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    At Barcelona, Timing Is Everything

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    The Barcelona team that faces Real Madrid in Saturday’s Clásico will be marked by youth, mostly because the club’s dire straits meant it had to be.As he rose through the ranks at Barcelona, Gerard Deulofeu seemed to have everything. Above all, he was fast, possessed of that urgent, quicksilver sort of speed that carries with it an air of permanent menace. But he had composure, too, a coolness on the ball, that stood out even at La Masia, Barcelona’s revered academy.His coaches knew, of course, that no player is a sure thing, but as far as they could tell, Deulofeu stood as good a chance as anyone. He scored buckets of goals for Barcelona’s reserve team, competing in the second tier of Spanish soccer. Luis Enrique, his manager, regarded him as his “standout.” He was fast-tracked into the senior side at the age of just 17.Deulofeu, though, never quite made it at Barcelona, not really. He spent a year on loan at Everton, to toughen him up, and then another season at Sevilla. He felt Luis Enrique, previously such an ardent advocate, did not “trust” him now that he was in charge of the senior team. There was scrutiny of Deulofeu’s industry, his attentiveness, his work ethic.Those criticisms were doubtless legitimate, but the real issue Deulofeu faced was less what he was, and more who he was not. In front of Deulofeu in Barcelona’s attacking queue, over the course of those years, were (in no particular order): Lionel Messi, Neymar, Luis Suárez, Cesc Fàbregas, Alexis Sánchez and Pedro. Andrés Iniesta could always fill a gap, too. Deulofeu played six times for Barcelona, and was sold.He was not alone in suffering that fate. In the club’s years of plenty, an apparently endless supply of prodigies rattled off the Barcelona production line. There was Cristian Tello and Isaac Cuenca and Adama Traoré and, because they were not all wingers, Marc Bartra and Rafinha and Martín Montoya.Like Deulofeu — now an alumnus of A.C. Milan, Udinese and Watford — they have mostly gone on to build respectable careers in Europe’s elite leagues. Tello played for Porto and Fiorentina. Bartra had a spell at Borussia Dortmund. Montoya spent two seasons at Valencia. For reasons that are not entirely clear, many of them seem to have joined Real Betis at one point or another.Gerard Deulofeu, once a sure thing at Barcelona, now plays for Udinese in Italy.Riccardo Antimiani/EPA, via ShutterstockMarc Bartra, now at Real Betis, has played in Germany and Turkey since leaving Barcelona.Robert Perry/EPA, via ShutterstockNo matter their early promise, though, none of them proved quite good enough for Barcelona. That, certainly, is how they are remembered, perhaps even how they will remember themselves, in time: that they fell just short, were in some way lacking. But that does not mean it is precisely what happened.Last week, Marc Guiu made his debut for Barcelona. He is 17, just as Deulofeu was when he was first summoned to the field for his boyhood team. Almost immediately, he picked up a pass from Joao Félix. He brought it under control with his left foot, and then swept a shot past Unai Simon, the Athletic Bilbao goalkeeper, with his right. He had been on the field for 23 seconds.Guiu’s case is, obviously, extraordinary — he is both the youngest and the fastest debutante to score a league goal for Barcelona. But it also felt, somehow, fitting. The Barcelona team that will host Real Madrid in the first Clásico of the season on Saturday is one filled with youth. Alejandro Baldé, 20, is now the default left back for both his club and Spain. The midfield has been constructed around Gavi (19) and Pedri (20). Fermín López, another 20-year-old, scored in this week’s 2-1 win against Shakhtar Donetsk in the Champions League.And then, of course, there is Lamine Yamal, the 16-year-old who has spent the last six months making it almost comically easy to remember who holds basically every age-related record in Spanish soccer.Yamal is now the youngest player to play for Barcelona in La Liga, the youngest player to start for Barcelona in La Liga, the youngest player to create a goal in La Liga, the youngest player to score in La Liga, and the youngest player to start a game in the Champions League. An unhelpful comparison: At the same age, Messi was still trundling about with Barcelona’s third team.The 16-year-old forward Lamine Yamal might appear in his first Clásico on Saturday.Joan Monfort/Associated PressSoccer is, of course, a results-oriented business. It is inclined to wait for an outcome before it reverse-engineers an explanation. By that logic, the difference between these two clutches of players is obvious. Yamal and his cohort are simply more talented than the generation that emerged from Barcelona’s youth ranks a decade or so ago; it follows, then, that La Masia must have rediscovered its magic touch.It should be remembered, though, that talent is only one of the ingredients that goes into the whether any given player makes it or not. Attitude, coaches will tell you, is just as important. Nobody is in any doubt that luck — particularly the good fortune to avoid serious injury — plays a role, too.But none of them are relevant without opportunity, and opportunity, in this context, tends to arise from crisis. The Barcelona team that Deulofeu and his peers were trying to break into contained some of the finest players of their generation. It won the Champions League three times in seven years, and probably should have won more. It is, rightly, remembered as one of the finest club teams in history. Its golden age spanned a decade, perhaps more. It was not a place, in other words, where young players could cut their teeth.The Barcelona of today, by contrast, the one that has granted opportunity to Yamal and the others, is a force diminished. Its parlous finances have forced all but a handful of its greatest generation to leave. Its plan — mortgaging its future for immediate success — might kindly be described as a moderate success, but it left the club with little choice but to turn to youth to fill the gaps.Young stars and old men: Barcelona will wear jerseys with the Rolling Stones logo in the Clásico as part of a marketing deal.F.C. Barcelona, via EPA, via ShutterstockIt is heartening to believe that a player like Yamal — and certainly the likes of Gavi and Pedri — would have come through at any time, in any context. So shimmering is their ability, they stand as proof that talent always wins out, that there is such a thing as a player who is destined to break through.But it is hard to believe that López, say, or Guiu, would have been given the chance had it not been for the circumstances in which Barcelona has found itself, that they would have been able to establish themselves if they had Iniesta or Suárez or any of the others standing in their way.The same could be said of La Masia’s most famous graduates, of course: They, too, emerged just at the moment when Barcelona needed them most. That is not a coincidence. Opportunity tends to have its roots in crisis. Deulofeu and his generation did not lack talent, not necessarily. They just had their timing all wrong.Judging the JudgesThe Ballon d’Or favorite at rest.Juan Mabromata/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesLet’s go through this quickly, one more time, just in case anyone is not quite clear on the principle. It will not be disgraceful if — when — Lionel Messi wins an eighth Ballon d’Or in Paris on Monday. It will not be an outrageous slander committed against Erling Haaland’s person and dignity.It will not be proof that the jury that hands out the most prestigious individual prize in soccer has not been paying attention, or does not give sufficient weight to England’s domestic cup, or is biased against either Manchester City or granite-hewn manifestations of the god Odin.Yes, there is a compelling case that Haaland was last season’s outstanding player, his 52 goals in 53 games crucial in Manchester City’s conquest of the Premier League, the F.A. Cup and the Champions League. But those trophies are not a sort of labyrinthine qualifying process for the Ballon d’Or. The prize for winning the treble is winning the treble.And besides, there is also a compelling case that Messi’s achievement — steering Argentina to its third World Cup title, and his first — was the more complex, the more startling, the more emotive. Yes, the prize for winning the World Cup is winning the World Cup, but the manner and the context of Messi’s triumph are not irrelevant. Qatar, after all, was his last shot, his final act, and by sheer force of will, he transformed it into his crowning glory.Rather than getting riled about that, it would be a far better use of everyone’s time to keep a very close eye on the women’s award. There is something of a tendency for individual prizes in women’s soccer to go either to a legacy candidate — Carli Lloyd or Marta, say — or to the most familiar name on the ballot sheet.This year, though in some ways it would be appropriate for Jenni Hermoso to win, it is hard to believe anyone has a better claim than Aitana Bonmatí. She does, after all, have a Spanish title, a Champions League and a World Cup to her name. Her candidacy is, to some extent, a test of how much the judges have been paying attention.Aitana Bonmatí is already the European player of the year. Next up? The world.Daniel Cole/Associated Press More

