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      Coming This Season: Pep Guardiola 3.0

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      Manchester City will begin defense of its Premier League title with a team that doesn’t (exactly) look like its predecessors. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing.Two months on, the euphoria has not yet faded. A few days ago, with the rich promise of a new season drifting into view, Manchester City released “Together: Champions Again,” an official documentary detailing the thrilling, triumphant journey that culminated in Pep Guardiola’s team lifting yet another Premier League trophy last May.There are still drops of pleasure to be wrung from the happy memories, even as the thoughts of Manchester City’s fans start to drift to the delights to come. Saturday’s meeting with Liverpool in the Community Shield, the phony war that traditionally heralds the dawn of a new English season, offers the chance to see Erling Haaland in sky blue, a first glimpse of the player around whom the club’s future will be built.It is strange, then, that flourishing in that valley between the twin peaks of jubilation and anticipation, has been just a hint of melancholy. Guardiola has, every couple of weeks, had to pay tribute to a departing star: first Gabriel Jesus, then Raheem Sterling, and finally Aleksandar Zinchenko.“The nicest player I ever worked with,” Guardiola said of Jesus. “An explosion,” he said of Sterling. “An important player in the locker room,” he said of Zinchenko. The players have noticed it, too. “There has been a lot of change this year,” Kevin De Bruyne said recently. “It has been quite sad, because I had good relationships with the players who have gone.”Gabriel Jesus will do his scoring for Arsenal, not City, this season.Julio Cortez/Associated PressThese are not the sorts of departures that have become familiar to City in recent years. There was sorrow, of course, when Yaya Touré and Vincent Kompany left, and when David Silva followed, and when Sergio Agüero departed. These were players who would be commemorated, soon after, in statuary outside the stadium, or players who deserved to be.But their exits were natural, inevitable, predictable. The sun was setting on their careers; City, a club that has grown accustomed to the idea that tomorrow always offers more, could offset its sadness with the knowledge that they had given their all, that the team could only grow in their absence.Sterling, Jesus and Zinchenko, though, are different. None of them are ready to retire. None have outlived their usefulness. They have left, instead, because they feel like they can be more useful somewhere else, and they have done so in a steady stream. The Manchester City that takes the field this season will be distinct from the one depicted lifting the Premier League trophy, wreathed in smiles, in the documentary.That is not to say worse, of course. The truism — echoed by Haaland after he made his first appearance in preseason last weekend against Bayern Munich at Lambeau Field — that City has spent the last couple of years playing “without a striker” is not accurate, as Jesus would doubtless point out himself. But it has not had a striker of Haaland’s type, his profile, for some considerable time, and it has not had a striker of his quality since Agüero was at his peak. Haaland’s presence alone should make City more of a threat, not less.Erling Haaland: coming soon to a goal celebration near you.Justin Casterline/Getty ImagesBut it does not seem too much of a stretch to suggest that City will be different. The club might have identified Marc Cucurella, the Brighton left back, as the ideal successor to Zinchenko — a fairly straight swap, given that Guardiola chiefly deployed the Ukrainian as a left back — but Sterling’s substitute is Julián Álvarez, a young Argentine striker, rather than what might be termed a wide forward.To Guardiola, Jesus was the sort of player who could “press three defenders in 10 seconds,” and play across three positions. Haaland, it is safe to say, will be used rather differently. Likewise, Fernandinho, having chosen to spend the final years of his career in Brazil, has been replaced by Kalvin Phillips, a more direct sort of a midfield player.Quite what impact all of this has on the way City will play is not yet clear, of course. Guardiola has been plain that he expects his new arrivals to fold into what he has built; he will not be reconstructing his masterpiece, or redefining his philosophy, to suit them.He might have acknowledged that Haaland’s “movement and quality in the box” compels his team to “put as many balls as possible into the box,” but it is fair to say that he will not be reinventing himself as a long-ball manager, the sort who encourages his wingers to sling in crosses from all angles at a striker memorably described by the comedian Troy Hawke as a “Nordic meat shield.”“We’re going to adapt the quality that the players have to be involved in the way we play,” Guardiola said. “We are not going to change the way we play.” That may broadly be true, but at the same time it is impossible to imagine Guardiola not finessing his approach somewhat to reflect the range of characteristics in his squad.Kamil Krzaczynski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHaaland, certainly, will have to learn Guardiola’s ways of doing things, but it hardly seems a stretch to suggest that the manager will have to learn how to elicit the best from his forward, too. City’s press, for example, may require a slight recalibrating. The same is true for the way its attacking line rotates, and its preferred methods for building play.The outcome, doubtless, will be what it always is with Guardiola: a team that dominates possession, scores great floods of goals, and either wins or comes very close to winning almost every competition in which it is involved. The question, instead, lingers on how it chooses to get there.Guardiola has a somewhat checkered history with players regarded as pure No. 9s: He turned Robert Lewandowski into the finest exponent of the position on the planet, and had no little success with David Villa and Agüero, but struggled to dovetail with Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Samuel Eto’o.That he has approved the signing of Haaland — and to a lesser extent Álvarez, a player many at City suspect will prove something of a secret weapon this season — suggests Guardiola recognizes the need to fine-tune his style.Not because of some shortcoming — as he has said, City has done “pretty well” under his aegis, after all — but because he wonders if there might be a way for it to become even more impressive, even more devastating. This has been a summer of euphoria and anticipation at Manchester City, but it has also been a summer of change. That change has been made in the belief that what emerges will be different than what came before. Different, but better, too.Euro 2022: Almost Home NowEngland will face Germany in the final of Euro 2022 on Sunday in London, where they are already talking, yet again, about how football’s coming home. The Times will provide live coverage of the match at nytimes.com. To ensure you know what you’re talking about at your watch party, or so you can pretend to look smart if you really haven’t been paying attention, here’s some background reading from earlier in the tournamentPeople Get OlderMark Cuban has, it seems, started channeling Helen Lovejoy. Just as he did in March, and then again in April, Cuban used an interview with Men in Blazers this week to fret and to fluster about teenagers. Not their moral and spiritual fiber so much, admittedly, just how they consume professional sports content. But still: Won’t somebody please think of the children?Cuban’s theory is based on his realization that his 12-year-old son engages with sports only by devouring highlights on TikTok, that most transient of social networks. A few seconds of a dunk or a 3-pointer or a goal, then he moves — or is moved by the algorithm — on to whatever captures his fancy next.This, as far as Cuban is concerned, has dire consequences for the sports that produce those highlights, based on the assumption that we are accidentally breeding an entire generation of humans without an attention span. These young people will, he believes, never develop the ability to follow a game over the course of an hour, or an hour and a half, and thus it is incumbent on the sports to adapt to the demands of their new audience.He is not alone in this, of course. Luminaries as respected as Florentino Pérez and Andrea Agnelli have suggested more or less the same thing — though not based, presumably, on a sample consisting exclusively of a Cuban scion — and the same fear has come to permeate much of the news media, print and broadcast alike.Yeah, sure, but will this Manchester City fan still love cheese when he’s 25?Jeff Hanisch/USA Today Sports, via ReutersNow, given that we have all apparently decided that wealth is an accurate measure of wisdom, intelligence and virtue, turning billionaires into our new philosophers, deviation to this orthodoxy does not seem to be tolerated. There does, though, seem to be one apposite fact missing from this puzzle: the fact that people grow up.Children being restless and easily distracted is not a new thing. It is not a function of the social media age. There is a reason, for example, that “Tom and Jerry” was a five-minute cartoon in which animals hit each other with mallets, rather than an hourlong slow burn filmed in the style of a Nordic noir.It does not feel impossible that, perhaps, younger people have always struggled to pay attention to games in their entirety; that they have been inclined to dip in and out; that they have preferred, for example, to consume the relatively brief clips on “Match of the Day” or an equivalent, rather than settling in with a beer and a snack to watch a whole 90 minutes. It is just that now they can get those highlights on TikTok, rather than on linear television.There is a strange insecurity to the sports industry. It is, at the same time, a vast and overweening production, full of strut and swagger and self-importance, and yet convinced of its own impending demise. Cuban’s son will, like everyone else, get older. And as he does so, he and the rest of his generation will learn the delights of delayed gratification, to appreciate the finer arts of their chosen sports, to realize that the highlights are a gateway, not a replacement.Romance: Not DeadPablo Porciuncula/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAs Cristiano Ronaldo contemplates his next move in the 2D chess match he is playing with Manchester United, he could do worse than to take into consideration the most heartwarming — and among the most intriguing — transfer of the summer: Luis Suárez, the Uruguayan striker, going back to where it all began.Suárez, even at 35, had options after leaving Atlético Madrid this summer. He was linked with Aston Villa, and a reunion with his former Liverpool teammate Steven Gerrard. There were offers from Major League Soccer, where the Seattle Sounders held his discovery rights. He might have chosen to go to the Middle East, to Saudi Arabia or Qatar.Instead, Suárez’s head was turned by a sweeping, organic campaign from fans of Nacional, the team in his homeland that he left some 16 years ago, to take his journey full circle. There were, by all accounts, some 50 million tweets left on the hashtag #SuárezANacional. The club’s fan base printed and wore tens of thousands of masks of his face at a league game last month.Pablo Porciuncula/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOn Thursday, they had their reward.“All of the videos and messages we have received have been so moving, it really touched our hearts in this situation where we had to decide,” Suárez said after announcing his return to Montevideo. “It was impossible to turn down the chance to play for Nacional again.”Suárez is not an uncomplicated figure, and he has not always made it easy to admire him. But it is difficult not to see the romance in his decision to turn down far more lucrative, far more ego-soothing offers in favor of something more authentic. Humans like stories, and Suárez has chosen to complete his.Ronaldo does not appear ready to do that yet. At 37, his priority remains to play in the Champions League, to have one or two more chances to add another couple of honors to his extended résumé. Manchester United, the team that made him a star, cannot offer that, and so he does not want to be there any more.Nor can Sporting Lisbon, Ronaldo’s equivalent of Suárez’s Nacional: Ruben Amorim’s team is in the Champions League, at least, but it is a bit of a stretch to imagine it venturing far into the knockout rounds. That has left one of the best players of all time in a curious position. He needs one of Europe’s best teams to be sufficiently badly organized to sign him, but sufficiently well run to win the Champions League. That is not a story that will have a happy ending.CorrespondenceLast week’s newsletter drew two distinct strands of communication. One centered on the future or otherwise of headers, with various suggestions for how they might continue to be incorporated — or not — into soccer.“Maybe one compromise is limiting them to corners and free kicks into the box?” suggested Ajoy Vachher. “Clanging heads and hard-struck balls hitting heads would still happen, but much less frequently, and a critical part of the game would be preserved.”Many others went for a more comprehensive solution: Michael Valot, Mary Jo Berman and Tom Kalitkowski all suggested that some sort of “lightweight headgear” might allow the game to preserve heading while minimizing long-term risk. That is thoroughly sensible, of course, but I do wonder how culturally acceptable it would be to players and to fans.I also thought Tim Schum made a fascinating point about the relevance of the development of the ball itself. The consensus holds that, because modern balls are lighter, they pose less risk than the heavy, sodden, leather balls that players of previous generations were compelled to head as “an act of courage.”That has come with a risk, though. “With the modern ball has emerged the ability of artisans to ‘spin’ or shape the flighted ball toward or away from goalkeepers,” Tim wrote, something that may have served to ensure crossing’s ongoing prominence in the game.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe other theme, you will be unsurprised to learn, centered on language. Thanks, first of all, to Kevin Duncliffe, for pointing out that the word “soccer” remains “alive and well” not only in the United States, but Ireland, too.“In news media generally, soccer is the preferred term, and football is reserved for the Gaelic game,” he wrote. “In conversation, ‘football’ may refer to either sport and you have to pick it up from context. Meanwhile, here in the United States, I remain ever eager to point out that the term ‘soccer’ is neither American nor an abomination.”And thanks to the dozen or so Italians, or Americans of Italian extraction or with Italian links, who educated me on the etymology of the word calcio. Lisa Calevi, for example: “I must remind you that calcio comes from calciare, meaning to kick.” My Italian is passable, though a little rusty, but I will confess I did not know that, and I am grateful for the correction. More

