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      Chelsea's Champions League Secret: N'Golo Kanté

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      Every coach has a plan. But players still decide games, and only Chelsea has Kanté. In the Champions League final, that made all the difference.PORTO, Portugal — Another attack had broken down, another minute had passed, and by now there was just a hint of panic in Kyle Walker’s eyes. The Champions League title was slipping away. And so he did what he has been conditioned to do these past five years. He turned to the place that always gives him the answers.As Chelsea dallied over taking a goal kick, hoping to see a few more precious seconds ebb away as it closed out its victory, Walker and Manchester City’s coach, Pep Guardiola, held an impromptu summit on the touchline. It was not hard to work out the dynamic. Walker wanted to know what to do. What had Guardiola seen? Where was the breach in the line? How did they rescue this?Guardiola responded with a torrent of instructions, as he always does. He is never short of ideas. Ordinarily, he passes them on to one or other of his fullbacks — the closest players to him — and they diffuse them through the rest of the team. This time, though, was different.Walker could see Guardiola’s lips moving. He could hear the words coming out, just about, above the din of Chelsea’s jubilant fans. But there was a look of blank incomprehension on his face, as if Guardiola had accidentally addressed him in Catalan or issued his instructions as a rap.Pep Guardiola and his players, out of time and out of answers.Pool photo by David RamosWalker furrowed his brow and stared, hard, at his coach, in a vain attempt to make it all make sense. Whether what Guardiola said got through, whether it was put into practice or not, a couple of moments later Walker was back at the touchline, this time with the ball in his hands. He took a couple of steps, and then launched it long, deep into the penalty area. A beat later, the same thing played out.Manchester City, that byword for sophistication and planning and command under Guardiola, the outstanding strategist of his generation, had resorted to soccer’s final roll of the dice, its last resort for the damned: the long throw-in.In the biggest game in the club’s history, in his own long-awaited return to the Champions League final, the system that Guardiola has so obsessively, so painstakingly coded into his players’ double helixes for half a decade had not just failed. It had broken down completely.There is a reason that, in times of trouble, Manchester City’s players seek the counsel of the bench. For all that Guardiola’s teams are often characterized as freewheeling, expressive, adventurous, the reality is — and this is not a criticism — the contrary. Manchester City’s great strength is not its pioneer spirit. It is that it has the most detailed map.Or, rather, Guardiola does. Much of what makes City so brilliant is not spontaneous, off-the-cuff virtuosity. It has all been trained and honed and perfected. Those slick interchanges of passing, all of the players darting into precise pockets of space to unpick the fabric of a massed defense? That is not improvisation. It is programming.And so when things go awry, when the plan does not seem to be working, the reflex of Guardiola’s players is to ask for further directions. It is hard to watch City for any period of time and not notice it. It is a reflex now: When some issue arises, the first instinct is always to look to the bench, to be given an update. There is no real room for personal interpretation. Under Guardiola, the system is king, and Guardiola is the system.He is not unique in that. Soccer in the 21st century is a cult of the supermanager: not only Guardiola but José Mourinho, Jürgen Klopp and Antonio Conte, Julian Nagelsmann and Mauricio Pochettino and Thomas Tuchel, the freshly minted champion of Europe.Chelsea’s Thomas Tuchel brought his family onto the field to celebrate after the final, a year after they had consoled him after he lost in it.Pool photo by Pierre-Philippe MarcouTuchel with Roman Abramovich. Tuchel told reporters after the game that it was the first time he had met the owner who hired him in January.Pool photo by Michael SteeleThey have diverse approaches and distinct philosophies, but they are united by a core belief: that at its heart, soccer is a game of competing systems. What defines the identity of the victor and the vanquished are choreographed movements and passing patterns and detailed tactics of each team. They all believe that it is the coach who has agency, that whoever has the best system will win.And yet that does not quite paint the whole picture. It would be perfectly valid to analyze Chelsea’s slender and yet convincing victory in Porto on Saturday as a tale of two systems: the one inculcated by Tuchel, brightly conceived and adroitly executed, overcoming the one unexpectedly — and to some extent inexplicably — adopted by Guardiola.Rather than stand by the approach that had made City all but untouchable in England since January, Guardiola chose to dispense with the services of a holding midfield player. Instead, he played Ilkay Gundogan in that role, with an array of creative, ball-playing playmakers around him.The temptation is to assess that call in psychological terms. This was Guardiola second-guessing himself, as he tends to in this competition, because he is so obsessed with winning it. Or, conversely, it was Guardiola distilling his beliefs down to their purest essence, trying to use the grandest stage of all to showcase his latest idea, the four-dimensional chess move of the boss-level supercoach.In all likelihood, the rationale was probably more technical. Guardiola expected Tuchel to sit back and defend, which would have made a holding midfielder an unnecessary encumbrance. Instead, he would need more players who could pick their way through Chelsea’s back line. It was, if one sees the game as a struggle between systems, the logical move.Reece James, one of Chelsea’s homegrown champions.Pool photo by Manu FernandezThe problem is that the game is not a struggle between systems. Or, at least, that is not all it is. On a more fundamental level, a game is also a struggle between humans: a physiological one, a psychological one, an intensely and intimately personal one. It is an examination of your fitness and your talent, your reactions and resolve. Chelsea’s system might have been superior. But so too, crucially, were its individuals.Not simply because, where City’s players seemed diminished by the occasion, driven to a frenzy by their desperation to deliver the club its self-appointed destiny, Chelsea’s appeared to be inspired by it.Reece James and Mason Mount, fresh-faced and locally reared, improved with every passing minute. Kai Havertz, the goal scorer, gave a statement performance, one that warranted his captain César Azpilicueta’s assertion that he will go on to be a “superstar.” Jorginho seemed unruffled. Antonio Rüdiger was nothing but ruffle.But more significant still was the fact that while City’s players had to turn to the bench to solve their problems, Chelsea had someone on the field to do it for them. Arsène Wenger was probably underselling it when he described N’Golo Kanté’s performance as “unbelievable.”With metronomic, almost eerie regularity, City built attacks only to find out that at the key moment, Kanté was there, in just the right place to win a tackle, at just the right angle to block a pass, at just the right time to interrupt the plan. At time, it felt as if someone had passed Kanté a script. He did not wait for instruction from the side. He just went to where the danger was, and eliminated it.Kanté was, in his own way, no less decisive here than Lionel Messi was in the 2009 and 2011 finals, or Cristiano Ronaldo was in 2014. The fact he is still pigeonholed as a holding midfielder means this will not be remembered as “the Kanté final,” but it would hardly be unwarranted.Kanté seemed to understand City’s plan as well, or better, than its players did.Pool photo by Michael SteeleBut to focus exclusively on his destructive capabilities, formidable though they are, is to do Kanté a disservice. He was also, often, the one who led Chelsea’s counterattacks. He determined the shape of the midfield. His passing helped to destabilize City’s defense. For a few minutes in the first half, he did a passable impression of Frank Lampard, turning his hand to breaking into the City penalty area, timing his run late.He did what great midfielders do, and shape-shifted as the flow of the game demanded. No wonder, as tends to happen with Kanté, a meme appeared at one point, detailing the great midfield threesomes of the recent past: Barcelona’s Xavi, Andres Iniesta and Sergio Busquets; Real Madrid’s Casemiro, Toni Kroos and Luka Modric; and Kanté, all by himself.That was, in the end, the difference on Saturday night. One team had Kanté on it, and the other did not. Perhaps there is some system that Guardiola could have conjured to negate him or to bypass him, but it is not immediately clear what form that would take.Even in the era of the supercoach, it is not always the finer tactical details alone that explain a result. The system is not always king. A game can be defined by ideas, but it can also be defined by people. And when it is, the visionaries on the sideline do not — cannot — have all the answers, because there are some things that do not appear on maps, no matter how finely drawn. More

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      Champions League Final: Chelsea Beats Manchester City

