with the sort of question that screams “trap” to any self-respecting newsletter writer: “Does any country other than the U.K. field multiple teams?”Let’s do the one that is not a political land mine first. In the men’s game, generally, players are paid an appearance fee for playing for their country: an amount that is, to elite professionals, basically a nominal sum and is, in quite a few cases, often donated to charity, rather than being spent on watches or supercars or herds of goats or whatever it is players spend money on.As for your second question, which has a very Ted Lasso vibe about it: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are all different countries. The U.K. is best thought of as a house that four individuals, all with very different needs and interests and wants, happen to share, sometimes happily and sometimes begrudgingly, and occasionally one or other of them threatens to leave, because they feel that their grandparents were forced to sign a cotenancy agreem… no, I’m stretching it. It’s simple: They are separate countries in soccer, rugby, health care and policing; they are the U.K. at the Olympics and in foreign policy; and they are all called England in cricket.On to simpler matters. “I’m no expert, not at all, but is Ole Gunnar Solskjaer not trying to impose a Manchester City-style possession system at Manchester United?” Tom Karsay asks. “Sure looks that way to me. Last year they were a counterattack side, like everybody else.”I’m no expert, either, Tom, but would say it’s quite hard to discern precisely what Solskjaer wants Manchester United to be. The problem, as it goes, may be that he’s not an expert, either. More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Soccer

      The Problem When Soccer Clubs See Athletes as Assets

      by

      Chelsea and Manchester City have both found ways to monetize their army of spare signings by loaning them out. But should soccer incentivize that, or limit it?One of the things that appealed most to Manchester City about Marlos Moreno was his flexibility. The club spotted him as a teenager, coming off the back of a breakthrough season in which he helped Atlético Nacional, his hometown club in his native Colombia, win not just a national title but the Copa Libertadores, too.Moreno, then 19, had the air of a rising star. He was the sort of prospect who stood out among the thousands of players around the world whose names and performance data flash in front of the eyes of the scouts and analysts at Europe’s biggest clubs.City’s recruitment team liked what it saw: not just Moreno’s finishing, but his creativity, his ability to play in a variety of places. The club decided to strike, paying Atlético $6 million or so to sign him, and tying Moreno to a five-year contract. Executives were sufficiently excited by the acquisition of a player they felt was one of the most promising in South America to mention his name to Sheikh Mansour, City’s owner.“He’s a versatile player,” City’s director of football, Txiki Begiristain, said when Moreno’s arrival was confirmed. “We believe he has a fantastic future in the game, and with City.”That was five years ago, in August 2016. Moreno, 24, has now completed his initial, five-year deal with City. He has not played a single game for the club. He has, instead, spent the last half-decade on a series of loans. As it turned out, he has needed to be a very versatile player indeed. Just not in the way Begiristain intended.There is, on the surface, little pattern to the arc of Moreno’s journey these last few years, no easy evidence of some grand design at play. Sometimes, he has gone to clubs in Manchester City’s orbit — Girona and Lommel, two of his stops, are owned by City Football Group — and sometimes he has not. There have been spells in Spain, Portugal and Belgium, but also Brazil and Mexico. If there is a rhyme or a reason, it is difficult to discern.Marlos Moreno, left, signed with Manchester City in 2016 but has yet to play for the club.Miguel Sierra/EPA, via ShutterstockThis summer, Moreno left Manchester on loan again. (There has never been official confirmation that he has signed a new contract, but it can only be assumed that City extended his terms beyond their initial expiration date this summer.) He has joined Kortrijk, in Belgium. It is his seventh club in five years.Moreno is not, though, an outlier. There are plenty of players on City’s books who have a similar story to tell. Yangel Herrera, a Venezuelan playmaker, is now on his fourth team in four years since signing with Manchester City. None of them was Manchester City. Patrick Roberts, once considered something of a breakout star in English soccer, is with his sixth team in six years. He has, at least, appeared for Manchester