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      From Marcus Rashford to Megan Rapinoe: What Our Stars Say About Us

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRory Smith On SoccerWhat Our Stars Say About UsOnly a handful of soccer players attain what might be best described as mainstream cultural relevance. That kind of fame now comes with responsibility.Marcus Rashford’s charity work has raised his profile in ways that even his immense talents could not.Credit…Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJan. 9, 2021, 7:30 a.m. ETThere are almost eight years between the photographs, but they seem to come not so much from different eras as from different worlds.The first is from the summer of 1990. Paul Gascoigne is beaming against a bright blue sky. He, plus the rest of the England team that had reached the semifinals of the World Cup, has just touched down to a heroes’ welcome. Gascoigne, the breakout star of the tournament, has decided to greet his public wearing a pair of plastic novelty breasts.The second image is from the summer of 1998, before a World Cup this time, rather than after one. David Beckham holds hands with his fiancée, the singer Victoria Adams, on a night out. Neither looks especially happy with the fact that a throng of photographers has chosen to accompany them for the evening. Over a pair of combat trousers, Beckham is wearing a sarong.David Beckham’s comfort zone was always much bigger than the soccer field.Credit…Daniel Leal-Olivas/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOnly a handful of soccer players ever attain what might be best described as mainstream fame. Anyone who follows the game even at a casual remove would know the name of Kevin De Bruyne, of course: He is, after all, one of the most gifted players of this generation, probably the outstanding star of the most popular league in the world.For all his talent, though, for all his medals and other achievements, De Bruyne remains famous only in a soccer sense. That is no mean feat, of course: Hundreds of millions of people across the globe will know his strengths and weaknesses, his highs and his lows. They will have fiercely held opinions on his most recent performances for Manchester City.But countless more will not. It is not a perfect parallel, but it is perhaps the difference between Broadway fame and Hollywood fame. Modern soccer is, as the journalist David Goldblatt has written, perhaps the most pervasive cultural phenomenon of all time, but even that comes with a limited power, a niche appeal. The vast majority of the global population does not follow it, not even a little, and so the name Kevin De Bruyne will mean little, or nothing, to them.Kevin De Bruyne is unquestionably a star. An icon? That’s different.Credit…Pool photo by Clive BrunskillThat is true of all but a select few. Often, the exceptions make the leap through virtue of sheer ability. Ballet is hardly an international passion, but for a while, Rudolf Nureyev was one of the most famous people on the planet. It is by the same osmosis that Pelé, Diego Maradona, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo found a fame that extends beyond the sporting silo in which it was forged. (For the record, in terms of sheer numbers, Ronaldo is surely substantially more famous than Nureyev ever was, but then Nureyev didn’t have Instagram.)Others, though, attain that fame not just through their sporting prowess but through their cultural relevance. Beckham is, perhaps, the clearest example. He was, of course, an outstanding player — far better than he was given credit for at the time — but it took something more for him to become as much a cultural figure as a soccer one.Beckham would have had an abundance of crossover appeal at any time, of course — the looks, the fashion, the Spice Girl romance — but the level of fame he achieved can be attributed to the precise time he emerged, too.It was with the Beckham wedding that the BBC opened a four-part documentary series last month on the nature of 21st century celebrity. The Beckhams did not herald the dawn of the celebrity era, of course — their engagement was announced a year after the death of Princess Diana — but they did represent an apogee, an acceleration of it: Crowds of fans lined the streets on their wedding day, and a glossy magazine paid a frankly unthinkable — in the social media age — 1 million pounds for exclusive pictures of the ceremony.We knew, at the time, that this was the era of Cool Britannia and Britpop and Danny Boyle. What we did not know, perhaps, was that it would soon be the era of Heat magazine, Britain’s equivalent to Us Weekly, and Paris and Nicole and Perez Hilton and “Big Brother.” Beckham cut through because he was not only a player, but because he also encapsulated a celebrity culture that was just starting to flower.Paul Gascoigne’s tears endeared him to fans watching the 1990 World Cup.Credit…Roberto Pfeil/Associated PressGascoigne, eight years earlier, had done the same, albeit in a very different culture. He is often credited with softening soccer’s image in Britain, his tears on the field during England’s defeat in the 1990 World Cup semifinals washing away the stains of hooliganism and Heysel and The Sunday Times’s damning verdict that soccer was “a slum sport played in slum stadiums increasingly watched by slum people.” After Gascoigne came “Fever Pitch” and Pete Davies and the Premier League, the agents of soccer’s gentrification.There is some truth in that, but Gascoigne was also very much a figure of his age, too. The drinking and the pranks, the novelty songs and the novelty breasts were all the accouterments of what would eventually be called “lad culture,” the unreconstructed, beery era of the early 1990s that bequeathed the world a suite of soft-core men’s magazines, a range of sugary alcopops and, to some