European Super League (Soccer)

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    Champions League or Super League? No One Wins.

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    Proponents of a European superleague do not lack for opposition. Those on the other side rarely have to explain why the status quo is worth saving.The feedback to the latest proposal for a European soccer superleague could not exactly be described as positive. On Thursday, the so-called sports development company that has spent much of the last two years pitching the idea produced its latest vision of what European soccer could — no, should — look like.The proposals were based on months of conversations with more than 50 clubs around Europe, according to the consultancy’s chief executive, Bernd Reichart. Those discussions, he said, had been boiled down into a set of 10 “principles,” most of them based on generic buzzwords like “sustainability” and “competitiveness” and “revenue distribution.”The central idea, though, was to replace the existing competitions run by European soccer’s governing body, UEFA — most notably the Champions League, which returns with its knockout stages this week — with a “multi-divisional” European competition comprising 60 to 80 teams and controlled, owned and operated by the clubs themselves.It did not, it is fair to say, go down well. Javier Tebas, the chief executive of La Liga and noted wallflower, described the superleague organizer as “a wolf disguising himself as a grandma.” The European Clubs Association called the latest ideas “distorted and misleading.” European Leagues, the umbrella body for the continent’s domestic tournaments, said that the game’s current model is “far from being broken and does not need to be fixed.”Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, railed on Twitter about the horrifying prospect of a competition dominated by a few big clubs.Susana Vera/ReutersThe prize for the best statement, though, went to the Football Supporters’ Association, a British organization representing fan interests. “The walking corpse that is the European Super League twitches again, with all the self-awareness one associates with a zombie,” its statement began. That was, as these things go, quite a strong start.Still, minor setbacks. Reichart, the Super League architect now flogging his company’s workshopped revisions, said the revised principles were intended as just a starting point, a way to begin a conversation with an even greater range of soccer’s “stakeholders.” It is, after all, one thing to knock down an idea. It is quite another to offer another in its place.In that spirit of openness and construction, then, here is another set of proposals, an alternative blueprint for soccer’s future that takes into account each of the newest superleague suggestions.1. MeritocracyThe same teams — four from England, two from Spain and one each from Germany and France — should make the Champions League quarterfinals every year. Entitled fans of these teams should complain that the group stages are “boring.” All other clubs should be locked out, in both a sporting and financial sense. Also the Europa League and Europa Conference League should happen.2. Domestic competitionsDomestic leagues should be won by the same teams, again and again, until those triumphs themselves become meaningless. England has special dispensation to have a maximum of three potential champions at any time.Common cause? The UEFA president, Aleksander Ceferin, with the Chelsea co-owner Todd Boehly.Damir Sencar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images3. Stable resourcesThe big teams should take most of the money, and win all of the trophies. The Premier League should dominate the financial landscape, allowing every other domestic league to wither on the vine. Clubs should be encouraged to be as irresponsible as possible in order to cling on to its coattails.4. Player healthA variety of different organizations should insist on as many games as possible, paying only lip service to the idea of player health. The players must not, at any point, be consulted on this.5. Financial sustainabilityOwners should be welcomed with open arms, no matter how many people they have dismembered. Soccer should, effectively, become a competition decided by which investment banks steer which clients toward which clubs. Once in place, these princelings and private equity firms should be encouraged to spend as much as possible in the transfer market, forcing rivals to risk bankruptcy to keep up, distorting the idea of value and making their own clubs entirely dependent on their continued and limitless largesse.6. The world’s best competitionAll of the best players should play for the same handful of clubs, mainly in England. Whole leagues should be turned into informal feeder competitions. The most prestigious teams in those leagues should be converted into talent factories for clubs whose accidental wealth has made them lazy, and everyone else should be bought out as part of a network of teams that functions essentially as a holding pen for prospective transfers.7. fan experienceAny suggestion of mounting disinterest among fans should be put down to young people no longer having attention spans, rather than the fact that soccer’s existing structures have turned the vast majority of games into meaningless processions.8. Don’t forget the womenWe have to mention women’s soccer, though how low down the list it is indicates where it lies in our priorities. Women’s soccer should continue to be an afterthought, modeled entirely on the men’s game — regardless of whether the men’s game functions effectively or not — because who has the time to think about it more deeply than that?9. SolidarityAny team that slips in status should face financial ruin. The constituent clubs of the Champions League would, ideally, be indistinguishable from one year to the next. Teams relegated from the Premier League should be handed parachute payments that essentially ensure they return immediately, but everyone should continue to pretend there is a pyramid that allows for near-impossible organic growth.10. Respect for the lawTeams that break the flimsy financial rules we put in place should not be punished. Instead, craven organizations should let them off with piecemeal fines, subtly affirming that you can do what you want as long as you are rich enough. Clubs and leagues should claim to be self-policing, rejecting any oversight, despite all of the evidence to the contrary.These 10 alternative principles, of course, are the obstacle that a superleague — or anyone proposing radical change to the status quo — must overcome. Reichart has to explain his ideas. He has to put them into an action plan. He has to try to make them palatable. He has to persuade people to come over to his vision.Whether that vision has much merit is open to question. Its one concrete suggestion — a broad, league-based tournament sitting above the domestic competitions — is at best a matter of taste. Subjectively, a European superleague seems a downgrade on the Champions League’s current arrangement, but it is probably no worse than the so-called Swiss Model set to come into force next year. (It does, ironically, work far better as a paradigm for how to grow women’s soccer in Europe, even though it clearly cares little for that aspect of the game.)The problem with criticizing new proposals is that nobody ever has to outline the alternative. None of the alphabet soup of governing bodies and lobbying groups ever have to explain where they think the game is going; how they envision its future; how they plan to address the blindingly obvious flaws in the “model that is not broken and does not need to be fixed,” the ones that — as UEFA’s own financial report, released on Friday, noted — have made soccer increasingly reliant on capital injections from owners and turning a blind eye to mounting debts.The Super League’s ideas man, Bernd Reichart, with two of its biggest proponents, Florentino Pérez of Real Madrid, left, and Joan Laporta of Barcelona.Mariscal/EPA, via ShutterstockSo long as they can avoid laying out their own plan for the future, the game’s current leaders can instead cast anyone proposing change as greedy and cynical and self-interested and hope that nobody points out the hypocrisy in those charges.They can rely on the fact that some fans yearn hopelessly for a return to a lost past, one in which the European Cup is a straight knockout tournament and Nottingham Forest is the champion of England, and that others, the ones whose teams either monopolize glory or happen to be in the Premier League, feel that things are working out quite nicely just as they are.They can depend on the understandable, and largely correct, suspicion of all fans that anyone suggesting something new has an ulterior motive, without ever being moved to wonder quite why all of these bodies are so furious at the very idea of their authority being challenged.There is no reason to believe that Reichart, and his consultancy, A22, have the best interests of European soccer at heart, just as there was no reason, in 2021, to buy into Florentino Pérez’s suggestion that he was trying to save anyone but Real Madrid.But, when taking up the cudgels, it is worth asking not only what your opponent wants but what your allies want, too. It is worth assessing the reality of what you are defending: a reality in which the gap between the Premier League and the rest of Europe turns into a chasm, where the Champions League is a closed shop, where the rich have it all and still want more. That is what they are fighting for. They just never have to explain it. More

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      What the Champions League Is Lacking

