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      The Best Time to Fix Soccer Is Right Now

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      The game’s authorities, its teams and its fans all agree alterations could help. The problem is that many of them are focused on the wrong things.The consensus, over the last few years, has become perfectly clear. FIFA thinks it. So do UEFA, its great rival, and the architects of the proposed European Super League and most of the major teams in most of the game’s major leagues. Even Gerard Piqué is sure of it. They cannot agree on much, but they all agree that soccer has to change.Their motivations tend to center on roughly the same theory, one perhaps best encapsulated by Piqué, the former Barcelona defender. The foundational belief of his Kings League is that soccer matches are just too long. Teenagers, he is convinced, cannot pay attention to anything that long these days, which he has decided is definitely a new thing that has never happened before.Piqué is not alone, though. Andrea Agnelli, the now disgraced former chairman of Juventus, regularly said that soccer had to do something to win the hearts and minds of the TikTok generation. The Real Madrid president Florentino Peréz, a wholly convincing spokesman for today’s youth, made it a central part of his pitch for the Super League.Their solutions, though, vary wildly. The Super League’s guiding principle was that what people really want is more meetings between the same, elite teams. UEFA, which took such great exception to that idea, basically thinks the same thing, if its redesign of the Champions League is any indication.FIFA agrees wholeheartedly, but with the important distinction that all of those games should be in competitions for which it sells the broadcasting rights. The clubs, on the other hand, feel that more money might sort the problem out. Piqué, to his credit, has at least thought outside the box a little. He has gone down the lucha libre mask and secret weapon route, ideas considerably more original than an expanded Club World Cup.For all the divergence of opinion on the means to achieve the aim, though, the basic theme is now so widely shared and so frequently repeated that it is essentially accepted as fact. Soccer has to change, somehow. And yet, fundamentally, this is very odd, because soccer — elite soccer, 21st-century soccer, Champions League and English Premier League soccer — has spent the last two decades attaining a sort of sociocultural critical mass. It now has the sort of reach, impact and engagement that actual religions crave. It is, by pretty much any measure, the most popular pastime ever.That is not to say that it should not be open to the idea of change. Baseball, a sport no less laden with tradition and with just as much reason to be convinced of its own enduring popularity as soccer, had the humility to amend its rules this season in the hope of providing a more appealing experience to its fans. The majors have introduced a pitch clock, limited pickoff attempts, and banned certain defensive shifts.(This last one is most curious to non-baseball-native eyes: Surely making it easier to score devalues the excitement caused by scoring? And is stopping an opponent from scoring not as valid and valuable a part of the game as the act of scoring itself? Why not make the pitchers throw underhand while you’re at it?)The inspiration for those alterations, of course, was not merely the mounting — and correct — concern that three hours and change was too long for a sporting event, but the impact of the sport’s analytical revolution: Data had rewritten on some genetic level how baseball was played, and as a consequence diminished it as a spectacle. Or, more accurately, it had diminished it as the spectacle that its fans had been conditioned over generations to expect.VAR: the soccer drama no one asked for.Thilo Schmuelgen/ReutersThat particular problem is not what soccer is facing. It, too, has undergone a data revolution over the last two decades — a case can be made, in fact, that it was experimenting with data before Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s had so much as muttered the word “quant” — but its impact has been more subtle.There are fewer shots from long distance now. Crossing is a little rarer. Everyone laughs at possession percentage statistics. (Heading is likely to diminish in the coming years, though as a result of greater research into its links to dementia, rather than any particular stylistic or philosophical development.)That does not mean the product could not be improved, though what is striking is how many of its greatest shortcomings are of the sport’s own making. The introduction of the video assistant referee has proved almost universally unpopular, and so too the hard-line interpretation of offside it has spawned. It remains an item of absolute conviction in this newsletter that nobody has the slightest clue what counts as handball anymore.All of these are within the wit of the game’s authorities to solve. V.A.R. should be invoked only for outrageous errors. Offside laws should be liberalized to give greater advantage to the attacker. Handball should be reserved for players swatting the ball away, like Luis Suárez at a World Cup, not a gentle, caressing brush with the fingers. Soccer has found itself in the curious position of trying to thrill young, fickle audiences by entangling itself in Byzantine regulation.There are other changes, too, that might be considered. There is, certainly, a strong argument for an equivalent of a pitch clock: Rather than playing a game over 90 minutes, it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that it should be an hour, with the clock paused every time the ball goes out of play.Should soccer learn from baseball’s new hurry-up rules?Elsa/Getty ImagesStrangely, though, for all who hold the consensus that soccer has to change, none of those parties who are so convinced of its imminent anachronism seem to want to consider any of those alterations. They just do not come up.Nor, for that matter, do any of the other tweaks that might serve to make the sport more immediately appealing: mechanisms to ensure more equal talent distribution, so as to reduce competitive imbalance, or greater revenue sharing, or a limit on the amount of players a team can acquire.In years of discussing how to attract more young people to the sport, meanwhile, nobody appears to have mentioned the idea of reducing the paywall that surrounds it, both on television and in the flesh. Piqué’s Kings League is not especially likely to be the future of soccer, but it proved popular at least in part because it was free to watch on Twitch.And yet for all the discussion of the sport’s looming irrelevance, the end of its golden era, few of those evangelizing for radicalism seem willing to tread down those paths.FIFA is happy to launch as many new competitions as exist in the depths of President Gianni Infantino’s galaxy brain. UEFA will willingly redesign the Champions League, and its rivals will gamely try to tear it down. Piqué will joyfully tweak the way kickoffs work and hand out penalties at random and name a player “Enigma.”But none of them, no matter how convinced they are that the future has to be different, will pause to wonder whether the solution has been present all along, whether the clues to the ways soccer needs to change can be found by simply looking at what made it popular in the first place. It is almost as if none of them really want change unless it just so happens to benefit them.Chanting for the AutocratsBayern Munich fans took their protest straight to Manchester City.