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    A Shocking Soccer Kiss Demonstrates the Power of Scandal

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    By generating public outrage, scandals make inaction costly: suddenly, doing nothing carries greater risks.After Luis Rubiales, the president of Spain’s soccer federation, forcibly kissed Jennifer Hermoso, a player on the national women’s team, in the wake of their World Cup win, many wondered whether it would be a #MeToo moment for Spain.Whether the televised kiss galvanizes a lasting movement against harassment and discrimination is yet to be seen. But the growing backlash against Rubiales highlights an often-crucial element of such public reckonings: scandal. During periods of social change, there is often a phase of widespread support for an overhaul in principle but a reluctance within the population to actually make those ideals a reality. Changing a system means taking on the powerful insiders who benefit from it and bearing the brunt of their retaliation — a hard sell, particularly for those who do not expect the change to help them personally.A scandal can change that calculus profoundly, as illustrated by the furor surrounding the kiss. Hermoso described it as “an impulse-driven, sexist, out-of-place act without any consent on my part.” (Rubiales, who has refused to resign, has forcefully defended his conduct and insisted that the kiss was consensual.)By generating public outrage, scandals make inaction costly: suddenly, doing nothing risks an even greater backlash. And scandals can alter the other side of the equation, too: the powerful have less ability to retaliate if their erstwhile allies abandon them in order to avoid being tainted by the scandal themselves. Action becomes less costly at the same time that inaction becomes more so.But although scandals can be a mighty tool, they are not available to everyone. Just as the growing backlash against Rubiales has shown the power of scandal, the events of the months leading up to it, in which many members of the Spanish women’s team tried without success to change a system they described as controlling and outdated, underline how difficult it can be to spark a scandal — and how that can leave ordinary people excluded from public sympathy or the ability to enact change.The unifying power of scandalTo see how this pattern plays out, it’s helpful to look at the influence of scandal in a very different context. Yanilda González, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, researches police reform in the Americas. In the 2010s, she set out to determine why, after Latin American dictatorships ended, democratic reforms often exempted police forces, leaving them as islands of authoritarianism.In her resulting 2020 book, “Authoritarian Police in Democracy,” she describes how police forces can be extremely powerful in political terms, sometimes using the threat of public disorder as leverage over policymakers who might seek to limit their power or threaten their privileges.Politicians were reluctant to incur the costs of pursuing reforms that might provoke a backlash from police. And public opinion was often divided: while some demanded greater protections from state violence, others worried that police reforms would empower criminals.But, González found, scandals could change that. Episodes of particularly egregious police misconduct could unite public opinion in demanding reform. Opposition politicians, seeing an opportunity to win votes from an angry public, would add to the chorus, and eventually the government would decide that change was the least costly option.The Harvey Weinstein scandal followed a similar pattern. For many years, Weinstein’s predatory behavior was an open secret in Hollywood. But then a Times article by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, in which multiple women detailed the abuses they had suffered at his hands, generated a massive scandal. The public outrage at Weinstein’s behavior meant that the old Hollywood calculus, in which it was safer to keep quiet about the powerful producer’s abuses than to try to stop them, no longer applied. Weinstein’s former allies abandoned him.That generated pressure for change that went far beyond Weinstein. A slew of other #MeToo scandals exposed powerful men as abusers, harassers, and general sex pests. A national reckoning followed.‘The kiss’ shows scandal’s power — but also its limitationsLong before the televised kiss, many members of the Spanish women’s team had lodged protests against Rubiales and the Spanish football association’s leadership. Last year, 15 members of the team, frustrated by unequal pay and general sexism, sent identical letters accusing the team’s coach, Jorge Vilda, of using methods damaging to “their emotional state and their health,” and saying they would not play for the national team unless he was fired.Those 15 women were some of the team’s best players. They were organized. And they were willing to sacrifice a World Cup appearance to achieve change.But they were not yet “Queens of the World,” as one magazine cover proclaimed them last week, with a World Cup win that would put them on the front page of every newspaper in the country. And they didn’t yet have a scandal. No single event had generated sufficient public outrage to shift power from the football association to the players. The Spanish football association, including Rubiales, reacted with outrage to the letters, and vowed to not only protect Vilda’s job, but to keep the writers off the national team unless they “accept their mistake and apologize.” Though there is no precise formula, to capture public attention a scandal often needs to involve an exceptionally sympathetic victim, as well as shocking allegations of misconduct. Kate Manne, a philosophy professor at Cornell and the author of two books on structural misogyny, has written about how some people will instinctively align themselves with the status quo, sympathizing with powerful men accused of sexual violence or other wrongdoing rather than their victims — a tendency she calls “himpathy.” To overcome that instinct, she said, victims often have to be particularly compelling, such as the famous actresses who came forward about Weinstein’s abuses.Of course, most victims of harassment and assault are not famous actresses, or queens of the world. Manne noted that Tarana Burke, the activist who founded the #MeToo movement, spent years trying to bring attention to the abuse of less privileged women before high-profile scandals galvanized global attention. “She was trying to draw attention to the plight of the Black and brown girls who can be victimized in ways that don’t ever scandalize anyone,” Manne said. Public outrage has tended to be reserved for high-profile victims. But if norms shift more broadly against abuse and impunity, there can be positive change for ordinary people as well. Famous actresses may have focused public anger on Weinstein, but the #MeToo movement also brought attention to abuses of some less-famous workers, such as restaurant staff.Once the machinery of scandal does kick in, the consequences can be significant. As my Times colleagues Jason Horowitz and Rachel Chaundler report, many Spanish women saw Rubiales’ action as an example of a macho, sexist culture that allows men to subject them to aggression and violence without consequence.As public anger grew, politicians weighed in on behalf of the players. Late Friday night, the entire team and dozens of other players issued a joint statement saying that they would not play for Spain “if the current managers continue.” The next day, members of Vilda’s coaching staff resigned en masse.On Monday, Spanish prosecutors announced an investigation into whether Rubiales might have committed criminal sexual aggression. The same day, the Royal Spanish Football Association, which Rubiales currently leads, called on him to resign.The question now is not just whether he will be fired or step down, but if the broader outrage will lead to real change in Spain. “When we have these women who are, you know, figuratively and literally on top of the world in professional sports — and it’s captured live on video — then we have the makings of a scandal,” Manne said. It is too soon to tell where that might lead. More

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      French Open Doubles Champion Austin Krajicek Goes For a Repeat at Wimbledon