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      Europe’s richest competition offers the best of what soccer can deliver. But the World Cup still has something it can’t match.PARIS — There will be stories, of course. There are always stories. The Champions League delivers them so frequently and so reliably that it is impossible to dismiss the nagging suspicion that all of this might just be scripted, the product of some complex simulation being run from a secret lair in Nyon.Robert Lewandowski, clad in the blue and red of Barcelona, will return to Bayern Munich, only a few weeks after forcing his exit. Manchester City’s visit to Borussia Dortmund will see Erling Haaland standing once more before its Yellow Wall, that great force of nature no longer at his back but marshaled in his face.And there will be scenes, too. Real Madrid, the reigning and apparently perennial European champion, will walk out at Celtic Park and wince at the roar of a place that impressed Lionel Messi so much that he keeps a Celtic jersey at home as a memento, an atmosphere described by Xavi Hernández as “incomparable,” an arena where the host’s winning so much as a corner generated a noise that made Antonio Conte think “the stadium was falling down.”That is what the Champions League does best, after all. Like its great contemporary, the Premier League, the competition is as much an iconographical phenomenon as a sporting one. Even in those years — not so long ago, even now — when its product was more noted for its caution, its risk aversion, its brutalist cynicism, its appeal endured because of the way it was packaged.The searing lights, the swelling music and the packed stands across Europe all serve as immediately comprehensible prompts to observers and participants alike. They denote that what is unfolding is the pinnacle of the sport, the only thing that matters, the indisputable main event.Real Madrid, last year’s champion, and Manchester City are back where both feel they belong.Juanjo Martin/EPA, via ShutterstockAnd yet, for the first time in three decades, that may not be true this year. This season’s Champions League will be a staccato one. The first two months of the tournament will bring a great rush of fixtures, six rounds of games played in nine breathless weeks, the only breather coming in the form of an unwelcome and, on some level, somewhat greedy international break.Then the competition that has spent 30 years establishing itself as the unquestioned and unrivaled summit of the game — the place where the sport’s cutting edge is sharpened, where new ideas bubble and sizzle, where players put their talent to the ultimate test — will be suspended in uneasy hibernation, put begrudgingly on hold from November until February.Reluctantly, the Champions League — and the constellation of Europe’s great clubs who have come to regard it as their objective and birthright — will cede the limelight to the World Cup: five prime weeks in the middle of the season handed over to international soccer, that anachronism of a bygone age, glossy club soccer’s unwelcome, ugly cousin.There is no shortage of reasons for club soccer to resent this intrusion: the financial ramifications of losing those weeks of television real estate; the potential risk of injury to players paid not by their national associations but by the clubs; the sense that the engine of the sport is being forced to stall so that the hood can be polished.Read More on the 2022 World CupA New Start Date: A last-minute request for the tournament to begin a day earlier was only the latest bit of uncertainty to surround soccer’s showcase event.Chile’s Failed Bid: The country’s soccer federation had argued Ecuador should be ejected from the tournament to the benefit of the Chilean team. FIFA disagreed.Golden Sunset: This year’s World Cup will most likely be the last for stars like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo — a profound watershed for soccer.Senegalese Pride: Aliou Cissé, one of the best soccer coaches in Africa, has given Senegal a new sense of patriotism. Next up: the World Cup.But greater than all those, perhaps, is the unhappy reminder that, while the Champions League is the most glamorous and most exclusive club competition on the planet, it is only the most glamorous and most exclusive club competition on the planet. The qualifier — “club” — tells a story of its own. For all the money, for all the power, for all the stories and the scenes, the World Cup is still the biggest show in town.It is worth pausing to reflect on why that might be; after all, it does not fit neatly with what we assume modern consumers — sorry, fans — want from sports. As discussed in this space a couple of weeks ago, audiences are drawn to soccer games by two factors in particular: the familiarity of the brands — sorry, teams — involved, and the stakes for which they are playing.The World Cup, like the Champions League, delivers both in spades. There is no brand recognition quite like being a nation state, with your own seat at the United Nations and history of governmental corruption and fully equipped army, obviously. And there is no tournament quite so doused in risk as the World Cup, in which one misstep can waste four years’ work.In every other aspect, though, the World Cup comes up short. It cannot match the Champions League for prize money, or for star power — Haaland, like Mohamed Salah and the noted nation state of Italy, will be absent from Qatar — or, most crucial, for quality. The Champions League, now, is where the finest soccer in the world is played. The World Cup, by contrast, is pockmarked by flaws.That is unavoidable, of course. If Manchester City lacks a striker, it can go out and buy the best one it can find. Spain, as it has helpfully proved over the last several years, does not have that luxury. Like everyone else, it has to make do and mend. Its coach does not have the opportunity of endless training sessions to hone a system that might accentuate the team’s strengths and disguise its weaknesses; a few days is all that is available.And yet, still, the World Cup possesses the quality of a Black Hole; it draws in the light from even the brightest stars around it. The first phase of the Champions League, like the early rounds of domestic soccer, will have the feel of an appetizer, for fans and players. Games will be played with an awareness that nobody wants to miss the main course.Qatar, where World Cup grass and World Cup anticipation are growing.Mustafa Abumunes/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat, perhaps, suggests the World Cup has something that the Champions League does not. That could be rarity: the fact that even the finest players might get only three shots at going to a World Cup when they can reasonably expect a dozen or so tilts at the Champions League trophy. It could be the jeopardy that is, for now, threaded into its structure. It could be good, old-fashioned patriotic fervor.Or it might be mystery. It may be the flaws themselves that make the World Cup so appealing. It could be that the tournament’s appeal is linked to the fact that Spain could turn up and win it or be eliminated in the group stage; that France, despite the quantity of its quality, could be eliminated on penalties by Switzerland; that South Korea can beat Germany and still not qualify for the knockout rounds.The Champions League has, over the years, lost all of that uncertainty. Every year, it feels more like a parade of the inevitable. There will be stories and there will be scenes this season, as there are every season, but they will be rooted in the same inequality that means it is already possible to be pretty certain of the identity of at least a dozen or so of the teams that will make the round of 16.The same cannot be said of the World Cup. None of the teams are perfect — none of them can be — and so the playing field is more level. The teams that do benefit from a disparity of resources do not have the safety net of five more group games, or a second leg, or the prospect of the transfer market.It is the flaws of the teams in the World Cup that make its appeal unrivaled. It is the uncertainty that they bring that make it the main event. It is the unpredictability that generates what the Champions League lacks, and what it might like to consider trying to capture once more.The Death of the Group of DeathThe Champions League groups for 2022-23.Emrah Gurel/Associated PressThere are, now, two types of Champions League groups. One features two heavy favorites, two teams whose seasons will be defined by how deep they can advance into the competition — Paris St.-Germain and Juventus, for example — and two comparative makeweights, in the form of Benfica, say, and Maccabi Haifa.These groups are something of a tease. The way UEFA draws the groups means that the eye is drawn to those first two names. P.S.G. and Juventus, you think: a clash of the titans. There will be genuine jeopardy here. This sensation lasts as long as it takes the observer to remember that two teams qualify from each pool, and so the games between the two resident superpowers may, in fact, mean nothing at all.The second sort of group is more interesting. Thanks to the quirks of the seeding system, these feature just one putative contender — Liverpool, despite its early-season form, or Chelsea, say — and three relatively evenly matched opponents: Ajax, Napoli and Rangers, or A.C. Milan, Red Bull Salzburg and (at a push) Dinamo Zagreb.Welcome to the big stage (for now), Viktoria Plzen.Martin Divisek/EPA, via ShutterstockIn this scenario, too, the superpower invariably makes it through — that is the nature of the modern Champions League, in which we all spend an awful lot of time making sure that the thing that always happens will, in fact, happen again — but it is generally with a lower points total and a degree of gratitude that their rivals all managed to beat each other.The sole exception to this rule of two groups comes on those occasions when there is a third kind: when one team in a group is notably weaker than all three of its opponents. That dubious honor, this year, falls to Viktoria Plzen, the Czech champion, drawn to face Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Inter Milan.There are eight groups in this year’s Champions League. This is the only one that does not fit the pattern. This is the only one that is not wholly predictable, that might just about be described as a Group of Death, and even that is only because it is impossible to be entirely sure how secure in itself this new vision of Barcelona might be. In ordinary years, even a club as famous as Inter would find itself succumbing to the inevitable, and European soccer would be facing up to the prospect of a fall without any jeopardy at all.CorrespondenceThanks to Jon Gilbert, first of all, for performing that most valuable of services: holding me to account for my attempt last week to hold Gary Neville to account.“Neville was railing against Glazer parsimony,” Jon wrote. “But that was nothing to do with buying players. Neville was apoplectic at the complete lack of investment in club infrastructure. He was hugely upset about the state of Old Trafford, now a leaky rust bucket. The club lacks a leading training facility, the lack of a sporting director has stifled progress and a soccer-competent leadership team is desperately needed.”The last couple of points were, I think, raised by last week’s newsletter, but I’ll concede the former: Neville was speaking more broadly than simply complaining that United should lavish more money in the transfer market. The decline of Old Trafford, in fact, is a pretty handy metaphor for the club as a whole: It still draws the crowds and rakes in the cash, but it is trading on memory.Manchester United beat Liverpool on Monday, righting its ship for a day.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA question, too, from Phil Friedman, soliciting an expansion to the suggestion that some revised version of the European Super League makes more sense for other teams from the continent than it does for the denizens of the Premier League. “Not sure I understand this thought,” Phil noted, which indicates a failure on my part to communicate with sufficient clarity.My logic — which may, caveat emptor, be faulty — is that the Premier League’s supremacy is now ensconced; its broadcasting income will continue to spiral, and so its teams essentially have no need to seek a more glamorous competition elsewhere. Indeed, you could argue that the Premier League will become a sort of de facto Super League anyway, with every other domestic competition in Europe feeding into it.For the elites of Germany, Spain, Italy and France (and potentially others) the only conceivable challenge to that hegemony is to join forces. A league not just boasting Bayern Munich, Barcelona, Paris St.-Germain and Juventus but also drawing on the combined populations of the countries they call home would, I suspect, be able to generate revenues that can match those on offer in England, allowing those clubs to gain access to the fortunes they so evidently believe they deserve.That is certainly not to say its advent would be welcome, of course. Regional leagues are an idea I can get behind; losing the variety offered by each domestic tournament would be a shame. It is just that, from my vantage point, it has a certain inevitability about it, even allowing for the fatal flaw in any proposed Super League: the fact that someone would have to finish bottom. More

