Grealish, Jack (1995- )

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    Luciano Spalletti and the Power of Walking Away

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    The Napoli coach led his team to a long-delayed title and then left because the job was done. That is worth celebrating.Luciano Spalletti’s farm sits high on a ridge outside Montaione, a peaceful, strikingly pretty Italian village set on a hilltop an hour or so southwest of Florence. It is picture-perfect Tuscany: cobbled piazzas lined with cafes; echoing, cobbled streets; a panorama of deep blue skies and verdant olive groves on rolling hills.It is, though, just a little off the beaten path. The stretch of the Tuscan countryside Spalletti calls home is not quite so well-touristed as, say, Chianti. But Spalletti grew up here, in the medieval walled city of Certaldo, and he saw in the farm the chance to draw more people to the region. The five vacation cottages he has constructed on its grounds can be rented for a (surprisingly competitive) few hundred euros a night.Business was not his primary motivation. The farm serves as Spalletti’s haven. He has turned it into something approaching the Platonic ideal of an idyll. As he says in a promotional video on the farm’s website, it is “a place to rediscover simple, forgotten emotions, between nature and animals.”He makes his own olive oil. He uses the grapes from his vineyard to produce his own wine. There are hens and ducks, donkeys and horses and alpacas, and even a couple of ostriches. The view stretches all the way from Pisa, in the west, to the Apennines in the east. “For my family, it was love at first sight,” he tells prospective visitors.It is here, to his own little slice of Arcadia, that Spalletti withdrew at the start of the month, his two-year spell as the coach of Napoli at an end. He had informed the club of his decision a few weeks earlier. “I told them I needed a year off,” he said. “I will not work for any club. I’ll rest for one year.”Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, top, and Victor Osimhen, who led Napoli to the Italian title, will eventually follow Spalletti out the door.Alberto Pizzoli/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSpalletti, of course, has earned the break. His first year at Napoli ended as most first years at Napoli do: in a swirling eddy of uncertainty and disappointment and regret. The club’s ultras stole his car and vowed to return it only once they had proof of his resignation. A raft of key players left.His second season, though, was utopian. For the first time in 33 years, Napoli won the Italian title. That is, in fact, underselling it. Napoli swept to the Italian title, obliterating the rest of Serie A. It lifted the trophy with a month to spare. Its final few games were a carnival, a celebration. Spalletti and his players found their images splayed across the city, afforded the same kind of worship as more traditional religious icons.That he should choose precisely that moment to step away, then, is so unorthodox that it borders — in soccer’s traditional thinking — on heresy.Napoli was vastly superior to all of its domestic opponents. Spalletti’s team was on autopilot for the last five games of the campaign and still finished 16 points ahead of second-place Lazio. Even allowing for the impending departures of two key players, Victor Osimhen and Kim Min-jae, there is little reason to assume it will not at the very least compete for the title next year.More important still, it was at Napoli that Spalletti, 64, had finally made manifest his vision of how the sport should be played. He had, for much of his career, been admired as a gifted coach, a sophisticated tactician, even an occasional visionary. It was Spalletti, during his time at Roma, who either pioneered or popularized the idea of the “false nine.”He was, though, widely — and not a little affectionately — regarded as one of the sport’s “nearly” men. He almost won Serie A with Roma, but did not. He almost won it with Inter Milan, but did not. He was one of several managers dismissed as the possessors of “zeru tituli” — zero titles — by José Mourinho, for whom significance is only gauged by the honors section of a Wikipedia page.At Napoli, Spalletti’s style finally found its substance. His team played no less attractively, no less innovatively, no less imaginatively than the sides he had forged elsewhere, but this one won, and won, and won. Napoli was his masterpiece, and yet no sooner had he completed it than he left it abandoned.Long a runner-up, Spalletti finally became a champion this year.Pool photo by Ciro FuscoHe did not do so, as tradition would dictate, to take on a bigger, or better, or more lavishly remunerated role. In his own telling, he did so because he wanted to take a break, to retreat to his farm, to find sanctuary from the stress and the strain of the last two years. The real rationale, though, is in the subtext. Spalletti left because