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      Europe's Super League Is Gone. What Now?

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      The plan hatched by Europe’s elite clubs was wrong on almost every level, but its architects got one thing right: Soccer’s economy, as it stands, does not work.Sign up for Rory Smith’s weekly newsletter on world soccer, delivered every Friday, at nytimes.com/rory.After all that, there is one thing we still do not know. We know what the dozen venture capitalists and industrialists and petrochemical princelings behind the Super League intended to do. We know what the future they had mapped out would have looked like. We know, or we can at least imagine, the damage they might have done.What we do not know, not really, is why.We have the platitudes, of course, the blandishments offered by Florentino Pérez, the president of Real Madrid, in that brash appearance on a gaudy Spanish talk show: that this was the only way to save soccer, that the rising tide lifts all boats, that there was no other option.And we have the presumption, too, the Occam’s razor explanation: that deep down this was about nothing more than money, the relentless, insatiable, metastasizing pursuit of it, a cynical and grasping attempt to hoard as much of it as possible, made by those who already have far more than most, and far more than they need.But while one of those points is considerably more valid than the other, neither quite satisfactorily explains what united these 12 disparate club owners behind a single, slapdash scheme like the Super League. They have, after all, spent much of the last decade quarreling among themselves. Their motivations, priorities and concerns are all quite different. They are, in the cold light of day, not so much one another’s solutions as they are one another’s problems. So the question stands: Why?It is easiest, perhaps, to divide the 12 into three groups. In one, there are the English teams under American, or American-inflected, ownership: Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal and Tottenham. Their aim is not just to make more money, it is also to spend less of it. They want cost controls, salary caps, financial regulation. They want stable income, and restricted expenditures.Their issue is the presence, in European soccer, of the second group: the outlier teams, Manchester City and Chelsea, backed by owners who would favor the abolition of such limitations. Their principal interest is in using their private wealth to gain a competitive edge. They are not involved in soccer to make money. They care little for the bottom line. They are here to win popular acclaim, and, through it, obtain cultural and political legitimacy.And then there is the third group, comprising the six Spanish and Italian teams. Their problem is not only the bottomless wealth of Manchester City and Chelsea and a few others, but also the existence of the first group. The financial juggernaut that is the Premier League has inflated salaries around Europe. It has placed Real Madrid, Barcelona and the rest at a disadvantage in the transfer market. It has forced them to build up mountains of debt, leaving teams that believe themselves to be in soccer’s front rank facing a second-class future.Florentino Pérez and Real Madrid are in the middle of extensive renovations of the Bernabéu. The Super League was going to help pay for them.Emilio Naranjo/EPA, via ShutterstockClearly, they all decided — some with rather more consideration than others — that a superleague was their way out. The first group could write in various cost-control measures, denting the power of the second group, leveling their private playing field; in exchange, City and Chelsea would get the prestige that made their projects work. The third group, meanwhile, would no longer have to gaze longingly at the Premier League’s broadcasting deals.That it did not work is a blessing, of course. That it was scuttled within 48 hours of its launch — undone, almost immediately, by a startling combination of amateurish planning, botched communications and underestimated backlash — was greeted as a victory for the sport as a whole, a blow delivered by the masses to the aristocrats, a bloody nose for the forces of global capitalism.And, to some extent, that is precisely what it was. The threat of a superleague, in one form or another, has hung like a cloud over European soccer for decades. It has been wheeled out every few years, surfacing in every negotiation over how the money generated by the Champions League, in particular, should be divided.Now that has gone. It is possible that, by the end of this weekend, as either Manchester City or Tottenham celebrates winning the League Cup, as Bayern Munich inches ever closer to yet another Bundesliga title, as Inter Milan closes in on a Serie A crown, all of this will feel like a fever dream. On the surface, it will be behind us. The insurrection will have been defeated, condemned to the past. Everything will be back to normal.Teams left out of the Super League still operate in the same troubled soccer economy.Pool photo by Neil HallBut that is an illusion, because though the Super League never had a chance to play a game — it barely had time to build out a website — it may yet prove the catalyst to the salvation of soccer. It has, after all, stripped the elite of their leverage. They played their cards, and the whole thing became a bluff. Now, for the first time in years, power resides in the collective strength of the game’s lesser lights.They will need to use it. The Super League was wrong on almost every level, but though its architects never quite had the nerve to come out and say it, they did get one thing right. Soccer’s economy and ecosystem, as they stand, do not work.This was recognition of what ultimately explains how 12 teams, in those three distinct groups, could stand together under the same flag, albeit briefly, albeit without seeming to notice that it was adorned with a skull-and-crossbones.The status quo does not work for the American owners who need cost controls. It does not work for the grand old houses of continental Europe, who cannot compete with the Premier League’s riches. And infinitely more important, it does not work for almost everyone else.It does not work for the teams condemned to life as cannon fodder for Manchester City or Paris St.-Germain, or for the domestic competitions withering in the long shadows of the Premier League, La Liga and the Bundesliga, or for the famous names — Ajax and Benfica and Red Star Belgrade — reduced to bit-part roles in European tournaments, ever farther from a return to their glory days.Aleksander Ceferin, the president of UEFA and the man who led the counterattack in what will come to be known as the Sunday-Tuesday War, knows that. The issue of competitive balance is the one that animated his rise to his current position. One of the many ironies of this whole sorry farrago is not only that those whom Ceferin fought know it, too, but that they have given him the perfect opportunity to do something about it.Aleksander Ceferin fought off one challenge this week. Others remain.Richard Juilliart/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThose governing bodies that resisted the Super League make for unlikely heroes. UEFA has, after all, been no less complicit than the domestic leagues and national federations in selling out soccer to the highest bidder. It has, for decades, not only sat by and watched but also actively encouraged the influx of money into the game, never once questioning where it might all be heading.A charitable interpretation would be that all of them were in thrall to, or in fear of, the elite teams. Suddenly, though, there is no longer need to be afraid. Behind Ceferin there is a confederation of governments and executives and players and fans, all of whom have made plain their objection to soccer’s inexorable journey down this same path.Now there is the impetus and the appetite for change: not their change, the kind that would barricade the elite in their palaces, insulating them from the currents and the crisis outside their gates, but change that might allow more teams to benefit from the rewards the breakaway clubs sought to cordon off for themselves.What form that might take is open for discussion. The rolling back of the reforms to the Champions League, passed this week while soccer was engulfed by civil war? A rebalancing of the way money is shared in the Premier League, after years of gradual erosion of the egalitarian principle that stands as the competition’s bedrock? Increased solidarity payments from UEFA across the Continent?Whatever the next move is to be, it requires more than the commitment of all of those who stood against the Super League and the willingness of lawmakers to take action, rather than just to score cheap political points. It also needs fans to establish, among themselves, quite how far they are willing to go, exactly what they mean by change.Wanting your cold nights in Stoke is one thing. Becoming Stoke, a one-time Premier League club now languishing in the middle of the Championship’s table, is quite another.Matthew Childs/ReutersIn those first few hours after the Super League was announced, a narrative took hold, particularly in England. This was, it went, an attempt by American owners to remake soccer in their own image: They wanted a closed league, one more like the N.F.L. or the N.B.A., one in which stability of place brought security of income.The parallel was imperfect, of course; it was, really, nothing more than a shorthand to explain and to demonize the structure of the proposed breakaway. Indeed, if anything, it is the suggestions for changes made in the aftermath of the Super League’s launch and swift collapse that might remake European soccer along more American lines.The prime difference between sports in the United States and soccer in Europe is dynasty. Dominant teams will, occasionally, surface in the major leagues of North America: The Golden State Warriors will win three championships in four seasons; the New England Patriots will sustain their success over nearly two decades.But as a rule, there are checks and balances in place — through player drafts and the presence of a salary cap — to ensure that today’s weak have at least a chance to become tomorrow’s strong.Soccer has no such mechanisms. It is, instead, driven by a desire not just for success now, but for success in perpetuity. It is a sport defined by dynasty. It is that which encourages not just teams like Barcelona and Real Madrid — owned, in theory, by members, and therefore run by presidents who must seek re-election — but also private entities, like Juventus and Manchester United, to spend recklessly in the pursuit of success.It is not possible, the executives of those teams know, to sit out a season. It is not possible to rebuild slowly and carefully toward some distant aim. Teams are expected to compete now, to contend now, to win now. If they do not, managers are fired and players are sold and new managers are hired and new players are bought.A season in which Bayern Munich does not win the Bundesliga is a disaster. Juventus, this summer, might fire a rookie coach because he has not won Serie A — not just in his first season at the club, but in his first season, full stop. Liverpool has been treated, at times, as a laughingstock because a lengthy injury list stopped it from winning a second Premier League title a year after claiming its first in 30 years.This is the sport’s dominant ethos: That, as Alex Ferguson used to put it, once a trophy is won, you forget about it and seek to win the next. But while that is part of soccer’s appeal — that one victory is never enough — it gives those that run its clubs a problem: There is always another triumph to plan, always another peak to conquer, always another player to buy. That is, ultimately, what fans have been conditioned to expect, and so that is what they demand.Pérez, instinctively, understands that. It is why, in his second television appearance of the week, he mentioned that, without a Super League, Real Madrid could not countenance signing players like Kylian Mbappé or Erling Haaland. The finances, in his eyes, simply do not work (though that has, in fact, never stopped him before).It was a transparent ploy, a form of emotional blackmail. Pérez knows that what matters most to Real Madrid fans is that the club should be making the sort of signings, building the sorts of teams, that can win the Champions League — not just this year, but next, as well. Give us what we want, he said, and we can give you what you want.But that approach is not sustainable in a model where wealth is spread more evenly. That does not make it bad; it does not even make it worse than what soccer has now. But that does make it different and, without changes in the way the sport is governed and in fan expectations, might also make it unsustainable.Would Real Madrid fans accept a few lean years as their club cut costs? Would the fans of any Super League club?Jose Breton/Associated PressIt would not be possible, of course, for the elite to be forced to relinquish more of their revenue in a game that was still open to investments of the sort that supercharged the rise of Chelsea and Manchester City. It would not hold: All that would happen is that Everton or Newcastle United or Harrogate Town, with the aid of new backers, would trample unencumbered across the landscape.More complex is that fans would have to redefine what success looks like. When Manchester United fans ask for the introduction of the admirable 50+1 rule — borrowed from German soccer — are they prepared to tolerate what follows? A watering-down of their own team’s chances of trophies?Will the Liverpool fans sincerely decrying their owners’ greed be happy to have a year or two of seventh-place finishes as the team rebuilds? Do the Chelsea fans on the streets want a world where a good decade means one league title? It is this that Pérez was driving at: He has to spend money because his fans demand it, so to meet that demand, he needs more money.The desire to share more of the lavish fruit of soccer’s growth is sincerely held, and it is morally sound. The idea of a dozen or more teams harboring genuine championship hopes at the start of every season — rather than the handful of clubs that do so now — sounds faintly idyllic, like a return to soccer’s roots.But it would come at a cost: It would mean that at the end of the campaign, your traditionally elite team would be less likely to be the one standing tall. The redistribution of wealth means the redistribution of success, too.Here, then, is another thing we do not know: Do those fans who stared down their owners this week for their greed and their ambition and their hubris want this to be the start of something new, or simply the safeguarding of the old? How much soccer can ever change will depend on the answer.That’s all for this week: There has, after all, only been one story in town. I’ve had plenty of communication on the Super League, but perhaps it is best gathered together next week. Any thoughts on the week that shook soccer should go to askrory@nytimes.com. Say what you like about the whole thing, but it’s been great for my Twitter interactions. And you’ll never guess the subject of this week’s Set Piece Menu.Have a great weekend. More