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      Fight Over World Cup Schedule Pits FIFA Against Leagues

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      A dispute about World Cup qualifying games has highlighted the power soccer’s governing body holds over clubs, and how little recourse they have.A meeting was called, discussions were held, and groups representing some of the world’s biggest soccer clubs and leagues were given a chance to have their say.Their concerns were immediate: Extra dates being proposed for qualifying matches for the 2022 World Cup would badly affect their operations, they said, with dozens of their players from South America, including Lionel Messi and Neymar, set to miss crucial league games because of their national team commitments.FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, reassured the officials from the clubs and the leagues. Do not worry, the clubs were told, FIFA would consider the needs of all the affected groups before deciding how to squeeze in the extra dates, which were needed to accommodate matches postponed by the pandemic.But in the end, FIFA chose what worked best for FIFA. Ignoring entreaties from clubs and leagues around the world, FIFA and its regional confederation for South America, CONMEBOL, went ahead and added two extra days for qualifying matches in September and October. The clubs, not World Cup organizers, would just have to adjust.The outcome was perhaps the clearest example of the immense power FIFA wields when it comes to directing a sport for which it is the chief governing body and also the organizer of the World Cup, one of the biggest sporting events on the planet. While everyone involved agreed something needed to be done to find a spot for the games, which had been postponed earlier this year because of the coronavirus pandemic, only FIFA had the final say on when they would take place.The rosters of top European clubs like Real Madrid are dotted with South American players.Pablo Morano/ReutersWhile the leagues, clubs and players’ unions are often given a hearing, they had little say in the matter beyond expressing impotent frustration at the outcome. That was what a lobbying group, the World Leagues Forum, did this month when it noted FIFA’s ruling would most likely leave clubs in Europe and elsewhere without hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of talent for key early-season games because the new dates — and player travel — would overlap with domestic schedules.“As a governing body, FIFA should be trying to find the best solution for the entire football community,” read the statement by the World Leagues Forum, an umbrella organization for about 40 top leagues. “Instead, FIFA has decided to impose the worst possible option with practically no notice. This poses an obvious governance issue which will have to be addressed.”The growing tension comes amid a wider discussion about the future of soccer, with FIFA pushing for new competitions and new revenue streams and even evaluating the possibility of staging the World Cup every two years. That discussion, which officially is related to soccer’s calendar for the next decade starting in 2024, is expected to conclude by the end of this year.The talks follow perhaps the most fractious period in modern soccer history, encapsulated by a failed attempt by a group of leading European clubs to form a closed superleague and break away from the century-old structures that bind the game together.While their efforts did not ignite the revolution they had designed — their so-called Super League collapsed in a matter of days — their revolt did highlight the unequal distribution of power in global soccer: While teams and leagues invest billions of dollars in the game, they have little say over how it is run.At present, FIFA has signed so-called memorandums of understanding that provide a framework that allows players, who in the main are trained and compensated by their clubs, to play for their countries. Under the terms of that relationship, clubs are required to release players for national team duty for up to 10 days for each international window.For years, that agreement largely held firm, until the coronavirus changed everything and cut the time available to fit in matches before the World Cup at the end of 2022. Instead of two games and their accompanying travel in each window, national teams now would be scheduled for three.At a meeting on July 27, FIFA, represented by Victor Montagliani, its vice president and the head of the regional body for North and Central America, met with officials representing the leagues and clubs. All agreed that a solution needed to be found in order for South America’s qualifiers — backed up by pandemic-related cancellations — to be completed in time for the World Cup.An official from CONMEBOL, according to notes taken at the meeting reviewed by The New York Times, explained that traveling to and within South America was extremely challenging, and that the confederation required three extra days in September and October to ensure the games could be played safely.Like Brazil and Argentina, Uruguay and Colombia also count on European-based pros to fill out their rosters in qualifying.Andressa Anholete/Getty ImagesA representative for the leagues said that would not be acceptable, since it would mean scores of players would be unavailable for at least one weekend of league play, and perhaps more, because of quarantine requirements upon their return to their clubs. He said the leagues could accommodate one extra day, and suggested that the games be played in a secure bubble to minimize travel. At the same meeting, a representative of the players’ union, FIFPro, reminded FIFA of the health effects on athletes of traveling long distances and playing so many games in quick succession.A few weeks later, on Aug. 7, FIFA announced its decision. In a meeting of its most senior body, the Bureau of the FIFA Council — a group made up of the FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, and the leaders of the six regional confederations — it was decided that the South American qualifiers in September and October would be triple match days — three matches in one international break — and clubs would be required to release players for two additional days. Only UEFA, Europe’s governing body, voted against the plan. Previously, it and CONMEBOL had worked together to oppose some of Infantino’s suggestions.“The addition of two days will ensure sufficient rest and preparation time between matches, reflecting the longer travel distances required both to and within South America, thus safeguarding player welfare by mitigating the negative consequences of this more intense schedule, while ensuring fair competition as well as a prompter return to their clubs of the players involved,” FIFA said in a statement.That hardly mollified the clubs. To make matters worse, FIFA said it had scrapped a regulation that allowed teams whose players faced quarantines upon return to withhold releasing them for national team games.“From a regulatory standpoint, this means that FIFA compels players to play for their national team even if they are restricted afterward from playing for their club for several games,” the leagues said in a letter addressed to the FIFA president. The effect, the leagues said, would be quarantine measures that would result “in the disruption or discontinuation of domestic leagues.”With the first games of the September window just over a week away, leagues and clubs are weighing their options. Under FIFA’s current regulations, they may not have many: They will be sanctioned if they refuse to release their players for the looming international window. The complaint would be brought by national soccer associations that comprise FIFA. The body that would rule on the complaints? FIFA. More

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      Champions League Final: The Rich Get Richer

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

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      The Super League Thought It Had a Silent Partner: FIFA