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      Champions League: Manchester City Bends the Story to Its Will

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      This season’s City might be Pep Guardiola’s coaching masterpiece: a juggernaut so fearsome that not even Hollywood writers dared suggest it could be beaten.The writers of “Ted Lasso,” the acclaimed, sugar-sweet Apple TV comedy, never particularly worried about being hidebound by reality. The world they created was, after all, based on an inherently fantastical premise: an American coach with no knowledge of soccer succeeding in the tumult of the Premier League.There would have been little point, then, in dismissing as too far-fetched the idea of a makeweight sort of a team signing a proxy for Zlatan Ibrahimovic just because its owner insulted him in the bathroom, for example, or a dog being killed by a wayward penalty kick, or West Ham being invited to take part in a global super league.It was notable, then, that there was one line the writers felt they could not cross. At the end of “Ted Lasso” — in all other aspects a determinedly romantic and uplifting show, an unabashed underdog story of empowerment and personal growth and the overwhelming power of nice — Manchester City still wins the Premier League. Even in fiction, City cannot be dislodged.City is not the villain, not really, in the Lasso Cinematic Universe. That role goes, instead, to a combination of conventional thinking and West Ham. Pep Guardiola even makes a cameo appearance in the show’s penultimate episode, offering a brief, distinctly Lassoist homily about winning being significantly less important than his players being good people.Rather than the bad guy, City serves as what the show’s eponymous hero refers to as his “white whale.” It functions as the series’ final level boss, a portrait of immutable sporting perfection, the one opponent that cannot be overcome by Lasso’s mustachioed, good-humored positivity.Even when his team eventually defeats Guardiola, the victory proves futile. The following week, City goes and wins the league anyway. Lasso, like so many others, finds that second place is the best outcome available to everyone else. “Such a shame,” one character tells Lasso in the show’s final scenes. “City are just too good.”As a piece of analysis, it is hard to top. This year, as for five of the last six, City has been far too good for anyone else in England. Even when it sat eight points behind Arsenal in the Premier League table, the season drifting to its conclusion and the distance to the finish line winnowing, it felt like City’s title to lose.From the middle of February — when a wasteful draw at Nottingham Forest prompted a full and frank exchange of views among the City players that Guardiola himself has described as the season’s pivotal moment — until the moment the title was won, City played 12 games in the Premier League and won them all. In that three-month spell, as The Independent pointed out, it found itself behind in a match only once. The unusual state of affairs was rectified after 10 minutes.Shaun Botterill/Getty ImagesThe F.A. Cup was the second leg of Manchester City’s quest for a treble.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Premier League trophy came first, City’s fifth title in six years.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesEven as it reeled in Arsenal, Guardiola’s team had an even grander prize in its sights. It was sailing smoothly through both the F.A. Cup and the Champions League, the prospect of a treble — victories in the league, the cup and in Europe — starting to loom on the horizon.The treble is, in truth, a distinctly English obsession. Manchester United’s 1999 squad is the only English team to have won all three major trophies in the same season. Though the feat has become significantly more common in recent years — Barcelona and Bayern Munich have both done it twice in the last decade and a half — it still functions as a trump card, the ultimate claim to greatness.Its rarity is precious, to United more than anyone else. That last week’s F.A. Cup final should have pitted the two Manchester clubs against each other felt fitting: Here was United’s chance to preserve the club’s honor, to protect its proudest accomplishment. It duly held out for roughly 12 seconds. The last vestige of English soccer’s resistance melted away. City, it turned out, was just too good.Nowhere, though, has that been made more plain than in the Champions League. That it is glory in Europe that Manchester City’s power brokers and paymasters — as well as its coach — crave more than anything else has long since drifted into cliché.Winning the Champions League has become, if it has not always been, Manchester City’s animating force: its final rite of passage, its final challenge, its white whale. To some extent, it is the purpose of the whole project.Everything — the fortunes spent on players, the state-of-the-art academy, the appointment of Guardiola, the global network of clubs, the accusations of breaches of financial regulations in both the Premier League and the Champions League, the legal battles, the risk that everything it achieves may yet be tainted, the distortion of the sport’s entire landscape — will be vindicated, at least in the club’s own estimation, only if and when City can call itself champion of Europe.City has, then, attacked the Champions League with a singular determination this season. Bayern Munich was obliterated in the first leg of the quarterfinals. Real Madrid held out for a little longer in the semifinal, but was routed at the Etihad in the second leg, the reigning champion dismantled both surgically and brutally.Guardiola made an exception for that victory against Real Madrid — it was, he conceded, among the very finest of his tenure — but as a rule he tends toward the coy when presented with all of the superlatives his team attracts. Habitually, he will always insist that his Barcelona team remains the finest he has ever coached, simply because it was spearheaded by Lionel Messi. His presence alone, Guardiola believes, automatically elevates any team.Perhaps that is true: Messi did lend Barcelona a wonder, a sense of the breath being taken away, that no other player — not even Erling Haaland or Kevin De Bruyne — can hope to match. And yet, by the same token, perhaps that makes the team Guardiola has crafted at City even more impressive. From a coaching perspective, it may be that this is his true masterpiece.Pep Guardiola with his most recent Premier League winner’s medal. He’s desperate to add a Champions League version.Carl Recine/ReutersCity has, of course, provided Guardiola with the most conducive working environment in the sport. He benefits not only from a budget that, effectively, allows him to obtain whichever players he wants, but from the sort of complete, uniform institutional support that can only ever be an aspiration at most clubs.That he has used it to produce a team that does not have a single apparent flaw, though, is testament to nobody but him. Manchester City, the 2023 edition, barely concedes chances, let alone goals. It scores from set pieces and counterattacks and long spells of possession. It can hurt opponents on the ground and in the air.It does not, as previous versions might have done, have an ever so slight tendency toward profligacy, thanks to the seamless integration of Haaland into Guardiola’s side, something that — perhaps more in hope than expectation — many expected to be at least a little bit of a challenge when the Norwegian arrived last summer.But that is not the switch that defines this vision of Manchester City; Guardiola’s most significant contribution, this season, lies elsewhere.John Stones anchored a rebuilt Manchester City defense that held Arsenal, and every other opponent, at bay.Adam Vaughan/EPA, via ShutterstockLast summer, he was concerned, just a little, about his resources at fullback, a key position in his system. Oleksandr Zinchenko had left. His replacement, Sergio Gómez, had initially been pointed out to the club as an investment for the future. João Cancelo’s form was patchy and his attitude, at times, questionable.And so Guardiola invented a solution. Rather than asking one of his fullbacks to step into midfield, as he had for the last year or two, he gave the task to a central defender, John Stones, and drafted in Nathan Aké and Manuel Akanji, two of the less prominent members of his squad, to balance things out.He explained the idea relatively briefly to his players; they had a few training sessions to try to iron out any kinks. And then, a couple of weeks later, they were trying it in a game. There were one or two who felt it was a risk, but it proved worth it: Stones, as much as Haaland, has emerged as City’s key player.More than anything else, it is that change that has made City untouchable in England, and in Europe, since the turn of the year. It has already delivered two trophies; only Inter Milan, now, stand in the way of a complete set.It is curious, then, that it should also — effectively — be one of the major plotlines in the final season of “Ted Lasso”: the coach has an epiphany, and everything clicks into place. That, of course, was a mere piece of fiction. Guardiola’s success is concrete, factual, real. Both have the same ultimate conclusion, though. In the end, Manchester City wins. More