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      The European Super League Explained

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      Whether you’re a lifelong fan or an outsider who doesn’t know your Manchesters from your Madrids, we’ve got answers to your pressing questions.A little more than a year after European soccer found a renewed sense of unity in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, the sport now faces its greatest crisis in a generation.Late on Sunday night, 12 of the world’s biggest soccer clubs unveiled a plan to launch what they called the Super League, a closed competition in which they (and their invited guests) would compete against one another while claiming even more of soccer’s billions of dollars in revenue for themselves.The announcement cast doubt not only on the ongoing viability of the Champions League — the sport’s showpiece club competition — but also called into question the very future of the domestic leagues that have been soccer’s cornerstone for more than a century.All of a sudden, it is not clear where soccer is heading, or what it will look like when it gets there. Here, then, is what we know so far.First things first: What is a Super League?The concept has been around for decades: a Continental competition that incorporates all of the most famous names from the Europe’s domestic leagues every year into an event all their own. For a long time, it has effectively been something between an aspiration and a threat. Sunday night, though, was the first time anyone had given it a physical form.Who gets to play in it?So far, there are 12 founding members. The teams that have been the driving force behind the project — Real Madrid, Manchester United, Liverpool and Juventus — have kindly invited eight other clubs to join them: Barcelona and Atlético Madrid from Spain, Inter Milan and A.C. Milan from Italy, and the rest of the Premier League’s self-appointed Big Six: Manchester City, Chelsea, Tottenham and Arsenal.They expect to be joined soon by three more permanent members, though it is not clear yet why those teams have yet to disclose their involvement. Paris St.-Germain in France and the Portuguese giant F.C. Porto were seen as likely candidates, but both have distanced themselves from the project. The organizers are eager to have a team like Bayern Munich, the reigning European champion and one of the world’s biggest clubs, but on Monday, Borussia Dortmund’s chairman said that not only was his team out but also that Bayern agreed with his position.Whatever the final roster, those 15 founding teams will form the league’s bedrock. The full allotment of 20 clubs each season will be fleshed out by a rotating cast of five more teams, chosen through some sort of formula that the organizers haven’t gotten around to deciding just yet.That sounds a lot like the Champions League.It does, to be fair. But the roster for the Champions League is set each year based on clubs’ performance in their domestic leagues. The Super League will have permanent members who face no risk of missing out on either the matches or the profits.The ‘Super League’ AnnouncementTwelve leading European soccer clubs issued a statement on Sunday confirming their plans to form a breakaway league. Here’s what they said at the time.Read DocumentHow will it work?The 20 teams will be split into two divisions — 10 teams in each — and then play one another home-and-away. At the end of the regular season, the top four clubs in each division will progress to a knockout round that will be familiar to viewers of the Champions League. The difference is that those playoffs will be held over the course of four weeks at the end of the season.Will the Super League teams still play in their current domestic leagues?That is absolutely their plan. It may not be the leagues’ plan.Is this about money?Yes. According to their own estimates, each founding member stands to gain around $400 million merely to establish “a secure financial foundation,” four times more than Bayern Munich earned for winning the Champions League last season.But that is just the start, really: The clubs believe that selling the broadcast rights for the Super League, as well as the commercial income, will be worth billions. And it will all go to them, rather than being redistributed to smaller clubs and lesser leagues through European soccer’s governing body, UEFA. At the same time, the value of domestic leagues and their clubs will diminish drastically as they are effectively rendered also-rans every year.Two architects of the Super League: Liverpool’s John Henry and Real Madrid’s Florentino Pérez.Armando Babani/EPA, via ShutterstockWon’t the Super League teams fight over all that money?The founding members have decreed that spending on transfer fees and wages will be capped at a certain percentage of revenue, which — theoretically at least — gives owners far more chance to restrict their spending at the same time as they are maximizing their income.Sounds good for those clubs. Their fans must be happy?Not so much, no. The reaction has been one of spittle-flecked rage at the betrayal of tradition. It does not help that, though several of the clubs have released statements insisting they will consult with fan groups as the project develops, nobody thought to do that ahead of time.It is hard, though, to be sure how universal the sense of outrage and betrayal is. There is a little evidence — though it is hardly overwhelming — of a demographic split in the reaction to the idea, and it may be that this is what the clubs are banking on: that older fans may be more wedded to tradition, and younger ones may be won over more easily. More