his job was finished.There is an adage in soccer — in sports in general, in fact — that there is no such thing as a happy ending. All managers are fired, sooner or later, regardless of what they achieve or how much they win. At some point, results will turn, and take the fans and the front offices with them.That is true, of course, but it is partly true because managers are so rarely willing to do what Spalletti has done, and walk away. There is always some problem to solve, some improvement to make, some slight flaw to polish and burnish and finesse. There is always the chance that next year will be even better. And there is always, most of all, another trophy to win.The finest managers are — as they should be — conscious of their legacies. They are driven not just by proving their superiority to their peers, but by winning their place in history. There is a reason that Alex Ferguson, and Arrigo Sacchi, and Pep Guardiola are held in the first rank of managers: They are the coaches, after all, who attained not just dominion, but dynasty. Their example encourages managers to twist, rather than stick.Spalletti has done the opposite. At some point in Napoli’s monthlong celebration, he decided that he had reached the pinnacle, and that whatever came next would inevitably involve a descent.Rather than risk tarnishing what he has achieved, rather than doubling down, he has preferred to leave it, perfect and inviolable, where it stands. He has his prize, and in winning it he has his monument, too. In doing so, he has done what so many others expend so much energy doing: He has ensured that his legacy will remain unsullied, untouched. In the haven he has built for himself on the outskirts of Montaione, Spalletti will savor the simple, forgotten joy that comes from knowing when to step away.In announcing his decision early, Spalletti and the fans got to say goodbye.Ciro Fusco/EPA, via ShutterstockHimbo JesusAt some point in the far-off future — when his role in public life is limited to a sofa in a television studio, just another bromide dispenser — someone will make a documentary about the 72 hours of Jack Grealish’s life that followed Manchester City’s victory in the Champions League final last weekend.That film will do a small service to Grealish, because the chances that his memories will be anything other than hazy are fairly slim. Corroborating witnesses will be required to answer key questions: Where, exactly, did he and his teammates ask the team’s plane to fly on the way back from Istanbul? What is this thing with the turkey about? How did so many of them acquire luminescent jackets, and why?Jack Grealish: life of the Man City party.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is possible — churlish, but possible — to suggest that Grealish’s celebrations were, if not excessive, then probably not the sort of thing that should be glamorized too much. For English fans of a particular age, it brought an uncomfortable, unhappy echo of Paul Gascoigne. And it is legitimate, certainly, to wonder if a Black player having the same weekend as Grealish would have been indulged in quite the same way by the news media.Grealish’s unapologetic revelry, though, served two important functions. It acted, first, as a reminder that while the meaning of Manchester City’s triumphs is far more complex than the club’s fans would like, the players themselves are athletes who have made countless sacrifices, who have committed years of their lives, to reach this point. That release, at times, can be lost in the broader story of financial rules and foreign investment; in his delight, Grealish brought the joy front and center.But even more significant, it was a powerful rebuke to soccer’s traditional stoicism. Alex Ferguson, among many others, always held it as an aphorism that one medal should simply be used as motivation for the next. In his mind, there was no such thing as an ultimate victory. Celebrating was simply a harbinger of complacency.It is an approach that to a large extent has become grizzled, hypermasculine dogma. It is also entirely miserable. If you are not going to enjoy your victories, then what is the point in pursuing them? What is the point, in fact, in the whole exercise? Manchester City has won a treble. If that is not the sort of occasion that warrants an impromptu flight to Ibiza, then what does?Do as I Do, Not as I SayKylian Mbappé wants you to know that his future lies in France. Until it doesn’t.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesKylian Mbappé would like you to know that he is perfectly happy at Paris St.