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      Manchester City’s Premier League Success Leaves Many Cold

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      City claimed its third straight Premier League title on Saturday. But admiring its excellence is not the same as accepting its methods.As it turned out, Manchester City had already done all it needed to do. On Saturday night, Pep Guardiola’s team’s last remaining rival — a bone-tired, spirit-sapped Arsenal — finally stumbled and fell. For the third time in three seasons, Manchester City was untouchable at the summit of the Premier League.The coronation will come on Sunday, City’s home game with Chelsea transformed into a processional, but it felt somehow fitting that the title should be decided without the league’s undisputed sovereign so much as kicking a ball. This has, after all, been a fait accompli for some time.Quite where the turning point of this season came is open to interpretation. It may have been City’s dismantling of Arsenal at the Emirates Stadium in February. Or its humbling of the same opponent at the Etihad Stadium two months later.Pep Guardiola has suggested that neither moment is exactly right. Everything changed, he has said, with an impromptu meeting in the aftermath of a February draw with Nottingham Forest. That was the moment, the Manchester City manager either believes or wants to believe, that his players buckled down, took control, and bent the Premier League to their will.Or, perhaps, none of that is true. Perhaps there is no turning point to identify. There is a very good chance that the season has simply ended the way it was always going to end, the way that Premier League seasons increasingly tend to end. Perhaps the outcome was preordained. Perhaps we all knew, deep down, how this was going to go.Advancing to the Champions League final kept City on track for three trophies.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesRegardless, that is another item crossed off Manchester City’s bucket list of inevitabilities. Only a handful of teams — four, to be precise — have ever won three English titles in a row: Huddersfield Town in the 1920s, Arsenal in the 1930s, Liverpool in the 1980s and Manchester United, twice, in the early part of this century.It is an accomplishment that has, until now, been the exclusive preserve of only two managers: Herbert Chapman, with Huddersfield and Arsenal, and Alex Ferguson. (Liverpool changed its coach in the middle of its run.) It has long been seen as the ultimate threshold for greatness, the game’s pearly gate. Manchester City, and Guardiola himself, have now passed through it.In doing so, they have reached another milestone in what appears to be a deliberate, concerted campaign to build a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence that this is the greatest club side England has ever produced.Over the course of Guardiola’s six-year tenure, City has gobbled up every record it can find, etching its name at the top of almost every one of the sport’s statistical leader boards. It has the most points any team has ever collected in a season. And the most goals. It has won the most consecutive games in a campaign, and had the highest goal difference, and the biggest winning margin.It was the first team to complete a clean sweep of all four domestic trophies. In Erling Haaland, it can lay claim to possessing the most prolific striker in a single Premier League season. At some point, it may not even need that caveat: Haaland has five games to score 12 goals and pass the all-time high-water mark. If he does not do it this year, he may well do it next.Erling Haaland: goal machine.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIndeed, such is City’s domestic supremacy that the only worlds it has yet to conquer are on more distant shores. See off Manchester United in the F.A. Cup final and Inter Milan in the Champions League final and City would be just the second team in English history to complete the fabled, sanctified treble.After that, its ambitions would have to turn to the faintly fantastical. No team has ever won four English titles in a row. Nobody has ever won seven competitions in a single year, or done a quadruple. No English side since Nottingham Forest has retained the European Cup. Perhaps City could try and become the first team to win a game in zero gravity, or while only using their left feet, or with a lineup comprised solely of people called Neil.It has become a reflex to suggest that this is simply the nature of soccer. There is, as the former Manchester City captain Vincent Kompany put it, always an “ogre,” a team that sits at the top of the pile, that towers over the landscape, that sucks up all the oxygen. “It’s never been any different,” Kompany told The New York Times in an interview earlier this month. “Liverpool was an ogre. Manchester United was an ogre.”There is some truth in that logic, but it is not a whole truth. In its years of plenty, in the 1970s and 1980s, Liverpool was undeniably a rich club: In the years before broadcast revenue and television deals and money-spinning global tours, it had the one advantage available, that of being a big city team in a big city stadium.For Pep Guardiola, every option is a good option.Lee Smith/Action Images, via ReutersBut it was not drastically richer than most of its rivals. Its challengers were sometimes Manchester United and Leeds and Everton, but they were also Ipswich and Derby County and Nottingham Forest. The game’s hierarchy was much flatter, its stratification not nearly so ossified.Twice, between 1977 and 1991, Liverpool held the British transfer record, but only for a sale: first Kevin Keegan to Hamburg, and then Ian Rush to Juventus. In that time, West Bromwich Albion, Wolves, Forest and City all spent more money on a player than anyone had previously. Liverpool did not break the £1 million barrier until 1987.United’s primacy was much more modern, much more recognizable, built on the club’s commercial heft. It is worth parsing, though, one of the phrases that entered the sport’s lexicon during that period: Fergie Time, the idea that referees generally gave United as much time as required in a game to find a way to escape disappointment.That was not true, of course. The reason United developed a reputation for late winning goals was because of the character and resilience of Ferguson’s immensely gifted team. But the idea stuck nonetheless.United was the dominant team of its age. It was possible, though, for opposition fans to trick themselves into believing it was all down to luck, to the grace and favor of the powers that be, and that if only the fight was fair then United would receive its comeuppance.The same cannot be said of Manchester City. All of those records, the monopoly it has started to exert on the game’s history, point to a type of hegemony that English soccer has not previously experienced. City has not just reconfigured what it takes to succeed in the Premier League, but redefined how the game thinks of excellence. Its dominance feels more extreme than anything that went before, largely because it is.And yet the response to it has not been the loathing that was generated by Liverpool and United — an animus so potent that it has been passed down from one generation to the next — but a sort of acquiescence. Guardiola’s style of play is widely admired. The beauty of his team, the ingenuity of his ideas, draws fulsome and fawning praise.Guardiola is most likely one victory from his fifth Premier League title.Molly Darlington/ReutersThe success of the club itself, though, feels somehow cold, clinical, detached. Manchester City has the air of a machine, both in the way the project has been constructed and the manner in which the team plays. It should not be a surprise, then, that it should elicit roughly the same emotional response. This is a state-backed enterprise of bottomless wealth and grandiose vision. It is impossible to resist. But it is also difficult to adore.City’s advantage is not, as is often suggested, that it can spend more than anyone else, though few teams could afford the squad that Guardiola has at its disposal, or indeed the Catalan himself. Manchester United has frittered away hundreds of millions in the transfer market. Chelsea, too. Liverpool commits almost as much in salary to its squad.The edge is in the consistency. City is rarely — if ever — forced to sell a player on anything other than its own terms. That is what separates it, as much as anything, from all of its peers. Plenty of clubs have a plan. City is the only one that has the privilege of seeing it through without being subject to the arbitrary tides of reality.That is not the same, though, as not playing by the same rules. It is a coincidence, doubtless, that the run of form that will end with Guardiola’s team claiming yet another title began after the club was charged with 115 counts of rules breaches — dating back over a decade, the whole span of its dominion — by the Premier League.Those charges retain the capacity to alter, on some fundamental level, all of the mosts and firsts and bests that City has accrued over the years. The titles, the trophies, the records — they are all contingent on that case.Jack Grealish, still the most expensive British player in soccer history.Odd Andersen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is just about possible for fans, for the game, to swallow the idea that a club owned and operated for the purpose of furthering the interests of a nation state is acceptable. It is just about possible for the television networks and media outlets that rely on the draw of the sport’s rolling soap opera to wallow in whatever moral gray area they can find.It would be much harder to excuse and explain and — above all — to accept that one team felt that the rules it had signed up to did not really apply, to decide that it did not need to be subject to the same constraints as everyone else.Many of the charges might feel historic, dated, but this has always been a long-term project. What happened 10 years ago led, inexorably, to today, to this, to Manchester City having a third title in three seasons, standing on the verge of a treble, its name scored next to almost every record English soccer can offer.What it has done, over these last few years, is plain for all to see. How it will be remembered is yet to be decided. More