extent, Oasis.It is difficult to analyze with any certainty the mechanics of Gascoigne’s or Beckham’s fame. Did they rise beyond their sport because they reflected an emerging culture neither they nor we quite grasped? Were they figures of sufficient influence that they shaped the culture in their own image? Or were they understood through the lens of the dominant culture of the time, and we turned them into what we wanted them to be?However it worked, both became emblems of their eras, soccer’s emissaries to the mainstream, individuals through which it is possible to parse the cultures that formed and distorted them. But they were not the first. George Best, regarded as the fifth Beatle, and Johan Cruyff, a symbol of the counterculture, had been through the same process in the 1960s and ’70s. (In England, at least, the 1980s are best understood through a cricketer, Ian Botham.)It is striking, then, that the two players of the current generation most firmly set on that path are Marcus Rashford and Megan Rapinoe. Neither is the best player of this era — though Rapinoe is closer than Rashford — but both, at the start of 2021, have the sort of mainstream fame that few of their peers will ever muster.Like a handful of stars before her, Megan Rapinoe has the kind of fame that transcends soccer.Credit…Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesAnd as with Beckham and Gascoigne, their fame offers a window into our culture, affirming not just that this is an era in which the traditional gatekeepers of fame have been replaced by something more direct — and, possibly, more egalitarian, thanks to social media — or that athlete activism is encouraged rather than merely tolerated.The rise of first Rapinoe and then Rashford is a sign that fame now comes with responsibility, that we have moved beyond the Beckham phase of celebrity culture (pictures of famous people being famous) and the Perez Hilton phase (pictures of famous people sweating) and into an era in which fame is bestowed for standing for something, whether it is equal pay or equal rights or feeding hungry children. In the 2020s, fame and values are interlinked.Just as with Beckham and Gascoigne, it is not possible to say for sure whether Rapinoe and Rashford created that era, or whether the era created them. Either way, though, their prominence says as much about us as it does about them. Their fame, to some extent, shows us who we are.Italian Soccer, but Not as You Know ItWeston McKennie added another goal to his highlight reel on Wednesday.Credit…Antonio Calanni/Associated PressWeston McKennie was not, it is fair to say, particularly known for his goal scoring during his time with Schalke, but he has developed something of a taste for it with Juventus. He scored, spectacularly, at Camp Nou against Barcelona late in 2020, and his 2021 started with a celebration in another of European soccer’s great cathedrals, San Siro, on Wednesday night.McKennie’s goal sealed a vital 3-1 win for Juventus against A.C. Milan, one that keeps Andrea Pirlo’s team in touching distance of Milan, and Inter, at the summit of Serie A, and preserves, for now, the dream of a 10th straight title.Pirlo’s first few months as a coach have been — as is to be expected, really — a little mixed: His Juventus beat Barcelona and lost by 3-0 at home to Fiorentina in the space of a couple of weeks in December. There are moments when his vision of an ultramodern, swift, ruthless side comes into focus, and moments when that seems distant as a dream.But what stood out most of all, on Wednesday, was how atypical the game felt, given both its stakes — an old rivalry, two title contenders, the last unbeaten team in any of Europe’s major leagues against a side that would have effectively surrendered its title with defeat — and its location.It is strange, really, how powerful the idea of Italian soccer as inherently defensive has proved to be. Serie A has not been like that for some time, not for a decade, perhaps longer. Teams like Atalanta and Sassuolo are as attack-minded as anyone in Europe; Serie A games, on average, had more goals last season than the Premier League.Wednesday at San Siro fit that new image of Italian soccer perfectly: a rapid-fire exchange of punches, a startling absence of caution, a breathless, faintly frenzied tempo. Even at two goals down, with the game as good as finished, Milan kept pouring forward. The stereotype has been outdated for a while. It may be time to dispense with it for good.The Half-Empty CupThe F.A. Cup is viewed by some more as a relic than as a prize.Credit…Toby Melville/ReutersSouthampton’s game against Shrewsbury is already off. At the time of writing, Liverpool’s trip to Aston Villa looked sure to follow. Lowly Chorley will have its moment against the comparative might of Derby County in name only: Derby, missing its entire first team, will be forced to field a squad of teenage hopefuls.The third round of the F.A. Cup — the point in soccer’s most venerable competition when the elite joins in — remains, even now, the most evocative date on English soccer’s calendar, a weekend of tradition and romance and occasional wonder that encapsulates so much of what England likes to believe is good about its game.The luster of the competition has faded in the last two decades, of course. It is no longer just coaches of the Premier League’s superpowers who resent its intrusion — most teams from most leagues now field their reserves, saving their stars for more important battles ahead — but the power of what it represents has, if anything, grown, the last glimmer of egalitarianism in an increasingly stratified world.But the F.A. Cup has long occupied a fragile place in soccer’s changing ecosystem. It is more than 20 years, now, since Manchester United was encouraged not to take part in the 2000 edition of the competition, traveling instead to Brazil for a