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      Erling Haaland, Darwin Núñez and Rediscovering the No. 9

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      It took Erling Haaland a couple of seconds to notice something had changed. Late last month, Haaland, the Norwegian striker, was inside the Manchester Institute of Health and Performance, patiently and quietly going through the many and monotonous steps of the medical exam that was part of his move to Manchester City.At one point, stripped down to nothing but a pair of briefs, Haaland was asked to take a deep breath and stand perfectly still, so that the club could get an accurate read of his height. He did as he was told. “OK, 1.952 meters,” the physician guiding him through the exam said, jotting down the figure on a piece of paper.That, Haaland thought, was not right. Everyone knows their own height. He checked what the doctor had recorded. There was the answer again. 1.952. “Wow,” Haaland said, sounding genuinely pleased with himself. “I’ve grown. Almost a whole centimeter.” A meaningful one, too: those extra few millimeters had tipped Haaland over a threshold. At the age of 21, he was now, officially, 6 feet 4 inches.Size is significant when it comes to Haaland. That is not to diminish his rich array of other qualities as a striker — his technical ability, his movement, his intelligence, his capacity to drop deep and build play, the power and precision of his finishing from either foot — and it is not something that exists in isolation.Indeed, watching Haaland in the flesh, what stands out first is his speed. Haaland is quick. He accelerates almost instantaneously, and then eats up the ground in front of him, his stride long and elegant. It is only after a beat that it is possible to realize that what makes that speed so striking is that it is unexpected, that it is being produced by a man with that frame.Erling Haaland’s mix of size, speed and strength makes him a test for any defender.Andrej Isakovic/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNor is it to pigeonhole the type of player he is, or to ponder how he will fit in to the intricate, delicate style of play preached by Pep Guardiola at Manchester City. Haaland has not been bought as some sort of battering ram. He is far more than a target man. It is just that, at first glance, that is how he is built.On a very basic level, Haaland is large, undeniably so. He is especially large in context. Elite soccer is populated, these days, by slight, almost elfin figures. Haaland is a head taller than most forwards. He towers over most fullbacks and wings. He has aerial clearance over central midfielders. He might even find the majority of central defenders a little diminutive.Darwin Nuñez, the Uruguayan forward added to Liverpool’s ranks by Jürgen Klopp this week, is similar. He is not quite so tall — only 6-foot-1, unless he, like Haaland, still has growing to do — but he possesses a similar profile. He drifts wide, rather than deep, to find space. He accelerates rapidly. He moves smartly.But he is, as Klopp noted, “powerful,” too. Liverpool’s forward line, these last few years, has been constructed around three players — Sadio Mané, Roberto Firmino, Mohamed Salah — who fit the accepted mold for modern forwards. They are nimble, fleet-footed, technically flawless. None, though, could be described as “powerful,” not in the sense that Nuñez is powerful.Klopp did have a more robust option at his disposal, in the form of Divock Origi, when he felt it was required — such as when needing a goal in a Champions League final, or playing Everton. Origi was, though, viewed more as a chaos agent than anything else; he was deployed almost exclusively as a Plan B. Like Guardiola, Klopp seemed to have moved beyond the idea of what might be called a “traditional” center-forward.The Uruguayan striker Darwin Núñez joined Liverpool from Benfica this week.Armando Franca/Associated PressThat both have, this summer, committed considerable proportions of their transfer budgets to inverting that mode, then, is significant. The explanations may be distressingly straightforward. City creates a plethora of chances every single game; adding Haaland is a surefire way to ensure more of them are turned into goals. Liverpool has, in Andy Robertson and Trent Alexander-Arnold, a precise aerial supply line. It makes sense to exploit it.Or it may, perhaps, hint at a shift that has ramifications outside the rarefied air of the Premier League’s top two. Strikers — pure, thoroughbred strikers — have become vanishingly rare over the last decade. Between the generation represented by Robert Lewandowski, Karim Benzema, Sergio Agüero and Luis Suárez — all in their mid-thirties now — and the one spearheaded by Kylian Mbappé, Haaland and, possibly, Nuñez, the No. 9 almost died out.True, there have been occasional oases in the desert: Harry Kane, a late bloomer at Tottenham Hotspur, and Romelu Lukaku, who flowered sufficiently early in Belgium that despite being five years younger than Suárez, both made their debuts in the Premier League in 2011.As a rule, though, soccer’s journey over the last 10 years has been away from what might be termed focal point forwards. The tendency, instead, has been to engineer more fluid, more dynamic attacking lines, built around players who can drift and roam and transform, depending on the situation: a generation encapsulated by generalists like Mané and Neymar and Raheem Sterling, rather than specialists.There is, most likely, no single explanation for why that might be. It may partly be philosophical: Guardiola, in particular, pioneered an approach in which a fixed No. 9 was optional and an aerial approach was deemed unsophisticated, while the German school that produced Klopp prioritized a player’s dynamism in the press. The rest of the sport followed suit.Haaland’s arrival could change the look of Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City.Lynne Cameron/Manchester City FC, via Getty ImagesBut the drift away from target men may have its roots, too, in the race to industrialize talent production over much the same time period. Soccer’s elite academies respond, in part, to what is being asked of them: If first-team coaches do not have much need for strikers, their counterparts in youth systems will not provide them.They will, instead, pour their energies into finding the types of players — ball-playing midfielders, inverted wingers, creative fullbacks — that the professional game now cherishes above all others.That pattern holds not only in Europe. Presciently, Arsène Wenger declared the better part of a decade ago that the old world, reliant on its academies, was no longer producing forwards. Only in South America, he felt, were the predatory instincts necessary to excel in the position still being honed on the street.Now even that no longer holds. In Brazil, clubs respond to the demands of the European market. They craft the raw materials into something they feel can be sold. And, for some time, pure strikers have not sold all that well.There is another relevant factor, though. Academies naturally place greater weight on the sorts of players they can produce. A well-honed youth setup, full of dedicated and talented coaches, can take gifted teenagers and turn them into neat, clever midfield players, or inventive inside forwards. What it cannot do is make them 6-foot-4.Haaland wearing soccer’s new favorite number for Norway last week.Ntb/Via ReutersIt is, then, difficult to be entirely certain what came first: Did Europe, in particular, stop producing strikers because soccer’s elite coaches felt they had moved beyond them? Or did soccer’s elite coaches move beyond strikers because none of the requisite level were emerging from the ever-more-prolific academies?What Guardiola and Klopp have spotted, then, is a competitive edge. Only a handful of teams possess a high-quality powerhouse center-forward. Only one or two boast one that is not already well into the autumn of their careers. Perhaps that is the next step in the evolution of the related, but distinct, styles both coaches have crafted: the repurposing of old virtues to fit the new game.That, in turn, will have a profound effect on soccer’s incessant pipeline. If the perception is that center forwards in the style of Haaland and Nuñez are back in fashion, then there will be value in producing them: if not the target-men of old, perhaps, then certainly a modern version, players able to fit into complex counter-pressing systems but also, in a very basic, very real way, extremely large. Size may matter once more. The No. 9 may yet have another day in the sun.Brick WallsZinedine Zidane: Next manager up?Thomas Samson/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe last few weeks have passed in a curious limbo for Mauricio Pochettino. He is still, officially, the coach of Paris St.-Germain, in the sense that he has not yet been fired. There has been no announcement, no expression of gratitude and regret, no statement offering him the club’s best wishes for the future, no mournful image of a drooping corner flag posted on social media.At the same time, though, Pochettino is very much not the coach of P.S.G. If he has not been fired by the time you read this, then he will be fired very soon indeed. His tenure can be measured in days, maybe. Weeks, at the absolute outside. He knows it. The club knows it. The fans know it, and so do the players.It is hard to say it is cruel, this Schrödinger status, because it is only soccer, and because there are plenty of prospective employers out there for a coach of Pochettino’s caliber, but it is a little undignified. It does not suggest a club that has a concrete plan of action, a crystal-clear foresight.More damning still are the identities of the two coaches competing to replace him. Zinedine Zidane makes sense: not just a glossy name for a superficial club, but a coach with a proven ability to take a motley collection of superstars and turn them into a cogent force. He certainly has a more compelling case than the alternative, Christophe Galtier, who might have won the French title with Lille last year, but his specialism is in helping the overmatched punch above their weight.But then does appointing Zidane as coach fit with the hiring of Luis Campos as P.S.G.’s de facto sporting director? Campos’s expertise is in spotting young talent, the likes of Kylian Mbappé and Bernardo Silva and Victor Osimhen. Those are not the kinds of players P.S.G. allows to flourish. They are not, particularly, the kind of player Zidane has worked with before.Such is the modern P.S.G., though, a club that remains happy to throw as many ideas as possible against a wall and see what sticks. Whoever replaces Pochettino, it seems a fair bet that in a year, maybe two, they will find themselves in exactly the same position, waiting to be put out of their misery, doomed not by their lack of ability but by a club unable to commit to a direction, to choose where it wants to go, what it wants to be.Draw Your Own ConclusionsShould this man still be running soccer clubs?Julien De Rosa/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBy the time Gérard López relinquished his ownership of Lille, the club was both on its way to the French title and drowning in debt. Despite bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars in player sales on a reasonably regular basis, two of his main lenders, JP Morgan Chase and the activist investment fund Elliott Management, were growing concerned that López would not be able to meet his loan obligations. Eventually, late in 2020, they forced his hand.Six months later, López was back in French soccer. He had bought Bordeaux, a national champion only a little more than a decade previously, at a reduced price after its previous owner, an American investment firm, had placed it in administration. López had, it was said, saved the club from bankruptcy.Last month, Bordeaux was relegated from Ligue 1 after finishing last in the table. Things, though, may still get worse: This week, citing the club’s precarious finances, French soccer’s licensing body demoted Bordeaux again. The team has said it will take up its right of appeal against a “brutal” decision, but as things stand, Bordeaux will begin next year in France’s third tier.Still, at least it has not suffered the same fate as Royal Excelsior Mouscron, a team across the border in Belgium. In May, Mouscron was stripped of its license and relegated to Belgium’s fourth tier. Last week, saddled with debts of $4.5 million and unable to find a willing investor, it filed for bankruptcy. Mouscron is — was — owned by López.Last year, the Portuguese side Boavista was banned from registering new players by FIFA. This year, Fola Esch, a team in Luxembourg, was implicated in a suspected money-laundering scheme involving Lotus, a now-defunct Formula 1 team. The common thread in all the stories, again, was their owner: López.Doubtless, there are differences in each of these cases. The roots of the problems will vary from club to club. But one question hovers above all of them, a question that should be addressed not to López but to soccer’s authorities: Why has he been allowed to keep buying clubs? How could he be deemed a suitable owner for Bordeaux six months after being forced out Lille because of the club’s debts? Who, exactly, is looking after the game?CorrespondenceA couple of bugbears requiring attention in this week’s correspondence section. Bruce Tully, for example, is perhaps slightly unreasonably aggravated by “stutter-step penalty kicks.”“They look ridiculous, and they’re not in the spirit of the game,” he wrote. “Penalty takers already have a tremendous advantage. They don’t need to resort to silly gimmicks that serve only to embarrass the goalkeeper. Neymar and Jorginho are perhaps the worst offenders.”His suggestion — to limit the number of steps a taker is allowed in the run-up — is a sensible one. I have a deep-seated distrust of the stuttering run-up, based on the entirely woolly logic that you’re more likely to lose your rhythm. I suspect we will see it less frequently in the next couple of years, on the grounds that goalkeepers have now worked out, both with Neymar and Jorginho, that standing still is the best approach.If anything, David Krajicek has identified an even more obscure irritant. “Is there a more overworked cliché in Premier League broadcasting than the worn-out trope of teams ‘asking questions’ of the opposition’s defense?” he wrote. “Are Brits contractually required to use it? Did they learn it in school?”This is difficult for me to share, because “asking questions” is part of soccer’s lexicon to me. It encapsulates what analytical types might refer to as a game state, in which one team is enjoying the majority of the attacking possession but is not, necessarily, taking lots of shots or scoring lots of goals. (The stage after “asking questions” involves “peppering” or “laying siege to” the goal.) An alternative might be useful, though. I’ll start the bidding with “stress-testing.” More