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      Manchester City and Real Madrid Will Eventually Have to Be Themselves

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      The teams drew the first leg of their Champions League semifinal as each tried to prevent the other from playing to its strengths.Erling Haaland had his instructions. His Manchester City teammates were methodically working the ball from the center circle all the way back to Ederson, the goalkeeper, but Haaland was not watching. He knew what was coming. Ederson pitched the ball high into the night sky, an unusually rudimentary opening gambit for a team coached by Pep Guardiola.Haaland was not watching, either, as the ball reached the apex of its parabola and started to descend. He was moving to where it was going to make landfall. He started to gather a little speed. And then, just as the Real Madrid defender David Alaba met the ball — his header sending it back into the sky — Haaland arrived, crashing into him. Not dangerously or recklessly but, with only about 40 seconds elapsed, certainly ominously.Guardiola being Guardiola, of course, the working assumption has to be that this was all preordained, the sort of effort that he has spent time perfecting on the training ground for Tuesday’s match. An understudy would have been drafted to act as Haaland’s crash test dummy. Haaland, the Norwegian striker, would have been lectured on the finer points of clattering technique. No, Erling, don’t barge into him like that; lead with the shoulder just a touch more.In this case, though, perhaps the agency lay elsewhere. Standing behind Alaba, watching the opening skirmish unfold, was Antonio Rüdiger, the German defender. Happenstance had brought him into Real’s lineup — standing in for the suspended Eder Militão — but he is not the sort to back away from a test of strength.Rüdiger has that valuable knack, for a central defender, of ensuring he gets the game he wants. He may as well have been licking his lips at the sight of Haaland’s opening salvo on Alaba. Clearly, this was going to be his sort of evening.This Champions League semifinal was, on a macro level, always going to be cast not just as a tussle between old glory and new money, the establishment and the aspirant, but as a conceptual collision, too. Carlo Ancelotti’s Madrid is inherently improvisational and player-centric; Guardiola believes, more than anything, in the power of his collective, his system. It is free jazz against orchestral arrangement. (The score, after the first of two legs, is 1-1; no sweeping conclusions on scant evidence can yet be drawn.)Vinícius Júnior, left, scored Real Madrid’s only goal.Julian Finney/Getty ImagesBut it was also — and at times, it seemed, mainly — an arm wrestle between Rüdiger and Haaland. That is not to suggest that either player is nothing but brawn, of course. Rüdiger’s job is to ensure that things do not happen; his successes are, often, inherently invisible to those not blessed with his foresight. Likewise, for someone so large, Haaland can make it very difficult to say with any certainty where he is at any given time, right up to the point when he materializes, peeling off an opponent’s shoulder.On this occasion, though, both players willingly indulged what might be described as their more muscular instincts. For an hour and a half, the two of them pulled and pushed and strained and tensed, relishing the atavistic thrill of it, each trying to establish nothing grander than sheer physical dominance over the other.Here was Haaland, dropping deep to pick up the ball, being thrown to the ground by Rüdiger. Here was Rüdiger, for some reason slipping his head through the crook of Haaland’s elbow, effectively giving his consent to be placed in a headlock, grinning in (presumably) accidental homage to Jack Nicholson in “The Shining” as he did so.Most judges, by the end, would have scored it a split decision: Haaland did not score, a rarity this season, and in truth had only a couple of sights of goal; his presence was central, though, in creating the space that led to Kevin De Bruyne’s equalizer for City, the strike that will make Guardiola’s team the slight favorite when hostilities are resumed next week in England.And that, perhaps, will not displease either coach. For all their philosophical differences, what was striking about this game was just how aware both teams were of the other’s strengths, their capacity to inflict damage. That, more than anything, might have been the enduring lesson of their encounter in a semifinal last season: Madrid conscious of just how good City can be; City conscious that a team can be as good as it likes against Madrid and still lose.Real, on home territory, was at times so passive that it tried its fans’ patience; the Bernabéu is not used, after all, to its visitors having the temerity to keep the ball for long periods of time. There was a point, midway through the first half, when City’s passing started to affront the crowd’s dignity: What had started as whistling turned, slowly but surely, into jeers.For Ancelotti, though, that was a price worth paying: Tactically, strategically, it made sense for Real to dig in, to sit deep, to lie in wait, and then to pick its moments. A few minutes later, his approach bore fruit: Eduardo Camavinga, playing the hybrid fullback/midfielder role that is so de rigueur these days, spotted a gap and levered it open, then found Vinícius Júnior in sufficient space to fizz a shot past Ederson.Even a goal down, though, City did not see the need to adopt a more assertive, more aggressive posture. Guardiola’s insatiable appetite for possession is not a purely offensive maneuver: To some extent, it is a defensive measure, too. More than he would like to admit, perhaps, he hews to his old rival José Mourinho’s adage that “whoever has the ball, has fear.”Kevin De Bruyne, right, scored Manchester City’s equalizer.Manu Fernandez/Associated PressIf Guardiola’s team is in control, he knows the opposition cannot score. In those moments, watching the ball sweep hypnotically between his players, he can feel safe. Against Madrid, a team whose superpower is its ability to score at any moment and effectively without any warning, that is doubly important.It was, both sorts of coaches seemed to have decided, that sort of occasion, one in which the focus was on preventing the opposition from expressing its identity. And so Haaland, the most devastating forward in Europe, a player who has seemed at times in his debut season in England like an inevitable force of nature, was employed — at least in part — as a battering ram.Guardiola and Ancelotti will both take heart that their approach worked, that nothing has yet been lost. Both will know, though, that at some point it will not be enough merely to stop the opposition; to win, someone will have to be themselves. More

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      Manchester City Eliminates Bayern Munich in Champions League