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      Publicly, soccer’s global governing body criticized a breakaway European Super League. Privately, it had held talks for months with the founders about endorsing the competition.Tucked away in the pages and pages of financial and legal jargon that constitute the founding contract of the Super League, the failed project that last month briefly threatened the century-old structures and economics of European soccer, were references to one “essential” requirement.The condition was deemed so important that organizers agreed that the breakaway plan could not succeed without satisfying it and yet was so secret that it was given a code name even in contracts shared among the founders.Those documents, copies of which were reviewed by The New York Times, refer to the need for the Super League founders to strike an agreement with an entity obliquely labeled W01 but easily identifiable as FIFA, soccer’s global governing body. That agreement, the documents said, was “an essential condition for the implementation of the SL project.”Publicly, FIFA and its president, Gianni Infantino, have joined other soccer leaders, fans and politicians in slamming the short-lived Super League project, which would have allowed a small group of elite European teams — a group that included Spain’s Real Madrid, Italy’s Juventus and the English powerhouses Manchester United and Liverpool, among others — to accumulate an ever larger share of the sport’s wealth.But privately, according to interviews with more than a half-dozen soccer executives, including one Super League club owner, Infantino was aware of the plan and knew some of his closest lieutenants had for months — until at least late January — been engaged in talks about lending FIFA’s backing to the breakaway league.The Super League was perhaps the most humbling failure in modern soccer history. Announced by 12 of the world’s richest clubs late on a Sunday night in April, it was abandoned less than 48 hours later amid a hailstorm of protest from fans, leagues, teams and politicians. Its founding teams have since apologized — some of them multiple times — for taking part in it, and a few could still face significant financial and sporting consequences.But the behind-the-scenes discussions that led to a week of public drama have laid bare simmering tensions between FIFA and European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, over control of billions of dollars in annual revenue; exposed a series of frayed relationships among some of the sport’s top leaders that may be beyond repair; and raised new questions about the role played by FIFA and Infantino in the project that shook soccer’s foundations.FIFA declined to respond to specific questions related to the involvement of Infantino or his aides in the planning of the Super League. Instead it pointed to its previous statements and its commitment to processes in which “all key football stakeholders were consulted.”The Super League’s discussions with FIFA began in 2019. They were led by a group known as A22, a consortium of advisers headed by the Spain-based financiers Anas Laghari and John Hahn and charged with putting together the Super League project. A22 officials held meetings with some of Infantino’s closest aides, including FIFA’s deputy secretary general, Mattias Grafstrom.In at least one of those meetings, the breakaway group proposed that, in exchange for FIFA’s endorsement of its project, the Super League would agree to the participation of as many as a dozen of its marquee teams in an annual FIFA-backed World Cup for clubs. The teams also agreed to waive payments they would have earned by taking part, a potential windfall for FIFA of as much as $1 billion each year. After their initial meetings, the advisers reported back that they had found a receptive audience.The Super League’s driving force: Florentino Pérez, Real Madrid’s president.Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesObtaining FIFA’s support was not merely a hedge; the organization’s consent was required to prevent the project from being mired in costly and lengthy litigation and to preclude any punishments for the players who took part.But it was also an insurance policy for the players. In a previous superleague discussion in 2018, FIFA had issued dark warnings that players could be banned from their national teams — and thus the World Cup — for appearing in an unsanctioned league.By the middle of last year, the advisers from A22 were telling clubs that “FIFA was on board,” according to a Super League club owner. Others interviewed, including several with direct knowledge of the meetings who spoke anonymously because they would face legal action for publicly disclosing information subject to secrecy rules, said FIFA was at least open to the idea of the new league. But they said the organization and its leaders remained noncommittal — at least officially — until more details about the structure of the project were in place.Confident they could obtain the support they needed, the organizers discussed various concepts for their new league before landing on the one they presented to the world when they broke cover on April 18. The Super League, as it would be known, would have 15 permanent members but would allow access to five additional teams from Europe each season.A22 had been working on iterations of a superleague for as long as three years. Laghari, an executive at the advisory firm Key Capital Partners who has known the Real Madrid president, Florentino Pérez, since he was a child, was to be the league’s first secretary general. Pérez had long been the driving force behind a superleague, but now, as he had come to grow confident he had FIFA on board, the stars started to align for him and his friend.In Infantino, Pérez and Laghari had found an energetic president eager to remake the soccer business. Infantino often spoke about being open to new ventures and proposals — he has championed the expansion of both the World Cup and FIFA’s Club World Cup in recent years — as he sought to assert FIFA’s dominance over the club game in a manner unlike any of his predecessors. Pérez and Laghari also found kindred spirits in the men who controlled most of Europe’s top clubs. Most were drawn to a project that promised to open a spigot of new revenue while ensuring that costs would be controlled, leading to enormous profits and access to elite competition in perpetuity.Aleksander Ceferin, left, and Infantino in 2018. They have clashed repeatedly over control of club soccer, particularly in Europe.Alexander Hassenstein/Getty ImagesYet even as they received assurances from the A22 advisers about FIFA’s involvement, some skeptical club owners did their own due diligence by reaching out directly to senior FIFA officials. And the word they got back, according to a team executive with direct knowledge of at least one of those conversations, was the same they were hearing from Madrid: If the plan was put together in a certain way, FIFA would not oppose it.Those talks gave the clubs and JPMorgan, the American investment bank that had agreed to finance the project, a level of comfort about its viability. Their confidence wavered, though, when leaks about a potential superleague emerged in news reports in January, accompanied by whispers of FIFA’s involvement in the talks.Alarmed by the reports, European soccer’s top official, Aleksander Ceferin, the UEFA president, held an urgent meeting with Infantino at UEFA’s headquarters in Nyon, Switzerland in which he asked Infantino directly if he was involved in the plan. Infantino said he was not, but he initially demurred when asked to commit to a statement condemning the proposals. Amid intense pressure and growing requests for comment, though, he backed down.On Jan. 21, a statement was issued in the name of FIFA and soccer’s six regional confederations. It said a “closed” European league would not be recognized by FIFA or the confederations and reiterated the threat of a World Cup ban for any participant.The statement shocked the organizers of the Super League, as their talks with FIFA until that stage had been positive. But according to people involved in the planning, they also sensed a signal in its wording: FIFA said it would not recognize a closed competition, but the Super League was now planning to supplement its roster of 15 permanent members with five qualifiers every season.The A22 advisers, according to the club owner, insisted that loophole meant all was not lost. “They reported that FIFA was still open to something,” he said.The founders’ plan was to tie the Super League to FIFA’s Club World Cup, the owner said. That way the clubs would commit as many as 12 of the biggest teams in Europe to Infantino’s ambitious global competition in exchange for FIFA’s blessing of their new league. To sweeten the deal, they considered waiving $1 billion in potential payouts to allow FIFA to keep the money as a so-called solidarity payment that could be spent on soccer development projects around the world.It is unknown if any more talks took place between FIFA and the Super League clubs in the weeks before the clubs broke cover and announced their project. But FIFA was the last of the major soccer governing bodies to issue an official statement on the proposed league after the clubs went public, and it only did so after UEFA, top leagues and politicians had made clear their opposition.Arriving as Ceferin was calling the leaders of the breakaway league “snakes and liars,” FIFA’s statement was far more measured. Any talk of excluding players from the World Cup was quietly dropped, and FIFA instead offered nuanced, conciliatory language. FIFA said it stood “firm in favour of solidarity in football and an equitable redistribution model which can help develop football as a sport, particularly at global level.”It also reiterated that it could only “express its disapproval to a ‘closed European breakaway league’ outside of the international football structures.”For those engaged in the breakaway, the words — as they had in January — were vague enough to suggest that there was still hope for their project, that FIFA might still be open to providing its backing.Within 48 hours, though, their hopes were dashed. Opposition to the plan had by then reached a fever pitch. Fans in Britain — where six of the 12 founding members were based — were protesting in the streets, and politicians had threatened to enact laws to block the league.Fans of Chelsea and the five other Premier League clubs that had signed up for the Super League forced their teams to reconsider and withdraw.Matt Dunham/Associated PressInfantino, just as he had in January, once again came under pressure from Ceferin to distance himself from the plans. He did so in a speech to UEFA’s congress on April 20 in which he effectively walked away from the Super League project.“We can only strongly disapprove the creation of the Super League,” Infantino said. “A Super League which is a closed shop. A breakaway from the current institutions, from the leagues, from the associations, from UEFA and from FIFA. There is a lot to throw away for the short-term financial gain of some. They need to reflect, and they need to assume responsibility.”Hours later, realizing that the “essential” requirement their contract had called for would not be forthcoming, the first clubs started to walk away. By nightfall, all six English clubs had announced they were out. By midnight, three other founders had followed.Today only three teams — Pérez’s Real Madrid, Juventus and Barcelona — remain as holdouts, refusing to sign a letter of apology demanded by UEFA as a condition of their reintegration into European soccer. If they do not sign, all three face significant penalties, including a potential ban from the Champions League.Infantino, meanwhile, faces pressures of his own, not to mention accusations of betrayal. The head of the Spanish league, Javier Tebas, openly called him one of the masterminds behind the breakaway league and said he had told Infantino as much when the men met briefly at the UEFA Congress.“It’s he who is behind the Super League, and I already told him in person,” Tebas said this month. “I’ve said it before and I will say it again: Behind all of this is FIFA President Gianni Infantino.” More

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      The Super League Founders Are Now at War With One Another