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      After years of frustration in singles, Austin Krajicek nearly quit tennis. Then an old friend asked him if he wanted to give the sport one more shot.The last time Austin Krajicek stormed through the front door, threw his tennis bag into a closet and announced that he was done with the sport for good, his wife, Misia Kedzierski, thought he might actually be serious.Krajicek, a big-hitting lefty from Florida who had been a champion as a junior and in college, had spent seven years toiling on the professional tennis tour, breaking into the top 100 in singles a couple times, even winning a couple of matches in Grand Slam tournaments. But as the summer of 2018 approached, the losses piled up and his singles ranking tumbled into the 300s.He and Kedzierski had been living in a cheap apartment in Chicago that summer, with a mattress on the floor, some old furniture from her parents’ house, a few dishes and their dog. She never questioned his tennis pursuits, but she was also covering most of their expenses, as Krajicek’s tennis career was costing him more than he was bringing in.“It’s like that awkward time where you don’t want to talk about money necessarily,” Kedzierski, a data analyst for the restaurant industry, recalled recently. “But then you get to a point where you’re like, ‘Well, if we can’t pay rent, then should we keep doing what we’re doing right now?’”Krajicek after missing a return in a second-round match at the Japan Open in 2015. He continued to struggle year after year.Toru Yamanaka/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesKrajicek didn’t think so.“It’s a brutal sport, and you have to be a little bit insane to keep going,” he said during a recent interview from his home in Allen, Texas, north of Dallas.Tennis seemed to be telling Krajicek to give up on the dream of competing for the biggest titles in the sport that had largely defined his life since he was 6 years old. At 28 he was no longer a kid, and he was a few credits short of finishing his degree in psychology from Texas A&M. He was getting his license to sell insurance. He was ready for Plan B.Then he got a call from a buddy from his college tennis days. Did he want to travel to England to play doubles in some minor league tournaments?Krajicek got his tennis bag out of the closet.One last shot.Playing for His Next MealKrajicek, who is a distant relative of the 1996 Wimbledon men’s singles champion, Richard Krajicek, began his tennis journey when he was 5, asking his father, a former college basketball player who had taken up tennis at a club near Tampa, if he could tag along. Soon he was training several days a week with the club professional, and soon after that, the club pro told Austin’s father he needed to find his son a better coach.At 14, Krajicek enrolled in the IMG Academy in Bradenton, where Nick Bollettieri famously churned out future champions under the often stifling Florida sun. At 18, Krajicek won the U.S. national junior championship in Kalamazoo, Mich., and flirted with turning professional. He opted instead to attend Texas A&M, to give his body and his game a few more years to develop. In 2011, he won the N.C.A.A. men’s doubles title.Then it was time to start playing for his next meal.The journey to the tennis big leagues has a few stops in grand world capitals like Paris and London, but players can spend far more nights in destinations like Binghamton, N.Y; Aptos, Calif.; Rimouski, Quebec; and Gimcheon, South Korea. There are terrible hotels, a lot of bad meals, and plenty of empty bleachers. Or no bleachers at all.Krajicek was a newly minted pro playing in a minor tournament in Champaign, Ill., when he met Kedzierski, a senior tennis player at the University of Illinois. A friend of Kedzierski’s had a crush on Krajicek but was too nervous to reach out. Kedzierski got his number and texted him on her friend’s behalf only to learn that Krajicek was interested in Kedzierski.They had their first dinner two months later in Maui, when they realized they were both there for tennis competitions. Nice guy, she thought.After graduation, she moved to Los Angeles to work for a stylist in the entertainment business. Krajicek, a master couch surfer who often stayed in the vacation homes of wealthy tennis boosters, was using Los Angeles as a training base. He started staying at Kedzierski’s place, showing up with his tennis bag and a suitcase, training for a week or two, and then heading back out on the road.Krajicek in his second-round match at the Australian Open in 2016. He would lose in straight sets to Kei Nishikori.Cameron Spencer/Getty ImagesPretty quickly, Kedzierski discerned that Krajicek didn’t actually have a home. She told him he could leave a pair of shoes at her place if he wanted. He said no thanks — he was fine living out of the suitcase.She went about her career and got a master’s in marketing at Texas A&M.And he went about his, such as it was. In 2018, seven years into his pro career, Krajicek was winning just 38 percent of his singles matches. That was when Kedzierski began to see her boyfriend toss his tennis bag into the closet and swear off the sport a little more often.Tennis Wasn’t the ProblemFor all but the best tennis players, the fleeting nature of top form is often a mystery.“Anyone in the top 250 can make a good week,” Daniil Medvedev of Russia, one of the game’s best players and its top player-pundit, has said, over and over. No one disagrees with him.Krajicek found his form once more when he headed to England with Jeevan Nedunchezhiyan. Maybe it was the comfort of playing with an old friend. Maybe it was because he had reached the point where he was ready to let it all go.Whatever the reason, he and Nedunchezhiyan quickly made the final of a tournament in Nottingham. The next week, they won a tournament in Ilkley in northern England. The week after that, they won two matches and qualified for the main draw at Wimbledon, where they lost in the first round in a third-set tiebreaker.Krajicek flew back to Chicago to the cheap apartment with the mattress on the floor. The next week, there was a small pro tournament just up the road in Winnetka, Ill., a 20-minute drive. He and Nedunchezhiyan figured, why not enter? They won it, sharing $4,650 in prize money.This was beginning to get interesting.In addition to his size and power, Krajicek had something that most doubles players do not. He is left-handed, which can instantly turn a quality team into a dangerous one because opponents have to adjust to different angles and spins of the ball. The usual weak spots for teams with two right-handed players aren’t there.Krajicek and Nikola Mektic teamed up during the Paris Masters in 2018.Justin Setterfield/Getty ImagesTennys Sandgren, another old friend who had climbed into the top 70 in singles, asked Krajicek to be his partner at the U.S. Open. They reached the quarterfinals. Rajeev Ram, who was on his way to becoming one of the top doubles players in the world, asked him to play an ATP event in Moscow. They won.That was when Krajicek concluded tennis wasn’t the problem. Singles was.“I was over it,” he said.Doubles became the only mountain he would attempt to climb.A Turning PointKrajicek’s productive summer and fall had made tennis financially sustainable. Now he was qualifying for ATP Tour events, where the prize money was significantly higher than on the lower-level tour. By 2021, he had made the U.S. Olympic team, but it was clear that he still needed to improve to make it into the top echelon of the pro game.He and Kedzierski had moved to Texas. On a hot spring afternoon, Krajicek landed on a backyard court that belonged to a friend of Phil Farmer, a highly regarded coach. Farmer had worked with top Americans, including John Isner, Sam Querrey and the Bryan brothers, one of the sport’s great doubles duos. A player Farmer was coaching at the time had told Farmer he had to check out his hitting partner.He obliged. Running Krajicek through a series of drills, he immediately saw a player with a huge serve who could nail targets down the line and crosscourt with both his forehand and his backhand. Krajicek also had soft hands and a stinger of a forehand volley.“I could really envision where his game was and where it needed to go,” said Farmer, who has been coaching him ever since.There was room for improvement — he needed to be more aggressive with his returns, and serve to the whole service box, rather than just his favorite spots. His low volleys needed work.Krajicek training with Phil Farmer at Wimbledon.Jane Stockdale for The New York TimesHe also needed a permanent partner. Then Ivan Dodig of Croatia, a mainstay of the doubles tour with a chess master’s understanding of the game, was suddenly free.He and Krajicek began their partnership in Belgrade, Serbia, in April 2022. By early June, they had reached the French Open final. Kedzierski, who had married Krajicek the previous December, caught a last-minute flight to Paris. She was watching courtside as Krajicek and Dodig squandered three championship points and lost in three sets.“That was not the match to watch,” she said.The next day, she and Krajicek delayed their return flight for 24 hours and rode rented bicycles all over Paris.Back at home, their friend Terry Brush had been keeping a bottle of Old Forester Birthday edition bourbon ready for when Krajicek won his first Grand Slam. He and Farmer, both bourbon lovers, had signed the label, pledging to open it only when they got that victory.Catching up at home after Paris, Brush asked Krajicek if he wanted to open it. They had come so close.Not a chance, Krajicek told him.In a Good RoutineA year later, Krajicek and Dodig were back in Paris, making their way through the French Open draw, but barely. Three of their first four matches went to deciding third sets as they vanquished a couple of Argentines, a Swiss and a Chilean, a Portuguese and a Brazilian, a pair of Germans, and a Spaniard and another Argentine.From 5,000 miles away, Kedzierski could tell that with each win, Krajicek’s routine was becoming more precise.Austin Krajicek and Misia Kedzierski.Matt SachsHe was eating the same meal (Chipotle delivered to his room) at the same time each day (around 6 p.m. so he could finish eating for the day by 7, which helped him get a good night’s rest). Then he watched videos of his opponents’ matches and went to sleep. Even his text messages to her came at the same time each day, including his check-ins about their two golden doodles, Tucker and Moose.When Krajicek made it to the finals, he asked her if she was coming to Paris. Not doing it, she told him.“He was in such a good routine,” Kedzierski said. “There was no way I was going to mess that up.”The final matched Krajicek and Dodig against Sander Gillé and Joran Vliegen of Belgium. Krajicek and Dodig seized control at the start and never gave it up. Watching from home with a few friends, Kedzierski saw Krajicek’s last blistering forehand clinch the title and, for the next week, the No. 1 ranking. She Facetimed him as soon as the ball landed so that when he looked at his phone, he would see she had called. Fifteen minutes later, from a tunnel under the stadium, he called her back.She told him how proud she was of him. He reminded her of all the times he had wistfully said he was going to get to the top.The next day, Krajicek crammed into an economy seat for the flight home to Dallas, even though he had to return to Europe five days later for the grass season and Wimbledon. The emergency exit door was sticking out in front of his seat, forcing him to angle his legs for the better part of 10 hours, leaving his frame a little cockeyed and sore by touchdown.Kedzierski was waiting for him. So was that bottle of bourbon.Krajicek, left, and Ivan Dodig after winning the French Open men’s doubles title.Caroline Blumberg/EPA, via Shutterstock More

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      in Soccer

      Women’s Euros Offer a Soccer Free-for-All

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      England will be expecting to win its first major women’s title on home soil this summer. But the field is deep, and filled with contenders.That old, familiar feeling crackled and fizzed into the warm night air as 20,000 fans streamed out of Elland Road last Friday. England had just dismantled the reigning European champion. A major tournament, on home turf, was only a few days away. The weeks ahead seemed to glisten with promise.England, by now, should know just how dangerous that feeling is. June is nothing but treachery and illusion. It is when July arrives, bringing with it the piercing light of high summer, that all of that faith and hope have an unerring tendency to curdle into disappointment and regret. Those flags, brandished so proudly, invariably fall limp in the heat.There are certainly reasons to believe that this year will be different. An abundance of them. England’s women’s team, without question, arrives at Euro 2022 as a genuine candidate to win its first major international honor.Its strengths are so many and varied that it almost seems disparaging to point out that it has home-field advantage and can expect the backing of raucous, capacity crowds. No player would dare say it, but if England emerges triumphant from the European women’s championship that begins next week, it will not be because of the passion of the public but the talent and experience of the squad.Its Dutch coach, Sarina Wiegman, knows her route to glory; she led her homeland to this title five years ago. It has a team packed with players who feature regularly in the world’s best competitions. It has a recent track record of traveling deep into the final stages of tournaments.“Watching those last 30 minutes, teams will be very worried,” Mark Parsons, the coach of the Netherlands, said after his side was picked apart at Elland Road. “England will be favorites for the tournament.” He is right. There is a convincing argument that Wiegman and her players not only can end the next month triumphant, but that they should.The problem is that the same applies to quite a few of England’s opponents in the tournament. A similarly compelling argument could be made for Spain, a team constructed around the stars of Barcelona’s all-conquering side and one that boasts at its heart Alexia Putellas, widely regarded as the finest female player on the planet.The Netherlands, too, should not be taken lightly, despite its defeat in Leeds. It has been only three years since — under Wiegman’s command — the Dutch were competing in the World Cup final. Vivianne Miedema, Lieke Martens, Danielle van de Donk and the rest have hardly regressed since.It is not quite a year since a Swedish team, bristling with experience, was competing in the Olympic final. Though it missed out on gold against Canada, the manner in which Peter Gerhardsson’s team swatted aside not only Japan, but also Australia and the United States during its run should serve as a warning.France’s coach, Corinne Diacre, raised eyebrows with her squad selections.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFrance’s aspirations seem to be limited not only by the fallout from what is best referred to diplomatically as the Aminata Diallo affair — it is hard to avoid the suspicion that another Knysna moment lies in wait, though in the rather less glamorous surrounds of Rotherham — but also by the curious decision of its coach, the imposing Corinne Diacre, to omit two of her finest players. Eugénie Le Sommer and Amandine Henry will be notable by their absence.Norway, by contrast, is bolstered by a returning force. The presence of Barcelona’s Caroline Graham Hansen alone would have been enough to make the Norwegians a threat. That she can now call on Ada Hegerberg, the forward seeking to make up for lost time after missing almost two years of her career through injury, may be enough to turn Norway into a contender.Ada Hegerberg is back on Norway’s team.Ntb/Ntb, via ReutersIt is true of all major tournaments — whether contested by women or men — that part of the charm lies in an unpredictability rooted in the comparative rarity of meaningful international soccer.Meetings of established, or expected, powers between finals are infrequent, and so it is difficult to interpret the teams’ merit in relation to one another. Both Argentina and Brazil, for example, will arrive in Qatar later this year among the favorites to deprive Europe of the (men’s) World Cup for the first time since 2002.Both are in rich veins of form. Both have considerable momentum behind them. Yet how much that means, what it is worth, is obscured by the fact that they have faced European teams on only a handful of occasions since 2018, all of them in the vanilla, faintly desensitized surrounds of the exhibition game.That is true of this summer’s Euros, too, of course: England’s 5-1 victory over the Dutch may or may not be a true guide to the sides’ strength, but it seems relevant that the Netherlands rested some of the standout players at Parsons’s disposal — Miedema included — and had enjoyed substantially less training time than the English. Neither of those will apply should the two teams be reunited in the final at Wembley.Lieke Martens and the Netherlands won’t be an easy out at the Euros.Nigel Roddis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe effect of those missing showdowns is magnified, though, by the fact that so little women’s club soccer is broadcast, certainly in comparison to the men’s game. As readers of this column have previously noted, the perception that England’s Women’s Super League is the strongest domestic tournament in Europe has arisen at least in part because there is no broadcast deal for its equivalents in Spain or France or Germany.England’s squad, as Wiegman has observed, is undoubtedly brimming with talent. A clear idea of how that compares with the strength in depth of, say, Spain is both possibly irrelevant — tournaments are not always won by the most gifted team — and somewhat elusive. Even performance data does not necessarily provide a complete picture because players’ statistical output depends entirely on the context in which they are operating.As women’s soccer grows, that should start to change and bring with it multiple material benefits. It would certainly be a shame if the insularity that afflicts the men’s game — mentioning no names, England — was adopted in a sport that has experienced its starburst in a far more connected world.For the time being, though, perhaps it is best just to enjoy its effects: a major tournament that offers the hope of legitimate uncertainty, one that could conceivably be won by almost half of its constituent teams — Denmark: we forgot Denmark — and one that, as tournaments used to do, will not reflect an established hierarchy but serve to define it.Freeways. Pebble Beach. Hollywood. In That Order.Gareth Bale: off to California.Geoff Caddick/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesGareth Bale has won the Champions League five times. He has three Spanish titles to his name and just as many European Super Cups and Club World Cups. He was once the most expensive player in the world, as long as Cristiano Ronaldo wasn’t listening. He has, to his name, either the finest, or the second-finest, goal scored in a Champions League final.He has scored more goals for his country than any player. He has been the central figure in restoring Wales to the ranks of soccer’s elite nations: ending its wait for a place at a major finals in 2016 and then, less than a month ago, qualifying for its first World Cup in more than 60 years. He is still only 32.It is hard to explain, then, why it is that both Bale’s departure from Europe and his arrival in Major League Soccer, with Los Angeles F.C., have been so comparatively low-key. Bale’s stock should be higher than Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s, say, when he landed in North America. He is closer to his prime than Andrea Pirlo was when he came to New York. His résumé is, if anything, better than Frank Lampard’s was when he made the same move.The most obvious explanation is that the last three years of Bale’s decade at Real Madrid have been underwhelming, at least on a personal level. He has been little more than an optional extra at the club since his decisive intervention in the 2018 Champions League final. He has, for reasons that have not always been entirely clear, been cast as a villain by the club itself.It is a shame that dispiriting coda has come to obscure, to some extent, quite how much Bale has achieved, quite how high he has soared. His has had, by any metric or measure, a superstar’s career. He is certainly the greatest coup secured by an M.L.S. team since Ibrahimovic, and possibly since David Beckham. It is tempting to wonder if it will be only after he retires that we come to realize it.A New Idea? Boooooooo.A.C. Milan finished two points above Inter in the Serie A table last season.Roberto Bregani/EPA, via ShutterstockRegular readers will know by now that it is the considered opinion of this newsletter that soccer does not handle change very well. All sports cherish their traditions, the mores and the practices that lend them their lore and their magic, but few are quite so resistant to the relentless march of progress as soccer.It is hardly surprising, then, that the idea — announced this week by the F.I.G.C., Italian soccer’s governing body — of settling the Serie A title not by goal difference or head-to-head records but through a winner-take-all playoff has not exactly won universal acclaim.In truth, it is hardly a sweeping revolution. The new measure will come into force only if the teams that finish first and second end any given season with the same number of points. Yet that has done little to soften the blow of what seems, to many, a wanton break with tradition, a tacky novelty and, worst of all, the unwelcome intrusion of Americanism into the sport.This, some have warned, will prove to be the thin end of the wedge. Before you know it, there will be playoffs for the Champions League places, every game will last three hours and for some reason everyone will stop using contactless card readers and insist on paying for things using a PIN.The thing with traditions, though, is that they have to start somewhere. The last time the two leading teams in Italy could not be separated was in 1964, when Bologna and Inter Milan both ended the season on 54 points. Italian soccer did not have an established tiebreaker, so the game’s authorities had to improvise. Their solution? A winner-take-all playoff. Maybe it was goal difference and head-to-head records that were the intruders all along.CorrespondenceWe start this week with another entry in the ledger marked “two nations, separated by a common language.”“Why do English papers refer to players getting paid however many thousand pounds per week,” Jerome O’Callaghan asks, though he is by no means the first. “An annual amount I could understand, but this weekly thing is very vague. Do I take that weekly amount and multiply it by 52? Why the obsession about weekly paychecks?”This is one of those conventions that I’m happy to admit I’ve never really thought about; it is just the Way Things Are Done. I cannot be entirely certain — and I’d welcome other analyses — but my instinct is that it is an echo of the era in which players were treated like industrial workers.Until the 1960s, their pay was capped at £20 a week; the fact it was measured by the week, I suspect, was because that is how most factory employees were paid. Even after the so-called maximum wage was abolished, the tradition stuck: Players’ salaries, from that point on, were understood as and presented in weekly amounts.“I’m wondering if you have any comment on the serial snubbing of Son Heung-min by the P.F.A. in their award nominations,” Glenn Gale wrote. “I’ve read articles claiming various explanations (he scored many of his goals late in the season and so on). One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is any suspicion of bias against him as an Asian player. Is this the proverbial elephant in the room nobody wants to mention?”Son Heung-min, the star hiding in plain sight.Paul Childs/Action Images Via ReutersI’ve always shared that suspicion, Glenn: It has seemed to me for a while that Son is overlooked a little because of the fact that we ascribe star quality much more easily to players from certain countries than we do others. We wrote about it, in fact, a few years ago. In this case, I wonder if perhaps the more pressing issue is that everyone on the Tottenham team is seen as a supporting actor to Harry Kane; it may be that which prevents Son from getting his due credit.And finally, a succinct one from Shawn Donnelly, presumably prompted by the Bale news. “Does anyone in England watch M.L.S.?” he asked. Some people must — the league has a broadcast deal here — but, like anything that is not the Premier League, the numbers are most likely quite small because England remains a very insular soccer culture. There aren’t vast audiences for Serie A, either, for example.The better news, perhaps, is that in terms of awareness, M.L.S. has made major strides. That can be attributed, in part, to the fleeting presence of the likes of Bale, Ibrahimovic, Wayne Rooney and the rest, but more significant is the (relative) success of players like Miguel Almiron. The medium-term future of M.L.S. is as a league that players come from, after all, rather than a place that, when they hit a certain age, they go to. More