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA little more than an hour into Bayern Munich’s visit to Manchester City in the quarterfinals of the Champions League, just before a defeat turned into a humbling, the German club’s fans unfurled a banner: “Glazers, Sheikh Mansour, Autocrats Out.” Then, on a second canvas: “Football Belongs To The People.”It was, though it was probably not designed to be, quite a clever gambit. It put Manchester City’s fans in an awkward position. The name of their club’s benefactor was, very clearly, being besmirched. They quite like Sheikh Mansour at the Etihad Stadium. (They probably also quite like the Glazers, though for different reasons.)And so they did what was to be expected: They chanted his name, almost until the point that Bernardo Silva headed home City’s second goal of the evening, and everyone’s minds returned to rather more pressing matters. There is nothing remarkable about any of that. But it did rather make it look like Manchester City’s fans do not agree with the statement that “football belongs to the people,” which is quite an odd position to put oneself in.It goes without saying, of course, that is not how those fans would see it. There exists an unbridgeable cultural divide between English and German soccer: a single people divided by a common game (and vastly different ownership regulations).German soccer resolutely believes that clubs should be owned by, or at least accountable to, their fans. English soccer does not mind who owns its teams, as long as they spend a lot of money.That has been made abundantly clear by the drama over the ownership of Manchester United. Both of the groups to have made public their interest in making a deal with the Glazers have also been sure to point out that, alongside their commitment to refurbish the stadium and reconnect with the fans, they would make money available for transfers. People want to hear blandishments about engagement and infrastructure. But what they really care about is getting Victor Osimhen.Fans of English teams, not just City, have been conditioned to believe that it is an owner’s job to spend money. At roughly the same time as the banner was being unfurled, and City was doubling its lead, news was emerging from Liverpool that the club did not intend to pursue the signature of Jude Bellingham, the England and Borussia Dortmund midfielder, this summer.That makes sense. Liverpool knew, of course, that acquiring Bellingham would be expensive — current estimates have the total cost of the deal at around $220 million, including fees and salary — but it did not know, a year ago, that its team was about to age several decades simultaneously.Jude Bellingham may wind up in the Premier League, but it won’t be at Liverpool.Stuart Franklin/Getty ImagesThe club can, then, no longer justify committing so much of its budget to any one player, not when it may need as many as five new recruits to refashion its team. Liverpool does not come out of this well; its decline this season speaks to a colossal failure in squad planning. But, economically, the decision Manager Jürgen Klopp and his executives have reached is the sensible one.Needless to say, that is not how the news was received by (the online section, at least, of) the fan base. Liverpool’s owners are, by the definition of Bayern’s fans, autocrats, but they share the fundamental belief that clubs should live within their means, and that owners’ primary function is not simply to lavish money on their teams in a quixotic pursuit of success.It is not an extreme position. It is, deep down, quite hard to criticize. But it is not what English soccer has come to expect, not what it has been told over and over again is the aim of the exercise, and so it was deemed a sign of cowardice, of parsimony, of the willing acceptance of mediocrity, proof to many that what you really need, now, is an autocrat to cheer.Up Down UnderCan a co-host be a sleeper? Asking for Australia, which knocked off the European champion this week.Ryan Pierse/Getty ImagesAustralia’s last experience at the Women’s World Cup was underwhelming. The country entered the 2019 tournament in France with high hopes, a growing reputation and the best striker in the world. Sam Kerr did her part, scoring five goals in four games. The rest was an anticlimax. Australia departed in the round of 16, beaten on penalties by Norway.Perhaps that has tempered expectations for this year’s edition, looming ever larger on the horizon. Australia has the advantage of being a co-host, alongside New Zealand, but its name has been conspicuously absent whenever favorites are discussed. The United States? Of course. England? The coming thing. Spain, France, Germany? Noteworthy all. But the Australians: distinctly low-key.On Tuesday night, though, Tony Gustavsson’s Australia offered a little reminder that it plans to do rather more than host a party this summer/Antipodean winter.England had not lost in 30 games, it had won the European Championship and then, last week, the historic and deeply prestigious finalissima, against Brazil, which is precisely the sort of event England takes seriously in victory only. England will be a force at the World Cup. And Australia dispatched Sarina Wiegman’s team with poise and precision.Kerr remains, of course, the spearhead: If anything, the Chelsea striker is a more fearsome prospect now than she was four years ago. But there is a noteworthy supporting cast, too, a clinical streak, and what Wiegman herself admitted was an admirable discipline. Add the intangibles — the fervor of the local support, a sense of a disappointment four years ago to address — and Australia should be taken seriously.CorrespondenceLionel Messi, spoiled for choice.Eric Gaillard/ReutersLionel Messi’s forthcoming dilemma elicited a considerable array of responses, but one reaction was conspicuous by its absence: sympathy.“I can’t buy the narrative of ‘Poor Messi,’” wrote Pete Mumola. “He has to decide whether or not to take a $400 million salary, an equity stake in a Major League Soccer club or try to make an underperforming side of superstars achieve a European title. This is beyond first-world problems.”Ken Roy was similarly matter-of-fact. “He is rich beyond the wildest dreams of his many fans,” he pointed out. If Messi was so devastated at leaving Barcelona in the first place, “he could have easily taken a token payment. Does he, his father, or any rational human being think that $400 million-a-year would in any way improve his life?”I am not entirely sure this last charge is correct, as it happens: Barcelona’s mistake was letting his contract run down in the first place. When it came to re-sign, my understanding is that he could not have been registered regardless of the amount he was being paid. (That changed later in the summer.) The point, though, is valid. Messi does not have to limit his options to who can meet his salary demands.Which brings us to a note from Paulo Coelho, who we are presuming is not that one. “You could also mention one (unlikely) option,” he wrote. “The return to his boyhood club, Newell’s Old Boys. But as you say, this is for business, not love.” Going back to Newell’s has always, I will confess, been my preferred coda to Messi’s career. I remain hopeful it will happen. It may just not be yet.On another subject, Ben Myers wonders if the general chaos in the Premier League — managers dropping like flies, relegation-threatened Aston Villa now sixth, and so forth — ought to be traced to Qatar. “I think the turmoil comes from the World Cup,” he wrote. “The Premier League has been impacted more than other leagues simply because it had so many World Cup participants.”It has not really been remarked upon enough how strange the Premier League table has been for much of the season. It is not normal to have eight teams embroiled in the fight against relegation. It is not usual to see three of the traditional Big Six™ locked in such enduring mediocrity, and it is not common to see their would-be usurpers last so long into the campaign. The fall World Cup must be a part of that. The dismissals, though, are probably just a corrective: Things have been relatively calm for managers for a year or so. That tends to be followed by a storm. More