City in a Premier League game. That was in 2015.But this is not simply a Manchester City phenomenon. Chelsea, too, has a troupe of players on loan: 21, in fact, after the closure of the transfer window. Some of them — like Billy Gilmour, the Scottish midfielder lent to Norwich City for the year — are undertaking a vital step in their development. The hope at the club remains that they will come back stronger, better, more experienced and ready to command a place with the first-team squad. Others, like the fullbacks Kenedy and Baba Rahman, are not.Chelsea is often credited — if that is the right word — with pioneering the idea of a soccer club as two separate but linked businesses: one designed to put the best team on the field, with the aim of winning trophies and claiming glory; and one set up to trade players, with the aim of making a profit that can then be reinvested in the other side of the company.Matt Miazga’s Chelsea tenure has been a European tour: He has been lent to clubs in the Netherlands, France, England, Belgium and, most recently, Spain, where he now plays for Alaves.David Aguilar/EPA, via ShutterstockWhether Chelsea invented the idea is a matter of debate. Several Italian teams might suggest they were operating along similar lines long before the current European champion. There is no question, though, that Chelsea has not only industrialized the concept, it has refined it, too.Its approach has two strands. Some players are bought, developed and sold a couple of years later, flipped like real estate. Others, though, are treated as rentals, lent again and again to different clubs, the return on the initial investment spread over several years of loan fees.This practice could, perhaps, be named in honor of goalkeeper Matej Delac, a Croat who spent nine years at Chelsea, and spent each and every one of them at a different club. The whole approach — of effectively spinning off a player-trading business as another part of a club’s identity — could easily be termed the Chelsea model.Except that it is, now, not just Chelsea. It is Manchester City, too, with Moreno and Herrera and others. Liverpool is doing it more frequently. There are players at Juventus and Real Madrid, among others, who have had similar experiences. It is now pretty much standard practice at most of Europe’s elite clubs.There is a reason it has been widely and quickly adopted: It is a good idea. It is a particularly good idea now, when the coronavirus pandemic has ravaged most clubs’ finances and only a handful of teams are able to pay actual transfer fees. The loan market will grow and grow. Having players contracted for that very purpose ensures a steady stream of income: small beer, perhaps, for a team like Manchester City or Chelsea, but perhaps a vital source of funds for the teams expected to compete with them.The impulse behind it is not just economic; it is also, to some extent, sporting. The teams that are good at it — the ones that can identify talent and develop it, the ones that can command a market for those players, the ones that can place them adroitly at teams that allow their value and demand to grow — are the ones that are rewarded by the system. Chelsea can bring in Romelu Lukaku, to some extent, because it has developed an effective transfer strategy to offset some of the costs. That is to its credit.There is only one sticking point. It is a simple question, and it is one that does not traditionally detain soccer for long, but it is worth asking. Is this OK? There is economic sense here. There may be some sporting logic, too. But morally, is the idea of players not as athletes but as assets something we should not just accept but incentivize?The transfer market, as a whole, is underpinned by a deep weirdness. It is rarely mentioned — the soap opera of the market is sufficiently compelling that we, as observers, willingly suspend our disbelief — but it is unusual that an employer can prevent an employee from taking another job, one that is better paid or more appealing, regardless of what that employee wants.Manchester City signed Yangel Herrera as a teenager but has yet to play him. Instead, he has appeared in Major League Soccer and for three Spanish clubs.Savvides Press/EPA, via ShutterstockOf course, plenty of employees have contracts, which bind them to a company. But for the most part, they also have notice periods, giving them some sort of agency over their careers and lives. Perhaps a company might make life difficult should a star employee wish to leave. Perhaps it will place him on some type of gardening leave. There are not many examples where it will keep him until a prospective employer pays a wholly arbitrary sum in compensation.We tolerate this state of affairs in soccer partly because of