forerunner of the Club World Cup, a move the English authorities themselves felt would be good diplomacy while the country was bidding for the actual men’s World Cup.At the time, many felt that move proved the F.A. Cup no longer truly mattered; in the years that have passed, it has come to be seen as a watershed in the competition’s history. It certainly has never felt as if it mattered quite so much since then, though the forces behind that are far more complex than the absence of one team for one season.It is easy, then, to see why the F.A. would not have wanted to cancel this year’s competition (quite apart from the value of its own television deals, and the lifeline F.A. Cup funds provide to smaller clubs). Skipping a year would have been confirmation that the tournament was some kind of optional afterthought.And yet plowing on may prove no less damaging. This weekend’s matches will be played in empty stadiums as the second — or possibly third, it’s hard to say for sure — wave of the coronavirus pandemic bites. The teams that do play will be even weaker than normal, as coaches try to manage the fearsome workload placed on their players; the ones that do not may be given free passes into the fourth round, or have to catch up at a later date, turning the competition into chaos.It is hard not to wonder if it might all just feel a little pointless, a tradition being maintained for its own sake in circumstances that are really not conducive to it. It is, equally, hard not to think that perhaps, in hindsight, this might be the point at which whatever remains of the tournament’s mystique evaporates for good.CorrespondenceFor Tom Davies, left, and Jack Grealish, one reader noticed, every day is leg day.Credit…Dave Thompson/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesI think I know where James Armstrong might fall on that question. “I think it is insane to be playing sports in a pandemic,” he wrote. “Is the risk of long-term Covid worth it for a football match? Or a basketball game?”It is a valid question and an understandable view, though it’s not one I share. In Europe — I cannot speak for elsewhere in the world — there is no evidence that I’m aware of to suggest that players have contracted the virus because they are playing soccer. The rise in cases we have seen in recent weeks seems, almost entirely, to be related to mixing away from the field.As a rule, the bubbles the leagues and their teams have instituted have held. And, speaking from the perspective of a country now in a third lockdown, it does not feel too naïve or self-aggrandizing to suggest that sports’ playing on gives at least a portion of the population some link to normality and some source of distraction at a time when both are badly needed.Carl Lennertz, meanwhile, is fixated on Tom Davies’s and Jack Grealish’s socks. “It’s so oddly unprofessional yet delightful to watch these two in their gym socks,” he wrote. “It’s like watching a rugby player come out in sandals or a pro golfer in flip flops. Why take the risk of exposing one’s shins that way? I’m sure they are in line with some sort of precise measurement, but it’s still not cool despite its individualistic look.”I see your point, Carl, but I’m afraid I have to invoke the Rui Costa rule: If he did it, then it is not only OK, but it is the very height of cool.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      With Man City Positives, Premier League's Coronavirus Outbreak Widens

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesThe Stimulus PlanVaccine InformationF.A.Q.TimelineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRory Smith On SoccerThe Premier League Has a Schedule. It Really Needs a Plan.As the coronavirus invades locker rooms and postpones matches, soccer needs to face up to a potential worst-case scenario.Manchester City played without fans for months. On Monday, it couldn’t play at all.Credit…Laurence Griffiths/ReutersJan. 1, 2021, 10:00 a.m. ETOn the face of it, the Premier League’s decision was an easy and an obvious one. Manchester City and Manchester United had finished last season late, thanks to their commitments in the summer’s European competitions.To ensure that both teams would have a similar break between campaigns as all of their rivals, the Premier League decreed that they would start the new season a week later than everyone else. The league’s omnipotent fixture computer had drawn City against Aston Villa and United against Burnley for that first weekend of the season; those two games would have to be postponed.All of this, so far, makes sense. What happens next does not.Knowing that its teams were facing a compacted schedule anyway, the Premier League could have decided that Burnley and Villa might as well play one another on opening weekend. That may have raised some logistical challenges — policing, scheduling — but hardly insurmountable ones, particularly with fans still locked out of stadiums. The benefit, of having only one game, rather than two, to slot in later in a busy year, far outweighed the cost.That is not how soccer works, though, not even in a pandemic. Burnley did not play Aston Villa. The two games from the first weekend of the season have not been made up. It took until Thursday for the Premier League to find a window: They now will be played in the middle of January, five months late.That may seem a trivial issue, little more than a minor misstep, one that can doubtless be explained by the myriad complexities of scheduling a sporting season and will be easily resolved once the field in the domestic cup competitions is thinned a little. And, in some senses, that is all it is.Soccer has made the best of bad situations for months.Credit…Pool photo by Martin MeissnerBut it is also an instructive example of how the Premier League — and elite soccer as a whole — thinks, how pervasive is its belief in its own