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      How Haaland’s Advisers Worked the System on the Way to Man City

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      A carefully crafted strategy for a young striker’s career paid off handsomely for him and his agents. But will everyone get what they want out of the deal?A few days before last summer’s transfer window drew to a close, a handful of Manchester City’s most senior executives gathered in a conference room at the club’s sprawling campus to pick through what had gone right, and what had gone wrong, over the previous couple of months.Though City, the Premier League champion, had succeeded in persuading Aston Villa to relinquish Jack Grealish, the impish playmaker who had emerged as England’s breakout star during the European Championship — making him the most expensive player in English history in the process — it had failed to land its other priority target, the Tottenham striker Harry Kane.What had always been a complex, fraught pursuit had descended, instead, into a squabble over who was to blame. Kane had, at one point, refused to train with Tottenham, the club he supported as a child, in the hope of forcing Spurs’ hand, but his act of brinkmanship failed. Tottenham claimed City had failed to present an offer that might act as a starting point for negotiation.That afternoon, City’s executives reflected on their strategy, contemplated why a deal had not materialized and considered how they would proceed. As the meeting wound up and his colleagues stood to leave, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, the club’s chairman, made one final remark. It amounted to only two words, an ambition and an instruction. “Erling Haaland,” he said.A little more than nine months later, that objective has been achieved. On Tuesday afternoon, City confirmed it had reached an “agreement in principle” with Haaland’s current club, the German side Borussia Dortmund, to acquire the striker, one of the two most coveted forwards in world soccer this summer — the scorer of 85 goals in 88 games for Dortmund, and regarded alongside Kylian Mbappé as one of the twin standard-bearers for soccer’s first post-Messi, post-Ronaldo generation.In reality, of course, it had not taken nine months to strike any sort of agreement with Dortmund. Haaland’s contract contained a buyout clause, somewhere in the region of $75 million, that gave Dortmund little to no say over where he might play next season. All City, all anyone, had to do was to inform Dortmund of an intention to pay it. Haaland’s employer was in no position to haggle.The Manchester City chairman, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, with the club’s chief executive, Ferran Soriano.Phil Noble/ReutersFar more convoluted was the process of persuading Haaland that City was the correct next step in his meticulously planned career. Haaland, 21, might have an emotional bond to the club: His father, Alfie, played for City at the turn of the century, and though his son has no memory of his time in Manchester, he told the Times in 2019 that he has some affection for all his former teams.But, as City would have known, there has been precious little room for romance in Erling Haaland’s inexorable rise. Every stage of his journey has been mapped out with surgical — possibly cynical — precision by his twin sherpas: his longstanding representative, Mino Raiola, the divisive Dutch-Italian agent who died last month; and his father.When Haaland left Norway as a teenager, he rejected the overtures of the English and German teams pursuing him in favor of Austria’s Red Bull Salzburg, home to both a reliable production line of talent for Europe’s major leagues and the prospect of matches in the Champions League. When he left Salzburg, it was not for England but for Dortmund, a club with a track record of developing and selling players and a willingness to set a reasonable buyout clause.That meant, of course, that not only was Haaland recession-proof — $75 million is, by modern standards, pretty good value for a player who appears to have been designed and engineered to score as many goals as possible — but that, when the inevitable auction started, the bar would not be who could pay Dortmund the most, but who could put together the most attractive package for the player and his advisers.The agent Mino Raiola helped draw up Haaland’s carefully planned career path. Raiola died last month, only weeks before Haaland’s move to City was arranged.Valery Hache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTo ensure the best possible outcome, Raiola and Alfie Haaland traveled around to Europe’s superclubs, stoking interest and fanning flames. There were visits to Real Madrid and Barcelona. There were eyelashes fluttered in the vague direction of Chelsea and Manchester United. There was even, for a time, a flirtation with Bayern Munich.That, of course, was their job. It is exactly what Raiola, in particular, was paid to do. He did it with startling effectiveness: not only because current estimates suggest the deal, in total, will be worth somewhere north of $200 million, once Haaland’s salary and sundry fees to agents are taken into account, but because in the course of doing so he may have invented a whole new paradigm for how agents shape their players’ careers.Received wisdom, in soccer, has always had it that players should — to be blunt — always take the money, the big break, as soon as they can. It takes only one injury, after all, to explode the finest-laid plans; one summer’s passion may be an afterthought by the next. Clubs are fickle, and everything has an expiration date.Raiola overturned that for Haaland, preferring instead a policy of delayed gratification. He did not chase the eye-watering transfer fee — as he had done, perhaps, for another of his clients, Paul Pogba — but rather built his client’s appeal a little more slowly, gradually ensuring he was in a position not only to make the leap to one of Europe’s elite teams, but to do so in a way that favored the player (and his representatives) rather than the club that happened to own his contract at that point.City’s offer is the reward. It is not a move without its caveats: Manager Pep Guardiola has worked with some of the finest strikers of the modern era, but not always successfully. He has spent six years painstakingly fine-tuning his system at City, only to have to refit it completely to suit Haaland. Sometimes, though, soccer is a startlingly simple game. A player who scores lots of goals joining a team that creates lots of chances should really have only one outcome.Pep Guardiola has conquered England, but not Europe, with his Manchester City teams.Carl Recine/Action Images Via ReutersWhether it is the final reward, though, is a different matter. At roughly the same time City was preparing its announcement, Mbappé was busy being pictured having lunch in Madrid. His contract at Paris St.-Germain expires in a few weeks and despite an impossibly large offer to stay, he seems set to move to Real Madrid this summer. The financing of that deal will, most likely, dwarf what City has offered Haaland.This is the logical next step in the model that Raiola and the Haaland family has pioneered. It is a reflection of soccer’s financial reality. There is no price point at which City, or P.S.G., feel compelled to sell a player. That leaves only one option: running down a contract and stepping out on to the free market.That is the challenge that awaits City, somewhere down the line. It has won out, this time, by convincing Haaland — its first true, plug-and-play superstar, someone who will be thought of but never referred to as a franchise player — this was his best next step. The question, for a player whose career has been planned out so coolly, so ruthlessly, is whether it is also his last one. More