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      Real Madrid, Juventus and Barcelona are threatening to extract damages from their former partners in a doomed European Super League.Less than two weeks after they became partners in a superleague project that would have cast aside the structures and organizations that have underpinned European soccer for a century, a group of the sport’s biggest clubs are now engaged in another pitched battle behind the scenes.This time, their fight is with one another.At the heart of the new battle are two letters: one renouncing the project, a short-lived Super League, and recommitting the teams to Europe’s existing system, and another threatening any club that walks away.European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, is demanding that the league’s founding clubs sign the first letter, which would complete the formal demise of the Super League and begin the smooth of repairing the clubs’ broken relationship with European soccer. Eight of the teams already have agreed to do so.But three of the 12 Super League founders — Real Madrid, Juventus and Barcelona — are refusing to let the project die. Doubling down in a letter of their own, they are threatening to pursue legal action against their former partners to extract millions of dollars in penalties if any teams follow through on plans to withdraw from the league.The Super League, announced by its 12 founding teams in a late-night news release on April 18, collapsed 48 hours later amid a popular and political backlash. In the days and weeks since that humiliating retreat, club presidents and owners have held emergency meetings with leaders of soccer in their own countries and with UEFA to try to limit any punishment they might face for being part of a breakaway that would have devastated the value of leagues and clubs across Europe.UEFA has said it will treat repentant clubs more kindly than those that refuse to back down. Those that refuse, it has warned, risk the most severe penalty available: a two-year ban from the Champions League.Fans angry with the owners of Manchester United invaded the team’s stadium on Sunday, forcing the postponement of a Premier League game against Liverpool.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDocuments, messages and conversations with executives involved in the talks suggest that eight teams of the 12 original Super League members have agreed to sign a declaration legally distancing themselves from the breakaway competition, one short of the number required to force through the liquidation of a company set up in Spain to run it.The three holdout clubs, though, are warning others of severe legal and financial consequences if they break the commitments they made when they signed up.The dispute is an indication of just how badly and how quickly relations between the top teams have soured, and underscores how even after its demise the Super League continues to tear at the fabric of European soccer.A majority of the breakaway teams have told UEFA they will sign on to a letter confirming their intent to walk away. But in a draft of the letter, which was reviewed by The New York Times, they point out that if all 12 teams do not come to an agreement, efforts to revive the competition may be outside their control.UEFA shall “promptly receive” details of what formal measures each club has taken to break free of its obligations, the letter says.Despite the popular backlash to the project, opinions have hardened among the three clubs — Real Madrid, Juventus and Barcelona — that were most committed backers of the project. They have vowed to press ahead with legal action to prove soccer’s current rules are incompatible with competition and free trade laws.In their letter, sent on Thursday, the clubs accused the teams that have publicly declared their intention to leave the Super League with committing a “material breach” of the founders agreement. Amplifying that damage by signing a declaration pledging their allegiance to UEFA would open them to significant damages, the letter warns.The Super League started to wobble even before the formal announcement of its creation. Within a day, some of teams started to make private entreaties to UEFA, acknowledging that agreeing to join had been a mistake.Less than 48 hours after the league was launched, Manchester City became the first team to officially announce its intention to withdraw. That started a cascade, with all six Premier League teams releasing public statements revealing their plans to withdraw.The defections left teams in Spain and Italy acknowledging the league was no longer viable in its original form, but not formally declaring they would not try to revive it.Two weeks later, as many as eight teams had told UEFA they were committed to walking away from the Super League project, and ninth, A.C. Milan, was on the verge of making the same decision. According to the Super League contract, the withdrawal of nine clubs can force the liquidation of the entity that was created to run the competition. That dissolution is one of UEFA’s requirements to put the entire chapter to rest for the clubs involved.The breakaway attempts continue to roil soccer on a domestic level, too. In Italy, the national association has introduced new regulations aimed at preventing any new breakaway attempts, while in England discussions are taking place over similar rule changes and also about how to punish teams whose actions threatened the interests of the Premier League.The Premier League is expected to announce the result of its consultation within days. One plan involves securing long-term commitments from member clubs not to join any unsanctioned competition, or to withdraw from the domestic competition, with severe penalties — including fines of more than $50 million — if they do.Finding a suitable punishment is proving difficult, however. Soccer’s leaders are aware that the collapse of the Super League owed much to the public opposition of fans of the English teams that had agreed to join it; punishing the teams in ways that do not anger those same fans is now the goal.That means clubs are unlikely to be hit with sporting sanctions, but rather with financial penalties aimed at the owners that backed the Super League plan. For now, one tangible response has been ostracism: Officials from the six breakaway clubs have been removed from the league’s internal committees. More

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      When the Goals Come Out of Nowhere