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      PORTO, Portugal — Manchester City’s players did not seem to want to leave. Not right away, at least. They stood, as if frozen in place, as Chelsea’s players heaved the prize City craves more than any other into the air. They could not go. To go, after all, would be to accept that it was real, that it was over.They had found themselves on the far side of the field at the Estádio do Dragão, silver medals draped around their necks. To get to the mournful safety of the locker room, they would have to walk past the seats that had, only a few minutes earlier, contained the massed ranks of their fans, hoping and willing that City might find a goal, that it might find salvation, that it might win a Champions League final it would go on to lose to Chelsea, 1-0. The seats were all but empty now. The fans had not stuck around to watch, to wallow.Slowly, the players mustered their last vestiges of energy and began their long, sorrowful march. Several were on the verge of tears. Several more were long past the verge. Others seemed glazed, scarcely able to move, as if they were buffering, trying to process what had happened, what this meant.It was just as they started to move that the fireworks went off, crackling and glittering and thudding into the sky. Soon, City’s whole team and its staff members were obscured, swallowed whole by a great cloud of cordite by fireworks that were supposed — were expected — to be for them. That is the thing about soccer, about sports. Sometimes, things do not turn out like they should.Kyle Walker and his teammates had to endure a celebration they had hoped would be their own.Jose Coelho/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn a lot of ways, Chelsea and Manchester City are two sides of the same coin. They are the vanguard of the money that has swept into soccer over the last 20 years, brought by hedge funds and vulture capitalists and oligarchs and nation states. They are, depending on one’s perspective, either the great insurgents or the nouveaux riches.But they are, at the same time, fundamentally different. The Chelsea of Roman Abramovich has always embraced chaos. It has now won the Champions League twice, both times in seasons in which it changed its manager at the slightest hint of disappointment, in seasons when its ultimate triumph made little sense.The Chelsea that was champion of Europe in 2012 was managed by Roberto Di Matteo, who won the trophy without his captain and with a debutante left back. The Chelsea that repeated the trick in 2021 has a squad that is both vastly expensive and curiously incomplete. Its leading goal-scorer, domestically, is a defensive midfielder who only shoots, really, when he takes penalties. Its main striker does not score goals. He does not, at times, look like he knows how.Manchester City, by contrast, is a monument to control. In the 13 years since it was taken over by a member of the royal family of Abu Dhabi, it has sought to perfect every single aspect of being a soccer team. It has worked under the assumption that success is, effectively, a formula: that if all of the variables are regulated, winning is inevitable.And so City is the benchmark: it has the best youth academy, the best training facilities, it has a playing style that unifies the club from bottom to top. It has the most data and the biggest scouting network, it has the deepest squad and the greatest manager and the most sophisticated commercial operation and the largest network of sister clubs.Chelsea’s N’Golo Kanté, who dominated a midfield City had hoped to control.Pool photo by Susan VeraNone of it has come cheap. Quite how much all of it has cost is not possible to put a precise figure on, but it has cost not far off a couple of billion dollars, at the very least, to transform a soccer team that was a byword for disappointment into a gleaming advertisement for the modernity and mastery of its backers.It has worked. Under Pep Guardiola, City has risen to become the dominant force in English soccer. For three of the past five years, it has probably — by most metrics — been the best team in Europe, whatever that means, really: the most complete and the most consistent, the one with the highest ceiling.It is a constancy that has always evaded Chelsea, always too turbulent, too impatient, too comfortable with change. And it has been achieved by translating the control that defines the club into its playing style. Guardiola wants not just to have possession of the ball, but to have ownership of space itself: to dictate where passes go and where players do.All of it, each meticulously-selected piece of the puzzle, had been done with this moment in mind. The Champions League represents the ultimate fulfillment not just of Guardiola’s vision, but City’s. It is justification for all of that investment, vindication for all of those ideas, and it is reward for doing all of those things right.There is just one flaw. Success is not a formula. Not this sort of success, anyway, the success that relies on an alignment of the stars and the rub of the green and the minutiae of countless little moments. That is the undeniable, untameable nature of sport: that, in the end, there is always something that you cannot account for, something that you cannot control. That, sometimes, things do not turn out the way they should.Pep Guardiola, who has been in charge of some of Europe’s best teams for the past decade, failed again the win the trophy he values the most.David Ramos/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAnd so, in the game that represented that manifestation of its destiny, Manchester City sought to exert a supreme, almost obsessive, control, and found only chaos. Guardiola named a team full of attacking midfielders — one at left back, three in midfield, two more upfront — with the aim of starving Chelsea of first the ball and then hope. In the event, it was City who seemed frantic, uncertain, whizzing and whirling round the field at breakneck speed to try to slow down the game.It lost because Chelsea was the precise opposite. It is only six months since Thomas Tuchel, its coach, was fired by Paris St.-Germain, unable to recover from losing the Champions League final last season. He was tasked not only with replacing Frank Lampard, a beloved club legend who many fans thought deserved more time to prove his worth, but with shaping some sort of identifiable team from the morass of gifted, but drifting, players he inherited.He was told to fashion order from chaos, and this was his ultimate, his irrevocable proof. City barely laid a glove on Chelsea. It found its every path blocked, its every idea pre-empted, its every thought read. As Guardiola’s team grew more frenzied, Chelsea held its fire, bided its time, and waited for the moment to strike.Kai Havertz flicked the ball past City’s goalkeeper, Ederson, and turned it into the net in the 42nd minute.Michael Steele/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIts chance came just before halftime. For all those midfielders in Guardiola’s lineup, not one of them was in the vicinity of Mason Mount as he picked the ball up in his own half. Timo Werner, the nonscoring striker, darted into a channel, dragging City’s central defenders from their positions. Kai Havertz sprinted into the gap. Mount found him, and he bore down on goal, unencumbered, unaccompanied.That was enough. That was all Tuchel’s team needed. It would be Chelsea’s players, at the end, running around the field, running to their fans, running on fumes and on adrenaline, running nowhere in particular, running because joy that pure, that uncut, the joy of a dream realized, is beautiful chaos.And it would be City’s on that long march past those empty seats, through that cordite cloud stinging eyes already raw with tears, slowly coming to terms with the fact that — for now, at least — it is real, and it is over. This is the game they were gathered to win, the trophy that is the club’s ultimate purpose. This was their moment. But that is sports. Success is not a formula. Sometimes, things do not turn out as they should, as you expect. Sometimes, there is just a little bit of chaos.Pool photo by Susana Vera More

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      Is the Champions League Final Christian Pulisic’s Moment?

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      There is an American at today’s game. Two actually.Christian Pulisic is expected to feature for Chelsea, though it will be from off the bench, the high-water mark in stages for the high-water mark in American players in Europe.The other American, Manchester City goalkeeper Zack Steffen, most likely will be a spectator in Porto unless there is an emergency or two in his team’s camp. Steffen’s consolation is that he has already become the first American to win the Premier League.But for most fans in the United States, Pulisic will be the main talking point today. Even since he joined Chelsea from Germany’s Borussia Dortmund in 2019, for a $73 million fee that raised eyebrows on both sides of the Atlantic, he has battled to find his place in London, and his team.Chelsea and its fans have had little complaint about his play.Just last month, he scored the goal that provided a valuable point on the road against Real Madrid in semifinals.A week later he showed similar poise to set up a goal by Mason Mount that finished off Madrid.But the ongoing competition for places in Chelsea’s star-studded attack is never easy; a year after bringing Pulisic into a team that already had Mason Mount, who plays a similar game, Chelsea bought the German forwards Timo Werner and Kai Havertz.Injuries, too, have been a persistent issue for Pulisic, and that is perhaps part of the reason Chelsea Coach Thomas Tuchel has tended to see him as more of a second-half super sub than a 90-minute fixture in his team.But did his performance against Real Madrid, and some other strong outings this spring, change that impression? No. He will start on the bench as usual, but said this week that he would be ready when called.“I’ve learned a lot, I’ve come very far,” Pulisic said in an interview with CBS Sports this week. “There have been some real ups, also some times where I had some really difficult moments. I’m happy with my form now. I’m happy with the way I’m feeling. I’m confident.” More