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      Erling Haaland and Manchester City Near a Deal

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      City, which is nearing its fourth Premier League title in five years, confirmed that it had reached an agreement with Dortmund to acquire the 21-year-old striker.Manchester City has won the race to sign striker Erling Haaland, confirming Tuesday that it had reached an agreement to make the 21-year-old Norwegian goal-scoring machine the latest addition to a star-studded roster that is on the cusp of winning its fourth Premier League title in five years.“Manchester City can confirm that we have reached an agreement in principle with Borussia Dortmund for the transfer of striker Erling Haaland to the Club on 1st July 2022,” the team said in a curt statement on Tuesday. The club said it only needed to resolve contract terms with Haaland to make the deal official.Haaland’s departure this summer from Dortmund, the German team where he has spent the past two and a half seasons, had been widely expected. City outbid (or outmaneuvered) potential suitors like Real Madrid and Bayern Munich for Haaland, one of the world’s most sought-after young forwards.City and its rivals had been facing a June deadline to activate the release clause in Haaland’s Dortmund contract — said to be worth as much as 75 million euros, or just under $80 million. It still needs to agree to contract terms with Haaland, whose new salary is expected to make him one of the dozen or so highest-paid players in the world.Those figures are not an issue for Manchester City, which is bankrolled by the billionaire brother of the ruler of the United Arab Emirates and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to assemble one of the world’s most-talented squads. But the numbers most likely put Haaland out of reach of other teams, including Barcelona, which is mired in a financial crisis that led it to lose Lionel Messi for free last summer, and Bayern Munich, whose sporting director said recently that adding Haaland “doesn’t make any sense” for the perennial German champions since the team already employs a world-class striker in Robert Lewandowski.Closing the deal for Haaland this week will allow him to say farewell to Dortmund’s fans in the club’s final game of the season on Saturday, at home to Hertha Berlin.City currently leads Liverpool in the Premier League title race by 3 points with three games remaining, but it surely entered the chase for Haaland with an eye on finally winning the Champions League. The trophy has been the goal of City’s leadership for more than a decade; the club finally reached the final for the first time last season, losing to its London rival Chelsea, and then returned to the semifinals this season before being eliminated stunningly by Real Madrid last week.A prolific scorer who possesses a fearsome mix of size, speed and skill, Haaland, who turns 22 in July, has been ticketed for global stardom since his teens. The son of the former Premier League midfielder Alfie Haaland, Erling Haaland made his debut for his boyhood club, Norway’s Bryne FK, as a 15-year-old, and joined Molde a year later, signed by the former Manchester United star Ole Gunner Solskjaer, who was Molde’s manager at the time.Haaland made his first splash at Molde in Norway, where he scored his first professional goals as a 16-year-old.Svein Ove Ekornesvag/EPA, via ShutterstockBy 2018, he was at Red Bull Salzburg in Austria, where he scored 17 league goals in his only season and added eight more in his first five appearances in the Champions League. Dortmund scooped him up less than a year later, and he hit the ground running by scoring a hat trick in 23 minutes in his debut.Haaland has 61 goals in 65 Bundesliga games for Dortmund, and 15 more in three Champions League campaigns.Once the deal is completed, he would join Manchester City almost 22 years to the month after his father did the same. Alfie Haaland signed with City in June 2000, only weeks before Erling was born, but retired in 2003 after several injury-marred seasons in Manchester and one infamous foul at the hands of Manchester United’s Roy Keane.Rory Smith contributed reporting. More

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      How Much Does a Top Club's Manager Matter?