-Germain, thank you very much. “I have already said that I am going to continue next season,” he wrote on Twitter, the formerly popular social networking platform, on Tuesday.He would also like you to know that he does not need another intervention from Emmanuel Macron, the French president, to persuade him to stay. “He hopes for me to stay, and I hope so too,” he said while on international duty with France on Thursday. “My only option is to stay at P.S.G. I plan to be there when the season starts.”It’s refreshing, really, to have all this cleared up so early in the summer. No long, drawn-out transfer saga. No will they, won’t they, Ross and Rachel drama with Real Madrid. (In this scenario, Real Madrid is 100 percent Ross.) Mbappé is happy. Mbappé wants to stay. Macron can get on with lesser matters of state.Except, of course, that Mbappé’s stance is deeply disingenuous. Or, more kindly: He is telling the truth, but he is not telling the whole truth.As my colleague Tariq Panja reported this week, Mbappé used another formerly popular social networking platform — the letter — to inform P.S.G. that he does not plan to extend his contract beyond 2024. (The exact timing of Mbappe’s communicating his desire to the club is in dispute, but it is almost entirely irrelevant to the meat of the case.)Mbappé knows full well that effectively forces P.S.G. at least to contemplate the idea of selling him this summer. The unpalatable alternative, after all, is to lose him for nothing next year. And that is perfectly reasonable. P.S.G. is not a club that easily attracts sympathy. Mbappé has every reason to feel he would be better off elsewhere.Presumably, he does not want to come out and say that for fear that it would damage his brand in some vague, ephemeral way. And yet the approach he has taken, hiding behind sophistry and omission and innuendo — all delivered with a straight face; he knows that we know he knows — has exactly the same effect.Mbappé has always seemed an intelligent, judicious sort of a character, impeccably prepared for the fame that has been his destiny since he hit his teens. Doubtless, that reputation is warranted. Still, it took some time to build. As things stand, the longer this draws out, the more threatened it will become.CorrespondenceWe’ll start, this week, with a bitterly disappointed Mark Harris. “Your bitter invective every time you cover Manchester City has finally turned me off once and for all,” Mark wrote. (This was not his first piece of correspondence on the subject.) “It is as if you can only see Novak Djokovic through the eyes of his father’s Russian sympathies, or Tiger Woods through his failings as a husband. Follow the sport. The back story will be elsewhere, no doubt.”It’s a frank letter, so I may as well respond in kind. Writing about Manchester City, at this stage, is difficult. Everyone knows the context. Every avenue for original thought on that subject has long been clogged. But merely “following the sport” is unsatisfactory, too, for two reasons.The first is that leaving the context to others is a professional dereliction. The general idea is to present the full picture, rather than merely one aspect of it. To ignore everything else that Manchester City represents is, effectively, to choose a side. (Perhaps not ignoring it is, too.) The second, and more important, reason is that it is impossible to separate the two: The sport and the financial, political and diplomatic project are inextricably bound together, because the former is the manifestation of the latter.Elena Zlatnik’s disappointment is rather better placed, I think. “If I were married to a footballer, or the daughter of one, I would be outraged if he chose to play in Saudi Arabia,” she wrote. “Anyone who is already rich from years in Europe’s top leagues but chooses to go to a place where his wife can’t wear what she wants, can’t go out by herself or with a male friend, can’t play football herself, is an anti-feminist.”They have already painted murals of Lionel Messi in Miami.Lynne Sladky/Associated PressAnd let’s finish with a slightly more uplifting subject. “This Lionel Messi business has me wondering: Who, outside of Miami, has the most to gain from his arrival?” asked Austin Underhill. “Millions of new fans are coming to Major League Soccer. Thousands will stay even after he leaves. Who are they going to follow?”My guess is that there are two ideas running in parallel here. One is that Inter Miami dominates the sudden attention, and converts at least a portion of it into long-term interest. The second — a corollary, really — is that those who tune in for Messi eventually stay because of everything else M.L.S. offers. Predicting how that will manifest, though, is tricky. Perhaps it will be a team that beats Miami? Perhaps it will be a team that loses pluckily? Or perhaps it won’t work like that at all, and the counterweight to the spike in interest that having Messi generates is the drop that comes when he is gone. More

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      Manchester City Chases New Trophies With an Old Friend: Money