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      Chelsea’s Graham Potter Paid Price for Owners’ Spending Spree

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      American owners spent billions to buy the Premier League club and then millions more on players. But as Chelsea sinks in the standings, is the worst still ahead?LONDON — Every week, it seemed, Chelsea officials worked their phones to quiet the whispers that Graham Potter was about to be fired. And every week the news media quickly relayed those reassurances to Chelsea’s fans, even as the defeats mounted, the grumbling grew louder and the team’s plunge down the Premier League table showed little sign of slowing.This Chelsea, its new American owners said in their own private briefings to reporters, was going to be different from the one previously controlled by Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch famous for his habit of churning through managers. Now, fans were told, the changes and the investments were for the long term.That was until Sunday. This time, the whispers were true: Potter was out.His exit, after only six months in charge and after the club spent hundreds of millions of dollars on new players for him to coach, was jarring. But it was also just the latest head-spinning announcement from Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali, the two American financiers who have thrust themselves forward as the frontmen for a soccer project that shows little sign of any overarching plan.And the cost just keeps rising.First, Boehly, Eghbali and their American-led consortium paid a record 2.5 billion pounds (roughly $3.1 billion) to acquire Chelsea, a club that lost about $1 million a week during the nearly two decades it was owned by Abramovich, and committed to spending another $2 billion on the team over the next decade. That shook up the soccer industry overnight, changing the valuations teams set for themselves. Within months, the owners of Manchester United and Liverpool had put their clubs on the market.Then came the new players, first in an initial group of acquisitions last summer and then in another big-ticket wave in January. They arrived in London at a cost of more than 600 million pounds (about $750 million), an extreme outlay that had no previous precedent, and which puzzled — and frustrated — even Chelsea’s most free-spending rivals, since it drove up the asking price for talent around the world and simultaneously made it harder for Premier League clubs to offload players they no longer wanted.But players weren’t the only costs. In between the shopping sprees, and within their first 100 days, the new owners had also dispensed with Thomas Tuchel, the German coach they had inherited, and who brought the club the Champions League title just over a year earlier. To replace him, Chelsea lured not only Potter but also half a dozen members of the coaching staff at his former team Brighton. The cost? About $25 million in buyouts, plus long-term contracts for all involved.Todd Boehly became a fixture at Chelsea as the face of its American-led ownership group.David Cliff/Associated PressIt seemed, in the moment, a shrewd (if pricey) bit of business. At Brighton, Potter, 47, had slowly and deliberately turned a provincial club, a relative newcomer to the Premier League, into a team that now has realistic aspirations to regularly finish in the top half of the table.Yet at Chelsea, the environment has appeared to be anything but deliberate. Now, with Potter gone, no one seems to know the plan for a collection of players — team feels too strong a word — cobbled together with what appears to be little coherence.There’s Marc Cucurella, the wing back brought in from Brighton at great expense but deployed, curiously, as a center back on Saturday; and forward Mykhailo Mudryk, whose experience did not seem to match his nine-figure price; and the 21-year-old Argentine midfielder Enzo Fernández. There are so many new faces at Chelsea, in fact, that at times the strategy has appeared to be nothing more than a simplistic desire to gather as much of the world’s best young talent as possible, whatever the cost, and find places for them to play later.Even as Chelsea was firing Potter, for example, multiple news media outlets reported that Chelsea was working to sign a 15-year-old prospect from Ecuador, reports the club did not deny.Maybe Potter knows what to do with all the disparate parts? That would at least explain the curious line in the statement about his firing that noted he had “agreed to collaborate with the club” on the transition to whatever comes after him.Graham Potter, whose service and staff cost Chelsea a small fortune, didn’t last a full season.Tony Obrien/ReutersBruno Saltor, one of the coaches who arrived with Potter from Brighton, will get the unenviable task of holding things together temporarily, starting with Tuesday’s visit by Liverpool. It is unclear how long his tenure will be, though, with Chelsea now starting a search for its third coach since the American takeover in May.News media reports have already linked the club with high-profile out-of-work coaches like Julian Nagelsmann, recently fired by Bayern Munich, and Mauricio Pochettino, an Argentine who coached both Southampton and Tottenham. That Boehly and Eghbali will make the right decision, though, is questionable.Chelsea, despite its deep pockets, looks to be a monumental repair job. It was beaten at home by Aston Villa on Saturday in Potter’s last game in charge, a performance that highlighted the effects of the curious squad-building undertaken in the last months. While it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring forwards, none of that cash was dispensed on a recognized scorer. Saturday’s 2-0 defeat — a game in which Chelsea took more than 30 shots yet rarely looked like it could recover from its early deficit — was the fifth goal-less performance by the club since the start of February.Chelsea stands 11th in the Premier League table. A date with Real Madrid looms in the quarterfinals of the Champions League next week. Winning the competition is now Chelsea’s its only realistic chance of playing in it again next season, but that remote possibility suddenly seems vital.Chelsea’s finances, already in disarray because of the cost of the takeover, the new coaches and the new players, could soon come under more serious strain. Failure to qualify for next season’s Champions League would mean the loss of tens of millions of dollars of revenue. That could put the club in violation of the Premier League’s cost control rules, raising the possibility of sanctions — or hurried player sales in a market that will know the team needs to sell quickly to balance its books.Sunday was a dark day for Chelsea’s owners. What’s ahead could be much, much worse. More