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      One set of researchers estimated a manager is responsible for only eight percent of a team’s results. But eight percent, when you think about it, is a lot.That first day, for an incoming manager at a new club, must be overwhelming. There is an entire squad of players to meet, to get to know, to win over. There is a staff, nervous of your intentions and fearful of what the future may hold, to convince and, hopefully, to command.There are training schedules to draw up and tactics to implement and a great pile of footage to watch, to try and work out where it went wrong — because it has, more often than not, gone wrong, and that is why you have a job — and how it might be put right. There are political currents to detect, alliances to forge, enmities to soothe. And there is no time, because there is a game looming on the horizon, a first impression to make.And yet, before all of that, there is one thing that seems to consume all new managers, young and old, fresh and wizened, hopeful and worldly-wise, one question that must be addressed before anything else can happen, one decision that will set the tone for your reign: Where do you stand, exactly, vis-à-vis ketchup?Managers seem to spend more time than might be expected establishing their precise policy on condiments. Within a few days of arriving at Aston Villa, Steven Gerrard had banned them. So, too, had Antonio Conte, when he joined Tottenham.Of course, as much as anything else, this is a power play. It is a way of establishing dominance over every aspect of the players’ lives, casting yourself as an authority figure, making plain that fitness is your absolute priority. (Most managers, when they take a new job, are struck by how terribly out-of-shape the squad of lean, musclebound elite athletes suddenly at their disposal seems to be.)Steven Gerrard banned condiments at Aston Villa. Enthusiasm is still approved.John Sibley/Action Images Via ReutersThere is an alternative route, though: The absence of condiments can be diagnosed as a problem just as much as their presence. In cases where a manager is replacing an anti-ketchup extremist, some will consider reinstating them as an olive branch — well, a tapenade — to the squad, a way of signaling that the brutal, flavorless days of the previous regime are over, and that a more collaborative, trusting approach is at hand.The significance of all of this is, of course, overplayed. Journalists focus on minor details like whether a manager has banned ketchup because — to offer the kindest interpretation — it serves as an illustrative, immediately comprehensible shorthand for what sort of coach they intend to be, in a way that detailing exactly what sort of running drills they are doing does not.The news media’s apparently insatiable obsession with condiments does, though, hint at a greater truth, one that generally goes unspoken, one that flirts with breaking the fourth wall: that managers, as a rule, do not matter as much as we think they do. For the most part, they are tinkering around the edges, their decisions and their choices and their approaches largely irrelevant to how their tenures will play out, their power limited not to their own destiny but to what players can have with their main courses.Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was given plenty of time to find a path forward at Manchester United. But last week, it ran out.Carl Recine/Action Images Via ReutersThat, certainly, is what almost every academic study on the influence of soccer managers has concluded. Some have entered popular discourse: the research in “Soccernomics” that estimated that a manager is responsible for only 8 percent of a team’s results; the work in “The Numbers Game” that placed the figure at around double that.Some have remained adrift in academia — one, in 2013, found that interim managers tended to have more direct impact on results than permanent ones — but reached the same broad conclusion.Only the true greats, people like Alex Ferguson and Arsène Wenger, had a tangible, discernible impact. Everyone else was at the mercy of factors not entirely within their control: a club’s financial potency, the quality of player on the books, the strength of their opponents. It is only necessary to glance at Paris St.-Germain to know that, even with a high-caliber manager and a high-quality squad, sometimes the mix is not right; something has to spark, something between chemistry and alchemy, to make things work.That conclusion, though, is not quite as straightforward as it appears. Eight percent, to use the lowest available estimate, may not sound like a lot, but in the context of elite soccer, in particular, it is a huge and unwieldy variable.This is a sport, after all, of fine margins: a brief loss of concentration, a slight tactical distinction, a single decision made instinctively by a brilliant player can all decide a game. That the identity of a single staff member can be directly responsible for almost a tenth of the outcome is proof not of a manager’s irrelevance, but of the opposite.Manchester United has problems, but star power, talent and budget are not among them.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockManchester United — yes, them again — is a case in point. United has one of the most expensive, richly remunerated squads in soccer history. This is supposed to be the great corollary with performance: How much you pay your players is, in theory, the best gauge for where they will help you finish in the league.But, at the point that Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was fired, United was marooned in seventh place in the Premier League. It had been humiliated, in quick succession, by Liverpool and Manchester City and Watford. There was little or no cohesion in defense, no identifiable plan in attack, no real sense that anyone knew what they were supposed to be doing at all.Not all of that is the manager’s fault, of course: United’s haphazard recruitment policy and its outdated, flawed structure were the primary culprits. But that the problems should have been so visible, so pronounced under Solskjaer, a coach so obviously out of his depth, serve as a potent reminder that, no matter how good your players, they are not enough on their own.They need to be organized effectively, too: not only to compete with City and Liverpool, two of the four best teams on the planet, but to survive against a straggler like Watford. In a sport of fine margins, after all, it does not take much to shift the balance, and to shift it drastically. A merely good manager may look like they do not have much of an impact. When one does not meet even that bar, the effect, as we have seen, is obvious, whatever they do with the ketchup.When the Reward Comes After the SeasonErling Haaland and Dortmund are out of the Champions League. He may be back in it before his old club is.Ina Fassbender/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere are, at least, mitigating circumstances. Borussia Dortmund went into its game against Sporting Lisbon in the Champions League on Wednesday without a raft of first-choice players: no Mats Hummels, no Giovanni Reyna, no Raphael Guerreiro and, of course, no Erling Haaland. Marco Rose, the coach, had resources so diminished that he could not even fill his quota of substitutes.Still, that Dortmund’s involvement in the Champions League should be over not only before spring, but before December, should be regarded as something of a failure. Not least because — in Ajax, Sporting and Besiktas, the Turkish champion — Dortmund could hardly bemoan the cruel vicissitudes of a tough group-stage draw.That even that pool proved too much, though, hints that balance has been lost at Dortmund. For more than a decade, the club has been held up as a paradigm of how to thrive in soccer’s new world: Dortmund’s success has been built, essentially, on turning itself into a springboard for the world’s brightest young talents, a way-station on the road to greatness.That praise was not misplaced. Though there has been no Bundesliga title at Dortmund since 2012, the club has remained competitive — by and large — while regularly selling off or being divested of soccer’s next generation: Robert Lewandowski and Christian Pulisic and, most recently, Jadon Sancho.There is a sense, though, of ever-diminishing returns. While the stars keep forming — Haaland will go next summer, and probably Jude Bellingham the year after that — the results are dwindling.The suspicion is that Dortmund’s priorities have changed: that selling players is no longer a byproduct of composing a young team capable of competing, but that competing is now a happy, occasional consequence of composing a young team that can be sold. Not reaching the knockout rounds of the Champions League is a failure, of course. But that is not the trophy Dortmund was hoping to win this year. Its aim, instead, is to make sure that Haaland can be sold at a vast profit in the summer. That remains on course. Whether that is the right course, though, is a different matter.The Super League Will Come AgainIt is, in a way, the punishment they deserve. Six months ago, the architects of the European Super League had grand, hubristic visions of breaking free from the unwanted control of faceless, supranational bureaucracies. Now, their revolutionary idea only exists — so much as it exists at all — in the legalistic quagmire of the European Parliament.We will not dally on the details of this, because they are, by their very nature, intensely boring: This week, the European Union’s assembly passed a resolution opposing “breakaway leagues,” and pledging to uphold what it described as the “European model for sport.” The motion was nonbinding, so has no material consequence, but it represented yet another setback for the cabal of clubs who refuse to let the subject rest.Before the various uneasy allies who came together to suppress the revolt celebrate too loudly, though, it is worth considering the situation — as things stand — in the Champions League. All four English teams have made it safely through despite, in three cases, barely breaking a sweat, and in one, that of Manchester United, not being very good.Manchester City and its Premier League rivals are waltzing through the Champions League again.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat contrasts starkly with the reality of life at their traditional, continental counterweights. Juventus has made it through, but was humiliated by Chelsea. Both Atlético Madrid and Barcelona may miss the knockouts. Germany and Spain may have only one representative each in the last 16.The dynamics here are clear: England has emerged unscathed from the pandemic — as witnessed by the multibillion-dollar broadcast deal the Premier League signed with NBC last week — while most of Europe’s major leagues have not. A handful of teams, like Bayern Munich and Paris St.-Germain, might not have lost ground, but nor have they gained it. For most, though, the gap that was already opening between England and everyone else has suddenly become a chasm.There have already been two all-English Champions League finals in the last three years. The economic currents swirling around the game make it very likely there will be more, many more, in the near future.That is not, to be clear, healthy for soccer as a whole. It is obviously not healthy for Europe’s major powers. More and more may come to recognize that in seasons to come. The idea of a Super League — one excluding the English teams — may not remain tangled in the European Parliament for long.CorrespondenceLluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAn excellent alternative viewpoint on last week’s newsletter from William Ireland, who from memory may, in fact, be a Bill.“The inability of Barcelona and Real Madrid to treat the Premier League as a feeder league is a problem for the Premier League, too,” he wrote. “The reality is that moving players before they grow stale and distracted has been great for the English teams. You wonder how much better their teams could be if some of their older players had been plucked away by the Liga duopoly. That problem is likely to get worse as teams keep acquiring more players and do not have any easy way to lose any from their current roster.”This is, I would agree, an issue that Premier League clubs are going to have to think about more and more. There is no longer a viable outlet for the players they would like to move on, either to cash in when their value is highest or their decline imminent, or because a newer, shinier trinket has captured their attention. Part of me wonders if it is a natural part of the cycle: the same phenomenon that has undermined Barcelona, say, but writ large across a league.George Gorecki, meanwhile, contests the idea that Africa should have more than five spots at a World Cup. “The African countries are among the least impressive, when it comes to their performances at the finals,” he wrote.“In every World Cup from 1990 to 2010, only one African team reached the knockout stage. In 2014, there were two, while in 2018, there were none. An African team has reached the quarterfinals only three times.” If anything, he suggested, this means “Africa should probably relinquish some of their places.”I would quibble with that. For one: Africa might send more teams to the knockout rounds if it had more teams in the tournament. Two out of five reaching the last 16 in 2014 is pretty good going, isn’t it?Second: African qualifying is substantially more arbitrary than it really ought to be. The final round of home-and-away playoffs, in particular, means there tends to be at least one, if not two, of the continent’s best sides left behind. I would agree, though, that Africa’s performances have not improved as it looked as if they might in the 1990s. But at least part of the responsibility for that, to me, is structural. More

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      Erling Haaland and Norway Miss the World Cup