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      Manchester City’s winning formula has delivered trophies. But to win the Champions League, it may need to make a few expensive changes.All these years on, it is hard to identify the exact straw that broke the camel’s back. Perhaps it was the night when Carlos Tévez, in the thick of a Champions League game against Bayern Munich, seemed to refuse to come on as a substitute. Maybe it was the evening Mario Balotelli spent setting off fireworks in, and setting fire to, his own bathroom.Ideally, really, as a way of illustrating the mounting absurdity of it all, it would be what became known as the Birthday Cake Incident: the time that Manchester City either did or did not buy Yaya Touré a birthday cake, but most definitely did not buy him a Bugatti, a decision that prompted Touré’s agent at the time to declare that one of the club’s greatest ever players wanted to leave.Most likely, of course, the last straw was all of them and none of them. It was their weight, taken together, the apparently endless stream of minor problems blown out of proportion, that persuaded City — at some indistinct point, six or seven years ago — that buying the biggest and the brightest stars was more trouble than it was worth. That the club would, instead, take a different tack.Where that led was cast, most clearly, when Pep Guardiola’s team encountered, and overcame, Paris St.-Germain in last season’s Champions League semifinals. City and P.S.G. are often presented as two sides of the same coin, the twin vanguard of soccer’s new order: both soaringly ambitious, both unimaginably wealthy, both bankrolled by private individuals who are definitely not acting with the backing of Gulf states.For all that they have in common, though, their approaches have been starkly different. Their squads for those two games in the spring made that abundantly clear. In the second leg, as P.S.G. searched in vain for a way back, Mauricio Pochettino had to throw on the on-loan Moise Kean, the unheralded Mitchel Bakker and the unremarkable Colin Dagba.In recent years, City has generally had a star and a spare at every position.Carl Recine/ReutersAs Guardiola looked to see the game out, he could introduce Raheem Sterling, Sergio Agüero and Gabriel Jésus. That left Aymeric Laporte, Rodri, Ferran Torres and João Cancelo all waiting on the bench. P.S.G. might have had the greater star power — even before its signing of Lionel Messi this week — in Neymar and Kylian Mbappé, but its resources seemed much shallower than City’s.Where P.S.G. had concentrated its wealth on acquiring a handful of superstars, City had spent the previous few years gathering a squad of unrivaled and unprecedented depth.City was not shy of big names, of course — including Kevin De Bruyne, Agüero and Riyad Mahrez — but only a handful, like Raheem Sterling, might have been considered major stars before they arrived at the club. There was no sense of a divide between the headline acts and the supporting cast. Instead, City’s team seemed to have two $70 million players for every outfield position.The policy that built Guardiola’s squad had been instituted painstakingly, deliberately, with the club investing substantially more time and energy than before on making sure it was recruiting players who were humble, hard-working and unlikely to cause any reputational damage on or off the field. There had been quite enough drama in the years of Tévez, Balotelli and Emmanuel Adebayor.A decade ago, City’s stars sometimes offered more headlines than goals.Kerim Okten/European Pressphoto AgencyCity took great pride in its approach, regularly defending itself against accusations that it had spent its way to success by pointing out that most of its rivals had more expensive acquisitions within their ranks: Manchester United had spent more on Paul Pogba, Liverpool more on Virgil Van Dijk and Chelsea more on Kepa Arrizabalaga than City had on its (then) record signing, the defender Rúben Dias. In some cases, quite a lot more.Besides, the approach worked. The Champions League title might continue to elude City — like P.S.G., it has played, and lost, one final in the competition it desires to win above all others since its reinvention — but City now stands as the pre-eminent Premier League team of its era; champion in three of the last four seasons, five times in the last decade, and a favorite to add to that tally this year.Last season, as City marched to the domestic league title, Guardiola regularly rotated as many as half a dozen players in and out of his team every few days. His side retained a freshness, an energy, that nobody else — not even in the money-soaked, recession-resistant heights in which City operates — could match. City’s success is rooted not in the brilliance of its strongest player, but in the competence of its weakest.And yet, this summer, all that has changed. City has already broken the British transfer record to sign Jack Grealish from Aston Villa. It remains quietly confident of having the chance to do so again: It would cost, most likely, $200 million or so to pry Harry Kane, the England captain, from Tottenham, but City appears prepared to do it. It will, alas, no longer be possible for the