relentlessness, how delicate and vulnerable this season remains. The simple fact that Burnley did not play Aston Villa on opening day encapsulates soccer’s myopia, and its hubris.The Premier League lost two more games this week. First, Manchester City requested the postponement of its trip to Everton after five of its players tested positive for coronavirus. Fearing a more widespread outbreak — and much to Everton’s surprisingly public chagrin — the Premier League acquiesced. (Pep Guardiola revealed Friday that City will be missing five players who had tested positive when it plays Chelsea on Sunday.)About 48 hours later, Fulham had to make the same request, canceling its match with Tottenham on only a few hours notice; it, too, had recorded a spate of positive test results, and in the interest of public health, it was determined the game should be delayed, despite the unhappiness of noted Instagram influencer José Mourinho.City and Fulham were not the first clubs to be hit by the virus. In November, Newcastle had to close its training facility and skip a game against Aston Villa after an outbreak that has left at least two players with the kind of persistent and debilitating symptoms doctors refer to as Long Covid. Those clubs will, it is safe to assume, not be the last. Sheffield United played its game against Burnley this week despite reporting a number of positive tests at the club.The situation in the Football League, which governs the second, third and fourth tiers of soccer in England, is even worse. In League One, seven of the 12 games scheduled to be played on Tuesday had to be postponed because of coronavirus outbreaks. Five had been missed on Boxing Day, too. There have been calls from some medical departments for a two-week “circuit-breaker” pause to the season to avoid players’ being overloaded by a backlog of matches in the spring.It does not feel as if any of this was especially difficult to foresee. Soccer cannot be blamed, of course, for failing to anticipate the scale of the second wave of the pandemic in Britain (or anyplace else), or for the appearance of a particularly virulent mutation of the virus in the southeast part of England.Fans have adapted to new realities. Leagues should, too.Credit…Pool photo by Paul ChildsBut it should not have required the clarity of hindsight to project that cases might rise in the winter, that the long-anticipated second wave might have some impact on soccer, that the bubbles the sport was relying on to play through might not prove entirely impermeable, that some sort of contingency plan might be needed.And yet soccer seems woefully underprepared for something that should have been wholly predictable. It is not just that there is little room in the calendar set aside to play postponed matches: just three weekends in the English season set aside for teams to make up games they have missed, but only if they are eliminated from the domestic cups first.It is that — as the Premier League confirmed in a statement this week — the subject of what happens if the season is paused, or worse, canceled entirely, has not even been discussed.(It is striking, though perhaps not vastly surprising, that two of the most ardent voices calling for cancellation on moral grounds in the spring, Aston Villa and West Ham, have been quiet this time. It’s almost as if they are keener to play now that they are fifth and 10th in the table, respectively.)To be clear, at this point, there is no reason to believe the season should be curtailed: Soccer has proved, over the last nine months, that it is able to play on. It has not increased the burden on the country’s medical services, or deprived the general population of tests, or been responsible for a more widespread outbreak of the virus. Its protocols, for the most part, have worked.But it is hardly outlandish to suggest that the Premier League — and most of its peers around Europe — might have looked at what happened in the spring and wondered if perhaps they needed to have a plan in place should the worst-case scenario unfold.Fans at Brighton. European stadiums that opened recently may soon close again.Credit…Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat need not have meant an immediate end to any season; other, more creative solutions were available. Something along the lines of the bubble tournament staged by the N.B.A., for example, or a shortened season — along the lines of what is already standard in Scotland and Belgium — might have served as an adequate break-glass course of action. Only if those workarounds were not possible would a nonsporting conclusion come into force.The Coronavirus Outbreak More

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      European Soccer Learns a New Virtue: Patience

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyEuropean Soccer Learns a New Virtue: PatienceWhy have so few managers been fired this year? Pandemic economics play a role, but there are bigger forces at work, too.Some forces are immune to the pandemic: Sam Allardyce was hired last week by West Brom, his eighth Premier League club.Credit…Pool photo by Lindsey ParnabyDec. 23, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETLONDON — Enrico Preziosi could hardly have held Thiago Motta in higher esteem. As a player, Motta spent only a single season at Genoa, the Italian soccer team Preziosi owns, but he made such an impression that, a decade later, his old boss cited him as his ideal professional. “A smart and empathetic man,” Preziosi said. “He taught me many things.”Not long after that ringing endorsement, the men were reunited. At the end of his playing career, Motta had moved into coaching and was developing a glowing reputation in Paris St.