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      A Super League Plan, but No One to Defend It

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      The organizers of a European soccer league didn’t believe in their idea enough to defend it.They must have known those they had abandoned would cry havoc. No matter how wealthy or out of touch the billionaires and oligarchs and princes behind the scheme for a European superleague were, they could not have imagined that the leagues, federations and clubs they planned to jettison in pursuit of bottomless wealth would greet their plan with garlands and cheers.They must have anticipated, too, some sort of backlash from fans. They could not have expected the greatest change in half a century to the world’s most popular sport — a sport with a ferocious, intensely personal passion coded into its genes — would be met with acquiescence and apathy, let alone universal approval.As they war-gamed how the launch of their galaxy brain idea might play out, how the prospect of a fundamental redrawing of the landscape of European soccer might be received, at least one scenario must have involved banners being draped from railings and protests swelling on the streets.Perhaps they did know. Perhaps they thought they could lose their fans and their peers and their former institutions and still ride it out. Perhaps what scuppered a project that has — for all the sophistry of Florentino Pérez, the two-day president of the 48-hour revolution — been years in the making was the fact they lost everyone else, too.Fans and players who were never asked for their opinion offered it anyway.Christopher Furlong/Getty ImagesBy Monday, less than a day into their brave new world, they had lost the governments, and they had lost the European Union. Not long after, they lost the television networks that, ultimately, would have had to pay for the whole thing.Then they lost the players and the managers, the stars of the show they were hoping to sell around the globe so that they might grow fatter still on the profits: first Ander Herrera and James Milner and Pep Guardiola and Luke Shaw and then, in a matter of hours, dozens more, whole squads of players, breaking cover and coming out in opposition to the plan.By Tuesday, there was scarcely anyone they had not lost. They had lost Eric Cantona. They had lost the royal family. They had lost national treasures. They had even lost the luxury watchmakers, and without the luxury watchmakers, there was nothing left to lose but themselves.Europe’s new Super League, created only two days earlier, was dead.Atlético Madrid had, quietly, been the first to blink, contacting UEFA on Tuesday morning to start to pick a way back. A few hours later, Chelsea followed, then Manchester City became the first to say so publicly. Pérez was supposed to be making a television appearance by then; he pulled out, reportedly because he was holding meetings with his fellow rebels.If he had tried to persuade them to hold the line, it did not work. The remaining English contingent — Liverpool, Manchester United, Tottenham and Arsenal — released nearly simultaneous statements just before 11 p.m. in Britain, confirming they were no longer involved. Only one of them, Arsenal, actually thought to apologize. Inter Milan bowed out soon after.An hour or so later, officials were confirming that the project was dead in the water. Pérez, on Spanish television Monday night, had fretted that young people did not have the attention span for soccer anymore. His solution to that problem, it turned out, had a half-life so brief a goldfish might have followed it.But it was not only how quickly it all dissipated — Sunday’s future of soccer did not even make it to Wednesday — but how easily those who had designed it and signed on to it seemed to capitulate. It is not just that they lost the fans, the leagues, the broadcasters and the sponsors. It is that at no point did they seem interested in even trying to win them over.The prospect of a Super League has been the great Damoclean threat hanging over European soccer for the better part of two decades. It has been wheeled out without fail every two or three years, the trump card in each and every negotiation with UEFA — and others — to concentrate more money and more power in the hands of a select few.And yet, in the Super League’s 48 hours of existence, only one of its architects spoke publicly: Pérez, giving an interview to “El Chiringuito,” a gaudy, late-night Spanish sports talk show, the equivalent of announcing the onset of war on the shopping channel. In a way, he deserves a little credit for that, for the willingness to own his decision.Florentino Pérez, Real Madrid’s president, was the only Super League founder who tried to defend it.Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBy contrast, none of his colleagues and co-conspirators uttered a word: not to the news media, not to the fans, not even to the godfathers of their children. Andrea Agnelli, the president of Juventus, had never previously been reluctant to give voice to some of his harebrained ideas about how to improve soccer; now that he had settled on one, he did not seem quite so willing to defend it.John Henry, Liverpool’s principal owner, has never hidden his belief that soccer needs to find ways to curb its spending, but this time he declined to make his case publicly, although he did offer an apology on Wednesday morning. Nor did the Russian plutocrat or the deputy prime minister of a Gulf state or the activist investor or the owner of a ranch the size of Los Angeles.There was no attempt to sell the idea, no attempt to outline the benefits, as they saw them. A high-profile public relations firm in London had been hired to handle the launch, and yet as the criticism grew more voluble and more shrill and more ferocious, there was no response whatsoever, no attempt to shape a more favorable narrative.For all the work they had done, for all the millions they had spent, for all the legal documents they had filed, nothing about this project seemed complete. The architects could not even figure out a way to make each owner produce a statement to be published by their own club explaining why they had joined the breakaway league. It was all, in some way, unserious: There was a cobbled-together website, an uninspiring logo and an American banker, but no broadcaster, no suite of sponsors and, in the end, no commitment to see any of it through.That is hardly a propitious trait for the custodians of institutions that are, though they are run like businesses and treated as entertainment complexes, also cultural and social touchstones. If they are this disloyal to their own much-cherished ideas, imagine how worrying it would be if they were in charge of things they do not, at heart, care about at all.And yet there is, in this whole, sorry mess, something deeply encouraging for soccer. What has given rise, in part, to the inequity the Super League was supposed to address is the need to placate this very group of owners, to meet their ever-increasing demands, to give them what they want.They have, though, now shown their hand. They have played their card. The reaction should not be to say that enough is enough. It is to ask if, after all the horse-trading and all the plotting, after years and years of bending and shaping and cracking the game so that it suits them more, what they have eventually produced is a website, a brand name and a waterfall of acrimony and scorn that they do not even have the courage to try to stanch. Is this, really, all they have got? More

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      Europe's Super League Plan on Brink of Collapse