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      How to Watch the Champions League Final: Time, Streaming and Location

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      Manchester City is chasing its first European club soccer title, and Chelsea its trying to win its second. Here’s how to watch.Chelsea and Manchester City, two deep-pocketed titans of England’s Premier League, will play for the biggest prize in European soccer on Saturday when they meet in the Champions League final in Porto, Portugal.Chelsea, a serial collector of titles and trophies since 2003, has won the competition once before, in 2012. Manchester City, a club that only in the last decade emerged from the long shadow of its more famous (and much more decorated) neighbor, Manchester United, is playing in the final for the first time.That unfamiliarity may bring some nerves, and some intrigue. But new faces or old, everyone will head into the final with eyes wide open about the stakes.“If you win, you’re a hero,” Manchester City midfielder Kevin De Bruyne said this week. “If you lose, you’re almost a failure.”What time is the game?Kickoff is set for 3 p.m. Eastern. Unlike some kickoff times, that one should be pretty accurate.How can I watch?The game will be broadcast in the United States by CBS Sports and on the Paramount+ streaming app. If you prefer commentary in Spanish, go to Univision or the TUDN app.If you are anywhere else in the world, check this comprehensive list of broadcast partners on UEFA’s website, which includes everything from RMC Sport (France) to Qazsport (Kazakhstan) to the magnificently named Silk Sport (Georgia).Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola has won the Champions League as a player and as a manager. But not with Manchester City.Carl Recine/ReutersWill there be fans inside the stadium?Yes. Each club received an allotment of 6,000 tickets to the game, and organizers said the crowd would be limited to 16,500 — well short of the 50,000-seat capacity of Porto’s Estádio do Dragão.Chelsea returned 800 of its tickets, with its fans angrily claiming that onerous UEFA rules had “intentionally prevented” eager supporters from traveling.Manchester City, on the other hand, announced this week that its owner, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the Abu Dhabi royal and the deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, had graciously picked up the travel tab for everyone.Fans in Porto, where the bars closed early this week.Pedro Nunes/ReutersWhat was the mood been like this week?Tariq Panja of The Times sent along this dispatch from Porto on Friday:Fans from England started arriving in small numbers throughout the week, and by Friday afternoon parts of the city were thronged by supporters of the two teams.A large group of Manchester City supporters became an attraction of sorts for locals as they drank beer and sang songs in the sunshine in the bars that lined one bank of the Douro river, one of the city’s main tourist spots.The fans were being closely watched by the Portuguese police, which the night before had to intervene when some visitors became frustrated by local coronavirus restrictions that forced bars and restaurants to close by 10:30 p.m.For many of the English visitors, the trip to Porto was the first time away from their country since its recent reopening after one of Europe’s longest lockdowns.Rúben Dias has been the savior of City’s defense this year.Manu Fernandez/Associated PressTell me something I can say to sound smart today.“Buying Rúben Dias changed everything for Manchester City, giving Pep Guardiola the quality he needed on defense to support that offense while it purrs along.”“Sure, Chelsea’s Christian Pulisic can become the first American to play in the Champions League final today. But he won’t be the first American to win it: That honor belongs to Jovan Kirovski, with Dortmund in 1997.” More

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      Revisiting Ilkay Gundogan