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      in Soccer

      At Champions League Final, the Fans Weren’t the Danger

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      Preconceptions about Liverpool supporters and policing decisions that didn’t prioritize their safety led to the chaos at the Champions League final. That’s dangerous for every fan.It can be hard, at times like these, to know exactly who to believe. On one side, there are the thousands of witness accounts, the contemporaneous reports from much of the world’s news media, the countless videos and an apparently bottomless reserve of high resolution photographs, all telling one story about last Saturday’s Champions League final.And on the other side, there are the claims of the politicians and administrators and law enforcement officials who were responsible for the staging of European soccer’s showpiece event and who would, ultimately, be held accountable if it was found that they had overseen a complete and colossal organizational failure. It is just so hard to know which side is more likely to be telling the truth.Not that it matters, of course, because the damage is done. Around 20 minutes before the game was scheduled to start, UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, announced to the Stade de France and to the watching world that the game would have to be delayed because of the “late arrival” of fans to the stadium.It was not relevant, it seemed, that images had been floating around online for more than two hours of huge lines not only at the stadium’s gates, but at its perimeter, too, or that it had been blindingly obvious for some time that there were impossible bottlenecks to get close to the ground, or that several journalists had informed UEFA of the problems.Thomas Coex/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNo, all of that was put to one side, and UEFA blamed the fans. It did so either without full knowledge of the situation at its own event — an unforgivable ignorance — or knowing that its statement was at best misleading or, at worst, an outright and pernicious lie.And that was all it took. As soon as UEFA decided that the real problem with this sporting event was all the people who wanted to watch it, the — let’s keep the lawyers happy — misinformation spread and disseminated and infected everything it touched. From that point on, Liverpool’s fans were presumed guilty until proven innocent, not least by considerable portions of the people who should, really, have been their allies: other soccer fans.Still, UEFA can take some solace from the fact that — even with that head start — it has not been the worst actor in the sorry story that has played out over the last week or so, a time that should have been dedicated to celebrating the marvel that is this ageless Real Madrid team.No, that dubious honor goes to various elements of the French state. Not just the body-armor-clad riot police — who sprayed tear gas at fans waiting patiently to attend a sporting event, who tried to funnel thousands of people through two narrow gaps under a highway overpass, who shuttered entry points without explanation for hours as the crowd gathered and swelled, and who then locked down the stadium during the game to pen fans inside — but their champions: the country’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, and to his counterpart for sports, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra.For almost a week now, Darmanin and Oudéa-Castéra have blamed Liverpool’s fans on Twitter, in comments to the news media and in front of a rapidly-convened Senate hearing.France’s sports minister, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, and the country’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin.Thomas Coex/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThey have blamed Liverpool fans despite all of those pictures of large, patient crowds. They have blamed Liverpool fans despite seeing videos of children being lifted from the ground to prevent them from being crushed. They have blamed Liverpool fans despite seeing footage of their own police officers squirting pepper spray and firing tear gas at people trying, quietly, to scan tickets.They have continued to blame Liverpool fans even as their own story keeps changing, even as the number of “fake tickets” presented at the Stade de France that evening has diminished from “30,000 to 40,000” to a fraction of that. They have stuck with their line even when it veered into baseless slurs, when it involved Oudéa-Castéra saying that Liverpool fans — maybe just English fans — posed a “very specific risk” to public safety.They have done so even though it does not take into account the problems that Real Madrid’s fans faced, or the footage and photographs of local residents forcing their way in, or the corroborated accounts of large-scale gang activity both before and after the game.They have done so even when it leaves more questions than answers: Where, precisely, did the 40,000 bearers of pretend tickets go, and why were they not captured wandering the streets of Saint-Denis? Were they ghosts? Other excuses have drifted into the realm of dystopian fantasy: Darmanin, at one point, claimed the police had to act because of the risk of a “pitch invasion.”This might all have the ring of a cover-up — and not even an especially good one, given how often the French authorities have had to contradict themselves — but there exists the possibility that it is not. Maybe it is not a series of outrageous and egregious lies. Maybe they have not seen all of those images, heard all of that testimony. Maybe it is just two politicians relying in good faith on poor, premature information. Maybe.It is hard, though, not to read into the persistence with which Darmanin and Oudéa-Castéra have peddled their accusations a certain calculation.Despite the fact that their interpretation of last Saturday evening is demonstrably, provably untrue, they have stood by it because the alternative is unpalatable: Admitting that the French security services got this one wrong would mean admitting that they have also got their approach to policing French domestic soccer wrong and that they are probably going to get next year’s Rugby World Cup and the 2024 Paris Olympics wrong, too.Most of all, they have stood by it because, deep down, they know it will work. They know, at least, that it might create the illusion of an alternative set of facts. They know, too, that much of the heavy lifting will be done by prejudice, by those who would point out, archly, that this does seem to happen to Liverpool fans or England fans or just soccer fans as a whole an awful lot.They know that while social media allowed all of those images and videos and firsthand accounts to be surfaced and to be spread, citizen journalism is a much less potent force online than deep-rooted partisanship. They know that the latter will overpower the former at some point, at least enough to muddy the waters, to obscure not only this specific truth but also the idea of truth, to ensure that some blame is apportioned elsewhere.Plenty, certainly, have seized on the opportunity to assume that Liverpool fans, or English fans, or even a certain stripe of soccer fans as a whole must be at fault. Plenty have decided that this must be the first time that anyone has ever tried to gain access to an event by using a fake ticket, without wondering whether perhaps some of those people were victims, rather than perpetrators, of a crime, without asking if perhaps that is the sort of thing the authorities should be prepared to encounter.And yet the temptation to side with the authorities, in the aftermath of an event like this, rather than those who are different from you only in terms of the team they support is a dangerous one.Thomas Coex/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhat was proved at the Stade de France on Saturday evening was that soccer — in France, at least — is still an industry content with having tear gas fired on its customers, on families and on children. That it finds it acceptable to put them in a position where they have reason to fear for their lives, to risk them being crushed to death, to assume all of them are equally guilty and then, rather than to ask how this might have been avoided, to have the temerity, in the face of all available evidence, to blame them for it.And that has ramifications for everyone. For any soccer fan, for any sports fan, for any participant in French democracy. The Stade de France is not the first time a UEFA final has descended into chaos. Last summer’s European Championship final, in London, prompted a governmental review. Last month’s Europa League final, in Seville, drew a letter of complaint from both clubs about the way their fans were treated.Increasingly, it appears that UEFA is no longer capable of staging these games. More troublingly, in France in particular, it would seem that nobody in any position of power is interested in discovering how to police events of this scale to make sure they are not only safe and secure but enjoyable, too. Nobody wants to accept responsibility. Nobody wants to learn lessons.What happened at the Stade de France, and the smear campaign unleashed in its aftermath, has ramifications far beyond the reputation of Liverpool’s fans. Allowing the allegations of Darmanin and Oudéa-Castéra to take root is to allow this to happen again, to guarantee that there is a repeat, that another set of fans will be funneled and kettled and trapped and gassed and told — by those in power, by those responsible, by those who are supposed to have them in their care — that it is their fault.At times like this, it should not be hard to choose which side to believe, to know who is very obviously telling the truth.That Didn’t Work. Let’s Do It Again.Hold you applause for Barcelona, please.Dan Himbrechts/EPA, via ShutterstockThere was a time, a little while ago, when it was possible to feel quite encouraged by Barcelona. Xavi Hernández had made a bright start as manager, steering the club back into the Champions League. In Gavi and Pedri and Ansu Fati and Ronald Áraujo, the young and gifted core of a new team was starting to emerge.Even the club’s transfer activity seemed quite smart. Ferran Torres and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang had given the team a lift in January. Franck Kessié, the Ivorian midfielder at A.C. Milan, had been secured on a free transfer for the summer, giving the team a dynamism it has missed for some time.True, the debts are still enormous, but the club seemed to have acquiesced to cold reality. It was cutting its cloth, balancing its books, adapting to its new strictures. It was even trying to rehabilitate its relationship with Ousmane Dembélé, an admirable but somewhat quixotic attempt to recognize that salvaging a distressed asset is cheaper than acquiring a new one.And then it emerged that it might be considering the idea of selling Frenkie De Jong to Manchester United. Now, on the surface, that felt like an unfortunate necessity: At 25, De Jong is the sort of player who might generate a fee with which to rebuild a team. Sometimes, those kinds of difficult decisions have to be made.But then it turned out that Barcelona was planning on using at least a portion of the money it might receive — most likely from Manchester United — for De Jong to buy Marcos Alonso and César Azpilicueta.Both are fine players, of course. Azpilicueta, certainly, would be an asset both on and off the field to Barcelona. But they are hardly spring chickens: Alonso is 31 and Azpilicueta 32. Alonso excels in a position, wing back, that Barcelona does not even use. This is not the work of a club that has learned its lessons. Not in the slightest.You Cannot All Be LeBronAll will be revealed, then, on June 17. In less than two weeks, humanity will finally discover the answer to the most burning question of the age: Which team will get to have endless, heated discussions about whether Paul Pogba is playing sufficiently well next season? And it will do so in the most apposite medium imaginable: through watching his own, personal documentary.Just a little of the sting from The Pogmentary — no, really — was drawn earlier this week, when Manchester United confirmed that Pogba would be leaving the club, six years on from his $100 million arrival, at the end of his contract. The “huge decision” that sits at the center of much of the promotional spiel of the documentary, it turns out, was not entirely his.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPogba is not the first player to go down this road, of course. His French teammate, Antoine Griezmann, announced his move to Barcelona in the form of what might as well broadly be called a documentary, too. That Griezmann, like Pogba, is a devoted N.B.A. fan is probably not irrelevant here. These are both transparent homages to The Decision, LeBron James’s great gift to the documentarian’s art.The problem, of course, is that LeBron James is one of the greatest players ever to grace a basketball court, a status that is probably just a little beyond both Pogba and Griezmann. If James’s announcement was full of hubris and self-importance — the phrase “I’ll be taking my talents” should always, always be laced with irony — then it is easy to feel there is something just a little more tawdry about soccer’s ersatz versions, something slightly, well, desperate.To the players, though, that is a price worth paying. Pogba’s time at Manchester United has, by almost any measure, been anti-climactic. The peak years of his career, at least at club level, have been spent seeing his status slowly fade, leaving a player once regarded as one of the finest midfielders in the world now widely regarded as an expensive luxury.The bombast and the faint pomposity of a glossy documentary, an announcement about his future — spoiler alert: He will probably return to Juventus — is, at its heart, a way of asserting that he is still a star, that he can still command attention, that he can still dictate his own terms. It is a message tailored, in part, to whichever club (again: Juventus) he joins. More than that, though, it has the air of a message to himself.CorrespondenceA couple of thoughts from readers on the final day of the Premier League season, which as far as I can tell happened several years ago. “Seeing how Serie A settles a points tie by looking at a comparable win/loss, why can’t the Premier League do something similar?” asked Erich Almasy. “Watching Manchester City run up the scores to get a higher goal difference is embarrassing and clearly hurts clubs fighting relegation.”(A brief translation for readers unfamiliar with league table math: Serie A separates teams that are level on points by head-to-head record. The Premier League does it on goal difference.)I will confess to being slightly torn on this one. Head-to-head seems slightly fairer to me — though not in this Premier League season, when it would have been no use at all if Liverpool and Manchester City had finished level on points, given both games between the two of them ended 2-2 — and I do believe that seeing teams run up the score is not especially compelling sporting entertainment.But what is the alternative? That City (and Liverpool) just take the last 30 minutes of games off? Goal difference is also, to my eye, more dramatic. A.C. Milan’s better head-to-head record against Inter Milan this year meant it effectively had an extra point; in England, there is at least the possibility of a team overturning a disadvantage in goal difference on the final day.Pep Guardiola left the final day as he entered it: confident Manchester City would bring him the Premier League title.Hannah Mckay/ReutersI am more inclined to agree with Chuck Massoud-Tastor. “How does the Premier League defend the idea of starting all games simultaneously on the final day? Would they not garner more viewership and excitement with staggered starts? Am I just being a provincial American?”Yes, Chuck, you are, but that doesn’t mean you’re not right. It would be possible to stagger at least some of the games on the final day, at least in some scenarios, as long as all of the games pertaining to relegation or Europe or the title happened simultaneously.I’m not sure any drama would be lost. In a way, it might even serve to allow each story line a little time to breathe. That said, the issue is in the logistics. You do not know which games will be significant for which prize until relatively late, and rearranging games on short notice would only inconvenience fans. More