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      Chelsea and Manchester City are said to reverse course, imperiling a project that would have remade world soccer.Plans for a European soccer superleague appeared on the brink of collapse on Tuesday, a potentially spectacular implosion for a multibillion-dollar proposal that had prompted howls of outrage from nearly every corner of the sport since it was announced on Sunday.Chelsea, one of six English teams that had signed up as founding members of the new league, was preparing documentation to officially withdraw from the project, according to a person familiar with the club’s discussions. A spokesman for the club declined to comment.Manchester City, which leads the Premier League, was also close to pulling out of its agreement, according to people with knowledge of the situation. City’s about face came soon after its celebrated Spanish coach, Pep Guardiola, had slammed the plans for a closed competition, saying, “It is not a sport if it doesn’t matter if you lose.” A Manchester City spokeswoman, citing legal reasons, declined to comment on the club’s plans.The loss of two giant Premier League clubs would most likely be a death knell for the Super League, stripping the project of some of the competitive legitimacy that would have made it attractive to sponsors and broadcasters, and forcing the other clubs — especially the four other Premier League teams that had signed on — to rethink their participation.Other top clubs in Europe had already rejected the project. The French champions Paris St.-Germain, a deep-pocketed team that had been courted by the Super League, announced Tuesday that it would not take part. Its decision came a day after the German powerhouses Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund had gone public with their opposition. The perennial Dutch champion Ajax, a four-time winner of the Champions League, soon came out against the plan as well.The Super League, an alliance of a dozen of the world’s best, richest and most popular teams, would have redrawn soccer’s structures and economics, and brought about one of the largest redistributions of wealth in sports history by funneling billions of dollars to a handful of clubs that would be permanent members of the new elite competition. Some of the biggest brands in soccer — including Real Madrid, Manchester United, Liverpool and Juventus — were to be part of the league.Instead, it appeared set to fall apart amid a growing wave of internal revolt, political threats, fan outrage and, most ominously, humbling U-turns by several of its founding teams.European soccer officials had erupted in fury over the plans over the weekend, seeing them as a direct challenge to the domestic leagues and continental competitions that have served as the backbone of European soccer for a century.That outrage soon spread. Players on the prospective Super League clubs came out publicly against the plan. Coaches did little to disguise their opposition. And politicians in England and France pledged to oppose the plan with official action.Hundreds of fans protesting the Super League marched on Chelsea’s stadium before its game with Brighton on Tuesday, a day after Liverpool fans had surrounded the team’s bus as it arrived for a Premier League game at Leeds United.Chelsea, like some of the other founding clubs, has been taken aback by the strength of opposition to the proposals from its fans and the wider British public. The strength of feeling led to the team’s change of heart, according to the person with knowledge of the club’s plans.The Guardian newspaper reported the team was forced to pull out after a revolt by players concerned they would not be able to participate for their national teams in global events like the World Cup or regional tournaments like this summer’s European Championship and the Copa América in South America.Those threats had come from UEFA, which oversees soccer in Europe, including the Champions League, and FIFA, the sport’s global governing body.FIFA had warned clubs in January that it would bar them and their players from international competitions if they pressed ahead with plans for a new league, and the organization’s president, Gianni Infantino, seemed to renew that threat — without repeating it — in an address to a European soccer congress on Tuesday in Switzerland.“If some elect to go their own way then they must live with the consequences of their choice, they are responsible for their choice,” Infantino said in a speech to European soccer leaders in Montreux, Switzerland. “Concretely this means, either you are in, or you are out. You cannot be half in and half out. This has to be absolutely clear.” More

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      The Premier League Race Is Over. The Champions League Lottery Is Here.

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      Everyone knows who will win the Premier League. Most can guess who will be relegated. All of the drama is in the race for a spot in the Champions League.Here, then, is the home straight of the Premier League season, the final quarter of a campaign that was heralded as the most chaotic, and least predictable, of them all.At times, throughout autumn and into winter, the combination of empty stadiums, a packed schedule and a frantic pace seemed destined to usurp the established order. Contenders seemed to rise and fall every week. Earnest conversations were held about whether Aston Villa could win the league or if Arsenal was in danger of relegation.It did not, it turns out, quite come to pass. It soon became clear that Manchester City — the team with the best and biggest squad, the side with the brightest coach — would be champion while spring was still fresh in the air. Pep Guardiola’s team sits 14 points clear of Manchester United, its fingers already brushing a third crown in four years.Relegation, too, is largely settled. Sheffield United and West Bromwich Albion will be playing in the Championship next season; all that remains to be decided is whether Fulham can muster enough momentum to condemn Newcastle, drifting and directionless, to a place alongside them.In that relative certainty, the Premier League is something of an outlier across Europe’s major leagues. Elsewhere, the curious circumstances of the pandemic season do seem to have had an effect. In Spain, Barcelona and Real Madrid are slowly reeling in a stuttering Atlético Madrid. In Italy, Inter Milan has six points on its city rival, A.C. Milan, and 10 on Juventus and Atalanta. But with at least one fairly spectacular choke in fans’ relatively recent memory, that is not yet a gap broad enough to permit any comfort.In Germany, the title race may effectively be decided this weekend, when Bayern Munich travels to RB Leipzig on Saturday knowing that victory will all but see off its last remaining challenger. A couple hours earlier, the top two teams in France will meet, though neither Lille nor Paris St.-Germain is in a position to deliver a decisive blow. Lyon and a resurgent Monaco are within touching distance of both, four teams separated by four points.In the absence of questions at the top and bottom of the table, the Premier League has concentrated all of its drama, jeopardy and intrigue into the jostling for position immediately below Manchester City. There are three more spots available in the Champions League for next season and seven teams with a realistic shot at one of them.Some are fallen giants, teams desperate to salvage something from a bitterly disappointing season. Others are surprise packages, those teams that have best adapted to the strangeness of this season. It is at this point that the consequences of all the chaos and unpredictability of the last seven months are made flesh, and it is a race that is all but impossible to sort — at least not yet. “It will go until the last day,” Carlo Ancelotti, the Everton manager, said last month. The challenge, he said, is to make sure you are still in contention by then.Jamie Vardy and Leicester City enter the homestretch with a lead on the teams chasing them.Pool photo by Alex PantlingHead Starts and Tough RoadsA glance at the table would indicate that two of the seven Champions League contenders — Manchester United and Leicester City — have a considerable advantage. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s United has an eight-point lead on West Ham, currently the first team outside the places in fifth. Brendan Rodgers’s Leicester side has a seven-point cushion.But in Leicester’s case, certainly, that head start could yet be canceled out by the fact that its remaining schedule is considerably steeper than some of its rivals’. Leicester faces Manchester City this weekend before traveling to West Ham. Three of its final four games are against direct rivals for a spot in the top four: trips to Manchester United and Chelsea, and a home game against Tottenham. Rodgers’s team surrendered a place in the top four on the final day last season; this year’s calendar brings with it the ghost of past regrets.No other team has quite such an arduous finish to the campaign, though Chelsea is close. The extent of Thomas Tuchel’s impact at Stamford Bridge will be gauged by visits to West Ham and Manchester City, and looming home games against Arsenal and Leicester.If the calendar is kindest to anyone, it is Liverpool, marooned in seventh after a dismal run since late December. That may prove scant solace for a team that has spent the last three months losing at home to Fulham, Brighton and Burnley, but it at least gives Jürgen Klopp’s side a slim chance of returning to Europe.The Price of DistractionsTottenham’s Europa League elimination had a silver lining: fewer games this spring.Darko Bandic/Associated PressIf anything has marked this season, it is the capriciousness of crisis. It is barely two weeks since José Mourinho accused his Tottenham players of being unable to display “the basics of football and the basics of life” during a humiliation at the hands of Dinamo Zagreb in the Europa League. Now he may wonder if being out of that competition is not such a bad thing.Nine league games remain of Spurs’ season, and Mourinho must also make room for the Carabao Cup final on April 24. But, that aside, he has a clear run. So, too, do West Ham and Everton. Leicester has one extra game than its rivals — an F.A. Cup semifinal — but the rest have more demanding commitments to juggle.Chelsea, for one, is still fighting on three fronts: An F.A. Cup semifinal against Manchester City beckons, as well as a two-legged Champions League quarterfinal with F.C. Porto. Should Chelsea reach the final of both competitions, it would have to play almost twice as many games as some of its rivals.Liverpool has a Champions League quarterfinal, too — a more arduous pairing, against Real Madrid — and Manchester United will be expected to reach the final of the Europa League, adding another five games to its schedule. At the end of a season that has been particularly demanding, the strain of any added workload to tired legs may prove crucial.The Fatigue FactorNo Premier League player has logged as many minutes as Harry Maguire.Pool photo by Laurence GriffithsThat injury has proved a defining factor in the outcome of this Premier League season is neither surprising nor particularly debatable. The root of Liverpool’s collapse lies in its loss of its central defense; Leicester’s form stuttered with the absence, at various times, of Jamie Vardy, James Maddison and Harvey Barnes, among others; Everton’s results dipped when James Rodríguez was missing.It would be reasonable, then, to assume that the next two months will be decided by which teams sustain the fewest injuries, particularly to their key players. Liverpool, of course, is still missing Virgil van Dijk, Joe Gomez and Joel Matip. Tottenham is without Son Heung-min. Leicester is without Barnes, Maddison and James Justin, while Manchester United is sweating on Marcus Rashford, Mason Greenwood and Anthony Martial.Injuries can, of course, be sheer misfortune — a bad tackle, a mistimed movement — but they can also be cumulative, the effect of a player pushed too far into what Arsène Wenger used to call the “red zone.” But that is not the only consequence of fatigue. Even if injury is avoided, performance can dip.It is this, more than anything, that should give Solskjaer and Manchester United pause. United’s captain, Harry Maguire, has played 3,946 minutes this season, an order of magnitude greater than every other outfield player in England. He has played the equivalent of five full games more this season than his nearest rival, Leicester’s Youri Tielemans.But Maguire is not alone. United has seven players who have played more than 2,700 minutes this season. Leicester and Everton have only one, Chelsea two, and Spurs and West Ham three. Even Liverpool, its options reduced because of all those injuries, has only five. If fatigue does prove to be a factor, the core of United’s side is more likely to be afflicted in the final stretch than anyone else.To some extent, of course, that is offset by its resources: Solskjaer has options should any of his key players be sidelined or suffer an alarming drop in form. Having to play Donny van de Beek because Bruno Fernandes needs a rest should be no great sacrifice.Indeed, that may well be the formula, more than any other, that comes to define the next two months, that serves to find the signal in the noise of this season. More than in any other season, the final prize on offer in the Premier League will go to the teams that can best minimize the effects of fatigue, thanks to a reduced workload or by possessing the strength in depth to ride it out. In all the chaos, in the end, there will be some sort of order. More