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      The Manchester City midfielder is a rare player in the Champions League final: one with experience in the game. He wants to know what it feels like to win.Ilkay Gundogan is a little sheepish as he admits it. It is not what he is supposed to do, he knows. He is supposed to take each game as it comes. That is the professional’s mantra. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Think about today, rather than tomorrow. That is what a sports psychologist would advise. It is what his manager, certainly, would recommend.It is not, though, what he has done. From the moment Manchester City eliminated Paris St.-Germain earlier this month to qualify for its first Champions League final, Gundogan has found himself thinking about almost nothing else. “There’s not been a day when I haven’t thought about this game,” he said. “Maybe too much, to be honest.”Even after Manchester City won the Premier League title — in absentia, effectively; the club’s crown was confirmed when Manchester United, its closest challenger, lost to Leicester City on May 12 — he did not feel in celebratory mood. The euphoria of that achievement almost passed him by. Instead, in his mind, it meant he could focus more absolutely on Chelsea, on Porto, on Saturday.“I tried to convince myself that everything was preparation for the final,” he said. “I didn’t want to hold back for one second. In training, in my private life, I tried to keep myself as up as possible.”City’s top scorer in the Premier League this season was not Gabriel Jesus, Raheem Sterling or Kevin De Bruyne. It was Gundogan, with 13 goals.Pool photo by Scott HeppellAffectionately, his friends and his family suggested that he was at risk of causing himself additional stress. Gundogan is smart, and thoughtful, and logical. He had considered the issue. They worried about him far more than he worried about himself. “This is just how I am,” he said.He has wondered, over the last few weeks, whether the final has occupied so much of his mental energy because he knows the pain of losing one. Alone on City’s squad, Gundogan has tasted the Champions League final. He was on the Borussia Dortmund team that lost, late, to Bayern Munich in London in 2013. It is not something he has put out of his mind. “When you get the taste of playing in that game, and you lose, it does feel like unfinished business,” he said.Every major final, of course, is laced with these sorts of stories: the club seeking revenge for a bitter defeat or the coach trying to cement his legacy or the president trying to live up to the legacy of his father or the team trying to quiet the ghosts of its predecessors.This weekend’s is no different. There are private stories, not unlike Gundogan’s. Chelsea’s Thiago Silva was part of the P.S.G. team that lost to Bayern Munich in Lisbon last year. He, too, will see this as a chance to address a regret. His teammate Mateo Kovacic, meanwhile, has been to the biggest game in club soccer twice, and has never played in it: He remained on the substitutes’ bench as Real Madrid lifted the trophy in 2017 and 2018.Gundogan in 2013, when he scored in the Champions League final but did not win it.Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAnd there are broader themes. This is Pep Guardiola’s first encounter in a decade with the game in which he confirmed his brilliance, his opportunity to win a third European Cup, the high-water mark for any manager. It is the culmination of Manchester City’s relentless march toward the pinnacle of the European game, the coronation as the game’s supreme power that represents the ultimate purpose and vindication of Abu Dhabi’s billion-dollar intervention in soccer.But some stories cut through more than others. A few years ago, Gundogan granted The Times rare access to his rehabilitation from a torn cruciate ligament. Over the course of eight months or so, he allowed us to track every stage of his recuperation — from his surgery in Barcelona to his first steps in the gym and on to his return first to training and then to the field.He invited us into his home, introduced us to his family, allowed us to photograph him in his private box at the Etihad Stadium as — a little distracted, a little mournful — he watched his team play yet another game without him. He made us Turkish coffee. He showed us his collection of sneakers. He did not mind when we asked whether he needed quite so many in gold.One afternoon, after checking that nobody was around, he took us into the club’s sanctum sanctorum: the first-team changing room at City’s training facility. Strictly speaking, it is for players only; the club has a firewall around first-team areas, one that applies even to senior employees, let alone journalists.Stealthily, as though he was quite enjoying the transgression, Gundogan opened a door at the back of the room to reveal what looked, at first glance, like a spa room at a country house hotel: a sauna, a cold bath, a couple of pristine swimming pools, complete with retractable floors and basketball hoops.After injuring his knee, Gundogan offered The Times an unusually candid look inside his recovery.Kieran Dodds for The New York TimesMore important, he spoke openly and frankly about the loneliness of injury, the fear, the frustration, the self-doubt, the boredom, the existential angst of being unable to do a job that is also an all-consuming identity. He talked a lot about the close group of half a dozen friends that has surrounded him since he was young; about how the prospect of a monthlong vacation with all of them, in Los Angeles, had gotten him through the long, bleak spring that year.That injury was not the first setback Gundogan had experienced. He had previously missed out on playing for Germany in the 2014 World Cup and in Euro 2016, too. He had endured a back problem that, at one juncture, he feared might dog him throughout his career, perhaps even end it.He is cool and considered and rational — he is proud of his Turkish heritage, but in many ways, he is very obviously German — but those disappointments nagged at him. He worried, deep down, that he was cursed not to have the career he might have had.And then, slowly but surely, he made his way back. As he did so over the past few years, it would have been impossible not to take some pleasure in seeing him thrive after seeing, close up, all that he had been through, not to feel a little vicarious happiness when he started, all of a sudden, scoring goals as City swept the rest of the Premier League aside this season. There had been points when he worried that the injury would rob him of something, that he would return somehow diminished, and yet here he was, better than ever.Gundogan has won 10 trophies at City. Saturday offers the opportunity for one more, and a bit of validation.Pool photo by Clive BrunskillTo report on a game is to suspend emotion. It sounds deeply unconvincing, but it is true: From experience, what matters in the 89th minute of watching your team in a major final is not whether it holds on to a lead or staves off a defeat, but that you have a decent connection to the Wi-Fi, more than 40 percent of your battery’s life, and a lead section for the story your office expects that is not a complete disaster. The disappointment or delight comes only after the words are written.Personal connections, though, are more complex, harder to suspend; those are the stories that cut through. Whatever happens on Saturday, what will matter most is what always matters on these occasions: reliable Wi-Fi, a conveniently located power socket, a vague idea of something to write.Should Manchester City win, though, the first thought will not be what it means for the power dynamics of the game or where this places Guardiola in the pantheon of history’s greatest coaches. It will be much smaller, much more personal: that this is the moment Gundogan has waited for, that this is the moment he worried he might never get to have, that everything he has been through was, ultimately, worth it.Maybe This New Idea Is a Good Idea?Chelsea’s team rolled into Porto on Thursday afternoon.Violeta Santos Moura/ReutersThis is becoming something of a theme. This week, as you may have noticed, my unstoppable — no, really: We try to get him to take vacations, and he just … doesn’t — colleague Tariq Panja reported that UEFA was exploring the idea of tweaking the format of the Champions League, swapping out the current two-legged semifinals for a weeklong “final four” tournament.To those of you who follow college basketball in the United States, this concept will require no explanation. To those of you who don’t: In lieu of the traditional home-and-away semifinals, followed by a final in a neutral venue, all three matchups would be one and done, held in the same city, over the course of a few days.The reaction to this news, broadly, was predictable: much wailing and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over UEFA’s riding roughshod over the long-suffering, match-going fan. It seemed, to be frank, a little overblown, as if this is just how soccer as a whole is conditioned to greet any change whatsoever nowadays, as the manifestation of some lingering evil.That is not to say the idea is perfect. It is not. The home leg of a semifinal is the biggest game a club can host at its stadium. Abolishing them would deprive tens of thousands of fans every year of an opportunity to attend a genuine, red-letter event. Travel to and accommodation in the predetermined host city every year would be chaotic, and expensive. And mixing fans of four clubs over the course of a week would be a strain on police resources.A change like this could not be imposed from above; it would have to be done in consultation with and with concessions to fans. UEFA would need to demand that cities provide reasonably priced accommodations as a condition of hosting. Flights, too, would have to be made affordable.But none of that is impossible. The idea could work. At the very least, it is surely worthy of discussion. It might be worse than what we have now. It might be tried and deemed to have failed. But there is also a possibility that it might prove better, more dramatic, more compelling.We have spent the last two months railing against the elite teams’ demanding that they play one another more often, claiming that the familiarity will breed contempt, that jeopardy is what makes the Champions League special. Reacting no less furiously to something that would introduce added jeopardy, and make games between the elite ever so slightly rarer, seems incoherent, as if what you are objecting to is not the nature of change, but change itself.Mañana, MañanaA sneak peek at Luis Suárez’s Christmas card to Barcelona’s board.Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesLuis Suárez, deep down, will not be impressed. The Uruguayan striker was unceremoniously dumped by Barcelona last summer, the club deciding that he was so old and so expensive that it would — despite the protestations of Lionel Messi — be a relief to offload him onto Atlético Madrid.A year later, of course, it has worked out quite nicely for Suárez: He scored the goal, last Saturday, that gave Atlético its first title in La Liga since 2014. That his exit still rankles, though, is clear: The sweat from that game had barely dried before he was suggesting that Barcelona had “undervalued” him.That will only be exacerbated by the fact that, a year later, Barcelona has at last identified a replacement. To take over from the then-33-year-old and thus over-the-hill Suárez, the club has plumped for the, er, 32-year-old Sergio Agüero. In public, Suárez has given the move his “complete support.” In private, he cannot fail to not to see the irony.That is not to say there is no sense in Barcelona’s apparent transfer policy this summer. In addition to Agüero, the club is hoping to add Georginio Wijnaldum (30) and the 27-year-old Dutch forward Memphis Depay. Eric García, a 20-year-old defender, is the only notable introduction of youth into a squad in desperate need of rejuvenation.It appears that Sergio Agüero will pursue his next trophy at Barcelona.Pool photo by Peter PowellWhat unites all four, of course, is the fact that they will not cost Barcelona a cent in transfer fees. All of them are out of contract. Their salaries may be burdensome, but they represent a chance to bulk out the team on a shoestring. Given Barcelona’s precipitous financial situation, adding four players for nothing would seem to be smart business.And yet the suspicion lingers that none of this solves the problem. Both Agüero and Wijnaldum are too old to have any resale value at all when the time comes for them to leave. Depay, too, will depreciate quickly. Barcelona, once again, is taking the short-term path when salvation lies in the long: selling off whatever aging stars they can this year, adding youth where possible, and starting the long, slow process of rebuilding.He might have had his revenge, but Barcelona was not wrong, last summer, to release Suárez. He is in the twilight of his career. He was earning a lot of money. That was not the mistake (though selling him to Atlético was, clearly, foolhardy). The mistake is replacing him with a player of exactly the same profile, solving today’s problem without thinking about tomorrow.Penalties Are Easy NowVillarreal players who made their penalties charging the goalkeeper who finally stopped one, Gerónimo Rulli.Pool photo by Aleksandra SzmigielAt the point when Gerónimo Rulli, an actual goalkeeper, stepped up to dispatch what was presumably the first penalty of his career with all the practiced élan of a seasoned striker, it felt as if the Europa League final might go on forever.Manchester United and Villarreal had played out a grinding 1-1 draw over the course of 120 minutes and were now seemingly inseparable even by penalties. All 11 Villareal players had scored — those who seemed nervous and those who seemed calm, the youngsters and the veterans, the forwards and the defenders. Even Raúl Albiol, who has apparently transmogrified into a weary fisherman.And all 10 of United’s outfield players had matched them. Of those, Luke Shaw alone had any real reason to feel fortunate, his shot squirming away from Rulli’s left arm and nestling, with a sigh of relief, in the corner of the goal. The rest had all been picture perfect: precise and powerful, penalties as executed by machines.It was David De Gea who broke the streak, a cruel inversion of the usual law that goalkeepers are supposed to be heroes in penalty shootouts, not villains. As the inquests into United’s defeat began, the line between success and failure felt grotesquely thin: How dare Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, the United manager, not have factored in that his goalkeeper might not be great at taking penalties?De Gea’s failure, though, highlighted just how good all of the other penalties had been. This seems to happen more and more now — penalty shootouts in which more than the traditional five are required, in which all of the players seem to have the technique and the poise to convert, even under intense pressure.It is worth asking why that might be. Players, generally, are technically better than they were a couple of decades ago. Clubs practice shootouts more often (though not Villarreal, as it happens). Managers focus intently on the psychology of their squads, readying them for these high-pressure moments. And does that mean that we might need to find an alternative to penalties? Asking goalkeepers to take penalties is, after all, not too far removed from the way of settling ties soccer used to have: the toss of a coin. There must, somewhere, be a better option.CorrespondenceWe start on an existential note from Tse Wei Lim: “There is something very capitalist, or perhaps Shakespearean, about the idea that Atlético, having learned to excel in La Liga, should now attempt to excel in Europe. Is there anything wrong with a club being content with domestic excellence and a profound sense of identity?”There is not, not at all, and this is something that soccer as a whole might do well to consider (and I include myself in that). Not achieving the ultimate success — if that is what the Champions League represents — does not consequentially make you a failure.Named for Madrid and dressing like Spain: lots of letters about Real Salt Lake this week.Andy Clayton-King/Associated PressA lively exchange of views followed the discussion of team names in Major League Soccer. Ryan Humphries believes those that work “build on European names without pilfering them: Columbus Crew and my hometown Philadelphia Union shine because they embody the idea of a united front, just as in Manchester and Newcastle, but in a distinctly American way. This is opposed to Real Salt Lake or Sporting Kansas City, which really sound like Gucci knockoff identities.”(This is a great phrase and I will, sadly, be stealing it without attribution.)Joey Klonowski, meanwhile, suggests “the best team names capture the history or iconography of their city. In America, that’s possible with American-style names (Portland Thorns, Chicago Fire) or with Euro-style names (Minnesota United).” I agree, though the Fire thing is weird: Why celebrate an event that destroyed a city? You wouldn’t turn Napoli into the Naples Volcanoes, would you?And more disdain for Real Salt Lake from Don Waugaman. The most egregious example, Don wrote, of “an attempt to impose a borrowed form of authenticity on a product is Real Salt Lake, a direct rip-off of one of the world’s biggest soccer teams in a country that was founded on anti-monarchism. Couldn’t we at least have gone with ‘Republica Salt Lake’?” Or, to follow the Fire example, maybe the Salt Lake Winter Olympics Bid Scandal.That’s all for this week. I’ll flick through your questions and comments and ideas while I’m enjoying the — checks weather app — rain in Porto. More