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      At Liverpool, Man City Means a Red Alert

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      A rough stretch, starting with Saturday’s game against Manchester City, will define Liverpool’s season. The harder work comes after that.Every year, in December, the BBC devotes an evening of programming to one of Britain’s longest-running broadcasting traditions. The Sports Personality of the Year Award was first presented in 1954; almost seven decades later, it is still going strong, a fixture in the country’s sporting consciousness.In an era when votes are no longer sent by postcard, it is possible to feel there is something a little quaint about the award. The criteria are pleasingly opaque: Last year, England striker Beth Mead beat out the cricket superstar Ben Stokes and Eve Muirhead, the skip of Britain’s Olympic curling team. Quite how their achievements should be compared is unclear.Still, the award’s existence is harmless, even kind of sweet. It is a chance, after all, to give athletes who devote years to their craft a celebration they deserve. More of a problem is the cultural gravity it exerts: In the months before the ceremony, there is a tendency to present any sporting success solely in the light of how it might affect the award’s destination.Lewis Hamilton winning the Formula 1 world championship, or Emma Raducanu the U.S. Open, or a British cyclist the Tour de France: Does this mean they are the favorite to be sports personality of the year? The actual sports themselves are reduced to nothing more than qualifiers.There have been times this season when the race to sign Jude Bellingham has taken on a similar air. The campaigns of the soccer clubs with designs on Bellingham, the Borussia Dortmund midfielder, have frequently been treated not as attempts to win trophies or to qualify for the Champions League, but instead as auditions to serve as the 19-year-old’s new home.A few months ago, there would have been little to choose among the three prime contenders. Real Madrid offers glamour, Luka Modric and an enviable supply of Champions League trophies. Manchester City has unrivaled wealth, Pep Guardiola and four Premier League titles in five years. Liverpool had Jürgen Klopp and the memory of Steven Gerrard and had picked up every major honor available since 2019.Jürgen Klopp’s wry smile is easier to spot in the stands than on his face these days.Carl Recine/ReutersThis season, though, has changed the terms of the equation considerably. Real Madrid and Man City have continued to sail as smoothly as ever, of course, but Liverpool has collapsed. Klopp’s team has lost more Premier League games this season than in 2018-19, 2019-20 and 2021-22 combined. It has won only three times away from home.It left the Champions League with a whimper against Real Madrid, and its hopes of returning to the competition at all are diminishing. Liverpool currently sits sixth, seven points adrift of Tottenham in the final qualifying slot. The good news is that the next week brings three games to try to reduce that gap. The bad news? They are against City, Chelsea and Arsenal.A variety of factors have been identified as contributing to Liverpool’s rapid, unforeseen decline — fatigue, injury, predictability, the remorseless march of time — but the way it has manifested defies simple diagnosis.It has made a good sound bite to point the finger at the defense, or the midfield, or for some reason just at Trent Alexander-Arnold, but the truth is that the system that led Liverpool to three Champions League finals in five years, as well as its first Premier League crown in three decades, was complex, interwoven.When one aspect of the team sneezes, the rest of it catches cold: Liverpool’s defense looks vulnerable because its midfield has stopped functioning. But its midfield is suffering because the attack is not pressing as effectively. Just as it once worked in flowing concert, Klopp’s team has ground to a halt in unison, and whatever he has tried in an attempt to jump-start it has failed.The difference-maker: Jude Bellingham.Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockThe solution, to many, is apparent. Liverpool has spent much of the season being told that it needs to overhaul its squad. Most urgently, it needs to reinforce its aging midfield. To that end, it is monitoring Mason Mount’s contract talks with Chelsea. The club also has a longstanding interest in Matheus Nunes, the Wolves and Portugal player.Universally, though, it is common consensus that the key is Bellingham. Liverpool’s need to win the race for his transfer, likely to cost in excess of $130 million, has increased in inverse proportion to its chances of doing so.This is, in truth, an oversimplification. Partly, that is because the idea that teams can be “rebuilt” in short order is a myth. Neither Alex Ferguson nor Arsène Wenger, the only two coaches in recent English history to be credited with fashioning more than one great team, changed everything overnight. They committed to evolution, not revolution. Whatever form the new Liverpool takes, Klopp’s repurposed team will most likely include seven or eight players who are already at Anfield.But more significant is that just as Liverpool’s entropy cannot be traced to a single isolated factor, nor can it be addressed by signing one player or strengthening one area of the squad.Under Klopp’s aegis, the club has been able to outmuscle the bulk of its rivals — including those, like Chelsea and Manchester United, blessed with greater financial resources — and keep pace with Manchester City because of an accumulation of edges.Liverpool fans no longer recognize the team Klopp built into a champion.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockLiverpool had a smarter data department. It spent money, particularly on salaries, but it made every dollar count. It thought more about nutrition, throw-ins and the psychology of penalty shootouts. It combined them all under a coach who had a clear sense of how he wanted to play, who knew what sort of players he needed, and what he needed them to be able to do.Slowly, then suddenly, those edges have been dulled. Liverpool’s rivals, domestic and international, have sought to nullify every marginal gain the club made. In some areas, it is doubtless still a market leader, but the composite advantage is much smaller. Plenty of teams have sharpened their recruitment strategies, or invested in data, or started to take more care over the minute details of the game. (And where they have not, in certain cases money has made up the difference.)At the same time, Liverpool’s sense of clarity has become muddied. The image of Klopp as a “heavy metal” coach — a phrase he must, surely, now regret — has been outdated for some time. He has sought to turn Liverpool into a more controlled, more assured, sort of a team. The result, at times, has been a team caught between two stools, determined to move on from what it was but not yet sure of what it is supposed to become.As talented as Bellingham is, he cannot address those issues, not on his own. What made Liverpool competitive was not just the talent within its team; it was the way the club had put that squad together, how it asked it to play, the cumulative impact of all those imperceptible steps it had taken to provide the best platform for them to succeed.Given the competition, a parade of all that it has achieved under Klopp, all that it has already done, would not be enough to make Liverpool more appealing to Bellingham than Manchester City or Real Madrid. If it is to secure the player around which it intends to build its future, it needs to persuade him that it knows what comes next.The Demise of the MachinesThere is always something heartening about seeing a player enjoying a sudden flourish, granted belated recognition after a career spent toiling away from the spotlight. It acts as a reminder that talent is not always a gift. It can be a reward, too.Joselu, certainly, fits that particular bill. He is 33 now, having spent the last decade or so as an industrious, faintly unspectacular forward for a variety of teams that might fairly be described as “midtable.” Last week, though, long after he might have abandoned hope of representing his country, he was called up to Spain’s national team.On form, his appearances against Norway and Scotland in the first round of qualifiers should not have been controversial: Joselu has scored 12 goals in 22 games for a struggling Espanyol team this season. He got his chance with Spain not because of an unexpected romantic streak in Luis de la Fuente, the country’s newly installed coach. He has done enough to deserve it.Joselu made his debut for Spain last week, days before he turned 33.Manu Fernandez/Associated PressThat does not necessarily mean it is a feel-good story for Spanish soccer, though. The team de la Fuente selected against Scotland — a game that resulted in just Spain’s third defeat in a qualifier in nearly two decades — also included David García, an equally unheralded 29-year-old defender. A 35-year-old, Iago Aspas, came off the bench. It is not to diminish Scotland’s achievement to suggest this was not a vintage Spain squad.The same could be said of Germany — its attack led by another late bloomer, Niclas Füllkrug, and duly beaten at home by Belgium — and Italy, which has had to scour Argentina to find its latest striker, the 23-year-old Tigre forward Mateo Retegui. Three of Europe’s great powers, all of a sudden, have found that their player pools are a little thin.In Italy’s case, that is nothing new: The country has long struggled to produce young players, largely because Serie A’s teams tend to believe that anyone who has not seen his 30th birthday is still an infant.It is not long, though, since Spain and Germany seemed to have established smooth, reliable production lines of talent. Both countries were praised, effectively, for having industrialized youth production. Now both find themselves increasingly stocking their squads — if not their first teams — with players like Joselu, Aspas and Füllkrug: the kind of journeymen they were supposed to have moved beyond.There is no immediate explanation for why that might be. Perhaps there is a roadblock on giving young players a chance. Perhaps their domestic leagues are too reliant on imports. Perhaps their lauded academies churn out identikit players, leaving gaps elsewhere. (The likelihood is that, combined with a bit of random chance, it is a blend of all three.)The consequences are a little clearer. Three of the continent’s traditional powers are not quite what they used to be. That has an impact not only on their traditional peers — England and France, in particular — but on smaller nations, like Scotland, that might suddenly find a little room to breathe now that the shadows of the giants have receded just a little.The Greatest AdventureHervé Renard: the right man for France’s Women’s World Cup moment?Molly Darlington/ReutersHervé Renard is one of those figures only the less conspicuous corners of international soccer can produce. He wears his shirts perfectly pressed, bright white, and often slashed almost to the waist. His hair is long, his face tan, and he has a tendency to pop up in unexpected places: Zambia, Ivory Coast, Saudi Arabia. He is essentially the adjective “swashbuckling” in human form.He is also, as it happens, good at what he does. He turned first Zambia and then Ivory Coast into champions of Africa. He guided Morocco to the 2018 World Cup. He was last seen steering a dynamic, enthralling Saudi side to a victory against Argentina that ranks as one of the most eye-catching results in men’s World Cup history.His newest job is of a different order. Renard this week was confirmed as the successor to the perennially unpopular Corinne Diacre as coach of France’s women’s national team. On the surface, his task is an onerous one. First, he must persuade the swath of players alienated by his predecessor to return to the international fold. Then he has to craft a side coherent enough to challenge the best teams in the world. He has three and a half months, give or take, to do it.The potential prize, though, is worth it. France is home to two of the finest women’s club teams in the world. In Grace Geyoro, Marie-Antoinette Katoto and Kadidiatou Diani — not to mention Amandine Henry, Wendie Renard and the twins Delphine and Estelle Cascarino — he now has, at least in theory, some of the best players on the planet at his disposal.If Renard, the coach, can repair the country’s shattered team spirit, if he can forge all of that talent into a cogent unit, if he can succeed where Diacre consistently failed and provide a platform for his players to fulfill their potential, then there is nothing to stop France’s rivaling England and the United States and Germany as genuine contenders for the World Cup. Renard has spent his career traversing the globe in search of a challenge. He may have found the adventure that might seal his legacy at home. More