club to claim that its spending power is no greater than anyone else’s.Is Harry Kane the final item in City’s shopping cart this summer?Pool photo by Shaun BotterillQuite what has prompted this significant, and costly, sea change in approach appears — on the surface — to be obvious. City is desperate to win the Champions League. It came closer than ever last season, strangely acquiescent in defeat in the final against Chelsea, and its executives and its manager are united in their desire to take that one last step.City has been richer than Croesus for 13 years; its patience is wearing thin. Guardiola has not won the trophy that means the most to him since 2011, when he was at Barcelona; so is his. Grealish was, by some measures, the most dangerous player in the Premier League last season, and second in Europe only to Messi. Kane is among the world’s finest strikers, a position where City, following Agüero’s departure, is noticeably light. There is no mystery here: This is a club pursuing the exact two players it thinks it needs to achieve its mission.And yet a couple of questions linger. Grealish is a brilliant player, imaginative and courageous and tirelessly inventive, but he has never played in the Champions League. He cannot, then, be a surefire guarantee of success in it. Kane has made a final, of course, but he is both more expensive and substantially more difficult to extract from his current club than, say, Romelu Lukaku proved to be.Grealish and Kane would, doubtless, make Manchester City even better than it already was. Whether they make it $300 million better, though, is a more taxing question. Whether City had to spend quite that much for a similar effect is a more compelling one. That both questions can be posed suggests that it is not inconceivable that there are other, off-field considerations at play.It may be, for example, that City feels it needs just a little more star power, not only to help it over the line both in England — where Guardiola has said it will take a haul of 90 points or more to win the title once more — and in Europe, but also to increase its commercial reach. Kane is the captain of England. Grealish, this summer during Euro 2020, became his country’s darling. City has learned to its cost, previously, that headline names can mean headline trouble; perhaps, as soccer continues its gradual lurch from competitive sport to content farm, that is not quite so unappealing.City’s first outing, the Community Shield against Leicester, produced a defeat. Don’t expect too many more.Pool photo by Tim KeetonA squad devoid of fixed reference points — big names who demand inclusion in specific positions — is ideal, of course, for Guardiola; his Platonic ideal of a team is 10 midfielders, interchanging positions at will. Both Grealish and Kane are more versatile than is perhaps realized, but their cost — if the latter joins the former — dictates that Guardiola must build around their strengths, at least to some extent, rather than deploying them as transferable cogs in his machine.That, too, offers a glimpse of another possible rationale for their arrival. Guardiola has regularly complained that his players do not win all of the individual awards for which they might be considered contenders. That they do not is rather less to do with some insidious campaign against his club among the news media and more centered on the fact that no star, at City, shines quite so brightly as the manager.No matter how many games De Bruyne dominates, no matter how many positions Sterling masters, no matter how many goals Ilkay Gundogan suddenly and inexplicably scores, their success is always subsumed by Guardiola’s; their brilliance always sits downstream from his. (Guardiola, and his entourage, are not displeased with this.)City’s squad had been built in Guardiola’s image. In many ways, the club has been shaping itself to suit his needs ever since its first title victory. That has proved devastatingly effective, but it also carries with it a distant cost: At some point, when he goes, a squad of players acquired by him, crafted by him and loyal to him will have to adapt to life without him.Not so, of course, Grealish or Kane. Both would, doubtless, thrive under Guardiola. More important, both — ready-made, plug and play stars — would continue to thrive after he is gone. That may not be next summer, or even the summer after that, but it will come at some point in the span of their contracts.They are both, first and foremost, signings for today: proof that this is a club desperate, urgent in its intent to thrive in the immediate. But their cost, their age and their profile suggest that they are something else, too: evidence that City is thinking not only about how to win even more under Guardiola, but how to keep winning once the brightest star it has ever known has gone.Game OnBayern Munich and its new manager, Julian Nagelsmann, open the Bundesliga season on Friday.