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      Champions League: Deep Pockets, Deep Benches, English Winners

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      Manchester City and Chelsea seal an all-Premier League final thanks in part to resources and rosters that no club, not even their biggest rivals, can match.MANCHESTER, England — Edouard Mendy’s palm would still have been stinging from the Karim Benzema shot he had saved seconds before as his Chelsea teammates advanced down the field. N’Golo Kanté exchanged passes with Timo Werner, parting Real Madrid’s defense. Kai Havertz’s delicate chip clipped the bar and fell, gentle as a feather, onto Werner’s head.By the end of Wednesday’s game, Chelsea’s superiority would be painfully apparent, its place in the final of the Champions League its ample and just reward. Mason Mount would add a second goal, but there might have been many more. Havertz alone might have had three. Thomas Tuchel’s Chelsea cut Real Madrid apart with an ease that, at times, bordered on embarrassing.“They played better,” Casemiro, the anchor of Real Madrid’s overworked midfield would say. Thibaut Courtois, the Madrid goalkeeper, simply described Chelsea as “the superior team.” But in that space between Mendy’s save and Werner’s goal, what would grow into a chasm was but a sliver. All that separated this result from another, quite different, was an inch or two.Sergio Ramos and Real Madrid were swept aside at Chelsea.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt had been the same in Manchester’s springtime snow the previous night. Riyad Mahrez had given Manchester City the lead only a minute or two after Paris St.-Germain had thought, wrongly, that it had won a penalty. From that point, City was immaculate. In hindsight, its victory, too, seemed predetermined, inevitable.But in that moment — had the ball struck Oleksandr Zinchenko a few inches lower; had P.S.G. been able to capitalize on the pressure it had exerted in the opening exchanges — everything turned on nothing more than the bounce of a ball, the precise placement of an arm.The nature of sports determines that, in large part, interpretation is downstream from outcome. The explanation for and the understanding of how a result came about is retrofitted, reverse engineered, from the unassailable fact of the scoreline itself.The assumption, in the case of this week’s Champions League semifinals, is that the evident supremacy of Manchester City and Chelsea would have told regardless: that Chelsea would have created those chances even if Benzema had scored; that City would have possessed the wit and the imagination to overcome conceding an unjust penalty.Manchester City has the deepest squad in the world, allowing it to swap out one star for another at any time.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat is possible, of course. Make no mistake: Chelsea and Manchester City most definitely are better teams than Real Madrid and Paris St.-Germain. They are more complete, more coherent, smarter, fitter, better drilled. But at this level, among the handful of the greatest teams in world soccer, there is no such thing as a vast difference. There are only fine margins.That is what Pep Guardiola, the Manchester City coach, meant on Tuesday night when he said that there can be “something in the stars” in the Champions League. Strange things happen. The best team does not win. The dice roll. Games and destinies hinge on the merest details: a stroke of luck, a narrow offside, a player slipping as he takes a penalty.It is Guardiola’s job, of course, to do all he can to make sure his team is not susceptible to the vicissitudes of fate, to ensure that the players at his disposal are talented enough, that his tactical scheme is effective enough, that his squad is fit enough to minimize the power of what is, in effect, random chance. But most managers accept there is a limit to what they can do: Rafael Benítez, who won the Champions League with Liverpool, saw his job as getting his team to the semifinals. After that, he knew, to some extent he had to trust to luck.What is clear, though, is that increasingly those fine margins are falling in favor of English teams. Before the year 2000, there had never been a European Cup or Champions League final contested between teams from the same country. Since then, there have been eight: three all-Spanish finals (2000, 2014, 2016), one each for Italy (2003) and Germany (2013); and three for England (2008, 2019 and, now, 2021).That concentration, of course, reflects not only the preponderance of teams from western Europe’s major leagues in the competition — those four countries now supply half of the teams that comprise the tournament’s group stage — but serves to demonstrate the shifting power balance between them, evidence of which league possesses the mix of tactical nous, technical virtuosity and sheer physicality to take center stage.When Italian teams led the world in tactics, they tended to dominate the Champions League. Spain’s golden generation, combined with first the brilliance of Lionel Messi and then Real Madrid’s second-generation Galacticos, were so technically gifted that no master plan could stifle them, until Germany’s homespun counter-pressing approach punched a way through. The Premier League’s best years have come when its traditional athleticism is married to cutting-edge tactics and technique, imported from continental Europe.That is precisely what has happened over the last few years, of course. England is now home to most of the world’s finest coaches, Guardiola and Tuchel among them. It first adopted and then advanced the German pressing style — and in Guardiola’s case, Spanish-inspired possession — marrying it with England’s long-cherished virtues of industry and physicality and both acquiring and developing players of sufficient technical brilliance to pull it off.For all of that to happen, though, England relied on its primacy in a fourth — and perhaps most significant — factor: resources. It should be no surprise that the Premier League is now anticipating a second all-English final in three years, both in the Champions League and, potentially, in the second-tier Europa League, too.Its teams, after all, have access to the sort of revenue that is unimaginable to their peers on continental Europe, thanks largely to the income from the Premier League’s gargantuan television deals. It means that, while Real Madrid and Bayern Munich and the rest can buy the same quality of player as England, only the Premier League’s elite can buy them in a certain quantity.That trend has become more pronounced, more obvious, in the age of the pandemic. The Premier League has been able to absorb the impact far better than any of its peers. And the two teams that have been able to outlast everyone else in the Champions League have been able to ride it out better than anyone.Three days before facing P.S.G. in the second leg of the Champions League semifinals, Manchester City traveled to Crystal Palace. Though it is within touching distance of claiming the Premier League title, Pep Guardiola’s team is not there quite yet: There was still something riding on the game. And yet the team he named contained only one player — Fernandinho — who would face P.S.G. City still won, comfortably.It has been a similar story for much of the last six months. Guardiola has regularly changed five, six or seven players between games, with little or no drop-off in performance or result. No other team — in England, let alone Europe — can call on that sort of depth.There is a reason that City seems so fresh, so cogent, at a time when teams across Europe are gasping for air, desperately cobbling together teams from the players they have available. The defensive partnership Real Madrid played in its semifinal against Chelsea was the 14th different combination it has used in the last 20 games. City, by contrast, could allow Ruben Días and John Stones to take the weekend off, saving them for battles ahead.Chelsea does not quite compare — seven of the players who took the field against Real Madrid had faced Fulham over the weekend — but its durability is no surprise when you consider that it spent more than $250 million on strengthening its squad last summer, as most of the rest of the game wrestled with the economic shortfall caused by the pandemic. Tuchel could leave Hakim Ziyech and Christian Pulisic on the bench on Wednesday, just in case he needed an infusion of talent worth north of $100 million.None of this, of course, is to diminish what these teams have achieved, to suggest that they do not deserve their place in the final, or to downplay the work their coaches have done in taking them to European soccer’s showpiece game. Indeed, in many ways, City-Chelsea is the perfect final for the year that soccer has had: that, at the end, the two teams left standing were those best placed to weather the storm, to endure the compact, draining schedule, that found that games that hung in the balance were weighted, ever so slightly, in their favor. More