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      Norway’s failure to qualify for Qatar means Erling Haaland will have to watch from home. Norway has taken it in stride.Somewhere, in a darkened room, Erling Haaland was watching. Injury meant he would not be able to take the field for Norway’s most significant match in 20 years. The Netherlands’ return to partial lockdown last weekend meant, with the game played behind closed doors, he would not even be able to support his national team from the stands.Instead, Haaland had to follow from afar, powerless to help. Two minutes into the game, he posted an image of the game’s television broadcast on Instagram, accompanied by a Norwegian flag and the heart emoji. There was, then, still a scintilla of hope. Norway needed to beat the Netherlands, in Rotterdam, to have a chance of qualifying automatically for its first World Cup since 1998, and its first major tournament since 2000.If Turkey — the other contender in the group — had lost its final game, against Montenegro, then a tie would have been enough to keep Norway alive, too, at least for the time being: A second-place finish would have earned the Norwegians a slot in the playoffs for Europe’s three final berths in Qatar. Those games will be played in March. Haaland would have been fit by then, and a fit Haaland would have changed everything.It will not matter now. Turkey won, after falling behind to an early goal in Podgorica, leaving Norway no choice but to gamble, to win, to have any hope. Instead, its team seemed to freeze, falling to a limp, toothless 2-0 defeat. “They only had half a chance,” as Louis van Gaal, the Dutch coach, put it.Norway’s path to the 2022 World Cup ended with a loss to the Netherlands on Tuesday.John Thys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat was no surprise, given the circumstances. “They have a great team spirit,” Virgil van Dijk, the Netherlands captain, said of Norway. “They never give up.” But, he said, “they have a fantastic striker, who they naturally missed.” That fantastic striker had been condemned to watching from home. He did not post again. His feed, like his room, had gone dark.That Haaland will not be present in Qatar next year is, from a neutral perspective, a source of regret. He is already one of the world’s most devastating strikers, the scorer of 70 goals in 69 games since joining Borussia Dortmund in January 2020, including 13 in only 10 appearances this season before sustaining a hip injury — expected to sideline him until next year — in October.Together with Kylian Mbappé, the 21-year-old Haaland is already seen as the standard-bearer for soccer’s first post-Lionel-Messi-and-Cristiano-Ronaldo generation. By the time the World Cup rolls around next November, he may be one of the most expensive players on the planet, too.After failing to sign Harry Kane last summer, Manchester City’s chief executive, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, instructed the club’s recruitment department to make acquiring Haaland — whose father, Alfie, played for City in its previous incarnation as a lovable, hapless underdog — its primary focus. Extracting him from Dortmund will cost somewhere north of $150 million.That soccer’s quadrennial showpiece will take place without a player of that skill, that value, dulls its luster just a little. Within Norway, though, the country’s absence from Qatar has been greeted with circumspection, rather than a sense of crisis.“We have done well to have a chance at all,” Erik Thorsvedt, a former national team goalkeeper who now works as a television analyst, said before Norway’s final two qualifiers: a dispiriting goalless draw with Latvia, which left the team with no margin for error, and Tuesday’s defeat against the Netherlands.“Our first ‘home’ game was not at home at all: We had to play Turkey in Spain because of Covid restrictions in Norway, and we lost. Given the circumstances, given the draw, given where we were seeded, that we are in contention even to make the playoffs is a success.”That it now possesses one of the most coveted players in the world did not mean Norway started qualification for Qatar with any great expectations; indeed, many in the country were uneasy at the prospect of legitimizing a tournament as swaddled in controversy by playing in it.Norway’s players wore shirts protesting Qatar’s human rights record before a World Cup qualifier in Spain in March.Jorge Guerrero/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBesides, Norway does not feel it has any deep-seated right to make it as far as the finals. Other than that brief, bright window of hope in 1998 and 2000, and a group-stage exit in the United States in 1994, it has only ever qualified for one other major tournament: the 1938 World Cup, where it played one game, lost it and promptly went home.It is the sort of record that prompted Karl Ove Knausgaard, the country’s celebrated novelist and autobiographer, to describe the team’s history as a series of games “in rainy Eastern Europe that they lost.”“The matches did not last an hour and a half,” he wrote. “They played up to five, six hours at a time, almost like in cricket.”The Norway that made it to France in 1998 and the Netherlands and Belgium two years later, for the European Championship, was the exception, not the rule. When the success faded, and mediocrity set in, Knausgaard found it comforting. “It was as if childhood came back, the world resumed its usual form,” he wrote. “Reassurance lay around me like a gray cardigan and a pair of gray felt slippers.”That downturn was linked, no doubt, to the diminishing numbers of Norwegians playing in elite European leagues, particularly the Premier League. For much of the 1990s, most English teams had some sort of Norwegian influence: 23 players from Norway were registered to top-flight English clubs in 1997, forming the core of the squad that would play in the World Cup at the end of that season.By 2014, that group was down to one: Brede Hangeland was the lone Norwegian representative in the Premier League. (“The Norwegian players in the big international clubs disappeared,” Knausgaard wrote. “Again, it became great to be a professional in Twente or Heerenveen or Nottingham or Fulham, and for an old man like me, it felt safe.”) England had always been Norway’s primary export market; now, English clubs were habitually shopping in France, Spain, Argentina and Brazil, and Norway suffered.That has, slowly, started to change, and Norway’s horizons have broadened as a result. Haaland is not the sole representative of the country’s new generation: He has been joined by Martin Odegaard, the Arsenal playmaker; Sander Berge, a well-regarded midfielder at Sheffield United; and Alexander Sorloth, a towering forward at Real Sociedad, the Spanish league leader.The depth of resources gives this campaign an air not of a missed opportunity, but a harbinger of a brighter future. “I am absolutely sure we will succeed in Germany 2024 if we continue with what we have started,” Stale Solbakken, the Norway coach, said on national television on Tuesday, referring to the next edition of the European Championship.There are plenty who read it the same way. “I’m sure that we will qualify for tournaments in the future,” said Henning Berg, the former Manchester United defender who formed part of Norway’s squads for both the 1998 World Cup and Euro 2000. “If it was just Haaland, then we would have a problem. We have seen with other countries that one top-class player, on their own, is not enough. But it is not just him.”This time, Haaland could do nothing but watch as Norway fell at the final hurdle, unable to cope with his absence. He, and the rest of his teammates, the rest of his country, will have to do the same in almost exactly a year, as the World Cup kicks off without one of the sport’s central figures. It feels, though, as if the exile is ending. Norway is confident that its time is coming again. Sooner or later, Haaland will lead his country out of the darkness, and into the light. More

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      The Moral Case for Buying Erling Haaland