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesStrictly speaking, this is not the weekend when soccer is back, since soccer never really went away. The early rounds of the Champions League were being played during the European Championship. The Gold Cup carried on until late July. And it is only a week since the French season started, right as the Brazilian men and the Canadian women won gold medals at the Olympics.But this is the weekend when the major European (men’s) leagues kick off, and thus this is officially The Weekend When Soccer Is Back. With fans, too: full stadiums in England, increasingly full ones in Spain and Italy, half-full ones (mostly, for now) in Germany. Soccer’s ghost era, with any luck, is nearing its end.The prospect of noise, color and life is not the only reason to greet the new season. The Bundesliga has a suite of managers in new roles, led by Julian Nagelsmann at Bayern Munich and Marco Rose at Borussia Dortmund. In Spain, the demise of Real Madrid and Barcelona may yet open the door for Sevilla to join the title chase. Juventus has a crown to regain in Italy.Erik Lamela will strengthen a Sevilla team with title hopes in La Liga.Cristina Quicler/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is England, though, where all of the ingredients are in place for a vintage campaign (after what was, if we are all completely honest, a fairly dull one last time around). Manchester City will start as the title favorite as it seeks to retain its championship, but Chelsea — bolstered by Romelu Lukaku, and buoyed by its status as European champion — carries considerable menace, too. So does Manchester United, newly embroidered by Raphaël Varane and Jadon Sancho.Better still, there is a pack of clubs gearing up to try to close the gap on the league’s great powers, a group containing not just the obvious names — the likes of Tottenham and Arsenal — but a smartly improved Leicester, a revamped Aston Villa, an engaging Leeds United and, possibly, Rafael Benítez’s Everton, a team that will, whatever happens, be one of the most compelling stories of the year. For those back in the stands, for those still afar, there is plenty to savor.P.S.G. Has Already WonLionel Messi was greeted by the masses in Paris on Wednesday.Yves Herman/ReutersThere were thousands of fans outside the Parc des Princes, clutching flags and burning flares and waiting for a glimpse, however fleeting, of the man who had made their dreams come true. There were hundreds more outside Paris St.-Germain’s shop in the center of the French capital, patiently waiting for their chance to get a jersey emblazoned with a name they never thought they would see.In a sense, of course, the story of Lionel Messi and P.S.G. is only just beginning: The club, as its president, Nasser al-Khelaifi rather oddly said at the news conference held to unveil the greatest player of all time, has “won nothing yet.” Still, nice to know that he doesn’t think that stream of French titles mean a vast amount, either.But in a way, too, it is over. The point of signing Messi, for P.S.G., is not what comes after: It is not the games he plays or the trophies he wins. It was the theater of the day itself: the crowd at the airport, the congregation at the stadium, the countless news crews, the endless content.No victory — perhaps with the one exception of the Champions League, but not necessarily — will attract quite so much attention, will compel as many eyeballs, will engender in fans the same feelings of excitement and awe as the piece of performance theater that captivated the planet over the course of last weekend. A transfer is not a means to an end, any more. It is the end in itself.CorrespondenceIt would appear that Brendan O’Connor has been gifted with just a touch of clairvoyance. “Why did Harry Kane sign a six-year contract? There is obviously huge benefit for Spurs in tying down their star player for six years in his prime,” he wrote. “But what’s in it for the player? He has no bargaining power or leverage in trying to engineer a move away.”I can’t give a definitive answer, sadly, but my reasonably educated guess would be that his reasoning was a blend of security — as a rule, players assume that longer contracts are safer and therefore better — and belief, three years ago, that he could fulfill his ambitions at Tottenham. The club, then, was coming off the back of two seasons of genuinely contending for the Premier League title, remember; a year later, it would make the Champions League final.As a rule, though, contracts of that length are likely to become less and less common, particularly for the game’s best and brightest: partly because the financial commitment for the clubs is too onerous, and partly because players (and their agents) know that the way to maximize earning potential is to keep transfer fees comparatively low. Players need leverage. Kane may yet come to stand as a warning of what happens when they do not have it.And, from Gavin MacPhee, an excellent theory on what it is that