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    North Korea’s Han Kwang-song Returns to International Soccer

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    Han Kwang-song’s recent appearances in World Cup qualifiers were his first ones overseas since 2020, when U.N. sanctions led to an involuntary career break.When the North Korean men’s soccer team took the field for two 2026 World Cup qualifying matches this month, close observers noticed an important roster change.Han Kwang-song, a high-profile striker, was back, more than three years after vanishing from public view for reasons beyond his control: United Nations-imposed sanctions on North Korean nationals over Pyongyang’s nuclear program.Mr. Han’s story is a rare case of North Korea sanctions reverberating through professional soccer. It also shows how enforcement of U.N. sanctions against individuals varies by country.The government in Italy did not deport Mr. Han, now 25, while he was playing professional soccer there. But once he moved to Qatar, the Qatari government did.“The basic story makes sense; the surprising part is that Qatar complied with the U.N. resolutions,” said Marcus Noland, an expert on North Korean sanctions and executive vice president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.A prodigy with ‘superhero’ statusMr. Han’s early success was partly a product of North Korea’s push to cultivate soccer talent. After attending a prestigious soccer school founded by the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, Mr. Han trained in Spain before turning pro in Italy.He quickly made an impression in Europe as a speedy forward with an eye for goal. Back home, North Korea’s official news agency praised him after a 2019 Asian Cup qualifier as “the player that experts and enthusiasts paid the most attention to.”“In North Korea, he’s a superhero,” said Kim Heung-Tae, a professor of sports science at Daejin University in South Korea who follows the North’s soccer program.But in 2017, as punishment for the North’s sixth nuclear weapons test, the United Nations Security Council ordered all North Korean nationals working abroad to be repatriated by December 2019 — a strategy for preventing financing of the North’s military.Mr. Han, one of several North Koreans playing overseas in professional soccer leagues at the time, was among the targets.Sanctions meet realityBut the Italian authorities did not repatriate Mr. Han by the 2019 deadline, United Nations Security Council reports show. Instead, Juventus, the Italian club where he had been earning more than half a million euros a year, struck a deal in early 2020 to send him to Al-Duhail, a soccer team in Qatar, on a five-year contract worth about 4.3 million euros, about $4.7 million.Though a Security Council panel of experts on North Korea contacted Italy and Qatar immediately after that transfer, it was not canceled, and Juventus accepted a transfer fee from the Qatari club, according to the U.N. The panel said in a report that it later “reiterated to Qatar the relevant resolutions concerning the case.”That summer, Mr. Han stopped appearing for Al-Duhail. In January 2021, Qatar’s mission to the United Nations said in a letter to the U.N. panel that Mr. Han had left Qatar after having his contract “terminated” by the club — and that Qatar’s actions reflected its commitments to Security Council resolutions about North Korean nationals who earn income abroad.At the time, the coronavirus pandemic was raging, and North Korea’s borders were sealed. Qatar said in its letter, a copy of which was included in a U.N. report, that Mr. Han had left the country on Qatar Airways Flight 131 — a nonstop flight to Rome.‘He’s probably been training all along’Details of Mr. Han’s movements since leaving Qatar, including the timing and circumstances of his return to North Korea, remain scarce. According to Transfermarkt, a website that tracks soccer players and their contracts, he has not played for a professional club since July 2021.Also unclear is whether any of Mr. Han’s earnings ever made it back to the North Korean government.Mr. Han signed an agreement in 2020 with a Qatari bank, where he had an account at the time, pledging not to transfer any money to his home country, according to a U.N. report. Still, Professor Kim said, North Korean agents had most likely accompanied him everywhere he went overseas and restricted how he spent his earnings.Neither FIFA, the governing body of soccer; nor the Italian or Qatari Foreign Ministries; nor North Korea’s soccer association or the Asian Football Confederation immediately responded to requests for comment. Nor did Al-Duhail, Juventus or Cagliari, another team that Mr. Han played for in Italy.Mr. Han’s return to competition this month was reported earlier by CNN and the website NK News, among other outlets.Professor Kim said that the pandemic had probably curtailed many athletic events in North Korea, where the long-lasting border closing crippled the nation’s economy. But soccer is the country’s most popular sport, and Professor Kim said that domestic competitions had probably been held regularly in recent months.As for Mr. Han, Professor Kim said, “he’s probably been training all along.”Rather than joining another professional league abroad, Mr. Han is likely to focus on preparing for the 2026 World Cup, Professor Kim said. He added that North Korea was competitive in its region and had a good chance of qualifying, in part because FIFA has nearly doubled the number of slots for Asian countries at that tournament, which will be held in the United States, Canada and Mexico.Max Canzi, who coached Mr. Han in Italy for Cagliari’s under-19 team, told CNN that he was “very happy” that the striker had returned to international competition for the World Cup qualifying match against Syria in Saudi Arabia on Nov. 16.As Mr. Han resumes his career, Mr. Canzi added that he was “very curious about the level of his performance after being out for so much time.”Mr. Han was substituted at halftime in the Saudi Arabia match, which North Korea lost, 1-0. But five days later in Yangon, Myanmar, he contributed to a 6-1 win over the home country with a signature headed goal. More

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      At Juventus, a Strange Season Takes Another Turn