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      Jesse Lingard and Tricks of the Light

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      Be patient, West Ham’s David Moyes said when he signed the out-of-favor forward from Manchester United in January. Both are already reaping the rewards.For possibly the first and only time this season, David Moyes was wrong. As the January transfer window drew to a close, his West Ham side had agreed on a deal to sign Jesse Lingard on loan from Manchester United, and Moyes was keen to stave off the Premier League’s proclivity for rushing to judgment.As far as Moyes was concerned, Lingard was a smart option. He was well aware that what his team needed more than anything was a striker: Sebastian Haller had left for Ajax, leaving the redoubtable Michail Antonio as the club’s only specialist forward. And even he, strictly speaking, was a late-in-life sort of a striker.The problem, as Moyes put it, was a scarcity of plug-and-play replacements on the market. Lingard, he said, might offer a way to think around the problem. He could play as a forward if necessary, but he could also play wide right, wide left, or in a deeper role through the middle. With West Ham chasing a place in Europe for next season, that versatility made him a great value.Not everyone saw it that way. The reaction to Lingard’s arrival at West Ham was mixed. In English soccer’s ever-voluble punditocracy, its content-industrial complex, some saw him as a “diamond.” Others questioned whether a player who had been an outcast at Manchester United would be “good enough” to earn a place at West Ham.As he fell out of favor at Manchester United, Lingard became the butt of jokes.Carl Recine/ReutersA former teammate, Rio Ferdinand — long before he produced what may be the most extraordinary take of the season, on any subject, in any sport — had always been a staunch supporter of Lingard, but even he could see the player was a polarizing figure. He had, he said, “argued with pundit after pundit, on air and off air,” over the 28-year-old Lingard’s merits.Moyes knew all of that, and so he asked for patience. “It will take him a little bit of time to settle, so let’s give him a chance,” he said a couple of days after Lingard arrived. And that is where he was wrong, because 24 hours later, Lingard was busy scoring twice on his West Ham debut, inspiring a rout of Aston Villa, and looking for all the world like the best player on the field.Since then, Lingard has hardly stopped. He did not, it turns out, need any time to settle at all. He has five goals in seven appearances for West Ham, the sort of form that has not only persuaded Moyes to attempt to sign him on a permanent deal but that has attracted the attentions of Leicester City and Aston Villa, too. This week, he returned to the England squad for the first time in two years.Lingard’s form drew the attention of the England coaching staff, which called him up for this week’s World Cup qualifiers.Pool photo by Carl RecineReputations rise and fall precipitously in soccer, but even by those standards, Lingard’s transformation, what he has described as his “new lease of life,” is eye-catching. He had not just become a bit-part player in Manchester United’s eyes; he had, to the wider world, become something close to a figure of fun.Every month, a meme borrowed from the influential, worryingly prescient British comedy series “The Day Today” made its way round Twitter, asking if Lingard had scored or assisted on a league goal over the last four weeks. It had been started innocently enough, but, as is the way of things on social media, had been co-opted by cruelty.The joke, of course, was that he never did. Lingard had enjoyed one golden month in December 2018, scoring four goals and creating two others, but had done nothing before or since. His reputation had been built on the exception, rather than the rule.That the impression stuck was, at least in part, because Lingard was seen as fair game for mockery. Partly, that was through no fault of his own. Pundits assailed him for his extracurricular business interests. The news media, meanwhile, bizarrely insisted on identifying him as a young prospect, long after he had outgrown that particular label. Fans, at least some, objected to his performed, public persona, particularly online.And partly, he did not help himself. It is deeply unfair and moderately pompous to judge a young man for expressing his personality, but at the same time it seems likely that the elaborate goal celebrations, the social media antics and the use of the nickname J-Lingz did not help others take him seriously. Lingard, to some extent, was complicit in his Peter Panning.By January this year, the combination of all those factors seemed to have brought Lingard’s career to a standstill. He had barely played for Manchester United, despite, in his view, the fact that he had returned from lockdown in good form and fine fettle. The only clubs interested in handing him a second chance were West Bromwich Albion and Newcastle United — the transfer market’s last refuge of the damned — and, thanks to the fact that Moyes had worked with him at Old Trafford eight years ago, West Ham.The evidence of the last three months is that he chose correctly. Some credit for Lingard’s renaissance, of course, must go to Moyes, who has filled him with trust and confidence, and provided a space in which he can thrive. Much of it, too, must go to Lingard. He has a whiteboard on the wall at his home filled with a set of targets for him to achieve, including the number of shots he takes, the number of players he beats. In private, he is clearly very serious about his career.But there is a lesson in Lingard’s story, too. More than one, in fact. The first is an old one: that, in soccer, the stage matters as much as the ability of the actor. Players thrive and talent shines in a conducive environment; being in the right place, at the right time, with the right people is as important as an individual’s baseline of talent.Trust me, David Moyes told critics of his decision to acquire Lingard. He knew the player from his brief tenure at Manchester United.Pool photo by Justin SetterfieldThe second lesson is that perception can be skewed by circumstance, that it is too easily forgotten that the higher up soccer’s pyramid one goes, the thinner the air. It is easy to forget that only players of the very highest quality are good enough to be surplus to requirements at Manchester United and the rest of Europe’s rarefied elite.Too often, there is an assumption that those who fail to make the grade at Old Trafford or the Bernabéu or the Allianz Arena have been exposed as talentless hacks, a curling of the nose at the idea of signing another team’s rejects.The reality is not only different, it is the precise opposite: A player who has survived for as long as Lingard did at Manchester United will stand out, in fertile soil, almost anywhere else. Perhaps Lingard was not good enough, not any more, for the club where he started his career. That he was, at one time, should have been reason enough to take him more seriously than we did.Postponing ProblemsBurak Yilmaz and Turkey opened World Cup qualifying with a win over the Netherlands in Istanbul. South America’s players had the week off.Pool photo by Murad SezerThe managers of Europe’s elite clubs would hardly have been alone at breathing a sigh of relief, a couple of weeks ago, when South America’s soccer authorities confirmed the round of World Cup qualifiers scheduled to be held this week would be postponed.It is precisely the outcome Pep Guardiola, Jürgen Klopp and several of their peers had wanted, of course, and it was the correct course of action from a public health perspective. But they were not the only beneficiaries.A two-week break in this most frantic of seasons will be of considerable benefit to those players who would, otherwise, have been traveling thousands of miles to play two matches inside five days. It is an unexpected blessing in a campaign that has pushed those whose job it is to play the game to their limits. Weary bodies will have had time to rest and repair. Tired minds will have had chance to reset.There is, though, a drawback. Obviously there is a drawback. And it is that those games now have to be slotted in somewhere else, and the calendar is no less forgiving once this season is finished.There is little space to play the postponed fixtures this summer. South America’s teams already have two delayed qualifiers to play in early June, squeezed in before yet another Copa América. (There is, as we have seen previously, always a Copa América. But don’t worry, they’ve changed this one, altering the format to make it worse.) And there is little room to breathe next season, with the schedule compressed anyway by the looming logistical problems of a mid-season World Cup at the end of 2022.We have learned this lesson before, of course, but it bears repeating: There is too little slack in soccer’s calendar. What is dressed up as compromise is, in reality, often nothing more than greed, every interested party happy to sign up to anything as long as they get what they want. And, at the end of it all, the people who suffer are the ones who have to fulfill these ludicrous schedules: the players.In Case You Missed It: U.S. 4, Jamaica 1Christian Pulisic newsletter klaxon: The United States, playing regulars like Pulisic and Sergino Dest, left, but also the newcomer Yunus Musah, right, thumped Jamaica, 4-1, in a friendly on Thursday in Vienna.Jakub Sukup/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Reward and the RiskTo many in women’s soccer in England, Monday was a day of vindication. After months of negotiation, the Women’s Super League — regarded by many, now, as the finest domestic competition on the planet — confirmed that it had agreed to a three-year television deal with Sky and the BBC, one that will earn its clubs almost $11 million per season.The triumphalism is, in large part, warranted. Nobody will pay more to broadcast women’s soccer anywhere in the world. Sky has promised to give the W.S.L.’s games the same treatment — hope you like bombast and slow-motion montages, W.S.L. fans! — that it affords the Premier League. It is a level of exposure and, bluntly, revenue that those who have worked tirelessly to advance the women’s game deserve.The hope, of course, is that the new deal will kick-start a virtuous circle: more investment means better facilities; better facilities attract (and produce, the thinking goes, though whether that part is correct or not is debatable) better players; better players lead to better games; better games attract more viewers; and more viewers lead to more investment.There are, though, two notes of caution worth considering. The first is that the W.S.L. is, increasingly, dominated by two clubs: Manchester City and Chelsea, two teams that have packed their rosters with international players. Indeed, lack of competitive balance is as much an issue for the women’s game as it is the men’s.A new television deal will expose more fans to Women’s Super League stars like Chelsea’s Sam Kerr. But it’s important that the money trickles down, too.Mike Egerton/Press Association, via Associated PressWill this television deal give their rivals the resources to compete, or will it simply entrench their dominance? In the longer term, too, will the money not incentivize clubs simply to buy in talent, rather than develop homegrown players, a problem that men’s soccer has had to wrestle with for years?And second, and more pressing: Though the free-to-air BBC will be showing a handful of games (and matches will be streamed by the Football Association itself), the vast majority will be on cable, effectively paywalled off from consumers.Sports that have a far larger popular following than women’s soccer currently enjoys — including cricket and Formula 1 — have found that can be an obstacle to building, or even retaining, an audience. This W.S.L. deal is rich reward for all those involved in the undoubted success of women’s soccer in recent years. But lack of access is not, necessarily, a price worth paying.CorrespondenceRodrygo, right, and Vinicius Júnior were two significant investments in Real Madrid’s future.Juanjo Martin/EPA, via ShutterstockLast week’s column on the folly of signing Eden Hazard prompted an impassioned and, if we are all completely honest, quite accurate defense of Real Madrid’s transfer dealings from Sebastian Royo.“If you look at the players they have hired in the last few years — Vinicius, Rodrygo, Luka Jovic, Martin Odegaard, Ferland Mendy — they are all in their teens or early 20s,” Sebastian wrote. “If anything, Real can be accused of getting players who are too young and not ready to start, and not giving them enough opportunity to play and grow.”This is a valid rebuttal. Real Madrid has spent a lot of money on young talent; so, for that matter, has Barcelona. But perhaps the problem is that, at the same time, both teams have been unable to resist signing ready-made superstars, which has to some extent limited the young players’ chances.A great point, too, from David Hamlyn on the surprisingly enervating issue of quick free kicks’ being discouraged. “In this era of scripted play, the offensive side will still want to do their setup, thereby slowing play down,” he noted. This is right, I think: Teams work doggedly on set plays. I’m not sure they would automatically take them quickly, even if they could do so more easily.Lynton Smith was in touch on the evergreen subject of video assistant referees and offside, which I’ll be returning to again in the near future — put a note in your diaries for that one — but one (throwaway) comment caught my eye. “We want as many goals in the game as we can,” Lynton wrote, “and the new precision disallows goals which in the past would have stood.” I don’t know if I agree with that assertion. Do we want as many goals as we can? Would that not make them less special? Is the gratification not in the delay?And finally, Atticus Proctor asks a very good question. “Why is soccer so obsessed with always restructuring its tournaments and leagues? I’m only 25, but just in recent memory, Concacaf has restructured World Cup qualification, teams were added to the European Championships and the World Cup, the Nations League was created, and the Champions League has changed format four times since 1999.”The glib answers, obviously, would be a) to make more money and b) to reflect the ever-shifting currents of the sport’s politics. But the endless flux is, in itself, interesting, because I wonder to what extent a prior willingness to be flexible leads to an assumption that everything is permanently up for grabs. More

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      Hazard, Griezmann and the Summers We Won't See Again