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      Manchester City or another wealthy club might need to sign Erling Haaland, if only to save soccer from financial calamity.As the danger bubbled to the surface, there was an audible intake of breath among Manchester City’s substitutes. Once it had passed, a few seconds later, as they exchanged glances — of admiration, of relief — came a little murmur of appreciation. In the silence of the stadium, you could hear the sounds of game recognizing game.The chance had come out of nothing, really. Mahmoud Dahoud, the Borussia Dortmund midfielder, had worked himself a scintilla of space in the middle of the field and slipped a ball into the path of Erling Haaland.It had led to nothing, too. Haaland’s shot was saved by Éderson, the Manchester City goalkeeper. Dortmund would lose the game, thanks to a late goal from Phil Foden. A week later, after another defeat, it was out of the Champions League altogether. City would have its place in the semifinals.In that moment, though, it was not the outcome that mattered, but the process. Haaland is too tall to be that quick, and yet here was visible proof to the contrary, his sudden, brutal acceleration a storm gathering out of a clear blue sky. City defender Ruben Días has, for most of the season, been imperious and intimidating, and yet as he ran, Haaland shrugged him aside like a rag doll. It all left the impression that the Norwegian is less a promising young striker and more the physical manifestation of some ancient prophecy.The previous day, Pep Guardiola, Manchester City’s manager, had poured cold water on rumbling speculation that Haaland’s appearance at the Etihad Stadium was something of an audition. Manchester City, Guardiola said, did not have the money to meet Dortmund’s $180 million asking price for its crown jewel.Pep Guardiola already has more stars than starting spots.Wolfgang Rattay/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThough it required at least some willing suspension of disbelief, it would have suited City’s rivals to believe Guardiola. His record of incorporating archetypal strikers into his teams is, it is fair to say, mixed: Robert Lewandowski fit his Bayern Munich side perfectly, but neither Samuel Eto’o nor Zlatan Ibrahimovic quite suited the masterpiece he built at Barcelona.His attitude to Sergio Agüero, arguably City’s finest-ever player, has been a little uncertain over the last five years, too. It is perhaps relevant that Agüero, who turns 33 in June, will leave the Etihad when his contract expires this summer, after a decade of prolific service, despite initially expressing an interest in extending his stay as recently as the start of this season. Guardiola would have to tweak his approach, at least a little, to suit Haaland.But still: It would be entirely understandable for those teams tasked with keeping pace with City to prefer not to have to find out if he could make it work. In theory, at least, the combination of a team as good as City — currently on course for an unprecedented domestic and European quadruple — and a striker as devastating as Haaland would make the club close to unstoppable for years to come.It is not, though, quite that simple. There are countless reasons for City’s rivals and peers to hope the club does not sign Haaland, but there is one counterargument sufficiently compelling to render all of them moot. Manchester City might need to sign Erling Haaland to save soccer from financial calamity.As the season reaches its climax — down to the final four in the Champions League and Europa League, Manchester City, Bayern Munich, Inter Milan, Ajax and Sporting Lisbon all brushing their fingertips against championship trophies — it is possible to believe that soccer has successfully played through the pandemic. The ball, the show, the money from broadcast deals: It has all kept on rolling, stanching the losses and limiting the damage.In reality, it has only cleared the first hurdle; the economic impact of the pandemic has yet to bare its teeth. Clubs’ accounts across Europe are already littered with multimillion dollar losses. More than a year of empty stadiums has left teams large and small with a shortfall in revenues that they cannot simply, or quickly, make up.If a rich club meets Dortmund’s price for Erling Haaland, the money will trickle down through the soccer economy.Ina Fassbender/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesEven for those lucky few cosseted by wealthy benefactors or cushioned by European prize money or covered by the Premier League’s gargantuan television deals, money is scarce; scarcer than it used to be, anyway. That much was evident in January, as transfer spending dropped precipitously. Teams are tightening their belts and hoping to get through.As much as it is easy to rail against soccer’s transfer market — the obscenity of the sums involved, the conspicuous consumption, the pervasive dogma that problems are solved by acquisition, rather than improvement, the unease at the idea of players reduced to assets to be traded by institutions — that is a problem, and potentially an existential one.Not for those, perhaps, at the top of the tree, the ones who might have to make do with the squads stuffed full of internationals already at their disposal for a year or two, but for everyone beneath them.The transfer market is, for all but a handful of teams, a crucial conduit for wealth: a “solidarity mechanism,” as Vincent Mannaert, the chief executive of Club Bruges, the Belgian champion, put it last year. It is how the money at the top flows down, from the Premier League and the super-clubs on through Europe’s minor leagues and out into the world.The fear stalking executives and owners is that the fallout from the pandemic will disrupt that mechanism. In France, where the losses from soccer’s hiatus a year ago have been compounded by the league’s decision to abandon last season and the collapse of a television deal, clubs would ordinarily sell players to balance their books.The problem, this time around, is that they are not sure who they will sell them to: Their usual buyers in Spain, Germany and Italy are all suffering, too. England, perhaps, remains a viable market, but greater supply than demand will serve to depress prices; so, too, the fact that French clubs are now perceived as distressed sellers.To some, that is just the start of it. Norman Capuozzo, one of the leading agents in South America, believes clubs at all levels will prioritize shedding wages. “Below the elite, there will be a lot of players released, a lot of free transfers, a lot of loans,” he said. The market, in other words, will be flooded to the point of saturation by castoffs and bargains.The only thing that can change all of that is an injection of cash: enough to crank the market mechanism back into gear, enough to enable teams not to cut players from their squads, enough to help teams spend a little, enough to keep the wheels turning and the money flowing, from the top on down.The millions spent by City and P.S.G. and Real Madrid eventually find their way to places like Wolfsburg and Ajax and Club Bruges, above.Johanna Geron/ReutersIt is here that Manchester City comes in: a club that felt confident enough in the middle of a pandemic to establish the biggest salary bill in English soccer history. There are alternatives, of course: Paris St.-Germain, maybe, which set out to inflate the transfer market beyond everyone else’s reach when it signed Neymar in 2017; or Chelsea, the modern game’s defining Gatsby, happy to spend $250 million last summer, only a few months after soccer had been on the brink of implosion; and Manchester United, a commercial juggernaut so powerful it emptied its stadium and posted a profit.None of that should be read as a criticism. It is merely as an assertion that these teams have been happy to shape the transfer market to further their own success, as is their inalienable right, overpaying on both fees and wages when it suited them, with the side effect/added benefit of driving up prices for everyone else.For once, though, there is cause even for those teams who believe themselves to have suffered from the rise of the superclubs to be thankful for their presence. The money that City — or P.S.G. or Chelsea or Manchester United — might give Dortmund for Haaland would, after all, travel a long way.Much of it would not rest at Dortmund. Perhaps some of it would trickle down through the Bundesliga: to Augsburg for Felix Uduokhai and Wolfsburg for Maxence Lacroix and Borussia Monchengladbach for Florian Neuhaus.From there, on it would go: from Wolfsburg and Mönchengladbach to teams in France, and from those French sides to Belgium, and from Belgium out to Scandinavia and Africa and Colombia, the transfer market suddenly liquid after a year of heavy, unmoving solidity, teams willing to pay fees and able to pay wages.It should not be especially controversial to suggest that the owners of Manchester City, P.S.G. and Chelsea are not involved with soccer exclusively because of their love of the game. They did not necessarily buy into the sport because of their desire to compete, either, or even just to make money (as is the case at Liverpool and Manchester United, for example).They all bought into soccer because of what soccer can do for them. Perhaps, then, this summer is a chance for payback, for them to do something for soccer. It should not, really, be too much to ask. All they have to do is what has come so easily to them in years past: spend money and sign players.The Final FourIt should not, perhaps, be much of a surprise that three of the teams with the capacity to buy Erling Haaland are also in the Champions League semifinals: City, Chelsea and P.S.G. were, after all, in an unusually strong position to ride out the financial impact of the pandemic, and to mitigate the sporting consequences.There will be time, in a couple of weeks, to assess the geopolitical consequences of the two semifinals — and whether, as the memes have had it, we are in the unusual position of seeing Real Madrid as the good guys — but, for now, let us focus on how they might play out on the field.Will Olivier Giroud, Christian Pulisic and Chelsea play a cautious and dour game against Real Madrid?Julio Munoz/EPA, via ShutterstockThe immediate reaction is to assume that one semifinal will be cautious and dour, and the other crackling with light. Chelsea has been miserly since Thomas Tuchel took over, after all; Real Madrid held off Liverpool at Anfield on Wednesday night with a performance of obdurate discipline. All of the brio and the verve will, presumably, come from the meeting of P.S.G. and Manchester City.That interpretation feels a little off, though. Real defended astutely against Liverpool — it had a commanding lead to protect — but it still gave up four or five gilt-edged, clear-cut chances; even with Sergio Ramos and Raphael Varane restored to the defense, relying on Chelsea’s finishing being as bad as Liverpool’s is a recipe for disaster. (Nobody’s finishing, at this point, is worse than Liverpool’s.)P.S.G., meanwhile, thrilled in attack against Bayern Munich, but might easily have conceded seven in the first leg alone. It remains a team of neon moments, less coherent and complete than Manchester City, but it will take encouragement from the fact that City’s form has dipped just a little in the last few weeks: not by much, but enough to give Neymar and Kylian Mbappé reason to believe.The Steph Curry MomentLong-range shots, like this one by Ronaldo, have fallen out of favor.Francisco Seco/Associated PressAt last, long-awaited vindication. I wrote in this column earlier this year that it felt as though the idea of shooting from range was dying out in soccer, dismissed by the sport’s data-dominated thinking as an outdated inefficiency. This week, a paper presented by researchers at the Belgian university KU Leuven to the M.I.T. Sloan Sports Analytics Conference has borne that out.Long shots have, they found, decreased over the last six years (the first season considered, 2013-14, dovetails with the rise of data in soccer pretty neatly). There are now 2.2 fewer shots from range in any given game; the number of shots from inside the penalty area, by contrast, has increased.That is only part of the vindication, though. The academics did not conclude that this was a great leap forward, proof of the triumph of science over hope, but wondered if perhaps the trend had gone too far. “The potential payoff of not shooting is that an even better shot may arise down the line,” the paper said. Using artificial intelligence, though, they concluded that “there is no guarantee of this happening.”Instead, the lead researcher, Maaike van Roy, said that there were “specific zones” where teams should be shooting rather than recycling possession; having a go, to use the technical term, may be no more or less of a gamble than working the ball out wide and flinging (again, apologies for the jargon) a cross in.Fans have known this for generations. After all, it does not take Rinus Michels to work out that there is a value in shooting that extends beyond the likelihood of scoring from the effort itself: There may be a rebound, or you may win a corner, or the shot might hit a beach ball. You do not need to be Arrigo Sacchi to understand that the mere possibility that you might shoot forces defenders to break their lines to close you down.But this is not a defeat for analytics; it is not proof that the reliance on data has gone too far. The relationship between science and tradition does not need to be inherently antagonistic. Instead, it is best understood as a case of the advancements in analytics helping to refine the traditional reading of the game.Yes, sometimes it is worth shooting from range, but only from certain areas, in certain situations and at certain times. You and I might have ideas about when those circumstances might arise, but it is only through the use of data that we can be sure that they are right. Analytics is there to deepen our understanding of the game, not to counteract it.CorrespondenceAs was to be expected, the book recommendations have flooded in over the last few days. “The Miracle of Castel Di Sangro,” “The Glory Game,” “How Football Explains the World” and “Soccernomics” all received multiple recommendations, all of which I endorse.Several of you nominated Fever Pitch, too, which I’m sure is very good; its influence, certainly, makes it worth your time. I can’t personally vouch for it, though: I have, appallingly, never read it. Or seen the film. Generally, I try to avoid reliving unpleasant childhood memories, and the one that centers on Michael Thomas’s most noteworthy contribution to English soccer history is at the very top of that particular list.Roland Mascarenhas, meanwhile, asked if the reader who started this conversation — Alexander Da Silva — would be willing to consider expanding the book group beyond whichever circle of friends he was presumably thinking about inviting. If others wish to join, I’m happy to put it to Alexander and see if you meet his no doubt exacting criteria.(This is risky, isn’t it? It’s the sort of thing that ends with me, Alexander and Roland in front of a special committee of the Senate, answering questions about how we’re using people’s data and whether we have accidentally become a vector for the collapse of democracy. And all because Roland didn’t just buy my book like he should have done.)Rachel Block asked if last week’s column dispensed too easily with the idea that Chelsea might beat Real Madrid in a Champions League semifinal. Possibly, though not intentionally: it was merely an attempt to say that it’s hardly a stretch to believe that Real could knock Chelsea out. Either way, hopefully that has been addressed this week. More

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      Real Madrid vs. Barcelona: Too Big to Fall