makes Lionel Messi so special. “Messi just about passes the test as coming from the Latin American street soccer development school. Yet he just happened to move [to Barcelona] at the point where the industrialization of player development by Western European countries was really starting to kick into gear. Messi is unique as a combination of the two great development environments.”That just about holds water to me, Gavin. So I suppose the question, now, is whether that blueprint can be repeated? Not to the same level as Messi, of course — his talent is what truly differentiates him — but can European teams use South America as a forge of very young talent, or (and better) can South American teams become as adept at polishing players as their counterparts across the Atlantic? More

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      Messi's Arrival in Paris Reflects a Troubling Time in Soccer

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      He could not stay where he wanted; few teams could afford him. Even one of the best players of all time was not able to resist the economic forces that carry the game along.In those frantic, final hours in April, before a cabal of owners of Europe’s grandest clubs unveiled their plan for a breakaway superleague to an unsuspecting and unwelcoming world, a schism emerged in their ranks.One faction, driven by Andrea Agnelli, chairman of Juventus, and Florentino Pérez, president of Real Madrid, wanted to go public as quickly as possible. Agnelli, in particular, was feeling the personal pressure of acting, in effect, as a double agent. Everything, they said, was ready; or at least as ready as it needed to be.Another group, centered on the American ownership groups that control England’s traditional giants, counseled caution. The plans still had to be finessed. There was still debate, for example, on how many spots might be handed over to teams that had qualified for the competition. They felt it better to wait until summer.If the first group had not won the day — if the whole project had not exploded into existence and collapsed in ignominy in 48 tumultuous hours — this would have been the week, after the Olympics but before the new season began, when they presented their self-serving, elitist vision of soccer’s future.That the Super League fell apart, of course, was a blessed relief. That this week has, instead, been given over to a dystopian illustration of where, exactly, soccer stands suggests that no great solace should be found in its failure.On Thursday, Manchester City broke the British transfer record — paying Aston Villa $138 million for Jack Grealish — for what may not be the last time this summer. The club remains hopeful of adding Harry Kane, talisman of Tottenham and captain of England, for a fee that could rise as high as $200 million.And then, of course, dwarfing everything else, it emerged that Lionel Messi would be leaving — would have to leave — F.C. Barcelona. Under La Liga’s rules, the club’s finances are such that it could not physically, fiscally, register the greatest player of all time for the coming season. It had no choice but to let him go. He had no choice but to leave.Everything that has played out since has felt so shocking as to be surreal, but so predictable as to be inevitable.There was the tear-stained news conference, in which Messi revealed he had volunteered to accept a 50 percent pay cut to stay at the club he has called home since he was 13, where he scored 672 goals in 778 games, where he broke every record there was to break, won everything there was to win and forged a legend that may never be matched.As soon as that was over, there came the first wisps of smoke from Paris, suggesting the identity of Messi’s new home. Paris St.-Germain was, apparently, crunching the numbers. Messi had been in touch with Neymar, his old compadre, to talk things through. He had called Mauricio Pochettino, the manager, to get an idea of how it might work. P.S.G. was in touch with Jorge, his agent and father.Then, on Tuesday, it happened. Everything was agreed upon: a salary worth $41 million a year, basic, over two years, with an option for a third. As his image was stripped from Camp Nou, a hole appearing between the vast posters of Gerard Piqué and Antoine Griezmann, Messi and his wife, Antonela Roccuzzo, boarded a plane in Barcelona, all packed and ready to go.Messi and his wife, Antonela Roccuzzo, on their way to Paris on Tuesday.Instagram/Antonelaroccuzzo/Via ReutersJorge Messi assured reporters at the airport that the deal was done. P.S.G. teased it with a tweet. Messi landed at Le Bourget airport, near Paris, wearing that shy smile and a T-shirt reading: “Ici, C’est Paris.”This was not a journey many had ever envisaged him making. But he had no other choice; or, rather, the player for whom anything has always been possible, for once, had only a narrow suite of options.There is a portrait of modern soccer in that restricted choice, and