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      The 2019 signings of Eden Hazard (by Real Madrid) and Antoine Griezmann (by Barcelona) already feel like they’re from another era. It’s one that might be gone for good.All was right with the world. There were 50,000 or so Real Madrid fans packed into the Santiago Bernabéu, all there to catch a glimpse of the latest gift bestowed upon them by Florentino Pérez, their club’s president. Out on the field, Eden Hazard was juggling a ball from one foot to another as the cameras flashed and the crowd cooed its approval.The ritual of presenting a new signing to the public like this — a tradition not unique to, but certainly pioneered and popularized by, Real Madrid — is one of those familiar, unquestioned parts of soccer’s landscape that grows more curious the more you examine it.What is the appeal of seeing someone stand on a field? What is that simple juggling exhibition meant to demonstrate? That the player is real? That the asset a club has paid hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire because of his proven ability with a soccer ball can — yes, look, you can see for yourself — control one?The answer, of course, is power. Those showcases — particularly those held at the Bernabéu or Barcelona’s Camp Nou — were designed to send a message. One is for the fans in attendance: a conspicuous display of the largess and wealth and general virility of the owner who acquired the player now performing tricks on demand out on the field.And the other is broadcast to the world outside, a declaration of status. The sight of Hazard — like Kaká and Karim Benzema and Cristiano Ronaldo and all the others before them — on the field at the Bernabéu was intended to show to soccer as a whole that this place, this club, sat at the very summit of the sport’s global pyramid. Hazard had been the best player in the Premier League for some years. And now he was here, because everything else is, at root, nothing more than audition for a place on this stage, the inevitable destination for greatness.Hazard’s presentation was only two summers ago, and yet, in hindsight, much about the scene — beyond the fact that 50,000 people gathering in the same place is a strange, uneasy and, in a substantial portion of the world, currently illegal concept — seems to belong to another life.Hazard’s time at Real Madrid has been bitterly disappointing. This week, the club confirmed that he had sustained yet another muscle injury — he seems, and this is not an attempt to make light of his travails, to be injuring muscles he probably did not know he had — and faces another few weeks on the sidelines.Since that day when the Bernabéu thrilled at the mere sight of him, he has played only 36 times, across two seasons. Hazard had dreamed of joining Real Madrid to work under his idol, Zinedine Zidane, but he has scarcely been able to play for him. He has scored only three goals in La Liga.His story is, deep down, a sorrowful one. It feels somehow uncomfortable to describe his transfer as a failure, or his Real Madrid career as a letdown, when he has been so assailed by injury.Soccer is a cutthroat sort of business, though, and so the conclusion and the impression are inevitable: At 30, it appears that Hazard has been betrayed by his body, which has been ravaged by more than a decade at the very pinnacle of the game. Real Madrid has had to get used to life without him; his presence, rather than his absence, is now the noteworthy event. The days when he was mentioned as a peer of Neymar and Kevin De Bruyne, in that cohort of players who seemed destined to inherit the mantle of Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, are far gone. His time has passed.Hazard’s time in Madrid has been characterized by more injuries than goals.Rodrigo Jimenez/EPA, via ShutterstockNot quite a month after Hazard was wheeled out at the Bernabéu, Barcelona — as it always must — responded in kind, forcing Antoine Griezmann to prove that he, too, could juggle a ball, before going one better and asking him to pass it around with a few children.Griezmann, like Hazard, was 28. Griezmann, like Hazard, had cost more than $130 million. Griezmann, like Hazard, saw his move to one of Spain’s Big Two as the culmination of his career. “My Dad always told me that sometimes a train only comes once,” he said after his presentation. This was not a train he could afford to miss.And Griezmann’s star, like Hazard’s, has waned since that day. He has played — and scored — far more frequently. His injury record is infinitely better. He is closing in on 100 appearances for Barcelona and has managed 28 goals.It is a respectable, but hardly spectacular, return for a player who was hired to solve Barcelona’s on-field problems but whose transfer stands now as a cipher for its off-field troubles: Griezmann was not just exorbitantly expensive; he was indicative of the club’s failure to think in the long term, to invest wisely, to place what it might need tomorrow ahead of what it wanted today.The two Spanish giants were not the only clubs that were guilty of that sort of thinking at the time. Juventus had spent heavily in previous seasons on Gonzalo Higuaín and Cristiano Ronaldo, players whose moves were predicated on the idea of their delivering immediate success. For much the same reason, Manchester United had agreed to pay Alexis Sánchez an eye-watering sum of money to join from Arsenal.Antoine Griezmann with the man who brought him to Barcelona, Josep Maria Bartomeu.Emilio Morenatti/Associated PressAll of those deals now seem to belong to another era. It is unthinkable, as soccer comes to terms with the long-term economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic, that clubs would invest so heavily in players already at — or in some cases beyond — their peaks.Even before last March, though, the sport was moving away from these grand, short-term statement signings. Most clubs had started to consider things like resale price before committing funds on transfers. Where clubs still decided to spend heavily, it was generally on players under the age of 24, those who might yet appreciate in value.In that light, those two days in 2019 represent not only the passing of a moment — the final two deals from another age — but a warning from history. Both stand as proof of why it is wiser to invest in youth, of the rectitude of the approach that favors the future over the now. Proven talent comes not only at a financial cost but at considerable risk.And so, now, Real Madrid has no choice but to hope that Hazard can recover his fitness and then his form. Barcelona must rebuild itself around Griezmann’s onerous contract or accept a sizable financial hit by selling him at a discount — if it can find a buyer. In the meantime, both clubs can only watch as soccer’s center of power shifts inexorably away from them, to Manchester and Munich, in particular, and to Paris and Liverpool and London, to the clubs where players used to hold their auditions, to the places where they thought about tomorrow, while they were glorying in today.A Merger That Makes SensePlaying in a league with Belgium’s top clubs can only help PSV Eindhoven and Feyenoord improve. The reverse is true, too.Maurice Van Steen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAnd just in the nick of time, along comes a faintly revolutionary idea — albeit one that has been whispered for some time — for the sort of change that