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      The Clásico has lost some of its luster as a season-defining day, but while its profile has fallen, its importance has not.It does not require a great leap of the imagination to envision the final few weeks of the season playing out like this:Atlético Madrid, shredded by nerves and running on fumes, surrenders its place at the summit of La Liga. Barcelona, restored and unbeaten since the turn of the year, supplants Diego Simeone’s team, reclaiming its crown.At the same time, Real Madrid, the familiar scent of European glory in its nostrils, breezes past Liverpool and edges Chelsea to win a place in the Champions League final. Real Madrid would, by most measures, be the underdog in Istanbul. Manchester City and Bayern Munich, certainly, are more coherent, more complete teams. Even Paris St.-Germain, its mission for revenge fueled by the brilliance of Kylian Mbappé, has more star power, more forward momentum, as it proved so thrillingly on Wednesday night in Munich.But it is Real Madrid, and it is the Champions League, and these things do not necessarily conform to logic. It and Barcelona, the twin, repelling poles of the Clásico, each may be no more than seven weeks from glory. Both have spent much of this campaign in what looked like free fall. It is hardly inconceivable that, in a few weeks, they will have come to rest, still at the pinnacle.That does not mean that the perception was an illusion. Barcelona’s financial strife is alarmingly real, even after the election of a new president. Its salary commitments are still greater than those of any other team. Its squad is still aging. It has still frittered away hundreds of millions of dollars in the transfer market. It has still squandered its legacy, still alienated the greatest star in its history, still lost sight of itself.Real Madrid’s situation is not quite as perilous, but here, too, are the telltale signs of institutional complacency and endemic drift. Its team is starting to creak with age. Its policy of paying premium fees for prodigious young talents — often with only a smattering of senior games under their belts — has not yet yielded the fruit the club imagined.Vinicius Jr. of Real Madrid, which is chasing a record 14th Champions League title.Juanjo Martin/EPA, via ShutterstockIts payroll, too, is littered with unwanted high-earners; Real Madrid’s finances have been stretched by the revamp of the Santiago Bernabéu that has forced it to play home games at its training facility for a year; its belief that it can sign both Erling Haaland and Mbappé over the next two summers seems fanciful at best and faintly hubristic at worst. Lulled by glamour and success, Real Madrid has allowed itself to be transformed into the personal fief of its president, Florentino Pérez.All of those issues were not imagined by a muckraking, scurrilous news media; they are not proof of some sweeping anti-Barcelona and yet somehow also anti-Madrid conspiracy. They are real, and they all manifest on Saturday, when the clubs will meet on the outskirts of the Spanish capital for the second Clásico of the season.When, 50 years from now, sports historians come to look back on European soccer’s imperial phase, examining how it became what David Goldblatt has described as the single greatest cultural phenomenon of the modern era, they could do worse than to start with those 18 days in 2011 when Real and Barcelona played one another four times.Even from the relatively shallow vantage point of 2021, those two and a half weeks have the air of a seed and a flower, a dawn and a dusk and the midday sun. It was, in the first decade of the 21st century, what soccer had been building toward. It would be what soccer, in the second decade of the 21st century, would measure everything against.Juan Medina/ReutersFelix Ordonez/ReutersThe War of 2011: Guardiola and Mourinho, Messi and Xabi Alonso and polite disagreements.Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Clásico was not only the meeting of soccer’s two great powers or the world’s two best teams. It was also the clash of its two brightest stars, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, the supernova game. It was a battle of wills and a battle of minds: José Mourinho against Pep Guardiola, defense against attack, destruction against creation, darkness against light.These were days when soccer held its breath.It is somehow fitting, then, a decade later, that the most materially impactful Clásico of the last few years will take place on Saturday night in the Éstadio Alfredo Di Stéfano, rather than the Bernabéu. It is a reduced circumstance for a diminished game.The stakes are high. The winner will take prime position to dislodge Atlético Madrid from the summit of La Liga. The loser, as is the case whenever these two meet, will suddenly be flirting with crisis. It is, without question, the biggest game of the weekend. It is not, though, the centerpiece of the European season as once it was, the fixture that makes the world stand still.In part, that is because of the decline of the teams themselves. Barcelona and Real Madrid are no longer the two best teams on the planet. That honor, currently, falls somewhere between Manchester and Munich. It would be possible to build an argument that neither Spanish giant is, at this moment, in the top five.Even in a pandemic, even in a closed stadium, the world will be watching.Nacho Doce/ReutersThere is still Messi, of course, but there is no Ronaldo, no Xavi, no Andrés Iniesta, no Xabi Alonso. Both teams are in the throes of (reluctant) generational change, works in various stages of progress. The quality — aesthetic and technical — will not be as high as it was on Wednesday night, when P.S.G. stormed the Allianz Arena.But that is also because of the broader decline of La Liga. Spain has long since vacated its position of primacy. France is the world champion, and the world’s most prodigious producer of players. Germany — and, to some extent, the city of Leeds — is the wellspring of soccer’s ideas. England is home to its finest league. Spain, as a whole, has lost its place at the vanguard.And yet, for all that, it is not difficult to envision the season ending with celebrations on Las Ramblas and at the Plaza de Cibeles, with Barcelona anointed kings of Spain and Real Madrid restored to its traditional status as Rey de Copas.That such a denouement is possible is testament, first, to our tendency to assume that decline — soccer as a whole, in fact — runs in straight lines, to reverse-engineer an explanation for every event. If Barcelona wins a championship, rumors of its demise must have been greatly exaggerated. If Real Madrid wins the Champions League, its methods must work.Luka Modric and Real Madrid won the season’s first Clásico, 3-1, in October.Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt does not always, if ever, work like that. Sometimes things happen. Sometimes stars align. Not everything has a deeper meaning, and not every success illustrates some broader truth. Sometimes Liverpool wins the Champions League with Djimi Traoré at left back. Sometimes Croatia gets a golden generation. Had Real Madrid been paired with Manchester City, rather than Liverpool, in the Champions League quarterfinals this week, its almost mystical relationship with the European Cup would not seem quite so potent.But that Barcelona and Real Madrid can be so close to the summit after a season spent at the depths is also a reminder that how far, and how fast, you fall is only one part of the equation. The other is where you are coming from.Between them, Barcelona and Madrid account for seven of the last 14 Champions League titles. They were soccer’s animating force for more than a decade. Each, at different times in that period, reached heights that few teams have reached. Both remain fabulously wealthy, in terms of talent and in terms of revenue. Both retain many of the players who helped them to touch the sky. Their talent may have waned, but it has not evaporated.Eras do not end overnight. History does not run in a straight line. The Clásico of 2021 will be a shadow of the Clásicos of 2011. That Real Madrid and Barcelona have fallen is not in question. But it should be no surprise that there might yet be glory awaiting one, or both of them. They did, after all, have quite a long way to fall.Take a Stand, but Lose 3 PointsValencia supported Mouctar Diakhaby after he said he was racially abused, and then played on.Roman Rios/EPA, via ShutterstockIt is hard to identify the most dispiriting part of the episode last weekend in which Valencia’s Mouctar Diakhaby reported that he was racially abused by the Cádiz defender Juan Cala. Ordinarily, there would be a clear answer: that it happened at all. This time, though, there is another option: that it is hard to identify whether that was, in fact, the most dispiriting part.First of all, there is the fact that it was not the only episode of racist abuse of a soccer player that weekend: several more players, as always happens, were racially abused online. Then there is the fact that, even if Cala is telling the truth in his stringent denials of the accusation, if there has just been some sort of misunderstanding, we are still in a position in which it is easy to believe a soccer player might have been racially abused by an opponent, on the field, in 2021.And finally, there was the sight of Valencia — having initially walked off the field in solidarity with Diakhaby — returning to play out the game, without the victim, but against the accused perpetrator. Cala had asked to play on, and did so. Diakhaby, on the other hand, was understandably not in the right mind to continue.His club played on, it revealed later, because it had been warned — by some unidentified third party — that it would be risking a points deduction if it did not return to the field. If this is true, it does not reflect especially well on Valencia: How many points, exactly, is your player’s dignity worth?More important, the decision to continue (and to threaten to punish a team that will not) reflects appallingly on soccer’s antiracism posturing. All the slogans and all the campaigns in the world are worth nothing if, when presented with an accusation of racist abuse on the field, the immediate reaction is to try to stifle protest, to protect the product at all costs.As usual, this is an area in which soccer’s authorities — more than the players, certainly, and to an extent the clubs — are complicit. These decisions should not be ad hoc, rested on the shoulders of the individual who has endured abuse. If a player believes he has been racially abused, the referee should be under instructions to call off the game. There should be no threat of punishment, no gray area. It is for the sport as a whole to make a stand, on behalf of those who play it.Sign of the TimesIt’s spelled Haaland, with three As.Phil Noble/ReutersIn hindsight, maybe it was the context, not the act itself, that caused such consternation. The officials in Manchester City’s 2-1 win over Borussia Dortmund on Tuesday did not, it is fair to say, have a great evening: The decision to rule out Jude Bellingham’s goal — and, more to the point, to do so before the video assistant referee was able to contribute — did not exactly scream competence, after all.Still, the outrage that followed those fleeting glimpses of the assistant referee, Octavian Sobre, asking Erling Haaland to autograph his red and yellow cards felt a little overblown. The point of autographs has always eluded me — look at this scrap of paper that a person I have seen on television unthinkingly and resentfully scrawled on! — but it is hard to read the incident as anything other than entirely harmless and even, deep down, quite sweet.Why should an official not want a souvenir of what is likely to be one of the biggest occasions of his career? Who, exactly, is suffering here? Why would we automatically assume that Sobre, who has devoted decades to his job, would sacrifice the integrity of his decisions just because he happened to be a big fan of everyone’s favorite goal cyborg? (Sitting at the Etihad as the controversy unspooled, it was hard not to notice quite how much emphasis seemed to be placed on Sobre’s nationality, too.)As it turned out, of course, there was a wholly different rationale for it. Haaland was not particularly special. Sobre had also hoped to get an autograph from Pep Guardiola. He has been collecting them for years, then auctioning them on behalf of an autism charity he supports in his native Romania. At that point, the shouting was quieted, just a little.It would be nice to think that a lesson might be learned here: to gather all of the available facts before rushing to judgment; to avoid leaping to the most aggravating conclusion possible; to resist the temptation to meet the slightest perceived transgression with fury. You probably wouldn’t hold your breath, though.CorrespondenceAn open goal presented by Alexander Da Silva, who is (admirably) starting a “book club themed around soccer history, politics and tactics,” and wants advice on possible reading material. Well, Alexander, this one was critically acclaimed. It didn’t sell especially well, but if anything that just makes it more exclusive.As for other — some might say lesser, not me, but some — works, there is an abundance. So many, in fact, that I wonder if I should put some sort of list together: It’s a question we get reasonably frequently.A reading list, you say? Let me check in the back.Fethi Belaid/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn short: Jonathan Wilson’s “Inverting the Pyramid” remains the compulsory work on tactical history. Depending on which sort of politics you’re interested in, there’s “Fear and Loathing in La Liga” (Sid Lowe), “Angels With Dirty Faces” (Wilson again, you can’t escape him), “Brilliant Orange” (David Winner) or Simon Kuper’s “Football Against the Enemy,” which is more than 25 years old now, but remains genre-forming. For more modern material, “The Club,” by Josh Robinson and Jon Clegg, encapsulates the Premier League era.I’d also recommend the James Montague canon: “When Friday Comes,” “Thirty-One Nil” and particularly his most recent, “1312: Among the Ultras,” all of which are fantastic. My favorite soccer book of all, though, remains “This Love Is Not for Cowards,” by Robert Andrew Powell.Mark Gromko, meanwhile, takes me to task for my “evident disregard for Manchester City. You are tired of the money, the organization, the style of play. Some of us, however, find watching the skill of the players, the coordination and precision of the teamwork, the depth of the squad, and the brilliance of the coach wonderful to watch.”There is no argument from me on any of that — though I’d contest that I’m tired of any of it; not emotionally stimulated is probably a better description — but I would hold off on any particularly ardent criticism. City will, of course, come much more into focus as they pursue all four major trophies — starting in a couple of weeks, in the Carabao Cup final — and we will be covering them in the detail they deserve. More