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      Quinten and Jurrien Timber Share Title Dreams and a Bedroom

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      Quinten and Jurrien Timber are on opposite sides of the Dutch championship race. At home, they may be closer, literally, than any two players in European soccer.Perhaps the following exchange provides the best example of the precise dynamic of the Timber household. One brother, Quinten, is reflecting on the various virtues that have helped his Feyenoord side soar, just a touch unexpectedly, to the top of the Eredivisie — Dutch soccer’s top division — this season.“Maybe we do not have the best individuals,” he says. “But we are a good team. We fight to the end.” He pauses for breath. Sitting next to him, his twin brother, Jurrien, takes the break as an invitation to interject.“You’ve been a bit lucky sometimes, too,” he tells his brother. His voice trails off as he does so, making it sound as if no team has ever been more fortunate than Feyenoord this season.Graciously, Quinten concedes the point. Yes, he says, but then, that’s sports. Any successful team needs the ball to bounce its way at times. He says it with the sort of tone that suggests he has clocked his brother’s attempts to be provocative, and that he does not intend to rise to them.The Timbers met when their teams played a 1-1 draw in January. Sunday’s rematch will help decide the Dutch championship.Sipa, via Associated Press“It changed after the World Cup,” Quinten says, picking up his train of thought. Suddenly, Feyenoord and its fans realized a first Dutch title since 2017 might be feasible. “The pressure was very high after that,” he says. “But we have stayed first since then.”“Yeah,” Jurrien says, turning back to take another swing, “but you want to be No. 1 in May. Let’s see how long they can handle the pressure.”This sparring works both ways: A little while later, Quinten will need no second invitation to remind Jurrien that Feyenoord is still in contention for three trophies, and that Jurrien’s team, Ajax, is, well, not. It contains not a hint of malice. This is just how it has to be, when you share not just a house but a bedroom with someone who plays for your fiercest rival, and your direct opponent in a title race.For most of their lives, Jurrien and Quinten Timber were on the same team. They played together for their school and for their local grass-roots team. At age 7, they joined Feyenoord together, and then early in their teens both made the leap to Ajax. The only exception was in pickup games. “Then we had to be apart,” Jurrien said. “Otherwise it wasn’t fair.”Quinten and Jurrien began their careers as teammates at Ajax.Sipa, via Associated PressNow, though, they are 21, and they find themselves on either side of Dutch soccer’s most intractable divide. An energetic, inventive midfielder, Quinten left Ajax a couple of years ago, determining that a move to Utrecht, his hometown club, would offer a quicker route to elite soccer. He did enough in a season there to win an immediate move to Feyenoord.“It was one step back to take two forward,” he said. “I had to make that choice to play more at the highest level. It was a good choice.”Jurrien supported him in that decision, even as he remained at Ajax. He is now in his fourth season as an intelligent, assured mainstay of the club’s defense. He has already picked up a number of Dutch titles. (“Is it two?” asked Quinten. “Three,” Jurrien countered. “But the first one was the season canceled by coronavirus.”)That, of course, would be schism enough for any family: The rivalry between Ajax and Feyenoord is as deep-rooted as any in Europe. “I don’t want to use the word hate,” said Quinten. No alternative, though, leaps immediately to mind. “Yeah, Feyenoord fans really hate Ajax.”Rivals and roommates, but not for long: Both say they plan to move out of their family home this summer.Melissa Schriek for The New York TimesThis season, though, the enmity has become more immediate. Last summer, Ajax lost not only its coach, Erik Ten Hag, but a swath of players: the defender Lisandro Martínez and the winger Antony both joined their mentor at Manchester United; Ryan Gravenberch and Noussair Mazraoui left for Bayern Munich; Perr Schuurs, Nicolás Tagliafico and Sébastien Haller all departed, too.Early in the season, the club — Dutch champions in three of the past four seasons — searched for its usual form. “We lost a lot of stupid points,” Jurrien said. “We were not playing at our level. It was the first time that had happened to me, the first bad patch I’d known. A lot of things had changed, and it takes time. It is difficult when you lose that many players. But now we are getting back.”(“Yes,” says Quinten, with just a hint of joyful condescendence. “Maybe now you are ready to compete.”)For Feyenoord, Ajax’s struggles represented an opportunity. The club won 10 of its first 14 games to move to the top of the Eredivisie before the World Cup. It has not lost since league play resumed after the tournament, even if a run of four draws in six games in January and February slowed its momentum a little. Still, though, it has a three-point lead over Ajax as the two clubs prepare to meet in Amsterdam on Sunday.The brothers’ only chance to play on the same side these days is with the Netherlands.Eric Verhoeven/Soccrates, via Getty ImagesThat should, of course, have the potential to be intensely awkward for the Timber family. The brothers said they were confident that there was no risk of split loyalties for their mother and their three older brothers, at least, given that Quinten has been ruled out of the game with a knee injury. “Normally our Mum supports the underdog,” Jurrien said. “But because Quin’s injured, I think she’ll be for Ajax.”In the bedroom they have shared since childhood, there is no sign of tension. Both plan to move out in the coming months but even in the thick of a title race, both seem ambivalent about the prospect. “We’ve lived together our whole lives,” Quinten said. “It will be weird.”He probably ranks as a little more enthused at independence than his brother, which may or may not be related to the fact that, when asked which of the two was messier, Jurrien looked immediately sheepish and Quinten looked immediately at Jurrien.They have not felt the need to institute a rule banning soccer talk when they get home; the only taboo is that they will not divulge potentially sensitive information to each other. “Giving details would be dangerous,” Jurrien said. “But it’s interesting how it goes at the different clubs, how they think, how we think.”“Normally our Mum supports the underdog,” Jurrien said of Sunday. “But because Quin’s injured, I think she’ll be for Ajax.”Melissa Schriek for The New York Times“They asked me today whether Ajax was confident,” Quinten said. “I told them that Ajax is always confident. Even if they are playing badly and not winning games, they are confident. That’s always how it is at Ajax.”The Timbers are, though, making provisions for what happens after the game. Before the season, and after Quinten had completed his move to Feyenoord, they agreed on a silver lining: At least this way one of them would be champion. “We said it would be me or him,” Jurrien said. “Not PSV Eindhoven or AZ Alkmaar or anyone like that.”That brotherly affection only extends so far, though.“You don’t want to hear after the game that they won,” said Quinten. “Well, a little bit, maybe. That’s the fun part. You can talk about the game, how it went. But not too much.”Jurrien is not so sure. Asked what he might do if Feyenoord were to win in Amsterdam, and take another giant step toward the championship at his and Ajax’s expense, he said, “I think I might go and sleep at my girlfriend’s.”More, More, MoreGianni Infantino, probably after seeing the accounting projections for a 2026 World Cup.Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere could not, really, be a more perfect encapsulation of the problem with FIFA than the one that played out in Rwanda this week. No, not the part in which Gianni Infantino was elected for another term as president by acclamation, as though he were some sort of Roman emperor, but the part in which the organization’s congress casually decided to add 104 games to the 2026 World Cup.In one sense, of course, this is the correct decision. FIFA had long been toying with the idea of dividing the field in the first-ever 48-team World Cup into 16 groups of three, with 32 nations progressing to an extended knockout round. It was an unwieldy, inelegant sort of a plan, one that seemed to guarantee an awful lot of pointless soccer early in the tournament.The drama of the group stage in Qatar — remember the part in which Poland needed to avoid yellow cards in order to qualify? — persuaded FIFA to change course. Groups of four, it noticed, worked quite nicely. And so, this week, it resolved that 2026 would follow the same format: The tournament will start with 12 groups of four.It is a typical FIFA solution, a technocrat’s fix, one that betrays quite how little it understands the appeal of its own competition. Four-team groups are not inherently better than three-team pools; what made the group stage in Qatar (and in every World Cup since 1998) dramatic is that it served to halve the field.That will still not be the case in 2026: The top two teams in each of the 12 groups will progress, and so will eight teams who finish in third place. The stakes, in many of the games, will be infinitely lower. There will be more second chances. There will still be an awful lot of largely pointless soccer.That, ultimately, is the price FIFA has to pay for expanding its money-spinning, showpiece occasion. There is, after all, a balance in all things. FIFA can have more teams in the World Cup finals. It may well be richer for it, both metaphorically and literally. But it comes at a cost, somewhere along the line. Changing the scale of the tournament alters the nature of it. And there is no way to square that particular circle, no technical solution to an emotional problem.Might Makes RightRB Leipzig and Red Bull Salzburg met in the Europa League in 2018. The company won either way.Andreas Schaad/EPA, via ShutterstockIt has not been all that long since European soccer’s ultimate power broker, UEFA, published a report that identified the rising trend of multiclub ownership as a clear and present threat to the game. Indeed, the model is now so popular, and so prominent, that it has generated a neologism: Executives now happily talk about pursuing “multiclub” setups as part of their strategy.The downside to one group of investors owning multiple teams, though, is twofold. Most obvious is that it might damage the integrity of a competition that brings any two teams from the same stable into direct competition.Much more serious — though a little less tangible, and therefore more easily ignored — is that it raises uncomfortable questions about what the point of some of those teams might be. Do the lesser sides in a network exist to compete for trophies, as they really should, or are they reduced to acting as warehouses for storing what investors might refer to as assets but have, habitually, been calling “players?”For years, the primary bulwark against the popularization of that approach has been a single rule in UEFA’s statutes, one that outright forbids the same group having “control or influence” over two teams in the same European competition.It has been teetering for years — in 2018, UEFA found a workaround to allow RB Leipzig and Red Bull Salzburg not only to compete in the same tournament but to play one another in it — but now, as more and more investors gobble up more and more teams, its very existence seems to hang in the balance.“We have to speak about this regulation,” UEFA’s president, Aleksander Ceferin, said in an interview with The Overlap this week. “There is more and more interest in this particular ownership. We shouldn’t just say no to multiclub ownership, but we have to see what rules we set because the rules have to be strict.”He is right, to some extent: Multiclub ownership should not be dismissed out of hand as an emerging evil. In some circumstances, at least, it is possible to make a case for its benefits. It should be the subject of a mature and intelligent discussion, rather than a reflex rejection.At the same time, though, it is very hard to avoid the suspicion that UEFA’s about-face on the subject illustrates how powerless the organization is to protect and nurture the game in the face of an unrelenting tide of money. It rather gives the impression that UEFA will bend the rules to incorporate anything that the rich and the powerful want. It makes it abundantly clear, in fact, who is in charge, and it is not the people who exist to look after the best interests of the game. More

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      How Should Fans Feel About Newcastle United?