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      Soccer’s Focus Needs to Be Product, Not Packaging

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      A simple rule change paved the way for the modern soccer we watch today. An obsession with Super Bowl-style changes won’t move it forward.Everything started with a letter. In the summer of 1990, Daniel Jeandupeux, a young Swiss coach, was bored. More precisely, he was bored by that year’s men’s World Cup. The romance of Toto Schillaci, the joy of Roger Milla, the swelling aria of Nessun Dorma: None of it could quite dislodge his sensation that it had been, by and large, a deeply “ugly” tournament.That thought inspired Jeandupeux to explore why that might have been. As he described it to the estimable Dutch news outlet De Correspondent, he used an early example of soccer analytics software, a platform called Top Score, to examine what form the game took, particularly in matchups in which one team took an early lead.The answer, as he found it, was that the game essentially stopped. In some cases, the winning team’s goalkeeper had “10 times as many touches” as all of the other players combined. The best way to win in soccer, Jeandupeux had discovered, was to ensure that as little soccer as possible was played.He sent his findings in a letter to an old friend, Walter Gagg, a functionary in FIFA’s technical department, the part of soccer’s world governing body that looks after the actual soccer. His warning was stark. “Such possession is bound to kill the game,” he wrote, unless there was rectifying action. Jeandupeux had an idea of what that might be.His timing, it turned out, was immaculate. FIFA had been worrying about an epidemic of time-wasting for about a decade, but had always found the International Football Association Board (IFAB) — the British-dominated body responsible for the game’s rules — reluctant to change. There was one person at the top of the organization, though, determined to break the stalemate. Rather inconveniently, that person was Sepp Blatter.A few months after that World Cup, Blatter had created what he called Task Force 2000, which is precisely the sort of name that Sepp Blatter might come up with for something. Led by Michel Platini — again, in hindsight, a little problematically — it was given the job of identifying ways to make the game more appealing, more dynamic, more dramatic.Jeandupeux’s letter, passed to Platini and his fellow Task Force members, crystallized many of their thoughts. Now they not only had empirical proof that soccer had grown slow, cautious and dull, but a recommendation as to how to change it. Jeandupeux had suggested that the most egregious form of time-wasting — one that had been a soccer cornerstone for decades — be outlawed: Goalkeepers, he said, should be banned from rolling the ball to a teammate, getting it back, and picking it up again, only to repeat the process a few seconds later.The Task Force decided that proposal did not go far enough. Instead, its members decided that goalkeepers should no longer be able to use their hands to receive a pass from any teammate. Within a few months of Jeandupeux’s submission to Gagg, they had invented what would become known as the backpass rule.Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockEverything in modern soccer flows from that single change. Without that letter, without that Task Force — and, yes, sadly, without Blatter — there is no tiki-taka, there is no gegenpressing, there is no Arsène Wenger or Pep Guardiola or Jürgen Klopp. There is no game as we currently see it.It is easy for fans of a certain vintage to scoff at soccer’s tendency to treat 1992 as some sort of Year Zero, to bristle at how easily everything that happened before the dawn of the Premier League and the Champions League — an entire century — is dismissed as an irrelevant prehistory.But 1992 was not just a rebranding exercise. It also brought a substantive shift in the nature of soccer itself. That summer, two years after Jeandupeux sat down and wrote his letter, the backpass rule came into force. It is a legitimate before and after: The soccer that would follow was not just fundamentally different from what went before, it was better.It is important to remember that as, once again, the sport finds itself discussing change. UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, has already rubber-stamped a new format for the Champions League. This week, it confirmed that it would reserve two places in the tournament for teams that qualified on what has been called, a little euphemistically, “historical merit.”Even that, though, did not go far enough for Nasser Al-Khelaifi. In his role as chairman of the European Clubs’ Association — rather than president of Paris St.-Germain or chairman of BeIn Sports or chairman of Qatar Sports Investments or vice president of the Asian Tennis Federation — Al-Khelaifi has other changes on his mind.They range from the rather vague — amounting essentially to a list of Web3 buzzwords like “metaverse” and “NFTs” — to the more concrete. Al-Khelaifi believes it is worth exploring the idea of an expanded European Super Cup, turning a semi-serious showpiece into a tournament in its own right, one that may be played outside Europe. He would consider a Final Four-style tournament for the Champions League. He would, reading between the lines, contemplate changing kickoff times to suit television markets in the United States and Asia.Despite the very obvious self-interest of their source, despite the fact that not all of these ideas are his, and despite the circumstance — almost exactly a year since the sudden launch and swift death of the European Super League project — these ideas should not be rejected out of hand.They are not, by any stretch of the imagination, perfect, but nor are they entirely devoid of merit. Soccer would do well to remember that, at first, it was assumed that the backpass law would simply encourage goalkeepers to launch the ball at every given opportunity; nobody imagined that its ultimate consequence would be Éderson.Expanding the Super Cup is, on the face of it, a reasonable idea. It is possible that the benefits of staging the semifinals and final of the Champions League in a single location — the sense of occasion, the drama of a one-and-done knockout — would outweigh the undoubted complications in security, logistics and the loss of revenue and, crucially, atmosphere generated by semifinals on a club’s home turf.Albert Gea/ReutersEven the concept of teams’ being given a pass into the Champions League despite not qualifying domestically is not quite as absurd as has been presented: Though such a proposal would, doubtlessly, increase the inequality that remains the game’s greatest challenge, there is at least some logic in the idea that how you perform in the tournament itself should be rewarded.There is no reason to reject Al-Khelaifi’s ideas, then, simply because they represent change. Change, as Jeandupeux would testify, can sometimes bring improvements, and in ways that are not immediately apparent. The problem, in fact, is the opposite; these ideas do not represent change enough.It was striking, for example, that Al-Khelaifi should cite the Super Bowl as an example of the sort of things soccer should be doing. Why, he asked, was the final of the Champions League not more of an event? Why was it not more of a show? Why was there not a litany of the world’s biggest musical acts lining up to play at the world’s biggest annual sporting fixture?These are all questions that soccer executives ask with alarming frequency. (The answer to that last one, for what it’s worth, is that the world’s biggest musical acts know full well that they would be jeered if they played the Champions League final, because all of the people in the stadium are there to see a soccer match, not a concert.)Patricia De Melo Moreira/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNobody, anywhere, is quite so obsessed with the Super Bowl as the people who run Europe’s soccer teams. None of them ever seem to stop to consider the fact that the global audience for the Champions League final dwarfs that of the Super Bowl, or the reality that soccer is more popular by an order of magnitude worldwide than the N.F.L., and that it has achieved all of that despite not having a halftime show. It gives the impression that soccer’s leaders have startlingly little confidence in the sport in which they have invested.That is not the case, of course; the reasoning is a little more subtle. The game’s power brokers propose these things — fireworks, dance troupes, rebranded competitions, format changes and all the rest of it — because, while the changes that would have the most effect are far simpler, they are very much not in their interests.The way to make every game “an event,” as Al-Khelaifi put it, is not to invite Maroon 5. It is to increase the competitive balance between the two competing teams so that the result does not feel like a foregone conclusion. The reason the group stages are not “compelling” is not because there is no Jean-Michel Jarre-style light show before kickoff; it is because it is a group stage, and so there is no genuine sense of jeopardy.Anyone with even a modicum of understanding of soccer — of sports — understands that: Memories only need to stretch as far back as last week, and the playoffs for the World Cup, to realize that drama is not generated by the staging of a game or even the quality of it, but the meaning and the content.Al-Khelaifi, of course, is not going to propose any change that radical, any change that meaningful. Addressing the chronic lack of competitive balance would not benefit P.S.G. or the rest of the cabal of superclubs whose agenda continues, even after the Super League debacle, to dominate UEFA’s thinking.Instead, he and his peers will continue to believe — and to insist — that soccer’s route to growth lies in improving the packaging, rather than the product. Like Jeandupeux, all those years ago, they very clearly sense in some way that things are just getting a little boring. The difference is that they are holding on to the ball, and they will do all they can to not give it back.Here’s What Else We Did This WeekKevin De Bruyne, center, and Manchester City broke through, eventually, Atlético Madrid’s defense.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSitting in the stands at Stamford Bridge on Wednesday night, it was very difficult to have any sympathy with the idea that the Champions League needs to change at all, other than perhaps by introducing some sort of rule that Karim Benzema’s presence should be compulsory in all matches.The previous evening, spent watching Manchester City try to break Atlético Madrid’s fearsome resistance, was not quite as entertaining. That is not because Atlético should not rely on grit and grizzle more than flash and flair, but because a cornerstone of any great defensive performance is some sort of attacking threat.And you may not have noticed, because FIFA has not been keen to publicize it, but it turns out we are not getting a biennial World Cup after all. Even the expanded Club World Cup seems to have faded from view somewhat. This happens a lot to Gianni Infantino’s big ideas, when you think about it.CorrespondenceA Qatar World Cup will turn off some viewers.Noushad Thekkayil/EPA, via ShutterstockIn good news for Alan Goldhammer, but bad news for both FIFA and the many and varied sports-washers of the world, we can now say with some certainty that he is far from alone.The audience for this newsletter is a self-selecting demographic, of course — one defined, let’s be clear, by its impeccable taste — and so cannot be treated as a broad sample. But it would appear that there are quite a few of you out there, like Alan, who do not intend to bless the Qatar World Cup with your attention.“I refuse to lend my eyes to an event which is designed by a nasty regime to bolster its image,” wrote Nathan Wajsman. “I also skipped the 2018 World Cup in Russia and the recent Winter Olympics in Beijing. It may not mean anything to the organizers, but it means something to me.Sjaak Blaauw has come to the same conclusion. “With 6,500 people having lost their lives, and many workers not having been paid what was their due, I cannot condone this,” he wrote.Some are a little more conflicted. “I am getting closer to Alan Goldhammer’s sentiment, but it is taking more time and thought for me,” wrote Rashmi Khare. “I feel more and more like I am being manipulated. If I participate, my eyeballs and my dollars will be used to justify the corruption that led to this tournament. If I do a full blackout, it’s just one less eyeball/dollar from billions.”And others still offered a different perspective. “Good on Mr. Goldhammer,” wrote Nick Adams, before acknowledging that rather than not watch, he would “put my mind to thinking how to make Qatar safe for all visitors, how I would voice a protest, and how I would do something to change the corrupt decision-making process” that led to the tournament’s being held there in the first place.There were many more submissions, all of them just as sincerely held and articulately expressed. Thank you to all of you who emailed, and please keep them coming. The correspondence on that subject has been rivaled only by the continued debate about deep dish “pizza,” including an assessment from Bart McKay that I enjoyed enormously. “Deep dish pizza,” he wrote, “is just casserole with better P.R.” More