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      Champions League Final: The Rich Get Richer

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      Seismic shocks to European soccer’s landscape have turned Saturday’s Champions League final between Manchester City and Chelsea into a sign of things to come.The shadows are drawing in across Europe.Inter Milan must shed millions of dollars from its salary bill. One or more of its brightest lights will have to be sold. Antonio Conte, the coach who only a few weeks ago ended the club’s decade-long wait for an Italian championship, does not intend to stick around to see his title-winning team broken up.Barcelona, a billion dollars in debt, must build a squad to meet its princely ambitions on a pauper’s budget. The club’s wish list does not extend much beyond the giveaway aisle: Sergio Agüero, Georginio Wijnaldum, Eric García and Memphis Depay are all out of contract, all available for nothing, a cut-price cavalry.Juventus must strip back in order to retool. Real Madrid’s president, Florentino Pérez, knows his fans crave a Galáctico but also that he cannot afford one. The usual delirium of transfer rumors swirls around Manchester United and Liverpool, but some players will have to go in order for others to arrive.It is not just the grand houses that are feeling the pinch. The Lille team that won the French title will be stripped for parts. The rest of Ligue 1 faces a fire sale. Spending in the January transfer window was a fraction of its normal level across all of Europe’s top five leagues.After years of plenty, money is tight, and times are straitened, for everybody. Almost everybody.Manchester City paid more than $80 million to add Rúben Dias, who became the cornerstone of its defense.Pool photo by Peter PowellTimo Werner, center, was the prime acquisition in Chelsea’s free-spending pandemic summer.Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockThere remain a handful of bulls in soccer’s bear market, not just immune to but liable to benefit from the recession unfurling all around them. Saturday’s Champions League final features two of them. A little more than a decade ago, it seemed certain that the 2010s would be dominated by the coming of Manchester City and Chelsea. Between them, they represented soccer’s new dawn: Chelsea, bankrolled by the wealth of its billionaire Russian owner, Roman Abramovich, and City, transformed by the functionally bottomless riches of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. For a while, their meetings were referred to as El Cashico, always with the slight ghost of a sneer: a confected nickname for an ersatz imitation of an authentic rivalry.Indeed, when Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan first arrived at Manchester City, it was Chelsea where he first trained his sights. Chelsea had been so confident of signing Robinho, the Brazil forward, from Real Madrid that its website had started selling jerseys emblazoned with his name. When the Spanish club noticed, it withdrew from the deal. City, eager to make a statement of intent, duly stepped in.The next summer, City tried to go a step further, identifying John Terry — Chelsea’s captain — as its priority transfer target. The club was, it was reported, prepared to pay him a then-unthinkable $300,000 a week. He chose not to accept, eventually, but City at least managed to bloody Chelsea’s nose: Abramovich was forced to reward Terry’s loyalty by making him the club’s highest-paid player.It took much longer for an on-field rivalry to develop. The clubs did, as predicted, emerge as the prime forces in English soccer in the 2010s: Between them, they have won eight of the past 12 Premier League titles. But rarely did they find themselves in direct opposition. More often than not, one waxed as the other waned, and the greatest threats to their immediate ambitions came from the ranks of the established elite both were seeking to usurp.Now, though, the situation has changed. Over the last year, the landscape of both English and European soccer has undergone a fundamental shift, one that has diminished almost all of their peers and leaves both Chelsea and City in a position of almost unparalleled strength. This Champions League final is not the culmination of a rivalry. It is, instead, a harbinger of what the future might hold.They owe their prospects of uncontested primacy to a confluence of factors. Foremost, of course, is the economic impact of the pandemic, and the year of empty stadiums and balance-sheet black holes.To assemble their star-studded teams, Chelsea and Manchester City have relied on some of the deepest pockets in soccer.Pool photo by Shaun BotterillEstimates vary, but most suggest that the pandemic has cost Europe’s clubs somewhere in the region of $5 billion, almost half of it borne by the 20 richest teams on the continent, some of whom — Real, Barcelona and Juventus in particular — were already struggling under the weight of mismanagement.City and Chelsea, because of the largess of their owners, seemed blissfully unaffected by that contraction. City spent $140 million on central defenders alone at the start of this season as its payroll hit an English-record high: almost $500 million-a-year, at a time when most of its rivals were trying to limit their spending.Chelsea spent more last summer than any other team in Europe, and almost as much as all 18 teams of the Bundesliga combined. Chelsea paid out more in fees, in fact, than it had at any point under Abramovich, taking advantage of being a rare predator in a world of prey to acquire the likes of Timo Werner and Kai Havertz effectively unopposed.There is little reason to believe, given the limited horizons across much of the rest of Europe, that this summer will prove any different. Among their peers, there is a growing acceptance that competing for talent with Chelsea, Manchester City and Paris St.-Germain is no longer feasible.Combating that, of course, was part of the rationale behind the short-lived and unmourned Super League. Buried in the aborted competition’s founding document were a set of specific provisions on spending that went way beyond the Financial Fair Play regulations that govern the Champions League.There would be “zero tolerance” for the manipulation of balance sheets. Expenditure on players, coaches and salaries would be strictly capped — at 55 percent of club revenues, or 27.5 percent of the highest-earning club, an effort to favor those teams with the largest fan bases — and clubs would have to commit to being profitable over a three-year period.The rules would be overseen and enforced by a monitoring body, responsible for auditing member clubs’ finances, ruling on sponsorship agreements and sanctioning anyone who transgressed. It was to be called the Financial Stability Group.City was part of the project, of course, but it was also, as those involved in its creation admit, its target. The Super League was not just a power play to grab a greater share of soccer’s revenues; it was also, for some of those involved, the only way to level a distorted playing field.Its collapse, though, has weighted the dice ever further in the favor of the new elite.Will even the dream of a Champions League final soon be out of reach for all but a few teams?Pool photo by David RamosManchester City and Chelsea had already, in effect, been given a free pass when UEFA announced, last year, that it was suspending the financial regulations that previously prevented both teams from making full use of their owners’ wealth. The losses across Europe were so broad and so great, it said, that barely any teams would be able to meet its criteria.UEFA is adamant that the system is not defunct. It says it is currently examining how to redraft and improve its cost-control rules to give them a “stronger focus on the present and the future.” European soccer’s governing body has said that it believes “wages and transfer fees, which represent the majority of clubs’ costs, must be reduced to acceptable levels.”But in their current absence there are benefits for those in a position of strength. First, by stockpiling talent now, they can in effect get in before the door closes. Second, and most important, they have an opportunity to shape the new rules to their needs.City, Chelsea and P.S.G. had long felt that the previous system of Financial Fair Play did not so much apply to them as apply at them. The original idea, their logic ran, of ensuring European soccer did not take on too much debt had been co-opted by a cartel of the game’s established powers to prevent clubs from investing in their teams, an effort to set in stone their position at the pinnacle.This time, though, as a consequence of the Super League, it is City — who in withdrawing started the collapse of the breakaway — and P.SG. — which never joined it — who can expect to have a seat at the table when the new rules are discussed. Whatever form of financial regulation is introduced, it is more likely to represent their interests than the ostracized old elite. Chelsea, its ambitions aligned with those two, will benefit by proxy.That, of course, is what those clubs who find their positions of power under threat fear: not that the collapse of the Super League will lead to some utopian, egalitarian vision of soccer’s future, but that one set of vested interests will be exchanged for another.Privately, owners admit there is little prospect now of holding back City, in particular. Some in England believe the club could win the Premier League for the next decade if it continues to use its wealth as adroitly as it has. In Europe, the fear is that the Champions League will become the exclusive preserve of the new elite, rather than the old.To some, of course, that may be a good thing, a welcome change after years of dominance by a handful of entitled and presumptuous superclubs. To others, it will have the feel of yet another step toward some grim vision of soccer’s future, where the global game becomes the plaything of oligarchs and plutocrats and nation states.Either way, the path from there to here has been laid, irrevocably, over the last year as the pandemic hit and the money dried up and the regulations loosened and the establishment crumbled. The new future is here, and it starts on Saturday. More