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      City dispatched Bayern Munich to reach the Champions League semifinals. But, as usual, getting close won’t be good enough.MUNICH — Suddenly, quietly, improbably inconspicuously, Manchester City finds itself within touching distance once more of the thing it does not like to talk about but is never far from its thoughts, the one prize that has eluded Pep Guardiola at City, the ultimate victory that has long felt like the inevitable conclusion of all that the club has done, all that it has spent, all that it has wanted.It has never been an easy subject to broach with Guardiola, the team’s head coach. How he reacts tends to depend on his mood. Sometimes, it makes him irascible, sometimes weary. There are occasions when he plays it for laughs, and moments when he goes for playful indulgence, like a man talking to a dog, as if the very thought of one of the most expensive and ambitious sports-political projects of all time gobbling up trophies is risible.“Forget it, forget it,” he said last month. “When you start to talk about that, you start to lose competitions and drop competitions.”Familiarity lies at the root of his contempt, of course. He has been asked about the possibility of winning “The Treble” — when spoken, the phrase is always capitalized — in every single one of his seasons at City, with the possible exception of his fact-finding first. For a while, convention dictated it not be mentioned until at least springtime. These days it is broached when, jet-lagged, he first steps off the plane on some far-flung preseason tour.If anything, though, it is a curious and admittedly somewhat contorted form of flattery. The treble — victories in the league, the F.A. Cup and the Champions League — is held up as an almost mythical achievement in English soccer. It stands as the ultimate seal of greatness: It has, after all, only been achieved once, though Manchester United mentions it rarely, and only when prompted.Pep Guardiola, with Manuel Akanji and Bernado Silva.Christian Bruna/EPA, via ShutterstockThat it seems to fit so readily in his purview is not just testament to soccer’s rapid-onset ossification into immutable hierarchies and to the irresistible power of money, but to the scale of dominion that Guardiola has established at Manchester City. He has already won the Premier League. He has retained it. Twice. He has broken the division’s points record. He has done a clean sweep of domestic honors. What other worlds are there left to conquer?(He might also like to direct a gentle admonishment in the general direction of his employer. In 2019, when City won the league and both domestic cups, Ferran Soriano, the club’s chief executive, commanded that the team be hailed as the “Fourmidables.” It would, he believed, thus overshadow United’s treble. Guardiola’s staff pointed out that including the Community Shield, an exhibition game taken seriously only by the winner, might be technically correct but had the effect of cheapening the achievement. They were overruled.)This season, though, has brought a minor — but telling — shift. City’s quest to clear that final hurdle has bubbled along in the background, as it always does, but it has hardly been front and center.Partly, that has to do with a deference to logic: It would be a little bit gauche, after all, to discuss one team winning every competition in sight when another is several points clear at the top of the Premier League. And partly it has to do with the distracting presence of Erling Haaland, who has spent much of the year forcing people to wonder if there is a number big enough to capture his eventual goals tally.All of a sudden, though, it is the tail end of April and the stars once more seem to have aligned. If Manchester City wins all of its games, it will claim the Premier League trophy for the third year in a row: another item ticked off Guardiola’s bucket list. It is in the F.A. Cup semifinals, and an overwhelming favorite to reach the final. And here on Wednesday in Munich, City filled in the last administrative duty before taking its place in the final four of the Champions League.Aymeric Laporte bending soccer’s rules, and Bayern’s Kingsley Coman.Matthias Schrader/Associated PressBeating Bayern Munich handsomely eight days earlier had made this game seem like a formality, though in reality it did not always quite feel like that. There were moments, particularly in the first half, when Kingsley Coman or Leroy Sané were tearing at City’s flanks and it was possible, just about, to believe that it might not be over.But then Erling Haaland scored, and it was. Bayern equalized, late on, through a penalty by Joshua Kimmich, but by that stage the Allianz Arena had long since given up hope.Magnanimously, Guardiola suggested that the aggregate score of 4-1 did not reflect the true nature of the home-and-home — probably correctly — but then these games, as he said, are defined by details. And the details, in this case, were that Bayern could not take its chances. City, by contrast, grasped those that came its way with a cold certainty, an unforgiving inevitability.It is a useful trait to have, of course, as the season enters its final, defining stretch. The challenges that remain, the obstacles between the club and the achievement that represents the absolute, unavoidable culmination of Abu Dhabi’s vision for soccer, are hardly trifles.Guardiola’s team still has to play, and beat, Arsenal, the Premier League leader. Manchester United or Brighton might await in the F.A. Cup final. Most ominously, Real Madrid lurks in the semifinals of the Champions League, just as it did last year. Nobody at City will need reminding how that ended. Guardiola regards those sorts of fixtures as a “coin flip.” He knows as well as anyone that nobody calls it better than Real Madrid.With Bayern out of the way, City will line up against Real Madrid in the semifinals.Afp Contributor#Afp/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut then City has not so much as dropped a point in the Premier League since February. In March and April, it has so far scored 31 goals and conceded only four. It has the look of a team gathering momentum, a blend of speed and force and purpose. It has the feel of a storm brewing. All of a sudden, almost surreptitiously, City has crept closer to the summit of its own grand ambitions than it has ever been.Quite what that means for soccer as a whole is a subject that will, rightly, come under scrutiny in the coming weeks, as Guardiola steers his side on those last few steps, the most delicate, the most treacherous of all. For him, though, as for his team and for the people who took a club and turned it into something else entirely, spinning it out of whole, golden cloth, this is where the path has always led. All that is left, now, is to get there. More

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      Manchester City Beats Arsenal, and the Premier League Season Pivots

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      Manchester City’s 3-1 victory lifted it over Arsenal and into first place in the Premier League. But the title race is far from over.LONDON — Erling Haaland was just starting to sprint when he remembered his manners. He was about to race off to celebrate yet another goal with Manchester City’s fans when he stopped, turned on his heel, and bounded over to Kevin De Bruyne instead, grabbing him by the forearm, roaring wordlessly in his face.In the ecstasy of the moment, it was not entirely clear what Haaland wanted his teammate to do. De Bruyne, certainly, seemed a little confused. Was Haaland merely thanking him for the assist on his goal? Was he inviting him to join in the celebrations? For a breath, both players stood at an impasse, wondering what to do next. And then Haaland took off again, hurtling toward the traveling supporters at full speed, his arms flailing in the air.By this stage, it is a wonder Haaland, the Norwegian striker, elicits any excitement from scoring. His latest goal gave him 26 in only 22 games in the Premier League since joining Manchester City last summer. He is on 32 in all competitions. Haaland does not so much harvest goals as factory farm them. He knew, though, that Wednesday’s was not just another goal. This one was different.Not just because it sealed City’s 3-1 win against Arsenal, or even because it confirmed Pep Guardiola’s team would leapfrog its opponent at the summit of the Premier League. Its significance was more deep-rooted than that. That goal, this victory, effected a profound shift in the psychology of the title race. It had the air of the hinge on which the season turned.Erling Haaland and Manchester City pulled ahead of Arsenal, for the moment, in the Premier League standings.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesGuardiola, of course, had stressed this week that February is far too early for a single game to be conclusive, no matter how apocalyptic the tone of the prematch hype. The campaign is only narrowly past its halfway point. There are, as he said, so many games remaining. And besides, the arithmetic is skewed. Arsenal has a game in hand. Nothing, he was very clear, has been decided yet.Judging by the tableau of reactions to Haaland’s goal, that message had not quite made it through to City’s players. As Haaland tore away from De Bruyne, Ilkay Gundogan was in the corner, punching the air; Rúben Dias was locked in a tight, tender clinch with his coach, Guardiola cradling the defender’s face in his hands; Riyad Mahrez and Jack Grealish, both recently substituted, were racing back onto the field; and City’s coaching staff was howling into the night sky.It is only 10 days or so since Arsenal’s lead over City seemed if not insurmountable then certainly commanding. Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal team had beaten Tottenham in enemy territory, and had swatted aside Manchester United at home. Its lead over City had stretched to eight points. Arsenal’s youthful exuberance was slowly crystallizing into an imperious momentum; at some point, it had gone from being a club that hoped and become one that believed.Suggesting that tenor has been extinguished over the course of the last two weeks would be a stretch, but it is hard to deny that Arsenal has sputtered. First, Everton, its loins girded by a new manager, Sean Dyche, shut out the league leader at Goodison Park. Then Brentford, the Premier League’s specialist giant slayer, left the Emirates Stadium with a draw that was simultaneously fortuitous and largely merited.Suddenly, the daylight Arsenal had so painstakingly claimed at the top of the table had disappeared. City was right there, its breath hot on the necks of Arteta’s players. This game became less an examination of the comparative merits of two title contenders and more a test of Arsenal’s mettle.Martin Odegaard and Arsenal are winless in three games.David Klein/ReutersThe fact of defeat — to an opponent that has won four of the last five Premier League titles (for now, at least) — will sting rather less than the manner of it.Arsenal was hurried, rather than urgent, frantic, rather than intense. It looked, in other words, like exactly what it is: a work in progress, a young team on a steep trajectory but one that is yet to reach its apex. City’s first two goals, scored by De Bruyne and Grealish, came from avoidable errors, rushed decisions, poor choices. That happens to teams as they grow, of course. It was just not a great time for Arsenal to have a learning experience.City, by contrast, has honed its ruthlessness over the course of five seasons. On Wednesday, Guardiola’s team might not have played with its habitual control, the poise and the certainty that has become its hallmark; there was, instead, a frenzy to its performance, too, a fury that the club ordinarily reserves for any governing body that questions the legitimacy of its financial results.The temptation is to draw a direct link between the team’s performance and the 115 allegations of rule-breaking made by the Premier League last week, to suggest that Guardiola has successfully used those charges to convince his players — whom he had accused, not so long ago, of being rather too happy to rest on their laurels — that they have a cause to fight for, an injustice to set right.Perhaps that is true. Perhaps City’s squad has bought into the club’s conviction that it is on some rebel crusade, persecuted by the vested interests intent on doing it down. It is entirely possible that the players have been jolted out of whatever torpor Guardiola had detected by the seriousness of the allegations.Far more likely is that City’s players realized this was their chance. Manchester City has not been taking Arsenal lightly: that much was obvious when Ederson, the goalkeeper, was booked for time-wasting after barely half an hour, and when the team’s captain, Gundogan, was twice asked to calm his teammates down by the referee, Anthony Taylor.The difference, more than anything, was that City could channel that desperation, that hunger. That it could sense weakness and exploit it when Arsenal could not do the same. It does not mean anything is over, that Arsenal’s race is run. But for the first time in months, it feels like City has the edge, and that is often all it needs. More