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      The Artist Who Painted a City

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      As Jesse Marsch takes over Leeds United, he faces the difficult task of replacing Marcelo Bielsa, who was equal parts coach and icon.Out on the Burley Road, where the last vestiges of the city of Leeds slowly dissolve into the Yorkshire countryside, there is a barn in the middle of a field. It stands there, alone, the size of a garden shed, in a patch of land demarcating the boundary between a pet grooming salon and a dog park.For a long time, it was about as unremarkable as any structure can be. A barn, in a field, in a part of the world where there are a lot of barns and a lot of fields. And then one day, a year ago or so, it changed. One side, the side that faces you as you head down the hill, was suddenly covered with a striking, monochrome mural of Marcelo Bielsa.What caught the eye most, perhaps, was the incongruity between the work and its location. Bielsa’s face, solemn and bespectacled, emerging out of nowhere, watching over all he surveyed — which, in this case, amounted to a succession of dogs at varying stages of cleanliness — gave it the air of a border post, a territorial marker. This field was Bielsa country, it proclaimed.Lee Smith/Action Images Via ReutersIn the days after the curtain was drawn on Bielsa’s three-and-a-half year tenure as manager of Leeds United, the discussion focused — understandably — on the state in which he had left the team. Had the Argentine coach’s famously exacting methods, his ideological intransigence, left the club at genuine risk of relegation? Or was his dismissal a premature reaction to a tough run of games and an ongoing injury crisis that had deprived a small squad of key players?Much more significant, though, was how he had left Leeds the place. It can be easy, at times, to overstate the impact that soccer has on a city, a country, a population as a whole. A team’s success or failure is assumed to have some seismic effect on its home; the sport has sufficient hubris to believe that the mood of millions hinges on its every turn.Bielsa’s impact on Leeds, though, has a physical form. The mural on the Burley Road was not the only piece of urban artwork that has appeared in recent years. There is another portrait of Bielsa in Wortley, close to the club’s Elland Road stadium, in which the Argentine is depicted as Christ the Redeemer.In Headingley — which is a bit like Brooklyn, except it is better, because it has a cricket ground and a Greggs — Bielsa’s image is accompanied by one of his axioms: “A man with new ideas is a madman, until his ideas triumph.” In the city center, there is a vast depiction of Kalvin Phillips, the club’s homegrown idol, around the corner from the Victorian grandeur of the Corn Exchange.And all over the city there are electrical boxes — those grim and gray pieces of street furniture that our eyes erase from our vision — that have been daubed in the club’s colors, blue and white and yellow, and decorated with its slogans and its iconography by the street artist Andy McVeigh.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockAll of that has happened since Bielsa arrived, since he brought a somnolent club to life, since he imposed order on a decade and a half of chaos. By the standards of modern soccer, where the superclubs weigh their trophies by the ton, Bielsa’s legacy is a thin one. He won promotion from the Championship. He guided Leeds to ninth in the Premier League, and left it fretting over relegation. He did not deliver a litany of medals, an era of glory.What he did was far less tangible, but much more important. He gave Leeds an identity. He did not simply make the fans fall in love with their club again, he gave them something to stand for, to represent, to call their own. He made Leeds an emblem of a style, a belief, an approach. And in doing so, he lifted the place it called home.Often, those sorts of assertions are difficult to prove. Not in this case. Bielsa, in a very real sense, has left Leeds a much more colorful place than he found it.That is not, of course, necessarily ideal for his replacement. Jesse Marsch might have exactly the sort of background that most English clubs now expect — an alumnus of the New York Red Bulls, Red Bull Salzburg and RB Leipzig, steeped in the principles of the German pressing game, de rigueur among the denizens of the Premier League — but he lacks Bielsa’s gravitas, his reputation and, most immediately, his emotional bond with the fans, with the city.Lee Smith/Action Images Via ReutersThat is not the only obstacle in Marsch’s path. Whether there are enough American coaches in European soccer is not, in truth, an especially pressing question: Chances certainly seem to fall more easily to them than they do to, for example, African coaches, or those working outside the bounds of the continent.The challenge, instead, is in the perception. Chris Armas, another graduate of the Red Bull school, was nicknamed “Ted Lasso” within a few weeks of arriving at Manchester United as an assistant to Ralf Rangnick. The same punchline was trending within minutes of Marsch’s appointment at Leeds.Bob Bradley, scarred by his experiences at Swansea City, found it surprising just how much controversy was stirred by his use of certain terms — “P.K.” instead of penalty, say — or his pronunciations: He made a conscious effort to say “defence,” instead of “defence,” and never to refer to the Premier League.Will they paint murals of Jesse Marsch in Leeds?Annegret Hilse/ReutersIf he is to succeed, Marsch will have to overcome that same stigma, to make sure he does not fall into any of the linguistic traps that await him. Even if he does so, he will know, most likely, that he will never inspire the same sort of adoration that was awarded to Bielsa. Bielsa was the man, after all, who took Leeds United home. Marsch will never be able to match that.Perhaps, though, Marsch’s predecessor offers the perfect illustration of the nature of the task at hand. Bielsa’s success was not measured in silver and gold, but painted in blue and yellow and white. His rewards were not prizes, but portraits. He won them because he gave a club, and a city, something to be proud of, something to believe in. He made the place more colorful. Marsch’s task, any manager’s task, is to do the same.The Model OwnerRoman Abramovich in better days for Chelsea, and for him.Matt Dunham/Associated PressRoman Abramovich changed far more than Chelsea. His impact on English — on global — soccer extends way beyond his taking a glamorous pretender and transforming it into the most consistently successful English club of the 21st century. It is not just Stamford Bridge that has lived under the “Roman Empire,” as the Russian flag that adorns the stadium’s Matthew Harding Stand has it, for the last two decades. We all have.It was Abramovich’s arrival, those first few years of apparently bottomless spending, that triggered an inflationary spiral that pushed transfer fees and salaries across Europe ever higher, that winnowed down the number of clubs able to compete first for talent, then for trophies, that pushed some of the old elite into irrelevance and others to the brink of something far worse.It was, in no small part, because of Abramovich that European soccer felt moved to introduce some form of financial fair play legislation. It was, in no small part, because of Abramovich that Chinese conglomerates and Gulf states and all manner of princelings decided soccer was the place to put their money, to service their egos, to launder their reputations.And, most of all, it was Abramovich who provided the model of the ideal owner to fans all over the world. Ever since he appeared, out of nowhere, in 2003, fans of countless clubs have craved the appearance of their own Abramovich, someone possessed of an impossible fortune who appears happy to fritter as much of it away as necessary in the pursuit of success.The pervasiveness of his example is evident in the response to his decision, this week, to put Chelsea up for sale. That Chelsea’s fans regard him as a good owner, a fond memory, a silent idol, is not at all surprising. Look at what he has given them. That those with no attachment to the club persist on giving him the same assessment is astonishing.Yes, Abramovich pumped money in whenever it was required. Yes, he delivered trophies on an industrial scale. Yes, he has turned his club into not just a state-of-the-art superpower, but a vehicle for some admirable charitable initiatives, particularly as regards fighting anti-Semitism and promoting Holocaust education.Toby Melville/ReutersAnd yes, it is possible, if you wish, to ignore the questions that linger over all of it: Why? Why did he do all of that? What was the purpose? Was it really that he fell in love with soccer after watching Ronaldo and Real Madrid destroy Manchester United? Did he just want a shortcut to British high society? Or was it something else? If so, what? Why has all of this happened?But it should not be possible to exclude from discussion of his legacy the manner of his imminent departure. Because of Abramovich, Chelsea may still stand under threat of the impact of the economic sanctions (very and possibly conveniently slowly) being imposed on Russia’s oligarchs by the British government.Because of Abramovich, Chelsea is now in the process of being sold effectively as a distressed asset. He has said he will not “fast-track” the sale, but the fact that his advisers appear to have reached out to whoever they can think of, and set a deadline of only a few days for bids, rather suggests he does not have the months such a process would ordinarily take.Abramovich, make no mistake, does not have the time to make sure he is passing “custodianship” of the club to precisely the right people. He will sell it to whoever offers him the most money. And that money, at his current asking price, will cover much of the $2 billion or so he has given Chelsea over the years. Abramovich will not be out of pocket.This is not, put simply, what a good owner does. A good owner does not put a club in this sort of political position. A good owner does not sell in a hurry. A good owner does not cut and run because a war instigated by a despot he insists he has absolutely no connection to changes the world overnight. Chelsea’s fans will treasure the memories Abramovich has given them. It has, they say, been a beautiful romance. But a romance cannot be detached from the way it ends.CorrespondenceOne of the most powerful men in soccer with Gianni Infantino, right.Martin Meissner/Associated PressLast week’s column on soccer’s relationship with money, and with Russia, elicited quite the flurry of responses. Many of them were kind, and as such very difficult for a British person to mention without blushing.“Before it’s too late, can you do another update on Newcastle, and their craven, spineless, unprincipled ownership?” asked Paul Bender, suggesting the club’s nickname might be changed from the “Magpies” to the “Bone Saws.” Newcastle, though, is only one example. Soccer has to reassess its relationship with money on some fundamental level.Fans can lead that conversation. “I had no idea that my beloved (and much despaired) Everton were sponsored by a Russian oligarch,” John MacMillan wrote. “I’d assumed our training ground ‘USM Finch Farm’ was just the location’s proper name and not an ersatz emblem of corporate sponsorship.”I suspect more will be reported on this in the coming days, but Everton’s situation is a complex and a serious one, unfortunately. The companies linked to Alisher Usmanov that the club has “suspended” — not good enough, thanks — its relationships with were responsible for a vast portion of its commercial income. Farhad Moshiri, the Everton chairman, is the chief executive of one of those companies. It feels fragile, and unsustainable.Thomas Jakobsh, meanwhile, asks a very pertinent question. “I fully share your disappointment, outrage, and shame at how our game has been manipulated and debased,” he wrote. “But where do you draw the line, the one that demarcates the grifters, thugs and opportunists? On which side of the line does someone like Silvio Berlusconi fall? As for nation states, on which side of the line does one place Qatar, the U.A.E., or Azerbaijan?”This is the complication, of course. How can anyone have known that Berlusconi was not just a media magnate looking for acclaim, but an aspirant politician using soccer as a vehicle? There is a reason, unpalatable as it may be, that FIFA and UEFA are not keen to arbitrate conflicts: If Russia has to be banned for invading Ukraine, why not ban Saudi Arabia for inflicting countless casualties in its war in Yemen? This is a cop-out, but I have no idea where the line is, or should be. I just believe there has to be one.And, on the other side of the coin, there’s Tom Karsay. “Surely you’re not serious about that column. You know, whether the Ukraine invasion is worse than, say, the machine-gunning of Iraqi civilians by U.S. contractors, or any of the myriad other atrocities across the globe committed by FIFA nations. Your column is biased and lacks any depth. Stick to football.”I realize nobody reads this newsletter for the geopolitical analysis, so I won’t offer my two cents on how Ukraine and Iraq differ, if they differ at all. But there is something Tom misses, I think: The American sponsors of soccer competitions are not backed by the American state. American owners of teams do not act as proxies for the government or serve as the power base for a tyrant.Soccer is vulnerable when those who are not in it just for the sport, or just to make money out of the sport, are involved. That is when the actions of countries stain the name of a team. And that is where we should draw the line.That’s all for this week. All correspondence is welcome at askrory@nytimes.com, even if you have not enjoyed what you’ve read. The standard of criticism is still higher than it is on Twitter. There’ll be a new episode of European Nights, with Roger Bennett of Men in Blazers, ahead of the return of the Champions League next week, too.Have a great weekend, and keep safe.Rory More