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      A rough start to the season has been forgotten in Italy amid an unlikely title chase and a date with Napoli.The start of Juventus’s season was miserable. A raft of injuries ravaged the club’s squad. The team’s results, in those first few weeks, were flecked with disappointment. Barely a month into the campaign, Manager Massimiliano Allegri was having to smooth over the impact of an interview in which he had suggested “something was missing” from his side, alienating several of his players.Things did not improve. By early October, with Juventus seemingly adrift in the Serie A title race and on the brink of a humiliating elimination from the Champions League, Allegri received the public backing of Andrea Agnelli, the club’s president. That is rarely a good sign. When it is prefaced by an admission that the team should be “ashamed” of its performance, it is significantly worse.As it turned out, though, that was not the nadir. Far from it, in fact. At the end of November, Agnelli — together with the rest of the Juventus board — had resigned his position, seemingly as a consequence of an 18-month investigation by Italian prosecutors into financial irregularities related to the team’s activity in the transfer market. (The club denied wrongdoing.)The Juventus president, Andrea Agnelli, right, and the rest of the club’s board resigned en masse in November.Alessandro Di Marco/EPA, via ShutterstockThe next day, UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, announced that it was opening an investigation into whether it had been misled by the club, too, raising the specter of a possible sporting punishment being levied against one of Europe’s grandest teams on top of a possible judicial one.Then, a couple of weeks later, the European Court of Justice issued a nonbinding ruling that — essentially — declared UEFA’s role as an apparent monopoly did not breach European law. The decision effectively quashed the legal basis for a European Super League, the project that Juventus, which registered a loss of $273 million last year, had identified as its way out of financial crisis.In the space of four months, almost everything that could have gone wrong for Juventus, on and off the field, had gone wrong. The team was in disarray. The club had been shaken to its core. Its light, for so long the brightest in Italy, was blinking and fading, obscured by despair and disappointment.On Friday, Allegri’s team travels south to face Napoli, a side that looked at one point like it might run away with the Serie A title this season. Napoli was, until last week, the last unbeaten team in any of Europe’s major leagues. In Victor Osimhen and Khvicha Kvaratshkelia, it possesses arguably the most devastating attack in European soccer.But should Juventus win, it would cut Napoli’s lead at the top to only 4 points. It would be the ninth consecutive victory for Allegri’s team. In the previous eight, Juventus has not conceded a goal. Win in Naples, and the most miserable season Juventus could have imagined would, all of a sudden, glisten with anticipated glory.Massimiliano Allegri’s Juventus has posted eight straight wins, and eight straight shutouts, in Serie A.John Sibley/Action Images, via ReutersQuite how Allegri has effected that upswing is something of a mystery. Juventus has not suddenly started playing well; cautious and obdurate, it remains something of an anomaly in the modern Serie A, now probably the most attack-minded league in Europe.Of the eight wins that have swept Allegri’s team into Napoli’s slipstream, five have finished 1-0. Juventus required an injury-time goal to beat Cremonese last week; Danilo scored in the 86th minute to secure victory against Udinese on Saturday. Antonio Cassano, the firebrand former striker turned pundit, insisted that Juventus did not “deserve” to win that game.Nor has Allegri benefited from the sudden return to fitness of a phalanx of major stars. Ángel Di María, now a World Cup champion, has returned to the side, and Federico Chiesa is slowly recovering from long-term injury. But Paul Pogba, Leonardo Bonucci and Dusan Vlahovic are all still missing, and Juventus’s resources are hardly any deeper now than they were three months ago.In their absence, of course, Allegri has had to trust more in youth than he — like all Italian coaches — would ideally like. That has allowed the midfielder Fabio Miretti, still only 19 but now an Italian international, to blossom into the standard-bearer of the club’s next generation. The sense of freshness, as well as the injection of energy, has helped.Juventus has had a glimpse of its future in midfielder Fabio Miretti, 19.Pedro Nunes/ReutersIt is tempting, though, to wonder if there is something else at play. It is striking, in modern soccer, when players can count on millions of literal followers and managers are habitually presented as possessors of rare and precious gifts, quite to what extent everyone involved believes the world is aligned against them.Seeding and curating what is generally known as a siege mentality is almost every manager’s basic play, their immediate reflex. Pep Guardiola does it, at unfathomably wealthy Manchester City. Jürgen Klopp does it, after five years of gushing praise for his Liverpool teams. Both Real Madrid and Barcelona fervently believe they suffer so the other can thrive.But while the specific content is often laughable, the fact that so many managers — and players and executives and fans — adopt this mentality is significant. There must, in some fashion, be a power in convincing players that it is them against the world, that everyone is out to get them, that they are the underdog, fighting the good fight. They must believe it, at least in part because they want to believe it.And so, perhaps, Juventus’s many months of weakness have metamorphosed into a strength. All of the criticism, all of the crisis, has helped bond Allegri’s players to one another and to their coach. It has helped them buy into the reactive, gnarled way he wants them to play, to act, to be. It has helped them scrabble and claw their way out of misery and into the light. Things could not, really, have got any worse for Juventus. And it is at that point, perhaps, that you realize they are going to get better.A Modern GreatGareth Bale was quite good at getting the last word.Manu Fernandez/Associated PressA few years ago, at the height of Gareth Bale’s cold war with Real Madrid, someone with a connection to the club and an ax to grind suggested that the Welshman had never really tried to establish a bond with his teammates.The evidence, beyond an alleged unwillingness to improve his Spanish and the longstanding accusation that he spent all of his spare time on the golf course, was that he had — on more than one occasion — failed to attend a team-building dinner with the rest of the squad. To the rest of Madrid’s players, the story went, it had felt like a deliberate snub.There was, though, an alternative explanation, offered by another Real Madrid player who had made the same call as Bale (though, curiously, did not attract so much censure). The dinner in question, it turned out, had been scheduled on Spanish time: appetizers at 11 p.m., a main course arriving around midnight, thinking about a dessert after one in the morning, that sort of thing. A couple of the club’s northern European players, including Bale, had decided that was far too late for food, and so given the event a miss.Even now, it is not entirely clear quite why such sourness infused Bale’s last few years in Madrid. The disconnect between player and club always seemed somehow small and petty, as if the problem was not a difference of vision or ambition but, more than anything, a lack of communication and understanding.Its impact, though, is indisputable. Bale’s sudden retirement this week, six months before the expiration of his contract at Los Angeles F.C., brought a flood of tributes and testaments to what has been, by any measure, a gleaming career.At the club level, Bale has won five Champions League titles, three Liga championships, a Copa del Rey, and an M.L.S. Cup. His most meaningful legacy, though, may have been with Wales. More than anyone else, he ended the country’s long wait to compete in a major tournament (the 2016 European Championship) and its even longer wait to return to the World Cup.For all that, though, it has long felt as if Bale receded from the front rank of major stars some time ago. Some of that, of course, can be attributed to age and injury — his powers had waned, no question — but his rumbling ostracism from Real Madrid’s team played a part, too.Over the years, as we have grown used to Bale’s absence, we have internalized the idea that no true great could ever be so dispensable. The argument has been made, in recent days, that Bale never quite fulfilled his talent. But while the working is sound, the conclusion is wrong. Bale’s career stands up in comparison to (almost) anyone. It is not that he did not give enough to the game. It is that the game did not think enough of him.Money Can’t Buy HappinessJoão Félix has joined Chelsea on loan for the remainder of the season. He was red-carded an hour into his debut on Thursday.Alastair Grant/Associated PressBoth of these things are true: At the start of the summer, Chelsea had a squad that consisted largely of players who had — only a year earlier — been crowned champions of Europe. Since then, the club has spent something in the region of $380 million on reinforcements.And yet, glancing through its squad, it is hard not to have questions. Two questions, in particular. The first is: “On what?” The second is: “Really?”It is not that Chelsea has bought bad players. It has, of course, spent a little injudiciously at times: Kalidou Koulibaly may, it turns out, have been past his prime, and Wesley Fofana’s injury record might, harshly, have been seen as a red flag. And it has, occasionally, paid over market value, most notably for fullback Marc Cucurella.The problem is not just that Chelsea has bought players who are not significant upgrades on what it already had. It is that it has bought them with no apparent strategy beyond the idea that more is better. João Félix, a relatively low-risk loan deal completed this week, embodies the issue: a fine player, but one that does not address any particular shortfall.Getting the best out of him will entail inhibiting — either in time or space — Kai Havertz, or Raheem Sterling, or Mason Mount, or some combination of the three. Will Félix make Chelsea better? Possibly. Will he assuage the most pressing flaws in Graham Potter’s team? Probably not. And that, really, is the central question: How can a team go through so much (expensive) change, and yet seem to get absolutely nowhere?CorrespondenceWill Clark-Shim has, it could be said, been reading this newsletter for too long. “I believe we have reached that time of year when you muse on the F.A. Cup and whether it has outlived its day,” he noted, immediately forcing me to change what I was going to write about this week. “Isn’t the better question why there is still a second English and Welsh tournament cluttering the schedule?”This, of course, refers to the venerable Carabao Cup, English soccer’s long-lasting optional extra. There is, certainly, some merit to the idea of abolishing a tournament that was only invented (in the 1960s) so that clubs could make money from newfangled floodlights. The rebuttal, though, is no less valid.Dan Burn, left, and Newcastle are enjoying the Carabao Cup quite a bit. They will face Southampton in the semifinals.Lee Smith/Action Images, via ReutersIt has two central pillars: the valuable funds the tournament generates for the lower tiers of English domestic soccer, and the opportunity for glory it provides second-tier teams in the Premier League. This week, after all, Newcastle, Southampton and Nottingham Forest have all made the semifinals. At least one will be in the final. It hardly seems the time to diminish the competition’s significance.And we had a perfect New Year email from Ellen Johnson. “Since the Brooklyn Dodgers went westward, I’ve not been interested in sports,” she wrote. “That changed with the World Cup. At 82, I’m a believer now. So what’s next? Which teams are worth following?”Well, first of all: Welcome on board. I give it three weeks before you’re railing against the perceived iniquities of V.A.R. There should be plenty, over the next six months, to meet your needs, as Europe’s major domestic competitions wind their way to the finish and the Champions League — home of the biggest game in soccer outside of the World Cup final — coalesces into its annual mayhem.What’s worth following? Whether Arsenal, without a title in 18 years, can cling on in the Premier League, Freiburg’s unlikely bid for a top-four finish in Germany, and Paris St.-Germain’s star-studded assault on the Champions League.The best teams to watch, though, are not always the obvious ones. Brighton comes with a guarantee of entertainment in the Premier League. Benfica is a compelling outsider in the Champions League. And it is this newsletter’s avowed belief that the only event that could come close to the frenzy of the World Cup, the story that could yet define this season, would be Napoli winning its first Italian title in 34 years. More

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      Paulo Dybala, Juventus and the Problem With Italy