-Germain’s youth system. Genoa, as is its default setting, was struggling. And so in October last year, Preziosi turned to Motta, the “player of his soul,” to arrest the slide.And then, two months later, he fired him. Motta, that smart and empathetic man, had lasted all of nine games.It was vintage Preziosi. This, after all, is what he does: He fires coaches. In the 17 years since he bought Genoa — Italy’s oldest club — he has changed his coach 27 times. He quite often churns through three in a single season. He once fired Alberto Malesani twice in the same campaign. He has fired one coach, Ivan Juric, three times. Italian soccer has a word — mangiallenatore — for owners like him: coach eater.The Genoa chairman Enrico Preziosi has a short leash with his managers.Credit…Simone Arveda/EPA, via ShutterstockPreziosi fired another manager this week, dispensing with Rolando Maran, whom he had appointed in August but who had not won a match since September. If all of that felt reassuringly familiar, though, the circumstances were unusual. This year, many of Preziosi’s peers in Europe’s top five leagues have discovered a virtue hitherto rarely associated with owners of soccer clubs: patience.More than a third of the way through the season, only one other Serie A team, Fiorentina, has fired its coach. In La Liga, only Celta de Vigo has changed managers. In the Premier League, Sam Allardyce had to wait until last week to be parachuted into West Bromwich Albion. His appointment was only the second time a Premier League team had fired a manager in 2020.In France and Germany, things are a little more familiar. Four managers — at Metz, Dijon, Nice and Nantes — have been fired in Ligue 1 so far this season. Four have also been dismissed in the Bundesliga, though the continuing implosion of Schalke accounts for two of them.Even there, though, most owners waited as long as they could before deciding on change. David Wagner, the first of the two Schalke coaches to be fired this season, lost his job after failing to win for 18 games; the club had been determined to give him a chance to turn the situation around. And of the eight dismissals in France and Germany this season, half happened this month.Much of this newfound restraint can, of course, be explained by the coronavirus pandemic. Clubs across Europe are facing immediate shortfalls of hundreds of millions of dollars in lost ticket revenue, as well as an uncertain commercial landscape in the coming years. In France, that has been compounded by the collapse of a television rights deal that would have provided the backbone of most teams’ budgets.Slaven Bilic was the first Premier League manager fired this season. He made it to December.Credit…Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFiring a coach, meanwhile, is expensive. At the elite level, that can mean several million dollars to pay out the contracts of an incumbent and his staff, and the commitment of millions more to appoint a suite of replacements.Fiorentina, for example, fired Giuseppe Iachini at the start of November, replacing him with Cesare Prandelli. The club is now paying the salaries of three coaches: Prandelli and Iachini as well as Vincenzo Montella, who was fired last year but is still officially under contract — paid, essentially, not to work. The club has the means and appetite to do that — the cost is borne by its owner, Rocco Commisso, the billionaire chairman of Mediacom — but most teams do not.“The mentality of team owners is just to get through this period,” said Stewart King, the global head of performance at Nolan Partners, an executive search and recruitment consultancy that works with a host of clubs across Europe to fill technical positions. “Teams that might want to be in the top 10 of their league are thinking that as long as they’re not bottom, what matters for now is that they survive and see what the world looks like on the other side.”As well as the cost, though, there is a unique practical consideration this season. Allardyce, after his appointment at West Brom, admitted that it “might take longer than normal” for his methods to have an impact because training time is so limited in a compacted, congested calendar. With so little breathing space between games this year, most teams are restricted to recovery and recuperation; a new coach simply does not have time to introduce a new tactical approach.But it is possible, too, that the pandemic — as it has in so many other spheres of life — has simply accelerated a change that was starting to occur naturally. “Most clubs now have a much more professional process when they hire a coach than they did 10 years ago,” said Omar Chaudhuri, the chief intelligence officer at the analytics consultancy 21st Club.Whereas typically owners in need of a new manager would scan the market for the latest flavor of the month, or use a network of agents to identify available and willing candidates, now many clubs conduct a much more extensive form of due diligence.Though Nolan Partners, for example, does much of its work identifying and recommending sporting directors, it is often brought in to source references and run the interview process for teams looking for a new manager. 21st Club is one of a number of firms that provide data and performance analysis not only on incumbents, but on their potential replacements.