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      Remembering What Draws You In

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      Fandom can be an exercise in frustration. But for a supporter who grew up on American sports, soccer’s community offered a welcome sense of power that had been missing.Astead Herndon, who follows politics for The Times and Tottenham Hotspur because he just can’t help himself, is filling in for Rory Smith this week.Let’s start with the bad: Tottenham Hotspur has not won a trophy in the 13 years I have watched nearly every one of its matches.It did not win one while I was in high school in Illinois, where I settled on my Tottenham fandom after selecting the club at random in the FIFA video game. It did not win one while I was in college, when I was a regular at early-morning gatherings of the first Tottenham Hotspur Supporter’s Club in Wisconsin.The early years of Mauricio Pochettino happened when I lived in Boston. Back then, I would sneak away from my desk at city hall to watch matches at a downtown pub. No trophy.In Washington D.C., the next place I lived, I watched two Champions League runs. In New York I once swore off a bar that serves particularly excellent nachos for a full year simply because it was the place where I watched the 2019 Champions League final. No trophy.Let’s not talk about the José Mourinho era at all.Thirteen years of supporting Tottenham, by American millennial standards, makes me something of Spurs sage. (The day Tottenham sold Gareth Bale, I drank away my feelings at a bar in Wisconsin. A well-meaning friend texted, “Sorry about Gary.”) In the beginning, I had an elaborate system of absolutely illegal streams. Then the NBC Premier League deal brought my team to me every weekend. Now I can stream its games right on my phone.Sell us your cups, your shirts, your scarves. Just please don’t sell Harry Kane.David Klein/ReutersMy 13 years don’t make me special, of course, more deserving of sporting triumph that fans who have waited far longer than I have. I could have just as easily have picked West Ham or Newcastle or Manchester United or (shudder) Arsenal off that FIFA console. Every fan’s pain (and joy) is their own.But those 13 years have seen the sport change itself, influenced by a global landscape that has undergone rapid political and cultural upheaval. There is no denying: the influx of money has changed soccer, probably forever. And while millions of soccer fans, including myself, decried the idea of the world’s wealthiest teams joining in a Super League, the sport’s most powerful bodies seem hellbent on imminent, structural change.The specter of that kind of systemic disruption sometimes feels like a reversal of what first drew me — and probably you — to the game. I grew up watching American sports, where the fan is assumed to be powerless. Your team could move across the country in search of a better stadium, or better tax laws. Rivalries in college sports — but also in baseball, football and hockey — were routinely upended by conference realignments driven by the pursuit of rich television contracts.In soccer, though, structures felt sacred. Tottenham, for example, is still mad at Arsenal for a move the latter made more than a century ago. But most of all, there was a language of fan ownership in soccer that I enjoyed. We are Spurs. There was a supporter’s trust. It rejected the way American sports — and specifically the N.F.L. — seemed to bother me the most. There, I thought, fans didn’t matter.The Super League announcement reminded me of that feeling. It was not only what the team’s were proposing, but the flagrant nature of it all. A group of rich clubs secretly plotting to disrupt a global game, willing to sever century-old traditions and alter generational rivalries, and do it all without a bit of fan input. Soccer clubs, after all — big ones or small ones and especially bad ones — don’t get to pack up their gear and run away from their fans when things go bad.Fans are happy to offer their support. Most times, they just ask their team to deserve it.David Klein/ReutersStill, with the benefit of maturity, I now realize that I always saw soccer through rose-colored glasses. The wealth inequality that has grown in recent years was already present 13 years ago. There was, I’m sure, also some desire to be a hipster in a land of Midwestern, “American football” fans. Spurs are also firmly among the world’s richest teams, even if they are well behind some of their rivals. But isn’t soccer fandom different? That’s what the Super League owners underestimated: The sense among fans that the club is equally their own, and that their support still must be earned. For a decade, fans of my other team, the Chicago Bulls, complained about post-Michael Jordan management decisions (thankfully it’s better now). Tottenham supporters tried to stage a protest over the January transfer window. Every club has its crises, its test of its fans commitment — some more existential than others.As a fan, I think I’ve accepted that 13 years from now, soccer will look different. I will not be surprised if we see a zombie Super League, or a biennial World Cup that no one outside FIFA seems to want. There will be more reminders of our collective smallness as fans. More protests, too.But margins matter. And while the Super League announcement felt familiar to my experience in American sports, the reaction to it was not.So let’s end with the good.At Tottenham, fandom passes through generations, from father to Heung-min Son.Peter Cziborra/Action Images, Via ReutersFor 13 years, across new schools and new cities, new jobs and the campaign trail, the cadence of Tottenham has been a comforting structure. Even the disappointments feel good, sometimes, a reminder that while I don’t support the world’s best team, I do support the world’s funniest.I like to think there’s an open pessimism to soccer fandom. Only a few teams have a shot at the title every year, and there are no coming draft picks to save you. At Spurs, the pessimism is a feature, not a bug. It is a bonding point among the supporters.In a way, that culture helps distill fandom down to its irrational essence. There is no guarantee Spurs will ever win a trophy I can cheer, no assurance that my team — your team, any team — will always be closer to the top than the bottom. The gap is growing between the club and its rivals; even Newcastle United has money now.But for the next 13 years, and the 13 after that, I’m willing watch nearly every Tottenham match, just on the off chance that the facts as I’ve come to know them are wrong.Back to Regular Programming SoonThat’s all for this week, and Rory will be back soon. For now, get in touch at askrory@nytimes.com with any hints, tips, complaints or ideas. Twitter works for finding him sometimes, too.Have a great weekend. More

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      The End of the Transfer Fee