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      The Premier League Is Back, With Quite an Act to Follow

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      The Premier League will play on Boxing Day because the Premier League always plays on Boxing Day. But the title race changed over the World Cup break.The Premier League was absolutely, resolutely clear. This was not a bluff. It was not a card to play or a chip to barter or a point to haggle. It was not, and this cannot be stressed enough, on the table. Whatever FIFA did with the World Cup, however the rest of Europe’s major leagues contorted themselves to make way for it, the Premier League would be playing matches on Boxing Day.That stance must, deep down, have seemed just a little absurd to the rest of the executives present at that summit in Doha in 2015, when the most powerful clubs and leagues in global soccer were informed that the World Cup was being shifted to the winter, like it or lump it. None of the leagues were happy, of course.But only the Premier League — the richest domestic competition in the world, the one that earns more from its domestic broadcast deals than FIFA turns over in a whole World Cup cycle — seemed so aghast at the very notion of its cherished traditions being imperiled that it drew a red line. The tournament had to be finished, it declared, in time for the fixtures that would be scheduled for the day after Christmas could go ahead.There were reasons for that stance beyond habit, obviously. What is described so often in England as the “busy festive period” that it really should be trademarked is a key pillar of those television rights sales from which all of the Premier League’s wealth and power flow: All those potential viewers sitting at home, their heads maybe just a little sore and their stomachs just a little full, gift vouchers from uncles they do not like burning holes in their pockets. Like most traditions, Boxing Day soccer is really about selling you stuff.And, of course, the Premier League is powerful enough to have received its wish. The World Cup, distilled into only 29 days, finished on Sunday. Most of Europe’s other major leagues have given their players a little more of a hiatus, a little more chance to rest and recover. Italy’s Serie A does not resume until the start of January, Germany at the end. Spain and France both have games scheduled this month, but the burden on teams, and on players, is much lighter.The Premier League, though, will play on Boxing Day because the Premier League always plays on Boxing Day. No, it must play on Boxing Day. It would not be Christmas without it.Raphael Varane, Hugo Lloris and Ibrahima Konaté will have a shorter break than most players: Their club seasons will resume only days after they played in the World Cup final.Julian Finney/Getty ImagesAt which point, the word hubris lingering ever so slightly at the back of the mind, all we can do is wish everyone involved the best of luck. Did you enjoy the greatest World Cup final in history? The one with what may well have been the best goal ever scored in a final — that sweeping, wondrous move capped by Ángel Di María — and the hat trick from Kylian Mbappé and Argentina winning it once, twice, three times and Lionel Messi, the finest player to have ever graced the game, at last fulfilling his dream and his destiny, as the world watched on with eyes wide?Well, next up we have Crystal Palace against Fulham. And it’s live.Before the World Cup, it was easy to wonder what physical impact the presence of the tournament in the middle of the season might have on Europe’s major leagues. (Which is why this newsletter did it, by my count, three times.) Would players return from Qatar exhausted or injured? Would there be a significant advantage for those teams who had fewer representatives at the World Cup? Would the second half of the season just be Erling Haaland, revived by a month of boredom, mowing down weary, disinterested defenses?At first glance, it would appear that the Premier League has no need to worry. England made the quarterfinals, of course, and those players who formed the core of Gareth Southgate’s team most likely will need a little time to rest and recover before being thrown back into the fray by their clubs. But there were surprisingly few Premier League stars who made it into the tournament’s final week.Nobody should be expecting to see Emiliano Martínez, Cristían Romero, Alexis Mac Allister or Julián Álvarez any time soon, since all were key members of Messi’s supporting cast. Only two players who started the final for France are currently employed in England — Raphael Varane and Hugo Lloris — and only one more came on as a substitute, the Liverpool defender Ibrahima Konaté.Likewise, while Chelsea’s Hakim Ziyech was a central figure for Morocco, it is fair to say Morocco’s Hakim Ziyech is not a central figure for Chelsea. Mateo Kovacic, his Croatian teammate at Stamford Bridge, is more of a loss, but a tolerable one.That is not to say that there is not an impactful injury legacy of the World Cup. Indeed, there is every chance that it was in Qatar that the fate of the Premier League title was decided: The medial ligament injury sustained by Arsenal forward Gabriel Jesus was precisely the sort of blow that England’s unlikely leader could not afford, particularly with Manchester City breathing down its neck.A knee injury sustained at the World Cup is expected to keep Gabriel Jesus out of Arsenal’s lineup for months.Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA, via ShutterstockIt will take time for the significance of that injury to become apparent. When Boxing Day rolls around, the Premier League may look as if it is at not far off full strength. That, though, was never likely to be the problem. There will be a physical impact on those players who were in Qatar, but it will not manifest until spring, once the miles in the legs have piled up. Even then, it will not take the form of mass absences, but greater vulnerability to minor aches and strains. Those looming concerns may not have much effect on the destiny of most of Europe’s domestic championships, but in the knockout rounds of the Champions League, where an ill-timed two-week absence can prove the difference between glory and disappointment, it may yet be decisive.The more immediate problem, though, is psychological. It is not just the Premier League’s wealth — and the quality of player and coach that can attract — which has made it soccer’s dominant domestic competition. Nor is it just the aesthetic appeal of its stadiums, or the fame and grandeur of its biggest names, or even the fact that it is all conducted in English. Part of its success is down to its ability to project just how much every single moment matters.Eight days after a World Cup, that is probably best described as a tricky sell. No other tournament, not even the Champions League, can offer quite the drama, quite the tension of the final rounds of the World Cup. Its secret is its scarcity; every game carries the sense that it is now or never, do or die, once in a lifetime. It is a competition of a different order, a blockbuster in a world of soaps, and one that offers something that most leagues are now far too stratified, far too hierarchical to provide on a regular basis. Every World Cup game has an air not just of jeopardy, but of balance, too. The gap between the strong and the (allegedly) weak is not quite such a chasm has it has been allowed to become in domestic soccer. The World Cup offers regular viewers a dash of something they do not get — but may secretly want — from their more ordinary diet.That is not to say, of course, that the Premier League, and the rest of Europe’s major competitions, will trudge reluctantly to a conclusion. The stadiums will be full on Boxing Day, because that is what lots of people do on Boxing Day. There are still plentiful stories to transfix fans around Europe: Arsenal and Napoli, genuine outsiders, competing for championships; the ongoing crisis at Barcelona; Liverpool and Manchester United trying to attract new investment, in the wake of the rise of Newcastle United; Chelsea’s attempts to buy every player in existence. In February, the Champions League will be back, too, which means we all have at least three remarkable Real Madrid comebacks to admire.To ask fans to pick up with those plot lines so soon, though, feels just a little like a misstep. It invites a contrast that, unusually, is not especially flattering for the Premier League, in particular, and risks casting the flaws in European domestic soccer in a rather sharper light than it might like. It will be eight days since what may well come to be regarded as the best soccer game of all time. It is asking a lot of Everton and Wolves to match that standard. Just because you always play on Boxing Day does not, in fact, mean you should.Up Next: A BreakAfter a World Cup that can, I think, be fairly described as intense, I’m going to allow myself a one-week break from the newsletter over the holiday period. Think of it as The Times taking the Serie A approach to life, and coming back, fully refreshed, in early January. We already have a month’s worth of correspondence that has gone unattended, but if you have any questions, or thoughts, or observations that you would like to throw into the mix, they’d be more than welcome: Send them along to askrory@nytimes.com.And if you don’t have any thoughts and would prefer to relax over the next few days, that’s fine, too. I will be endeavoring to have as few thoughts as possible. I hope that those of you who celebrate enjoy the time with family, or friends, or people you know from Twitter, and I hope that those of you who do not choose to celebrate have a wonderful time, too.All the best,Rory More