it is a stark one. Lionel Messi, the best of all time, does not have true agency over where he plays his final few years. Even he was not able to resist the economic forces that carry the game along.He could not stay where he wanted to stay, at Barcelona, because the club has walked, headlong, into financial ruin. A mixture of the incompetence of its executives and the hubris of the institution is largely responsible for that, but not wholly.The club has spent vastly and poorly in recent years, of course. It has squandered the legacy that Messi had done so much to construct. But it has done so in a context in which it was asked and expected to compete with clubs backed not just by oligarchs and billionaires but by whole nation states, their ambitions unchecked and their spending unrestricted.The coronavirus pandemic accelerated the onset of calamity, and so Barcelona was no longer in a position where it could keep even a player who wanted to stay. When it came time for him to leave, he found a landscape in which only a handful of clubs — nine at most — could offer the prospect of allowing him to compete for another Champions League trophy. They had long since left everybody else behind, relegated them to second-class status.And of those, only three could even come close to taking on a salary as deservedly gargantuan as his. He should not be begrudged a desire to be paid his worth. He is the finest exponent of his art in history. It would be churlish to demand that he should do it on the cheap, as though it is his duty to entertain us. It could only have been Chelsea or Manchester City or Paris.To some — and not just those who hold P.S.G. close to their hearts — that will be an appetizing prospect: a chance to see Messi not just reunited with Neymar, but aligned for the first time with Kylian Mbappé, who many assume will eventually take his crown as the best, and with his old enemy Sergio Ramos, too.That it will be captivating is not in doubt. And doubtless profitable: The jerseys will fly off the shelves; the sponsorships will roll in; the TV ratings will rise, too, perhaps lifting all of French soccer with it. It may well be successful, on the field; it will doubtless be good to watch. But that is no measure. So, too, is the sinking of a ship.Paris Saint-Germain supporters waited for Messi to arrive at Le Bourget airport, north of Paris, on Tuesday. Francois Mori/Associated PressThat the architects of the Super League arrived, in April, at the wrong answer is not in doubt. The vision of soccer’s future that they put forward was one that benefited them and left everyone else, in effect, to burn.But the question that prompted it was the right one. The vast majority of those dozen teams knew that the game in its current form was not sustainable. The costs were too high, the risks too great. The arms race that they were locked into led only to destruction. They recognized the need for change, even if their desperation and self-interest meant they could not identify what form that change should take.They worried that they could not compete with the power and the wealth of the two or three clubs that are not subject to the same rules as everybody else. They felt that the playing field was no longer level. They believed that, sooner or later, first the players and then the trophies would coalesce around P.S.G., Chelsea and Manchester City.It was sooner, as it turns out. P.S.G. has signed Messi. City may commit more than $300 million on just two players in a matter of weeks, as the rest of the game comes to terms with the impact of the pandemic. Chelsea has spent $140 million on a striker, too. This is the week when all their fears, all their dire predictions, have come to pass.There should be no sympathy, of course. Those same clubs did not care at all about competitive balance while the imbalances suited them. Nothing has damaged the chances of meaningful change more than their abortive attempt to corral as much of the game’s wealth as possible to their own ends.But they are not the only ones to lose in this situation. In April, in those whirlwind 48 hours, it felt like soccer avoided a grim vision of its future. As Messi touched down on the ground near Paris on Tuesday, as the surreal and the inevitable collided, it was hard to ignore the feeling that it had merely traded it for another. More

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      Jack Grealish: England’s Golden Boy

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      Fans chant his name at Wembley and pressure his coach to play him. But what does England really know about Grealish? And what does it want from him?The Wembley Stadium crowd was calling for him, yearning for him, long before it had seen him. The second half of England’s game with Germany had reached a deadlock. The English had not troubled Manuel Neuer’s goal for some time; the Germans had mustered a single shot, and then retreated into their shell. Stalemate had set in. More