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      Saudi money has revived a Premier League soccer team and sent it to a cup final on Sunday. Those cheering say they shouldn’t have to answer for the source of its recent success.NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE, England — As he walked out of the tunnel and onto the field at St. James’ Park, Eddie Howe paused for a beat. Much of the time, Newcastle United’s manager makes a conscious effort to maintain the distance between himself and the effects of his work. It is a natural instinct, a self-defense mechanism.But for once, Howe could not stop himself from taking in the tableau. All around him, the steep banks of seats were filled with striped black-and-white flags. In the Gallowgate, the grandstand that serves as the stadium’s heart and lungs, there were banners for heroes current and past.“A lot of the time, you do separate yourself from some of the feeling around the city,” Howe reflected a couple of hours later. “But it’s good to get an idea of what it means. The view of the stadium, all of the scarves and the flags: It is an incredible place to play.”In recent years, that has not always been the case. For more than a decade, as it bristled under the unpopular and at times deliberately provocative ownership of the British sportswear tycoon Mike Ashley, St. James’ Park stewed in melancholy and resentment and despair.The contrast, these days, is stark. Newcastle has the distinct air of a club going places: possibly to Europe, and the Champions League, by the end of the season; and, more immediately, to Wembley, to face Manchester United in Sunday’s league cup final.On the bitingly cold night in January when Howe’s team confirmed its place in that showpiece, the club unveiled to the crowd Anthony Gordon, a winger acquired from Everton for more than $45 million a couple of days earlier. Clutching a Newcastle scarf and blinking under the floodlights, he seemed just a little taken aback by the fervor of his greeting.“All we saw was relegation,” Manager Eddie Howe said of the club he took over in November 2021. It now sits in fifth place.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesGordon is just the latest in a string of a dozen or so new signings added to the squad at considerable expense in the past year, but that recruitment drive is not the only explanation for Newcastle’s rise.Howe has also reinvented or repurposed many of the players he found when he first arrived: Joelinton, a misfiring forward turned into an all-action midfielder; Sean Longstaff, an academy product given a second chance; and, most spectacularly, Miguel Almirón, an eager but mercurial winger who suddenly, on either side of the World Cup, decided to be the Premier League’s deadliest finisher.That all have flourished, unexpectedly, under Howe has burnished Newcastle’s underdog sheen, one that fits neatly with the club’s and the city’s sense of itself. There is something inherently romantic about the restoration of Newcastle. In one light, it is a rare and precious feel-good story for English soccer. The problem is that, in another, it really isn’t.RevitalizedEvery couple of minutes, Bill Corcoran has to put the brakes on his train of thought to engage another fan wanting to throw a some coins or a folded bank note into his collection bucket. A volunteer for Newcastle’s West End Foodbank, Corcoran greets them all like old friends.He chews the fat with each of them about the evening’s game. Only lowly Southampton, bottom of the Premier League and on the verge of firing its coach for the second time this season, stood in between Newcastle and Wembley. Most of the fans, though, seem suspicious of this state of affairs. A twist, they assume, is coming. Loving a team and trusting it are very different things.In between, without missing a beat, Corcoran returns to the subject at hand. Or, rather, subjects: At various points, he sweeps in the Tasmanian genocide of the 1820s, the relative merits of freeing Julian Assange, the Irish famine and the history of the Mikasa, a 20th-century Japanese battleship. This is not traditional pregame chatter.It is, though, indicative of the strange intellectual territory Newcastle’s fans have found themselves occupying over the last 18 months, ever since their club was purchased by a consortium fronted by the British financier Amanda Staveley and her husband, Mehrdad Ghodoussi, but backed largely by the Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s enormous sovereign wealth fund.Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of the Public Investment Fund, has been a regular guest in the owners’ box at Newcastle.Fayez Nureldine/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe deal itself was wreathed in controversy. The Premier League blocked the sale, at first, on the grounds of suspected Saudi involvement in the piracy of its broadcast rights. It only allowed it to go through after it had received “binding assurances” that the P.I.F. was a distinct entity from the Saudi state. (Last week, in a legal dispute over the P.I.F.-backed LIV Golf series, the fund claimed “sovereign immunity” in front of a federal judge in California.)The deal’s eventual approval drew thousands of fans to St. James’ Park in celebration. A smattering waved Saudi flags. A handful wore traditional Saudi dress. The effect was jarring and disorienting: a brutal, repressive autocracy being greeted as liberators from the hated regime of Sports Direct.Since then, the club’s owners have delivered everything the fans could have asked. Howe was appointed as manager. Newcastle has twice broken its transfer record to acquire a new star. It spent more money in last year’s January transfer window than any other club on earth. A team that had been languishing at the foot of the Premier League table has, in the blink of an eye, become a contender.The effect has reverberated beyond the confines of the stadium. “There is a real buzz in the air,” said Stephen Patterson, the chief executive of NE1, which represents the interests of 1,400 businesses across Newcastle’s downtown. “The success has spilled out of the club and into the city itself.”In part, that is to do with a slate of major infrastructure projects getting underway in a city — and a region — that has long felt both underappreciated and underfunded by England’s political and financial power center in London. “The skyline is evidence of investor confidence,” Patterson said. “I’ve never known so much public and private investment in the city.”The soccer team, though, has acted as an accelerant. “It has de-risked a lot of projects,” said Rachel Anderson, the assistant director of policy at the North East England Chamber of Commerce. “Developments that have sat on ice for a long time have come online. The takeover has acted as a catalyst. It makes it easier to raise financing or to greenlight a project.”“There is a real buzz in the air,” a business executive in Newcastle said. “The success has spilled out of the club and into the city itself.”Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat “buzz in the air,” though, has come at a cost. The P.I.F.-led takeover of Newcastle has been condemned by a host of human rights organizations: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, FairSquare.Democracy for the Arab World Now, a group launched by colleagues and friends of the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, said that allowing the takeover to go through normalized “a dictator who literally goes around butchering journalists.” Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, said before the deal was announced that she was “horrified” at the prospect of Saudi ownership of an English club.In the same time frame that its team and its city have started to soar, Newcastle has been turned into a cipher for the dangers of sportswashing, accused of being nothing but an attempt by the Saudi state to “distract from serious human rights violations,” as Amnesty put it. Inside Newcastle, the club’s new reality still feels a little like a dream. Outside, it has been cast as something far darker.Moral ArbitersThe day the takeover went through, Charlotte Robson was invited onto a prominent national radio show to discuss the meaning and merit of Newcastle’s new ownership. At one point, she remembers, another member of the panel bemoaned that the club’s fans had allowed it to happen. “It really struck me,” said Robson, a board member of the Newcastle United Supporters Trust. “Because I don’t remember us being given much of a say.”It would be wrong to suggest there has been a uniform response among Newcastle’s fans to their new reality, beyond the fact that absolutely nobody misses Mike Ashley. At times, as the initial celebrations suggested, there have been some who are happy to embrace the links to Saudi Arabia, or at least the iconography of that connection.For many, though, it has been a more complex, considered process. Robson herself would ideally like to see the club owned — at least in part — by the fans. She does not equate being a Newcastle fan with being a “supporter of the nation state of Saudi Arabia.”Striker Chris Wood, acquired last January, in Newcastle’s alternate jersey, which critics gleefully noted is in the colors of the Saudi flag.Ed Sykes/Action Images, via ReutersShe has, though, been able to take pleasure in the club’s rise. “The fact that the majority owners are not especially visible is important,” she said. “That’s been helpful for a lot of fans trying to dissociate the club from the ownership.”So, too, has the nature of the team. The club’s spending has been considerable, but hardly wanton by the bloated standards of the Premier League. What she calls the “redemption story” of the more long-serving members of the squad, meanwhile, has made it feel more organic. “Almirón was signed by Rafa Benítez, three managers ago,” Robson notes. “You can point to the coaching staff and say it’s because of them.”Her instinct, though, is largely that many fans resent the idea that it should fall on them to act as “moral arbiters” for the game, when nobody in a position of power — the Premier League, UEFA, the British government — is prepared to do the same.“The league has a policy dating back years of letting potentially unscrupulous actors in,” she said. “The average fan is a bit put out that it’s apparently their job to object, when all they want to do is watch their team.”That, certainly, is where Corcoran falls on the spectrum. Despite his unprompted disquisition on the many and varied failings of British and American foreign policy, 1820-2023, he insisted he has not had to “persuade himself” to accept the ethical legitimacy of Saudi ownership.All he has seen so far, he said, has been encouraging: The owners have pledged to match whatever donations to the food bank he and his fellow volunteers can raise on matchdays. There have been no edicts passed that contravene his sense of what Newcastle United should represent.St. James’ Park, which stewed in resentment under its former owner, now bounces with life again on matchdays.Lee Smith/Action Images Via Reuters“If they asked us to compromise our morals, we would be the first to protest,” he said. “Newcastle is about being inclusive, being welcoming, open to everybody, and those values will not change. It is not worth being a great team if it comes at the cost of being ourselves.”Not everyone has been able to make that sort of accommodation. “There is no glory in success obtained like this,” said John Hird, a member of NUFC Fans Against Sportswashing, a lobbying group set up in the aftermath of the takeover.Though a vast majority of fans have “respected our right to protest,” Hird said, his group has been regularly falsely smeared — particularly online — as some sort of sleeper cell composed of Sunderland fans, seeking to effect the destruction of Newcastle’s impending golden age.In reality, its aims are a little more modest. Hird said he would like to see the city’s lawmakers, as well as larger, more established fan groups, “make good on their promise to be a critical friend to the Saudi owners.” He would encourage those fans won over by the benefits of the takeover “at least to speak up on human rights.”Though its numbers are small — “we accept we are a minority,” Hird said — the group has done what it can to make its voice heard, staging protests outside St. James’ Park and, last week, delivering a letter to Eddie Howe on behalf of the family of a dissident imprisoned in Saudi Arabia.Thus far, though, it has been lost in the clamor generated by Newcastle’s ascent. Every train south is booked this weekend. St. James’ Park is an “incredible” place to play once more. Newcastle has the air of a club going places. Most fans do not see it as their job to stop and think about how it got there.Lee Smith/Action Images, via Reuters More

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      Reputation Meets Reality in the Champions League