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      With the vast majority of teams no longer able to pay stratospheric transfer fees, elite players are recalculating risk and reward on their terms.The two transfers that drew all the oxygen from the summer of 2021 were both monuments to the past.Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have dominated their sport for a generation. That they are both, now, approaching their autumns did not matter; as soon as the chance to to sign them arose, neither Paris St.-Germain nor Manchester United paused for thought. Any doubt at all about what they might do, how they might fit, was assuaged by what they had done.Amid all of the noise generated by those two moves — and two of the greatest players of all time changing clubs in the space of a few weeks will generate a lot of noise — another transfer, one that might come to be seen, in time, as a harbinger, rather faded into the background.That David Alaba had always wanted to play in Spain had long been an open secret. He had, over the course of 12 years at Bayern Munich, won everything there was to win: a couple of Champions Leagues, fistfuls of German titles, a Club World Cup or two. He was part of a Bayern team that won the domestic and international treble. Twice.It was at Bayern where Alaba became, for a time, the best left back on the planet. And when that was not enough, it was at Bayern where he became one of the world’s best central defenders, too. He was appointed captain of Austria’s national team. And, throughout, he was paid beyond handsomely to do it all, by a club that prides itself on the bond it establishes with its players.But Alaba harbored a desire, at some point in his career, to test himself at one of Spain’s twin titans, Real Madrid or Barcelona. Though it is slightly awkward to acknowledge it, now, it was never entirely clear if he had strong feelings on which he would prefer. By late 2020, though, it had become obvious he felt the time was right.Alaba and his representatives had been trying to agree to a new contract with Bayern for some time; his last deal in Bavaria was set to expire in the summer of 2021 — when he would be 29 — and the club wanted to tie him down for the remainder of his peak years. Negotiations, though, were achingly slow. Bayern felt Alaba’s salary demands were too high. They started to suspect there was a reason for that. In October, the club unilaterally withdrew from the talks. Alaba, one of Bayern’s crown jewels, would walk for nothing.In April 2021, he did just that. Despite interest from at least three Premier League teams, Alaba signed a five-year contract with Real Madrid. Reports in Germany at the time suggested it would be worth far more than Bayern had been willing to pay him: $75 million in total, by some estimates. He also stood to earn somewhere in the region of $25 million as a golden handshake.David Alaba: Madrid on his mind.Susana Vera/ReutersWhat Alaba had done, in an American context, was not especially unusual. He had, in effect, used free agency as a way of maximizing the value of what would be, in all likelihood, the most lucrative contract of his career. It was what LeBron James did first to join the Miami Heat, and then to sign for the Los Angeles Lakers. Kevin Durant did it. Albert Pujols did it. Everyone does it.In soccer, though, a star of Alaba’s caliber running a contract down has always been — if not quite a unicorn — the exception, rather than the rule.Quite why that pattern has held is open to interpretation. Players tend to sign long-term contracts, and clubs tend to want them to do so. It gives both sides security, after all. The player knows that their earning power is not dependent on a poorly-timed, lightning-strike injury. The club does not have to worry, every couple of years, about being held over a barrel by an agent.But that is not the only reason. Contract negotiations are rarely, despite appearances, about money; or, rather, they are always about money, just not about money as an end in itself. They are, invariably, about status. A player’s salary is a measure of how much they are appreciated by their club in relation to their teammates, and their peers. The same logic can be applied to the length of their contract. The longer the team will pay you, the more you must mean to it.The corollary to all of that is, of course, that teams tend not to want players to reach the end of their contracts. As a rule, should a valuable player enter the last 18 months — or two years, in some cases — of a deal and prove reluctant to commit to a new contract, the club will seek to sell. Put crudely, allowing a player to run down their contract is, in effect, ceding the economic initiative to the asset, rather than the investor.And yet, increasingly, across European soccer, that is precisely what is happening. Alaba, it seems, may have opened the floodgates. At P.S.G., Kylian Mbappé, the standard-bearer for the sport’s first post-Messi, post-Ronaldo generation, has made it so clear that he wants to leave for Real Madrid on a free transfer in six months that he has even written a comic book on the subject. Reports flutter around Europe every few weeks that a deal has even been agreed.Kylian Mbappé has made no secret of his desire to run out his P.S.G. contract and move to Real Madrid.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAt Chelsea, both Antonio Rüdiger and Andreas Christensen are out of contract soon and both have delayed signing new deals; Real Madrid has been mentioned as a suitor for the former, too.The saga over Paul Pogba’s contract at Manchester United seems to have been dragging on for so long that it might as well be mentioned in the cave paintings of Lascaux. His deal, finally — for the good of humanity — expires in the summer, too. It is perhaps less surprising that there does not seem to be any great rush to alter that particular situation.Mohamed Salah, meanwhile, has a little longer to run on his deal at Liverpool. Like Sadio Mané and Roberto Firmino, Salah is committed to Anfield until 2023. But talks over a new contract have reached an impasse. He does not seem especially fazed by that fact. It is almost as if he knows that if a new contract does not materialize, he will be able to name his price to take his talents elsewhere.It is tempting to assume that the shift can be attributed, solely, to money, too. All of these players — even Christensen, the youngest of all of those mentioned — have earned enough during their careers to make sure their grandchildren never have to worry about income.They have sufficient financial security to tolerate the small risk that they will pick up an injury before they can land their windfall. The reward is worth it, after all: As Alaba found, a club that has not had to pay a transfer fee can be much more generous with its welcome package.That is not, though, the only factor. The financial landscape of European soccer has changed markedly over the last two years, a consequence not only of the coronavirus pandemic, but of the chronic mismanagement of the game’s elite teams during the wild, hedonistic years that preceded it.The vast majority of Europe’s major teams can no longer afford to pay stratospheric transfer fees, not if they can avoid it.It was telling that, Liverpool’s capture of Luis Díaz apart, the January trading period was characterized by clubs desperately trying to trim their expenses: Barcelona jettisoned Philippe Coutinho and tried to shift Ousmane Dembélé elsewhere; Arsenal offloaded its erstwhile captain, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, to Barcelona on a vastly reduced salary; even Juventus, which signed Dusan Vlahovic from Fiorentina, freed up space by handing off two players to Tottenham and, remarkably, Aaron Ramsey to the Scottish champion, Rangers.Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang’s transfer fee suited Barcelona’s budget perfectly: zero.Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNone of these clubs can afford to hand out the sort of sums that it would take to pry a player from the few of their peers that have weathered the storm well: the likes of P.S.G., Bayern and the vast majority of teams in the cash-soaked, bulletproof Premier League.Real Madrid, for example, might be able to pay Rüdiger $60 million over four years, plus a handsome arrival bonus (not least because that cost is absorbed over the length of his contract when it is entered onto the club’s books). It could not, though, pay him $60 million over four years, a handsome arrival bonus and give Chelsea $60 million, too.Even if it could, though, there is no reason to believe Chelsea would accept such an offer. The European champions are bankrolled by a Russian oligarch. There is no price point at which economic logic kicks in, because — like Manchester City and P.S.G. — Chelsea, for all that it attempts to be self-sufficient, does so out of inclination, not out of necessity. It does not have to be subject to economic logic if it does not want to be.For a player at any of those clubs that has emerged unscathed from the last couple of years to have access to a full suite of options on the market is, then, to reach the end of their contract, or near enough for their current team to blink. Their employers cannot be pushed, so they have to jump.This is, perhaps, the conclusion soccer has been waiting a quarter of a century to see. Twenty-five years ago, the Bosman ruling turned the sport on its head, enshrining in European law for the first time the idea that a player, when their contract was up, was in complete control of their destiny.That has been the case for more than a generation, but it is only now that the first few players seem to be breaking from tradition, exploring the full range of possibilities unleashed by that case.For the overwhelming majority of the rest, of course, that will not be possible: The young, the hopeful, the unsettled and the unwanted will all still have a price, just as they have always done. Some teams will have to sell. Others will be happy to buy.For the elite few, though, what was once the security of a long-term contract might soon come to be seen as restriction. Rocco Commisso, the outspoken owner of Fiorentina, had it right when he reflected on his club’s being forced to sell Vlahovic, its prize possession, to Juventus, its loathed rival: The player and his agents, Commisso said, had it in their minds from the start to run down the player’s contract, and to keep all the rewards for themselves.The age of free agency may now be upon us. It might, in time, come to be named the Alaba Model, in honor of the quiet transfer in the noisy summer of 2021 that started it all, the deal that offered a glimpse of the future while everyone was dawdling in the past.Cutting Out the Middle TierDele Alli, who might get to do more than warm up once he joins Everton.Peter Powell/ReutersJanuary had been a month of slumber, right until those last couple of days. It was only when Europe’s transfer deadline loomed that everyone suddenly sprang into action. Everton did the most Everton thing imaginable, signing two good players — Dele Alli and Donny van de Beek — who play in much the same position, therefore condemning at least one of them to failure.Tottenham, too, conformed to type, shipping out Tanguy Ndombélé and Giovani Lo Celso, as well as Alli, only to replace them with Dejan Kulusevski and Rodrigo Bentancur, leaving Antonio Conte with a squad roughly exactly as good as the one he had before all that whirlwind activity, only $50 million lighter.Much more uplifting, of course, was the news of Christian Eriksen’s signing with Brentford. Eriksen, who will turn 30 on Feb. 14, has not played in seven months, not since he collapsed to the turf and went into cardiac arrest while playing for Denmark at the Euros last summer. His return, then, was different from the money-driven moves and hard-feelings exits as friends, rivals, former clubs and fans lined up to wish him well.But it is worth pausing on another deal, too, one that attracted a little less hullabaloo: Manchester City’s acquisition of Julian Alvárez, a 22-year-old forward, from the Argentine club River Plate. Quite what City expects from Alvárez is not entirely clear: Some within the club’s hierarchy see him as a potential replacement for Sergio Agüero; others, it seems, feel he may spend time at City’s network of clubs before arriving in England.Either way, his arrival — as well as that of the 17-year-old wing Zalan Vancsa — illustrates the next phase in City’s attempts to reshape soccer’s established order in its favor. The transfer market, ordinarily, functions as a pyramid. Players move up the tiers at ever increasing cost; those at the top pay a premium to avoid risk.Is Julián Álvarez Manchester City’s next big thing?Natacha Pisarenko/Associated PressIn the ordinary run of things, then, Alvárez might have moved from River Plate to — say — Benfica. Benfica would pay $20 million: a large bet, of course, but not an astronomical one. If he succeeded, then perhaps he would move to Atlético Madrid for $50 million, the price having risen because Atlético could be more certain that he would be a success.Only after he had passed that step would a team of City’s profile — one expecting to win the Premier League, and hoping to lift the Champions League, too — step in and pay $80 million or more for a player it could almost guarantee had the quality to contribute.It is, of course, in City’s interests to short-circuit that process, to have a scouting process so refined and so sophisticated that it can tell who will succeed and who will not without being forced to pay Roma and Atlético and all the other denizens of soccer’s (financial) second tier to find out. It is to the club’s credit if that is the case.Whether it is in the game’s interests is less clear. Money trickling down through the transfer market is the closest thing soccer has to a solidarity mechanism. Flipping players has long allowed countless clubs — Lyon and Porto and Sevilla and Borussia Dortmund among them — to compete despite massive financial disparities.Clearly, there is a sense among the elite that such an approach does not work for them (and, let’s be clear: it doesn’t). In their eyes, the risk is now worth the potential reward. True, City may not have a use, in the long run, for either Alvárez or Vancsa. In that case, they will be sold. And the profit — and there will, in all likelihood, be a profit — will not be banked by a club in desperate need of it, but by one of the richest teams on the planet. More