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      The travails of Dybala, whose contract with Juventus runs out this month, are emblematic of a soccer ecosystem that is often a world apart.Paulo Dybala did not, particularly, look as if he were ready to say goodbye. As the lights at the Allianz Stadium in Turin, his home for the last seven years, flashed and flickered, and Tina Turner’s “The Best” began its crescendo, he started to cry. Not in the sense of a single, elegant tear rolling down the cheek. He sobbed. He racked. His chest heaved as he gulped for air.As Juventus’s fans stood as one to applaud Dybala, Leonardo Bonucci, his longstanding teammate, rushed over to put an arm around his shoulder. It was not an act of consolation so much as one of support. His eyes red and his face raw, it looked momentarily as if Dybala might struggle to remain upright.Dybala had not wanted to leave. Not really, not deep down. Instead, his hand had been forced. His contract at Juventus expires next week. He had been set to sign a new one, one to keep him in Turin for four years, last October, but Juventus withdrew it. The club had scheduled further discussions for March, but those never materialized.Things had changed in the intervening months, the team’s executives explained to Dybala’s agents. The Juventus attack was going to be built around Dusan Vlahovic, a Serbian striker signed from Fiorentina in January. There would be no room for Dybala, either on the field or on the salary roll. His time was up. He was free to leave.Dybala in May, after his final game at Juventus.Massimo Pinca/ReutersDybala might, when the tears had dried and he had recovered his composure, have wondered if that was no bad thing to be this summer. Europe’s teams are still recovering from the financial impact of the coronavirus pandemic. Most are not sufficiently flush to pay vast transfer fees, but that has not dimmed their desire for improvement. This is — as it was always going to be — the summer of the free transfer.Antonio Rüdiger has already taken advantage of it, swapping Chelsea for Real Madrid. His former teammate at Chelsea, Andreas Christensen, has done the same, joining Barcelona. Paul Pogba will, in the coming days, announce that he is returning to Juventus after his contract at Manchester United expired. All of them will have made sure that at least some of the money that they might have fetched in transfer fees on the open market now finds its way into their pay packets instead.Dybala might have expected to attract more suitors than all of them. He is 28, in the thick of his prime years. He was, for a while, arguably the most gifted player on one of the most successful teams in Europe. He has won Serie A titles and played in the Champions League final. He scored 113 goals in 283 games for Juventus. He is, by any measure, an elite forward. His signature would be a coup.It has not quite played out like that. With a week to go until he is no longer a Juventus player, Dybala has yet to find a new employer. Inter Milan, for weeks his most likely destination, has suddenly cooled on the idea, having already restored Romelu Lukaku to its ranks. A.C. Milan, the returned Serie A champion, would be an alternative, but no offer has yet emerged.Romelu Lukaku couldn’t wait to leave Chelsea and return to Inter Milan. His move ended one possible exit route for Dybala.Tiziana Fabi/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMore curious still is the apparent apathy from outside Italy. Dybala, a player who has previously captured the imaginations of Manchester United, Tottenham, Barcelona and Real Madrid, has received only one serious proposal from abroad, from Sevilla, that great collector of mercurial Argentine forwards. The catch is that it comes with a significant pay cut. One of the finest players in Italy is available at no cost, and much of Europe has barely blinked.In part, that is because of Dybala himself. His salary expectations rule out a vast majority of clubs. His injury record might give others pause. His form, over the last couple of years, has been a little inconsistent, though he would doubtless point out that Juventus has hardly played in a way that might extract his best performances.That, in fact, may be the most apposite factor. In an era when most teams play with some version of an attacking trident — two wide players cutting in, one central forward employed to create space — Dybala does not have a natural home.He is, by inclination and disposition, a No. 10, a position that has all but ceased to exist in modern soccer. Even Juventus, where the role — as much as the number — carries a certain “weight,” as one of the club’s executives said this year, is abolishing it. Elite soccer, now, does not have room for what Italian soccer has long called the fantasista. Dybala may prove to be the last of the line.But the limbo in which Dybala finds himself is part of a broader trend, too. Italian soccer is an increasingly isolated ecosystem, a world unto itself. It is not just that Italian players, as a rule, do not leave Italy: Only four members called to Roberto Mancini’s team for this month’s meeting with Argentina, the so-called Finalissima, played outside Serie A, the same number as he called up to his victorious squad for Euro 2020. It is that the country’s coaches travel less and less frequently, too. Carlo Ancelotti may have won yet another Champions League less than a month ago, and Antonio Conte might have helped Tottenham win back its place in Europe’s elite, but they are exceptions rather than the rule.Gennaro Gattuso was installed a few weeks ago at Valencia — a match made in Jorge Mendes’s idea of heaven — but he is the only other Italian coach in Europe’s big five leagues. The Netherlands, Portugal, Germany and Spain export great numbers of managers, seeding ideas and spreading philosophies. The graduates of Coverciano, Italy’s fabled coaching academy, tend to stay closer to home.Carlo Ancelotti is a rarity: a successful Italian coach working outside of Italy.Oscar Del Pozo/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIncreasingly, too, Serie A has drifted free of its moorings at the heart of elite soccer’s economic system. According to the consultancy firm Twenty First Group, 138 players have left France’s top flight for teams in the other big-five leagues in the last five years. Ninety-eight have left Spain. Only 82 have left Italy, fewer even than the Premier League, soccer’s great apex predator.Some, of course, have been eye-catchingly successful: Liverpool plucked Mohamed Salah and Alisson Becker from Roma; Paris St.-Germain, a frequent importer of luxury Italian goods, has acquired the likes of Mauro Icardi, Gianluigi Donnarumma and Achraf Hakimi from the two Milanese clubs. There have been other, more low-key triumphs, too: Bayer Leverkusen’s signing of Patrik Schick and Leicester’s recruiting Timothy Castagne.But largely, Italian clubs now trade with each other. In the same time period, teams in France, Spain, Germany and England sold around 100 players apiece to their domestic rivals. Italian sides did almost twice as much business internally: 215 players have left one Serie A club for another since 2017.It is that, more than anything, that may have precluded Dybala’s having the choice he might have expected, once his sorrow at seeing his time at Juventus cut short had abated. Italy is no longer a place teams go to shop. One of the best players in Europe is out of contract next week, and only a handful of teams seem to have taken note. Not because of what he can do, or because of what he has achieved, but because of where he has done it, a global star who flourished in Italy’s own little world.Time to Say GoodbyeSadio Mané is happy. It’s OK to be happy for him, too.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThose of you not regularly exposed to Britain’s soccer content-industrial complex might be blissfully unaware of the fact that a variety of retired players have declared Sadio Mané’s transfer to Bayern Munich a bad one. Michael Owen is “struggling to understand” why a player with one year left on his contract would leave Liverpool for a European giant.Ally McCoist, meanwhile, finds it “very strange.” Paul Merson was equally baffled. Dean Saunders believes Mané, the Senegal forward, will “ruin the best two years of his career.”To some extent, of course, the thing that comes out worst from this whole confected farrago is the soccer media in Britain, thanks to its willingness to lend weight to the words of almost anyone who has ever kicked a ball and its desperate need to drag out whatever thin talking point it can find in a long, slow, balmy June.The reality, of course, is that there is nothing to say about Mané’s departure from Liverpool. Indeed, it is something of a unicorn: a player swapping one major club for another with absolutely no acrimony whatsoever.The rationale behind Mané’s decision is blindingly obvious: He has spent six years at Anfield, won everything, and now wants to try something new. Bayern Munich offers not only a guarantee of trophies but a consistent place in (at least) the Champions League quarterfinals and the sort of salary that Liverpool was not prepared to pay.It is so simple that even the one faction that might be expected to have criticized Mané’s decision, Liverpool’s fans, seems satisfied. There is a disappointment that the club’s beloved front three is no more, of course, but there has been no fury, no resentment and no accusations of greed or treachery.That has partly to do with the affection and esteem in which Mané is held, but it also has to do with the timing of his departure. Mané goes having achieved everything he set out to achieve at Liverpool. There are no unanswered questions, no sense of what might have been, no reason to regret. There is also no feeling that he lingered too long. Perhaps that is what has caused the confusion. Perhaps that is what that legion of former players is struggling to understand. Transfers are not meant to happen like this. Someone is meant to be angry. Everything falls apart if they are not.Welcome to FIFA’s Party. B.Y.O.Gianni Infantino and FIFA’s golden goose.Eduardo Munoz/ReutersEnvironmentally, it borders on the criminal. Logistically, it will be a nightmare. There are too many teams and too many games and, as begrudging as it sounds, too many venues. If this year’s World Cup threatens to be too compact, too tight, then the 2026 iteration seems too sprawling, too vast.Still, for all of that, it is hard not to find the prospect of a World Cup scattered across North America tantalizing. A final in Los Angeles, Miami or (the correct answer, for reasons not quite as partisan as they might seem) New York? A debut for the men’s tournament in Canada? A return to Mexico, to the Azteca, the quintessential World Cup venue? Soccer at Arrowhead? All of it is perfect.That, of course, is not why FIFA awarded the tournament to North America. It did so because it will be the most lucrative World Cup in history. It might well be the most lucrative World Cup there could ever be. The North American bid team’s own projections estimated that FIFA will leave the United States, Canada and Mexico with an $11 billion surplus.Not that FIFA needs the money, of course. The organization’s cash reserves already run into the billions. And yet it still felt the need to demand various tax breaks from candidate cities, simply to make the whole exercise more money-spinning for itself.All of that, though, simply makes the question more urgent. What, precisely, does it intend to do with the infusion 2026 will bring? Will there be a sudden, dramatic improvement on the amount of money it can pump into the game in less-developed soccer nations?A FIFA employee may well have provided the answer. Earlier this month, Arsène Wenger — a little ham-fistedly — suggested that soccer was missing out on talent because the infrastructure to find it was not as advanced in Africa as it is in Europe. There are no prizes for guessing whose responsibility that is. FIFA already has the money to redress the balance between Europe and, well, everywhere else. After 2026, it will have no excuses for failing to do so.CorrespondenceShawn Donnelly has a question. “It’s easy to find out how much money athletes are making during the season. Why is it so difficult to get the same information for European soccer players? It seems like these figures are state secrets. As a fan, it’s tough to get a full picture of how much the players are making, and so to know the real cost to the clubs.”This is meat and drink for the correspondence section: an Atlantic cultural divide. There is, as a rule, traditionally a greater degree of transparency in American sports. (I always enjoy American journalists who complain, understandably, that teams increasingly won’t let them into the locker room; try shouting a single question at Harry Winks in a parking lot, only for him not to answer it.) That seems the most obvious explanation.But I might be tempted to flip the question on its head, too. Why are American sports and American athletes so willing to divulge their salaries? As a journalist, obviously, I’d encourage it. As a fan, too. Fans have a right to know these things. But I’m not sure any of us especially enjoy talking about how much, or how little, we earn, just as I’m not sure any of us like being questioned about our performance at work while in our underwear.Speaking of asking questions, there were plenty of submissions for commentary bugbears, too. Karl Thompson pitched, “well, there was contact,” when discussing whether something should or should not be a penalty. Benson Lieber dismissed my suggestion of “interrogating” because it has “become one of the most prominent buzzwords in the literary humanities,” which is more than enough to rule it out. And Josh Curnett volunteered, “showed a clean pair of heels,” which feels evocative enough to be allowed a pass.And special mention to Andrew Melnykovych, who wondered: “Are you asking questions of asking questions?” More