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      The Premier League’s financial might should allow it to dominate Europe’s top soccer competition. So why hasn’t that happened?Everyone involved was taking the positives. In Dortmund, Chelsea’s Graham Potter was talking about a “step forward” in his efforts to solve the gilded thousand-piece puzzle he has been handed by his club’s new owners. In Milan, Tottenham’s Antonio Conte was happy his “trust” in a youthful emergency midfield pairing had been repaid.Both were doing all they could to project an air of calm assurance. Conte, a man who could never be accused of bottling up his emotions, even used the word “relaxed” to describe his state of mind. Sure, Chelsea and Tottenham had both lost the first legs of their Champions League round of 16 ties, but that was nothing to worry about. There are the home games to come in a few weeks. Things will be better then. Wrongs will be righted. Everything is breezy.Neither manager’s pose was particularly ludicrous. Neither team had played especially badly. Both sides might have felt just a little unfortunate to have lost. Chelsea, still feeling its way to a settled identity after its winter excess, created a raft of chances against Borussia Dortmund. Spurs, its squad winnowed by injury and suspension, had menaced A.C. Milan. Both had lost only by a single goal. Both remain firmly in contention to make the quarterfinals.And yet, for all the legitimacy of those mitigating circumstances, for all the fine margins that separate victory from defeat and one interpretation of history from another, it is hard not to feel as if this sort of thing should not happen to the moneyed elite of the Premier League any more.Kepa Arrizabalaga and Chelsea lost at Borussia Dortmund. But all is not lost. Yet.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesChelsea, in case you have forgotten, spent more on players in January than every club in France, Spain, Italy and Germany combined. A.C. Milan found itself unable to compete on salaries with Bournemouth, a team with a stadium that has a capacity of 11,379 people. Dortmund’s business model involves the annual sale of its best players to England.Here they were, though, not just standing up to two of the best that the Premier League can offer but beating them. It may have been with home-field advantage, the backing of 80,000 or so bellicose fans, and it may only have been by the skin of their teeth. And it may not, in the end, mean much at all, should Chelsea and Spurs assert themselves in the return legs.And yet still they beat them, the reality of England’s unassailable financial power not quite living up to the theory.Two games is far too small a sample, of course, to draw any firm conclusions, but those defeats are part of a broader, more established pattern.For years, as the Premier League’s wealth has grown — its television revenues more than twice that of its nearest competitor, its clubs the richest on the planet — the assumption among its clubs, and the fear among its competitors, has been that at some point it would be able to break the Champions League to its will. Its teams, stuffed with the choicest fruits the market has to offer, would leave the rest of Europe trailing in their wake.It has not, though, quite worked out like that, certainly not as definitively as might have been expected.Chelsea beat Manchester City in the 2021 Champions League final, one of two recent finals matching Premier League opponents.Pool photo by David RamosIn the last five years, the Champions League has taken on a distinctly English inflection. Two of the finals in that time have been all-Premier League affairs, and there has been at least one English side (mostly Liverpool) in every final but one since 2018. And yet the long-anticipated wholesale takeover of the tournament has failed to materialize.Perhaps it is no more than an accident of fate that no English team has won a Champions League final against a foreign opponent since Chelsea’s victory against Bayern Munich in 2012. But it feels significant that only once — in 2019 — has the full cohort of four Premier League teams all made it through safely to the quarterfinals.The likelihood that this year will break that trend is minimal. Chelsea and Spurs might both be at only a slender disadvantage — and the absence of the away goals rule works in their favor from here — but even if they both recover to make it through, the chances of Liverpool’s overcoming Real Madrid remain slim.There are a host of possible explanations for that. The most obvious is that money is not necessarily a measure of virtue: Just because England’s teams have cash to burn does not mean they always spend it well, as Chelsea is currently doing its best to illustrate.Harry Kane and Spurs have work to do in the second leg against Milan.Marco Bertorello/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe most appealing, certainly in England, is that the very competitiveness of the Premier League is in itself a disadvantage; teams are so exhausted from domestic combat that they are prone to fatigue when it comes to Europe.The most likely explanation, and the most simple, is that an unwillingness to succumb to economic logic is coded into the algorithm of a knockout competition. Financial might is likely to prove decisive over the course of a league season. Turn a competition into an arbitrary shootout, conducted over the course of 90 or 180 minutes, and what can seem like a chasm in terms of revenue streams suddenly manifests as nothing more than the difference in the technical and psychological capacity of two sets of players.And that, most often, is nothing more than a hairline crack. Dortmund and Milan and all the others might find the English clubs calling every year, seeking to extract another star from them ranks in exchange for a king’s ransom, but they know too that there will be another player along soon enough, that they will be able to replace and replenish. There are, after all, always more players.There is something to celebrate and to cherish in that, a relief and a pleasure in the fact that wealth does not make a team — or a set of teams — invulnerable to misfortune or immune to the vicissitudes of fate, that European soccer has proved just a little more resilient to the Premier League’s supremacy than even its own clubs anticipated, that even now, money is no guarantee of happiness.Red Letter DayHistoric English soccer club seeks new owner. Serious offers only. Inquire within.Molly Darlington/ReutersTime for another addition to English soccer’s ever-expanding calendar of high holidays: alongside Cup Final Day, League Cup Final Day and the two Transfer Deadline Days, we can now reliably celebrate Soft Deadline for Investors to Submit Bids for a Major Club Day.Like Easter, this one moves around. It fell in April last year, in the midst of the scramble to take Chelsea off the hands of Roman Abramovich. This time, Raine, the investment bank that plays the role of Hallmark for this particular holiday, has decreed that the Manchester United sequel should come as early as mid-February.As of Friday, only one contender had gone public: Jim Ratcliffe, the British billionaire and one-time Chelsea suitor who seems to have remembered late in life that his real passion is for sports rather than chemicals, had confirmed he would bid. He was expected to face competition, though, from at least one “U.S.-based consortium,” as well as “private” bidders from both Qatar and Saudi Arabia.That last prospect, of course, might have been greeted with caution, or even concern. The questions are obvious. How “private” could any bid emanating from a tightly controlled autocracy ever really be? What would be the implication for the integrity of both the Premier League and the Champions League, given the Saudi ownership of Newcastle United and the Qatari control of Paris St.-Germain?Or it might have been greeted with a breathless frenzy, focusing exclusively on what Gulf ownership might buy for the club and its success “starved” fans: Kylian Mbappé, or Jude Bellingham, or (genuinely, inexplicably) a new monorail running directly from Manchester airport to a giant mall outside Old Trafford.There are no prizes at all for guessing which description best fits the tone of much of the coverage, because there are no winners here. That serious questions over the integrity of the sport — let alone the issue of whether it is ideal that the Premier League should be a stage on which global power games are played out — should be so easily ignored thanks to the specter of yet more consumption, yet more acquisition, makes you wonder if the spirit of the whole enterprise has been lost along the way. The way you celebrate your holidays, after all, says a lot about where you are as a culture.An Old Truth, RevisitedStop us if you’ve heard this before but P.S.G.’s star-studded experiment doesn’t seem to be working. Again.Anne-Christine Poujoulat/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIf the misadventures of the Premier League’s moneyed elite in the Champions League this week served as a reminder of one of this newsletter’s mottos — that there are always more players, no matter how many of them you buy — then the starting teams at the Parc des Princes brought another to mind.On one side, of course, there was P.S.G., a team that is rapidly becoming a definition of insanity in and of itself. It is now perfectly apparent that building a team around Lionel Messi, Neymar and Kylian Mbappé does not work, not at the elite level, not when all three of them essentially refuse to engage in any defensive effort. P.S.G. may yet recover from a first leg deficit to Bayern Munich, but this is not a side that can win the Champions League.On the other was a Bayern team, its attacking line led by Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting. The Cameroonian striker suffers, as many do, from the long shadow of the Premier League.He has spent the better part of a decade and a half as a professional. He has built a steady, respectable career, one crowned unusually late by trophy-laden spells at P.S.G. and Bayern. To many fans, though, he will always be a curiosity: Hey, look at that, it’s that guy who played for Stoke City, except that now he’s in the Champions League.That is a shame, because Choupo-Moting’s story is telling in a number of ways. It proves, as he discussed with the Times, the value of patience. The timing of his rise suggests a shift in what elite clubs want from forward players, and as a corollary perhaps highlights a deficiency in the academy system. That tends, after all, to produce what teams want now, rather than what they might need in the future.Most of all, though, it illustrates that Choupo-Moting did not fail to shine at Stoke because of a lack of talent. Ability is often not what determines whether a move is successful or not. More important is whether the team, the style, the environment is right for a player to thrive. Choupo-Moting is evidence of the old truth that there is no such thing as a bad player, only the wrong context. More