might actually benefit soccer. As detailed in this newsletter last week, the sport has no dearth of ideas at this point. It is good ideas that have been sadly lacking.Kudos, then, to the clubs of the Belgian Pro League, which on Tuesday unanimously backed an agreement in principle to merge with the league next door, the Dutch Eredivisie. Assuming the Dutch are as open-minded, the new competition — the BeNeLiga, or some such — would most likely start in 2025, when the current television deals for both existing competitions expire.This seems, on the surface, an obvious win. Independently, neither league can possibly hope to command the sort of broadcast rights that Europe’s big five domestic championships do. Together, they are a more attractive proposition: a combined market of more than 28 million people, with a roster of clubs that would include Ajax, PSV Eindhoven, Feyenoord, AZ Alkmaar, Anderlecht, Club Brugge, Standard Liege, K.R.C. Genk and K.A.A. Gent, among others. The league would feature some of Europe’s brightest young talent.The clubs themselves believe the unified league could earn an annual $476 million in television and marketing deals — not a patch on what Serie A or La Liga makes each year, but more than double what the leagues currently bring in on their own.There are, of course, valid questions here, and potential victims, too. What happens to those clubs that are locked out of the combined league? How much of that newfound wealth will flow down to clubs outside the top flight? Will there be a promotion and relegation system to allow a way back to the respective national divisions, to maintain the integrity of those lower-tier competitions?None of those questions, though, should prevent this idea’s being explored further. There are two ways to alter the dominance of the big five leagues — both in a financial and a sporting sense — and to make European soccer a more level playing field.One is to reduce the power of the elite — a valid, but inherently utopian, idea. The other is to increase the power of those locked out by the status quo. They might be heresy to tradition, but cross-border leagues are the first, most immediately apparent, route to doing precisely that.Mr. ZeroThomas Tuchel has started his rebuilding of Chelsea at the back.Pool photo by Mike HewittIt has been 13 games since Thomas Tuchel replaced Frank Lampard as Chelsea’s manager. In those 13 games — a run that has included two meetings with Atlético Madrid and encounters with Manchester United, Tottenham and Everton, as well as the admittedly guaranteed three points that now come to anyone traveling to Anfield — Chelsea has conceded two goals.One of those was a freakish, and hilarious, own goal from Antonio Rüdiger at Sheffield United, which makes Takumi Minamino the only opposition player to have scored against Tuchel’s Chelsea in almost two months.This is not, of course, necessarily what Tuchel was hired to do. In time, he will be expected to turn Chelsea into a slick, adventurous attacking team, playing the sort of cutting-edge high-pressing style that is now de rigueur among Europe’s elite. But, for now, it is a more than useful trick.Manchester City is running away with the Premier League, in part, because of the obduracy of its defense. It is too late for Chelsea to derail that particular juggernaut — though it has the air of the most likely challenger next season — but defensive improvement makes Tuchel’s team a clear and present threat in the Champions League.Friday’s draw only served to strengthen that perception. Chelsea’s quarterfinal pairing with F.C. Porto will not, most likely, be festooned with goals, but it offers Tuchel and his team a smooth path to the semifinals. There, Chelsea would encounter either a Real Madrid that is a shadow of its former self, or a Liverpool team that has collapsed since Christmas. On the other side of the draw, Bayern Munich, Paris St.-Germain and Manchester City will be busy eliminating each other.As recently as January, Chelsea looked like nothing more than makeweights in the Champions League. All of a sudden, though, Tuchel has turned the club into a credible contender to win it. That he has done so with precisely the same resources Lampard had reflects well on him, and poorly on his predecessor.It also rather neatly encapsulates the value of a truly elite manager.CorrespondenceLet’s get this over with: It turns out that the crossover between “Readers of This Newsletter” and “People Who Like Ballet” is greater than I was expecting. “Ballet leaves you cold?” Charlie Henley asked, incredulously, echoing the sentiments of several others. “Have you seen ABT or the Royal Ballet perform ‘Romeo and Juliet’? All by itself, Prokofiev’s score covers the entire landscape of human emotions. The dancers put faces to those emotions, and their movement and bodies are wonders to behold.”I can only apologize for my lack of sophistication. If it’s any consolation, I understand the skill involved. I appreciate that it is, clearly, something of great beauty. But there is, alas, no accounting for taste. And that’s before we even get on to my views on Shakespeare.Lazio tried everything to stay in the Champions League, but Bayern Munich showed it the door anyway.Matthias Schrader/Associated PressOn much more comfortable ground, James Armstrong wonders if the Champions League might be improved by “eliminating the league part.”“You play 96 games in the group phase to eliminate 16 teams,” James notes. “In the old European Cup, you played 32 games to eliminate 16 teams. When each pair of games is an elimination pair, excitement is raised.”For a long time, I’ve found this argument unconvincing. The straight knockout format of the old European Cup has a pared-back, unadulterated simplicity, of course, but it also emphasized the random a little too much. The nostalgia it inspires is, I have always thought, a little deceptive. Do you really want Manchester United and Real Madrid meeting in the first round?In the last couple of weeks, though, I’ve started to soften. As Jonathan Wilson wrote in The Observer last week, Andrea Agnelli and those who pull his strings seem to have fundamentally misunderstood what we, as fans, want from games: not endless showpiece encounters between famous clubs, but genuine jeopardy. That is what lifts a fixture from mundane to compelling, whoever is involved: when there is something riding on it. Look at the success of the Nations League for proof.There are enough glamorous teams that the latter stages would still feel heavyweight even if a couple fell by the wayside early on; the idea of an Olympiacos or a Zenit St. Petersburg or a Benfica reaching the semifinals would enliven a tournament, rather than detract from it. Still, it will never happen, so to an extent the whole idea is moot anyway.And in the regular correspondence slot that I may start calling “Good Idea, I Agree,” we have Steve Marron. “Why does the attacking team have to wait until the defenders are ready before they can take a free kick? The defending team conceded the free kick, usually to stop an immediate threat, so why give them all the time in the world to regroup, set up a wall, lie someone on the ground behind it, get a handle on the player they are supposed to mark?”In theory, they don’t — the referee can give permission to the attacking team to take the free kick quickly — but most often, that is precisely how it works, and it probably should not. More