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      Andrea Pirlo Is Timeless

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      With elite soccer increasingly driven by coaches and systems, Pirlo feels as if he belongs to another era. But can a classic ever go out of style?Officially, whenever Andrea Pirlo has watched soccer over the course of the last year or so, it has been for work, rather than merely for pleasure. It might be almost a year since his first foray into management was ended, abruptly and unceremoniously, by Juventus, but being a manager is less a job and more a lifestyle choice, like being a monk, or a double agent. It cannot be switched off.He does not watch passively, losing himself in the thrill of the game. Instead, he tries to distill from what he is seeing some idea, some concept, some notion that might come in useful somewhere down the line. His appetite for coaching remains undimmed by his experience in Turin; he will, he knows, return at some point. Everything is research, revision, for that moment. “Anything that might help me do my job,” he said.But while Pirlo is now a manager by trade, he remains every inch an aesthete by inclination. That does not come with an off button, either. And so, he admits, he finds it intensely difficult, if not impossible, to watch a game if it does not bring him pleasure. “I want to see teams doing something positive,” he said. “They can do it well, or not so well, but I want them to try. But if there is not something interesting to see, I find a new game to watch.”For more than a decade, Pirlo served as elite European soccer’s version of Petronius, the sport’s appointed arbiter of good taste. He came to embody élan and panache and easy, timeless style. He made the deep-lying playmaker the game’s must-have accessory, for a while, at least. He single-handedly popularized the Panenka. He wrote a soccer autobiography that should not have immediately been pulped.It is intriguing, then, to know quite what, in Pirlo’s mind, qualifies as “interesting.” It is, after all, only five years since he retired — and only seven since he left Europe, where soccer’s searchlight shines brightest, for Major League Soccer — but, in that time, the game he left behind has changed considerably.The best measure of that, perhaps, is that Pirlo already feels as if he belongs to another era, another time, despite the fact that he has played in the Champions League final as recently as Lionel Messi. The last time either one graced that stage, the grandest that club soccer has to offer, was in Berlin in 2015, when Messi and Neymar and Luis Suárez swept Barcelona past Pirlo’s Juventus.That is not simply because soccer has a tendency toward instant amnesia. It is not just because, in the years in between his retirement as a player and his short-lived managerial tenure at Juventus he faded, just a little, from view. Nor can it be attributed, entirely, to the fact that many of the moments with which he is most indelibly associated are from what might politely be referred to as “some time ago.”Pirlo at Euro 2012. Maurizio Brambatti/European Pressphoto AgencyPirlo has spent the last few months designing and curating an NFT collection, like almost everyone else with a little time on their hands; it has taken as its theme his most treasured, most iconic memories. His first Champions League final, in 2003, when Babe Ruth’s curse still held. Winning the World Cup in 2006, something that occurred before the invention of the iPhone. His effortless, unfazed Panenka against England at Euro 2012, when Lance Armstrong was still a hero. These are all moments from a past so distant, both in a sporting and a cultural context, that it may as well be frozen in amber.And yet it is not that, or at least not only that, which makes Pirlo feel like an emissary from a different age. It is that players like him do not exist any more, not really. It is no surprise that, when asked which individuals he most likes to watch now, he picks out Sergio Busquets, Frenkie de Jong, Marco Verratti, Jorginho.They all contain trace elements of Pirlo, in different ways — position or technique or role or poise — but none are quite cut from his cloth. De Jong is too industrious, Busquets too defensive, Verratti too chaotic, Jorginho too busy. Pirlo was the last of his line. Modern soccer does not produce, does not tolerate, players as languid as him, not in his position; nor, increasingly, does it have room for the sort of unhurried imagination that was always Pirlo’s hallmark.It has become, instead, a game of “automatisms,” as another of Pirlo’s peers, Cesc Fàbregas, put it earlier this year. “The manager basically tells you where you have to pass the ball in every moment,” Fàbregas said. “The player has to be positioned in their exact place. It’s becoming a robotic game. I’ve had various managers and it’s not just happened with one or two. It’s happened with four or five. This thing is here to stay.”It has drifted, in other words, from being a game defined by players to one designed by managers. Pirlo has noted the same shift. “Before, there were maybe not as many coaches who were so prepared, so obsessed with their work, so dedicated to finding the smallest detail so that they could improve,” he said. “It was simpler, in that way, but it was also more difficult: There was less data, fewer ways to study.”The game has changed. Pirlo says he has not.Alessandro Di Marco/EPA, via ShutterstockWhere, then, would that have left him? Would Pirlo, had he been born a decade or two later, have been forced to adapt to a different role? Would he have been molded into an unwilling defensive midfield linchpin? Would he have been asked to press relentlessly from the front, devoting his energies to restricting space, rather than expanding it? Would he, perhaps, have been disregarded completely, rather than enjoying one of the most decorated careers of his generation?He has an answer for that. No. “Maybe I would have done even better,” he said, with a smile. His logic is based on more than unflappable self-confidence. “It was a little more technical when I was playing,” he said. “Now maybe it is more physical. But there were a lot of players in my generation, a lot of teams with technical players of the highest level.“Maybe now there are not quite so many, so a bit of quality goes a long way. It would be just as valuable in this sort of soccer, maybe more so. Those kinds of players, the ones who are a little smarter, or a little more technical, are harder to find now. In all that speed, all that haste, there are certain situations where the most important thing is a little intelligence, a little technique.”Besides, Pirlo is adamant that certain truths about soccer hold, regardless of how the game’s fashions, its tastes, ebb and flow. He might watch it now with a manager’s eye, scouring what he sees for some strategic insight, some tactical maneuver, but he remains a player at heart. “You have to work within systems now more than you did,” he said. “But it always comes down to the players.” A coach, he knows from personal experience, is never in complete control of events. Even the finest strategies, the most complex schemes, hinge on the humans tasked with implementing them.“Everything can change,” he said. “It can be quicker or slower, it can have one style or another, but it is always the players that make things happen on the field.”In that, to Pirlo, it always remains the same, familiar, recognizable, as appealing as it has always been. “You can ask if it was more beautiful before, or more beautiful now,” he said. “But it is always beautiful.”A Straight SprintManchester City and Liverpool are separated by a point in the league, but by little else.Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe question this weekend is the same as it is every weekend. Will this be the moment the Premier League title race takes its twist? Will Liverpool’s exertions on four fronts, its pursuit of the impossible, finally catch up with its players? Or will Manchester City, so smooth and so relentless, stumble and fall, offering Jürgen Klopp’s team a gap, a glimmer, an edge?The answer, thus far, has been just as consistent: No. A deafening, resounding no. There is a curious lack of drama to what should, by rights, be the most compelling denouement imaginable to the English season. City and Liverpool, two modern greats, are separated by a single point. Neither has the slightest room for error. Neither would grant its rival any mercy for even a single slip.And yet it all feels just a little bloodless. Liverpool wins. City wins. City wins. Liverpool wins. It is a straight road, with no blind corners or switchbacks or chicanes. Not just in terms of results, but in the nature of the games. City has not trailed in a Premier League game since February 19. Liverpool was behind for 17 minutes, in total, against City when the teams met in early April; other than that, Klopp’s team has not had a game to chase since conceding first against Norwich the same February day. Other than in their encounters with one another, there has been a distinct lack of this column’s favorite quality: jeopardy.Perhaps this is the weekend that changes. Tottenham, certainly, presents the most formidable opposition Liverpool has met since its visit to the Etihad. City must overcome the exhaustion, physical and spiritual, that comes from prolonged exposure to the madness of Real Madrid. Maybe this is when the twist comes, when Liverpool falls away, or when City stutters. Experience suggests it is not. All we can do is hope.Timing Is EverythingImmortality, Garth Lagerwey called it, in those heady, breathless minutes after the Seattle Sounders team he has spent years shaping into a true Major League Soccer dynasty had become the first American team to break Mexico’s stranglehold on the Concacaf Champions League.Whether this proves to be a watershed or not will only become clear in time, for both the league and for Seattle itself. Lagerwey has expressed his hope that the Sounders might now become a “global” team, the first real international breakout brand M.L.S. has produced, and he may be right. He will worry, though, that the timing has hardly been ideal.Alex Roldan and the Sounders are the first U.S. team to qualify for FIFA’s Club World Cup.Steph Chambers/Getty ImagesIt is, frankly, baffling that the Champions League final was scheduled on the same night as a (European) Champions League semifinal. Seattle’s achievement might have resonated a little more outside North America had it not been overshadowed by events in Madrid. The time difference mitigates against attracting a considerable television audience, but that is not the only route to exposure. There are, though, other ways to attract attention in our fractured media age.More unfortunately, it is not yet clear when Seattle may get its chance to — as Lagerwey put it — face “Real Madrid or Liverpool” for a trophy (a claim the champions of South America and Africa might suggest is premature).This was supposed to be the year that FIFA’s much-vaunted Club World Cup expansion took place. That has been postponed, seemingly indefinitely. There is no word, as yet, on when or where the more traditional competition — the one featuring the six regional champions and a nominee from the host nation — will take place. That is a rather more complex issue than normal, of course, because there is a great big World Cup slap-bang in the middle of next season.FIFA will, doubtless, find a fix — most likely a late, unsatisfactory one — at some point. Seattle, certainly, has earned its moment on the international stage, to claim another first, becoming the first American team to have the chance to become world champion.CorrespondenceThe great thing about this newsletter is that it serves as an education to me, too. “I was confused by your expression ‘dopamine-soaked reverie,’” wrote Jim Goldman. “I’m a practicing endocrinologist — and a Tottenham fan — and this phrase didn’t make sense to me.”Now, I cannot claim to be an endocrinologist, not even a lapsed one, so I will bow to Jim’s wisdom on this. I was under the impression that dopamine was the chemical released during pleasurable situations, such as a reverie or when you encounter a really good sandwich. Further research suggests the reality may be a little more complex. I stand (partly) corrected.Line of the week, meanwhile, goes to Brian Marx. Or, more accurately, his daughter, Natalie. “She wondered why there is so much noise about finding a new owner for Chelsea, when it is clear the club is owned by Karim Benzema,” Bob wrote, doing the decent thing and not claiming the punchline as his own.Well played, Natalie.Juan Medina/ReutersJavier Cortés, on the other hand, forces me to issue a clarification that the views expressed in this section do not necessarily reflect my own; a mention is not, by any means, an endorsement. “I agree with your definition of fandom in Europe and Latin America,” he wrote. “It is part of a person’s cultural background.” In the United States, Javier — not me — believes, “most fans are just followers of commercial brands. That explains why, if people move from one city to another, they change teams.”He does, it should be pointed out, make an exception for baseball, where the existence of teams with more than a century of history possess “a real fandom.”There are, I will admit, elements to American sporting culture that are oblique to me, in particular the ability to disregard a team after a lifetime of support, even to disavow it completely, should it pack up and leave. (I understand why fans would take that measure; I just do not understand how.)My instinct, though, is not to decry those differences as evidence of inauthenticity, but rather to chalk them up to a different cultural reality. That is the authentic experience of supporting a team in the United States. It may not follow the same patterns and mores as fandom in Europe, but that does not make it any less sincere, any less genuine, or any less real.That’s all for this week. All thoughts, as ever, are welcome at askrory@nytimes.com; we take note of and appreciate them all. Well, most of them. Certainly more than 50 percent. You can find my thoughts on the gnawing tension of the Premier League title race on Twitter, too, if you’re that way inclined.Have a great weekend,Rory More