“Even when an owner or a chief executive has an idea of who they might want, they have to demonstrate a process,” King said. “It is much more sophisticated than it was.”David Wagner was the first manager fired by Schalke this season. It’s now on its third.Credit…Martin Meissner/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn Chaudhuri’s experience, that sophistication in hiring coaches has made owners less impulsive in firing them. “Clubs are much more invested in their appointments,” he said. “Executives increasingly look at the underlying numbers, and often are reassured by what they see, even if results aren’t great at the moment. They have put the work into finding the right guy, and they want it to succeed.”King said at least a part of that shift is because of the increasing number of American investors — who tend, he said, to arrive with a “medium- to long-term mind-set,” and run their clubs along the general manager model common in American sports. “A sporting director lends a bit of air cover to the manager,” King said. “The days of the sporting director criticizing the manager because he wants the job are gone.”The patience demonstrated in the straitened times of the pandemic, then, may be rooted as much in inclination as it is in necessity. But for all that soccer is starting to change — to grow more sophisticated, more thoughtful, less impulsive — some things stay the same.Preziosi fired Maran on Monday, and replaced him with Davide Ballardini. The new man, at least, goes into the job with his eyes open: It is the fourth time Preziosi has hired him. There are no prizes for guessing how the other three turned out.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Roberto Firmino's Goal Vaults Liverpool Over Tottenham in Premier League

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn SoccerLiverpool Pulls in Front, but Premier League Race Has Far to GoA lineup altered by injury, and supplemented by youth, summons the energy to beat Tottenham at Anfield.Roberto Firmino’s header in the 90th minute gave Liverpool a 2-1 victory over Tottenham at Anfield.Credit…Pool photo by Peter PowellDec. 16, 2020Updated 7:44 p.m. ETLIVERPOOL, England — José Mourinho left one name off his list. The Tottenham manager had been busy using his final news conference before his team’s trip to Liverpool to indulge his taste — and his talent — for sophistry, trying to prove Jürgen Klopp’s squad was not quite as threadbare as has been advertised by reeling off names of all the players that would be available.It is an act that has been polished to precision, but even Mourinho seemed to sense he was pushing his luck just a little. He got through the defense OK, and no manager blanks on Liverpool’s front line, but the midfield was more of a problem.He could not think who might join Georginio Wijnaldum and Jordan Henderson in Liverpool’s midfield. Nothing sparked — in the end, he could name only 10 players, which definitely proved a point, but not the one he was making — and so he moved on, not letting facts get in the way of a good argument.Next time, he may not make the same mistake. Mohamed Salah might have given Liverpool the lead against Tottenham on Wednesday. Roberto Firmino might have scored the goal that deprived Spurs of a merited point and sent the reigning champion to a 2-1 victory, and to the top of the Premier League table. Henderson might have provided the moment that will boil Mourinho’s blood, his subtle nudge on Eric Dier clearing a path for Firmino to strike.But much of Liverpool’s play ran through the midfielder Mourinho forgot. Curtis Jones signaled his promise, just short of a year ago, with considerable noise: a spectacular, curling shot to give a youthful Liverpool team a derby victory against Everton in an F.A. Cup tie at Anfield. The game — broadcast live on the BBC — attracted an audience of 7.2 million people, two or three times what most Premier League games command.Jones’s rise since then, though, has been curiously quiet, particularly for a locally-reared talent at one of England’s grandest clubs. He started just one Premier League game after soccer’s restart in June; he made just a couple of substitute appearances — offering flashes of his ability, no more — in the opening weeks of this season.More and more players have fallen by the wayside, though, as Klopp’s squad has been stripped by injury — eight senior players were missing against Spurs, with two more available only as substitutes — and Jones has had to step up. He has started four of Liverpool’s last five league games, and four of its six Champions League appointments so far.And yet he has become an established presence in Liverpool’s side almost unnoticed. That is, perhaps, because having one of the Premier League’s academies produce a gifted young player is not quite so rare as it once was. England — all of a sudden — has a glut of talent in its late teens and early twenties, capturing the imagination at even the most demanding clubs.Curtis Jones, 19, held his own against Lucas Moura and everyone else he tangled with in Tottenham’s midfield.Credit…Pool photo by Clive BrunskillManchester City has Phil Foden, Manchester United has Mason Greenwood, Chelsea has Mason Mount. The days when it was rare for a young English player to make the grade, for him to be given a chance in the Premier League, are long gone. It is no longer possible to celebrate each one individually, as it would have been even five years ago. There just is not the time.Jones’s progress, too, is testament to the circumstances in which he has been given his chance. Liverpool’s early season has been defined by injuries: not just the season-ending damage sustained by Virgil van Dijk and Joe Gomez, but the seemingly endless run of needling, niggling problems that have made Klopp such an ardent advocate for teams to be able to call on more substitutes. A hamstring here, a knee problem there, three weeks out, four weeks out, another game with Liverpool’s resources depleted.It creates a phenomenon in which watching Liverpool is to note that which is absent more than what is present: How will Klopp’s team cope without Van Dijk? Does it have the same aura without any of its senior, specialist central defenders? Is it running out of energy? Has it lost its spark? It has been so powerful that it has been possible not to notice Liverpool’s presence close to, or now at, the summit of the Premier League.But most of all, Jones’s transition into Liverpool’s team has been so smooth because of him. His teammates joke about his self-assurance, his