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      Champions League Schedule Blurs Home and Away

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyChampions League Adapts to a Fluid Concept: Home and AwayCoronavirus restrictions have sent multiple games to neutral sites. Will this summer’s European Championship be the next big event to reschedule?RB Leipzig’s Hungarian goalkeeper Peter Gulacsi might have been the only player truly at home last week in a Champions League match against Liverpool in Budapest.Credit…Attila Kisbenedek/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFeb. 23, 2021, 2:00 a.m. ETTwo European soccer giants, Atlético Madrid and Chelsea, will meet in the Champions League on Tuesday. The site of this much anticipated game? Bucharest, Romania.On Wednesday, Manchester City will play the German team Borussia Mönchengladbach. That game will be in Budapest, the Hungarian capital, where the English champion Liverpool beat Germany’s RB Leipzig last week.In the Europa League, the continent’s second-tier club championship, neutral sites are now almost as common as home games. Last week, Spanish and English teams played in Italy, and teams from Norway and Germany met in Spain. On Thursday, a week after the London club Arsenal played to a draw against Portugal’s Benfica in Rome, the teams will meet again in the second leg of their not-home-and-home tie near Athens.The pandemic has wreaked havoc with international sports schedules for a year, and that chaos continues to have an impact on soccer’s biggest club tournaments. The reasons — government edicts, travel restrictions and quarantine rules — vary around Europe. In some countries, teams are still allowed to travel to and from their opponents’ stadiums without issue. In others, countries have blocked entry to visitors from entire nations, or drawn up onerous rules that make such travel impractical in a soccer season when teams often play two or three games a week.UEFA, the European soccer governing body that runs the competitions, has decided that if restrictions adversely affect any game, it will be played at a neutral site where travel is permitted. But the decision to play knockout games in places seemingly chosen at random has led to confusion, and not a little grumbling.Real Sociedad, for example, played its “home” leg against Manchester United last week in Turin, Italy, but will play the return match at United’s home, Old Trafford, on Thursday.“It does not seem coherent to me that as the home team, we play on a neutral field, and as a visitor, we do it there,” Roberto Olabe, Real Sociedad’s director of football, told Diario Vasco. “I would like the return to also be on neutral ground, or for UEFA to appoint a single venue for a one-game tie as it did last year.”The displeasure has not been universal. Both Hungary and Romania, whose teams almost never go deep in major European competitions, have been eager to bring the games to their countries — even if, in many cases, they must still be played behind closed doors.“A match played in the framework of the most prestigious European interclub competition is a major sporting event, and we offered our support to the organizers as soon as this possibility was raised,” the Romanian soccer federation president, Razvan Burleanu, told Agence France-Presse.The playing of some games at neutral sites has turned the first tiebreaker for the tournament, the away goals rule, into something of a paradox. Normally, if a home-and-away tie ends with neither team ahead in total goals, the team with the most goals away from home advances. The logic is that scoring away from home is a little harder in a hostile environment, and should get a small bonus.But home isn’t the same for everyone. Chelsea, for example, will play its away game not at Atletico’s Wanda Metropolitano stadium but on neutral ground in Bucharest. But any goals scored there still will count as away goals only for the English team.Atlético will then have to defend, or make up, any difference in the score line on Chelsea’s home field in London next month.Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, left, and Arsenal played to a draw against Benfica last week in Rome.Credit…Alberto Lingria/ReutersFor the Benfica-Arsenal matchup, the away-goals rule seemed even more puzzlingly arbitrary. The first leg in Rome ended in a 1-1 tie, when Arsenal was considered the away team. Benfica will be the away team in Greece, but if that leg ends in a higher-scoring draw — say, 2-2 — Benfica will advance by having scored more away goals.(Some European soccer traditions appear immune to the coronavirus: The Serbian club Red Star Belgrade was forced to apologize last week after some of its fans broke into a closed stadium for a Europa League tie against Milan and racially abused Milan striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who is of Bosnian descent.)Soccer’s scheduling problems may not be over, however. The continuing reach of the pandemic has called into question the plans to stage this summer’s European Championship in 12 cities around Europe. Traditionally, the event has been a less-sprawling affair hosted by one country, or a pair of neighboring ones.Given the travel complications laid bare by the club competitions, the idea of national teams flying around Europe seems foolhardy, or downright dangerous. Already there are calls for relocating the entire tournament to a single county, probably England, which is already scheduled to host the two semifinals and the final.Over the weekend, The Sunday Times of London reported that the British government had told UEFA it was ready and willing to stand in as host of the full schedule of games, although the country’s health minister promptly denied that report.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More