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      European Super League Fallout, Now in a New York Court

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      A lawsuit filed by an American soccer entrepreneur says the head of European soccer declared “war” on him for working with three top soccer teams.It has been a year since the European Super League was born and collapsed in a two-day soccer supernova of angry statements, legal threats and bad blood. But the project’s repercussions are far from over.In a court filing this week in New York, a prominent American entrepreneur accused the president of European soccer’s governing body of “declaring war” on him to prevent him from organizing a series of exhibition games in North America featuring three teams — Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus — who remain committed to the idea of a breakaway European league.The exchange between the promoter, Charlie Stillitano, and the president, Aleksander Ceferin, emerged as part of Stillitano’s employment dispute with Relevent Sports, an events and marketing company owned by the billionaire Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross.Stillitano had been Relevent’s executive chairman until his departure last spring, when he left the company amid a dispute about a pandemic-related pay cut and a noncompete clause that Relevent had demanded.In his lawsuit, Stillitano and his lawyers offered details of a text message he received in which they said Ceferin warned Stillitano that working with the three teams would effectively render him an opponent of UEFA, the governing body for European soccer that Ceferin leads.The message, Stillitano said, came after he had texted Ceferin telling him that Relevent, which for a decade under Stillitano’s leadership had organized exhibition tournaments and games for top European clubs, had forbade him from working with any of the event company’s former clients. Stillitano asked Ceferin, whose organization is part of a partnership with Relevent, for a meeting, telling him that several teams “including the three that have caused issues with UEFA” had approached him to arrange games.Those teams remain a toxic subject for many European soccer leaders. Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus have sued UEFA in Spain over the Super League failure — an action that forced UEFA to suspend disciplinary actions against the teams — and they are also trying to persuade European regulators that UEFA is abusing its monopoly position to block their efforts.For Aleksander Ceferin and UEFA, the Super League fight never fades away.Jean-Christophe Bott/EPA, via ShutterstockThe implications of the court rulings could lead to a significant change in the decades-long organization of soccer in Europe, and to new legal fights: UEFA has insisted it will resume its efforts to punish the clubs once it has the legal right do so.Ceferin reminded Stillitano of that in his reply.“I have heard about your ‘business’ with the three clubs,” Ceferin said in the text message, which was included in Stillitano’s lawsuit. “Those clubs didn’t ‘cause issues with UEFA.’ They tried to destroy UEFA, football and me personally. It’s a shame that you don’t understand it. The fact that you work with them means that me, UEFA or anyone I can have influence on will not have any business or private relation with you until you’re on the other side.”Stillitano’s lawyers described Ceferin’s message as “threatening.”“It became clear that Ceferin and UEFA — and by extension their new partner, Relevent — were declaring war on Stillitano for considering an affiliation with the three teams,” the lawyers wrote.UEFA recently negotiated a contract with Relevent, picking the company as a commercial partner to sell broadcast rights to competitions like the Champions League in North America. The organizations are also discussing the possibility of Relevent’s arranging an off-season competition that would be endorsed by UEFA.In an interview on Friday, Ceferin said he was not interested in whether or not Stillitano worked with the three clubs. But the mere idea that he would, Ceferin said, was enough to end their relationship.“When I realized that he is actually cooperating with them at the same time I decided to finish any relationship with him,” Ceferin said. He was more angered, he said, that a private text message had been disclosed in a public filing. “I never spoke with anyone about this because I have more important things to deal with than dealing with Stillitano,” Ceferin said. “By using the private correspondence publicly, Stillitano showed what his moral values are.”The case is the latest example of ongoing bad blood between UEFA and the three teams, who are among the wealthiest and most powerful in world soccer, and the peripheral damage that the Super League fight continues to cause. It has already destroyed the once-close relationship between Ceferin and the Juventus president Andrea Agnelli; the men have not spoken since last year, even though Ceferin is godfather to Agnelli’s youngest child. Now it is Stillitano who has been cut off.For years, Stillitano moved easily among European soccer’s elite, building Relevent’s soccer business by using connections and friendships to arrange matches for top teams, strike multimillion-dollar deals and rub shoulders with legendary players and coaches. But he has for months been embroiled in a dispute with the company over payments and conditions related to his departure last May.Stillitano contends that Relevent owes him about $1 million in salary and severance payments. Relevent has countered that it ended the payments only after Stillitano breached terms of a noncompete agreement by contacting its clients.According to the lawsuit, Relevent had been paying Stillitano $650,000 a year until the pandemic, when, citing reduced revenues, it moved to reduce his base pay to $200,000. The company said Stillitano agreed to the reduction; Stillitano’s filing contends the pay cut was actually a deferment, and that he would be repaid at a later date.But after Stillitano disputed the deferment, his relationship with the company deteriorated to the point that Relevent terminated his contract in May.Stillitano had little choice but to find new work after that, his lawyers argued. He was “not a wealthy man,” they wrote in the filing, and was therefore required to work. More