lack of doubt, his iron self-belief. Klopp has found that he is not backward in coming forward, in asserting that he should, perhaps, be in the team ahead of some of the celebrated stars who have conquered both England and Europe with this team.All of that manifests in his play. Jones demands the ball constantly, drifting into space, directing his teammates, dictating the game. He is not cowed by the standards he must meet. His colleagues have responded with the most significant judgment of all: their trust. It is possible not to notice Jones because he looks like he belongs.None of that, though, should diminish what an achievement it is both for him — winning a place in one of Europe’s best teams at age 19 is, after all, no mean feat — and for Liverpool.By the time Firmino scored his goal, the winning goal, Klopp’s players had been running on fumes for some time. The high-tempo, high-intensity style he demands is being pushed to its limits by the relentlessness of this season. Sadio Mané seemed diminished. Salah had drifted out onto the right flank, hoping something might happen, rather than believing that it would.Steven Bergwijn missed two golden chances to put Tottenham ahead in the second half.Credit…Pool photo by Peter PowellHarry Kane drove an open header into the ground. The bounce carried it over the goal.Credit…Pool photo by Peter PowellBut when Firmino rose above Toby Alderweireld and planted his header past Spurs goalkeeper Hugo Lloris, he seemed to get a burst of adrenaline. He turned and sprinted along the field, across the halfway line, back toward the Kop, where the 2,000 fans permitted entry were punching the air in delight.He — and they — knew this was a significant step on what remains a long and arduous road. The Premier League table is packed tight. Liverpool is only eight points ahead of Wolves, and Wolves are 10th. Spurs and Chelsea and Leicester, as well as both Manchester clubs, lie menacing.Under the circumstances — given Liverpool’s injury list, whether Mourinho regards it as valid or not — the fact that Klopp has his team ahead of them all, even if only for now, is to his immense credit. But it is to the credit, too, of the players who have stepped into the breach, Jones prime among them. Mourinho, you suspect, will not be the last to learn his name.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Decoding José Mourinho's Instagram

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn SoccerWhat Is José Mourinho Telling Us on Instagram?The Tottenham coach’s account is a surprisingly unfiltered window into his personality. It’s revealing a side of him he hasn’t always wanted people to see.CreditDec. 15, 2020Updated 1:18 p.m. ETLONDON — The content itself does not, when you type the words, sound especially fascinating. A 15-second video of a man buffing his shoes. A photograph of that moment he checked his phone in the snow, or that time he sat on a bus, or the day he ate some popcorn.In truth, the execution is not especially polished, either. Often, the angle is a little off. The framing is rarely perfect. Little thought has gone into the lighting. In more than a few shots, an eagle-eyed critic might point out that the subject is not actually in focus.None of those minor flaws, though, have stopped what may be the most unlikely transformation of the year: José Mourinho’s blossoming into a bona fide Instagram sensation.It is no surprise, of course, that in the 10 months since Mourinho, the Tottenham Hotspur manager, restarted his account — and particularly in the six since he seemed to remember that he had it — he has managed to pick up 1.5 million followers. He has, after all, been one of the most famous and most fascinating figures in soccer for almost two decades.But that is not what makes his account stand out. On the surface, Mourinho should not be especially well suited to Instagram. At 57, he is not exactly a digital native. He has never shown a particular interest in social media; indeed, as Paul Pogba discovered when Mourinho coached him at Manchester United, he is more likely to have thought of it as a nuisance, if he thought of it at all.Nor has Mourinho ever given the impression that he wants to offer fans a window into his life, professional or personal. He has admitted that his previous dalliance with Instagram, while he was at United, was entirely designed to placate his sponsors. He stayed on it, casually and reluctantly, for two years before deleting his account in May 2018. Friends said he had grown “bored” with it.In his first year at Spurs, too, he grew to resent the ubiquity of the film crews making the Spurs edition of “All or Nothing,” the Amazon Prime documentary series. “Only when I go to the toilet are they not coming with me,” he once said. He was happy when the cameramen and producers left, he said, because it meant that “things can stay inside, between us, the way I like it.”But for all that, it turns out that Mourinho is something of a natural at Instagram. His early contributions were limited: a half-dozen posts in the first four months since he reactivated his account, all but one of them for the benefit of one or another of his sponsors.Since June, though, he has used it more and more frequently, and to better and better effect. Of his 65 posts through Monday, only 12 appeared to be fulfilling some sort of commercial demand. Eight others are likely to be images taken from professional photographers and repurposed for his account. There are five dedicated to causes close to his heart, particularly the United Nations World Food Program.All the rest — 14 videos, 26 still images — are personal, if not taken by Mourinho then taken at his behest. He will, regularly, hand his phone to whichever member of the Spurs coaching team or club staff is closest at hand and ask that they take a picture for his feed.Though he has conceded that