tradition, partly because it protects sporting integrity; partly because we (wrongly) assume that everyone is extremely well paid anyway; partly because players do jobs we all dream of doing, so we adore them individually but hate them as a concept; and partly because the transfer market is an important and reasonably effective mechanism for wealth distribution.Even by these low and strange standards, though, the use of players as nothing more than assets — to be fattened for sale like livestock or to be rented to the highest bidder — feels like a step too far.It is akin, perhaps, to those complex derivative packages traded on financial markets, the ones that are bets on the outcomes of bets, on and on into eternity. The original purpose has been lost: It is no longer about trading to get better; it is simply about trading to make money. And the things being traded, in this case, are humans, ones who are no longer in control of their own destiny, not really.This is one of those rare problems in soccer that has a relatively easy solution: The authorities who run and, in theory, safeguard the game could quite easily rule that clubs can have only a certain number of senior professionals on their books. They could ban teams from having more than, say, five players on loan at any time.They could, but of course they won’t, which means there will be more cases like Marlos Moreno and Yangel Herrera and Matej Delac and all the others, forever on the move, hired out to whoever will take them, bonded to a club that sees them not for what they can do but for how much they can make.Selling TomorrowAntoine Griezmann completed a round-trip journey to Madrid. Barcelona paid coming and going.Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJust as time expired, the money started pouring in. The great bazaar of Barcelona had been open all summer, but it was only in the final couple of days that anyone came through the doors, the buyers and the bargain-hunters, all hoping to take advantage of soccer’s great distressed sellers.If the sale of Emerson Royal to Tottenham was a little strange — he had officially joined Barcelona only a month earlier — it is the departure of Antoine Griezmann that will sting the most: the sheer humiliation of allowing a player signed with great pomp and ceremony two years ago to return, initially on loan, to Atlético Madrid.Still, it could not be helped: Barcelona’s most pressing need was first to save and then to raise money, and at the end of the transfer window it had done just that. Lionel Messi has gone; Sergio Busquets, Gerard Piqué, Jordi Alba and Sergi Roberto have all agreed to reduced terms; Griezmann is off the salary bill. By next summer, when his move to Atlético is made permanent, Barcelona will have generated $115 million in sales.What Barcelona could not do, of course, is sell off the players that it most needs to sell: the high earners, the waning stars, the reminders of its years of folly. Philippe Coutinho, Miralem Pjanic and Samuel Umtiti are all still there. Barcelona does not have a vast amount in common with Real Madrid, but here, perhaps, there is some common ground.Whether Real’s approach (or approaches) to entice Kylian Mbappé this summer was real or not we will never know, not truly: Real Madrid insists it was, Paris St.-Germain is adamant it was not. Either way, the club has spent the last couple of seasons trying to raise the funds necessary to sign the 22-year-old Mbappé: funds that would either have been used as a transfer fee or as a golden handshake.To do that, it would have liked to sell players like Gareth Bale and Isco: big names on money to match. But nobody came forward, and so instead Real Madrid has had to cash in on a suite of promising youngsters: Achraf Hakimi and Sergio Reguilón and Óscar Rodríguez last season and Martin Odegaard this summer.The policy has worked, of course, but it brings with it an unavoidable question: How much brighter would Real Madrid’s future have been, how much more balanced would its side be, if it had been able to add Mbappé to a promising young squad, rather than having to sell off many of those players to finance his eventual arrival?It is the same question that lingers over Barcelona. Emerson, like Junior Firpo and Carles Aleña and Carles Pérez and Arthur before him, might not have made Barcelona great again, but he would, at least, have helped to rejuvenate an aging squad. Instead, he was sold, as they all were, to cover the costs of the mistakes of the past. Barcelona’s finances are in better shape now than they were a month ago. The price is a high one, though: It has had to mortgage tomorrow to pay for yesterday.CorrespondenceThere was an intriguing thought in an email from Jillian Mannarino, touching on the varying