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      A Greek striker is one of the top scorers in Europe, and his play has caught the eye of big clubs. But are his goals a product of his talent, or his environment?Giorgos Giakoumakis had never scored goals. Not in great numbers, anyway. He had played 22 games, spread across three seasons, before he finally managed a single one for his first club, a team of modest ambitions and close horizons called Platanias, based on his home island, Crete.In the early stages of his career, he broke into double figures for a single campaign only once, mustering 11 goals in his final season at Platanias. It appeared, at the time, to be his breakthrough. That summer, he moved to A.E.K. Athens, one of the three powers that dominate the Greek capital.There, Giakoumakis would carve out his own little place in the club’s mythology. Midway through his debut season, he scored a 93rd-minute winner to settle a derby with Olympiacos, decisively swinging a finely poised title race in A.E.K.’s favor. It was his first league goal for the club. It would also prove to be the last.He spent much of the next two seasons out on loan, A.E.K. hoping either that he would find his form or that it might find a buyer. The signs were not promising. A spell back on Crete — this time with O.F.I. — brought two goals. A year in Poland, with Gornik Zabrze, produced only three.Giakoumakis seemed set for a career as a journeyman. There was nothing on his résumé that so much as hinted at what would happen next.This season, out of nowhere, Giakoumakis has been transformed into one of Europe’s most prolific forwards. He has scored 24 goals in 27 league games. He got three on his debut with his new club. He has scored four goals in a single game twice. He scored 11 — previously his career-best for an entire campaign — in January alone. That month, no player in Europe scored more.More impressive still, he has done it all while playing for VVV Venlo, a club struggling to avoid relegation at the foot of the Eredivisie, the Dutch top flight. It currently sits 17th out of 18 teams. Earlier this season, it managed to lose by 13-0 to Ajax. It has recorded only six wins all year, and has scored only 39 goals. Giakoumakis accounts for almost two-thirds of them. “Without him,” his teammate Christian Kum said, “things would have been much worse for us.”Giakoumakis after Venlo’s most notable result this season: a 13-0 defeat to Ajax in October.Olaf Kraak/EPA, via ShutterstockThat sort of form attracts attention. Giakoumakis’s career prospects have been, in the space of just a few months, utterly transformed. He is now a fully minted Greek international, having made his debut for his country in November. Clubs further up soccer’s food chain have suddenly taken an interest. Norwich City, recently promoted to the Premier League, has watched him. So, too, has Southampton.Many would caution them to treat his supernova burst with a degree of skepticism. This sort of thing happens, after all, with curious frequency in the Eredivisie. Dutch soccer has a long, proud and quite odd history of previously unheralded strikers suddenly hitting an almost impossibly rich vein of form.Sometimes — as in the case of Ruud van Nistelrooy, Luis Suárez or Klaas-Jan Huntelaar — it is a harbinger of greater things to come; they could score great gluts of goals in the Eredivisie because their talent, their dedication and their brilliance meant that they could score great gluts of goals anywhere.And sometimes — as in the case of Georgios Samaras, Vincent Janssen or, perhaps the most famous example, the Brazilian Afonso Alves — it is not. Sometimes, the volume of goals a striker scores in the Eredivisie is, if not quite an illusion, then certainly a trick of the light. Sometimes they do not go on to shine on a grander stage. Sometimes, their success says more about the shortcomings of Dutch soccer than it does about them.“You do wonder why it always happens here,” said Arnold Bruggink, formerly of PSV Eindhoven and now an analyst for ESPN. “It is because all the teams want to play in the Dutch way. Even among the smaller teams, there is a sense that you have to play well. Everybody wants to do the same, even if they don’t have the quality to do it.“It is a very young league, and it gets younger every year: it is not unusual here to have central defenders who are 19 or 20. A player who is 26 is a veteran. And young players make mistakes. If you look at the bottom teams in Spain or Germany, they will have conceded maybe 50 goals in 30 games. Here, it is often 60 or 70.”Vincent Janssen’s 27 goals at AZ Alkmaar earned him a move to Tottenham in 2016. He now plays for Monterrey in Mexico.Julio Cesar Aguilar/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesInstinctively, then, it feels as if Giakoumakis’s story is actually about Dutch soccer: Its moral is that because goals come fast and loose in the Eredivisie, their meaning is difficult to discern, a reminder that there is no correlation between how many goals a player scores in the Netherlands and how many they might score elsewhere.And yet there is a problem with that reading. Goals might be cheap in Holland, but not every Eredivisie team has a striker — every season — who scores them by the bucketload. The leading scorer at Ajax, as it canters to another championship this year, is Dusan Tadic, a midfielder. Something, then, must be different about Giakoumakis, just as something must have explained Alves or Janssen in years gone by.The answer, of course, lies in context. There is a degree of serendipity in how Giakoumakis found himself in Venlo. It is not the sort of club that can afford to be choosy. It plays in one of the smallest stadiums, and has one of the smallest budgets, in the Eredivisie. At Venlo, success is getting to fight relegation again next year.Stan Valckx, the man in charge of cobbling together its shoestring team, has no vast network of scouts. He cannot pay colossal transfer fees. He has to keep his eyes and his mind open, and he has to take risks. Most of all, he has no choice but to listen to every pitch from every agent for every player. “I always answer the phone,” he said.That is how he found Giakoumakis. Last March, he got yet another unsolicited call, from an agent suggesting he take a look at a 26-year-old Greek striker playing in Poland. Valckx did what he always does: a little cursory investigation. Giakoumakis’s numbers were not especially impressive. “If you just looked at the statistics, he probably would not have come to us,” he said.Giakoumakis has already made his debut for Greece.Thanassis Stavrakis/Associated PressFootage of his performances, though, was more promising. “We have a team that plays more often in its own half than the opponent’s,” Valckx said. “We need a striker with depth in his game, who can hold the ball up, who works hard.”Giakoumakis ticked those boxes. The club’s manager at the time, Hans de Koning, was encouraged by how Giakoumakis tended to celebrate his (rare) goals with his teammates, rather than taking the acclaim for himself. His salary was within Venlo’s reach. Valckx flew to Poland to watch him in the flesh, only to find that — because of attendance restrictions to combat the spread of coronavirus — he was not allowed into the stadium.Instead, he watched the game in a sports bar. Still, he liked what he saw. The next day, he met Giakoumakis in a hotel. The player had done his research. He knew a little about his prospective teammates. He could identify which system Venlo played. Valckx was convinced this was a risk worth taking.He does not pretend that he expected Giakoumakis to take Dutch soccer by storm. He did not think — he possibly did not even hope — that he was signing a player who might end the season as the Eredivisie’s top scorer, ahead of all the coruscating young talents at Ajax and PSV. He saw Giakoumakis as the sort of player who might “score a goal every now and again, as a bonus.”But it is not only in the Eredivisie where what goals — or a lack of them — signify is difficult to pin down. What has enabled Giakoumakis to shine at Venlo is that the way the team plays suits him. His sole job is to be in the box, to win the ball in the air, to take chances. “I have never seen a striker so focused on goals as him,” Kum said. He is not asked to do anything he is not good at.The same is surely true of all of those improbable names who went before him, Samaras and Janssen and Alves and all the rest. They, most likely, thrived because they found themselves in teams that accentuated their strengths and disguised their weaknesses.That they could never burn quite so brightly as they did in the Eredivisie does not mean they were bad players who got lucky. True, perhaps, they benefited from those callow and generous defenses that make goals a little easier to come by in the Netherlands. And true, maybe their golden year was an exception, rather than the rule.But it seems likely, too, that some fundamental truth was missed: that goals and the ability to score them are not innate traits, something that can be smoothly transplanted from one place to another with nothing lost in transit.That nothing at all on Giakoumakis’s résumé suggested he was capable of this season did not mean it was impossible; that his time at Venlo has been so fruitful does not mean he will automatically be able to do the same next year, whether he is in the Netherlands or England or elsewhere.Whether he is good or bad or indifferent is not fixed; what came before will not define what comes after. What they say about goals is, perhaps, true of all players: What matters most is being in the right place, at the right time.Strength in DepthManchester City’s 2-1 win in Paris moved it within reach of its first Champions League final.Alex Grimm/Getty ImagesFor the second time in three years, the Premier League stands on the cusp of a clean sweep. In 2019, English teams took up all four slots in Europe’s major finals — Liverpool beating Tottenham to the Champions League, Chelsea overcoming Arsenal in the Europa League final — and, in 2021, it is 90 minutes away from repeating the trick.Manchester City and Chelsea, certainly, are well-placed to make the Champions League final. City is in the stronger position, thanks to Paris St.-Germain’s second-half collapse, but Chelsea has less to fear: It turned out that beating a Liverpool team that had also lost to Burnley and Brighton did not prove Real Madrid was ready to reclaim its European crown.Christian Pulisic is the first American to score in a Champions League semifinal.Bernat Armangue/Associated PressManchester United, meanwhile, demolished Roma, 6-2, to seal — or as good as seal — its return to the Europa League final. Arsenal retains a hope of completing the set: Mikel Arteta’s flawed and fragile team lost at Villarreal, 2-1, but he will have seen enough to believe redemption is possible next week in London.It is dangerous to draw sweeping conclusions from relatively small sample sizes, but the direction of travel seems clear. The coronavirus pandemic has eviscerated the finances of clubs all over Europe, but the same financial advantages that made the Premier League such a force in 2019 have enabled its clubs to ride the storm better than most.There will always be exceptions, of course. Perhaps the Europa League will return to its rightful home in Seville next year. Maybe Bayern Munich or Barcelona will be able to mount a successful Champions League campaign in 2023. No rule will ever hold entirely true. But it feels distinctly like prominence is now the Premier League’s to lose.Management Shake-Up at Red Bull HQJesse Marsch, who won a league and cup double at Red Bull Salzburg in 2020, will take over the company’s Leipzig operation next season, the club said Thursday. He will replace Julian Nagelsmann, who is moving to Bayern Munich.Pool photo by Maxim ShemetovCorrespondence: Super League SpecialIt might only have lasted two days, but what a two days it was. All that plotting, all that intrigue, all those appearances by Florentino Pérez on late-night Spanish television — I hope they do another superleague soon. You’ll be unsurprised to learn that the very notion of it brought a deluge of correspondence, the best of which I’ve tried to answer below.Dave Moore: How much of the intense anger has to do with Brexit and class antagonism? Yes, people resented having tradition and history messed with, but isn’t part of the ongoing white hot outrage directed at the feeling that in a world in which there is a finite amount of money, people like these owners have a lot of it, and then they wanted even more?Quite a lot, Dave. I think this is the same feeling that we would have toward things like Big Tech or governmental corruption if it didn’t all seem so complex and distant. The idea of the Super League upset fans on a sporting level — promotion and relegation is almost sacred, it seems — but the perception of greed from the already staggeringly wealthy was too much to bear.Walid Neaz: If the rules were slightly different, might the plan have succeeded? For example, if the 12 teams didn’t have a permanent spot beyond the first season, but could then be subject to relegation if they had a bad year?There is definitely a format that could have made this idea more palatable — I have an idea myself that I might be willing to share once everyone has stopped shouting — but a lot of the failure was a public relations one. Nobody ever made a good case for change, even if the change in question was bad.At Real Madrid, the big question is: OK, now what?Javier Soriano/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBill Kelsey: How deep into dire straits are Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus if they are clinging to this idea?Deep, in the case of the two Spanish teams. Juventus’s problem is more sporting: The club’s executives know it isn’t possible to keep up with the Premier League teams or P.S.G. This was the only way of equalizing the revenue.Stephen Gessner: People forget that the Premier League was formed in 1992 by a breakaway group of owners who needed more revenue, mostly from TV.True, but the Premier League was always attached to the rest of the Football League by promotion and relegation. In one sense, it was a rebranding, more than a breakaway.Paul Speelman: Would some sort of salary cap be worth looking at?Yes, in principle, but no, in practice. How do you implement that rule across Europe, let alone South America and Asia? And how do you get lots of competing clubs who don’t trust one another to sign up for it?Michael Fisher: Don’t you think players need to be more involved in decisions concerning the future of soccer?Absolutely. I wonder if there is a time, now, for FIFPro — the global players’ union — to be more central in these discussions. More parochially, it strikes me that there is a pressing need for a Premier League-specific union within the broader English union, the P.F.A.Some of the most public protests against the Super League came from players who would be locked out of it.Pool photo by Mike HewittKathleen Hayward: Why is nobody discussing the $130 million penalty clause, which Florentino Pérez is unlikely to forgive?Good question, though I suspect the answer is that nobody is quite sure at this point how enforceable it is. As I understand it, there were clauses in the contract that made pulling out possible in certain situations. Besides, officially Pérez hasn’t given up on it yet ….Matt Watts: I’m interested that there was no mention of your change of stance on the issue: that something like this was inevitable?That was my stance, Matt, and you’re quite right: I hadn’t factored in how vitriolic the opposition to it would be, or how potent the impact of that would prove. Now I’m of the view that this idea is dead in the water for at least 10 years. But that said, in a way, I was right: It was inevitable that they would try it, and they did. (Is that a stretch? It feels a stretch.) More