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      Juventus, Chasing Style, Forgets the Substance

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      Juventus has thought for too long about the now, and too little about what comes next.Perhaps the best measure of how concerned Juventus is by image — of how central to the club’s identity is the way that identity is projected and perceived — is that it may well be the only team in world soccer to have its own, custom-designed font.It was commissioned in 2017, presumably after a raft of meetings that featured intense, sincere discussions about what typeface best conveyed the team’s values and mission. The font appears in all of the club’s marketing campaigns. It is deployed on all its social media pronouncements. It adorns the Juventus offices in Turin and Milan.Using the font is important to Juventus executives: uniformity of iconography, they believe, is crucial in helping build the club’s brand, in expressing to current fans and prospective ones and, where none can be found, putative customers, quite what Juventus stands for. Everything the club publishes has to have that distinctive, recognizable Juventus look. Image comes first.All of which makes the events of the last few months — perhaps longer — difficult to understand. First, there is the ongoing and now faintly masochistic devotion of Andrea Agnelli, the club’s president, to a Super League project that has not only cost him friendships and positions of power, but that has been met with pretty much universal opprobrium from fans. Continued commitment to it is not, as they say, a good look.And then, more serious still, there is the investigation by Italy’s financial authorities into six current and former executives — including Agnelli and Pavel Nedved, the club’s vice president — into Juventus’s transfer dealings. The authorities are said to be considering various charges of false accounting and reporting. The police have already raided the club’s training facility and its offices. That is not great for the image, either.It would be easy, then, to see more than a little hubris in Juventus’s on-field travails this season. There is a scene in the first episode of the club’s edition of the “All Or Nothing” documentary series — which started airing on Amazon Prime late last month, and over which the team’s executives hung like hawks, every step of the way — in which Agnelli gathers the members of the playing squad and lets them know, in no uncertain terms, the expectations.With an expletive or two thrown in, he tells the players that the previous season was not up to scratch. The year in question was the one before last, the one in which Maurizio Sarri led Juventus to a ninth straight Serie A title. The coach, an unlikely appointment who turned into an unpopular incumbent, had gone; Agnelli would not, he said, tolerate a repeat.The Juventus president Andrea Agnelli, right, and vice president Pavel Nedved are said be to be under investigation for the club’s transfer dealings.Massimo Rana/EPA, via ShutterstockIn comparison, of course, that year under Sarri would come to be seen as the last chapter of the golden era. Under his replacement, the novice Andrea Pirlo, Juventus barely scraped into the Champions League — relying on Napoli’s stumbling at home on the final day to make it — and then, over the course of the summer, discovered that Cristiano Ronaldo, the player it had brought in to turn domestic hegemony into continental success, no longer wanted to stick around.If that seemed like the nadir, it was not. After the failed experiments with Sarri and Pirlo, Juventus restored Massimiliano Allegri as coach this summer. His task was to prioritize “results,” as he has put it, over the pursuit of style that had captivated the club when it decided, a couple of years ago, that it had outgrown Sarri. Juventus had realized, it seemed, that the fact of winning was more central to its identity than the nature of it.Things are not, though, quite so simple. Allegri’s team has lost five games in Serie A already this season. Relative minnows, like Sassuolo, and actual minnows, like Empoli, have returned from Juventus’s Allianz Stadium with victories. Last weekend, Atalanta won in Turin for the first time in more than 30 years.Juventus sits seventh in Serie A, 12 points behind Napoli, the early leader. Allegri has already stated his belief that finishing fourth, and securing yet another season in the Champions League, may be the limit of this team’s ambitions. Even that relatively meager target is by no means guaranteed.Juventus fans are not used to watching a seventh-place team.Massimo Pinca/ReutersThe cause of that decline can be traced to the same root as the demise in Juventus’s image. There is a tendency, in soccer, to believe nobody is capable of doing two things at once: A player taking an interest in off-field activities — whether that is being on TikTok, running a fashion label, feeding hungry children — will, at some point, invariably be told to concentrate on their performances; a club that takes care of its brand identity will be told to focus, instead, on signing players.It is a false dichotomy, of course. Players can run a business, campaign or social media account and still remember how to mark opponents on corners. Clubs employ hundreds of people, not all of whom are devoted to tactics, nutrition or being a right back.Where the two threads of Juventus’s struggles entwine is in the rationale behind them. Agnelli favors a Super League because it solves his club’s immediate financial problems. The plusvalenza system that the team’s executives are accused of manipulating offers the same, short-term hit: It makes sure this year’s books look good, with little or no thought to what happens later.Manager Massimiliano Allegri is already setting limits on what his team can achieve this season.Ciro De Luca/ReutersThat is precisely how Juventus has been run, too. In 2017, after a second defeat in the Champions League final in three years, Agnelli became obsessed with winning instantly. The painstaking, intelligent work that had returned the club to the pinnacle in both Italy and Europe was out; signing players to triumph immediately became the order of the day. A year later, the approach reached its apogee when Ronaldo arrived in Turin.Now Juventus is paying for that impatience. Ronaldo may be gone, but there are countless others — all on hefty contracts, all eating up the club’s pandemic-ravaged finances, all too costly to be easily offloaded — who remain: Aaron Ramsey and Alex Sandro and Adrien Rabiot.Allegri has at his disposal the sketch outline of a young, competitive team: Matthijs de Ligt, Rodrigo Bentancur, Manuel Locatelli, Dejan Kulusevski and Federico Chiesa. The club’s decision to establish an under-23 team in Italy’s third tier was made with the future in mind, too.But none of it can come to fruition while the squad, and the balance sheet, is filled by the underperforming and the overpaid. Juventus has thought for too long about the now, and too little about what comes next. And it is that, ultimately, which will do the damage to its image, to how it is perceived, and how it perceives itself. What matters, after all, is the story a club tells, not how it is written.Not Such a Walk in the ParcLionel Messi’s brilliance has not translated directly into French quite yet.Thibault Camus/Associated PressThere have been years when it has felt at least a little like either Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo won the Ballon d’Or by default, that they were awarded the most prestigious individual prize in soccer not so much for what they had achieved recently but because it seemed inconceivable to suggest one of the two of them was not the finest player in the world.This year was not one of them. Of course, Robert Lewandowski offered a compelling alternative case. Even discounting the emotional appeal of honoring a player who so richly deserved the award 12 months ago, Lewandowski, the Bayern Munich striker, had done enough — more than enough — to win it based on his 2021 alone. It is not every season, after all, that a player breaks a 50-year-old goal-scoring record.But it hardly requires some great suspension of disbelief to understand why, eventually, France Football’s jurors chose Messi: It was this year, after all, that he finally ended his — and his country’s — long wait for an international trophy. The Copa América was Argentina’s first senior triumph since 1993. Delivering international glory was the one hole on Messi’s résumé. Now he has filled it. That was, as it should have been, enough.The complication is that Messi won his seventh Ballon d’Or as his domestic form is — how to put this delicately? — stuttering. His final season at Barcelona brought 38 goals in 47 games, even in a bitterly disappointing campaign, but he has struggled to find that form at Paris St.-Germain.He has three goals in the Champions League — including a wonderful strike against Manchester City — but only one in Ligue 1. A delayed start to the season, a couple of interruptions from minor injuries and being part of a somewhat inchoate team have not helped, but he has certainly not found France’s top flight as easy as anticipated.That will change, obviously, as P.S.G. hits its stride and as Messi adapts to a league he has acknowledged is more physical to the one to which he was accustomed. He recorded three assists against Saint-Etienne last weekend.But for now it serves as a reminder, perhaps, that Ligue 1 — widely derided as the weakest of Europe’s major domestic tournaments — is not quite the cakewalk many believe it to be, that any player at all can find a new environment challenging, and that nothing is easy, not really, even for the greats.Twenty’s PlentyIt is hard to tell which is the more startling statistic: that England scored 20 goals — 20, two zero — in a single game on Tuesday, or that in the process, Sarina Wiegman’s team racked up 64 shots. That works out, math fans, to roughly one every 90 seconds.The victory, in a World Cup qualifier against Latvia, ranks as the biggest-ever win by an England team. It also represented a European record for a competitive women’s game, though there should be just a small asterisk there: the previous mark was set only a few days earlier, when Belgium beat Armenia, 19-0.The issue of what to do with overmatched teams is not exclusive to the women’s game, of course — the debate flares up pretty reliably in men’s qualifying, too — but, because of the rapid development of the game across Europe, the scale of the imbalance and the urgency with which it must be addressed feel much greater.Ellen White and Beth Mead each scored three goals against Latvia this week. Their teammate Lauren Hemp had four.Tim Goode/Press Association, via Associated PressIt is, certainly, no time to indulge the two nonsensical orthodoxies that infect this debate in the men’s game: that playing the very best helps the smaller nations to improve — even Wiegman quite rightly dispatched that idea — and that changing the format of qualifying, in some way, prevents everyone from having an even chance to reach a tournament.A two- or even three-tier qualifying system for major competitions exists in North America, Africa and Asia. It does not exist in South America, but only because the likes of Suriname and French Guiana compete (for reasons that are not strictly geographical) in Concacaf. There is absolutely no reason Europe could not do the same.As Wiegman said, Latvia learned nothing from losing, 20-0, to England, in a game in which it had 14 percent possession and no shots on goal. England, likewise, learned nothing. Streamlining qualification is not a mark of disrespect to developing nations. It is not depriving them of a chance to get better. If anything, the exact opposite is true.CorrespondenceTo be honest, I could just copy and paste Nitin Bajaj’s email and leave it there for correspondence this week: “I read the bit on managers’ captivation with condiments with a great deal of … er … relish,” he wrote, clearly very pleased with himself.Gary Brown, meanwhile, thinks there is some sort of ketchup-based conspiracy at play. “What’s the evidence that Dean Smith had ever allowed ketchup at Villa before his sacking?” he asked. “Steven Gerrard announced that he’d banned it before he’d even seen it on the table at his new club. On the other hand, a suspicious mind might follow Dean Smith to his quick appointment at Norwich, whose majority owner is Delia Smith, cookery writer and TV legend, who is on record as saying she and her husband have ‘Big Mac picnics in the car-park’ at evening games, with fries and loads of ketchup’.”A clutch of you, meanwhile — James Patch, Martin Maudal and Jim Yoder — all got in touch to suggest the perfect example of how much difference a manager can make: Thomas Tuchel at Chelsea. This is absolutely correct, of course, but once again: I cannot produce a newsletter that just runs to four words.Thomas Tuchel, the exception that proves the rule.Frank Augstein/Associated PressAnd Thabo Caves sends an email that leads me to another thought. “A team has 11 players on the pitch most of the time,” he wrote. “If one player has roughly the same impact as another, then each player would have roughly a 9 percent influence on their team’s performance. Bringing in a new manager could then be considered as almost as influential as signing a new player in the middle of the season. Single players are consistently lauded for having transformative effects on teams, so why can’t a manager?”Why not indeed, Thabo, which leaves me to wonder: Should we not limit when teams can change their managers — perhaps to two windows, one before and one during the season — as we do with players? Why the reason for the difference? More