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      Juventus Finds Its Fall Guy in Andrea Pirlo

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      Andrea Pirlo was given a difficult task and failed at it. But if Juventus misses out on next season’s Champions League, it won’t be entirely his fault.The jokes almost wrote themselves. Last summer, Juventus announced that it had installed Andrea Pirlo as coach of its under-23 team. It was a thoroughly sensible idea: the perfect place for a beloved former player to cut his teeth in a new phase of his career, the ideal spot for him to take his first job in management.The same, at the time, could not be said for what came next. Ten days after getting that job, Pirlo was handed another, this time as coach of Juventus’s first team, the one that included not only several of his former teammates, but Cristiano Ronaldo, too. And so the jokes came, cheap and quick and irresistible. Pirlo must have really impressed in those eight days! No wonder he got the job: He’d never lost a game!The official explanation was only a little more convincing. “Today’s choice is based on the belief that Pirlo has what it takes to lead an expert and talented squad to new successes,” a Juventus club statement read. There seemed to be only three feasible, overlapping explanations, and none of them reflected especially well on the team’s hierarchy.One — the most likely — was that it had decided to fire his predecessor, Maurizio Sarri, with little time to find a replacement who was not already in-house. Pirlo just so happened to be in the right place at the right time.The second explanation held that Pirlo was a place-holder, willing to do the job for a year or two, until a more suitable candidate became available.And third was the thought that, after nine Serie A titles in nine years, Juventus had come to the conclusion that it could employ anyone it wanted — the least talented of the Backstreet Boys, a friendly spaniel, or maybe, at a push, Sam Allardyce — and still win the league.Whatever the club’s thinking, its folly was ruthlessly exposed over the subsequent nine months. It is not just that Juventus has ceded its title, or even that it has surrendered its dynasty so meekly. It is that the decline has been far steeper, far quicker and far more consequential than the club could possibly have imagined.On Saturday, Juventus hosts Inter Milan — the team coached by its former manager, Antonio Conte, and overseen by its former technical director, Giuseppe Marotta, and that has swept to the championship this year — knowing that it must win if it is to retain any realistic ambition of playing in the Champions League next season. Otherwise, barring a collapse from one or more of Atalanta, A.C. Milan or Napoli, the ignominy of the Europa League beckons in Turin.Juventus currently lies in fifth place in Italy, just outside the Champions League places for next season.Alessandro Di Marco/EPA, via ShutterstockThe likelihood, of course, is that much of the blame for that will be placed squarely on Pirlo’s shoulders. Already, his future is the subject of intense scrutiny in the Italian news media: There have been various reports in the last few weeks of emergency talks inside the club to establish whether he will be allowed to fulfill the second and final year of his contract.Outside, too, he seems to have been identified as the source of the problem. This week, a handful of Juventus fans confronted — though that is not quite the right word for what was, basically, quite a congenial conversation — the veteran goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon outside a training facility the club was using and asked if it was true that the squad had given up on its rookie manager. Buffon assured the supporters it was not true.Regardless, Pirlo is experienced enough to know this is how it works. The manager is always the fall guy, and particularly in these circumstances. Juventus had won nine consecutive titles with experienced managers at its helm. The year it appointed a neophyte, it collapsed. It is hardly outrageous to believe those two things might be connected.For all the significance they are afforded, for all that we hang on their every word and elevate the best of them to guru status, managers do not make quite as much difference as we think. There have been several academic studies on how much of an impact they have on results. The book “Soccernomics” held that managers account for, at most, 8 percent of a team’s performance. “The Numbers Game” had it slightly higher. Neither estimate puts a manager’s significance close to the importance of money, or luck.That is not to say managers do not matter. Elite soccer, in particular, is a sport of the very finest of margins; often, all that separates great triumph from bitter disappointment is a momentary lapse of concentration here or a little extra fitness there. A single, controllable factor that affects 8 percent of the outcome matters a great deal.Inter Milan, led by the former Juventus manager Antonio Conte, won its first Italian title in a decade this season.Matteo Bazzi/EPA, via ShutterstockPirlo would, on the surface, seem to be proof of that. Juventus had what appeared to be an unassailable advantage over its domestic competition for almost a decade, and yet when it traded an experienced manager for an inexperienced one, it slumped not by a few points, but from first to, potentially, fifth. Eight percent is the difference, it turns out, between Serie A titles and the Europa League.A little deeper, though, the picture is more complex. The reason that soccer tends to react to disappointment by changing the manager is that it offers the illusion of the simple solution: Fix that 8 percent and everything else will follow. In the case of Juventus — in every case, for that matter — it does not quite work like that.The club that Pirlo inherited was not quite the smooth-running machine it appeared. His appointment itself was proof of that: He was hired on short notice because the incumbent, Sarri, had proved stylistically unsuited to the squad. Pirlo, from the start, appeared equally ill matched: The soccer he wanted to play did not seem to be the sort of soccer that fit the players at his disposal.Pirlo didn’t create the problems at Juventus, but he didn’t fix them, either.Alberto Lingria/ReutersThat sort of disjointed, disconnected thinking has infected almost everything Juventus has done for some time, perhaps since it last reached the Champions League final in 2017. The signing of Ronaldo — a hugely expensive indulgence, even if his performances preclude its being called a mistake — is the most glaring example. But there are many more.Juventus has spent the past few years desperately trying to offload whomever it can in order to reduce its salary commitments and to comply with European soccer’s financial regulations, often relying on curious swaps to do so: João Cancelo for Manchester City’s Danilo, Miralem Pjanic for Barcelona’s Arthur. It has left many on the squad feeling unwanted and uninvested.At one point, Juventus lent Gonzalo Higuaín to A.C. Milan and then Chelsea, only to welcome him back when Sarri was appointed. It then spent a summer trying to offload the playmaker Paulo Dybala, arguably its most gifted attacker other than Ronaldo, in order to pay Higuaín’s wages.Dybala stayed and, eventually, Higuaín left. Last season, Juventus was forced to leave Emre Can off its Champions League squad — without offering him any warning — because its playing resources were so bloated. He departed soon after, along with a clutch of other exiled veterans.Even the signing of Ronaldo — a commercial success and, broadly, a sporting one, too — has hardly been an exercise in joined-up thinking. At this stage in his career, Ronaldo is effectively a pared-down attacking spearhead; he cannot, or at least does not, run and press as he might have done a decade ago. And yet Juventus has presented him with two coaches whose approaches work only if attackers do just that: first Sarri, and now Pirlo.Will Cristiano Ronaldo accompany Juventus into the Europa League next season?Marco Bertorello/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is easy to see why Juventus would want to assume that Pirlo is the source of all of its troubles, to decide that changing the coach, swapping out the rookie for a more garlanded name, has the air of a panacea. It was a gamble, and it backfired. He wasn’t good enough, not yet. It was too much, too soon.That might all be true, but it is not the root of the problem. Pirlo is not a cause; he is a symptom. The issue, for Juventus, is not with the man who got the job, it is with the people who gave it to him, whose expertise runs so deep that they took a coach with eight days’ experience and threw him into one of the most challenging jobs in Europe, and expected it all to work out fine.A coach, after all, makes only 8 percent of the difference. The other 92 percent comes from the structure and the organization and the thinking behind the manager. Perhaps, as Juventus confronts its demise, the blame should be apportioned on similar lines.The Meaning of the CupBrendan Rodgers and Jamie Vardy haven’t given up on the cup’s magic.Pool photo by Richard HeathcoteIt is the