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      The Hollywood Merger That Could Reshape Soccer’s Transfer Market

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      As two behemoths join forces against boutique agencies in the fight for control and commissions, some fear profits could come before players.LONDON — Everything about the deal seemed to connote vastness. Most obviously, there were the figures: The merger created a company with a combined value of an estimated $5 billion. There was the language, too. A “landmark,” according to Variety. “Seismic,” The Los Angeles Business Journal said.In this case, though, time is the best way to gauge scale. It was in September last year when word filtered out of Los Angeles that two of the world’s biggest talent agencies, Creative Artists Agency and ICM Partners, had decided to join forces, but it was not until June that the union was given the green light.The nine-month delay could be attributed to antitrust investigators combing through the deal, trying to establish whether the unified agency would wield too much power. The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission reportedly cast an eye over the prospective merger.The central concern was the potential impact on Hollywood from having two of its most influential agencies become one market-dominating behemoth, and what that might mean for the industry. The Screen Actors Guild, for one, expressed concerns that its members might be “disadvantaged” by the deal.At no point did anyone feel the need to mention soccer. It is there, though, where the deal’s impact might be felt most keenly.Both CAA and ICM have, in the last three years, expanded into soccer. In 2019, CAA acquired Base Soccer, one of Britain’s biggest sports agencies, with more than 300 professional clients. A year later, ICM completed a deal to buy the even-bigger Stellar Group, in what was thought to be the most expensive acquisition in the company’s history.For years, Base and Stellar have been powerhouses — Stellar, the largest agency in the sport, represents more than 800 clients — but they have also been rivals, and not always cordial ones. But as soon as the Justice Department signed off on CAA’s acquisition of ICM, they became teammates.That has ramifications, of course, for the firms, the agents who staff them and the players whom they call clients — including stars like Gareth Bale, Jack Grealish and Eduardo Camavinga. But the scale of the combined venture may also have a profound effect on the delicate power balance in the fraught, lucrative player trading business which acts as the financial engine for the most popular sport in the world.Poetic LicenseErkut Sogut, an experienced agent, has written a novel about the sometimes sordid industry in which he works.Gualter Fatia/Getty ImagesThere is one element of Erkut Sogut’s debut novel that, he admits, belongs squarely in the realm of fantasy. Soccer is not, he wants to emphasize, actually controlled by a cabal of superagents who will resort to anything — sabotage, match-fixing, kidnapping, murder — to keep the game and its riches in their vise.Everything else, he maintains, is real. More than that, in fact: The plot of his book, “Deadline,” a thriller set against the backdrop of soccer’s transfer market, is drawn from firsthand experience. Sogut has spent 15 years as an agent, and he is best known for his longstanding association with Mesut Özil, the onetime Arsenal, Real Madrid and Germany playmaker. It is a world, he said, that does not demand a great deal of poetic license.The portrait of the industry he paints is not a flattering one. His characters are, by and large, hucksters and vultures, charlatans and sharks, operating in a sport rife with corruption and addled with cronyism. It is, though, intrinsically familiar: Soccer has grown accustomed to the depiction of agents as puppet masters in sharp suits and designer sunglasses, wielding ultimate influence over the fates of players and teams.That image, though, the one that suffuses Sogut’s novel, does not quite capture the reality of the industry as it stands now. The likes of Jorge Mendes — consigliere to Cristiano Ronaldo and José Mourinho — may be cast as rainmakers possessed of sufficient clout to bend the whole market to their will, but they increasingly seem like the exception, rather than the rule. The world of agents is in convulsion, soccer’s latest battleground between new money and old hands.Though FIFA’s controversial decision, in 2015, to deregulate the industry opened the doors to any family member or friend who wanted to sign up to represent a player — a move that turned a chaotic and irrevocably murky world into a “complete free-for-all,” as one agent put it — the most significant new entrants in recent years have not been cowboy operators hoping to make a quick buck but established corporations panning for new fortunes.That market now includes not only CAA — which first entered soccer by handling the commercial deals of Mendes’s stable of stars — and ICM, but also the California-based sports agency Wasserman. The latter established a beachhead in English soccer in 2006, but has expanded rapidly in the last two years, acquiring another British agency, Key Sports, and the Spanish firm Top Value, as well as opening a German office.The appeal is no mystery. According to FIFA, agents and intermediaries made more than $500 million in commissions last year alone. In 117 deals, those paydays ran to more than $1 million. Even that seems like small change in comparison to, say, the deal that sent Erling Haaland to Manchester City this summer: His representatives are reported to have earned somewhere in the region of $40 million simply for delivering his signature.Those sorts of figures are difficult to resist. “Football is the No. 1 sport in the world,” said Jonathan Barnett, a co-founder of Stellar. “If you want to be a major sports agency, you have to be involved.”The deal that sent Erling Haaland to Manchester City paid off handsomely for him and his representatives.Craig Brough/ReutersThe Benefits of ScalePlenty of people have offered to buy Andy Evans’s business in the last few years. There have been inquiries from other soccer agencies and from firms that have never worked in soccer. There have been talks with several companies in Britain and at least one from the United States. None of the approaches, in Evans’s view, have felt quite right.Sometimes the finances have not added up. Sometimes Evans has not been sold on exactly what a new owner had planned for World in Motion, the agency he founded a quarter century ago. Mostly, though, he has not been inclined to sell at all. “I’ve been running it for a long time,” Evans said. “I’m not especially inclined to not run it.”The client list he has established is an impressive one — it includes Aaron Ramsdale, the Arsenal goalkeeper, and the England defender Conor Coady — but Evans has never had any desire to operate at the sort of scale of Base and Stellar. That was a conscious choice: He has long believed there was an advantage in being a David.He is conscious, though, that the arrival of the corporations, and in particular the merger between CAA and ICM, could start to alter that equation.Whenever he pitches a prospective client, Evans finds that the first question is always the same. “It is always, ‘Who else do you represent?’” he said. “Players want to know that more than anything else. They know that if you don’t know anyone, you can’t get anything done. People just wouldn’t pick up the phone.”That gives the monolith that has emerged from the union of CAA and ICM — and, as a result, between Base and Stellar — an almost unassailable advantage. Neither firm expects to lose any soccer agents as a result of the merger; the intention is to grow the client list rather than shrink it. The answer to the question “Who else do you represent?” might as well be “everyone.”“It has been a huge advantage in terms of commercial, marketing, organization,” Barnett said earlier this year, before the merger had been approved by the Justice Department, but he was adamant that even becoming part of ICM had been “fantastic” for both his staff and his clients. The impact of joining forces with CAA could be only greater still.Heavy LiftingMichael Yormark in 2013. He joined Roc Nation a year later.Omar Vega/Invision/APMichael Yormark, with his cut-glass jaw and his close-cropped hair, does not seem the sort to be easily intimidated. A veteran agent, he has spent the last six years steering the expansion of Jay-Z’s Roc Nation label into international sports, painstakingly building out a roster of clients that started, by accident, with Jérôme Boateng and has since grown to include the Belgian star Romelu Lukaku and the Chelsea defender Reece James.Yormark might then have been expected to greet the prospect of a colossal new rival on his turf with something sandwiched between reluctance and dread. Instead, in an interview at Roc’s London headquarters, he seemed genuinely enthusiastic. “That deal is great for us,” he said.His logic is straightforward. Roc Nation’s pitch to prospective clients is based on what Yormark described as a “360-degree service,” one that focuses as much, or more, on meeting their aspirations away from the field than on negotiating new contracts or arranging money-spinning transfers. The label keeps its client list small by design.“The heavy lifting is in helping build a brand, a platform, whatever they want to do,” Yormark said. That is not possible, his company contends, with a client list numbering in the hundreds. “It would be hard to do what we do with 150 clients,” said Alan Redmond, Roc Nation’s head of football. “It would be impossible if we had 400.”Inside CAA, those concerns are airily dismissed. Executives believe that the company’s scale belies its flexibility. The example often cited is the N.B.A. player Zion Williamson of the New Orleans Pelicans.Williamson, when selecting his representation, made clear that he wanted a “boutique” feel, precisely the kind of treatment that Roc Nation has made its hallmark. To win his signature, CAA pivoted. Williamson and his family, one CAA executive said, have two points of contact at the agency, no more. The fact that those representatives are merely a tiny part of a giant company is hidden from view.There are others, though, who worry that the type of representation players might receive is far from the most significant consequence of the merger.While the arrival of corporations — with shareholders and workplace cultures and public images to worry about — may hint at an encroaching professionalization in what has traditionally been the kind of lawless industry Sogut’s novel depicts, it also exposes players to the possibility that their futures will be determined by a greater need to bolster a parent company’s bottom line.“If you have an agent who is under pressure to move you early because it is the best thing for the agency, it can compromise a career,” as one veteran agent put it.That has always been a risk for players, of course. They have always been vulnerable to their careers being shaped by their agents’ interests outweighing their own. It is that tension that makes the world of agency such a rich, compelling setting for a thriller, for example. There have always been sharks in the water. The only thing that has changed is the size of the fish. More