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      Cristiano Ronaldo Rejoins Manchester United

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      After flirting with joining Manchester City, Ronaldo will instead return to the team he starred for from 2003 to 2009.After 12 years in which he has claimed a dozen or more major trophies and broken a string of records, Cristiano Ronaldo will return to the place where he first established himself as one of the finest players of this, and any, generation, leaving Juventus to rejoin Manchester United on a two-year contract.The team confirmed Ronaldo’s return on Friday, saying the deal was “subject to agreement of personal terms, visa and medical.” The rush of people logging on to read the announcement crashed Manchester United’s website. A reunion that many United fans have longed for over much of the last decade materialized only at the last minute, thanks in part to the public and private interventions of several of Ronaldo’s former teammates, his long-term mentor, Alex Ferguson, and his colleague with the Portuguese international side, and now United, Bruno Fernandes.On Thursday evening, it appeared that Ronaldo would be returning to Manchester — but to play for the team across the city. He had informed Massimiliano Allegri, the Juventus manager, that he had no intention of playing for the team again, while his agent, Jorge Mendes, was trying to negotiate a salary package with Manchester City, the reigning Premier League champion.Ronaldo was a dominant force for Manchester United earlier in his career. Andrew Yates/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesCity’s appetite for the deal, though, was said to be tepid at best; the impetus had all been from Ronaldo’s representatives. City refused to countenance paying Juventus a fee for a player it was desperate to offload as it sought to cut costs in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic. City’s best offer was a swap deal including Raheem Sterling, the English forward, which Juventus rejected. By Friday morning, the club was distancing itself from signing Ronaldo.United, though, had been spurred into action by the thought of one of its most beloved alumni playing for a direct rival. Several former United players, including Rio Ferdinand and Wayne Rooney, as well as Ferguson, either reached out in private or spoke out in public to urge Ronaldo not to forget where in the northwest of England his loyalties lie.Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, the club’s coach, spoke glowingly of Ronaldo in a news media conference on Friday. “He knows we’re always here,” Solskjaer said.The club, with permission by its owners, the Glazer family, agreed to a salary package for the next two seasons with Ronaldo’s representatives, and eventually offered Juventus a fee that could rise close to $40 million, depending on the 36-year-old’s success with the team during his second stint.As the details were being finalized, all Ronaldo could do was wait. He had been pictured, earlier on Friday, boarding a private jet near Turin, Italy, where Juventus is based. At that stage, his destination was unknown. A few hours later, as far as United’s fans, his former teammates and his current manager are concerned, he was heading for the only place he could: home. More

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      Euro 2020 Is Over. Next Season Starts Now.

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      The players who battled for the Euro 2020 title will walk away from the tournament and right into a new season.LONDON — Giorgio Chiellini and Leonardo Bonucci had a full day of activities planned. They left England in the small hours of Monday morning, and landed back in Rome together with the rest of Italy’s exultant and exhausted Euro 2020 champions not long after dawn. There, they presented the glinting, silver spoils of their campaign to their public. Chiellini was wearing a crown.From there, Italy’s coach, Roberto Mancini, slipped away to snatch a brief moment with his family, and the players were whisked to a hotel. The team would have the morning to sleep, reporters were told, before gathering once more for a celebratory lunch.Monday afternoon brought a full slate of appointments: Chiellini, the Italy captain, was scheduled to present his teammates to Sergio Mattarella, the country’s president, at the Quirinale at 5 p.m., and then lead them to a reception with Mario Draghi, the prime minister, at Palazzo Chigi an hour and a half later. The country’s authorities, as of Monday morning, were still exploring whether they might squeeze in a victory parade. By Monday afternoon, that, too, had been arranged. Only once all of that is done will Chiellini, Bonucci and the rest of the players be able to draw the curtain on their season. A couple of days later, their other set of teammates — the ones with whom they spend most of their days at their club side, Juventus — will report back for the first day of preseason training.Pool photo by Laurence GriffithsAlberto Lingria/ReutersFor Italy, a whirlwind 24 hours went from photos on the field to a raucous return to Rome and then, after a short nap, a trip to meet the country’s president.Angelo Carconi/EPA, via ShutterstockThe club is not expecting much of a turnout. As well as its two central defenders, Chiellini and Bonucci, Juventus knows that their Italy teammates Federico Chiesa and Federico Bernadeschi will be absent as well.So, too, will the various representatives of Juventus who have been engaged by other nations over the last few weeks: Álvaro Morata, whose Spain side was eliminated by Italy in the European Championship semifinals, and the defenders Alex Sandro and Danilo, part of the Brazil squad that lost the Copa América final a few hours before Italy’s triumph. Adrien Rabiot, Matthijs de Ligt, Cristiano Ronaldo and all of the others have been given an extra couple of weeks’ break, too.They will need it. This summer’s championships — in Europe and in South America — have come at the end of a long and arduous schedule, one that stretches back beyond the start of this season, in September, to the resumption of soccer after the hiatus enforced by the coronavirus pandemic.Many of these players have been playing, with only the most cursory of intermissions, since last June: 13 months of uninterrupted slog, prompting warnings from Fifpro, the global players’ union, various managers and, increasingly, the players themselves not only that they were being placed at risk of injury, but that their workload was too great to expect them to be able to perform at their best.It would be comforting to think, with Euro 2020 and the Copa América — though not yet the Gold Cup in North America — now decided that the slog is over; that soccer has caught up with the three months it lost in the first wave of the pandemic, that everything will go back to normal now. In England, clubs are already planning for games with full stadiums as soon as the Premier League gets underway on the second weekend of August.The reality is a little different. June 30 is the date that, traditionally, marks the end of the soccer year. That is the moment at which contracts expire or renew, when clubs release the players they no longer require, when one season silently turns into the next. It fell, this year, as it so often does, in the middle of a tournament. But as one season bleeds into another, the slog has only just reached its midway point. And for that, soccer has nothing to blame but itself.The first game of the 2022 World Cup is fewer than 500 days away. The tournament, scheduled for the winter to avoid the stifling summer heat in the Gulf, is scheduled to get underway on Nov. 21 next year. Qatar, the host, will be involved in that fixture. Thanks to the delay caused by the pandemic, nobody else is even close to qualifying.Pool photo by Andy RainPool photo by Laurence GriffithsMarcus Rashford, top left, Declan Rice and the majority of England’s players will soon be back in training for the new Premier League season, which starts in the middle of August.Pool photo by Carl RecineIn Europe, most teams still have six qualifying matches to play; several more will have to negotiate a playoff before claiming their places. In Asia, the group stages have yet even to start. Africa, too, is not yet underway, and it has a continental championship to fit in: the Cup of Nations is slated to take place in Cameroon in January. South America’s prolonged qualifying process is a third of the way through: Brazil sits atop the standings after six games, but still has 12 left to play.And in North America, the expanded final round of qualifying will not start until September, with teams set to play 14 games to discover which ones will join Mexico, the region’s only sure thing, in the finals next year. All of that has to fit into a club calendar already squeezed by the timing shift necessary to accommodate, for the first time and contrary to what was originally advertised, a World Cup held in the northern hemisphere’s winter.That will force Europe’s major domestic leagues — the competitions that will provide the bulk of the players for the World Cup — to start the 2022-23 season just a little earlier, in order to allow a monthlong break right in the middle of their campaigns. But that does not mean the forthcoming season will finish any earlier: the Champions League final, the climax of the 2021-22 club campaign, is scheduled for May 28, in St. Petersburg. Once again, what little elastic that can be found will come out of the players’ chance to rest.It is not, in fact, until the summer of 2023 that the world’s elite men’s players will have a summer to rest and to recuperate properly. Most of them, the Europeans and South Americans, anyway. There is another Cup of Nations scheduled for Africa that summer, and a further Gold Cup, too.As ever, it is the players who will pay the price, and especially, ironically, those who enjoy the greatest success. It was hard, at Wembley on Sunday evening, not to be impressed by the composure, the calm, the obduracy of Chiellini and Bonucci, those grizzled old warriors at the heart of Italy’s defense. They have 220 international caps between them.They have been doing this for almost two decades, now. They deserve the pomp and ceremony of an official reception with the Italian president. More than anything, though, they deserve a break. They can have one, now. But they should just make sure they are back at work in two weeks. More