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      The Short, Unhappy Life of Europe’s Super League

      by

      A timeline of the Super League, which was designed to reshape European soccer and instead rained only grief on its 12 clubs in the two days before it imploded.The 48-hour history of European soccer’s long-discussed, hastily arranged, belatedly announced, much-derided and quickly abandoned Super League was short on chapters but long on drama.The battle for control of soccer’s billion-dollar economy — a fight that Rory Smith of The New York Times referred to on Friday as The Sunday-Tuesday War — began with rumors of a blockbuster new league, then burst into the open with talk of lies, deceptions and betrayals; prompted street protests in several countries; and produced threats of official government action and sporting excommunication in many others.And then it all ended, only two days after the news broke, with a cascade of humbling reversals by half of its member clubs.If you weren’t paying attention, you missed quite a bit. Here’s a recap.The president of European soccer’s governing body, Aleksander Ceferin, was working to thwart the Super League even before it was announced.Yves Herman/ReutersThe PlanThe idea of a superleague of top European soccer teams had been discussed for decades, but never with the detail and the concrete plans that emerged on Sunday morning.After months of secret talks, the breakaway teams — which included some of the biggest, richest and best-known teams in world sports — confirmed that they were forming a new league, unmoored from soccer’s century-old league systems and Continental organizational structure. They declared that the soccer economy no longer worked for them, and that their new project would create a shower of riches that would reach every level of the game.European officials, national leagues and the clubs left out — not to mention fans, who smelled greed as the prime motivation — recoiled.The league they have agreed to form — an alliance of top clubs closer in concept to closed leagues like the N.F.L. and the N.B.A. than soccer’s current model — would bring about the most significant restructuring of elite European soccer since the 1950s, and could herald the largest transfer of wealth to a small set of teams in modern sports history.Read more from Tariq Panja, who broke the news.Real Madrid’s Florentino Pérez, the first, and likely last, chairman of the Super League.Javier Soriano/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHigh StakesRory Smith noted not only what soccer would lose with the play by the big clubs, but also why fans (and sponsors, and TV broadcasters, and the news media) bore some of the blame for the idea’s coming to fruition.And it is here that those who hope to benefit from shutting the door, from fixing the rules of engagement, cannot take all of the blame. Many of those who spent Sunday spitting fury at the greed of the conspirators have been complicit, over the last 30 years or so, in making this — or something very much like it — the only conclusion possible.That is true of the Premier League, which waved in money from anyone and everyone who could afford to buy a club, which took great pride in its “ownership neutral” approach, which never stopped to ask whether any of it was good for the game. It is true of the Spanish authorities, who made it clear that the rules did not really apply to Real Madrid or Barcelona.It is true, perhaps most of all, of UEFA, which has grown fat and rich on the proceeds of the Champions League, from bowing to the demands of its most powerful constituent clubs, giving more and more power away just to keep the show on the road. It is true, even, of the rest of us in soccer’s thrall — the news media and the commentariat and the fans — who celebrated the multimillion-dollar transfers and the massive television deals and the conspicuous consumption of money and did not stop to ask where it would all go.A wall in Barcelona. Outrage among fans was not limited to England.Nacho Doce/ReutersThe Fight BeginsBy Monday morning, the battle to stop the Super League was on. Governments and heads of state weighed in. So did FIFA, which often views itself as an independent nation. Secret intelligence was shared, frantic phone calls were made, and shouts of “Judas!” and other insults, like “snakes” and “liars,” added to the tension.By first light, the fight was on. In a letter written by the breakaway teams, they warned soccer’s authorities that they had taken legal action to prevent any efforts to block their project.A few hours later, Aleksander Ceferin, the president of European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, used his first public appearance to denounce the group behind the plan and vowed to take stern action if it did not reverse course. He raised the possibility of barring players on the participating teams from events like the World Cup and other tournaments, and threatened to banish the rebel clubs from their domestic leagues. Sunday’s announcement, he said, amounted to “spitting in football fans’ faces.”How was the Super League different from the Champions League? Let us explain.Pool photo by David RamosWait: What’s a Super League?Still not sure what the Super League even was? We can catch you up really fast right here.Rival players mocked Super League opponents with shirts and social media posts.Clive Brunskill/Agence France-Presse, via Pool/Afp Via Getty ImagesThe Tide TurnsWith prominent players, respected coaches, everyday fans, and sponsors and television networks adding their voices to the opposition, Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, was persuaded to pull out the biggest threat in the arsenal of those fighting for the status quo: In a speech at the congress of European soccer’s governing body, he reiterated FIFA’s threat to ban any players who took part in an outside competition from the World Cup:“If some elect to go their own way then they must live with the consequences of their choice, they are responsible for their choice,” the FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, said in an address to European soccer leaders at their congress in Montreux, Switzerland. “Concretely this means, either you are in, or you are out. You cannot be half in and half out. This has to be absolutely clear.”By Tuesday, even Liverpool’s dogs had turned against the Super League.Jon Super/Associated PressIt All Falls ApartTuesday was a blur. First, whispers, then street protests, and then news: Manchester City was out. Chelsea was looking for ways out of its contract. Arsenal, Spurs and Manchester United walked away. Liverpool followed.Forty-eight hours after it began, it was all over.The denouement was a stunning implosion for a multibillion-dollar proposal that had prompted howls of outrage from nearly every corner of the sport since it was announced on Sunday, and the culmination of a frantic 48 hours of arguments, threats and intrigue at the highest levels of world soccer.Chelsea fans took to the streets on Tuesday to protest the club’s Super League membership. Within hours, the club had dropped out.Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhat Were They Thinking?How, Rory Smith asked, could the founders have been so blind? How could they not have seen this coming? Where was the people backing this idea? And do we ever have to take their threats seriously again?By Monday, less than a day into their brave new world, they had lost the governments, and they had lost the European Union. Not long after, they lost the television networks that, ultimately, would have had to pay for the whole thing.Then they lost the players and the managers, the stars of the show they were hoping to sell around the globe so that they might grow fatter still on the profits: first Ander Herrera and James Milner and Pep Guardiola and Luke Shaw and then, in a matter of hours, dozens more, whole squads of players, breaking cover and coming out in opposition to the plan.By Tuesday, there was scarcely anyone they had not lost. They had lost Eric Cantona. They had lost the royal family. They had even lost the luxury watchmakers, and without the luxury watchmakers, there was nothing left to lose but themselves.Street art in Italy titled “Il Golpe Fallito,” or “The Failed Coup.”Filippo Monteforte/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Tick TockThe back story, reported in rich detail by Tariq Panja, was even richer, though. How Barcelona tipped everyone’s hand. How Paris St.-Germain and Bayern — after receiving offers to join — turned down the league and instead helped to kill it. How an olive branch tucked into a speech in Switzerland gave England’s clubs a way out.The full, definitive story reads like a movie thriller:Still, the drumbeat of rumors continued, and Ceferin felt he needed to be sure. So as he slid into the front seat of his Audi Q8 on Saturday to start the eight-hour drive from his home in Ljubljana to his office in Switzerland, he decided to get to the bottom of things. He placed a call to Agnelli. His friend did not pick up.Ceferin — the godfather to Agnelli’s youngest child — texted the Italian’s wife and asked if she might get the Juventus president to call him urgently. He was three hours into his journey when his cellphone rang. Breezily, Agnelli reassured Ceferin, again, that everything was fine.Ceferin suggested they issue a joint communiqué that would put the issue to rest. Agnelli agreed. Ceferin drafted a statement from the car and sent it to Agnelli. An hour later, Agnelli asked for time to send back an amended version. Hours passed. The men traded more calls. Eventually, the Italian told Ceferin he needed another 30 minutes.And then Agnelli turned off his phone.Would Real Madrid fans accept a few lean years as their club cut costs? Would the fans of any Super League club? Would you?Jose Breton/Associated PressWhat Now?By Friday, even the bankers were apologizing. But soccer’s problems were not over.The plan hatched by Europe’s elite clubs was wrong on almost every level, but its architects got one thing right: Soccer’s economy, as it stands, does not work.Now it is gone. It is possible that, by the end of this weekend, as either Manchester City or Tottenham celebrates winning the League Cup, as Bayern Munich inches ever closer to yet another Bundesliga title, as Inter Milan closes in on a Serie A crown, all of this will feel like a fever dream. On the surface, it will be behind us. The insurrection will have been defeated, condemned to the past. Everything will be back to normal.But that is an illusion, because though the Super League never had a chance to play a game — it barely had time to build out a website — it may yet prove the catalyst to the salvation of soccer. It has, after all, stripped the elite of their leverage. They played their cards, and the whole thing became a bluff. Now, for the first time in years, power resides in the collective strength of the game’s lesser lights.They will need to use it. More

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      in Soccer

      What Happened to Europe's Soccer Super League?