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      Manchester United Bidding War Already Has a Winner: The Sellers

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      A Qatari royal and a British billionaire have designs on the Premier League giant. But the Glazer family still gets to set the price.The World Cup in Qatar was in its third day when Manchester United’s press office announced that its American owners were exploring an end game they had long refused to even consider: a potential sale of the famed English soccer club.Every day since that November morning, the swirl of speculation about who might buy United, one of the world’s most popular and most valuable sports teams, has gathered pace.A British billionaire quickly confirmed that he planned to bid. An American hedge fund kicked the tires. Reports of a Saudi Arabian offer sent the club’s stock price surging.But it was from Qatar, rumored for weeks to have investors interested in adding United to the country’s expanding sports portfolio, where details of the first official bid appeared. And just like that, the fight for the club’s future, a battle of differing visions for what kind of Manchester United would emerge from the auction, was on.The official word of concrete Qatari interest arrived in a statement on Friday night: an all-cash offer — reportedly worth as much as $6 billion — by Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad al-Thani, a little-known royal whose power may lie more in his post as the chairman of a major Qatari bank and in the influence of his father, a former prime minister who helped put their small nation on the international map.Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad al-Thani, the son of one of Qatar’s most powerful royals, was the first Manchester United suitor to confirm his bid.Karim Jaafar/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSheikh Jassim’s statement offered populism, or at least what sounded like a Gulf billionaire’s vision of it. Pledging to invest in United’s stadium and its teams without adding a dollar to its debts, his five-paragraph statement read like a box-ticking exercise in proposals designed to win the support of anyone eager to see the back of the Glazers, the family that has controlled the Premier League giant for nearly two decades.But Sheikh Jassim’s suggestion of a “debt-free” takeover also did nothing to hide the financial muscle behind the offer that would make United, in an instant, the most high-profile Qatari-owned property on earth.His public pitch took other bidders by surprise. Raine, the investment bank handling the sale for United’s board and the Glazer family, had asked prospective buyers to limit any public pronouncements, perhaps to entice as many offers as possible, or at the very least to avoid scaring off any suitors.The Qatari offer changed that, and quickly led another bidder, Jim Ratcliffe, a British petrochemical billionaire based in Monte Carlo, to first privately and then publicly confirm that he had made an offer for 69 percent of United, the amount of the club owned by the Glazers.Ratcliffe pointedly offered United fans an English alternative to the prospect of Gulf ownership. Manchester born and a lifelong United fan, Ratcliffe promised to put “the Manchester back into Manchester United,” to revive a club anchored not to foreign interests but to “its proud history and roots in the northwest of England.”The British billionaire Jim Ratcliffe is bidding for United only a year after losing out on Chelsea.Eric Gaillard/ReutersThe competing offers immediately split the United fan base, with many overseas supporters openly pining on social media for a sale that they hoped would see Qatar’s deep pockets do for Manchester United what billions of dollars from the United Arab Emirates have done for its neighbor Manchester City. That sentiment did not appear to be shared by much of the club’s matchgoing supporters, with concerns raised by fan groups in England about everything from human rights to sporting integrity.The latter may prove to be the more formidable obstacle, because Sheikh Jassim and Ratcliffe can expect to face scrutiny under rules set by European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, that prohibit teams with the same owner from playing in top continental competitions like the Champions League.Ratcliffe already owns OGC Nice, which plays in France’s top league and has drawn some of his fortune to finance its push toward European qualification.Sheikh Jassim will face the challenge of convincing soccer regulators that his interests are different from those of the Qatari ownership group that runs the perennial Champions League contender Paris St.-Germain. Sheikh Jassim’s father was, with the country’s former emir, one of the architects of Qatar’s vision of itself as a player on the global stage, and one of the driving forces behind its flashy purchases of showcase assets like another British institution, the department store Harrods, and the Shard, Britain’s tallest building. The father’s close links to the country’s leadership already have raised doubts that his son’s pursuit of United is merely a private investment.Ratcliffe and Sheikh Jassim may soon face other challenges, too. Friday’s deadline for bids was an artificial one, confected by United’s bankers to create urgency. Other bids may already exist, and new (and possibly higher) ones can still be presented.But one thing all the bids — public, secret or still to come — may benefit from is near universal agreement among United fans of all stripes that the club should no longer be run by the famously unpopular Glazers. The family acquired the team in a highly contentious deal in 2005 in which it leveraged the majority of the purchase price against the club, meaning United has spent hundreds of millions of dollars paying for the right to be owned by the family.Many Manchester United fans agree on one thing: They want the Glazers to sell.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat deal, while infuriating supporters, has been hugely profitable for the Glazers. Through fees and dividend payments, the family has already secured a return far higher than its initial direct investment (a fraction of the roughly $1.4 billion purchase price at the time). The club’s value has skyrocketed, with news media reports suggesting the family is now seeking as much as $7 billion to part with it.That price point will narrow the pool of potential owners considerably. At least one potential buyer told The New York Times last week that anything close to that figure was “madness,” and said that his group had walked away because it believes that United, which still carries debt of nearly $600 million, is not worth more than 3 billion pounds, or $3.6 billion.Yet in Raine, United’s owners have entrusted the job of soliciting offers to a bank with a recent track record of finding buyers willing to pay above-market prices. The firm, led by the New York banker Joe Ravitch, secured £2.5 billion (about $3 billion) last year in the sale for Chelsea. But that was more of a forced sale, one sparked by British government sanctions against Chelsea’s Russian owner, Roman Abramovich, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.The Glazers do not face similar pressure. Their call for bids for United was framed as merely an effort to “explore strategic alternatives for the club.” That means whatever the billionaires offer, whatever they promise, wherever they call home, Manchester United will be sold only at a price the Glazers are willing to accept. More

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      Christian Atsu Is Found Dead in Turkey After Earthquake

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      Mr. Atsu, a Ghanaian national who played for the Turkish club Hatayspor, had been among the thousands of people missing. He was 31.The body of Christian Atsu, a professional soccer player from Ghana whose career took him to England’s Premier League and the World Cup, has been recovered from the rubble in southern Turkey nearly two weeks after a powerful earthquake struck the country, his club and his agent said on Saturday. He was 31.“It is with the heaviest of hearts that I have to announce to all well wishers that sadly Christian Atsu’s body was recovered this morning,” Nana Sechere, Mr. Atsu’s agent, wrote on Twitter on Saturday. “My deepest condolences go to his family and loved ones.”Mr. Sechere said Mr. Atsu had been found in Hatay Province in southern Turkey, one of the hardest-hit areas in the earthquake.Mr. Atsu, who played for the Turkish club Hatayspor, had been among the thousands of people missing since Feb. 6, when a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck Turkey and Syria. Just hours before the quake, he had scored his team’s winning goal in its match against Kasimpasa, a team from Istanbul.His club also confirmed the news and said he was being repatriated to Ghana.“We will not forget you, Atsu. Peace be upon you, beautiful person,” Hatayspor said in a statement on Twitter on Saturday.There had been conflicting accounts of Mr. Atsu’s whereabouts after the earthquake, and earlier statements that he had been rescued had initially raised hopes that he had survived the earthquake.Mr. Atsu, a member of Ghana’s World Cup team in 2014, had spent the bulk of his career with European clubs, and signed with Porto, Chelsea and Newcastle United. He joined Hatayspor last year.Condolences poured in on Saturday on social media, including from Newcastle United, the Premier League and FIFA, soccer’s world governing body. The Ghana Football Association said that weekend games would hold a moment of silence for Mr. Atsu.“Ghana football has lost one of its finest personnel and ambassadors, one who will be difficult to replace,” President Nana Akufo-Addo of Ghana said on Twitter.As the club desperately searched for Mr. Atsu after the earthquake, Volkan Demirel, Hatayspor’s manager, had pleaded for aid.“I thought the day of judgment had come. I immediately thought of my players,” Mr. Demirel told Hurriyet, a Turkish newspaper, about the moment the earthquake hit.“May God not cause such pain to anyone,” he added.More than 45,000 people have died in the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, according to figures from the Turkish authorities and from the United Nations, and the death toll was expected to continue to rise. More