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      Mourinho, Benítez and the Endless Pursuit of the Past

      by

      Why do two elite managers persist with a trophy-less, and seemingly joyless, slog toward a past they probably will never reclaim?In the sudden flood of spare time he had after departing Manchester United, José Mourinho filmed a commercial for a bookmaker. A couple of years and a couple of jobs on, it is still running on British television. It still works, after all. Mourinho is still a household name in Britain. The ad’s central concept holds up.Mourinho’s acting might be just a little hammy — as you might expect — but it is quite deft, too. Looking as tanned and healthy and relaxed as we all did in 2019, he earnestly walks viewers through what it takes to be “special.” The joke is that he should know: He is the Special One, after all. Get it?He plays it all, though, with a wink and a smirk. The tone is entirely self-deprecating. Mourinho variously pokes fun at his vanity, his boastfulness, his penchant for chicanery. He willingly, happily satirizes the cartoonish villainy that has, for 20 years, made him possibly the most compelling manager of his generation.It is worth noting, though, quite how dated so many of the references are. One of the gags is about him getting into a laundry cart, a nod to an incident that happened before the invention of the iPhone. There is another involving a piece of topiary shaped to look like three raised fingers, a gesture he first adopted before “Game of Thrones” had aired on television.Indeed, the commercial’s prime conceit, the idea of Mourinho as the Special One, predates the existence of YouTube by almost a year. That particular schtick comes from a time when it was still called The Facebook, Netflix was a mail-order DVD rental company, and DVDs were things that people wanted. It is a struggle to describe it as current.That all of the jokes still landed, that they were all immediately comprehensible to their intended audience, is testament both to Mourinho’s enduring relevance and to the spell he has long cast over English soccer, which has long been and possibly always will be hopelessly in love with him. England has never really been able to move on from him.And nor, it would seem, has Mourinho. He is, increasingly, a manager in the same way the Rolling Stones are a live band. They have become, in some way, a tribute act to themselves. Nobody has any real interest in hearing their new material. The only appeal, now, lies in playing the hits.Mourinho’s identity was always as a winner. Then he stopped winning.Alberto Lingria/ReutersMourinho, for his part, keeps on doing just that. A couple of weeks ago, as he chewed over his Roma’s team’s engrossing defeat to Juventus — squandering a 3-1 lead to lose by a single goal — he claimed, variously, that his players were too nice, too weak, too afflicted by some sort of deep-seated psychological complex that he simply could not solve. Everyone, it turned out, was to blame except him.It was not the first time he had delved into his back catalog in his six months in Rome. After a humiliating 6-1 defeat to Bodo/Glimt, he claimed that the Norwegian champion had “better players” than Roma, despite operating on a fraction of the budget. He has squabbled with referees. He has highlighted the shortcomings of his squad after almost every defeat.And defeat has come more regularly than he would like. Mourinho’s tenure has not quite been a failure by the club’s standards: Roma sits seventh in Serie A, still at least theoretically in the race for a Champions League slot, roughly where it might have been expected to be. By Mourinho’s standard, though, it has been beyond deflating.Winning is not just central to Mourinho’s reputation, it is the cornerstone of his identity. For two decades, he has earned some of the most illustrious posts in soccer — Chelsea, Inter Milan, Real Madrid, Manchester United — not for the way in which his teams play but for the way his games end. Mourinho is a winner. He might be an acquired taste, but he gets results.It is tempting to wonder if, perhaps, the reason he has seemed so much more fractious in recent years, that the warming charm that always used to balance out the lurking snarl has all but disappeared from view, is because he has lost that sense of himself. He is a winner who no longer wins.Mourinho’s Roma is clinging to hopes of a Champions League place next season.Andrew Medichini/Associated PressHis last few seasons have served as a case study in decline. First, he celebrated finishing second with Manchester United, something a younger, more bellicose Mourinho would never have done. Then he took on the job of rebuilding Tottenham, but seemed to lack the patience and indulgence and gentle touch such a project required. It turned sour, fast. Choosing outcome over process, it turned out, is not a viable approach when that outcome is not predicated by economics.And now he finds himself at Roma, a fine and historic and weighty club, but hardly in a position to meet his ambitions. Roma, after all, is not Real Madrid. It is not capable of winning every game, of delivering the trophies and the glory that Mourinho craves, the ones that affirm his status and burnish his legend.The question that lingers, then, is why? What does Mourinho get out of this? He does not seem to elicit any joy from it: He looks far happier in that three-year-old ad than he has in his day job for some time. Is it greed, then? Perhaps, but then elite managers are paid handsomely to win, and then paid off equally handsomely if they do not. Mourinho has earned enough, in salary and in compensation, to buy all the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs he could ever want and never need.It may, then, be the status: not that of a winner, but that of a manager. Roma, like Tottenham, may be a second-tier post, but it remains prestigious and powerful and high profile. It means Mourinho can still command a crowd, a stadium, a room; it means, most importantly, that he is still what he has always been: a manager.Mourinho with Rafael Benítez in better days, which for both men is the past.Nigel Roddis/EPA, via ShutterstockPerhaps he, like his old nemesis, Rafael Benítez, simply cannot countenance the idea of not working. Certainly, it is hard to understand why else Benítez would have chosen, last summer, to sacrifice the lingering affection in which Liverpool’s fans held him to take charge of Everton, his former team’s bitter city rival.It cannot have been because Everton had an upwardly mobile air: The club has employed five managers in as many years, possesses the disjointed squad to prove it, and was turned down by at least one contender for the post last summer because the club looked so chaotic from the outside.It was operating under severe strictures in the transfer market after years of wild spending. Its expectations far outstripped its opportunities. Benítez’s background, meanwhile, made it obvious that the atmosphere would turn toxic at the first hint of trouble, and he would be fired. In many ways, it was remarkable that the inevitable denouement to an unhappy marriage of convenience did not come until last week.Benítez will have known all of that, and yet he took the job anyway, and for precisely the same reasons that convinced Mourinho to sign on at Roma and at Tottenham. It is not just a need to manage — their work long since having fused with their identity — but the pursuit of the one victory they now, truly, cherish: vindication.Benítez, who won the Champions League with Liverpool, was always an odd pick across town at Everton.Lindsey Parnaby/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImageThey are driven on by a furious refusal to relinquish their primacy, by an avowed belief that they will be proved right in the end, by a conviction that they will have the last laugh. The game may change — the tactics and the training methods and the tools used, the data and the nutrition and the sports science — but it is striking how managers do not.Benítez remains wedded to the core approach that brought him his halcyon days at Liverpool and, before that, Valencia. Mourinho has seen how damaging it can be to hang his players out to dry in public, at United and Tottenham and Roma, but he keeps on doing it anyway, because that is what worked back before YouTube.As they age, managers become avatars for the systems they once merely adopted. They become one and the same as the approach they are seen to represent. They become set in their ways in a literal sense: They want not only to win, but to win in the way that they once did, as if to demonstrate that they were right all along, that the game has not moved on from them. It has happened to Benítez and to Mourinho, just as it once happened to Arsène Wenger.And so they keep moving, keep trying, keep working, taking jobs that bring them no joy in the vain hope that, one day, the innate superiority of who they are, of what they stand for, will be clear once again. And in doing so, they grow ever more calcified in their own ideas, their own pasts, unable to accept or admit that all those things that made them special were quite a long time ago.Narrow HorizonsThomas Tuchel, who led Chelsea to the Champions League title, won FIFA’s coach of the year award on Monday. Like every winner before him, he coaches a big European club.Harold Cunningham/Agence France-Presse, via Pool/Afp Via Getty ImagesNot once, in more than 30 years, has a player based outside Europe won FIFA’s men’s world player of the year award, no matter which guise it has taken at the time. None has, in fact, even come close.Martín Palermo did not make the top three after inspiring Boca Juniors to both the Copa Libertadores and a club world championship in 2000. Nor did Neymar, despite his youthful brilliance sweeping Santos to South American glory in 2011. By 2019, when Gabriel Barbosa won that year’s edition of the tournament for Flamengo by scoring twice in the dying minutes, nobody would even have considered voting for him.And, as unfortunate as it is, there is a logic to that. It is hard to dispute that, for at least 20 of those 30 years, the best players in the world have been in Europe. They have not all been Europeans, of course — Brazilians have won the FIFA award five times, and Lionel Messi has a collection of them — but they have all played in one of Europe’s major leagues. That, after all, is where the strongest teams are. It is where a player’s talent is tested most exhaustively.(The geography of the women’s award has been more varied: It has been won by players based in the United States, Australia, Japan and, for a stretch a little more than a decade ago, basically wherever Marta happened to be playing. That the last couple of years have been dominated by Europe perhaps says something about the shifting balance of power in the women’s game.)What is less simple to understand is why that same Eurocentrism should be applied to managers, both in the men’s and women’s categories. No manager of a men’s team outside Europe has finished in the top three since FIFA started handing out the prize in 2016. (Jill Ellis, the former coach of the United States’ women’s team, and her former counterpart with Japan, Asako Takakura, have both taken a podium place in the women’s voting.)This year, the omissions were especially egregious. FIFA’s own rules state that the prize should be judged on a coach’s performance between October 2020 and October 2021. In that time, Pitso Mosimane, Al Ahly’s South African coach, won the African Champions League. Twice. Abel Ferreira of Brazil’s Palmeiras won one Copa Libertadores and was well on the way to picking up a second in the same calendar year. Neither was even nominated.The logic that can be applied to the players’ awards does not hold with managers. It does not automatically follow that the manager who has won the biggest trophy has performed better than all of their peers. Management, after all, is about making the most of the resources available to you. It is about exceeding expectations in your own personal context.It is why, for example, it is possible to make a case that David Moyes’s taking West Ham into the Champions League would be a more impressive achievement than Pep Guardiola’s winning the title with Manchester City. Or why Chris Wilder leading Sheffield United to seventh in the Premier League was a better feat of management than Jürgen Klopp’s making Liverpool the league’s champion.And it is why there is no reason that neither Mosimane nor Ferreira were officially recognized for their remarkable success over the last 12 months or so. They were overlooked, instead, because soccer, on some structural level, has bought into the bright lights and the ostentatious self-importance of Europe. And in doing so, it sells itself short.CorrespondenceJosé Luis Chilavert. omitted last week but never forgotten.Matthias Schrader/Picture-Alliance/DPA via AP ImagesThe easiest way to handle the main theme of my inbox this week is to list all the people — Mark Brill, Bob Shay, Christopher Dum, Alex McMillan — who sent emails that contained the words “José Luis Chilavert” and “Rogério Ceni” in response to last week’s newsletter on Manchester City’s flirtation with having Éderson take its penalties.The readers are quite right, too: There have been a handful of famous penalty- and free-kick-taking goalkeepers, particularly in South America. As Christoph von Teichman mentioned, it has happened in Europe, too. “Hans Jörg Butt, a Bundesliga goalkeeper, scored 26 goals from the spot for three different teams (Hamburg, Bayer Leverkusen and Bayern), as well as one for each of these teams in Champions League games, curiously all against Juventus,” he wrote.As a man who considers himself an insufferable know-it-all, the fact that none of them were mentioned is a heavy blow to my self-esteem. Still, I think, the point holds: Pep Guardiola has wrought a drastic shift in English soccer’s conception of what is acceptable if we are open to an idea that always used to seem like something of a carnival trick.Firmer ground was provided by Will Allen, who asked a deceptively tricky question. “Why is an odd number of substitutions sacrosanct,” he asked. He’s right, too: The debate is either for a return to three or an increase to five. “How about everyone has four?” I don’t know, is the short answer. I mean, yes. Obviously. They should just have four. That’s a fair compromise, isn’t it? It is. So why does it seem morally and spiritually wrong? More