fortunes of Arsenal’s two senior teams. “Everyone following the Premier League is talking about how bad Arsenal men’s team is,” she wrote, “but no one seems to be talking about how good Arsenal’s women’s team is: stacked with superstars like Vivianne Miedema, Kim Little, Danielle van de Donk and Beth Mead, and consistently good for the last decade.”Arsenal has at least one team that is making its fans smile.Steven Paston/Press Association, via Associated PressWe will cover the start of this season’s Women’s Super League in England elsewhere this weekend. But it is worth pausing a moment on Arsenal, too, because there is a stark contrast between its two elite divisions.The women’s team recruits sufficiently and consistently well enough — including the arrival of Tobin Heath this week on a free transfer — to punch above its weight: It has not spent quite as much as Chelsea and Manchester City in recent years, but it remains a peer of those teams in a way that it is very much not in the men’s game. How can that be explained? Why can the club make good decisions for its women’s team, but not its men’s? Is it to do with the executives working on the women’s side? And if so, should someone maybe not ask their advice?These are questions I cannot answer — though I will endeavor to do so — but I can, at least, furnish Mary Jo Berman with a response. “Did Barcelona receive nothing in return for Lionel Messi?” she asked. “Couldn’t they have traded him or transferred him for cash?” They couldn’t, for the very simple reason that the club had allowed his contract to expire: He was free to move wherever he wanted. The fact that Barcelona allowed that to happen, too, remains the most interesting aspect of this summer.And Calvin Wagner was quite right to pull me up on a poor turn of phrase last week. “The transfers of Messi, Mbappé and Ronaldo are clearly more driven by the statement of acquiring their star power than footballing fit,” he wrote. “But surely the Lukaku deal has more sporting logic to it? It seems to me that he brings greater marginal gains in sporting quality to Chelsea relative to the other transfers mentioned in your column.”This is, of course, quite right. Lukaku makes complete sense from a sporting perspective — he fills a glaring need that Chelsea has — in a way that Ronaldo, for example, does not, particularly. Lukaku was included simply because of his cost, one that would have been beyond the reach of all but three or four teams this summer, rather than because of the motivations behind the deal, but that should have been made more clear.That’s all for this week. We may now be behind the paywall, huddling against the cold, but the usual rules still apply: Questions go to askrory@nytimes.com, urgent matters go to Twitter, all of the other thoughts I’ve had this week that I could not crowbar into this newsletter are littered throughout Set Piece Menu.Have a great weekend,Rory More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Soccer

      Chelsea Proves a Point While Collecting One at Liverpool

      by

      A red card put Chelsea to the test, but a draw won with control, composure and calm felt like much more.LIVERPOOL, England — Romelu Lukaku’s second half was not an especially glamorous one. There was a lot of running, darting into the slivers of space on either side of Liverpool’s central defenders, hoping for a ball that rarely came. There was a substantial amount of tussling and wrestling with Joel Matip, in particular, the two scrabbling for every inch of ground.There were not, conversely, many touches: only 20 in all after halftime, not quite one every two minutes. There was only, in the entire span of that 45 minutes, one scoring chance, a single moment that Lukaku spent his entire night trying to conjure, a snapshot from just inside the penalty area. He caught it well. No sooner had it left his foot than Virgil van Dijk blocked it.Such is the lot of the striker, of course: all of those moments of glory, as they wheel away, their arms aloft, adulation pouring forth upon them from the stands are the product of countless hours of unseen, unyielding and often underappreciated work. Every goal is reward for all of the effort silently expended. Lukaku, now in his second tenure at Chelsea, has been doing this long enough to be used to it.Even then, though, Saturday’s 1-1 draw at Liverpool will have felt like an arduous evening. Circumstances had dictated that Lukaku spent much of the second half looking backward, rather than forward. Chelsea had been leading, through a clever header from Kai Havertz, with the clock ticking toward halftime when Reece James handled the ball on the goal line.James was — eventually — sent off, Mohamed Salah converted the penalty, and Anfield smelled blood. From