his sponsors asked him to rejoin the site — “They felt that when I closed my account a few years ago we had a few million followers and they weren’t happy” — he has not farmed the work out to an agency. He is also not doing it at the behest of the club.He has come to view it, he said, as a chance to “open our world to the world.” According to one consultant who has previously worked with Mourinho, it was a realization that dawned on him after the Amazon documentary aired: The quotidian reality of his existence was at least as interesting to people as his behavior on the touchline or his tactical decisions.Mourinho is a devoted Formula 1 fan — one early video shows him gathered with his coaching staff, watching a Grand Prix race; they do not look nearly as engaged as he does — and would “love to know how a big team, the drivers, the boss, works,” he said. “People love when they see the inside. They love what they don’t see.”And so Mourinho’s account offers regular glimpses not only into his world — a tracking shot of the inside of his office as he analyzes a training session, a glimpse inside the Spurs changing room, the place regarded by most in soccer as a sort of sanctum sanctorum — but into his mind, too.There are captions praising players — “Top players are team players,” he wrote alongside a shot of striker Harry Kane — and ones criticizing his whole squad — “I hope everyone on this bus is as unhappy as me.” And, of course, Mourinho being Mourinho, there are occasional broadsides at anyone who has incurred his displeasure, including a withering assessment of the Covid-19 protocols during the last international break.He uses Instagram to celebrate and to sulk, to badger and to chide, and he does it all with a stripped back, unfiltered, resolutely honest aesthetic. Whether that is a deliberate, artistic choice or a lack of technical skill — it is entirely possible that Mourinho simply does not know his Amaro from his X-Pro — it works.“Generation Z tends to value creativity and humor,” Lucie Greene, the founder of Light Years, a consultancy that works with brands on digital strategies, said. “For millennials, it is generally an aspirational, lifestyle thing: Instagram as the new Condé Nast. But older influencers tend to be a lot more real, a lot less concerned with polish and presenting their personal brand.“Mourinho comes across as quite stoic. His posts aren’t thirsty. That can be quite strategic, to act like you’re not selling it too much. It’s quite self-deprecating: You can see a corporate P.R. freaking out at some of the posts.”Instagram has grown in popularity with an older generation in general and older men in particular, she said.“To millennials,” Greene said, “Instagram is a consumption machine, but to older users it can be more based on community — a way to connect to an audience and exchange ideas.”Mourinho, it is fair to say, is not in it for the community. He follows only 13 people, mostly the official accounts of his sponsors, as well as a couple of family members, his representative at Creative Artists and — a bit of an outlier, this one — the naturalist David Attenborough. None of the accounts are players, past or present.Instead, his account is a fairly clear example of Instagram as a sort of visual diary, Greene said: an authentic, unadulterated vision into his world. Mourinho does not just post when he is happy; he posts after defeats, too.His feed is not addled with the type of humblebrags best exemplified by a picture of a golden stretch of sand, a gleaming blue sky and the caption “today’s office.” (There is one vacation shot, of Mourinho staring at a disinterested dolphin.) The shots he chooses are not designed to embellish his life; they are there merely to reflect it.Mourinho himself still feels that social media does not come easily. “I am not, in my nature, an Instagram man,” he told Tottenham’s official club channels this season. And yet, in a way, he is.Mourinho has spent the last two decades carefully cultivating a public image of himself through meticulously staged media appearances and strategically chosen, often incendiary, public interventions. Instagram is simply a logical next step, one in which he can tweak that image — make it more rounded, more relatable — as he sees fit.And despite himself, he seems to enjoy it. “You can see that he’s definitely got into it,” Greene said.As she scrolled through his feed, she was surprised to see that friends, colleagues and relatives had liked a succession of posts that, to someone who does not like soccer, made little to no sense. Man eats popcorn and man sulks on bus have little artistic merit; they are not, in any traditional sense, aspirational. But they are undeniably, indisputably Mourinho: Champions League winner, Premier League winner, Instagram influencer.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Premier League Reopens Stadiums to Fans

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesC.D.C. Shortens Quarantine PeriodsVaccine TrackerFAQAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn SoccerAs Premier League Gates Reopen, a Soothing Soundtrack ReturnsThe return of a few thousand fans to Premier League stadiums was a reminder that it’s not only their roars that we’ve missed.The players were allowed to ignore social distancing rules on Saturday. The 2,000 fans were not.Credit…Pool photo by Justin SetterfieldBy More

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      Arsenal Is Learning Nothing Lasts Forever

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRory Smith On SoccerNothing Lasts ForeverArsenal’s recent history is a case study in slow, steady decline. With the club now staring at a long climb back to the top, it is also a warning to other elite teams.Alexandre Lacazette and Arsenal are reeling as they enter Sunday’s North London derby.Credit…Eddie Keogh/ReutersBy More