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      Euro 2020: Chiellini, Bonucci and the Joy of Pushing Back

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      The veteran defenders Giorgio Chiellini and Leonardo Bonucci have given Italy the freedom to push forward at Euro 2020, right to the brink of a title.LONDON — There are plenty of stories. Some of them are so far-fetched that, if it were not for the eyewitness testimony or the video footage, the natural instinct would be to assume they are apocryphal. The best of them, though, the most illustrative, is the one about the garlic tablets.In 2014, before Juventus was scheduled to play Roma in a crucial game at the summit of Serie A, Leonardo Bonucci ate a handful of garlic tablets. His motivational coach, Alberto Ferrarini, had given them to him, later explaining that “hundreds of years ago, soldiers ate garlic to keep them strong, healthy and alert.” The tablets were intended to give Bonucci the same traits.There was, of course, another benefit. Ferrarini also told Bonucci to “breathe in the faces of Gervinho and Francesco Totti,” Roma’s star attackers. The ploy worked — Juventus won, 3-2, Bonucci scored the winning goal — and the myth crystallized just a little more. There was nothing Bonucci, like his Juventus and Italy teammate Giorgio Chiellini, would not do in service of victory.Italy’s run to the final of Euro 2020 has, in many ways, highlighted a drastic shift in the country’s soccer culture. Roberto Mancini’s team is young, vibrant and adventurous, designed around a slick and technical midfield and imbued with a bright, attacking style.If it was that vision of Italy that carried the team through the group stage and helped it sweep aside first Austria and then Belgium in the knockout rounds, the team’s semifinal victory against Spain was built on a more familiar iteration: ruthless and redoubtable, cast not in the porcelain image of Lorenzo Insigne and Marco Verratti but the unyielding concrete of Bonucci and Chiellini.It is that Italy that England must overcome, on Sunday evening, if it is to lift the European Championship trophy: the Italy that not only finds pride in its defending but treats it with genuine relish. As Bonucci has previously said, “As a defender, you always like winning, 1-0.”In the tournament’s opening game, with Mancini’s team up by 3-0 on Turkey and cruising to a victory, Chiellini and Bonucci celebrated an injury time goal-line clearance with the sort of vigor more traditionally reserved for last-gasp winning goals.It has been that way for years, of course. Chiellini made his Italy debut in 2004; Bonucci, only two years younger but a much later bloomer, joined him in 2010. Between them, they now have made 219 appearances for their country, the vast majority of them in tandem. They are so inseparable, at both club and international level, that one of Google’s suggested searches for them is: “Are Chiellini and Bonucci related?”They are not, but even they admit they may as well be. “I think I know Bonucci better than I know my wife,” Chiellini has said. Bonucci finds that he does not have to “think about the other things you normally would when playing with someone else; we know each other’s games inside out.”“Giorgio is the type of defender who needs to feel contact,” his former teammate Andrea Barzagli said.Pool photo by Justin TallisBonucci is “more modern,” Barzagli said, better at “reading the game, understanding situations.”Pool photo by Laurence GriffithsWhat makes it work, though, is not that they are similar, but that they are different. Away from the field, Chiellini is sufficiently divergent from his on-field persona that the Spain striker Alvaro Morata’s mother once told him that she was surprised at how gentle, polite and, well, nice he was.He has a degree in economics and commerce. He was co-author of a book on his hero, the Juventus defender Gaetano Scirea. He is, by his own estimation, much more “serene, much more reflective” than he appears. Being captain of both Italy and Juventus brought him a sense of “calm,” he wrote in his autobiography, so that he even felt comfortable toning down his combative style while playing. His broad grin, as Italy’s semifinal with Spain went to penalties, was taken as gamesmanship by his opponents. In reality, he was probably just enjoying himself.Bonucci, the more refined of the two, is also a contradiction. It is he who struggled, early in his career, with self-doubt; who felt the need to hire Ferrarini as a young player. The trainer’s methods were unorthodox — in one telling, he would take Bonucci down to his basement and repeatedly punch him in the stomach, to improve his focus — but, over time, they worked. Bonucci became, as Ferrarini put it, a “warrior.”On the field, the story is the same. Their shared passion for stopping other people having fun might make it seem as if they are cut from the same cloth, but the strength of their partnership is in how little, rather than how much, they are alike.“They understand each other,” said Andrea Barzagli, a former teammate of both men. “When you have been through so many moments together, you know what is happening, how the other one will respond. You can remember what happened in that situation previously, how you dealt with it between you. They compensate for each other.”Bonucci, left, and Chiellini have honed their partnership in years together at Juventus.Stefano Rellandini/ReutersBarzagli, of course, is in a better position to analyze their relationship than most. Until recently, Bonucci and Chiellini were not a pair, but part of a trio, for both Juventus and Italy: Barzagli completed it, until he withdrew first from international contention in 2018, and then retired from playing entirely a few months later.Each one, in that triumvirate, had his own role. In Chiellini’s estimation, he was the “aggressive” one, Bonucci was the “metronome,” and Barzagli the “professor.” “He is always in the right place at the right moment,” Chiellini said.To Bonucci, Barzagli was the “example.” “Andrea is unbeatable in one-on-ones,” he said.Barzagli’s interpretation runs along similar lines. “Giorgio is the type of defender who needs to feel contact,” he said. “He uses his intelligence but also his physical strength to deny a player space. That type of defending is increasingly rare now. It has changed a lot in the last few years. I don’t want to say he is one of the last great Italian defenders, but he is in that tradition.”Bonucci, by contrast, is “more modern,” Barzagli said, better at “reading the game, understanding situations,” the sort of player that Pep Guardiola, the high priest of the modern style of defending, has described as “one of his favorite ever.” Matthijs de Ligt, the Dutch defender who serves as Barzagli’s heir at Juventus, admires his “vision, the accuracy of his long and short passing.” He sees something else in Chiellini. “It looks like he has a magnet in his head,” de Ligt said.Barzagli has not yet decided where he will watch the final on Sunday. Nerves never troubled him as a player; watching games as a spectator, he has found, is a little more stressful. “It is because you can’t do anything,” he said. He might choose to watch in the sanctuary of his own home, rather than with other people, to help him cope with it better.What dulls that anxiety most is the presence of his two former comrades. That they are still here, at the highest level of the game, is testament, in his eyes, to their “professionalism, their dedication, how well prepared they are physically and mentally.“That is their great secret, why they have been able to go on for so long.”Once again, on Sunday, familiarity will bring Italy comfort. Much has changed in front of them, but Bonucci and Chiellini are still there, still celebrating tackles, still enjoying their work.“One thing that maybe Italy knows and other countries do not,” Barzagli said, “is that defenders get better with age. You are always learning. With more experience, you have more solutions. You know what to do in every situation, because you have seen it before. That happens even when you are 34 or 35.” It is what has happened for Bonucci and Chiellini, too. This is a major final, of course, but it is also just another game. It is nothing they have not seen before. More