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      Premier League Preview: Has Arsenal Pulled It Together? Will United Fall Apart?

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      Six contenders (more or less) and five story lines (plus a few extra) as the new season kicks off with everyone chasing Manchester City (again).Somehow, it is that time again. Cue the dramatic music, crank up the content generator and get ready to absorb the hottest takes around: the Premier League season is upon us once again.Quite what form this edition of soccer’s great hubristic soap opera will take is, of course, not yet clear. That, after all, is the fun of the thing.As the 20 teams in the richest league in the world return to the field this weekend, though, there are several questions that linger over everything. How they are answered will go a long way to determining how things play out.Will Manchester City Beat Manchester City?Manchester City’s reaction every time someone suggests its time with the trophy is up.Dave Thompson/Associated PressThe obvious question before the start of every new Premier League season is which team is likely to have won the thing at the end. Unfortunately, in the current incarnation of the league, it is not a particularly interesting inquiry. Manchester City will win it, as it has four of the past five editions, and it will most likely do so by seeing off a spirited but ultimately futile challenge from Liverpool. Although, this time, there is just one small caveat.The idea that Erling Haaland’s presence will somehow disrupt City’s rhythm sufficiently to impact the team has been overblown; it may be an awkward marriage for a few months, but both are more than good enough to thrive despite that.Far more important is the fact that Haaland is currently just one of 16 senior outfield players at Pep Guardiola’s disposal. That would be a risk in a normal season. This one has a great big World Cup in the middle, making it seem like a colossal gamble.Is Arsenal Back?Gabriel Jesus practicing a pose Arsenal expects to see a lot this season.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt sounds like damning Arsenal with faint praise to suggest that Mikel Arteta’s team has won the preseason — largely because it is — but, amid all of the hype and exaggeration, the last few weeks have produced some genuinely encouraging signs for the Spaniard and his fellow documentary stars.Gabriel Jesus, certainly, has the capacity to be a transformational signing, and his former Manchester City teammate Oleksandr Zinchenko may not be far behind. Arsenal looks like a much more complete side than it did a year ago. Not one ready to challenge City or Liverpool, perhaps, but one that could end the club’s long exile from the Champions League.Will Tottenham’s Impatience Pay Off?Richarlison traded life at the bottom of the table at Everton for a view of the summit at Spurs.Andy Buchanan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe biggest obstacle to Arsenal’s resurrection sits just down the road. Not at Chelsea, where a chaotic transfer window will most likely end with a stronger and yet somehow less coherent squad, but at a Tottenham transformed by Antonio Conte, the sort of supernova coach who comes in, pushes his players to the limit and then implodes. The worry, when he arrived at Spurs, was that the club had an almost diametrically opposed approach.That, it seems, was not a problem. Tottenham is very much in win-now mode. Ivan Perisic, Richarlison and Yves Bissouma have been brought in to turn a side good enough to get into the Champions League last year into one that can push for the title. Given the strangeness of the season, that does not seem impossible. Spurs has one chance under Conte, effectively. It has done all it can to take it.Manchester United: DiscussA rare sight this season: Cristiano Ronaldo happy at Manchester United.Ed Sykes/Action Images, via ReutersIn what may have been the purest distillation of modern soccer imaginable, Cristiano Ronaldo received a rapturous reception upon his return to Old Trafford last weekend. Manchester United’s fans clearly wanted him to know how much he meant to them, even as he has made it very obvious he does not wish to remain at the club.Roughly 45 minutes later, having been substituted, Ronaldo was leaving the stadium at halftime, very much against the wishes of his manager, Erik ten Hag, and apparently convinced that he did not need to stick around.There has, believe it or not, been progress at Manchester United this summer. Ten Hag is a smart appointment. The club has made a couple smart signings. But it is a curious progress, one tempered by the fact that United does not appear to have a list of recruits beyond players ten Hag knew and liked and undercut by the Ronaldo saga. As things stand, he may be forced to stay merely because nobody else wants to sign him. How ten Hag handles that will define the early months of his reign.Can Anyone Break the Seal?Declan Rice and West Ham floated into Europe last season. Is more in their future?Justin Tallis/AFP, via Getty ImagesIn one view, this season should be the best chance since 2016 for a team outside the traditional Big Six to make a run for a place in the Champions League. The whole campaign will be affected by the World Cup, and it is hardly ridiculous to suggest that the superpowers — stocked as they are by players headed to Qatar — may be more susceptible to fatigue in the aftermath.Whether any team can emerge from the pack, though, is a different matter. Newcastle ended last season on a Saudi-bankrolled high, but it has been substantially quieter than the LIV golf series this summer. Leicester and Wolves seem to be stagnating. That leaves, perhaps, West Ham — bolstered by a couple of smart additions — as the only viable candidate. More likely still, of course, is that David Moyes’s team cannot last the pace either and that at the end of a season unlike any other, everything will be precisely the same as before. More