that moment, it was clear that Chelsea’s second half would be dedicated to holding out, not pushing on, and Lukaku, restored to the club for $135 million this summer, would endure an evening of silent toil.Chelsea striker Romelu Lukaku tangled with Liverpool’s Virgil van Dijk, right, and Joel Matip all afternoon.Peter Powell/ReutersThanks to both his cost — Lukaku is now the most expensive player in soccer history in terms of cumulative transfer fees, at least until Kylian Mbappé joins Real Madrid — and that status, there is a natural inclination to assume that the final piece in the puzzle is also the most important, that this Chelsea team is now constructed for, and around, Romelu Lukaku.His first display, at Arsenal last week, did little to disabuse anyone of that notion. He played there with all of the intent and menace of an avenging hero, scoring within 15 minutes of the start of his second spell in England; he may well have single-handedly robbed Pablo Marí, his direct opponent that day, of any scrap of self-belief for several years.His second game, on Saturday, served as a reminder that there can only be a final piece if the puzzle is nearly complete. Lukaku was, through no fault of his own, an optional extra for much of this game, against one of Chelsea’s putative rivals for the title, and yet the club’s traveling fans still greeted the final whistle of a roar of approval.Thomas Tuchel’s team had not won, of course, not in any strict, literal sense, but championships are built on moral victories, too, and this one was resounding. Chelsea — even playing at a disadvantage after James departed, in front of a baying crowd, against a team with one of the most potent attacking tridents in world soccer — produced a display of quite stunning control, and composure, and calm.There was no dispute that the ball hit Chelsea defender Reece James on the line, keeping it out of the goal.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe referee, Anthony Taylor, deemed it a penalty, and a red card.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesChelsea’s captain César Azpilicueta, and nearly everyone else in blue, disagreed.Peter Powell/ReutersFor much of the first half, Chelsea had frustrated its host, seemingly reducing the great green sprawl of Anfield — the open expanses in which Liverpool thrives — to nothing but a postage stamp. Every way that Jürgen Klopp’s team turned, there was a blue jersey. Chelsea has an inexorable ability to fill space, to turn every alley blind.Liverpool had been growing a little rushed, a little ragged as it sought a way out of that vise, with van Dijk and Trent Alexander-Arnold at one point reduced to despairing loudly at each other over the width of the field: Van Dijk wanted his teammate to push forward; Alexander-Arnold could not see where he was supposed to go.The penalty, and the red card, alleviated that pressure, but it redoubled Chelsea’s determination. Tuchel reorganized: Thiago Silva came on in the heart of defense, César Azpilicueta shifted out to the right, the indefatigable Mason Mount played as a holding midfielder and an attacking midfielder and an auxiliary right wing back, too.Chelsea had lost N’Golo Kanté to an injury at the break, a third cause of regret, and yet his spirit seemed to suffuse his team. In 45 minutes in which Liverpool exerted a monopoly on the ball, in which Lukaku barely featured, it did not create a single, clear-cut chance. There were a handful of efforts from range, but no way through, no way around, no way out. Even Klopp, in the aftermath, could barely contain his admiration. “A man extra is not a massive advantage against a side with the defending skills they have,” he said.Liverpool’s Andy Robertson with Chelsea’s Mason Mount.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is this, as much as the threat of Lukaku, that makes Chelsea such a threat: the air of invulnerability, of redoubtable stolidity, that Tuchel has bestowed on his team in his eight months as coach. Chelsea has the firepower to see off the majority of the Premier League’s teams. But just as important is that it has the battery to keep out the great and the good.It is easy, in the frenzy of the summer, as new players arrive to garland old teams, to believe that what matters is who can call upon the most talent, that titles are handed out to the sides with the most dazzling squad lists and the greatest expenditures.But that is not quite how it works. There is another stage to the process: those resources have to be fashioned into a functioning unit, all of those gifted individuals crafted into a team. Lukaku may yet prove the final piece in the puzzle for Chelsea. What matters more, though, is that Tuchel had already put the rest of it together. More