memories passed down between the generations that slowly, steadily accrete into something that becomes a tradition, and so it is with the greatest tradition in English soccer: worrying about the diminishing majesty of the F.A. Cup.Those who were there speak in hushed tones of the year that Manchester United was forced to pull out because the authorities wanted the team to play in a tournament in Brazil instead, or of the time that Liverpool sent out a squad of under-7s because the club had a more important game in Qatar the next day.But every club has its own story: a set of reserves sent out to play so as to save the first team for the league; a manager admitting that the cup is a distraction from the much more important business of securing 14th place, rather than 15th, in the Championship.Nowhere is this played out in more somber tones than on British television, where the only thing that interrupts the self-flagellation about the demise of the magic of the cup is the advertising proclaiming that it is, in fact, alive and well. It is a rich irony, because what has destroyed the cup more than anything else is television, both because of the money it has poured into the Premier League and because of its insatiable demand for content.One of the things that made the cup final special was the fact that it had a whole day reserved for it: We called it “cup final day.” There is no better gauge of its reduction in status than the fact that this year the game — Chelsea vs. Leicester on Saturday — will be squeezed in between Southampton’s meeting with Fulham and Brighton’s match with West Ham.Still, there is hope. The other problem faced by the F.A. Cup these days is that it is almost always won by a team that considers it, at best, a consolation prize and, at worst, an afterthought, as Chelsea will if it emerges victorious at Wembley this weekend. It is nice for Chelsea, winning the F.A. Cup, but its eyes are cast on much brighter horizons.Things are different for its opponent, Leicester City. Leicester has never won the cup. It came close, three times, in the 1960s, but lost in each final it reached. For some time — possibly until it won the Premier League in 2016 — those defeats defined the club, at least in the eyes of a generation of fans. This weekend is a long-awaited chance to address that longing.Winning the cup would mean a lot to Leicester — so much, in fact, that it might even have the power to change the meaning of the cup itself, to prove that the rumors of its demise have been exaggerated, that it does not have a fixed value, but rather that it signifies rather more in some contexts than in others and that, in the right hands, it still matters very much indeed.Glory DaysSporting, which ended a long title drought this week in Lisbon.Pedro Nunes/ReutersFrom a Premier League perspective, this pandemic season has not brought quite so much chaos as anticipated. Manchester City, for the third time in four years, stands as English champion. It is the same in Germany, where Robert Lewandowski’s Bayern Munich picked up a ninth consecutive championship last weekend.Elsewhere, though, the picture is different. Inter Milan had waited 11 years to win Serie A. Lille is two games from winning its first French title in a decade. Atlético Madrid needs two more wins to claim the Spanish championship for the first time since 2014.But no club had waited quite so long as Sporting Lisbon (yes, yes, I know: Sporting Clube de Portugal). Until this week, it had been 19 years since the club last won the league, almost two decades of watching its two great rivals, F.C. Porto and Benfica, trade the title between them.Under Rúben Amorim, its promising coach, Sporting has ended that purgatory in style, going through the season undefeated. That it did so in a season of empty stadiums is a shame, of course, but it did not seem to diminish the celebrations in Lisbon on Tuesday.A word, too, for Ajax, champion yet again in the Netherlands. Rather than mount the trophy it received for winning the Eredivisie in its museum, the club chose to melt it down and create tens of thousands of little stars, one to be sent to each season-ticket holder, a reward for their perseverance in this most difficult of years, something to hold close as a memento of the year they had to stay apart.Not All Ideas Are Bad IdeasNever, it seems, underestimate the vengeance of a governing body scorned. In the month or so since the chaotic life and unmourned death of the European Super League, UEFA has been unsparing in its pursuit of the dozen clubs who concocted the plan, its own little Catilines.Nine of the teams were made to sign a humiliating mea culpa, repudiating their rebellion and promising never to do it again. Particular venom has been reserved, though, for Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus, the three holdouts. UEFA has commissioned a disciplinary panel to decide their fate, and the domestic leagues of Spain and Italy may follow suit. The latter is already threatening to deny Juventus a license for next season unless it performs repentance.There is no doubt, of course, that much of the anger over the proposed breakaway was justified. There is little reason to sympathize at all with any of the clubs involved. But that does not mean that UEFA is best advised to use its new power — or, rather, its long-term foes’ sudden impotence — as nothing more than a cat o’ nine tails.Bringing the mutineers to heel provides short-term satisfaction, of course. It flexes the muscles, slakes the thirst for vindication. But it also risks failing to engage with some of the ideas that lay beneath the self-interest and opportunism of the breakaway — some of which, like proper financial controls, are worthy of consideration.Fans in Manchester after City clinched the Premier League title on Tuesday. Soccer’s current economic systems work just fine for the fans and their club.Jon Super/Associated PressMost of all, though, UEFA is in danger of calcifying the status quo, offering it a false status as the final form of the game and demonizing all change at just the point when European soccer needs it most. Not change as devised by the elite, perhaps, but change of some sort.Currently, the economics of the game work for, at most, a couple of dozen clubs: those owned or operated by nation states or individuals of fabulous wealth, and the lesser lights of the Premier League. That is not enough. The central problem with the Super League was that it sought to put a pin in history, to freeze the elite forever as it happens to be now. UEFA’s taste for retribution risks doing precisely the same, but for the game as a whole.CorrespondenceA brilliantly curious question from Bill Eash. “The layout of most Premier League fields includes a small extension outside the playing field,” he points out, correctly. “Most of that surface is sloped to the barriers. I wonder: Are injuries incurred by that design? And what’s its real purpose?”Yes, very occasionally, players hurt themselves by being forced to run at full speed down a hill into a barrier, though thankfully not as often as you would think. And no, I have no real idea why some stadiums — Old Trafford has the starkest off-field slope, I think — are designed like that. I guess it’s to do with drainage, but it has always struck me as a strange idea.Pool photo by Ian WaltonLaurence Guttmacher has a similar “question of culture,” as he put it. “Soccer teams play a man down while someone warms up before entering the pitch. Basketball players enter a game after prolonged periods on the bench. Both sports involve similar physical demands, so why the difference in approach?”I haven’t watched enough basketball benches to confirm this thesis, but if it’s right, my instinct is that it must be rooted in some sort of tradition — soccer players do it because they always have, and basketball players don’t because they never have — and that basketball is probably wrong on this one. It would, I think, be a good idea if the players stretched before coming on. That’s just good sense, isn’t it?Luke Doncic, ready for any type of game to break out.Jerome Miron/USA Today Sports, via ReutersAnd the final one of this orthodoxy-challenging trifecta comes from Carl Lennertz, who asks about the relationship between “the transfer fee versus what the player earns.” This is an especially good one, and it is a subject we should think about more.Essentially, they are totally disconnected. There is no consequential link between a players’ salaries and the fees they can command: A player earning $250,000 a year could cost $50 million to sign; a player on $10 million a year might be given away for some nominal sum. Both are left entirely to the market to decide. I wonder, though, if it might not be a bad idea if that changed, and transfer fees were to become more, well, explicable.By contrast, Rob Haxell is here to pick holes in arguments, particularly my (borrowed) suggestion that there might be ways of reducing the elite teams’ ability to hoard talent. “I wonder how Liverpool would feel about Virgil van Dijk being available on a cut-price deal this summer because they didn’t give him enough playing time?” he wrote, fully aware that an injury exemption would not be an especially difficult thing to draw up. More