      by

      A timeline of the Super League, which was designed to reshape European soccer and instead rained only grief on its 12 clubs in the two days before it imploded.The 48-hour history of European soccer’s long-discussed, hastily arranged, belatedly announced, much-derided and quickly abandoned Super League was short on chapters but long on drama.The battle for control of soccer’s billion-dollar economy — a fight that Rory Smith of The New York Times referred to on Friday as The Sunday-Tuesday War — began with rumors of a blockbuster new league, then burst into the open with talk of lies, deceptions and betrayals; prompted street protests in several countries; and produced threats of official government action and sporting excommunication in many others.And then it all ended, only two days after the news broke, with a cascade of humbling reversals by half of its member clubs.If you weren’t paying attention, you missed quite a bit. Here’s a recap.The president of European soccer’s governing body, Aleksander Ceferin, was working to thwart the Super League even before it was announced.Yves Herman/ReutersThe PlanThe idea of a superleague of top European soccer teams had been discussed for decades, but never with the detail and the concrete plans that emerged on Sunday morning.After months of secret talks, the breakaway teams — which included some of the biggest, richest and best-known teams in world sports — confirmed that they were forming a new league, unmoored from soccer’s century-old league systems and Continental organizational structure. They declared that the soccer economy no longer worked for them, and that their new project would create a shower of riches that would reach every level of the game.European officials, national leagues and the clubs left out — not to mention fans, who smelled greed as the prime motivation — recoiled.The league they have agreed to form — an alliance of top clubs closer in concept to closed leagues like the N.F.L. and the N.B.A. than soccer’s current model — would bring about the most significant restructuring of elite European soccer since the 1950s, and could herald the largest transfer of wealth to a small set of teams in modern sports history.Read more from Tariq Panja, who broke the news.Real Madrid’s Florentino Pérez, the first, and likely last, chairman of the Super League.Javier Soriano/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHigh StakesRory Smith noted not only what soccer would lose with the play by the big clubs, but also why fans (and sponsors, and TV broadcasters, and the news media) bore some of the blame for the idea’s coming to fruition.And it is here that those who hope to benefit from shutting the door, from fixing the rules of engagement, cannot take all of the blame. Many of those who spent Sunday spitting fury at the greed of the conspirators have been complicit, over the last 30 years or so, in making this — or something very much like it — the only conclusion possible.That is true of the Premier League, which waved in money from anyone and everyone who could afford to buy a club, which took great pride in its “ownership neutral” approach, which never stopped to ask whether any of it was good for the game. It is true of the Spanish authorities, who made it clear that the rules did not really apply to Real Madrid or Barcelona.It is true, perhaps most of all, of UEFA, which has grown fat and rich on the proceeds of the Champions League, from bowing to the demands of its most powerful constituent clubs, giving more and more power away just to keep the show on the road. It is true, even, of the rest of us in soccer’s thrall — the news media and the commentariat and the fans — who celebrated the multimillion-dollar transfers and the massive television deals and the conspicuous consumption of money and did not stop to ask where it would all go.A wall in Barcelona. Outrage among fans was not limited to England.Nacho Doce/ReutersThe Fight BeginsBy Monday morning, the battle to stop the Super League was on. Governments and heads of state weighed in. So did FIFA, which often views itself as an independent nation. Secret intelligence was shared, frantic phone calls were made, and shouts of “Judas!” and other insults, like “snakes” and “liars,” added to the tension.By first light, the fight was on. In a letter written by the breakaway teams, they warned soccer’s authorities that they had taken legal action to prevent any efforts to block their project.A few hours later, Aleksander Ceferin, the president of European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, used his first public appearance to denounce the group behind the plan and vowed to take stern action if it did not reverse course. He raised the possibility of barring players on the participating teams from events like the World Cup and other tournaments, and threatened to banish the rebel clubs from their domestic leagues. Sunday’s announcement, he said, amounted to “spitting in football fans’ faces.”How was the Super League different from the Champions League? Let us explain.Pool photo by David RamosWait: What’s a Super League?Still not sure what the Super League even was? We can catch you up really fast right here.Rival players mocked Super League opponents with shirts and social media posts.Clive Brunskill/Agence France-Presse, via Pool/Afp Via Getty ImagesThe Tide TurnsWith prominent players, respected coaches, everyday fans, and sponsors and television networks adding their voices to the opposition, Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, was persuaded to pull out the biggest threat in the arsenal of those fighting for the status quo: In a speech at the congress of European soccer’s governing body, he reiterated FIFA’s threat to ban any players who took part in an outside competition from the World Cup:“If some elect to go their own way then they must live with the consequences of their choice, they are responsible for their choice,” the FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, said in an address to European soccer leaders at their congress in Montreux, Switzerland. “Concretely this means, either you are in, or you are out. You cannot be half in and half out. This has to be absolutely clear.”By Tuesday, even Liverpool’s dogs had turned against the Super League.Jon Super/Associated PressIt All Falls ApartTuesday was a blur. First, whispers, then street protests, and then news: Manchester City was out. Chelsea was looking for ways out of its contract. Arsenal, Spurs and Manchester United walked away. Liverpool followed.Forty-eight hours after it began, it was all over.The denouement was a stunning implosion for a multibillion-dollar proposal that had prompted howls of outrage from nearly every corner of the sport since it was announced on Sunday, and the culmination of a frantic 48 hours of arguments, threats and intrigue at the highest levels of world soccer.Chelsea fans took to the streets on Tuesday to protest the club’s Super League membership. Within hours, the club had dropped out.Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhat Were They Thinking?How, Rory Smith asked, could the founders have been so blind? How could they not have seen this coming? Where was the people backing this idea? And do we ever have to take their threats seriously again?By Monday, less than a day into their brave new world, they had lost the governments, and they had lost the European Union. Not long after, they lost the television networks that, ultimately, would have had to pay for the whole thing.Then they lost the players and the managers, the stars of the show they were hoping to sell around the globe so that they might grow fatter still on the profits: first Ander Herrera and James Milner and Pep Guardiola and Luke Shaw and then, in a matter of hours, dozens more, whole squads of players, breaking cover and coming out in opposition to the plan.By Tuesday, there was scarcely anyone they had not lost. They had lost Eric Cantona. They had lost the royal family. They had even lost the luxury watchmakers, and without the luxury watchmakers, there was nothing left to lose but themselves.Street art in Italy titled “Il Golpe Fallito,” or “The Failed Coup.”Filippo Monteforte/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Tick TockThe back story, reported in rich detail by Tariq Panja, was even richer, though. How Barcelona tipped everyone’s hand. How Paris St.-Germain and Bayern — after receiving offers to join — turned down the league and instead helped to kill it. How an olive branch tucked into a speech in Switzerland gave England’s clubs a way out.The full, definitive story reads like a movie thriller:Still, the drumbeat of rumors continued, and Ceferin felt he needed to be sure. So as he slid into the front seat of his Audi Q8 on Saturday to start the eight-hour drive from his home in Ljubljana to his office in Switzerland, he decided to get to the bottom of things. He placed a call to Agnelli. His friend did not pick up.Ceferin — the godfather to Agnelli’s youngest child — texted the Italian’s wife and asked if she might get the Juventus president to call him urgently. He was three hours into his journey when his cellphone rang. Breezily, Agnelli reassured Ceferin, again, that everything was fine.Ceferin suggested they issue a joint communiqué that would put the issue to rest. Agnelli agreed. Ceferin drafted a statement from the car and sent it to Agnelli. An hour later, Agnelli asked for time to send back an amended version. Hours passed. The men traded more calls. Eventually, the Italian told Ceferin he needed another 30 minutes.And then Agnelli turned off his phone.Would Real Madrid fans accept a few lean years as their club cut costs? Would the fans of any Super League club? Would you?Jose Breton/Associated PressWhat Now?By Friday, even the bankers were apologizing. But soccer’s problems were not over.The plan hatched by Europe’s elite clubs was wrong on almost every level, but its architects got one thing right: Soccer’s economy, as it stands, does not work.Now it is gone. It is possible that, by the end of this weekend, as either Manchester City or Tottenham celebrates winning the League Cup, as Bayern Munich inches ever closer to yet another Bundesliga title, as Inter Milan closes in on a Serie A crown, all of this will feel like a fever dream. On the surface, it will be behind us. The insurrection will have been defeated, condemned to the past. Everything will be back to normal.But that is an illusion, because though the Super League never had a chance to play a game — it barely had time to build out a website — it may yet prove the catalyst to the salvation of soccer. It has, after all, stripped the elite of their leverage. They played their cards, and the whole thing became a bluff. Now, for the first time in years, power resides in the collective strength of the game’s lesser lights.They will need to use it. More